The Clay Hand

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Tu, tu, tu,” the widow said. “Go ahead. Stick up for her. He did too. You’re all alike. You’ll see. It’ll all come out in the wash.”

  He lifted his glass and studied her over the rim of it, trying to determine whether she was enjoying the gossip. “Put it to me straight, Mrs. O’Grady. Do you mean Dick was having an affair with this woman?”

  “An affair,” she mimicked. “There’s a fancy word, isn’t it? I mean he was carrying on with her and sleeping over there nights, and the father of her, the old devil, encouraging it.”

  “That’s serious stuff you’re saying. I wouldn’t repeat it unless I was damned sure of it.”

  “Do you take me for a fool? Wasn’t I laying in there tossing, listening for him, and him coming home to me in the light of morning, moaning and crooning about her. ‘Oh, the two brown eyes,’ he’d say, as though there was some of us with three. ‘The two brown eyes with the little candles burning in them.’”

  “But you can’t prove it,” he said doggedly.

  The widow rocked back in her chair. “Proof, poof. You’ll see. I’m not the only one knows it.”

  He got up and went to her chair and stilled its rocking. “I thought you were a friend of Dick’s. I thought you were fond of him.”

  She looked up at him, a faded rag doll, its head still cocky. “I was. You can’t say I wasn’t.”

  “Then if I were you, I’d never let that filthy scandal out of my mouth.”

  He set the bottle down hard on the table beside her and went up to his room. He had had quite enough for one day.

  Chapter 11

  HE AWAKENED TO SOUNDS in the house and to utter darkness. He lay a few minutes feeling the edges of the narrow bed, gradually recalling where he was, and the circumstances which had brought him there. The sound of wind along the side of the house was a high-pitched whistle that broke off at times, and slid through the rough-hewn window frame and whispered about his head…. “The wind…at night…lies down beside me,” Dick had written.

  Phil threw off his blankets and groped for the light cord. It was five-thirty, and the other boarders were going downstairs to their breakfast. He dressed and made up his own bed. Downstairs, Mrs. O’Grady was making sandwiches, two lunch buckets open before her. A bumpy handkerchief covered her hair, done up in curls, no doubt.

  “There’s no warm water yet,” she said, seeing him.

  “I’ll wash in cold then.”

  “Get the bucket and take it out. Don’t leave the door open.”

  The men nodded and continued eating when he said good morning to them. Their leather jackets and mining caps were laid out on the kindling box by the stove to warm them after having hung in the back kitchen all night. Phil drew his bucket of water and took it out. He stripped to the waist and washed quickly. Once dressed again, he felt alert and more awake than he could remember having been for some time. He went out on the porch and emptied the tub with the wind. Below him, the early lights in a hundred kitchens dotted Winston. There were no stars, and still no shade of dawn. Down the hill and up another, the church bell tolled an early Mass. The miners came out of the house and thumped down the steps, one of them carrying a flashlight. Phil heard the tinkle of the bell on the outside gate presently, and then watched their circle of light rise and fall along the road until it was lost among the first stores. A minute later the siren sounded once. Six o’clock.

  “Do you want your breakfast or no?” the widow called.

  He went into the house. “Just coffee, Mrs. O’Grady.”

  “You’ll not go long on coffee. You better let me fix you a couple of eggs. They’re just out of the nest, you might say.”

  “Just coffee, thank you.”

  She rattled the cup in the saucer as she poured it. He took it from her hand to the table. The spoons were in a glass on the table, and in another glass were paper napkins.

  “Fill it up with cream there. If I heat some biscuits will you eat them? I’ve a jar of honey.”

  “No thanks. I’m not used to eating this early.”

  “Then what did you get up for?”

  Having no particular answer for it, he gave none. She gathered the used breakfast dishes in a stack and hobbled across to the sink with them. She returned, bringing a half-filled cup of coffee with her. “You’re sore at me for what I said about him last night, aren’t you?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m disturbed by it. That’s all.”

