He gave her a finger in the ribs.
"Where are you going, Tommy?"
"Who said I was going anywhere?"
"You did."
They reached town before he decided what to say. "Millie, just promise me you’ll never tell a soul about Flora and me. Let me tell everyone."
“So where are you going, Tommy? Does Junior know?”
He suddenly and surprisingly lost his temper at this point. “No he doesn’t—what I mean is,” he said, controlling, “there is nothing to know. I’m not going anywhere.”
He lied to her. It surprised even himself. He just didn’t want her to know their plans, so he had to keep secrets from her.
It was hurtful to her, he knew. She was hurt most that he had a secret he was sharing with someone else in the world, but not her. And maybe he was indeed being silly about it—there was this chance. There was this chance that his suspicions were baseless. Maybe Geshen was over her after all these years; maybe Junior was just worried about her wellbeing; maybe her father was not as old fashioned as they thought. Tommy had heightened the drama of a situation before, only to be embarrassed in the end. Was this the same?
Sonnet was moving at a walk now they were in town. The facades of Main Street eased by them on either side. Tommy saw a familiar white sedan in front of the barbershop. He did his best not to turn his head, not to notice. Even without looking he could see the large redheaded man inside through the window, Jonas and Jake Neuwald by his side, Gomer and Geshen sitting in chairs getting cuts, each of them stopping what he was doing to make a show of staring out at him.
No, this was not the same.
*
The other lover had no bodyguard from whom she would have to withhold her secret. She had no sibling to tempt the secret from her lips. The other lover had nobody. Her silence was total. In some ways, this made it easier for her to maintain a semblance of normalcy in her daily life. The love affair ended at her bedroom door; everything outside that door seemed to be as it always had. In fact, if anything, she wondered if she was giving the appearance of too much normalcy. She went to the school, she taught the children, she came home, she spent time with her grandmother—whom she was already beginning to miss—she helped around the house, she ate supper, she crocheted with her mother after dinner, then at last she disappeared into her room—and to the other world she lived in, which is to say, where she was actually alive.
She had to avoid her father. And there was no other way to handle her father through this, but to avoid him. He had emerged from the hard winter a different man. This oil debacle, which was to make him governor, instead ruined him. His blood was always one degree below the boiling point, and this meant the women of the house walked on glass day and night, even his own mother. God help them if something should be misplaced, dirty or in his walking path. The house then became a series of vibrating walls while he went from room to room to find whatever small detail he felt was imperfect about the room, and bringing the blame of this catastrophe down on someone's head with a full swung hammer. As he lost control of his life outside the home, his control over what happened inside his home became all important to him.
But because he was almost never home, he had to employ, he felt, outside help to maintain control over his house; this meant alternating the Neuwald twins as sentries on the front porch. This meant she could no longer avoid the confrontation with Geshen Neuwald she had been dreading for weeks, months, probably years.
“I’ll die if I can’t marry you,” he’d said to her one night on the porch. “Don’t you see?”
It was a warm evening for April, and despite the dry winter, the mosquitos were already a bother. She kept her gaze on her hands, folded in her lap.
Tears seem to dampen the edges of his voice when he spoke next. “Is that what you want, Flora, you want me to die? Because if that’s what’ll make you happy—”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Geshen.”
“Is it because you love Tommy Donnan?”
She looked at her hands.
“It is, then. Gomer was right. You were in the schoolhouse with him?”
“Geshen…”
“And is it you two that’s been sneaking off to my hunting cabin?”
“I just want to…”
“Well I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch.” His anger was taking over now. “What is it about those Donnan boys? I finally get you away from old bat-shitty Junior, and now you take up with his little brother?”
“None of this is your business, Geshen. You and I have been through since I left for college.”
“Just because you were through with me, doesn’t mean—“
“It does, Geshen. It does.”
They were quiet for a moment. Bats had begun feasting in front of the porch.
“Your pa aint going to like it one bit.”
“Not going to like what, exactly? What? He’s not going to like me making a decision for myself? About my life?”
“He’s not going to like you humping it up with that dirty mick Donnan, that’s what.” The tears were long gone now, dried up in the heat of jealousy.
She stood. “Goodnight, Geshen.” She was inside the house, lifting her dress to mount the stairs when he drove his point home, sealing the victory, in his mind.
“He aint gonna like it, Flora. He aint gonna like it one bit. No sir.”
22.
Millie had already decided to follow Mr. Sterno by the time he had cranked up his car and driven away—though this time it would not be the bicycle. She took Sonnet bareback through the rear door of the stable, took her straight back at an angle that made it impossible for anyone to see them from the house. When she had reached Pa’s bottom corn field, she heeled Sonnet’s ribs, leapt through the field at a gallop until the house was out of sight. Then it was the farm roads back to the highroad and straight into town.
She saw Mr. Sterno’s car at the side of the road, drew rein until she and Sonnet were at the edge of a corn field. Mr. Sterno had been bent over in a ditch with his hands on his knees when she saw him. He then got back into the car; but it was still a good ten minute wait until he pulled his car back onto the road.
