“You can just bury that notion right this minute, thank you very much. Do you want to know what I found out or don’t you?”
“I do.”
“He says that none of the Lebruns had anything to do with what happened over here. He was positive about that.”
“Albert said the same thing. Do you believe him?”
“I don’t want to but, Lord have mercy, I do.”
“Why is that?”
“Because he is a dying man and he wants to be right with the Lord ’fore he’s taken. He ain’t lying, Jesse.” They sat in silence for a minute. “You know what that means.”
“I’m afraid I do.”
Chapter Thirty-four
Jesse returned home sometime after midnight. He expected he’d get a talking to from his mother. She, like mothers everywhere, would never reach the point in life where she believed her children didn’t need her counsel, advice, and correcting. But he was mistaken. Addie had no words for him. She sat motionless by Abel’s bed. Jesse had moved the bed from their room into the main cabin near the cookstove. The weather was turning cold and Abel didn’t need being chilled half to frozen on top of his other difficulties. Addie’s eyes flickered in recognition but she did not move or speak to him. Her focus stayed on her youngest child, the one, if she were to be forced to choose, dearest to her heart. She never would, of course. Jesse stood over his brother and tried to arrange some words in his mind that would serve as a prayer. One that might be acceptable to the God he’d grown up with who was generally angry over one thing or another. That made it no easy task. He realized at that moment what an advantage those Catholic boys he’d met in the service had. If they didn’t have anything to say, or couldn’t speak, they could just make a cross sign on their chest. It was like a prayer, like they prayed with their hands and didn’t need words. He wished he could remember how it went, but he couldn’t. Instead, he laid a hand on Abel’s cool forehead and bowed his head. He checked his mother, who still hadn’t moved or spoken, and went to bed.
Thinking about Abel did not keep him awake, nor did the shooting of Little Tom. Those things that happened should have pestered him more than a little bit, but they didn’t. It was thoughts of Serena Barker and that kiss that agitated his brain. He thought, briefly, that he ought to feel guilty about that. Here he was in the tightest spot he’d been in since he tumbled into the trench full of Huns—people, cousins, kin were being shot dead, and all he could conjure up was Serena Barker’s dear face and that kiss she blessed him with.
Somewhere between two and cockcrow he must have drifted off. If he slept, it was the restless kind. Whatever, he woke with a start. He could just make out his breath in the moonless dark. He swung his feet to the floor and quickly slipped them into his boots. The floor was like ice, his boots only slightly less so. He pulled his blanket close around his shoulders and silently thanked the U.S. Army for providing him with one twice as thick as the ones he grew up with and now lay folded and put away for another day, another time.
What had stirred him awake? He stood, considered a trip in the dark to the privy, and then he heard it…a moan? Something. Jesse made his way out into the big room. His mother sat exactly where he’d left her. Now her head lolled to one side and mouth open, she snored gently. She would pay for this vigil with a cow-sized crick in her neck in the morning. It was Abel who drew his attention. Abel’s eyes were open and staring at the ceiling. It was as if he could see straight through the roof to the stars above. It scared Jesse a bit, that stare did. He leaned closer.
“Abel, you with us?”
No reply.
“Abel, who did this to you?”
“Sumbitch.”
“What?”
“Sumbitch.”
“What son of a bitch did it?”
“Him, din see ’im.”
Abel’s eyelids fluttered shut.
“Abel, who hit you?”
Nothing.
Addie stirred. “That you Jesse?”
“It’s me. Abel woke up there for a minute. He said some words and dropped off again.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“It took up only maybe a second, Ma. I came out here, something woke me, I guess, and I happened to look at Abel. His eyes was wide open, scary like. Then, they slid over and he like to look at me. Well, I asked him if he was here, you know, awake? He didn’t say a word. Then I asked who it was that put him in this fix.”
“He answered!”
“Yep.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said son of a bitch.”
“He said what? I never taught him to talk like that. It must have been his Pa done that.”
“Ma…”
“Well, I didn’t. What else? Did he say anything else?”
“Not really. I think he tried to tell me he didn’t see who hit him.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
Addie slumped back in her rocker. “It ain’t much, but it’s something. It is, ain’t it?”
“Yessum, it is. It means his brain ain’t dead and soon enough he’ll come back to us.”
“Well, praise the Lord for that. I’ll fix us a pot and maybe I can find something to eat. It’s what you do when good news comes in the front door.”
***
Garland Lebrun told Big Tom that no Lebruns were involved in Solomon’s shooting and none of them for sure killed Albert Lebrun either. In the light of this last killing, that assertion begged at least two questions: who killed Little Tom and how did one define being a Lebrun? Clan lines got fuzzy when you got out on the edges. Jesse was a McAdoo for sure because he was in a straight line from his grandpa and that line stretched clear back to the Flood, for all he knew, but out on the perimeter…out there were the Billingsleys, for example. Were they McAdoos? Their connection was more about geography than blood. Sure there was a marriage in there somewhere, hardly anybody remembered where or when, but it was a pretty thin connection. Were the Barkers really Lebruns? Serena said they were because of a cousin connection or something, but there again, how tight was it? More important, would a dying Garland Lebrun who, while straightening out his record with the Lord, also narrow the definition to keep Lebruns clean and clear from the murders? Blood made for an odd kind of loyalty.
