He could have gone his whole life without telling me that. I smiled and pretended that he didn’t really say anything. He got up and said goodbye to all of us and he was out the door.
“Do I have to call him Grandpa?” Rachel asked.
The thought of the forty-something sheriff being called Grandpa was rather humorous. It was actually very funny. “Will it bother you to call him Grandpa?” I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders and said, “No, guess not.”
“Then, yes, you should call him Grandpa. It will make his whole life,” I said.
“What puddle was he talking about?” she asked.
Twenty-eight
Harlan Clayton hung himself in August of 1942. He fed his pigs, hosed his barn, ate his dinner and went out to the garage to die. He left sixteen children and a wife. Nate Keith had stolen what self-respect the man had when Nate announced to the world that Harlan’s youngest son, Charlie, was actually his. Mrs. Harlan Clayton had not denied it.
Gee, that was a nice new reason to hate my great-grandfather. There was a new one every day. I only hoped that I found out who killed him soon, so that I could congratulate them.
I looked at the photographs in the file and was amazed at how much the place had changed from the late forties to the early seventies when I was a kid. It had changed even more in the past few years. It was now abandoned.
In a few photographs there was a large puddle of blood right in front of the door on the porch. There had always been a rug there when I was a child. I’d played right there with my Sweet April Play Land. There were two windows from which the porch was visible, one in the living room and one in the bedroom. And there was another window on the east side of the living room, looking out on the yard and the dirt road and the barn.
The last page of notes in Hubert McCarthy’s file was a piece of paper with the words Nobody saw anything. Nobody saw a soul. Nobody knows anything.
The words were repeated over and over, as if McCarthy had been doodling his last few days on the case—the doodling of a frustrated man or the doodling of a man trying to convince himself that nobody saw anything.
I called the hotel that my cousin Damon was staying at and asked him if he’d like to take a ride down to Pine Branch. I wanted to go down to the old house, but I didn’t want to go alone, and Damon was the only one I felt I could tell any of this to, if he asked. He agreed and I picked him up a half-hour later.
“So, what’s this all about?” he asked.
“What? Why do you ask?”
“You’ve been acting strange this year, Torie. I mean, you’ve always been a little stranger than most of us,” Damon said. “We just assumed it was from your mother’s side of the family.”
“Ha ha ha,” I said to him. “I’m pregnant.”
“I heard,” he said. “Congratulations.”
I looked over at him as he looked straight ahead, eyes on the road. He wore a navy blue parka, with a red and black flannel scarf. The rich colors complemented his swarthy complexion and black hair.
“Who’d you hear it from?” I asked. “No, don’t answer that. I don’t care at this point.”
“Aside from being pregnant, something is going on. We’re all shook up over Uncle Jed, but you should have seen your face that night. You looked like a ghost. And now you invite me on an impromptu trip to the old place,” he said.
“Can you keep a secret?” I asked as I turned off the highway and down the outer road. We were nine or ten miles from Pine Branch. We went down the outer road and finally I turned onto a two-lane blacktop. We were in the country. Houses dotted the landscape every half mile or so and once in a while we’d come upon a farm with all the outbuildings and such. For the most part all we saw were snow-covered trees and fields with cows looking bored.
“A secret, eh? One that deals with the family?” he asked.
I sighed heavily. “It seems that we, the heirs of one Nathaniel Ulysses Keith, have inherited not a fortune or a legacy but a secret. An ugly little secret. Nice inheritance, huh?”
“What is it?” he asked, eyes sparkling with interest.
“Nate Keith was murdered.”
“The man you were asking me about the night we were ice skating,” he said.
“One and the same. And the only, thank God,” I said. “Shot on Grandma and Grandpa’s front porch, only then it was his front porch,” I said.
“No way. Get outta here,” he said.
“While the whole family was held at gunpoint by Great-Grandma Keith to stay put in the house, until he was finished dying.”
“Holy Jesus,” he said and gave a whistle. It took him a minute to really hear what I was saying. The whole family included his mother. The dawning realization hit with force as he turned to me, eyes wide. “You mean my mother…”
“Yes. Aunt Charlotte was in the house with the rest of them, except my father, who was in the barn, and Uncle Jed, who was in the smokehouse. They had a cousin, Dolly, who was in the chicken coop. Everybody else was inside,” I said.
The blacktop road had now turned into gravel and I had to raise my voice a little to be heard over the pinging of the rocks on the underside of my car. “Did she ever mention it to you? She ever mention anything at all?”
“No,” he said with a glassy look in his eyes. “Wow. Did Great-Grandma Keith do it? Did she kill him?”
“I don’t think so, but she was certainly an accomplice.”
“Wow,” he said again. “How’d you find all this out?”
“Don’t ask,” I said. “It makes my head hurt just thinking about it.”
“Why? Why was he murdered?”
“He was a horrible person. Poisoned farmers’ crops, slept around and had several illegitimate children, ruined people’s investment chances, beat his boys until their ears bled—”
“Then why do you care?” he asked. “Why do you care who killed him.”
