“I was in the outhouse when the man come.”
“What man, sweetheart?” I asked, not comprehending.
“The man who set the fire. He was here before and yelled at momma.” She began to cry “Why he do it Papa? Why?”
“What man Effie, who is he?” I begged for understanding.
“The man with the star on his car. I saw the headlights on the car through the cracks. I was scared to come out, so I stayed until he left.”
“Was it a deputy sheriff, Effie?”
“He wasn’t in no uniform like before, just regular clothes. I saw the star, when he left, in the light from the fire.”
“Did he yell at your mama last night?”
“No, he just poured something from a can, all quiet like, all around the house and up on the sides. It was gasoline, I think. Then he lit a match on his boot and started the fire. I tried to get back in the window when he drove off, I always climb out my window when I need to go ‘cause it’s closer, but the fire was too tall. Then I saw Mama. In the window, through the fire. She had Lottie all wrapped up and she threw Lottie out the window to me. Mama couldn’t get out the window because of the fire. She said she would go out the back but she never came out Papa. She never came out!” My sweet Effie buried her face in my shoulder and cried like her small chest would burst. I held her and Lottie in my arms for the longest time, we three in the grass with our hearts burned in the ashes.
The man with the star on his car had to be Tom Wilkerson. But who would believe a little girl? No one but me.
I swear by the Blood that stained the Cross that he will die for what he has done.
Cole ran his finger across the signature below the entry. The faded red brown name with the three strange starburst splotches was the blood of a man he had hardly known, yet flowed through his veins. His grandfather sworn a blood oath to kill a man.
SIXTEEN
Cole finished his milkshake but hardly tasted it. He paid his check at the counter and left the Dutch Creamery and drove home with the radio off. He was trying to imagine the fire. He saw a little girl waiting for her mother to escape the burning house and all the devastation. Cole could feel the loss that Mattie was to George.
As Cole pulled into the drive and saw the freshly painted house, it struck him that Mattie’s ashes must lay beneath its foundation. He didn’t believe in ghosts or spirits or contact with the dead. Just the same, he had an odd sensation when he entered the house.
Cole went into the living room and sat on the couch. His grandfather died when he was five and he spent very little time with him. He remembered lots of old black and white photos of a big man that looked like a cross between Edward G. Robinson and Clark Gable. His face was deeply lined and showed the rough life and mileage of a heavy drinker. He seemed to go from pomade patent leather black to snow white haired overnight. Dressed in double breasted suits and fedoras or bib overalls he was either the slick dapper gangster from the movies or a Dust Bowl refugee from an old LIFE magazine.
He was a contradiction. Flush or bust his chin was turned up in the photos with a defiant, “do what you will” air that contradicted his alcoholism and self-destructive life style. Cole wished he could ask his father about this man. Cole’s father always spoke of his own father with affection and a melancholy admiration that Cole, even as a young man, saw as hero worship. The stories, always told out of his mother’s presence, were offered with the colorful vision of someone retelling the story of another. As he sat quietly thinking about the man in the old notebooks and photos, Cole remembered a dream he had as a teenager.
The dream always bothered him. It was a curiosity, a strange piece of his life he just never understood. He had the dream several times, and each time it was the same. He was standing on a railroad track. The rails seemed to go on forever before him. Fifty yards down the track his grandfather walked towards him, in one hand was a candy bar and in the other a pocket knife. As they approached each other his grandfather smiled and held up the candy bar, a Three Musketeers. Cole would shake his head and smile back. As they walked towards each other his grandfather would begin unwrapping the candy. Suddenly, a crossing bell would begin to ring, and the long red and white striped crossing arms would come down across a road that just as suddenly appeared between them.
“Stay put!” his grandfather would call out from the other side of the road.
“OK Grandpa!” Cole would call back from the opposite side.
