“Said he done dreamt of this white light which he thought was the Lord Himself, but the Devil come out of it and grinned at him. Bothered the boy,” Spargo said. “Would me too. Elray ain’t been sharp since Sister Rosa went over to the Lord.”
Cotton Spargo nodded politely, and stopped talking. Service followed Waco into the wood line.
They had heard the whine of a helicopter’s turbines while they were at the spring, and by the time they got back to the house, the body had been carried inside and the chopper was sitting in the field, its rotors wobbling like a vulture’s flight feathers in the variable breeze.
Waco introduced Oregon County sheriff Doug Hakes, who wore a chocolate-brown and blue-gray uniform shirt and a sweat-stained brown baseball cap. “Any trouble with the feds?” Waco asked.
“Snakebit fed’s not able to make a fuss, and the young ’un’s feelin’ so much pressure he seems a bit tongue-tied,” the sheriff said.
“What about Bonaparte?” Service asked.
The sheriff took off his hat and stroked his brush cut. “One which come out by whirlybird afore the storm? He’s long gone.”
Service wanted to ask where and when, but bit his tongue.
“They’s fixin’ ta clean Elray up,” the sheriff said, leading them into the house. A young man came out of a room looking green and spewed vomit as he dashed for the outside.
Eddie Waco offered Service a small container of Vicks, and Service dabbed a little under each nostril.
“No call for thet,” the sheriff growled. “He was ’frigerated and we brung him home in ice.” He pushed open a door and held out his hand for them.
The room was white and stark. Service saw nail holes in the walls and knew that the room had been cleared. There was a table in the center. The dead man was unclothed, stretched out on his back, his skin gray. Damp white cloths lay on his hands. There were quarters where his eyes should have been. Service flinched at a whump, marking an explosion not that far from the house.
“Dirt up this way’s thinner’n Maggie’s drawers,” Eddie Waco explained. “Hardpan and rock right up to a man’s boot soles. Dynamite’s quicker’n shovels.”
Service understood. During the winter in the U.P., bodies were kept in storehouses until spring when the ground frost melted and holes could be dug for graves. What had to be done for and with the dead was not something most people gave much thought to until it was staring them in the face. Once he had arrested a poaching crew out of Champion. They used a body-storage facility to stash their take over winter. Standing among boxes of frozen human corpses and hanging deer carcasses, the lead poacher had looked at him and said, “Hell, dese folks don’t mind, eh?”
Service studied the body. Elray Spargo looked even larger all spread out on his back than he had looked in the refrigerated tent on the Eleven Point River. Spargo had long red-gray hair, a thick neck, and broad shoulders. His beard had the texture of steel wool. His hands had protruding knuckles, and long thick fingers. What clothes had the man been wearing? More importantly, had Spargo intended to fish the night he’d been killed? There had been no mention of that so far. If fishing wasn’t involved, did this mean another shift in pattern, another mistake, or had he misunderstood the pattern?
Service made a twisting motion with his hand, and Eddie Waco said to one of the men washing the body, “You don’t mind, you fellers want ta help me roll ole Elray over on his belly?”
They did as they were asked. It was obvious they had handled bodies before.
The lungs had been removed, or put back into the body. The wounds that remained were horrific, and had been crudely stitched with what looked like coarse, braided black fishing line. Service was certain Tatie Monica and the FBI would go ballistic when they found out they no longer had the body. Why did the killer remove the victims’ eyes? His mind kept going back to this and he wasn’t sure why.
The law officers helped the men roll Elray Spargo onto his back again and went outside. Service lit a cigarette, Waco put a pinch in his cheek, and Doug Hakes took a cigar stump out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth without lighting it.
Thunder was buzzing intermittently to the southwest.
“Should hold off,” the sheriff said, looking up. “What you make a’ all this?” he added, glancing at Waco.
“Ain’t no ord’nary man could git the edge on Elray.”
“You hear anythin’?” the sheriff asked.
“You?” Eddie Waco answered, countering the question with a question, the sign of an experienced cop. Service hadn’t known Waco long, but he was comfortable with him, and though Waco played the hick, and was a bit stingy with words, he seemed to have a sharp mind and a reason for the things he did.
