The End of Vandalism

by Tom Drury

  • • •

  If Russell Ford was angry at Dan for pushing the issue of the dead heron, he did not let on. In fact, he saw to it that the board of supervisors sent Paul Francis to the state police training school at a time when Russell was still being ridden pretty hard by the Stone City newspaper, which printed, for example, a large illustration showing the many differences between the mallard duck and the great blue heron, including size, coloration, shape, and manner of flight.

  The police school at Five Points was situated in a former Baptist Bible camp in the southern part of the state. Dan went along as Paul’s sponsor on the first day of the two-week course. He did not have to appear in person, but his father lived in Five Points and Dan figured he would take the opportunity to see him.

  To get to the main lodge of the police campus you had to cross a ravine on a rope bridge. The bridge swayed as Dan and Paul crossed it, and Paul accidentally dropped his shaving kit into the ravine. The office was not open when the two men arrived, and they stood under a large oak tree in the dead grass. With a pilot’s sense of curiosity Paul spied something red in a knothole on the tree and reached in and brought out a moldy pocket version of the New Testament that must have been there since the days when the camp was occupied by Baptist children. Being a religious man, although a Methodist and not a Baptist, Paul felt that this discovery meant he was on the right track. But Dan could not shake the uneasy feeling that the police and trainees milling around in sunglasses and the uniforms of their respective towns were about to be asked to sing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” and so once the lodge had opened he delivered the check that was signed by Russell Ford, shook Paul’s hand, wished him luck, and left.

  Dan’s father was a retired pharmaceutical salesman named Joseph Norman. A stern, sorrowful man, he lived in a yellow bungalow on two acres of thick and untended trees. His first wife had drowned while on a picnic at Lake Margo in 1949, at the age of nineteen. His second wife, Dan’s mother, was also dead. She died five years ago. Joe Norman’s job had taken him all over the upper Midwest but had seemed a relatively small position in a region where many men, through no special effort of their own, had wound up running farms of hundreds of acres. He was once reprimanded for failure to account for some pharmaceuticals but there were no hard feelings, and he retired on a full pension.

  Joe Norman had tried various hobbies, but few had worked out. He had golfed but his eyesight was not good, and when he ran a motorized cart into the corner of the clubhouse, his membership was restricted. Then he tried woodburning, but lost interest once he had put decorative brands on every wooden item in the house. Now he carried a video camera everywhere, and so far nothing terrible had happened. When Dan visited, which was not often, his father would play tapes for him on the television. “This is a Buick LeSabre bought by a friend of mine, and here he is washing it… This is Denny Jorgensen, who delivers the mail… Some people don’t like Denny. Denny and I get along fine.”

  This time Joe played a tape of wild animals eating white bread and cinnamon rolls at night under a floodlight in the back yard. This was fascinating at first, and then weirdly monotonous.

  “Look at the raccoon, how he uses his hands,” said Joe.

  “Boy, I guess,” said Dan.

  “They call him the little thief,” said Joe. “Well, I say ‘they.’ I don’t really know who calls him that. I guess I do.”

  “We missed you at the wedding,” said Dan.

  “I wasn’t feeling that good.”

  “I’ve got a picture,” said Dan, reaching into the pocket of his shirt.

  “There’s a pain that comes and goes in my eye. I don’t know what that’s about.”

  “This is Louise.”

  “She’s a very pretty girl, son.”

  “You can keep that,” said Dan.

  His father got up and stuck the picture to the refrigerator with a magnet. On the television, skunks were shimmying around with slices of bread in their jaws. “Well, have you been to the doctor?” said Dan.

  “What is a doctor going to say?” said Joe.

  “Maybe he’ll be able to figure out what’s wrong.”

  Joe pulled out a drawer in the kitchen counter and rummaged through it. “I’m old,” he said.

  “That’s no attitude,” said Dan. He took from a coffee table an orange rubber ball covered with spiky nubs. “Didn’t they use these for something in the Middle Ages?”

