The carcasses couldn’t be left for the forest animals and were too heavy to lift, so they had to be cut into more manageable sizes. The cold didn’t make any of this easier. Even after Ben sawed through the leg, it stuck up from the glaze of frozen blood as if it had been sunk in concrete. Jake had brought a sledge for such work.
Five dead cows was a high toll for one farm during a single night, but last week eleven had been struck down on the Wyatt parcel. Like these five, they hadn’t been found until morning, their bodies frozen to the ground, their blood and viscera mingled in a crimson lake that filled the spaces between them. The coyotes must have thought they’d died and gone to scavenger heaven. Gas was treasured in the remote valley, but gallons had been spent in burning the bodies where they lay.
Ben pressed the blade down again and watched as blood misted the nearby tufts of grass red. The spines were always tough.
As Ben went for another pass, a white pickup pulled alongside his car, with a battered black truck following close behind. Roger Armfield raised a hand in greeting as he got out of the white vehicle. These cleanups had an ever-shifting cast, but as the town veterinarian, Armfield was a constant presence. Two younger men, the Connelly brothers, hopped out of the black truck.
Greetings were exchanged in the local parlance—head nods and evaluative squints.
Reaching the first carcass, Armfield clucked to himself. “Rheumy eyes, swollen tongue, bloodied saliva.” He ran through a checklist of symptoms. Not being a cattle owner himself, Ben hadn’t made a study of the sickness, but it did seem strange to him how it killed in clusters. The townspeople were exceedingly diligent in their quarantine procedures, and yet this appeared to have little effect.
Armfield moved on to examining the predatory element of the grisly scene. He spoke in staccato observations, as if summarizing the autopsy into a recorder. “Seven to eight individuals. Large hunting pack. Unusually large for coyotes. Lupine hybrid? Highly socialized. Scat suggests—” Armfield had misjudged the slickness of the icy blood, and his feet flew out from under him. He landed hard on the gory field.
Ben bit down on a smile, but the others didn’t bother to hold back. Ben offered his hand as the gangly man unfolded himself back to his full height. As he did, Armfield clutched his head, leaving a crimson swath across his bald pate. Ben almost felt sorry for him.
As the vet staggered away from what was left of the Holsteins, Ben revved the chain saw and resumed his cutting. With the Connelly brothers here, he could cut larger pieces, and their pace quickened.
Months ago, Ben couldn’t have seen himself chopping up frozen diseased cattle with a chain saw. But he needed to feel what it was like to be a part of this place, to be a member of this raw and austere world that the Swanns had lived in. In this valley, he’d learned, your hands sometimes got dirty. Sometimes they got bloody.
The chief or Armfield might throw the boys a twenty or two at the end of the day, but the cleanup crews practically worked for free. Ben had heard his share of clichés about rural living, and every one of them had rung in his head in the months he’d spent here, but there was something about watching a small, isolated community like Swannhaven pitch together in a crisis that made him feel as if this was how things were meant to be.
Arms thrumming from the machine, face and clothes splattered with crystallized blood, Ben cut and the boys hauled. Somewhere nearby, milk was bottled and eggs were cleaned, grain was ground and bread baked. Even in the frozen stillness of December, the little valley hummed onward.
It was inspiring, but it sometimes filled Ben with envy. If only his own household ran with such elegance. Free of acrimony and stripped of cross-purposes.
Ben sliced into the bowels of one cow, and the air shimmered with fumes. This one hadn’t frozen all the way through. The smell was as horrific as the scene itself, but Ben was careful to keep his face as expressionless as those of the other men. There would be no eye rolls at the unpleasantness of the task. Here, Ben had learned that all work was stoic’s work.
Ben felt his phone buzz in his pocket but ignored it. He was covered with blood, and he was pretty sure there was no provision for abattoir damages in his service contract.