“Think Cake was around?” Hakes asked.
“Have to see,” Eddie Waco said, noncommittally.
At 10 a.m. people began to queue to view the body and pay their respects.
Hakes wandered off to talk to a plain woman in a navy blue frock. “Okay to ask questions yet?” Service asked.
“Not yet,” Waco answered.
Service heard a lot of crying and wailing and caterwauling inside, but when people came out, they seemed composed and joined in normal conversations with others.
During the night sawhorses, doors, and planks had been used to make temporary tables outside the house. Around noon people began filtering to the tables and standing behind their chairs until Fiannula Spargo came out of the house with her eight children, all of them dressed in black. A small veil of black lace hung over her face. After the family was seated, the others sat down.
Platters of food were served: hams, turkeys, roasts, tubs of mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, string beans and black-eyed peas, huge pans of corn bread, endless pots of black coffee, and sweating pitchers of iced tea.
Eddie Waco snatched a cob of corn and began gnawing. Between bites he said, “This here’s a real offmagandy. Local crop won’t be in for two month. Somebody done toted this in from outside.” Waco ate the corn without salt, pepper, or butter, shoveling ears into his mouth like logs on a conveyor belt. Because of his false teeth Service couldn’t eat corn without cutting it off the cob, so he contented himself with other things, like the corn bread, which had onions and green peppers in it, and more than a dash of sugar to sweeten it.
People laughed and talked and gently scolded their kids like it was a church social. Service saw a man take two heaping plates, walk out to the wood line, and come back empty-handed a short while later. He nudged Eddie Waco, who said, “I seen,” as he attacked another ear of corn.
After the meal was finished and table cleared, Service watched a sleek black horse pull a small trailer with rubber tires across the field toward the house. The horse was tall and wore a headdress of gaudy, tall, black plumes, which undulated as it moved. The air remained close and heavy. The open coffin was carried out by six men and slid onto the trailer. Elray Spargo was beginning to ripen. Service touched his upper lip and Waco gave him another dollop of Vicks.
The dead man’s wife and children walked directly behind the horse-drawn trailer. Cotton Spargo and other relatives followed the widow. The rest of the mourners filed along behind. The shoes of two hundred people raised dust, leaving an opaque cloud hanging in the humid air. Thunder continued to rattle softly in the southwest like someone shaking cookie crumbs off a baking pan.
The grave had been blown out of a more or less flat spot by some boulders and several spiky white oak trees. The widow and her children gathered around as the coffin was placed on short logs beside the gaping hole. The six men worked ropes under the casket and stepped back.
The minister who stepped forward had a withered arm, and the twisted countenance of a demented chipmunk, but the crowd responded almost immediately, and in no time the preacher was slapping the sides of the casket and railing against sin and evil and demanding everyone live
a righteous, God-fearing life.
Service tuned him out. The sermon, if that’s what it was, went on interminably, but didn’t dull the responsiveness of the mourners.
Cotton Spargo spoke. “Y’all know Elray done his duty twinny-four years. He done loved Fiannula and his kids and all his kin. Police respected him, lawbreakers a’feared him. Anybody needed help, Elray was there. All y’all know how he was. Couldn’t bear to see people in bad times. . . . Bin a heap a’ Spargos called home ta the Lord, but this time Lord—and preacher, I apologize for a-sayin’ this—hit’s too dadgum soon. I cain’t explain God’s ways, and neither can you’n, so we just accept and keep on livin’, but I tell all y’all this . . .” He gulped, paused, and sobbed. “I loved that big ole boy a’ mine, an’ I’m gon’ miss ’im ever day.”
Grady Service choked up, remembering two boxes of ashes sitting in his cabin.
The crowd, led by the children, sang, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” The young voices touched something inside Grady Service. He kept thinking about Walter, the son he had known nothing about until a year ago. At seventeen, Walter had left California alone to find his biological father. The boy had courage and determination beyond words. Service thought, My life is out of order. Fathers should go before their kids.
