Beast of the Field

by Peter Jordan Drake

  "Meet our Pinkerton man, Doc," the mayor said. "Charlie Sterno's his name. Mr. Sterno, meet Dr. Eugene Rosen-zeeg, Hope County's own full-time doctor."

  "Und mortician, und coroner," he said. "I help with suspicious deaths und murders, not that we get suspicious deaths. Well, in any case, let us see, we have this one, do we not? Please sit, Mr. Sterno." He suddenly froze in the act of adjusting his chair under his behind. "I assume it is Tommy Donnan you are here to look into."

  "Thank you," Sterno said. He sat down. The file on the desk had been well-used already. Across the top corner of the front cover were the words "Donnan, Thomas Andrew: died 1 May '22" written in a script that approached calligraphy in its flourish. Dr. Rosenzweig thrummed the cardboard with his fingertips as he took in Sterno. Actually, it was only one part of Sterno's face that held the doctor's attention.

  "Ja, that is…" he breathed as he studied Sterno’s jawline. "Hyper-pronounced masseter, extended maxillary body..." He reached out a hand to tilt Sterno's chin back, but caught himself. Instead, he tilted his own head back, he tilted it left, he tilted it right. From Sterno's angle, his eyes became bug-like behind his wire frames.

  "It is almost like it is from our human ancestors. Goodness, would I like to get a picture," he said.

  Sterno cleared his throat. The doctor snapped to attention, straightened in his chair.

  "Now, let us see. Mr. Sterno, where would you like to begin?"

  Sterno used his eyes to indicate the cameras and slides and flash pots behind the doctor. "I was told you might have some photographs from that day."

  Dr. Rosenzweig peered at Sterno over his frames, one eyebrow arched up onto his forehead. “They are not pleasant. But I assume you have seen many like them before,” he said. He opened the file, thumbed aside some typewritten notes before finding the pictures, then pushed all else aside to lay them flat on the table. "Oh, here, let us see. I suppose you should first take a look at this. Have you seen any photos of Tommy Donnan yet?"

  “A few old ones,” Sterno said. He had spent the night in Tommy’s room, in his bed, listening to the house around him—the snoring sounds of Tommy’s over-worked father, the bed chamber dribbling of Tommy’s grief-drained mother, the tossing of Tommy’s shell-shocked brother (as far as he knew, the girl had never returned to the house) and the random baying of the hound. A handful of younger Tommy Donnans had stared out at him from the dresser, the walls, the bureau—a happy enough looking fellow. Sterno had been kept awake by the nagging of an old dream come back to him—more a dreamt feeling than a real dream. He spent much of the night yawning but not sleeping, blinking without thought at the unblinking buggy racer. The rooster’s crow had been welcomed this morning.

  The old doctor said, “Here is the most recent one of him I could find—of him alive, I should say.” He handed a print to Sterno. "This is from the summer of 1921, so let us see, almost a year before he died. Nine or ten months, perhaps. His mother gave it to me. Das is a blue ribbon he is holding."

  He looked more like a man in this photo than in the photos Sterno had seen at the Donnan house last night. Tommy Donnan's cheekbones and jaw had come in by the time he died. His shoulders had rounded out. His attempt at a Valentino moustache had not been a bad one, and went well with his high cheekbones. The eyes in this picture had the same glowing quality as the eyes in his boyhood pictures: the gray they took on in the photos couldn't disguise the gemlike blue they must have been in life.

  "Quite a handsome young man," the doctor said. “Not like many of the boys around here, not too interested in baseball and football. Did not chase the ladies so much—though he did not have to, from what I understand. He just seemed to be somewhere else all the time, daydreaming. Like a poet, perhaps. I liked him, Mr. Sterno, und I was sad to take these photos that day. I will tell you this, he sure was good vit horses.”

  Sterno studied the image for half a minute more. Finally, it was Dr. Rosenzweig who removed the print from his hand, replaced it with four others.

  "Good Christ," Sterno said as he took the pictures. It was cause enough to place the photos down on the desktop, slide his last readyroll from its pack, start over with a cigarette.

