Death Across the Lake

by Lyle Hightower

  I turned on the engine and Irene gave a loud whistle, the agreed upon signal, and both the uniforms and the townies started shooting, providing cover. I started accelerating, Irene holding on to me with one arm, holding the gun in the other. We came over the crest of the incline and onto the bridge, and I accelerated even more, and then we were moving swiftly across the bridge, covering fire whizzing past us, and then the bullets started coming in the other direction, hitting the shield with a high-pitched sound. I was holding the sheet metal with the same hands I was steering the bike with, and every hit moved my hands this way and that. The bike started to fishtail. We were still moving forward, more or less, and out of my peripheral vision I saw that we were driving past four Minutemen who had been shooting at us. They looked confused, angry, and Irene opened fire, hitting at least two of them. Fire was coming at us from both sides, and the police and the townies were now running across the bridge, yelling and shooting. Bullets whizzed past my head, hit the metal sheet, and finally the bike slid out from underneath us, and I rolled, sheet metal still in my hands and ended up splayed on the dusty pavement. I looked back, and Irene was staggering, struggling to get up, before she was hit in the arm and fell down again. Of the four soldiers she had shot at, two were still standing, and running away from the scene, but another detachment, on the other side of the bridge, was shooting at us. I picked up the shield and walked slowly over to where Irene was lying, bullets hitting the shield, threatening to knock it out of my hands.

  “You okay?” I said, seeing full well she wasn’t.

  “It’s a flesh wound. I’ll be fine.” She was bleeding a lot. I applied pressure to it with my hand. She winced, and then relaxed. The sound of gunfire hadn’t stopped, but now was coming from the other side, our side, and bullets no longer were hitting the shield.

  Irene tore a piece off of her poncho and had me tie it around her shoulder so she could use it as a sling. I looked over to the mouth of the bridge. Our side was holding it, under heavy fire from further up the road, as more Minutemen platoons moved up to fill in for their fallen brothers. We ran, taking our makeshift shield with us, to where the uniforms were huddling on the other side of the bridge railing.

  “We’re not going to be able to hold them back,” McMurtry said.

  “Falling back isn’t an option,” Molly said. “We’ll be wiped out.”

  “She’s right,” Irene yelled over the din. “There aren’t enough of us to mount a rear guard. As soon as we back off they’ll have us. We have to stay put, and return fire as best we can.”

  We stayed there, under heavy fire, praying the mortars wouldn’t reach us. One valiant fool from the townies stood up and threw a molotov cocktail further than I would have given him credit for, and it lit up the night for a brief moment, but landed without doing any harm, and as it left his hand he was hit by a bullet and crumpled to the ground.

  This went on for what seemed like forever. We were all running low on ammunition. It looked like the end. I smiled at Irene, who looked at me with a deadly serious expression.

  And then something happened. The shooting stopped. One last mortar fell thirty feet away from us, and then indistinct cries came from the Minutemen platoons. Slowly, the shooting started again, but there was less of it this time, and peering over the railing, I could see some of them withdrawing. The fire coming towards us was cover, as they moved back.

  “The causeway!” Irene said. “It’s the Grand Isle causeway, they’ve been ordered back.”

  “They won’t be gone long,” I said. They’ll fix it and then reengage.

  “True enough,” she said, looking at me and then Molly, and McMurtry. “But it buys us some time.”

  Dust rose up over the road behind us. I stood up, warily, to try to get a glimpse. It was a column of men and women from the town, at least fifty of them, and they were armed. At the head was Bernie Ouellette, carrying an old hunting rifle in one hand, a revolver in the other. He was wearing a gun belt, barely visible over his paunch.

  “Come out to see the fireworks?” I said as he approached.

  “Someone’s gotta save this town,” he said. “You thought it would be you?”

  “Come on, we have to go,” Irene said, irritated.

  Looking north into Winooski, I could see Minutemen soldiers scurrying away. I left Molly and McMurtry in charge of holding the bridge with the newly arrived reinforcements, while Irene and I returned to the station house to regroup.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Hensley won’t budge. Says the constitution of the Farmer’s Union gives him the final say, and he’s got the board on his side, so they won’t push him out of office. They say it’s not in their interest to interfere, that this is a municipal matter,” said Chief, the exasperation plain on his face. It was the next morning and we were in the library with Irene, waiting by the computer, hoping for a message from State.

  “So they won’t raise any battalions,” I said.

  “Not a one. And they’ve barred their membership from fighting on an independent basis,” Chief said. “Message just came in now. I sent a courier back to see if he’d be willing to talk about this, but he’s stonewalling. We can’t defend the town without them. That’s two, three thousand able bodied men and women in the county. Not well armed, but armed enough.”

  I could almost see Hensley’s position. If the Minutemen were just going to walk through farmland without occupying it, just to get to town, it was safer, in theory, for his membership to let it happen. Of course we all knew what would actually happen if they gained control of the city. They’d take from the countryside whatever they needed to pacify the towns, and everyone would lose. Hensley understood this as well as anyone. I couldn’t escape the feeling that someone had gotten to him.

