by Noah Bly
Mary’s eyes flickered. “Deputy Tucker is the biggest sissy-pants I’ve ever met, that’s how.” She leaned down to Dottie again and spoke softly to her. “Ma’am, I know this has probably been the very, very worst night of your life, and the last thing I want to do is trouble you for anything. But if it’s all right with you, I need to ask you one quick question before we leave you in peace.”
Dottie gave a small, tentative nod and Mary touched her head gratefully.
“Can you tell us where we might be able to find a little town in Missouri called Pawnee?” she asked.
Interlude
Sunday night, June 24, 1923, 11:47 p.m.
Ben Taylor grabbed Julianna’s arm as soon as she reached the bottom of the ladder and dragged her into the shadows by her father’s tractor, avoiding a patch of moonlight by the barn’s open doorway.
“Over there,” he hissed in her ear, pointing across the lawn at the Larson house. His breath was hot on Julianna’s cheek and she could hear the fear in his voice. “Rufus just did something to your back door!”
The rear of the house was thirty yards from the barn and Julianna had only the light of the night sky to see by, but she immediately spotted the mammoth shadow of Rufus Tarwater standing in the darkness on the steps to the back porch. She could only make out his general shape and size, but after their confrontation the day before she would have recognized his over-large head and hulking shoulders anywhere. Rufus had his back to her now, and all his attention seemed to be on the house. He appeared to be looking up at the open windows on the second floor, as if searching for signs of life in her brothers’ bedrooms.
Julianna began to cry out, but Ben clapped a hand over her mouth. “Don’t!” he whispered frantically. “He’s got a gun!”
Julianna’s eyes grew enormous as he released her. “Are you sure?” she whispered back. She searched Tarwater’s silhouette but saw no sign of a weapon.
Ben nodded. “Yeah. He put some stuff down by the well a minute ago.”
As if on cue, Rufus vacated the steps and moved over to the well, leaning down by the pump handle. When he straightened again he was holding a rifle in his right hand and what looked like a maul in his left.
“Oh, God!” Julianna moaned, stricken with horror. “Oh dear God in heaven!”
There was no doubt in her mind about what Rufus was up to. The look on his face the previous morning as he’d sat on his horse in front of their house came back to her full force, and she couldn’t believe she’d managed to convince herself he wouldn’t try anything for a while, or that if he did her mother would be able to handle him with something as inconsequential as a revolver. If Rufus went inside now while her parents and brothers were all sleeping, he could do anything he wanted and they wouldn’t stand a chance. The doors to the Larson house were never locked, and if he were quiet he could be standing over their beds before they were even aware he was there.
“We have to wake them up right now,” she gasped, readying herself to scream as loudly as she could. The windows were all open, so she knew her family would hear her. Her heart felt as if it was going to burst from her chest; it was all she could do to keep from charging straight at Rufus like a madwoman, just as she had done yesterday. The memory of how that particular assault had ended, however, was temporarily making her more circumspect. “Get ready to run, Ben.”
Ben shook his head fiercely and seized her arm again to hold her still.
“What are you plannin’ to do, Julianna?” he asked in a murmur. “Rufus’ll shoot you for sure once he knows you’re here.”
Julianna’s blood ran cold at the grim certainty in Ben’s voice, but she pulled away from him. “I don’t have a choice,” she said, trembling. “You didn’t see him yesterday, Ben. He’ll kill them if I don’t do something!”
Ben knew better than to argue with her, but he wasn’t sure at all any of the Larsons would live to see the morning, regardless of what Julianna did. Ben had heard every story there was to hear about Rufus Tarwater’s violent temper—including rumors that some of the people who ran afoul of the man in his moonshine business were never seen or heard from again—and he’d always been warned by his parents to stay as far away from Tarwater as possible.
“He beat his own daddy half to death with his bare hands,” Ben reminded her, almost vomiting in fear. “And he would’ve killed his own brothers for sure if they hadn’t run off.”
