The Drifter's Wheel

by Phillip DePoy

  “In the field hospital at Gettysburg,” Lucinda continued after a brief moment of head-shaking, “Polly apparently took to wandering amongst the soldiers, offering what solace she could. It helped to pass the time while they were waiting to hear from the president—see, he told me that part.”

  “Sorry,” I managed to say around a bite of turnip.

  “So this Polly, she stood next to the man’s cot and sang Mozart while the doctor prepared to saw off his right leg.”

  “Mozart?”

  “One of the parlor songs,” Lucinda said breezily. “But he said he’d been given so much whiskey he had no idea what was going on around him. All he knew was that a woman was singing somewhere. But she stopped singing to speak to the doctor, and do you know what she said? She said, ‘I’m no expert, of course, but that leg looks dislocated. I saw something like it when my brother fell from a horse. Why couldn’t you shove it back into place the way we did then—and not saw off this man’s leg? Aren’t you tired of sawing off men’s legs?’ And the doctor exhaled; the hand that held the saw relaxed. He hated his job. He just wandered away, and this Polly person twisted the leg, then snapped it back into its socket. The man said he had never known such pain, and he passed out completely.”

  Lucinda picked up her fork and stabbed a baby carrot.

  I swallowed. “Yes. The thing is, when he talked to me he seemed to have in his head the kind of personal details that you could only have if you were remembering an experience.”

  She nodded. “Or if you had studied up on them, like for a test.”

  “That was your impression?”

  “Well, his breadth of knowledge concerning the Hutchinson Family, which I had never heard of, was impressive. I’m sorry to say it this way, but he sounded a little like you do when you get off on one of your intellectual tangents.”

  I sat up straight. “If I occasionally explore a phenomenon that may be a few steps off the path, I’m only gathering berries, as it were, for the rest of the long journey.”

  “I know you think that your digressions will eventually contribute in some way to the larger picture, but they don’t always.” She was looking down, barely able to keep a smile from her lips.

  “I know you think you’re funny, teasing me about my intellectual tangents.”

  “Well,” she said, shifting in her seat, “they are amusing.”

  “And they always have something to do with the point, my digressions.”

  “Well,” she began, obviously in doubt.

  “We were talking about our visitor,” I insisted.

  “Let’s see.” She set down her fork, apparently unable to eat and think at the same time. “He told me that the Hutchinsons’ reinstated singing tour left Gettysburg while he was recuperating. When he awoke the doctor told him about the woman who saved his leg and maybe his life—and that she was gone. He vowed then that he would find her, follow her across the highest mountain, to the ends of the earth, to hell and back.”

  “As luck would have it,” I interrupted, “he only had to pursue her as far as Atlanta.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because I am a man of mighty intellect,” I sighed, “and because as a sophomore at the university I studied the Hutchinson Family as part of a ballad and broadside course in the folklore department. They really were quite extraordinary in their day, very sociologically advanced. And some of them lived in Atlanta.”

  “I give,” she acceded, teasing. “You actually do know everything.”

  “I don’t know why I have to keep reminding you of that.” I smiled back.

  “Yes, he went to Atlanta,” she said, continuing her recollection of the stranger’s story. “They met early in 1865 at a church social, a dance. They were both Catholics. He came into the church during a sweetheart dance. Polly had no sweetheart.”

  “Hard to believe.”

  “Not really, especially in that day. I think it’s likely that men were intimidated by her fame, her beauty, her intelligence.”

  “Well, you’re probably right there,” I agreed. “And the population of eligible bachelors in Atlanta had been severely reduced by the war.”

  “But here’s the good part. He told me that when he talked to Polly the first time, she asked him how he was wounded, and he told her he hadn’t been injured in the battle at Gettysburg. He said his leg had been dislocated when he was wrestling with an angel, and he told her his name was Jacob.”

  “There was a Jacob in my story—the one he told me.” I nodded slowly. “But then he told me his name was Truck.”

  “No, I mean, that’s a story from the Bible,” Lucinda pressed. “Jacob wrestled with an angel all night long, and the angel dislocated Jacob’s leg.”

  “That’s right.” My recollection of the story was hazy, but it was there.

  “And apparently they were mad for each other after that.” Lucinda blushed. “Before the older women at church could stop it, fire had seized them both. He told me he often ran from the field in the middle of the morning to be with Polly. He ran. They had six children, and the whole family could be seen planting roses, painting the farmhouse, singing in the kitchen while they all made dinner. There wasn’t a man in the world who loved his own family more. That’s why it must have been such a shock to Polly, to everyone, when he ran off one day and didn’t come back.”

  “He left her?”

  She nodded. “Never went back.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “I think he was going to,” she said, picking up her fork, “but the phone rang about then. It was Stacy, you know Stacy—the one you were just flirting with? She was calling about the—she couldn’t read Dr. Mercer’s handwriting, and she wanted to give this patient her medication; it was nothing. But when I came back to the porch, he was gone. Like he’d never even been there.”

  “Why do you say it that way?”

  She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “We were sitting in those rockers on my front porch, you know, the ones with those nice blue cushions on the seats? And when I came back out, there wasn’t an indentation in the pillow where he’d been sitting. I noticed that.”

