Beast of the Field

by Peter Jordan Drake

  “So what’s the reason?” Sterno asked. “For the rock.”

  She stared at him, shaking her head slightly. “There aint no goddamn reason for the rock, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Are you gonna keep smoking your tobacco or are you gonna start chewin’ it like everyone else?”

  Sterno finished his cigarette, flicked it into the air to be pulled away in sparking embers by the wind of the high sun.

  “Hellfire! You gonna to burn the whole state down!”

  “Don’t you have some chores or something to do, young lady?”

  “Horseshit,” she said. She was pushing at the bay door again, and did so with some anger. "You gonna to help me or aint ya?"

  "With what?"

  "Pulling this buggy out for you to get a good look at it. What'd you think I meant?"

  Sterno stood behind her, pushed with her until the barn door was opened all the way. Two black speckled hens leapt, squawked, fluttered out at their feet. The girl was inside with one side of the singletree in her hand before the second chicken had hit the ground. She pulled at it as though she fully intended to roll the buggy out by herself.

  "They’re all full of shit, I tell you. Every goddamned one of them. High-piled, stinking horseshit, if you ask me."

  “Who’s that?”

  “Everyone,” she said, answering another stupid question.

  Sterno knew now whose face he had seen at the window to the sheriff’s office. A born snoop, just like himself. "Here," he said. He took the other side of the singletree and like this the buggy rolled out into the sunlight. Millie panted in silence next to him.

  "Even the mayor?"

  "The mayor’s just the mayor, Mr. Sterno. He don't know any better than to think what all those rednecks at that garage tell him to think."

  "You think that?"

  "That's far enough, now drop it. Yes, I do think that. Hell, you met him, the man's too dang nice to be smart."

  This made Sterno bark once in laughter. It had been so long that he didn't even recognize the sound of it. The scowl on her upturned face cut off the merriment.

  "Now lookit here, mister. Lookit this buggy. Lookit it good. You tell me, can a grown man—which is what Tommy was, by the way, not some 'boy' like that no-star sheriff kept saying—tell me how a grown man can fall off the front side of a buggy and get caught up in it the way we found Tommy. Did you go see Doc Rozen-zeeg's photos, or didn't ya?”

  “I saw them.”

  “Then you saw there’s no goddamn way for anyone to get hung up in a buggy that way, the way they say. Even if you’re the clumsiest sonbitch’t ever put an ass in the seat of a buggy—and Tommy wasn’t that, not even close. So go ahead,” she said, motioning to the buggy. “Take your time."

  The buggy was beat up a good bit. The canopy was gone from the metal frame, likely a result of the storm, the seat was falling off its brace and some of the buckboard slats had come off the sides of the bed. Sterno got on his haunches and studied the front axle of the buggy. He had to admit, it would be a tight fit.

  "That Doctor Rosenzweig thinks he grabbed on to that reach bar there running to the back and hooked his legs over the axle."

  "He didn't grab no reach bar. He didn’t have no grease or no marks on his hands. Did you think of that?"

  Sterno sighed: he hadn’t.

  He walked around the buggy, then hiked up a foot to the long step and lifted himself into the car. The girl watched him quietly. He leaned over the dash rail, so far over he had to hook the back of his shoe under the seat to keep from falling. From this angle Sterno was just inches from the spring bars that ran between the carriage deck and the axle. A pretty damn difficult feat of acrobatics, he thought. Drunk or no, and at full speed.

  The girl read his mind again. "I told you it's impossible."

  He leapt down from the buggy. "Not ‘impossible.’ Here," he said, handing Millie his fedora. She put it directly onto her head and tipped it back, still squinting up one eye under the sun at him. He got down on the dirt under the buggy, slid himself around so that his head faced the rear of the wagon and his toes the front. The body of the buggy was three feet off the ground. Lots a room for a man to hang in without bumping himself on the road.