  The first photograph showed a side view of a horse and buggy, with an unidentifiable object tangled up in and hanging down from under the carriage.

  "Let us see. This is how his father found him. This is looking from the house," said Dr. Rosenzweig, the photographer, as he lit a pipe.

  The second photo was the same angle as the first, but closer. The object under the buggy was a body, Tommy Donnan's body. The details of the body were clear in this image. It was a clear picture of a black mess, like the war photos and the crime photos he had studied at the Agency. In real life, all that black was dry brown blood.

  "He'd been dragged all the way from town under that wagon and God knows where else by the time the horse found home." These were Mayor Greentree's words. "Then overnight the vermin got at him. Kigh-yoats, maybe. But I'm adventuring it was those dogs from the woods east of Donnan's farm. This is all congestion, of course. Nobody really knows what happened."

  The third photograph was of the body removed from the under-parts of the buggy and laid out on the ground next to it. His body from the hips down was pulled unnaturally long, ripped along the near side, showing chewed-at innards and bare rib bones. One arm was splayed out over his head, a long white leather sock full of broken bones. His face lay with both eyes sockets pointed to the sky, black and empty. Something had taken his eyeballs. His lips and ears had been chewed on too. Something struck Sterno strange about the positioning of the head, or the angle of the face, maybe. He picked up the print and brought it to his face.

  "Good Christ..." he breathed.

  There was little bone, little flesh behind the upturned face to elevate the boy's face from the ground. The front side of his head lay on the long grass like a split melon.

  "All the way from town…" the mayor repeated.

  In the fourth photograph, someone in work gloves had what remained of Tommy Donnan up off the ground and was angling it to show just how much of his back half he had left on the roads behind him.

  There were other photographs: blood on the road, a piece of clothing off to the side of the road, a blood splattered rock in the road. Sterno kept his focus on the boy.

  The doctor pulled once again from his pipe, sighed deeply as he replaced it in its cradle. "Let us see. The way it must have happened, I surmise, is that he fell forward over the dash rail of the buggy--

  "Drunk as all get-out," the mayor said over the doctor.

  "—This would put the back of his skull, his shoulders und his upper back on the ground. His face up. Let us see, then he became caught somehow on the front spring bar, or the axle rod, perhaps, und was pulled down under the carriage body. Hard to imagine what happened next."

  "But his knees are hooked over the axle," Sterno said as he noticed it.

  The doctor sighed. "I have given this much thought. That Donnan girl has been here almost once a week, und has not given me any choice, but by and by, I began to become genuinely curious myself, in a scientific manner. Und the way I figure it, he might have grabbed hold of the wagon. In self-preservation, that is. He got pulled under the wagon, he grabbed on und held on for his life vit his hands while he hooked his legs up over the bar. It is panic, ja? Maybe he thought he could ride all the way home like this. But then could not hold on, und he hit his head on the ground. Or, maybe—I say this because the bones in both legs were broken into shards und pieces—maybe his legs were getting broken up by the bouncing spring bars over the axle. Could be the pain was too much for him; he let go of the wagon to try to pull his legs free. Or maybe he lost consciousness from the pain. Somehow he lost his grip."

  "Strange to me the horse didn't stop," said Sterno. “Why did it take so long for the horse to get home?”

  The doctor shrugged at this too.

  The mayor cleared his throat. "Turned every-which-
way from the storm, running back and forth in front of the gate. That was a hell of a twister come through. You saw yourself, we're still trying to repair some of our buildings and houses, four months later. Plus, she was a skittish animal to begin with. From that first night he runned her."

  "Let us see...moving along," the doctor said. "For whatever reason, he let go of the reaches under the buggy...." Dr. Rosenzweig then detailed Tommy's injuries. "His spine had become disconnected just above his pelvis, between the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae. His top seemed to simply unsnap from his bottom. Just horrible, I can tell you. All skin, sinew and bone from his ninth vertebrae and ribs to the top of his head were torn away. I will if you like, but I have to say it is hardly worth going into the rest of his body. You can see yourself the end result. The scavenging activity made it difficult to discern when und where the damage occurred. Or how he died, for that matter. Certainly, there were no puncture wounds—stab wounds, is what I am trying to say. There were no bullet holes. The front of his neck was one of the few parts of his body intact, und there was no sign of strangulation. Blunt trauma is finally what did it, I imagine. I have to imagine it, because the back of his head was simply not there to see any indication of it—but that is my guess, anyway. Or the spinal injury. Again, I do not suppose it matters now."