With the additional help, the work sped by, and in no time the beds of the two vehicles were filled. The bodies were gone but the patch of blood would remain, and Ben wondered if it would poison the ground or fertilize it. Sometimes death begat more death; sometimes it made new life possible.
When he was finished, Ben stripped off the long raincoat he’d worn for the occasion. He did his best to knock the gore from his boots. Jake did the same before getting into the Escape.
“Might finish the roof today,” Jake said as Ben pulled away from the field. The fire had totally destroyed their old shed, and Jake had been building them a new one. Except for the shingles, he was nearly finished, and just before the full brunt of winter came crashing upon them.
“You’ve done a great job on it,” Ben said.
“Incoming call from Cee,” the car announced.
“Ignore,” Ben said. He’d be at the Crofts in five minutes, anyway.
The Robards’ farm was on the south edge of the valley, but already Ben could see the Crofts between the mountains. When November passed, it took the fall’s blazing forests with it, but what color the forests had lost, the rooms of the Crofts had gained. Cracked plaster and faded wallpaper had been replaced by drywall and paint in empire blues, deep sea greens, noontime yellows, and day-end reds. The floors had been sanded, stained, and waxed to a brilliant depth.
When Ben turned from the country road onto the gravel path, he accelerated into the slope.
“Why is that the only tree out there?” Ben asked Jake. He jutted his head toward the great elm on the lip. It was a beautiful tree. It reminded him of the giants that flanked the Literary Walk in Central Park. When he stared out of his windows, he often found himself wondering about it.
“The elder tree,” Jake said. “They say that when Aldrich Swann first cleared the woods from the Drop, he kept that one tree there to remind everyone of how great the forest once was.”
Ben nodded. From what he’d gathered, the Swanns had been an eccentric bunch.
When the Escape was parked, Jake headed for the shed, while Ben made for the kitchen. Bub toddled up to him in lurching steps when he entered the kitchen. The baby had started walking a few months ago and now careened around the house with all the grace of a clubfooted drunk. Ben swept him up and kissed him on his forehead.
“I called you,” Caroline said. She was chopping leeks on the island. “More than once.” She wore khakis and one of Ben’s old oxford shirts. Back in the city, this wouldn’t have qualified even as weekend wear, but now every day was the same for them. The chores demanded of him were the only things that changed.
“Had my hands full,” Ben said.
“Too bad dead cows take precedence over your own son.”
“What are you—” Then Ben noticed the clock on the microwave. “Oh.”
“What is this? The third time this week you’ve forgotten him?” She made a sound with her tongue.
“Don’t. Please.” Ben closed an open drawer with more force than was necessary.
In his father’s arms, Bub began to fuss.
“If only you could get out of your head for long enough to—”
“The last time I checked, I wasn’t the only one in this house with a driver’s license,” Ben said.
“Good. I’d been trying to figure out how this was actually my fault.” She slammed the chef’s knife into the cutting board.
Bub began to squall, his lungs now as strong as his little legs.
“Hush,” Ben said as he bounced him. The baby wasn’t as easy to wrangle as he’d once been. Ben could tell from the quality of his cries that Bub was ramping himself up to an inconsolable level. “Where’s Hudson? Hudson?” he bellowed into the house.
“Forget the dog!” Caroline told him.
&nb
sp; “Bye-bye,” he told Bub, trying to pry him from his arms. The boy, now hopelessly distraught, shrieked for him. He arched his back in that way that made everything impossible. But Ben forced the baby to the floor, near where a Fisher-Price airport had collided with a parking garage.
He jumped into the Escape and took the gravel drive at a reckless speed. Fallen leaves from the forest danced in his rearview mirror.
Ben punched up the volume on the stereo. He was playing another one of the albums that Ted had sent his way. The vocals were angry, but they fit him fine.
—
The priory bused many of the boys, but Charlie was the only student from Swannhaven, and the little village was too remote to warrant a bus route. Ben rarely minded driving him, though he hoped that everyone had exaggerated the treacherous winter weather.