  He grabbed the center reach bar like a baseball bat. Keeping only the bottoms of his feet still in contact with the dirt, he pulled himself to the bar and held himself there as long as he could: just under two minutes.

  "How about that?" he mumbled to himself.

  "How about what?" Millie Donnan said.

  "Nothing."

  Two minutes is plenty of time for a man to unspook his own animal, he thought. Now come on, Charlie. You get a case in front of you and you all of the sudden don't want to be a detective. Well good, go home and mope around the office some more. Crack the seal off another bottle.

  Sterno studied the axle for a few seconds. He tried to fit his feet into the spaces the spring bars and axle afforded them. There was barely room. He imagined doing that with a belly full of corn whiskey, moving down that bumpy road back there behind a sprinting horse. He imagined it would have been impossible, just like the girl said.

  Sterno sighed again. Deeply. He let the back of his head fall back to rest on the dirt under the buggy. A feeling like draining sand ran coldly through his belly; it had started when he first saw those photos—not the doctor’s, the photos in the house behind him. It was a familiar feeling. He got it every once in a while, on a case--it was his blessing and his curse. He couldn't just look at the facts coldly, like a detective should, count them, stack them, put them in order, discard them when done. Instead, he felt the case. It chased him down, surrounded him, then went inside him; he couldn't do a thing to stop it. Once he had seen the places and the faces, has heard the words and smelled the smells, the events took shape in his head; and once the shapes of the case were forming in his head, the shapes of the emotions surrounding the case took shape in his belly. It was less the procedure of a detective, than it was the way of crime solver. This time, as before, the first thing he felt was the sinking, sandy feeling in his belly. It felt like a murder. It felt like loss, and Sterno knew very well what loss felt like.

  He slid out from under the buggy. As he dusted himself off, he took one last stroll around the buggy, head wrenched downward, face pulled in around his squinting eyes. The girl followed his feet; the girl followed his gaze. She stopped, looked at him, eyes blazing green under the brim of his hat. The look on her face was not one of satisfaction, or of victory, but a look that reflected Sterno's. These looks—his and hers—said same thing: there was work to be done.

  Now there's the old Charlie.

  7.

  After she and her Pinkerton had rolled the buggy back into the barn, Millie ran up to the hayloft, watched Mr. Sterno go to the garden to speak with Mother. She watched the exchange very carefully, and when they shook hands, Millie knew he had accepted the case. He then grabbed his grip from the front porch, waved to Pa in the east field, left in his car.

  As soon as he was gone Millie flew down the ladder from the mow, sprinted to Tommy’s room. There, listening for Mother, she checked every detail—his closet, his trunk, his drawers, the pictures on his dresser…of all these, only the pictures showed any sign of being handled. Millie replaced them to the exact position in which Tommy had left them—especially the one of him and her at the fair, after winning the three-legged race—and was stepping from his room to the hallway when she was stopped by Mother with the spatula. She had been chasing Millie around all morning, since Millie and Junior had returned from town. This time Millie didn’t put up a fight, however, decided to just get it over with instead: there were more important matters at hand.

  When Mother had finished with her, Millie went back to the barn, paced the mow floor, fingering the new red welts on the back of her thigh, and thinking about mysteries. Thinking about Tommy. Thinking about those letters she’d hidden in the cigar box. Those damn letters.

  She h
ad found them the day of the funeral, when everyone else was in the house. They were in his buggy, half-soaked and dirty, but still in their silky handkerchief wrapper. Tommy’s trunk had had to be moved from the barn back to his closet, which she had done with Junior’s help with Mother and Pa at church so they wouldn’t ask questions. After this was done Millie hid the warped, water-stained bundle of letters inside the trunk, under the big Shakespeare book, where he had kept a similar bundle of letters, though these were neat and dry because they had never left the trunk. She thought that was where they belonged—the two bundles of letters, side-by-side. Tommy would have wanted them there. So then, she had to wonder, why had it been so important to her that she get them out of the trunk last night? When she saw Mother heading up to Tommy’s room with the Pinkerton, getting those letters out of there where that sneak from St. Louis wouldn’t see them had become suddenly the most important thing in the world to her. Why?