He remembered standing numbly at his own father’s grave. There had been no children singing the day they buried his old man, only a bugle and rifle shots as snow wafted across the gray November landscape. There had been shock more than sadness, a sudden void where a partial void had been before, his father working most of the time and rising to legendary status.
The six men used the ropes to lower Elray Spargo’s coffin into the grave. One of the men helped Cotton Spargo climb down, and handed him a screwdriver as he slid the lid in place and tightened the screws. When the dead man’s father had finished, the men helped him out of the hole, and the preacher went into his ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust routine, and the crowd began to sing “Good-bye Until We Meet Again.”
There was nothing rehearsed about any of this, nothing fake or forced, and Service felt himself enveloped in real community and family, and he found himself fighting back sobs with people he doubted he’d even recognize six hours from now. A steel-eyed Eddie Waco squeezed Service’s arm.
The mourners dropped rocks and soil into the six-foot-deep hole until it was full. A wheelbarrow full of black dirt was dumped on top, and a dozen small children began tamping the dirt with their bare feet. Service looked at the pattern of footprints and saw young life walking on new death. He couldn’t watch and turned away.
Fiannula Spargo watched her father-in-law hammer a small oak cross into a dirt mound and pile stones around it for support. She bent down, placed Elray’s sweat-stained service cap on top, joined her hands, and straightened up. “All y’all come on back ta the house an’ eat afore ev’thin’ spoils.”
What did a game warden’s career reduce to? A lifetime of unending responsibity and duty, Service thought, then ashes to ashes, dirt to dirt, and all that remained was an old baseball cap perched on a rough-hewn cross, pounded into hard ground. He told himself he would rather be left where he fell to feed the wolves and coyotes and ravens and crows. It was too damned hard to put the living through this. His old man’s funeral had been a circus, mourning a drunk run down by a drunk. But this was different. It had quiet, simple dignity, an acceptance of death as part of the cycle of life, even if it was sudden and from the hand of an animal. Maybe he had been selfish in not holding services for Maridly and Walter. It was an unsettling thought.
“Ready to work, Michigan Man?” Eddie Waco asked, interrupting Service’s thoughts.
Service nodded and followed the Missouri conservation agent.
The man seated on the rock ten yards from the grave had a plaster cast on his lower left leg and a sling holding up his left arm. From a distance he was youthful-looking, with windblown, corn-colored hair. Up close he looked ancient and battered, with a ruddy complexion and crooked teeth that jutted out from lips grooved like licorice twists. There were two empty plates on the ground by the rock.
“We knew you’n was feelin’ poorly, some of the boys woulda hepped draw you up closer, Cake,” Eddie Waco said.
“I heared what got said,” the man said. “Cain’t face the widder and them young ’uns. You know was a time I took the fever, and Elray carried me home, and he and Fi and them kids done ministered ta me. They even got the Cherokee ta drive his buggy up and have a look. They had me in thet house goin’ on a month—just like I was kin.”
“You and Elray was close,” Eddie Waco said supportively.
The man sighed. “I got the shame upon me.”
Service heard the patter of raindrops on the oak leaves overhead and knew that if the rain came hard enough, it would leak through once the leaves were soaked.
“How’s that, Cake?”
“What happened to Elray.”
“Ya’ll thinkin’ hit’s yore fault?”
The man nodded. “Shou’n’ta happened.”
“You were with ’im, was you?”
“Made me stay back, but I seen what was done.”
“You seen it happen?”
“I seen afterwards.”
“After he met someone,” Eddie Waco said.
“Yessir.”
“You know who he met or what it was about?”
“I never seen the man and he wouldn’t say. Jes said hit was official.”
“Thim his words?”
“’Zackly how he done said.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“Nossir. He done tole me stand tight for an hour less’n I heard a ruckus.”
“And you waited.”
“I always done what Elray asked.”
“I know you did, Cake. Did you find him where you thought he’d be?”
“Said he’d be by the old bat cave camp, but he weren’t.”
“You found him at the abandoned Hurricane Creek Camp.”