She followed at a canter on the horse path that ran along the highroad, keeping the car in view as a black splotch in the dust it raised. Her mind had not stopped racing since she had burst from the lilac bush. That St. Louis sot, she thought, can’t hold his liquor down any better than a boy. What right does he have asking questions about Junior? He doesn’t know what Junior’s been through; he’s a veteran of The Great War in France. Can that drunkard say anything like that about himself? No, I reckon not, she thought. I reckon he can’t.
And just when she was starting to like him.
As she led Sonnet along, the seed he planted cracked and began to grow, no matter how she tried to shake it off. There were the dreams in the night, that continued to this day. And there was that day with the pig. She couldn’t fight off that day Pa slaughtered that pig. It popped up in her mind and she tried to put it down and it popped up somewhere else.
They hadn’t wanted any more gossip about Junior than there already was, so they told everyone in town it was a machine accident, a conveyor belt came undone from the car engine. Tommy had been gone at the college a few months by then. The house had already settled into a strange and unhappy silence without him in it. They were still getting used to Junior’s silence; like he did, his silence took up a whole room back then. Not like now, where it was just a plain old silence. He had just begun to say his “h-y”, which had started in the night, during his dreams, but soon became his entire vocabulary, even in the waking day. But that day Pa slaughtered that pig…
Ahead of her, Millie saw that Mr. Sterno’s Model T had come to a stop at the edge of town. She didn’t know how long it had been idling there. She reined Sonnet over into the shade of the solitary tree marking the gate to Mr. Mitchell’s farm. Watched. What was he doing? She noticed then he was at the point in the road whe
re a right turn would take into Price and a left turn back to Missouri.
Good, go on home, you soak. You half-blind soak.
That’s what he seemed to be doing: he took a left turn, away from town. She watched the profile of car until it went behind some corn stalks, then watched the dust from it as she had the first time she saw him. Perplexed, she fanned her gaze ahead of him, much faster than the car could go. He wasn’t really going home, was he? She thought of where else that road went and it didn’t take long for her to figure it out. After about three miles that road had a big left turn marked by a rusted old tractor; that left turn would take him to the Neuwald’s farm, what was left of it.
The Neuwald brothers, she thought. Either he’s off to buy more hooch, or he’s got some other reason for going there. Either way, she wanted to know. She could beat him there if she went through the east woods.
She bird-whistled at Sonnet, pulled her muzzle up from the grass. Went at a walk through the hay field, directly to the wall of trees that marked the east woods.
Maybe they had been waiting for something like that to happen with Junior. Maybe, quietly, they had all been expecting it. Not fearing it, really, but wondering when it would come.
She had been with Junior in the house that November day when Pa slaughtered the pig, a day of cold winds and flurries. She had seen him flinch and nearly drop his rummy hand at the sound of the .22 pistol Pa used once a year against the head of a porker. He flinched on the second shot too, laid down his hand, and stood from the table because he knew Pa would need his help now. The two of them hefted the pig—a young hog—to lie across an old door set up on sawhorses outside the back of the barn. She and Junior stood side by side as Pa punctured the front of its neck, letting the blood come as though from a pitcher, a deep, deep pitcher, to spill onto the ground. Junior made a little sound in his chest, stepped back at the sight of the blood, upsetting the little table that held the hacksaw, cleaver and knives, nearly knocking them into the horse trough of scalding water Pa had positioned above a fire, to clean the hog of its hair. “Careful boy, it aint your bath day today,” Pa had said, and laughed his laugh. “Heck!”
Millie pulled her mind back to the hot Indian summer of September, 1922, and tracking down her detective. She was getting close enough to the woods now to see the dead trunks hidden in the shade of the tall canopy. She could see the dried saplings that would never see another summer’s sun. This close to the woods, a cold feeling took hold of her innards. She pulled back on Sonnet, who was happy to stop: she didn’t like those woods either.
Pa had righted the table and laid out his tools once more. He kept his head down, sliced off the genitals and let them thud to the dirt without comment. He had done this all quietly, Millie remembered now, which for some reason was worth remembering. Pa was never quiet. Had he sensed something with Junior too? He wiped the dirt from the long skinny blade he used to gut the pigs, and without a word he worked it into the upper belly of the pig. Some blood came, though not much. Pa wiggled the knife a little, sawed at the meat a little with it, then in a single fast motion he sliced down the under-length of the pig and brought the knife out when he got to the genital area...
Millie took Sonnet north through the field, the wood’s edge running along their right. She was angry at herself. She for some reason could not take that horse into those woods. It’s just trees, she told herself. Just trees and some wild dogs that wouldn’t go near her atop Sonnet. Still, Sonnet blew through her nose, tossed her neck; she didn’t want to go in there either. What had happened in those woods, girl? She asked the horse in her mind, but was too intent on listening to say it aloud. They came to the two-rut dirt path that led east-west and ran to the road that led to the farm road; all she had to do was lead the horse in, follow the path through woods she’d been into a thousand times. That was all she had to do.