Then the thunderous roar of the train separated them. Car after car the train roared by. Cole would wave at hobos sitting in the open boxcar doors. The train cars seemed unending, minute after minute, car after car, boxcars and flat cars, tankers and open top scrap metal cars, they roared by. Finally, the caboose and the man standing inside the back iron fence holding a lantern waved at Cole and the train was past.
In every dream it was the same. Cole would stand staring across the road. Grandfather was gone. He would frantically call out, but no answer. His grandfather was nowhere to be found. Cole knew, even in the dream, his grandfather died years before. But he was very much alive in the dream. Where did he go? Cole would wake in the darkness of his room with a deep aching in his chest. The next day he would have a deep sense of loss and be in a grey mood. He felt the same way now. He mourned for the loss of Mattie. Silly as it seemed, he felt her death, just as if he knew her. He knew George’s pain all too well.
Cole read no more that day. He spent the afternoon down by the pond, tossing stones and watching the occasional catfish break the surface of the water. He looked across the alfalfa field to Ernie Kappas’ big, white, house. It was a picture from a Country Living magazine cover. Like the man who lived there it gave the impression of life at its best, and also, like the man who lived inside, it was dark and full of memories.
What started as a month’s stay in an inherited house, became a journey into the heart and soul of a man who, whether Cole liked it or not, shaped his life in ways he would never be able to begin to understand. The idea of “sins of the fathers” always intrigued Cole. He always carried the self-satisfaction of knowing that he was not one of those the paradigm described. His father lived and died free of major vices, tragedies or involvement in major conflicts. Yet three shelves crowded with old notebooks were painting a picture of a man that molded and defined the man who raised him. Cole, being brought up in a house where his paternal heritage was all but ignored or ridiculed by his mother, spoke volumes about what made Cole’s father who he was, and in turn, who Cole became.
Stories his father told on trips to the store, while painting the fence, or while working on a school project now came rushing back. Why hadn’t he asked more about his grandparents? His father died before Cole felt the need to know his family history. He always enjoyed the stories of his grandfather’s wild adventures, but they were like tall tales of a fictional character, not of a living, breathing, man who told those stories to his father as a boy.
Through his readings, Cole was beginning to better understand his mother’s attitude toward her in-laws. She was raised in a loving, stable home where it was rare when anyone raised their voice. They were strict teetotalers and it was no secret in his house growing up that alcohol would not be tolerated. Like the old joke, it was simply understood that if you looked up alcoholic in the dictionary, his grandfather’s picture would be there. Now he was beginning to see that there was a deeper fear than drinking that colored his mother’s feeling toward the Sage family. The underlying reasons for George Sage’s drinking were far more desperate than the act itself.
Cole spent a restless night. He rolled and tumbled and threw off the covers. He chilled and struggled to pull the covers back up. Sometime in the night he dreamed of fire. He was in his office and the floor was in flames, short neat rows of flame like on a gas grill. He couldn’t step over them, but he could step between them; as he passed his co-workers they all laughed and pointed at his feet trying to avoid the flames. About dawn he fell into a deep sleep, n
ot moving or waking, until after nine-thirty.
Cole showered and determined as he let the water cascade over his head that today he would buy a bicycle. Downstairs he made toast and was waiting for the Mr. Coffee to stop dripping and gurgling when the familiar chimes of his cell phone sounded brightly from the table.
“I’m home!” Kelly said brightly.
“You sound like you’re in the next room!”
“No reception in the same state, but clear as a bell twenty-five hundred miles away. Don’t you just love modern technology?”
“How was your flight?”
“It was OK. Sure is nice to be back. Ben and Erin met me at the plane and we had a bite at a little Thai place on the way home.”
“Ahh, the cultural diversity of the West Coast. Any news in their life? How’s Jenny?”
“She was tired so she wasn’t the little princess I remembered. Bit of a snot actually. Ben is going to Michigan next week to speak at a conference. Erin said she would call you today or tomorrow. She has a bunch of appointments or something.”