Waco pronounced the word hur-a-cun, and it took a second for Service to interpret.
“He was gone,” Cake Culkin said, looking off in the distance. He took a deep breath. “I peeked quick and run,” he said.
“Did you see anyone?”
“I just lit out and hit me a tree and whanged my shoulder and fell down a drop-off an’ busted a bone in mah leg. Cracked it like a dry stick. Had to wait till first light to make me a splint and find a stick to hold on to, and then I come direckly here.”
“When was this?”
Culkin looked up, like he was trying to recall. “Four days ago?”
“You hain’t sure, Cake?”
“Like I said, I done hiked on over to Cotton’s thet next day, an’ me an’ him done told Fi, and Cotton a’hauled me on over to the Cherokee’s in his wagon, and the Cherokee popped my shoulder back in an’ put that dang plaster on my leg. Ask Cotton when it was I come.”
“You walked all that way on a broke bone?” Eddie Waco asked.
The man looked up at them. “Thet day I got out a jail, I went right out to my pap’s and got me my twinny-two and went out and shot me a turkey to take over to my gal. I called a big ole Tom right in and put ’im down neat and quick. When I got over to thet bird, old Elray stepped out and grabbed a’holt a’ my arm. He sit me down and lit up ’is pipe. Elray done said he was mighty perplexed about what to do with the likes a’ me. He said he didn’t want to send me back to jail since I’d just been gone six months. But he didn’t feel like he could trust me, he said.”
Cake Culkin paused. “Ole Elray finally says, ‘Let’s us do this with honor. Right here, right now, man to man. You c’n whup me, you go right on shootin’ and fishin’ whenever you a-want. I whup you and you’n never break the law again.’” Cake paused again, obviously reliving the moment. “Elray was a big ole boy with consid
erable grit, but I was on the wiry side myseff and I had me some nasty scraps and allus handled what got throwed my way. So I said, ‘It’s a deal.’ We spit on our hands and shaked, fair and square. Then my head done exploded and I could feel I was goin’ out and all I could see was Elray’s eyes. I swear, he was enjoyin’ whuppin’ me near to death. Next thing I knew the Cherokee was a-tendin ta my face. He done sewed me up and Elray took me to my kin and give ’em thet turkey, too. For that man, I’d a’ crawled to his kin with my head cut off.”
“You become his pine shadow.”
Cake Culkin nodded. “I never broke the law once, all them years—not that I weren’t tempted time to time—but when I seen him dead like that, I run like a yella dog.”
Eddie Waco patted the man’s back. “You’re no coward, Cake. You backed up ole Elray for twinny years, and the two of you’n barely got through some of them times. He was here now, he’d say you done right by ’im. You’n done what he asked and you’n cain’t ask a shadow more’n thet.”
“I cain’t face the widder,” Cake said.
“Sure you can,” Eddie Waco said. “And soon as thet laig gets healed up, you gon’ be my shadow; that sound okay by you, Cake?”
“I’ll jes let you down,” the man whispered, studying the ground.
“You’n do and I’ll put a whuppin’ on y’all make you’n think what Elray done give you’n was a schoolmarm’s slap. You with me?”
“Sir, I reckon,” the man said, nodding unenthusiastically.
The two game wardens helped the man walk to the house and set him down with the widow, who hugged him. They left them talking, with the kids gathered round. Service saw that the kids had great affection for Cake Culkin.
“State’s never got money for enough agents,” Waco explained. “Was Elray come up with the idee of shadows—unofficial helpers. Cake there was a young man when Elray took ’im on, poachin’ since he was tin. Not a better man in the woods, and he never did break the law again—leastways not that Elray or any of the rest of us knew.”
Michigan had used unarmed volunteer conservation officers—VCOs—for many years. They had twenty or so hours of training and worked for free. Last fall Chief Lorne O’Driscoll had canceled the program because the state’s lawyers felt there were substantial liability issues. A lot of officers were still complaining about the decision. Two sets of eyes always beat one set, and two bodies at night served as a deterrent when violets turned frisky or vicious.
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