The belly of the pig lurched outward with the relief of pressure. The long gray cut opened up like it was going to throw up, then did. The guts of the pig slopped out in a sticky, greasy sound and slid down until they hit the ground then splayed outward as if growing right in front of their eyes. That sound came from Junior’s chest again—a catching, barking kind of noise—but louder. A sound came from his throat too. It was not just a sound and a pitch that was unrecognizable coming from Junior, it was like the voice did not belong to him either. He did not step backward this time, but forward. Pa saw him coming but could not do a thing about it. Junior took the wrist of the knife hand, squeezed his hand open and the knife fell away. He then grabbed the front of Pa’s shirt—his fingers had actually dug in between his ribs, they found later—and flung him over his pick-up. Pa’s leg caught on the roof, causing him to cartwheel over the roof of the cab. Millie heard the snap of bone. By the time Pa had tumbled down a fence post to the ground, unconscious, Junior was standing over him.
“Junior!” she had called, which stopped him as he was bending over. He blinked awake, saw what he had done, and ran directly into the house to get Mother.
She was about to do it. She was just about to take Sonnet into the woods. She had whispered the horse calm, had reached forward with an oat cake, and she felt the horse trusted her enough. She had actually pulled the reins tight to the right, tapped the heel of her left foot and was turning the horse when the first shot came.
Sonnet bolted, stopped, then cantered nervously in a circle as Millie bird-whistled her down. The second shot came then, followed by two more, quickly, these from a different gun. After a few seconds three more shots were fired, from the first gun. Then all went silent. There was the wind in the leaves, the breath from Sonnet and the heart in Millie’s ribs, and nothing else.
*
The swaying of the car in the broadside winds had proved too much for Sterno. He pulled the car off the road, set the brake, and had just made it to the weeds when he let loose the morning coffee, and some of last night’s whisky too, and some spit and bile after that. He stood with his hands on his knees until he knew it was safe to move again, then got back in the car.
But still could not move.
A woman. Love. Good old fashioned love, good old fashioned jealousy. The Shakespearean dying a Shakespearean death. It couldn’t be, Sterno thought. But it was starting to make sense. Geshen Neuwald, the icy, calculating jealous lover. Braun Donnan Jr., the war veteran, the quiet one—quiet like a bomb. Still, it was hard to believe. Could a woman really cause a man to lose his head that way? Sterno pulled the photo of Flora Greentree from his pocket, stared at it for several seconds; it was hard to take his eyes away from the picture. Yes, he thought, a woman could.
He was about to turn toward town, head back to the hotel for a bath and a shave, when he found himself idling at a stand-still once more. This time in the day, there was a chance they wouldn’t be at home. Work to do, somewhere, even if it was at the stills. Sterno turned left instead of right, already going over the layout he had kept in his head from the Helmcamp woman’s cellar maps.
A left at the road marked by a rusted tractor took him north again. He drove by the turn off the road leading to the Neuwald gate; once up the road a piece, he turned around again, drove by it again, this time a little slower. A half mile down the road he saw a half-collapsed horse stable. The ruins of a fireplace foundation poked out the weeds not too far from the stable. Sterno turned off the road again, this time going straight through the hay. He rounded the dilapidated stables, pointed the nose of his Ford toward the road, in case he had to get away in a hurry. After setting the brake and cutting the engine, he listened, but heard only the wind.
The woods were as dry as the hay. Under his feet the treefall from the previous fall still crunched. Following a map in his head, he moved through the woods to where he thought the house would be. If there was no one home, he’d go right in. Maybe even if there were someone home, he’d go right in. That lockbox in Junior’s drawer had spurred some thoughts—that missing watch of Tommy’s. It was somewhere. And if he was right ab
out this being a crime committed by someone close by, then it was somewhere close. Maybe it was in that lockbox of Junior’s. Maybe in the old farm house in the trees ahead of him, setting on a dresser, safe from all eyes in this fortress of trees.
Simultaneously he heard the report and the hum-thud of the bullet as it went into a tree over his head and to his right.
He crouched. Took his .38 from his ankle strap after all.
“Who is that?” the voice came. The gimpy one, Gomer. “Who’s there, I say?”
Sterno saw no easy way out of this, but the easiest was backwards.
You fool, he thought. You soft-headed, hung-over idiot, in a matter of minutes you managed to forget the stills in these woods. Coming up on a still was like stepping on a rattlesnake. You knew they’d be at the stills, but you forgot the stills were in the woods—great detective work, Charlie. What in hell were you thinking?
Too late for beating himself up, however, or maybe too early. He moved one crunching step at a time, his eyes forward, his pistol ready. He saw movement in the mid-growth, maybe a fifty yards from where he was creeping back to his car.
The second shot came, and it came close.
Sterno had had enough, he fired two rounds into the leaves over where he had seen Gomer, then turned to run. Three shots came after him, but were falling wide. He was grateful for Gomer Neuwald’s bad leg.
Sterno ran hard, stumbling twice, ripping his pants and cutting his leg on the second fall, though he didn’t feel it. He made it to the car, cranked the engine, revved away with no sight of Gomer Neuwald in the trees or anywhere else.
He was breathing heavily as he drove. He had not run this fast—nay, he had not run—in many years, and it was enough to bring more bile up from the bottom of his stomach, but this was sent out the window of his flivver, on the road back to town.
23.
Beast of the Field Page 17