Some students still loitered around the school’s front steps when Ben pulled up, but Charlie wasn’t among them. He parked the Escape and walked around the cluster of buildings to the athletic fields, where a soccer practice was in session. The priory ran a winter soccer program that competed against nearby private schools. The boys were running passing drills in two lines, from one end of the field to the other.
Ben found Charlie watching from one of the small metal bleachers that flanked the field.
“Hi.” He sat next to his son. “Sorry I’m late.”
“It’s okay.”
The boys who had completed the drill started doing tricks with the balls. They bounced them off their knees and knocked headers between them. Ben could feel the cold from the bleachers through his jeans. He watched Charlie’s eyes follow the boys showing off to one another.
“I bet you can juggle the ball better than any of them. I should get you one so you can try it.”
“I have one already.”
“Well, we should play with it more. Did you know that I was on the soccer team when I was your age?”
Charlie shook his head.
“I was pretty good, too.” Ben saw Father Cal walking through the priory’s garden, and he raised a hand to him. “I was a forward. You know what that is?”
Charlie shook his head again. His eyes were still on the field, but Ben sensed that his thoughts were far away.
“It was my job to score the goals.”
“Oh.”
Father Cal reached the bleachers and shook Ben’s hand. “Getting chilly.”
“I can’t believe they’re still wearing shorts,” Ben said, nodding to the boys on the field.
“The young don’t stand still long enough to feel the cold,” Cal said. “Hello, Charlie. Do you mind if I borrow your dad for a moment?”
“Okay,” Charlie said. His eyes did not stray from the soccer players.
“Is everything okay?” Ben asked Cal as they walked toward the garden. He talked with the priest every few days, and Cal had never hesitated to speak in front of Charlie.
“Charlie’s doing exemplary work in all his classes. He’s a bit shy, but that’s not unusual since he’s still new and he’s been through a lot recently.”
“Switching schools is hard,” Ben said. “But after the last one, this place must feel like a relief.” He kept up with the priest’s casual tone, but Ben had plotted enough dialogue in his time to already dread where this conversation would take them.
“Moving here from the city is a big change. Getting a new brother can be traumatic. And having Caroline around more is something else he’s had to get used to. There was also that business with the fire over the summer.”
They skirted the edge of the garden to head toward the buildings. “That could have been a lot worse than it was.” The fire in the shed had been a near thing; if the wind had been any different, they could have lost much more than its four walls and some lawn equipment.
“Some events latch on to children and don’t let go. Who can say why? But it’s best that they’re brought into the light, rather than left to grow in the dark.”
“What exactly are we talking about here?”
“His art teacher, Miss Woods—you may remember her from back-to-school night? Lovely woman. They’ve been doing pastel work in Charlie’s class, but Miss Woods sensed that they needed a break and gave them a free drawing period.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“It’s a small thing, Ben,” Cal said. “But a thing that shouldn’t be ignored.”
They entered one of the low stone buildings on the edge of the school’s campus. Student artwork was on display along the walls of the hallway. Watercolors of the seasons, colored-pencil renderings of pilgrims and tall ships.
When they reached the classroom, Father Cal announced their presence to the young woman updating the bulletin board.
“Hello, Mr. Tierney.” A smile lit Miss Woods’s face. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“Likewise,” Ben said. He tried to return the smile.
“Well, as I told you at conferences, Charlie’s great.” She gathered a sheaf of papers from her desk. “He’s very careful and doesn’t cause any trouble—which, I can tell you, is a characteristic I appreciate in kids of any age.”
Father Cal remained standing, but Ben settled into a desk in the third row that he remembered was Charlie’s.
Miss Woods recounted what Father Cal had already told Ben about the free drawing period. She pulled a page from the pile and showed it to them: a jungle scene with a child’s stab at giraffe shapes and elephant impressions. The second sheet she showed them depicted a figure standing on grass, with rows and rows of multicolored circles in the background. “I think this one is of a soccer stadium,” she said, before setting it aside. She removed the top few pages from the pile.