  Joe looked up. “That’s for my circulation. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “As weapons,” said Dan.

  Joe finally found what he was looking for and brought it into the living room. It was a Polaroid of the headstone of Dan’s mother’s grave.

  “See a difference?” said Joe.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “I had them redo the letters.”

  “Oh… O.K. How did that come about?”

  “I happened to be at the cemetery when some fellows came by offering the service. And do you know what the problem is? Acid rain. It turns out that acid rain is eating away at the stones. It’s the same thing that’s happening to the statues in Rome and Vienna.”

  “So what did they do exactly?” said Dan.

  “Well, they had what I would call a router.”

  “And it helped?”

  “I’m not saying it leaps at you across the cemetery, but yes, there’s a difference.”

  “What does a thing like that run you?”

  “It’s paid for.”

  “Well, it sounds a little bit like a con.”

  “You could see the erosion.”

  “I believe you,” said Dan. On the television the animals scattered and Joe himself came onscreen, casting more bread into the yard. His back and arms seemed stiff. He wore a red plaid shirt, gray pants with suspenders.

  “When did you film this?” said Dan.

  “Last night,” said Joe.

  Dan left his father watching the tape of the greedy animals, and on his way back to the highway he visited the cemetery where his mother was buried. He knelt and examined her stone but could not tell any difference in the letters, which said, “Jessica Lowry Norman, 1922-1987. What a Friend we have in Jesus.” His mother had died of a heart attack on Flag Day in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. One of Dan’s strongest memories of her was the time she broke a knife. The three of them were eating supper one evening when there was a loud clatter and his mother inhaled sharply. A stainless steel table knife had broken in the middle, separated blade from handle, cutting her hand. She cupped the base of her thumb in a napkin and hurried to the sink. There was a perfect silence in the house except for the running of the water. Dan had never heard of a table knife breaking under normal use, or any use, and the whole thing seemed to suggest or represent some deep psychic turbulence in his mother.

  The cold weather took a long time coming that winter. It snowed maybe three times before Christmas, and the snow did not stick. The fire department wore shirtsleeves while stringing lights across Main Street in Grafton. It was sixty-three degrees for the football game between the Stone City Fighting Cats and the Morrisville-Wylie Plowmen, and the game drew nine hundred fans, although Stone City had a bad team that could do nothing with a conventional approach and was reduced to trying desperate sleight-of-hand plays that resulted in losses of six to thirty-six yards. Dan waited until two weeks before Christmas to cut a tree. He paid twenty dollars and walked across the hills of a tree farm outside Romyla. The sky blazed with a blue so strong that he could hardly take his eyes away long enough to look where he was going. Louise was three months pregnant, beginning to show. Accordingly Dan selected a full and abundantly branched tree. “Tree” is maybe even the wrong word; it was more like a hedge. Dan lay with his back on needles, sawing through the trunk. He dragged the thing over the grassy fields and struggled to confine it to the bed of a borrowed pickup.

  The tree took up the whole north side of the living room. Dan had to run guy wires
from the window frames on either side of the tree to keep it from falling. At first the large tree seemed wrong somehow in the house. Why this was so Dan could not explain. Either it seemed like the tree of a showoff or, by its sheer expanse, it revealed something sinister and previously unknown about the whole concept of having a Christmas tree. The only thing to do was decorate it. Being the kind of people they were, Louise and Dan had not really considered what they would use for decorations. Louise found some ornaments that dated back to her days with Tiny, but they decided not to use these, and in fact burned or at least melted them in the trash burner. They went over to see Mary, who gave them six boxes of bird ornaments that she had got years ago and never opened. Louise hung these one afternoon while Dan straightened a snarled ball of lights that had been seized in a drug raid and stored for several years in a closet at the sheriff’s office. Louise glided around the tree, breasts and belly pressing sweetly against a long colorful dress. The flimsy silver birds responded to air currents, turning and glittering when doors were opened or closed.