“It’s more lonesome here than I figured. Your visit spoiled me.”
“What were you trying to tell me yesterday about not staying?”
“I met a lawyer downtown. He claims that there are loopholes in the law and I can leave within forty-eight hours.”
“Well?”
“I don’t know. Sounds too good to be true on one hand...”
“And on the other she had warts, yeah, yeah, what are you really thinking?” Kelly always knew when Cole was avoiding the point.
“I have been thinking about writing a book. These notebooks, there is a story that begs to be told. Like the letter that was in the trunk. It was like a key to a world to be explored. The only thing my grandfather left of any value was the trunk. The landlord in the house where he died realized the notebooks were saved for a reason. He saw their value, that’s why he shipped them back here. Fate’s a funny thing. Me being the one to finally get them? A writer? That was my grandfather’s dream, I am living his dream. You have to admit it’s kind of weird.”
“Admit nothing, deny everything, destroy all evidence.” Kelly gave a soft laugh. “I think it is wonderful. You’re going to turn the journals into a book? Like edit them? Have you started?”
“Just in my head. No, I am going to write the story as a novel.”
“But Cole, you don’t know how it ends? What year are you on?”
“1934. I will have to finish reading of course.”
“What if the story doesn’t lend itself to a plot? I mean, on a level that would grab a reader. Then what, fictionalize?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. But I would really like to frame it up. Get my basic idea together before I leave here. I probably won’t have this much peace and quiet again for a long time.” Cole paused. “It’s not just the quiet either. Maybe it’s this house. Maybe it’s how the story speaks to me. It’s hard to explain exactly. The part I read yesterday really bothered me.”
“What was it?”
“Mattie was murdered. Burned to death in the first house that was here. George swore a blood oath to kill Tom Wilkerson. Remember him? He set the fire, poured gas all around the house and torched it. It’s chilling, Kelly. To see the way he recorded something like that. Then he signed the page in actual blood! He swore on Christ’s Blood to avenge Mattie’s death.” Cole stopped.
“What else?”
“The two girls survived the fire, Effie and Lottie. What do you suppose happened to them?”
“How many notebooks are left?”
“I don’t know. A row, row and a half.” Cole walked toward the living room.
“Do you have time to finish?”
“All the work on the house is finished. It’s just hurry up and wait from here on.”
“Well, as much as I would love for you to be back home, I can see why you’re excited. Have you ever written any fiction before, Mr. Factsman?”
“Nope.”
“Well, I can’t wait to read it!” Kelly spoke as if the book were finished.
Cole didn’t respond, he just smiled and savored her belief in him.
Kelly was in no hurry to hang up. She told Cole about the awful lunch she ate at a roadside hotdog stand, the woman she sat by on the plane and how several of her house plants went limp in her absence. After about twenty minutes she ran out of steam and asked Cole to call her in the next day or two.
When Cole finished his mocha and another couple of pieces of toast he drove into town. He was on a mission. He drove to several stores he found in the yellow pages, without much luck. Then he spotted a second hand store across the highway from the feed store that wasn’t on his list. In the gravel in front of the store, lined up in a nice neat row, were six bicycles.
Cole knew what he wanted and this was it. Old, fixed up, not too rusty, big tires, heavy duty, big butt seat: a cruiser. In front of him was a whole row of them. Huffys, Schwinns, and Columbias, all well-oiled, and ready to ride. As Cole pulled into the lot a mangy old Australian Sheppard stood at the sound of tires on the gravel. She gave a half-hearted growl followed by a dusty, dry, bark, then laid back down. A weather beaten piece of beef jerky in bib overalls, a plaid cowboy shirt, with pearl snap buttons, and wearing a faded, greasy, old baseball cap slowly came out of the corrugated metal building, and stood with one thumb looped in the strap of his overalls, and his hand shading his eyes.
“Howdy.”
“I need a bike,” Cole said in greeting.