  “What time was he there at your place, do you remember?”

  “I came home from work and he was on the porch.” She cocked her head. “I’d say it was about six o’clock.”

  “You were late.”

  “A little.” She resumed her eating.

  My food was gone.

  “So that means,” I mumbled, thinking to myself, “that he visited Hovis first, me last.”

  “Is that important?”

  “Well,” I said, taking in a big breath, “if I’m wrong, and the guy Skid found this morning is actually the guy who visited us last night, I’m the last one to see him alive.”

  “But you think the dead man is someone else.” She kept eating.

  “I do, however odd it may seem. I mean, the dead man looks a little like the man I spoke to last night—”

  “Dressed in the same clothes.” She continued my thought.

  “You’ll have a look at him when you’re finished eating.” I stared down at her plate. “If you ever do finish eating.”

  “You eat too fast.”

  “Fine.” I sat back. “But do you mind having a look at the body?”

  “Of course not.” She scooped a bite of purple-hull peas on her fork with a crust of the manna bread. “Do we have to go get Skidmore?”

  “He seems to be leaving this part of it to me while he does other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Paperwork.” I grinned. “He has to sit in that stuffy old office while I get to have lunch with the prettiest girl in town.”

  She looked up instantly. “Is she having lunch with you? I better hurry up and finish my bread; she’ll be mad if she sees me still sitting here when she walks in.”

  “You know very well—”

  She smiled, and it shut me up instantly.

  “You’re very sweet
to me, Fever,” she murmured, “and there’s no other boy in town who would take me out to lunch with the promise of a dead body for dessert.” She blinked once.

  “And how many other women in these parts,” I countered, “could eat spinach and talk about corpses at the same time?”

  “Made for each other,” she sighed, mocking me.

  “The point is,” I insisted, “that our visitor was trying to tell us something. It made sense to him. I mean, he didn’t ask me for money or a place to stay or anything like that.”

  “Same here.” She popped the last bite of bread into her mouth.

  “So why did he visit us,” I continued, “and what was he trying to say?”

  “Well,” Lucinda said, staring at the tabletop, “he didn’t seem to be trying to tell me anything but his story. I mean—he’s just a wandering soul.”

  “Except for the fact that he probably couldn’t have fought in the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.”

  “Maybe he was telling someone else’s story.” She shrugged. “We should hurry on over to the Deveroes’. I kind of have to get back to work—wish I didn’t.”

  I reached for my wallet; she stood. A quick half an hour was the best I could have hoped for. Lucinda had worked too hard for most of her life. She was genetically incapable of slacking off. When it was time for her to go back to the hospital, there was no argument about it.

  “I’ll just speak with Miss Etta,” I said, heading for the cash register.

  Miss Etta, as usual, was asleep in a very uncomfortable chair close to the kitchen door. I knew she had been awake since four that morning, cooking and preparing the place for her customers. Her hair was white smoke, wreathed in a pale halo just above snowy eyebrows. Her face, ancient but barely wrinkled, was the very model of serenity. I lifted a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet as quietly as I could, but Miss Etta spoke to me, eyes closed, as she always did.

  “That’s too much, Fever. They was only two of you.”

  “But we enjoyed it as much as four people would have,” I told her, placing the twenty in the cash register.

  “You trying to figure out who it was they found behind the Jackson place this morning?”

  I had long since given up wondering how she knew everything, and saw everything with her eyes closed. I just nodded.

  “More power to you.” She resettled in her chair and was silent. “Tell Lucinda she’s right.”

  Lucinda was already at the door. I glanced at her and then back down at Miss Etta.

  “I know she’s usually right about most things,” I said hesitantly, “but to what, in particular, do you refer?”

  The whisper of a smile touched Miss Etta’s lips. “You two are made for each other,” she said softly. “Peas in a pod.”

  I took in a breath to respond, thought better of it, and followed Lucinda out the door.

  The sun had warmed the pavement, and, in turn, the air had expanded. A cool, watery breeze against the sun-warmed skin: there was a sensation barely matched in heaven, in my opinion.

  “So what are you going to do?” Lucinda was already climbing into my truck.

  “I’m going to take you back to the Deveroe Brothers’ place,” I answered, opening the driver’s door, “and then I’m going to take you back to the hospital.”

  “I mean after that.”

  “Depends on what you say about the body.”

  It was close to one o’clock when we pulled up to the parking area on the side of the yard at the Deveroes’. Donny Deveroe, most vocal of the family, appeared on the porch.

  “Thought you’d be back,” he called before I’d even turned off the engine. “Sheriff told me that you might have been the last man to see the deceased alive. Hey, Ms. Foxe.”

  “Hey, Donny,” she said, sliding out of the truck. “How’s that thumb?”

  “Still hurts,” he said shyly, “but it ain’t all swole up like it was.” He held it out for us to see.

  “Casket slammed down on it last week,” Lucinda confided to me as I came around the truck headed for the porch.

  Donny was the size of a barn, but his face was scrubbed and blushing, his brown hair combed back, and he wore a fresh black suit.

  “Hear anything from your sister?” I asked him.