  So all in all it was a good Christmas, though Louise was still spending her nights in the trailer by the garage. Robin Otis had advised against changing anything that was working and especially not during the holidays, a stressful and for many people a hideous time to begin with. So it was that Dan woke alone on a windy Christmas morning and made bacon, eggs, and coffee with “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” playing quietly on the radio. The broadcast had that strange, nobody-at-the-station quality that you don’t find at any other time of the year. Louise came over at about seven forty-five in a nightgown, robe, and sneakers. There was no snow on the ground. She kissed Dan on the neck, and the smell of sleep in her hair made him shiver. Out the window above the sink, the sky was the yellow color of dust.

  They exchanged presents at the breakfast table. He gave her a coral necklace and earrings, and she put them on, and she gave him a long gray and purple scarf that she had knitted, and he put that on. They went upstairs to bed and stayed there until one o’clock, when it was time to watch college football. Louise had turned into a dedicated fan of college football since becoming pregnant. She felt that the college boys played a better game than the pros, because in college the plays seemed more earnest and at the same time less likely to work, and therefore more poignant when they failed.

  She had watched the games every Saturday and knew the names of eight or ten colleges in Arkansas alone. She had developed a science of upsets. California teams always upset Great Lakes teams. Any college with “A & M” in the name could upset any college whose name ended in “State.” Teams called something “Poly,” on the other hand, might come close to an upset but would always lose in the end. The higher the male cheerleaders could throw the female cheerleaders, the more likely a team was to be upset, all else being equal. Michigan State was in a class by itself, a school that existed for no other purpose than to have its football team upset. As her pregnancy progressed, Louise was both emotional and forgetful. She could not keep track of the score and grew pensive whenever a kicker, with his forlorn minimal face guard, squared his shoulders to try a field goal.

  In the middle of the afternoon Dan and Louise walked up to Henry Hamilton’s place with a bottle of Grand Marnier. They all sat on the sun porch drinking it—even Louise had half a glass—and listened to the strange unseasonal wind.

  Elsewhere in the county the public forms of Christmas were being observed. Paul Francis had drawn his first flying assignment since becoming a certified constable, playing Santa’s pilot to Russell Ford’s Santa for the benefit of a group of poor children from the Children’s Farm gathered on the tarmac at the Stone City airport. The plane rolled from wing to wing as it came down to land, leading the children to speculate with genuine excitement about the prospect of Santa crashing in flames before their eyes. But Paul got the plane down all right, and Russell climbed out in a red suit and white beard and that shiny black vinyl belt that seemed to have been added to Santa’s wardrobe sometime in the seventies. He gave out dolls and footballs and colored pencils, and one little boy said, “We already got colored pencils,” so Russell took back the gift, boarded Paul Francis’s plane, and, grabbing a microphone that did not work, said, “Clear the runway for departure.”

  And over at the Little Church of the Redeemer in Margo, Johnny White and Tiny Darling were trying to cook Christmas goose for forty-five declared alcohol and drug abusers who participated in the programs offered by the Room. Two things that people fail to understand until it’s too late about the cooking of goose are how long it takes and how much grease is produced. So at four-thirty, with a church full of hungry addicts, Tiny and Johnny huddled in front of an oven, stabbing at a tough goose in a gently swirling lake of grease. “Probably we should spoon some of this off,” said Tiny, and using an oven mitt that looked like the head of a goat, he attempted to pull the pan toward him. This little bit of motion spilled grease onto the grate of the oven, where it ignited with a fiery gust that singed Tiny’s forearms. Johnny shoved Tiny away from the oven door and blasted the goose with a fire extinguisher. When the fire was out, they tried to scrape the foam and ash from the main course, but this proved futile and the celebrants had deviled ham instead of goose with their string beans and sweet potatoes. But they had waited so long that even deviled ham seemed good, and they ate hungrily in the basement of the church.

