The Clay Hand

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “How old are you, Anna?”

  “Fifteen, sir.”

  “How long have you been with Mrs. O’Grady?”

  “Since I was thirteen.”

  “You knew Mr. Coffee?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Your father told us this morning that Mr. Coffee gave you money. How much money?”

  “A dollar a week. Sometimes two.”

  “Why did he give it to you?”

  “He said I ironed his shirts real nice.”

  “I see,” Handy said. “Now, Anna, have you been walking in the hills east of town lately?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Did you see anything unusual there?”

  “I saw Mr. Coffee and that Mrs. Glasgow.”

  “That isn’t so unusual, is it, Anna?”

  “I saw them holding hands and lying together.”

  A sound of shock escaped the women. It was soon hushed in their fear of missing a word.

  “Real close together, Anna?” Handy asked evenly.

  The girl flushed to the roots of her hair. “No sir.”

  “Did you tell anyone of what you’d seen?”

  “I told Mrs. O’Grady.”

  “Told me!” the old lady shouted. “She brought up a tale that’d raise your hair. The details the little strut gave me.”

  “That’s enough, ma’am,” Handy said. “You were mild enough with your comments before us. Be so good as to keep your peace now.”

  “My peace! There’ll be a hell of a lot of peace now with the tales coming out of her.”

  “You liked them,” Anna said in an instant’s rebellion. “That’s why I told them. He was good to me…”

  “Bah!”

  “Anna, talk to me and the jury,” the coroner said. “Did you make up the stories yourself?”

  Deserted and cornered, Anna began to fight back. “No sir. I just told what I saw, and I saw plenty.”

  “Did you tell it at home, too, Anna?”

  “Yes.”

  They both would be fond of a lecherous tale, Phil thought—her father and the widow. It accounted for their camaraderie, and was indulged in spite of her affection for Dick Coffee. When Dick was carried home, and only the smoke and dirt remained in Winston, they would sit at the kitchen table with a bottle and wait for the devil to pluck them out of it.

  “Anna,” Handy said, “tell us the truth now, and mind, this is very important. Did you ever see Mr. Coffee and Mrs. Glasgow at the mouth of the mine over there—the entry that’s closed up now?”

  “I saw them go into it,” the girl said, and then as the clamor rose in the room, she shouted, “Yes. I saw them move the boards and go in there!”

  Rebecca Glasgow bit hard upon her underlip, as though to dull another, deeper pain than that of her teeth upon her flesh. At the coroner’s desk the sheriff had taken over the questioning of Anna, trying to place the date on which the girl had seen them. It was small wonder that he failed. What was one day from another to one who went to the Widow O’Grady’s house with daylight and left it only in time to go to her bed?

  A long shiver seemed to run through Margaret Coffee. The widow had observed it, too, for she reached her horny hand across and patted Margaret’s where it lay upon her lap. Margaret smiled at the consoling gesture. Phil turned his back on them and stepped deeper into the hallway. From there he heard the sheriff say: “Maurice, I’d like you to adjourn the inquest till one week from today when…”

  He was interrupted by Howard Lempke, the mine superintendent, who was on his feet among the witnesses. “What kind of shenanigans is this?” he shouted. “I demand you bring a verdict. You’ve heard the witnesses. If the men don’t go back in Number Three…”

  Handy banged him down, his big fist almost shattering the table. “You are not coroner of Corteau County, Mr. Lempke. Not yet, anyway. And you aren’t going to stampede us with your threats.”

  “No,” Lempke said. “But you can stampede the men out of the mines, can’t you?”

  “This inquest doesn’t give a damn about the mines,” Handy said. His face was flushed and sweating.

  “That’s pretty obvious. Maybe you don’t give a damn about the people who get bread and butter out of them, either.”

  The sheriff laid his hand on the coroner’s shoulder. “Let me say a few words, Maurice.”