In the war, men were bound by a different kind of blood relationship—spilled blood. Those men he fought with, some of whose names he could hardly pronounce, he’d bled for them. He’d put his life on the line for them and they weren’t McAdoos. They weren’t even family, not even close. But he’d have died for them. Now? Sweet Jesus, well, now he might have to fight John Henry Lebrun and maybe die. And he was to do that for the honor of the McAdoos? He should die for Anse and the idiot Sam Knox and Little Tom and the two Crowther boys, who’d come close to stringing up Jake Baker? How could that have anything to do with honor?
Jesse had no doubt about the connection between this last killing and the first. He couldn’t have told you what that connection was, but he had no doubts about there being one. The thoughts rattled around in his head like seeds in a dried-up gourd. He found a place to sit and tried to get his brain to think in a straight line. If he were a policeman, how would he go about making the connection? That was a poser. Nothing in his growing up or his time as a soldier prepared him for the kind of thinking needed to unravel a puzzle this messy. It was like when your fishing line got snarled. After an hour of picking at the tangle, you were mighty tempted to just go at it with a knife. That was pretty much what the folks on the mountain did. See a knotty problem; don’t bother to sort it out. Can’t be done. Instead, just point a finger at them other people and accuse them for making it. McAdoos would naturally holler, “Lebrun.” Lebruns would yell back, “McAdoo.” Nobody tried to pick it apart. Just hack at it with a knife.
He sat on the porch st
ep, still cocooned in his Army blanket, and watched the sun wrench itself free of the mountain to the east and rise up to splash new light on his part of the world. He thought that, by God, he was going to pick the thing apart if it took ’til Saturday. If he hadn’t untangled it by then, well, whether he liked it or not, there’d have to be the knife after all.
Chapter Thirty-five
Jesse hadn’t moved from the porch step when Serena hove into view. Her long legs propelled her from the road and into the yard. Jesse was embarrassed; he still had on only his long johns and boots. The Army blanket was the only thing between him and cause for alarm in the woman department. He hugged the brown blanket closer and tried to get to his feet and still stay covered.
“You do not look like a man who is contemplating a death sentence.” She’d stopped a way off, apparently relishing the difficulty he’d put himself in. “Don’t get up on my account.”
Jesse lowered himself back down to the porch step.
“You are a long way from your hearth and home, Serena Barker, and in enemy territory, if I hear rightly. I don’t believe you come over here for a social call. Is there something wrong at the mill…at home?”
“Nope, none of those things. Your lawyer friend telephoned the mill yesterday late and left you an important message.”
“He did? That was mighty nice of him. Would you be able to repeat it to me?”
She took a step or two closer. Jesse pulled the blanket tighter. She grinned at his predicament. “I could, for sure. I am not sure I should, though.”
“Because?”
“I don’t know if I can trust communicating with a man who sits around in his drawers and hob-nobs with lawyers.”
“Which is it, the drawers or the lawyers?”
“Well there you go again, making poetry.”
“It is always a pleasure to provide entertainment to the secretarial corps. The message?”
“Mister Nicholas Bradford, Esquire, says to inform you, and here I repeat his words exact, ‘the deal is done. You need to get down here’…that’d be Floyd, I reckon…‘and sign some papers.’ That is the message and with that, I will say goodbye.”
Serena turned and took a step, turned back again.
“Jesse—”
“Little Tom McAdoo was shot last night, Serena. Who could have done that, you think?”
“Another dead man. There ain’t no end, is there?”
“I need some help here, Serena. You were about to tell me again to run. I would if I could, but now I can’t.”
She walked closer, no longer mindful or caring of his relative state of undress. “I’ll go with you, Jesse. You said you’d leave if I went. Well, I will go with you, if you want me to.”
“Because you don’t want me dead and will sacrifice yourself for a good Christian end, or because of something else?”
“Don’t do that, Jesse. It’s not fair.”
“I won’t. Here’s the problem. A day ago, I would have jumped at the offer. You know that. To die for some old-fashioned notion about family and honor didn’t appeal to me then, and not now either, but things has got out of hand. There is a murderer loose on this mountain. I am about convinced it don’t have a blessed thing to do with the Lebruns or McAdoos. As long as he’s loose, nobody is safe. Fact is, if there is a pattern here, and I’m inclined to think there is, that could include you. I will give you your own advice back, Serena, go away. Go away at least until this business is over.”
“I can’t do that, Jesse, any more than you can.”
“Then we are in this together, whether we like it or not.”
“I’m not complaining.”
They looked at each other long and hard. Serena’s eyes seemed sort of shiny. She shook her head, adjusted her little straw bonnet and started back down the way she’d come.
“A whole lot of folks care about you, Jesse Sutherlin, so you be careful, you hear?”
“Would you happen to be one of them folks?”
She didn’t answer.