  “I believe she’s expecting,” he said hesitantly. “She and Able might finally have a baby.”

  Sister Truevine and her husband had moved to Athens, Georgia, so that she could attend the university.

  “That’s very nice,” I told him. “I know they wanted to start a family.”

  “Come on in.” He turned and held the front door for us. “I reckon you didn’t come to talk to me about my kin.”

  “Right—the reason we’re here,” I said in a very deliberate voice, “is that the man you have back there might have visited Lucinda last night, right before he came to see me.”

  “Oh.” Donny had learned, as a part of his mortuarial studies, how to offer the perfect noncommittal response. “Then won’t you come in.”

  He stepped aside, and we entered the quiet of the funeral parlor itself. The hallway was spotless. To our left was a perfect Victorian sitting room. The staircase that led to the office upstairs had been given a recent lemon scrubbing. The banister was more mirror than wood.

  “Back this way,” Donny said, his voice lowered, “as you know.”

  He slid effortlessly past us and led the way. In a little room at the end of the hall sat a gleaming chromium table covered with a snow-white sheet. He folded back the sheet covering the body as if he were performing some sort of magic trick. His face was a solid mask of dignity, and his hands moved with the delicacy of a dancer.

  Finished with his effort, he stood back, hands clasped in front of him.

  Lucinda peered down at the face of the corpse. I was more interested in the dead man’s hands.

  “Donny?” I asked softly. “Why is he wearing those?”

  The corpse was sporting some very large plaid cotton gloves.

  “Sometimes,” he whispered, as if he were in church, “when a person dies suddenly and it’s a little cold where they got killed at, if it’s a killing, then blood can rush to the extremities. His hands are all swole up and gross looking. We ain’t had time to fix it yet—but we will.”

  Lucinda’s concentration was more appropriate.

  “Can you turn up the lights in here?” she asked, not looking at Donny.

  “Of course.” He took a single step to his left, touched a slider on the light switch, and doubled the illumination in the room.

  Lucinda appeared not to be breathing. She didn’t move. All her concentration was focused on that pale, blue-veined face.

  With a sudden pulling back of her head, she sipped a loud breath.

  “Nope.” She bit on her lower lip. “This is not, in fact, the man I talked to last night. Looks a little like him. Dressed like him. Not the same.”

  “Well.” I nodded.

  “Then,” Donny stammered, losing a bit of his professional composure, “who the hell is he?”

  I glanced at my watch. I had roughly fifty-two hours to answer that question, and I had no idea where to begin.

  Six

  All the way back to my house, after I’d dropped Lucinda off at the hospital, I tried to convince myself that the time constraint placed on finding the murderer was artificial. Millroy’s obstinate stupidity meant nothing. Even if he filed his report, I could still go on looking for the man who had been in my kitchen. Skidmore could work surreptitiously. He’d done it before.

  But I knew the more urgent truth of it. If we didn’t find the man in two days, that would almost certainly mean he’d escaped Blue Mountain, and once he was gone from our home, the odds of ever finding him were relatively hopeless—unless I could piece together some meaning from the man’s fantastic stories.

  As I pulled up into my front yard, I realized that I might be able to learn about the man if I could make sense of his fictions. He had been fair
ly specific in each of his tales, naming real places and people. I wondered if those bits of information might lead to a greater portrait of the stranger, and perhaps expand our possible time frame beyond the two-day prison set for us by Millroy. For that I needed a bit of assistance.

  I climbed down out of the truck and all but ran into the house. I had the phone in my hand and was dialing before the door slammed behind me.

  “Andrews?” I said into the phone. “If you don’t put down whatever it is you’re doing and help me, a killer will get away.”

  “Oh, hello, Fever,” he said very casually. “That again?”

  Winton Andrews was, as I had always said, the most unlikely Shakespeare scholar in America. A rugby player from Manchester, England, tall, blond, and bony, he was the sort of person who would bet he could drink you under the table in a neighborhood bar—and win the bet. He had, in fact, directed plays at the newly rebuilt Globe Theatre in London and had once unearthed a document that seemed to be from Christopher Marlowe to Thomas Kyd warning him that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was better than Kyd’s. It had yet to be authenticated to everyone’s satisfaction—and probably never would be. See, a little thing like that could, apparently, roil the waters of Shakespeare scholarship to the boiling point. His reputation in the academic community was growing. He had been my best friend in Atlanta before I’d left the university, and we’d remained close enough that it was not the first time I’d called upon his aid. In fact, it might have been the fifth in fewer than that many years.

  This time, however, after I’d spent nearly a quarter of an hour regaling him with the facts of the situation, his reaction was different from the usual one.

  “No.” He sounded as if he might be chewing something.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean I can’t leave Atlanta at the moment. We’re in the middle of homecoming week, and I have midterm exams to finish, and you know it’s Tuesday, right? I just can’t take off in—”

  “But someone’s been killed!”

  “Be that as it may,” he mumbled. He was definitely eating a sandwich or something—right into the phone. “Two other faculty are out with the flu, and I have to take over some twentieth-century lit course with absolutely no idea—hey, Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, right? And P.S.: why is it that you only call me when someone’s dead?”