Beast of the Field

by Peter Jordan Drake

  Forever, Your Darling

  Sterno had been pacing while he listened. Now he had to stop.

  Mrs. Donnan had clear tracks of tears falling from her eyes. "Those poor kids," she said. “She really didn’t know.”

  Millie's anger was keeping everything else down. "How the hell could she know?" she said. "She was whisked away to that phony-baloney girls’ home—by her own pa, no less. 'Feeble Minded and Wayward' my rosy-pink ass. Hell, maybe she still don’t know. Maybe she’s there waiting for him still."

  Sterno thought about it. "He didn't want her telling anyone about what she knew about those oil men. And if she did tell anyone about it, he didn't want anyone believing her." He took the letter from Millie, moving his entire head to read it, looking for clues; but truth was he was still not himself; he was still feeling something strong and sad for this girl. He was feeling something strong and sad for this family that never got a chance to be a family. For all families that never got a chance to be a family. He was thinking about all the lost loves. About a river he saw in a dream, where on the far bank was a place a man can smile. He was also thinking about finding love again, about smiling right here in this place where it’s not supposed to happen.

  He pulled himself from this reverie, took another look at the address on the last letter. "Fredonia's east of here, if I remember right."

  "Next county."

  He checked his wrist watch. He stood from the hayloft floor, thinking. "Well, let's go then."

  "Right now?"

  "Right now. We'll be there before dark if we get a move on."

  Millie began stomping out candles with her black boots. "Do you like mustard?"

  "What's that?"

  "I’ll quick make up some sandwiches. No way in hell you're driving me all over God's creation on a day-old whisky stomach. You like mustard, or do you want cheese and jelly?"

  He didn't like mustard, he got mustard.

  29.

  From her bedroom window, Flora Greentree watched the road. She watched the wood. Twice she thought she saw Tommy waving to her from the trees, but it was probably just the trees themselves, tossing. If he were really there, he would come and get her, wouldn’t he? Come right up to the door and punch Gomer in the face, throw her onto his buggy, take her away from this house? Surely he would. But Gomer had his gun. And what if her father and the Neuwalds did catch him? And now another storm was nearly on top of them, and a stronger one.

  The alarm clock by her bed read five-thirty. She could not wait any longer. She dragged her trunk from the back window, down the hall, passed her room and to the stairs. Without a pause she went down the stairs with the trunk behind her, clunking down step after step loudly enough to rattle her mother’s China. Her cheeks were red by the time she reached the ground floor. It was only when she nearly bumped into Gomer Neuwald that she stopped. She faced him with her fists on her hips.

  “Where you off to, Florella May, gay Paree?”

  “Move from my way.”

  As an excuse for a smile, he lifted one side of his mouth, showing tobacco stained teeth. “This aint exactly your way, now is it there, Florella May?”

  “I mean it, Gomer.”

  “What’re you gonna do, haul that suitcase all the way to La-La Land? Or just to that cabin yonder where you and Tommy been humping away at each oth—"

  For the first punch she had ever thrown in her life, it was not such a bad punch. It hurt her knuckles but she got him on the left side of his nose, with her thumbnail sticking out just enough to rip his left nostril. With the few seconds this bought her she opened the screen door with her behind and dragged her heavy trunk out onto the porch. She had pulled the trunk down the porch steps to the gravel walkway in front of the house when Gomer, bloody kerchief at his face, crashed through the screen door.

  “Little slut. Now I got all the reason I need to give you what you got coming.”

  His rifle had been leaning against the house next to the door. He swiped it up in both hands—one on the barrel and one the stock—and came at her with a look in his eyes like they had come loose from thinking. The butt of the stock came down onto the top of the trunk, knocking the trunk from her hands. She stood shaking the pain off her hands while he laid his gun down to the grass, raised his hand instead.

  The slap was loud and hot in her skull. She was left stunned on her seat in the grass. Gomer was reaching down to take her by the arm when she saw Jove Moreland step up behind him and use a blackjack over the top of his head, the blackjack he had until today carried to protect her father.

  Gomer fell to the wet grass next to her. He blinked once at Flora, but it was with no focus, no thought—a quick blink, then sleep.

  Now it was Jove Moreland reaching for her. He handed her a kerchief for the blood coming from her lip, led her with one hand to his Model T, which had been idling at the side of the house. When she was in the passenger’s seat, he went back for her trunk, which he hefted to one shoulder and carried against the strengthening wind to his back seat. Just as he had turned north from her father’s house to the highroad, that was when the rain came.

  *

  Thunder stampeded across the sky. A vast hollow crack and then the shaking of the earth and then the rolling away on the clouds, one clap after another without interlude. In this same relentless manner lightning fluttered here and there and here again and jaunted in mighty streaks from horizon to horizon. The wind was constant and powerful and made flat the new green blades of wheat to the ground. Through it all was the rain.

  Now with the wind behind her Sonnet had outrun her fears. Her head dove forward with each outward thrust of her forelegs, her mane and tail tossed about behind her, and Tommy had to hold on to his trilby with one hand, taking it away for seconds at a time, to look at the rain-splattered face of his watch. Just before six.