“I can’t explain it. I’m nosy, Damon. Really nosy. I have an insatiable curiosity and … and … Aren’t you the least bit interested?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “As long as I knew it wasn’t going to be my mother that killed him. Yes, I want to know. How could you not want to know?”
“Exactly.”
We were silent a moment as we passed the Pine Branch Methodist Church. It was the postcard-perfect white clapboard church and steeple with a well-kept cemetery in back. As soon as you rounded the corner and went down a hill, we’d be at our grandparents’ old house. We both instinctively got quiet so as to brace ourselves for what we were about to see.
We came down over the hill and I slowed down a bit and drove the remaining quarter of a mile at a snail’s pace. “There it is,” Damon said.
“Yup,” I answered.
“I don’t think you can get in the driveway,” he said. He was right. In the summer the place must have been completely overgrown. Tall grass and twigs from trees long dead were in the middle of the driveway, covered in snow. The two walnut trees by the pond were dead. And the pond was nearly dried up.
“Okay, we’ll walk in,” I said. I pulled off to the side of the road and put the hazard lights on, so that if anybody came upon the car they wouldn’t hit it. I went to the trunk and handed a baseball bat to Damon and dug around for the jack for me. Then I put my heavy-duty gloves on, pulled my scarf around my head and shut the trunk.
Damon just looked at me.
“What?”
“You think we’re gonna need weapons? What’s here besides old ghosts?”
“You never know,” I said. “There could be hobos living in there or there could be a bobcat. Just carry the darn bat and hush.”
“Okay, okay.”
We walked onto the property by the pond, bypassing the driveway all together. The barn door was falling off, hanging loosely by one hinge. It was no longer red, it was brown and it had taken on a slight list to the right. The chicken coop was gone. I couldn’t even find a remnant of it, except some wire almost totall
y covered with snow.
Damon and I stayed together as we walked the property. We both checked out all the buildings, conveniently ignoring the house. “Look at that,” Damon said and pointed about a hundred yards west. “Is that the outhouse?”
“Yeah. It’s in pretty good shape.”
“And the smokehouse looks exactly like it did.”
“It didn’t look none too good when we were kids,” I said. “You’re right, it doesn’t look much different.” The green shingled siding was torn in places and falling off, but it was like that when I was a kid. The roof had old bird nests sticking out of the corners of it, and in the spring a generous congregation of wasps must live there, judging by the size of the nests that hung from the overhang of the roof.
There was nothing left to look at, so we turned to the house. We walked around the front, neither one saying anything. The swing lay on the ground and you couldn’t even tell what color it was anymore. A flash of a memory as a child came to me. The swing was white with red trim. My grandmother sitting in it in spring with flowers from the flower garden she’d planted blooming behind her. Pansies were her favorite.
The house that used to be white with red trim and red shutters was now a washed-out gray. Rust-colored streaks stained the metal roof, making it look as though the house was melting. And indeed, rust-colored icicles hung off the roof, which covered the front porch. The porch that Nate Keith was murdered on.
“Hello?” Damon called out. “Anybody here?”
His voice echoed off the hills around us. There were no houses to be seen from where we stood. We were all alone.
“I don’t see any tracks or anything,” he said. “What looked like a dog’s tracks over there by the smokehouse, nothing else, though.”
The wind whipped around and whistled through the naked oak trees in the front yard. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and remembered. Green. The place was always green. Even in the winter it seemed as though the green was hiding and if you looked at it just right it was there, peeking out at you. Barking dogs and butterflies. Mimosa trees and strawberries. And the starlings that my grandfather was always and forever trying to figure out how to annihilate.
And the front porch, which now sagged in the middle, with fallen shutters strewn across it. The front porch where we kids ate hot dogs and baked beans. The front porch where my grandfather sat and smoked his pipe. The front porch where my grandmother sat and crocheted. The front porch where my great-grandfather’s blood had been spilled.
I came out of my reverie and looked to Damon to see if he’d noticed that I’d slipped away for a minute. If he had, he said nothing.
“Look at this place,” he said in a hushed tone. “I can’t believe it.”
“You are aware that we’re trespassing,” I said.
“Yeah, who owns it now?”
“Same guy that owns the farm over there on the southwest ridge. He just bought it for the land. He didn’t really want or need the house,” I said. The place came with about 150 acres and it connected to his property. It was a good investment for him.
“This place was the center of our lives for so many years,” Damon said.
“I couldn’t have said it better.”
I walked toward the porch and Damon held out a hand. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going up on the porch to have a look.”
“Be careful, it looks pretty rotted.”
“Well, it’s only about a three-foot fall if it gives way,” I said. I walked up the two concrete steps and stopped. The rug that used to be in front of the doorway was gone. Believe it or not, I was a little disappointed to see that there was no bloodstain. It was probably cleaned up and painted over many times. How many times had I sat right there? Right there on that very spot. How many times had my sitting there triggered a memory in my aunts’ and uncles’ minds that they quickly dismissed?
From where I stood I looked toward the barn. My father would have had a good view of the porch, but a limited view of the sides of the house. From the chicken coop Dolly couldn’t have seen anything. From the smokehouse, Uncle Jed would not have been able to see the porch but he would have gotten a good look at whoever ran away, if he had looked quickly enough after the gunshot.