  She leaned close to him, the smell of sleep and liniment still on her. “Do you think that one up there is disturbed about it? No sir. Not her.”

  He nearly scalded himself getting the coffee down. He got his overcoat and went out. The chickens were coming alive in the coop, and although the sky still seemed dark, a light haze was shimmering along the ground. He would not lessen her venom by escaping it himself. And God knows, he thought, how hard it is for the mind to stand up straight when the body is bent in two. He went back and asked her if there was anything he could do before he left.

  “Will you open the door of the chicken coop, the way I can feed them over the rail?”

  “Anything else? Can I feed them for you?”

  “No. I’ll want a mouthful of air. It’ll be daylight soon, and that simple one’ll come up to help me.” She reached her hand toward him. “You mustn’t think I want to be hard on Dickie, for I was a long time fond of him.”

  “He was just here six weeks,” Phil said.

  “There’s three weeks longer than I had a husband.”

  At the corner of Lavery’s he turned up, and climbed the long slope to the church. He had seen many a city cemetery smaller than the one there, with so many of its markers identical except for the names on them. In the little distance they were like white sheaves stacked side by side in a long, smooth field. The great harvest.

  He entered the church, startled by the huge angel in the vestibule. Dick had written of it. As the door closed behind him, the flames of the candles on the altar quivered. Only the priest himself was present. He moved the missal and then turned, speaking aloud, his rich voice reverberating through the empty church. “You may turn on the light if you wish. The switch is in the vestibule behind the statue.” He returned to the missal and bowed his head.

  Phil stayed the Mass out in the semi-darkness. The first light of dawn was caught in the stained glass windows. As it heightened, he read the in memoriams inscribed on each window…. Burke, Halitski, and the foremost, IN BELOVED MEMORY OF FATHER JAMES DUFFY. For him Christ multiplied the loaves and fishes, and Phil thought, perhaps in His wondrous way He did, for surely the good priest had need of them.

  As Father Joyce turned for the last blessing, Phil got his first good look at him, a handsome ascetic-looking man—far from home in Winston? Who was he to say that, having seen him only at the climax of his devotion? Phil left the church before the priest came down from the altar, passing again the great angel, and seeing in the growing light a greenish cast to it where the paint had chipped away.

  He drove to the cliff from which Dick had fallen. This time he started up the hill at its nearest slope to the road, keeping a few feet from its edge. The ground itself was matted with weeds and a sort of knotty quag-grass. There were a few scraggy trees, but beyond that nothing to break the monotony of an untilled land whose only life was the dead deposit of centuries, the coal yield far beneath its surface.

  From the height of the hill he saw the whole town of Winston—the churches, the railroad station, the tracks, a web of them running out of vision, all looking like miniatures on a simulated setting. The nearest building was the Clauson house. Four goats were lined up at the back gate, their soft bleating rising to him.

  Phil started down the hill, intending to cover it, as if a fan might have been spread over it, by following each rib to its apex on top. The first few trips yielded him nothing except pain in the calves of his legs from the climbing. Then he came upon another abandoned mine shaft, this one freshly boarded up. About it the ground
had been trampled recently, probably by many feet. It might have been the entry Kevin Laughlin had taken, and all the scuffling and tramping had come after his body was found. If that was so, it was in this area Dick had first detected the gas. He wondered if Dick knew mines and mining that well.

  Ranging the vicinity of the entry, Phil saw the weed-overgrown markings of a former railway bed. It ran through the valley around the hill and joined the main line. A flight of sparrows was the only movement along it now. He climbed the hill once more. A train whistle whined in the distance, and seemed to come up to him in an eddy of sound, bouncing from one valley to another until, at moments, it seemed within a few feet of him. He lit a cigaret and waited, presently seeing the little curls of smoke rising from among the southern hills. At the station, the mail truck turned in and backed up to the platform. Another truck was standing there, and a few men gathered around it, waiting. The train crept past the tool sheds, the engineer waving to the men working there. Phil watched it slowly take the hair-pin turn through the hills into town. When it pulled into the station, he went down the hill.