  She didn’t know. She’d never read them. For four months she had resisted—knowing there might be something in there to tell her why Tommy had been so desperate to get out of town that day, the day he was killed. Still she had resisted; but now, with the Pinkerton here to put things right, maybe it was finally time. Tommy, she knew, would want her to read them—he would want her to see if there was a mystery in them, a story being told through them.

  Tommy said there was a story in every written thing. It didn’t matter if it were an ad in the newspaper, a postcard from San Francisco, or War and Peace. He said you have to understand what came before it and what would come after it (What was that word he’d used? It began with a C.) to really understand the story in it. Did she think Victor Hugo invented Napoleon’s France? Did Shakespeare think up the kings of England? No, they were given a character and context (that was it), and created a story using only these. It was a writer’s job to find the story in all of this—which came from the emotions and desires of the characters involved—then re-create it for the reader, then it was the reader’s turn to re-create it as she read, and maybe understand it as the writer had. It was all nothing but mumbo-jumbo to her, something Tommy had picked up at the college in Wichita; but when Tommy was as passionate about something as he was this, he wouldn’t rest until someone else was as passionate about it with him.

  He had started her with the Bible, because he said it was written for children and fools, and for the time being she fell into one of these two categories. Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle came after that, because he thought their writing was as clear as any writing. She thought Edgar Allan Poe's writing was about as clear as a cow puddle, full of horrible words like prolixity and syllabification, which Tommy made her look up in the dictionary just so she could forget them. Mostly, he made her read these mysteries because he said life itself was a mystery brimming with little mysteries for each of us to solve.

  She had called it all a “high pile of fly-bitten horseshit.” After a while, in frustration, she quit on it, refusing to even glance at so much as one more O. Henry story. Then one day he asked her that one question, one simple question that should have had a simple answer but didn’t.

  “Hey soldier,” he’d said. They’d been in the mow together. She was throwing a pocket knife into a target she had drawn on a potato sack and draped over a wall of hay bales; he was lounging across more bales, Ambrose Bierce opened but pages-down on his stomach. This was after supper in the spring of her eleventh year, a season after he came back home from the college, a year before he was killed. The plowing was done for the day and Tommy was tired but too restless for sleep.

  She tossed the knife but it slapped broadside off the target, clattered to the floor. She was snatching it from the floor as she answered. “You’re messing me up Tommy.”

  “I have a question.”

  “So then ask it and then leave me alone.”

  “Do you remember what Junior was like before the war?”

  She was suddenly frozen there, knife-tip between her thumb and finger above her head. Eventually, her arm with the knife came down to hang at her side. Tommy was already up off his back, brushing hay from his shirt. From his satchel he pulled a cigar box—“El Dorado Cigar Company, Wichita, Ks.” it had on it, with a Spanish explorer and an Indian in a headdress smoking a peace pipe. He moved to sit on the wooden floor of the mow. With his head he motioned for her to sit while with his hands he spread out the letters. Millie still couldn’t move, standing there with her eyebrows brought in together in thought—she was frozen because the answer was no. She couldn’t remember Junior before the war.

  “Sit, soldier,” Tommy said. He placed the lantern out in front of the arrangement of letters, so they could be seen. “Let’s solve a mystery.”

  *

  He said, “The first thing you do is place them in chronological order. If you’re going to tell a story, you have to have a beginning, a middle and an end, right?”

  She didn’t answer. She was staring at the letters, not the words or numbers on them, but the letters themselves. They were on yellowing pieces of paper, given to the soldiers by the YMCA or the Red Cross. There were dried brown streaks and smudges on the ones from the front, because they had been written in trenches or French barns, Tommy explained. She had never seen Junior’s handwriting before, sloppy, uneven lines in a rushed, sometimes-print-sometimes-script that was like reading code. She could tell by the way he handled them that Tommy had been over these letters many times.