  Handy waved him ahead impatiently. Fields moved between the witnesses and the coroner’s desk. Sit down a minute, Mr. Lempke, please. We’ve heard contradictory evidence here. It’s my job to find out what’s the truth and what isn’t. I can’t snap my fingers and have it shake out like numbers on a pair of dice. I know what two weeks’ loss in production means these days. I know there isn’t the demand for coal there used to be. I know what that means to you. I know what two weeks out means to the men, too. It means bills they’ll be paying on months later. Now the truth of all this is, it’d be a lot easier for me, too, if the men was to go back, and everything in Winston was to go on like normal.

  “So I’m on your side there, Lempke. I’d like the men to go back in the morning, and with the Number Three recertified, I don’t see no reason they shouldn’t. But that isn’t my business. My job is investigating Richard Coffee’s death, and I’m going to do it no matter what happens.”

  He turned and faced the coroner. “Do I get the week, Maurice?”

  The inquest was adjourned for one week.

  Chapter 16

  THE ROOM CLEARED QUICKLY of weary and disgruntled people. Mrs. O’Grady was waiting for Margaret to pack her things, and Phil realized that he was expected to take them both to the widow’s house. He had no desire to be with either of them at the moment, and went to the back room to offer Fields any help he might be able to give him. There he walked in on another argument.

  “I can’t give you that authorization, Fields,” Lempke was saying. “I’ll have to get in touch with the main office. That’s not the state fair grounds out there, you know.”

  “You don’t have to get any authorization, Mr. Lempke. I’ll have a court order in the morning. I’m trying to cooperate in every way I can with you. I purposely didn’t mention this out there. I’ll do it as quiet as I can. But I’m going over that whole section of Number Three tomorrow.”

  “All right, Sheriff. But the bill goes in to the county.” Fields saw Phil then. “Come in, McGovern.” He was introduced to Lempke, who left immediately. Fields accepted the cigaret Phil offered him. “I see you got the two widows together. How’d you manage it?”

  “Their own doing completely,” Phil said. “I came in from the recess and found them there—holding hands almost. Margaret’s staying on for a while.”

  “It can’t be she likes our company.” Fields studied the end of his cigaret. “Some interesting things came out in the light in there, even if they go back in hiding.”

  From the next room came the sound of hammering—Dick’s remains being prepared for a final journey home.

  Fields looked about the room. “I’m going to have this fixed up for temporary headquarters. One thing about being a bachelor, your home’s where you take your shoes off.” He got up. “You know, I’d like a play-by-play account of what Coffee did the last two months in Chicago—and the two weeks before he got here after leaving there. I don’t see any reason the Chicago police shouldn’t give us a hand in it. Do you?”

  A knock at the door covered Phil’s answer. It was Margaret. “Mrs. O’Grady said you were here, Phil. Excuse me, Sheriff.”

  Fields nodded. “Sit down, ma’am.”

  “No thanks… Phil, I’ve decided to have Dick interred in Winston. I think it’s appropriate, with the work he was doing among the people here.”

  “What work was he doing, Mrs. Coffee?” the sheriff asked.

  Margaret looked at him. “Isn’t it pretty obvious that he was concerned with the health and conditions here?”

  “Concerned, maybe,” Fields said. “I’m concerned, too. But I haven’t seen anything concrete he
was doing about it.”

  Margaret bridled. “If you don’t want him buried here…”

  “I’m not saying that, Mrs. Coffee. It just seems to me you’re kind of anxious to put the label on the package. It ain’t wrapped up yet. Now I’ll be glad to help in any way I can, making arrangements for his funeral. But I’m going right on trying to find out how he died.”

  “Thank you, Sheriff,” Margaret said coldly. “Phil, will you talk with the priest? Dick was born a Catholic.”

  “I’ll talk with him,” Phil said.

  Fields pinched out his cigaret. “I’ll go up with you, McGovern. I’ve got a notion it’ll take some talking to convince him he died one.”

  Father Joyce surprised them, however. He readily acceded to the burial, and offered to perform the service before they asked him. The burial was to be directly from the funeral parlor.

  “In view of the circumstances, I think that advisable,” he explained.

  Neither Phil nor the sheriff pursued his views of the circumstances. The hour for the funeral was set for nine-thirty the following morning, and the three men went out in the gathering darkness to select a plot in the cemetery. Somewhere among the many rows of headstones was a new marker, above the grave Dick had dug for Kevin Laughlin.