  Dr. Rosenszweig leaned in toward Sterno to peer more closely at the photo in his hand. "His poor mother," he said. He leaned back in his chair then, puffing at his pipe, gazing through the curtains. "I am no Pinkerton detective, but I do know this, Mr. Sterno. Tommy Donnan was a fine young man, a good boy to his mother, and to his family. He was honest and a nice fellow to talk to—smarter than most. What I am trying to indicate is that no one in Price had any reason to want to hurt this boy. If he was killed by another hand, it must have been by a stranger. But, Mr. Sterno, I am only a doctor, und mortician. What do I know?”

  6.

  Sterno left the Mayor at a breakfast table, left the darkness of the hotel lobby for hard sun and hard wind of the late morning. He started at one end of Main Street, followed it until it ended, crossed the street, came down the other sidewalk. It was midday Saturday, and the carts, pickups and flat trucks were packing up to leave town for the farms. Main Street, a bricked road, was the only non-dirt road in the town, as far as Sterno could tell. The town itself was a tiny grid of four or five east-to-west streets and four to five north-to-south streets, sliced off through the north-east corner by the state road and through the southeast corner by the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad line. A small and ornate station from the boom days of passenger travel sat next to the tracks alongside a grain elevator twenty times its size. Tall shade trees stood in front of tall houses on the residential lanes, while on the parallel streets of Main and Elm ladies' boutiques, a bakery, a restaurant, a brown-bricked grocer, a hardware store, a drug store, a post office, a land office and a farm agency mingled with a blacksmith shop, a sawmill, horse stables and a Ford garage and filling station. The oversized Old Price Hotel, with its powder-blue bricks and tall windows, was the town's second largest structure, next only to a naked wood barn on the edge of town that could house two of the hotels. Telephone and telegraph wires ran thick and black with the oaks along the street, in spans and stacks numerous enough to cast the walks in shade. At the east end of Main, where the shops left off and the fields started, there was a new looking wooden billboard with the words "Welcome Home To Price, Kansas – A One Hundred Per Cent American Town!"

  The citizens of Price were of a handsome and hale Christian stock, same as he'd seen in many of these of former frontier towns. They seemed thrifty and resourceful. Many of them seemed to have completed at least eighth grade. Their stores held magazines and newspapers from all over the country, which in one case, in the general store, were opened by one patron and read to whomever happened to be in or near the store. They had opinions of President Harding, Babe Ruth and Gloria Swanson. They spoke well enough—most of them—and were knowledgeable of events happening in the world around them and had opinions on these too. The one thing about which they each and all seemed completely ignorant and had no opinion whatsoever was what happened in their own town on the night of May 1, 1922.

  "We didn't see a thing," said a lumber dealer, Fleming. He was speaking for the men in suspenders and hats who leaned on various pieces of furniture and stacks of lumber in the corner of his warehouse, where he kept a desk. "Ask around, mister. Nobody saw a thing. Believe you me, we all talked about it, we all asked about it. We was every one of us either in our own cellars or in the town cellar at the dance barn. Ask around and you'll see, no one saw a thing."

  Sterno did just that, and it was the same story every time. We were in the cellar. We were waiting out the storm. We couldn't possibly have seen a thing.

  The only one of them who saw anything at all was a man named Huber, the owner of the local Ford garage, a large man with ears and a nose like red cauliflower, ruined by the sun, most likely, before he learned a trade that brought him indoors. "Yessir, I saw Tommy. Hell, I's probably the last person to see him alive. Boy was it ever raining. Wind blowing to beat the band."

  "This was outside, then. Outside the barn."