  In February, as scheduled, Russell Ford went to Wildlife Court to face the charge of shooting a protected species. Wildlife Court met on the second Tuesday of every month, presided over by Ken Hemphill, a retired judge and permanently tanned outdoorsman who ran his court in the affable style of Curt Gowdy on The American Sportsman. In the summer months the court mainly concerned itself with fishing violations, but during the winter most of the defendants were young or middle-aged men who had been keeping illegal trap lines. One innovative step taken by Ken Hemphill had been to order the surrender of any trap line deployed without a trap stamp, and defendants were accordingly required to bring their traps to court in case the verdict should go against them. Thus it was that in the cold months Wildlife Court became a sort of purgatory of downcast men wearing Red Wing boots and orange coats and clinking their chains up and down the aisles of the courthouse. Dan ordinarily enjoyed this spectacle, but today he was testifying.

  Russell’s lawyer was Ned Kuhlers, a mousy man who represented so many people in Grouse County that he more or less ran the court docket, and when he went on vacation the system slowed to a crawl. Ned’s strategy was simple. He tried to show that the witnesses for the prosecution could not know what they claimed to know. First he emphasized that Bev had not been at the slough and so could not say firsthand who shot what. Her response was typical of the flustered citizen trying to defend her common-sense conclusions only to be told that common sense has no place in the judicial system. “But he told me,” she said. “We had just finished our waffles and he said that he had shot this bird that he could not identify. I mean, I suppose that’s hearsay, but for heaven’s sakes, it’s hearsay from the guy who did the shooting.”

  “I’m afraid I object to that,” said Ned.

  Judge Ken Hemphill chuckled softly. “Overruled,” he said.

  Dan took the stand next. Ned spoke to the bailiff, who went out and returned after several minutes with a large stuffed bird. There was a moment of surprise as Ned held the bird up before the members of the jury.

  The jury foreman, who had seemed uncertain of his role throughout the trial, said, “Excellent taxidermy.”

  “Sheriff,” said Ned. “You have testified that Russell shot a waterfowl. I would ask you now to look very carefully at this example, who comes to us courtesy of the folks at the Stone City Museum of Natural History. Please take your time, because this is important. Is this the same species as the bird that you have testified was shot by Russell?”

  Dan looked at the bird. It was gray and spindly with a red mark over the eye. The courtroom was hushed. “I don’t know,
” said Dan.

  “In other words,” said Ned, “it might be, or it might not be? What kind of answer is that? Don’t look at Bev. We want your opinion, Sheriff. Isn’t it true that you don’t know what kind of bird Russell shot?”

  “I’m not an ornithologist,” said Dan. “I think the two birds are similar. But whether it was this exact one, no, I don’t know.”

  “Sheriff,” said Ned Kuhlers, “what if I were to tell you that this is a sandhill crane, who spends his winters in Texas and Mexico. And what if I were to tell you there is virtually no way a sandhill crane could have been in Lapoint Slough on that day in November.”

  “What does that prove?” said Dan.

  “What indeed,” said Ned. “The defense rests.”

  The jury deliberated all morning and all afternoon. At twelve-thirty they were given a lunch of deli sandwiches, cole slaw, and chips. At three they requested a snack and received two bags of pretzels and some Rolos. At four-thirty a message came from the foreman informing Judge Hemphill that one of the jurors was on a salt-free diet and that this should be kept in mind when ordering the evening meal. At this point Russell entered a plea of nolo, or no contest, and Ken Hemphill called the jury in and told them they were free to go home and make their own suppers.

  TWELVE

  THE GROCERY STORE in Grafton closed in the spring. No one had really expected Alvin Getty to make a go of it. There will always be people who are drawn to a business on the skids and, given the chance, will take the thing over and finish it off.

  That winter everyone had known what was happening. The shelves emptied while novelty displays appeared in an effort to jolt the store from its decline. You could get jam made by Trappist monks but not the bread to spread it on.