  “We need to figure out what to do next,” Chief said. “We’ve got some time, but not much. I think your bridge stunt scared them, showed them we’re thinking strategically. But it’s not like the Minutemen aren’t thinking strategically too. They’ll pull back for a while, and start testing us. We had a report this morning that Willard’s boys from the Blacksmith’s Union held off a small Minutemen force on the Shelburne road. They were under light fire for about a half hour and then the Minutemen pulled back.”

  “I don’t like this business with Hensley. You don’t make an about face like this for no reason,” I said. “The whole union executive decides at the last minute that they don’t want to play ball?”

  “What are you saying, Bailey?” asked Chief.

  “I’m saying something stinks. When I talked to Peck’s contact in the Rangers, he said Peck hadn’t told anyone in the executive about their meetings. He was planning to arm his membership without telling the executive. Given how they’re acting now, is it possible Peck knew what the executive really wanted? That his whole plan was to force the executive’s hand by taking the decision-making power away from the executive and giving it to the membership, who he knew would follow him into battle?”

  “There’s no way to know,” Irene said “if he didn’t talk to anyone about it, and Hensley won’t talk to us.”

  “What about his widow?” I said. “She wouldn’t come into town to retrieve the body. Maybe she knew something we didn’t.”

  Irene gasped. “She knew it would dangerous for her to be here.”

  “Or she was in on it,” I said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  You could have forgotten there was a war on, it was so nice out in the countryside. I left the next morning, after a fitful night sleeping in the briefing room at the police station. Chief, Irene and I had to take turns manning the radio. Velasquez, wounded but patched up and still standing, provided status reports most of the night. There was fear in his voice, but no sign of a renewed attack from the Minutemen up at the Winooski bridge, and reports from our other positions were similarly uneventful. Morning finally came, and I prepared for my journey. Peck’s widow, a woman named Nancy, lived on a farm near a town called Jericho, northe
ast of Burlington. Under normal circumstances it was an hour and half ride by bicycle out of town. I would have to avoid the Winooski bridge, taking the long way around the airport, and try to slip past any patrols. It would have been safer to go by foot, but there wasn’t time.

  It was surprisingly quiet out on the road, once I’d left town. Farm laborers, ignoring their bosses in the Farmers’ Union, had set up a road block and checkpoint at the junction of Main and I-89, and they waved me on, smiling. As much as the Minutemen wrought terror, they had given these people purpose. What little they had they had fought for, and they weren’t about to let them come and take it away from them.

  The sun was out. It had rained in the early morning, leaving everything feeling fresh and reborn, and I thought of poor Velasquez, and Molly and McMurtry huddling together at the bridge, exhausted. Some of them would have slept in the night, in shifts, and now that it seemed like the threat was gone for now, they would be going home in shifts too, as would the townies who showed up to protect their homes. Bernie Ouellette was a surprise. His bread was buttered either way, I guess. A trader would always make money, no matter who was in charge. But I realized now that part of him cared, at least enough to show up.

  Once I had passed the airport I biked along the old U.S. Highway 2, as pot-holed and mottled a stretch of asphalt as one could reasonably imagine. It was overgrow in places. There was less east-west traffic than there was north-south along the lakefront, even though this was the Montpelier road, the royal road to the state capital. Showed you just how loosely tied together the Republic was. There was a character to lakesiders, as they called us in the interior, that was wholly different from southerners, Rutlanders, or the isolated homesteaders of the Northeast Kingdom. When communications are difficult, everyone goes their own way.

  I got to Jericho just after noon. I was looking for a farmhouse on Lee River Road, just south of town. I found it, sure enough. It was in good keeping. It seemed the whitewash on the clapboard was new, and the fields were sown with wheat and corn, and cows grazed on a large patch of grass.

  I leaned my bicycle against the house and walked up the steps. It was very quiet, and the door to the house was open, behind a screen door that obscured the interior. I looked in for a second, and as my vision adjusted the form of a child appeared, red-haired, a girl, about ten years old. She didn’t move, but stared out at me from inside, a bizarre unchanging expression on her face.

  We stared at each other like this until a woman walked into the room. “Mildred, get away from the door,” she said, pushing her child back behind her and walking to the door, proud, but afraid.

  “And who are you?”

  “Mrs. Peck?”

  “I said, who are you?”

  “Detective Benny Bailey, Burlington Police Department,” I said, showing my badge.

  “You’re a bit out of your jurisdiction aren’t you?”

  “Well, yes, but I wondered if I could speak to you about your husband.”

  Tears started to well up in her eyes, but just as quickly, she composed herself, and looked set to close the door on me.

  “Ma’am, it’s very important I ask you some questions about him.”

  “You’re that man who talked to the legislature, about the Minutemen. My husband talked about you.”

  “Can I come inside?”

  “I don’t see what more there is to say. My husband is dead. There’s no use in trying to bring him back.”

  The little girl started to cry.