“Charlie always does things a little differently—which is one of the things I most enjoy about teaching him.” She began to lay the pages out on her desk. “A different perspective is invaluable. It gets the other students thinking and certainly keeps me on my toes, too.”
Charlie’s drawing was comprised of six sheets of paper, arranged in three columns. The left column was a stark outline of the Crofts, executed in sharp black strokes, its towers pressing all the way to the top of the upper sheet. The right column was of the forest, an impenetrable bank of overlapping trees rendered with the same clear purpose as the drawing of the house. With a medieval sense of proportion, Charlie had given the two subjects an equal presence. Taken together, the drawing’s two outermost columns had a stark elegance to them.
The center column was the problem. The shed, half the height of the Crofts itself, was ablaze—the vivid red of the conflagration the only color on any of the pages.
“And the smoke, do you see it?” Father Cal asked.
Ben did see it: The way the smoke coiled and curved like a dark halo above the blaze. The way its tendrils looked like two arms and two legs. The way the cloud of smoke at the uppermost edge of the page looked like a featureless face.
“Okay.” The word came out cold and tight.
“I asked him about the man in the smoke, but he didn’t answer me,” Miss Woods told him. “He gets quiet sometimes.”
“Yeah.” Ben ran his hands over the unblemished wood veneer of Charlie’s desk. He didn’t need to look at the desks around him to know that they were etched with half-formed words and scratched by restless pens.
“We thought it best to point it out to you, Ben,” Cal said. “It’s normal for a child his age to have lingering anxiety from witnessing a fire like that. Everyone processes these things differently—children often deal with fear or trauma in unanticipated ways.”
“I didn’t realize it was still on his mind,” Ben said. He’d never tell them, but he couldn’t recall ever discussing the fire with Charlie. He remembered that afternoon, with his son sitting in the field watching the fire, his dark tousled hair and unblinking blue eyes immobile among the waves of grass. “Sometimes it’s hard to guess what he’s thinking.”
“It’s probably a small thing,” Cal told him
again. “We share a counselor with another school who’s trained for this, if you’d like Charlie to see her.”
“Thanks.” Ben rubbed his eyes with his hands. “I’ll talk to Caroline about it.”
“Good,” Cal said. He smiled and straightened his back, his duty done. “Thank you, Miss Woods.”
“Yes, thank you,” Ben said, and stood up.
“How’s everything else?” Cal asked once they were out of the building.
“Fine. Busy, you know.” He was happy not to have to talk about the drawing or the man in the smoke.
“I’m sure.”
“Caroline’s still upset that we weren’t able to open in time for the foliage.”
“You’ve both accomplished amazing things in such a short amount of time.”
“I’ve tried to tell her that, but she’s back to the pace of her finance days. She can never admire the things she’s accomplished. The tasks left undone are all that matter.”
“And it’s not as if the Crofts is your only project. Have you heard back from your editor?”
“Yesterday,” Ben said. He stopped at the path that would lead him back to the athletic fields, but Cal moved to walk deeper into the dying garden. “I should probably head back to Charlie.”
“Indulge me for a moment,” Cal said. “I learned something that I think you’ll appreciate. And I’m dying to hear what your editor said.”
“Oh, he said he liked the pages.” Ben had also used the opportunity to ask his publisher to release part of his next advance payment early. He hated asking, but Caroline said they were having “liquidity issues” and that an early payment would help keep them going for a while longer. Ben hadn’t been in a position to argue, but it was still hard for him to believe things had gotten so bad so quickly.
“Congratulations!”
“Thanks.” He’d been happy with the pages he’d sent in, but lately the words weren’t flowing as easily as they had been. “He said he’d feel better if I sent him an outline for the rest of it, but he knows I don’t really work that way.” He forced himself to smile. “But I couldn’t have done it without you,” he told Cal.
House of Echoes: A Novel Page 15