“Nobody needs a bike unless you lost your driver’s license.” The old man cackled at his own joke.
“You’re right. I want one!” Cole said, smiling at the old man’s wit.
“OK then, we can do business. You look to me like you need a twenty-six incher. How about something racy? Got a ten speed inside.”
“Nope. I want something with a big butt seat and fat tires. A cruiser.”
The old man tilted his hat back and wiped sweat from his forehead. “Take a look at this one.” He walked over and slapped the seat of a green and white model with no maker identification. “Solid as the Rock of Gibraltar.”
“How much?”
“Thirty five dollars and it’s got Slime in the tires and I’ll adjust the seat.”
“Sold.”
“That was too easy,” the old man replied.
“You’re a good salesman.”
“No I’m not, but I’ll take your money just the same.” Once again he cackled. “You passin’ through? I don’t believe I seen you around these parts.”
“Actually I have been staying out at the old Sage place.”
“That so?” The old man frowned.
“I inherited it.”
“What would your name be?”
“Cole Sage. It was my grandfather’s place.”
“You from Lawton, then?”
“No, San Francisco.” Cole saw in the old man’s eyes a question he was trying to form.
“Tell me something.” The old man paused. He moved to where the sun wasn’t in his eyes and licked his lips slowly. “Who was your granddad, son?”
“George Sage.”
“The real George Sage?” The old man paused again. “Not that fancy pants teacher.” He was making a statement, not a question.
“That would be the one. The teacher was my cousin.”
“I’ll be goddamn.” The old man stretched out his hand to Cole. “Billy Gibson.”
Cole grinned and shook the rough old hand.
“Your grandpa was quite a fella. I was only about twelve or thirteen when he left town but we all knew him just the same.”
“That right?” Cole said, not wanting to appear too anxious.
“He cut quite a figure around here. He loved to look the part, you know what I mean? He would put that Dixie Peach Pomade in his hair and slick it back like a movie star or something and play cards. When he was flush he would toss us kids nickels on his way home; yes sir, he was a gent. Thing was,
when he was drinkin’, he’d lose. Those times he would stagger home lookin’ like somethin’ the cat drug in, hair all down in his face, horse shit and sawdust all over his fancy suit. He’d fight a street lamp if he thought it blinked at him. Then he just ups and disappeared. Some say it was over the colored woman.”
“Colored woman?” Cole asked innocently.
“Yeah, name of Mattie. Don’t know she had a last name. Half Indian. Damn fine lookin’ woman. We weren’t supposed to notice that sort of thing back then, her bein’ colored and all. They say her kids were fathered by your granddad.”
“Really?” Cole said, in mock surprise.
“Guess nobody would tell you somethin’ like that I suppose. Yes sir, it was whispered by the grownups that the two little girls she would bring to town were your granddad’s.”
“Really?” Cole again acted surprised. “I never really knew my grandfather; he died when I was little.”
“So what did you think of that grandma of yours? If you don’t mind me askin’.” The old man checked himself.
“She lived with my aunt back east, never knew her.”
“Ugliest damn woman I ever seen. You musta took after George or had a real good lookin’ mama.” The old man slapped his thigh and laughed.
“Little of both I guess.” Cole smiled encouragingly. “So, what happened to the girls?”
“Not sure. I got a beatin’ from my pa just for talkin’ about the Sages once after they left town. So I minded my own business. My pa could make you swear off Christmas if he had a mind to let into you. Let’s go inside. I got somethin’ I want to show you.”
Cole followed the old man into the building as he slowly shuffled along. Inside, a swamp cooler roared in the back corner. Lawn mowers and bicycles were displayed in an uncluttered showroom that would have made Sears jealous. Billy Gibson finally made his way to the counter in the back. He took a small sales book, and a crooked promotional pen from a Chiropractor’s office, and scribbled up the bill.
“Twenty-five bucks even,” Billy said, tearing the page out.
Cole Dust Cole Page 21