  “Go upstairs Mildred. Now.” Turning back to me, she said: “Come in. Come in. I don’t see what good it will do, but come in.”

  She held the screen door open for me, and offered to take my hat and jacket. She motioned towards the couch, and I sat down.

  “Can I get you some water, and something to eat?”

  “Yes, that would be lovely, thank you.”

  She went to the kitchen. The sitting room was a large open space, and I could see out into the back yard, where tomatoes and potatoes grew, and into the fields behind it. A dust devil was winding its way through the cornfield.

  She came back with a glass of water and a plate with some potato cakes on them.

  “Sorry, these potato late-keys are cold, I hope you don’t mind. My great-great grandmother was Jewish, the recipe comes from her.”

  I’d never eaten them before, hot or cold, but they were very good.

  “Now what is it you want to know?”

  My mouth was full, and she waited patiently for me to finish chewing, her hands sitting primly on her lap. She was haughty and dour at the same time, but polite.

  “How much do you know about your husband’s dealings with the other members of the Farmers’ Union Executive.”

  She seemed to think about this for a long time.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, he ran for the office reluctantly. A gang of about six of them came to visit one day, saying they respected his forthright manner and clearheadedness, and that they wanted him to run, and they, as members of the executive, would back him.”

  “Was Andrew Hensley in that group?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes he was. The six of them, they were a faction within the executive. Now it’s a plum position, or it’s supposed to be. You get paid well, and a lot of respect comes with it. He had trouble saying no, and I do reckon I pushed him into it, at least partly. But he didn’t like it much. The work he had to do was fine. He liked organizing, found real satisfaction in that, but he didn’t much like the people. He came to believe he’d been put in the position by the six, as part of a kind of coup day-ta, a takeover. I think they thought he’d roll over, that he’d be grateful for the money and do as he was told. My husband was a quiet man, I can see how they thought they might get their way, but he was more stubborn than they could have imagined. Had principles too.”

  “Did they come into conflict openly?”

  “In the executive? You bet. They thought they’d done an end-run on the old guard. The older guys, they were all about consensus, cooperation, protecting the little guy. These new people, they saw opportunities for themselves, if you ask me, didn’t care about what happened to the small-time farmers, people like us. He wasn’t looking forward to this trip either. They didn’t want to mobilize the membership for the defence of the county. Irving wanted a compromise solution, something that would work for town and country, so to speak.”

  “Were you aware that your husband had been approached by guerrillas?”

  “The Rangers?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at the floor. Something in her tensed up.

  “I, I was. I worried terribly that it was a mistake.”

  “What were they discussing?”

  She again seemed hesitant, almost ashamed.

  “He was discussing the Rangers supplying arms directly to the membership. He thought that if the membership felt itself sufficiently equipped, it would be enough to get them to fight, in the country and in the towns. And it would undermine the authority of the executive.”

  “And his own,” I said.

  She laughed. “He didn’t care one way or the other. He didn’t want the job. He thought the Union had betrayed its mission. I think he was right. It was supposed to be a democratic institution. It had stopped being that. I don’t know much about politics, Mr. Bailey, but I know that.”

  She wiped her eyes with her fingers. “What will happen with that Cartwright woman?” she asked. “They told me she did it.”

  “Well, if we think she did it by the time the investigation is over, and she’ll be tried.”

  She sniffled. “Seems straightforward enough.”

  “Mrs. Peck, are you certain Irving hadn’t spoken to anyone else about his talks with the Rangers?”

  “Oh, 100% certain. He didn’t trust anyone else in the organization.”

  “But he told you?”

  “Well he had to. Would’a had to tell someone. Can’t keep a secret like that all to yourself. As for me,
I didn’t whisper a word to anyone. I mean, look around this place. There isn’t anyone to tell.”

  I left Nancy Peck to her mourning. I walked down the steps, got back on my bicycle and started riding back into town. Whereas the air had been brisk and refreshing in the morning, the faintest hint of early morning drizzle still in the air, it was now dry, the hot sun baking the dusty highway. I looked behind me and I’d left a trail of dust that slowly rose behind me. I would’ve have worried about being seen, but the road felt strangely abandoned. The demarcations of territory we make in our minds, safe versus not safe, they never feel more arbitrary than when war is happening. One can be sleeping five feet from a line that marks the beginning of danger, that is danger, but you keep on living because you can’t do anything else.

  Intuitively, perhaps, Irving Peck had sensed that danger lay ahead for the Farmers’ Union and its membership. He also knew he couldn’t trust his own executive. It made sense then to do an end-run around them. Power exists only so far as it can be exercised. The thing I couldn’t figure out was how did they know? For they must have known, just as they must have killed him. I was sure they knew he was talking to the Rangers, and they knew what his movements would be the night he was killed. If Nancy Peck was right, and no one else knew what he was trying to do, then it was someone on the Rangers’ side who either killed him, or told the people who killed him what they needed to know. This much was certain, but how to fill in the rest, I didn’t know.