I stepped across the spot where the blood had been and jiggled the door handle.
“What are you doing?” Damon asked from the yard. “Torie?”
“I’m going inside.”
“What? Oh no you’re not.”
I turned around to face Damon. “I want to be able to see who could have seen what from where.”
“Can’t you just try and remember what it was like from when you were a kid?” he asked.
I weighed his suggestion. I pressed my face to the glass on the door and peered inside. It was dark … What was that? “Damon?”
“Yeah?”
I moved over to the full-size window on the porch and looked inside just as a face looked back out at me. I screamed bloody murder and dropped my tire jack. Damon was on the porch next to me in seconds, grabbing my hand and dragging me off the porch.
“What?” he yelled at me as we ran away from the house. “What was it?”
“Face,” I said. “Th … there’s somebody living in it. Homeless.”
We ran all the way to the car without looking back or stopping. I slipped in the snow once, but Damon grabbed me and kept me from falling. My adrenaline was coming out the top of my head and once we reached the car I had to bend over and put my head between my knees.
“Jesus,” Damon said, out of breath and scared. “God.”
“I second that.”
“Let’s not stand out here. Get in the car.”
I did as he said and fumbled for my keys, which I finally found and put in the ignition. My heart pounded so hard I could feel my eyes jolting. The ends of my fingers were numb.
“Drive,” he instructed.
I did as he said, turning around in the middle of the dirt road.
“Just like when we were kids,” he said as we drove away. “Remember all the scrapes we used to get into? Just like when we were kids.”
Twenty-nine
“I want to stop at the church,” I said.
“Why?” Damon asked.
“I want to stop at the cemetery.”
“Why?”
“When was the last time you were at the cemetery, Damon?”
“Why?”
“When was the last time you paid respects to Grandma and Grandpa?”
Damon was silent a moment as I pulled into the church parking lot. He looked back over his shoulder all nervouslike. He looked at the cemetery and back at me.
“Look, that homeless person isn’t going to follow us all the way here. He knows he’s trespassing. I wouldn’t put it past him to protect his haven and hurt us if we’d stuck around … but he ain’t gonna follow us here.”
Damon was still silent.
“Okay, even if he did, he can’t run that fast,” I assured Damon. “Am I having any luck at persuading you?”
“All right,” he said. “If you insist. But make it fast. I mean like ten minutes, Torie. Ten minutes.” He held up five fingers.
“You mean ten,” I said and held up all ten of mine.
“Whatever.”
We got out of the car and I couldn’t help but smile to myself at Damon’s sudden chicken demeanor. When we were kids we were pretty even, only he’d had just a little more dangerous edge to him. Marriage and kids, college and a successful job must have dulled him a little.
We walked through the gravel and came to the wire fence, rusted from years of exposure. A chain was looped on the inside of the fence to hold it closed. It wasn’t meant to keep people out. I unfastened it, noticing the rust it left on my gloves. My mother bought me these gloves. She would have a fit. I found myself wondering what miracles I could use to get them clean, when I looked up at the simple, beautiful church next to the cemetery. My grandfather helped build this church. H
is children played on its porch. There are pictures of my dad and his siblings sitting at various stages on the steps.
Our shoes crunched the snow as we made our way past the church and into the cemetery. The cool thing about this cemetery is that almost all of my family is buried here. There are only about ten people in the whole cemetery that aren’t related to me. My grandparents, their parents, their brothers and sisters and so on were all here. And now, Uncle Jed would be added to it. The next generation.
Well, that thought depressed me no end.
We made our way to our grandparents’ graves and stood silent as winter itself. I don’t know what Damon was thinking, but I was thinking how much I missed them and how much I wished that one of them had broken the silence about this whole blasted mess. There was a plastic nosegay of flowers stuck in the ground. I picked it up and brushed the snow off it and put it back. Then I used my coat sleeve to wipe the snow off the front of the gray and white marble tombstone, exposing their names.
It was silly, I know, here out in the middle of nowhere. Like anybody was going to come here anytime soon and walk to this grave and look to see if it was readable. I just couldn’t help myself.
I looked around the snow-covered cemetery with the barren tree branches bending every so often with the slight wind. “You know, almost everybody here is related,” I announced.
“Really?”
“Yeah … Over there is the Duncans, they’re not related. The Elsters over there are, sort of, by marriage. And that part over there by that big cedar tree, that’s the Claytons,” I said and stopped abruptly.
“What?” Damon asked. “What is it?”
“The Claytons. Harlan Clayton.” I walked over toward the cedar tree and stopped and searched the tombstones for Harlan Clayton.
“What are we doing?” Damon asked, his breath leaving him in big billowy gasps.
“I’m being morbid,” I said.
“Well, be morbid quickly because your ten minutes is about up,” he demanded.
“There,” I said and pointed to a sandy-colored stone. I walked over and stood in front of it. It read:
HARLAN CLAYTON
BORROWED FROM GOD ON 21 JUNE 1880
A Comedy of Heirs Page 16