  “Father, just what did Coffee say to you about Laughlin?” Fields asked.

  The priest pulled at the gate where it was stiffened in the frosty ground. Phil added his weight to it, and together they swung it open.

  “‘I could have saved the man’s life. I could have given it to him, and I could have taken it away from him. I took it away.’ That was the gist of it. We talked a bit about Laughlin then, for the poor old man was much given to talking about the mines himself.”

  “Did Coffee know Laughlin’s story,” Fields asked, “about losing his wife there, and all?”

  “I told him about it when we selected a burial place for Laughlin. ‘Poor little man,’ was all he said, that and ‘mea culpa.’”

  They selected a space at the far end of the cemetery. A single, stunted bush stood between it and the long, gray sweep of wasteland, that was gathered now into a darkened wisp at the first rise of the hills. Phil wondered who would turn the crusted sod. But he had not the heart to ask.

  Chapter 17

  WHEN THE ARRANGEMENTS WITH Krancow were completed, Phil walked down the street to McNamara’s, reopened for the evening business. The only customer was Randy Nichols, there certainly for the company more than for a drink. “File your story, Randy?”

  “I did. I’d no idea his wife was such a sentimentalist, McGovern.”

  Phil ordered a drink.

  “It takes a lot of sentiment to bury him out on the lone prairie,” Nichols drawled. “A bucket of it. Or a bucket of something else.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Oh, I’m touched. Deeply touched. And I know the whole town of Winston’s going to be touched the same way. Maybe they’ll make a crown of coal for their martyr. Look, McGovern. I’ve been around a long time. I know a good reporter when I see one, even when he’s called a journalist. That’s what Coffee was, a good reporter. No more, no less, in his work. What he was in his private life I don’t know. I’ve a notion he was a right guy. That’s beside the point. But when she sits up there like the world’s holy mother and says: ‘Dick always felt his most important work was in the coal mines,’ I got a dirty word for it. Dick felt his most important work was where there was a good story. Mark my words, that’s what brought him to Winston.”

  Nichols finished off his drink and almost choked on it. “Why the devil can’t you carry a bottle of milk, Mac?”

  “You bring the cow and I’ll milk it for you.” McNamara looked at Phil. “She’s staying with the widow, is she?”

  “She is. They make a fine pair.”

  “She’ll meet her match there, I’ll wager that, my boyo.”

  “Where are the customers, Mac?”

  “They’re by the union hall in a meeting. They’ll be busting in here any minute now, crying or singing. I’m sending next door for my supper. Do you want them to bring you in something?”

  Within an hour the men began drifting down the street from the union hall. Billy Riordon, who, at the inquest, had told of the coal dust in the spittle of miners, danced into the tavern. “Let me have one little one more on the book, Mac, this for the celebration. We’re hoisting in the morning.”

  McNamara emptied his coffee cup before going behind the bar, and Riordon danced to the piano. He played a weird tremolo with the thumb and little finger of his right hand. “If I’d the rest of my fingers I’d play a fandango.” He turned to Phil and Nichols. “Is there one of youse play at all?”

  “Here’s your drink, Billy,” McNamara said. “It’s on the house and not on the books. Your wife’s too good an auditor of them. Was it a unanimous vote, Billy?”

  Riordon lifted his glass to those present and emptied it. “Aw now, Mac, you’re not the one to be asking that. Did you ever hear of a unanimous vote from a bunch of Irishmen in your life? Well. I’ll go home with the news and it may be the old lady’ll parcel me out a nickel in cash for the evening. My thanks to you, Mac. You’re a darling rebel. The best of evenings to all of youse!”

  He raised his hat along with his voice in a song and bounced jauntily out of the tavern.