  “Here,” he said, handing one of the more neatly written and neatly folded letters to her. “Now read. A garter snake has a beginning, a middle and an end. A story is so much more than that.”

  March 11, 1918

  Camp Lee, Vrg

  Little brother,

  Well, it looks like Im in the Army now. This camp is a lot more different than Army City up in Garnett, or down in OK. The officers here mean business, let me tell you. I like it tho, I was beginning to worry about Uncle Sams Army, all that drinking and carrying on we have had up to now. You can bet thats over. Now we dress and act and look like soldiers, tho they had special fatiges and a uniform made for me because of my size. We have been in this camp for three days now and let me tell you, I havent eaten so good in all my life. Dont tell Mother. They got beefstake here that will melt your mouth. We get up at 445 in the morning, which let me tell you for these city kids this isnt a treat, but for us boys from the farms, the Army is like a pade vacation. Which I havent been pade yet, but Im sure I will be soon. Until then I got a few bucks Paw gave me which will at least get me some chocolate bars when I need it—which is all the time! HAHA! They have me toating around this n that. I suspect Ill be doing this until they let me out of the Army, because most of these guys are no bigger than you are. They say some of us boys will be put aside for Home Duty--farming! God____it Almighty, I didnt join the Army to work in the rows. I could have stayed home for that and then I wouldnt be missing you guys so God____ much!

  I sure do miss you guys. You tell our little soldier how much I liked the train ride to the East. She doesnt care much for flat-old Kansas, so maybe shell be interested. She will love these mountains in the east if she ever gets away from Price. Ill send her a letter to. I promise to write. Send chocolate!

  My address: Co. C 127th Infantry, 35th Division, American Expeditionary Forces Best To All, Jr.

  This was the first letter he had sent home. Tommy said try first to picture his face, his voice, speaking the words. She had trouble. He said try to picture Junior in special-made fatigues. She was having trouble with that too.

  “Can’t you hear him laughing, that big, almost silent, opened mouthed laugh of his, which always caused him to cough? That fire he had in his eyes all the time like there was nothing he wasn’t a hundred-percent sure of?”

  She tried like hell, still couldn’t do it.

  He said, “Read on, then.”

  April 25, 1918

  Little Brother, Camp Lee, Vrg.

  Well, like Ive been telling you, w
e are set for the train ride to New York. We have been issued rifles, and even cartriges. My helmet is like a screw top on a canteen it is so tight. The boys really get some good comedy out of it. They call me Jumbo and Sgt. Sheehee says any Sammy (thats us) that is near me in the trenches is done for because "those Hun bastards" have never had it so easy finding a target for there artillary. I hope hes not right. Im starting to really like these guys in my co. Moreover than that, I cant wait to get over to France and start beating hell out of the Kaiser.

  So Mother tells me you are coming home from Wichita. Don’t do it little brother. Paw will get on just fine—hell hire some men to help. You are to smart to be scrubbing around in the dirt of Hope County. I know our soldier is lonely without us, but it is war T., we all have to make sacrifices. That’s why I joined up and left the farm in the first place. I love this country! And if the President says fight, then I fight. Anyway we will go over there to France and fix the Hun in time for me to get back for a good thanksgiving dinner.

  Some of the boys here are a little scared of fighting. I want you to reassure Mother I am not afraid. I don’t think there has been a German born who can lick a good farm boy from Kansas. I gess I owe it all to you, little brother. If you werent such an oddball, talking that fancy talk like you do, than I would of never learned how to fight. I dont mind. Im glad for it. Dont take me seriously. Those Hun sons of _____es are in for it when I get there.

  Hug our soldier for me before you go. I sure do miss her. If one of those jerrys gets lucky and hits me with a bullet, its going to be my brother and sister I miss the most, but dont get all ____blasted teary eyed on me now!