***
Jesse parked against the boardwalk in front of Bradford’s office. He thought he spied a familiar face ten yards farther down next to a dusty Essex. He took a stroll toward the car and, sure enough, it had the writing on the door. Sam Schwartz had returned to Floyd. The same stepped out of his car and waved.
“So, Mister Jesse, where is your hat?”
“I am giving it a well-deserved rest today, Mister Schwartz. What brings you and your haberdashery back to Floyd?”
“Ah, you should ask. Well first, I am for thanking you. I took your good advice and drove to Picketsville. Right on the nose, you were about that town. They do not have anything like a good place for men’s clothes and accessories. They did have a store for rent. So now I am settled there. I came down to Floyd to see Gottlieb. He has merchandise he wishes to dispose of. He is unhappy with his new name, it seems. He wants to trade as Gottlieb, not Lord and Lovett. He is planning on resettling in a bigger town where he can start over as Gottlieb. You can make your name sound like something else, but He knows.”
“He?”
“The Lord. Never try to fool Him, Mister Sutherlin. Take some advice.”
“I hear you, Mister Schwartz, and good luck up there in Picketsville.”
“And to you, too, in the sawing of wood.”
Jesse retraced his steps to Bradford’s door. Miss Primrose gave him a look that would curdle cream and banged on a button mounted in a box on her desk. Somewhere in the distance he heard a bell ringing, six bursts, a pause and four more. Was it a code so Bradford would know who just came in? Six and four…
How you gon-na keep ’em…down on the farm?
A beaming Nicholas Bradford popped out of his office.
“Come right on in, Jesse. We have us some papers to sign and get you on your way to your first million, by Godfrey.”
The paperwork was simple. Jesse signed a document claiming the abandoned property, a deed transfer, and he became the owner of The Oaks, which turned out to be more like twelve acres, not ten. With the deed came a plat map showing the property lines and the markers. If he wasn’t mistaken, Charlie Bascomb was planting on one corner of Jesse’s new holdings. Jesse had to pay Bradford a dollar for the land to make it official. Then he had to borrow it back because it was the last bit of cash he had. Payday would be tomorrow, but a trip to the mill might not be something he’d do. Maybe Serena could bring him his pay envelope.
Bradford leaned back in his big oak swivel chair. “Well, Jesse, what happens next?”
Jesse told him of the situation he found himself in, the latest killing and what he might have to do on Saturday.
“I have not heard a word you’ve said, Jesse. If anybody asks, you never told me this.”
“I didn’t? Why didn’t I?”
“Because, if I heard you right, and mind you, I didn’t hear anything, you all have trampled your way across at least three statutes which could get you fined or jailed and you are about to crash into another.”
“I guess not reporting a murder is one of them. I ain’t so sure about the rest.”
“I would elaborate, but as I said, I haven’t heard a word. Well, except you should be aware that dueling is also against the law. What you plan to do with that other young man up on the mountain constitutes a duel, clear and simple, and it is against the law. That is to say you might have one and not suffer any consequence except someone is killed. Then, honor or not, it’s considered murder.’
“Up on the mountain, there is not a whole lot of worry about what the Law says about most things, Mister Bradford.”
“So they say. So they say. Do you want me to send a policeman up on the mountain to arrest you two when you start? That way you won’t get yourself killed and won’t lose face either.”
Jesse grinned. “I think that would be a firs
t rate idea, Mister Bradford, Esquire. I ain’t the least bit worried about losing face, if I understand what that means, but a state policeman could come in mighty handy. Tell him this Saturday noon he should get himself up to the top of the mountain and then follow the path down into the meadow on the south side. It would be best if he were not in uniform, though. The folks up there would rather have the French disease than have a policeman inside a mile of them. He should do his best to look like he belongs. The Lebruns will think he’s McAdoo and them will think the opposite. Yes, sir, that will be just dandy.”
“You’re serious?”
“I am. There is one other thing I need you to do.”
“Name it.”
“I need a will. Just in case your policeman don’t come or don’t act in time or I can’t put an end to the foolishness without getting myself killed, which is the plan, by the way. Having him stop us is the last resort. You and him need to know that people up there are getting techey. It’s like a powder keg, Mister Bradford. It won’t take much to set her off. Like I said, the whole mountain could blow at any minute.”
Chapter Thirty-six
When he returned home, he found his mother and Abel on the porch. Somehow she’d managed to get him bundled up and in a chair. He looked a whole lot better. Maybe that came from being out in the sunlight, or maybe he had made some progress.
“Well, Abel, you’re up and about. You feeling perky? Can you tell me what happened to you?”
“He ain’t spoke much, Jesse. He give a grunt or two when I was getting him dressed and hauled him out here. Nothing else.” Addie turned to Abel and barked at her son. “You ain’t said a thing, has you, Abel?”
“Ma, he ain’t sitting over in the next county, you know.”
“What?”
“You don’t have to yell at him. He ain’t deaf, you know. He just has trouble in the answering. Ain’t that right, Abel?”
A ghost of a smile flickered across Abel’s face.
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