  As the evening wore on the men wandered into the tavern from their suppers. A card game was resumed. There was laughter, and a bit of song, although through it all Phil sensed an uneasy gaiety. Above all he felt a stranger to it himself. He looked at the yellowing-keyed piano and wondered where the youngsters of the town hung out, and if they had a juke box. Was the only such machine at the Sunnyside, the only music tunes that came to the town in an early migration? He put on his coat and went out, walking as far as the theatre…the Majestic Theatre…how unmajestically majestic… You paid your money and went in…no tickets, no waiting…Tarzan now, The Frozen North tomorrow … Next door, Nick’s confectionery. Half a dozen teen-agers, and the varicolored juke box, a thin peal of jive weaving through the closed door to him.

  Here at least were the symbols of normalcy in Winston. But somewhere in the town, things were far from normal…the alliance at the widow’s, which he was reluctant to face yet…and the Clausons. He walked across the town and past the railway station, in semi-darkness now. A murky half-moon was rising above the giant cliff. He cut across the field to the Clauson house.

  Even as he stood a few seconds at their door, glimpsing the cluttered living room, he could believe that here Dick found a happy companionship in the barrenness of Winston. The old magician was reading in front of a coal-burning grate, a shawl about his shoulders. He laid down his book at the sound of Phil’s knock, threw off the shawl and came to the door.

  He looked up at Phil as though trying to place him. “Ah yes,” he said in sudden recollection. “I saw you this afternoon.”

  “My name is Phil McGovern. I was a friend of Dick Coffee’s.”

  “Come in then, by all means.”

  It was the room which held him first—a mass, indeed, he thought, almost a mess of color, but not quite—gaudy paintings that, on being looked twice upon, took definition, and invited study, books in ancient bindings piled on the table, with naked shelves in the case from which they had been taken, woven Indian rugs on the floor, and bits of statuary without order of style or position on the mantle, on the shelves, even on the floor. In a bay window at the side of the room a large worktable was cluttered with bits of wood, cloth and tin sheeting.

  “Your coat, Mr. McGovern.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Clauson.” He had been staring about the room.

  “You find it interesting?”

  “I haven’t seen this much color in the whole of Winston.”

  “There are colors in the town all the same. Wherever there are people there are colors. Sit down, please.” He hung the coat on a hall tree near the door.

  A staircase ran along
the inside wall. From the back of the house came the sound of dishes, and as Phil went near the fire he could see a light beneath the dining-room door. The dining room itself had long since ceased seating diners. It, too, was a workroom. A table against the wall held many tubes of paint. A green smock hung over the back of a chair.

  “My daughter will come in presently unless you wish me to call her now?”

  “No,” Phil said. “I only want to talk.”

  “Only?”

  “My semantics are bad. I wanted to talk with you about Dick, Mr. Clauson.”

  The old man nodded. He brushed the thinning hair at his temples with nervous fingers. He seemed then to pull himself up to the task, but he smiled. “Dick only wanted to talk, too. There was no end to the things he wanted to talk about.”

  Phil could believe that, having known Dick from his early curiosities, the nights at school, overseas, in bars, restaurants, parks. “He was the sort of guy would stop a farmer in the field and ask him the depth he was ploughing. He would end up knowing the rotation of his crops, how many cows he had milking, and about the time the pig got struck by lightning.”

  Clauson folded the long hands. “And it was never quite idle curiosity, was it?”

  “Sometimes it was. I remember his talking twenty minutes to a park attendant once. Nonsensical stuff. It turned out the man had just one tooth left in his head, and Dick was fascinated with the things he could do with it.”

  Clauson smiled. “Even that takes a special kind of curiosity, or, at least of patience.”

  “Yes,” Phil said. “Dick was long on patience.”

  The old man did not answer. He sat, his mouth a little pursed, his eyes upon the coals in the grate. Phil, conscious of the books strewn about the room, the paintings, a writing portfolio on the table with a pen beside it, experienced a strange sensation. He was eager for Rebecca to come from the kitchen, for the old man to tell him about the books, about the work that was obviously done in this house. He could not ask it. He did not have the easy, casual manner that would permit him to say: “That’s nice work there above the fireplace. Who did it?” It was strange to be jealous of the dead, but in this house he was jealous of Dick. It would never be open to him as it was to Dick. He would ask his questions and receive a polite answer. He might even have a cup of tea here some day. But he would have to probe for each thing he learned from it. It would never unfold itself to him.