  Chapter 12

  MARGARET WAS HAVING BREAKFAST when he knocked on her door. She was wearing a trim black suit, with a white blouse that was almost clerical in the severity with which its collar circled her neck. He remembered Randy Nichols’ words immediately, and as quickly thrust them from his mind.

  “It was very kind of you to spend last evening with me, Phil,” she said coldly.

  “I thought you wanted to rest.”

  “Be honest, at least, Phil.”

  “I was ashamed to come, Margaret. I know now that was petty vanity on my part, indulging my shame. I’ll stay with you now, and do everything I can to help you.”

  She smiled up at him. “You sound like a child who knows he’s been naughty. Come and have a cup of coffee. Mrs. Krancow expected you. She brought an extra cup. I’ve made the arrangements for the train tonight for Dick’s remains. I hope to leave then, too. The sheriff has been very kind. I’m not sure the coroner will be as considerate.”

  “I think he wants a quick verdict,” Phil said.

  “Why?”

  “The men are still out at one of the mines as a result of the death of a man there. Dick reported the gas in the mine by which he died. You’ll hear it all at the inquest.”

  “No doubt. But will it bring them any nearer to the cause of Dick’s death?”

  “I don’t know, Margaret. I doubt that anything will until they find out what he was doing here in the first place.”

  “And no leads on that?”

  “None that I know of.”

  Phil went to the window. People had gathered outside the funeral parlor, most of them in their Sunday clothes. They were talking together in small groups. He noticed Randy Nichols moving among them, asking a question here and there. The Winston taxi drove up. Mrs. O’Grady was sitting in the front seat with Whelan.

  “Margaret, here’s Mrs. O’Grady, if you’d like to get a look at her.”

  She went to the window beside him and drew the curtain away. As the car stopped, Anna got out of the back seat with a little stool, and set it on the ground beneath the running board. The Widow O’Grady got out backside first. Anna held her cane for her. When the old lady got her footing, she put one hand on the girl’s shoulder and turned around. Her first look was at the window. It was a long look, her hand freezing Anna in a crouching position. Phil’s impulse was to draw away, but he resisted it, Margaret standing where she was. Other eyes followed the widow’s and it seemed that the whole of Winston was gaping up at them.

  Margaret turned away abruptly. “What terrible people, Phil! That old woman makes my blood run cold.”

  “Their manners may not be much,” he said. “But they’re perfectly normal people. We’re the strange ones to them.”

  “Chains wouldn’t hold me here another night,” she said. “I’d be afraid, Phil. I really would.”

  “We’d better go down now,” he said, taking a last drink of the thick black coffee.

  “It’s a wonder they didn’t hire the movie house,” Margaret said on the stairs. The parlor had been cleared of furniture, rugs and fernery, and was lined with folding chairs. Two young men wearing deputy-sheriff badges were stationed inside the front door. One of them opened it at that moment to help Mrs. O’Grady up the steps and in. A stream of people were following her.

  “The witnesses take the front seats, please,” the other deputy said. “The side seats are for the jurors. If you’ve just come to look, you got to stand in back.”

  Mrs. O’Grady made her entrance without looking up the stairs, already concerned with the seat that was provided for her. She complained of it immediately, and the deputy brought her a more comfortable one, and made the mistake of offering to help her into it. He fled from the abuse, red-faced. Fields and the coroner were at a large table in the back of the room, a clerk beside them.

  One by one, the witnesses were directed to their seats: Lavery, McNamara, starch-collared, his tavern closed tight, Father Joyce, the man following him leaving a chair of respect between himself and the priest, a boy Phil took to be the one who had found Dick. The curious and the volunteers of miscellaneous acquaintance soon filled the back rows.

  Margaret pulled at Phil’s sleeve. “Shouldn’t we go in?”