  "Get up, girl! Come on!"

  He stood in the buggy, leaned forward, one foot on the dash rail, whistling sharply at Sonnet, snapping the reins against her rain-slicked hide. They emerged from the field road to a highroad without a car upon it. He took this road south, and almost instantly the mayor’s mansion appeared in the maelstrom. The oaks lining the drive to the front porch flopped to and fro in the gale winds. Tommy split them, talking, whistling, ticking the horse through. Together they went headlong for the porch steps. Tommy leaped from the buggy before it had stopped rolling, bounded to the porch, crashed open the door.

  “Flora, my darling! I’ve come!” he called. He searched through the house as he made his way to her room, but she was not in the house and not in her room. He looked about the room and could see she had left in a rush—or had she been taken? Through her window he saw the figure on the grass, stirring under the rain. A rent opened up down the middle of his gut. This was very bad.

  Gomer Neuwald was lying in a heap in the lawn of the mayor's house. With his foot Tommy rolled Gomer over to his back. Gomer bled from his nose and from the back of his head. The blood washed in pink rivulets into his clothes with the rain. His eyes were open and searching. Tommy got on one knee, picked up Gomer by his shirt, made sure what his eyes landed on were his own eyes.

  "What the hell happened here?"

  Gomer groaned. His hand made its way to the back of his head. He blinked in the rain and saw the blood on it and his eyes rolled up into their sockets.

  "Where is she, goddamnit. Who took her?"

  Gomer made noises but made no sense. Tommy dropped his head back to the grass. Sonnet twitched and hammered her hooves against another flash of lightning. Tommy looked to the house, then to the horse. With a wooden face he went to the closest willow he could find, a younger tree compared to the giants in the mayor's yard. He found a seven foot switch, snapped it off the tree, stripped it clean of leaf. He ran a soothing hand across his filly's neck as he passed her to the buggy, but he could not look her in the eye.

  "Alright then. 'Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks,'" he said, once atop the buggy, then laid the first
line across her haunches.

  *

  As soon as Miss Flora had left her father’s house, she got a cold, terrifying feeling behind her ribs like she had made a tragic error.

  “Jove, what time is it?” she asked, as though time in the way it could be measured by gears, hands and numerals mattered here anymore.

  He took his eyes from the rainy road, blinked his long eyelashes at his pocket watch. “Just before six, now.”

  “Oh Jove, what have I done?” she breathed. Jove did not hear her for the wind and rain on the car. They came to where the road turned left, to the west. Flora knew where the dirt path jutting off that road lead when it ran eastward. She asked him to slow down, then stop. They stopped at the turn. She then asked him to drive through the field.

  "Through there?"

  "To the trees."

  "Those trees yonder?"

  "Please. I have no time to waste."

  The challenge alone of it apparently pleased Jove. He turned off the road. The car leapt forward, bounced and slid along the tractor path until it reached the tree line. Without slowing, Jove turned back to her, received a nod, a nervous nod, and plunged his car into the underbrush of the wood. Leaves and branches slapped and grabbed at the car. Jove seemed to know the road, or his car seemed to know the road. Flora could not imagine how else it was possible for him to go at this speed without being stopped by one of the thicker tree trunks. The road then sunk and became even bumpier, and she knew she was close.

  "Stop here, stop here, please!”

  "Miss Flora! You best not—!" Jove said when she opened the back door. "We got to git! This aint no normal storm wind. I think they's a tornado coming!"

  Her trunk was stuffed onto the seat next to where she had been sitting. She opened the lid a few inches, pulled something from inside. A pack of letters, wrapped in a pearl-colored handkerchief and bound with green ribbon. "Go, Jove. Find someplace safe to ride out the storm. And hurry!”

  “Miss Flora! They aint no way I can—“

  “Do it, Jove. I’m staying here." Then, dress billowing around her, hair pulled from its ties, ribbon-bound letters held to her breast, she vanished into the thrashing trees.

  *

  From the mayor’s house Tommy went to town. The going was against the wind the entire way, but the switch at her back was new to Sonnet and stronger than the headwinds and so she plowed through the gusts and hard driven razor shavings of rain as though this was her last time to gallop.

  And the switch came down again, and the horse dipped her head to run faster.

  The canopy had been ripped from the buggy and was flailing across a field behind them. Now only the spidery frame was left, quivering in the rush of full speed. On either side of her, the filly's harness was coming undone around the traces, tinkling down her flanks to be crushed and bowled over by the mad muddy wheels of the buggy. Still the switch came down. Still they drove on.

  Where is she? Where is she?

  These were tornado winds, Tommy knew. Everyone would be in the cellar of the big barn. Maybe she had gone there. Maybe she thought he had gone there too. This was where he would try first. That’s where she would be. Above him the storm was bearing down on the town. It teetered high and large and green-black above the rooftops as though it were a cliff about to collapse on the tiny lives below it. Tommy went straight into it. By the time he reached town the wind was carrying shingles away, snapping boughs, stopping people in their tracks, moving them backwards against their will. He took Sonnet to the big barn. He stopped when he saw a cluster of cars. The cars rocked back and forth in the wind, and some of them were losing their canopies too, Tommy saw.