  "Yessir. Me and my boy were pushing that old Packard of Stu Aaronson's into the barn. The old man was all up in a panic about that old piece-of-shit car."

  "I was told it backfired, and scared the horse. Did you hear a backfire."

  "A backfire? You mean from the car?" Huber stared off through the window of his filling station. Thinking back took some of the power of his voice from him. "Hell…maybe. It was running, I remember that. We had the engine idling, but the gears weren't working, so's me and the boy had to push it. It might of backfired. Hell, Mister, it's hard to tell—I don't think I can rightly say. When a twister comes to town, that twister is the only thing in town."

  "Did it appear to you he had been drinking?"

  Huber chuckled and wiped a bead of froth from his lip. "Hell, mister," he said.

  Sterno sighed at this comment, thought of defense lawyers standing over these half-drunk, in-the-dark townsfolk of Price, Kansas. It was enough to cause him to give up, turn around and go home; but he had one more question for Mr. Huber, thus far his sole witness to the events. "Which way was Tommy heading when you saw him leave?"

  "'Which way?' Mister. Whered'ya think he was going, berry picking? That boy took off up the road, the highway, I mean. He was going home. He was keeping that family together, you know. With the old man all gimpy from that machine accident and the other brother half-gone from the war."

  This was the extent of the eyewitness accounts of the evening of May 1, 1922, just over four months ago. Other than this it was the same everywhere he went: There was a twister, mister. We was in the dark, mister. We didn’t see a thing, mister.

  And Charlie Sterno was getting thirsty.

  *

  Now in his car, Sterno followed Main Street. It ran east of town, then curved to the north. At the end of the curve Sterno saw the big barn they call the "dance barn," where the people of Hope County gathered to celebrate harvest, the thaw, whatever else there was to be happy about around here. The barn was among the biggest he had ever seen. A crew of workers was on the roof, replacing shingles lost in the storm last May, Sterno guessed. Sterno left his car running about a hundred feet from the barn, walked to the barn and slid open one of the giant bay doors to peer into the darkness inside. Nothing to see, really. Mostly, he wanted to get close to his thoughts.

  Good Christ, those photos, Sterno thought, squinting into the distance. The doctor had been wrong: Sterno had never seen anything like them.

  His readyrolls were gone, so he opened a new pouch of tobacco, rolled and smoked a cigarette while he strolled back to his car. He leaned against the back fender, smoking. Something was bugging him, but he couldn’t get in front of him.

  Every minute or so he would raise his head from the ground to squint at a passing wagon or a car on the road. Wh
en he had finished his cigarette he flicked the butt away.

  Something about those pictures. Or maybe that “sheriff” of theirs. Something didn’t feel right.

  He got back into his car. Where the highroad ended and the country road began, driving became hard work. He came out of the ruts and nearly went off the road twice, once from the wind, once from the road. Surely, there were enough bumps in this road to send a fellow off his wagon, a drunk fellow, driving through a storm wind.

  He turned into Donnan's gate. The Model T jumped and coughed to a stop in front of the barn. He rolled his shoulders, stretched off the drive while Jumpy howled at him from the porch. The men were in the field; he watched Junior slap a mule hard enough to put air under its hind hooves. Mrs. Donnan was the middle of the garden rows, behind the house on the other side of the men. The girl was nowhere to be seen.

  Sterno felt a nudge at the lower part of his rear end. He turned to find Jumpy sniffing at him, tail waving behind him like an arm. He moved a hand over the dog’s head, pushed him away. He rolled and lit a cigarette, staring at a huge mound of rock sticking four feet out of the ground in the middle of the field south of the house .

  “That’s the God Rock,” she said, startling him. The voice was coming from inside the barn, but Sterno couldn’t see the girl. “We call it the God Rock because Mother says God put that rock in the middle of that field for a reason, so Pa might as well forget about moving it or blowing it out of there and get used to plowing around it.”

  The tall, heavy bay door slid open enough to show her face. She used a shoulder to open the door a few more feet, led a brown-black filly out by the halter. She was a natural with the horse. It followed her to a fenced field next to the barn. She slapped its hind end and sent it lunging out into the grass.