  He nodded and led the way to the two vacant chairs near the center of the room. The jurors were filing in from the back room at the same time. They sat down in flushed and quiet self-consciousness, three men and three women, the women tugging at their skirts, the men at their collars, and all given to sudden smiling and as sudden sobering. Their hands were red and swollen from the work they rested from this day, Phil noticed—the laundry tub or the baker’s oven.

  The murmur of hushed conversation stopped, the only sound in the room the crackle of the folding chairs as people turned to look. Three witnesses entered and withstood the stare of a hundred pairs of eyes as they found the seats reserved for them. A little noise of hissing came from the back of the room. Maurice Handy was on his feet immediately. “The sheriff will remove anybody who makes a disturbance.”

  The witnesses were Clauson, his daughter, and her husband. Margaret had turned with the others on their entrance. Phil was aware then that her whole body had gone tense at the sight of them. She paled first and then flushed.

  Rebecca Clauson Glasgow. She sat between the two men, as tall as the younger one and a head above her father. Her face was sallow, her lips, without lipstick, failing to break the long mask. Her eyes seemed the only living part of it.

  Under the pretense of speaking to Nichols, Phil moved away from Margaret and stood in the hallway a moment with the reporter. It gave him a better view of the witnesses.

  “There’s a mating of opposites if I ever saw one,” Nichols said into his ear. “I’ll bet the only thing they got in common is a long bed.”

  “Yeah,” Phil said, scarcely hearing him. Glasgow was studying Margaret Coffee, a half smile on his face. Phil knew what the sheriff had meant when he described him. A lot of women would call him good-looking, and there was a slouching casualness about him that indicated his awareness of it and a tendency to let it carry him. He was about forty, and wore a large mustache that disguised in some measure the first lines of age.

  “And I wonder if they got that in common,” Nichols added. He, too, watched Glasgow take the measure of Margaret Coffee. “I’d call him an insolent bastard for that, if I liked her any better.”

  Phil wondered if Glasgow was comparing her with the wife beside him. Probably. Nichols was right—it wasn’t their intellects he was measuring… For all her plainness, there was something attractive about Rebecca Glasgow. Clean-cut would have been the word, if he were to choose it instantly…and that, in afterthought, was a hell of a description for a woman.

  The old magician himself was a dapper-looking man, probably always with the look and air of the stage about him—a briskness of movement, a nervou
s quickness of the hands. Only his eyes were quick this morning, however, moving over the faces in his view. He, above all others here, would know the bitterness of unfriendly people who thought they had found the hoax in his magic.

  The coroner looked at his watch, as did everyone else in the room who had one. A stillness settled upon the expectant crowd, in which the flow of the clerk’s pen could be heard as he prepared to enter the morning proceedings. Handy pocketed his watch and got up. “I’ve found it fitting in this inquest to ask for the help and advice of a jury.” He addressed himself to them directly then. “You have viewed the body of the deceased. Will you please rise?”

  The members of the jury got up.

  “Do you solemnly swear that you will diligently inquire into the time, cause, manner and circumstances of the death of the person whose body you have viewed, and will make presentment of the truth as it comes to your knowledge, so help you, God?”

  They affirmed their promise and sat down.

  The first witness called was Constable Joseph Krancow, who described the first exploration of the scene where Coffee was found. His testimony was corroborated by Doctor Turpel, the Winston physician who had accompanied him, and Nat Watkins, the boy who had found Coffee Sunday morning. They were then excused temporarily in order that the testimony of the state medical examiner might be heard.

  Doctor Edward Phalon sat before them easily, listening to the coroner explain why he had been called in. Handy turned to him. “Doctor, will you now tell us, please, in language we can understand, the findings of your postmortem examination?”

  “I found that the deceased died between six and twelve on the night of March 19, last Saturday. That was at least forty hours before my examination. That lapse of time makes it impossible for me to give exact information in some instances.”

  The coroner nodded.

  “The cause of death was the snapping of the spinal cord, near the base of the neck. Death would have been practically instantaneous.”