  Mr. Aaronson was watching two younger men push his horseless carriage into the barn. Tommy hallooed to him. The old man shielded his eyes, squinted back at Tommy.

  "Have you seen Miss Greentree?"

  "Mister who?"

  "Miss Flora! Flora Greentree! The mayor’s daughter!"

  "The mayor's girl? Naw, I haven't seen her! The mayor was here, though. Him and Jonas was looking for you. You better get out of this storm, boy. Looks like a twister." He was at one of the open bay doors to the barn by the time he finished saying this, and disappeared inside before Tommy could stop him.

  The first little pellet of hail thocked on Tommy's hat, then another hit his hand, then they were coming down all over, little by little knocking the obvious idea free from the grasp of his desperation, until it came all at once and he could view it in plain sight. He slapped himself on the forehead for his stupidity: the cabin.

  "Come on, girl! Get up!" he yelled. And down came the switch.

  30.

  The Methodist Home for the Feeble Minded and Wayward Girls of Kansas sat like a bulldog next to the lithe and high-reaching First Methodist Church of Fredonia. Both buildings were of brown and gray bricks, but one of the two had these bricks comprising a six-foot high wall that closed in its courtyard. Lightless windows on the upper floors completed the building's feel of a prison.

  The only light on in the building was in the receiving room, where a woman no younger than ninety with the skin of an onion strewn with black veins stared up at Sterno in amazement. "You want to see her now, you said? At this time of night?"

  He flattened his lips in way of a response, as though these were the facts and there was nothing he—or more importantly she—could do to change them. The old lady was slow to buy it. Although she couldn’t see his ripped pant leg and scraped ankle, she could see his jaw, which Mrs. Donnan had done well to clean up but not hide away. After blinking at him roughly ten times without stopping, the lady pushed herself up from a desk, limped away from the lamplight into the darkness of a corridor.

  Sterno was back at the window, looking out at his partner, who like it or not, Sterno had ordered to stay outside. Not. She sat with her legs hanging out the passenger’s side door, her black cowboy boots dangling, arms over her chest, glaring at him. Sterno had had to do it. He did not know what kind of shape this Greentree girl would likely be in—she might have gone feeble after all—and it was best to keep his partner outside.

  Footsteps in the corridor brought him back to the desk. The old woman returned. With her, however, was not Flora Greentree, but a woman with loud shoes, a square build, high round shoulders like Jim Thorpe and an unfair share of facial hair on the sides of her jaw. Her name was Mrs. Biertzer.

  "Are you a police man?" Mrs. Biertzer asked after bringing her bulk to a military-style stop.

  "I am," he said. He showed her his identification.

  "A Pinkerton," she said, holding it up to her spectacles. "What is it you want with Miss Greentree? At this time of night."

  "Her mother is ill, terminally ill, I'm afraid. I’m a friend of the mayor's—Mayor Greentree, that is—and I help the family out from time to time. They asked me to come and give Miss Greentree the news. I won't be but a minute."

  “Terminally ill,” she said. The woman looked over Sterno's face, his swollen jaw, his clothes, raised an eyebrow at him. At last she handed him back his wallet. The two old women exchanged looks. The Biertzer woman then turned on her feet, marched back the way she had come.

  Sterno sat until he heard them coming back down the corridor.

  The swollen belly came out of the shadows a full second before the rest of the nightgown. She held it with both hands, shuffled along the floor with her shoulders thrown back behind her, for it was nearly a third the size of her frame. For a handful of seconds Sterno watched her walking, his heart beating against his ribs. It was not like seeing into a dream this time; it was like seeing into the past, directly into a long lost place and time, to Elizabeth, using her own two hands to hold up the living load beneath her nightgown.

  Flora’s hair was in a sleeping cap, but this only brought more attention to the sad blue eyes Sterno had till now only seen in pictures. She then removed the cap to let her sun-gold hair fall over her shoulder.

  Sterno could not tear his eyes from her.
He held out his hand in greeting, albeit a trembling hand. He smiled at her in the friendliest way he could muster through the bruises on his face. "Miss Greentree. My name is Charlie Sterno. I'm a friend of your father's." He had said this for the sake of the old ladies. The girl, however, pulled her hand back from him to cradle it in her other hand.

  "I'm a friend of Tommy's too," Sterno added. He gave her a look as he said this that erased the comment about her father. She caught on right away.

  "Hi," she said. Her voice was like white down. So was her hand shake.

  "Can we have a little privacy?" he asked the women. He didn't expect to be able to talk straight with these women standing over the girl's shoulder. "It's a private issue."

  The women allowed them to sit in two chairs by the front windows. Sterno helped the girl down into the chair. She was visibly relieved to be off her feet.

  "You're holding up okay?"

  She smiled through her discomfort. "I'm holding up," she said.

  "My wife didn't fare too well either," Sterno heard himself say. He was trying to reach out to the girl, but had never expected these words to leave his lips.

  "You have children then."

  "No," he said. "They didn’t make it—" He stopped himself from saying what they didn't make it through. What his wife and baby didn't make it through was the last thing this girl needed to hear just weeks or days away from her own battle.