Across the yard, Rufus stepped away from the well and made his way toward the west side of the house. Julianna and Ben stared after him in confusion; both had been expecting him to enter the back door, but it now appeared this wasn’t what he had in mind. From where the two teenagers stood, they had a good view of everything but the front of the house, so the big man was still in their line of vision as he moved around to the west. He lumbered toward the front porch, but stopped well before he reached the corner. From this distance his body was indistinguishable from the rifle and whatever else he was carrying; he looked like a large black bear standing on its hind legs.
“What’s he up to?” Ben demanded, straining his eyes to see in the dark. “I can’t see what he’s doing.”
A glimmer of light on the back of the house distracted Julianna’s attention for a moment, until she realized it was just a reflection of the crescent moon on one of Seth’s window panes. It was possible Seth might still be awake, she supposed, but she doubted it very much. He and Michael had just left the barn a few minutes ago on their way to bed, but both her brothers had been blessed from birth with the ability to fall asleep the second their heads hit the pillow, and she didn’t know why tonight should be any different. They’d be hard to wake, too, but Eben and Emma were both light sleepers and could be counted on to quickly rouse their sons if Julianna’s screams didn’t suffice.
The skin on Julianna’s arms and neck began to crawl as a macabre thought stole her breath away. Her brothers would have gone in the back door of the house tonight, like always, and it seemed impossible for them to have missed running into Rufus. What if Rufus had seen them coming and had somehow gotten the jump on them? What if Seth and Michael were already dead, and her mother and father were next?
That Rufus Tarwater may have already begun killing her family was more than she could bear. Disregarding everything but the overpowering urge to make sure Seth and Michael were still alive, she leapt into the moonlight and sprinted across the lawn with Ben right behind her—loving her too much to let her face Rufus alone, even though he already guessed how this was going to end. Julianna’s first scream tore from her throat at the exact moment Rufus lit a torch and tossed it through the window of her father’s study.
Rufus Tarwater believed he had outdone himself in his plan to “get even” with the Larson family for the way they had treated him.
Amazin’ what you can do with a few fuckin’ pennies, he thought, jamming a fifth coin into the space between the bottom of the Larsons’ back porch screen door and the door frame. The door was solid maple on the bottom, but with only a flimsy screen on the top half.
The front porch door had taken eleven pennies before it felt like it wouldn’t open without actually ripping the thing from its hinges, but the back door wasn’t going to need quite as many to make it equally unusable. The idea of the crippled Eben and his chunky wife having to crawl through a door screen or out a window was particularly appealing.
Rufus wanted the Larsons’ deaths to look like an accident, however, so as much as he would enjoy such a sight, he was hoping they wouldn’t wake up until it was too late to even make it down the stairs. No neighbors lived close enough to interfere—except for Clyde Rayburn, who was deaf as a stone and so afflicted with gout that it would take him forever to get there— and when other people started showing up Rufus would be long gone.
As would Eben Larson and his whole goddamn snooty family.
It was an ingenious plan, in Rufus’s opinion, but if worse came to worse and some of the Larsons actually got out and tried to run, he wouldn’t hesit
ate to shoot them. Using his gun would throw a fatal cog in his whole “accident” scenario and set the law to sniffing around his door, but he figured he’d have to hightail it out of the state anyway if any of the Larson family lived to implicate him, so he might as well gun them down and worry about the fallout later.
The eighth penny did the trick on the back door; he tugged on the handle and could feel that nothing short of a sledgehammer would budge the thing. He admired his handiwork for a minute, then searched the windows on the rear of the house to make sure he was still unobserved. He froze when he caught a glimpse of movement in one of the second-floor windows, but then realized it was just the corner of a curtain, fluttering in the breeze. Satisfied, he made his way over to the well to reclaim his rifle and the ax handle he’d presoaked in gasoline, then proceeded over to the west side of the house.
Fuckin’ uppity bastards, he thought, drawing even with the window of Eben’s study and remembering all the books and papers he had seen in there. Those very same books were going to make one helluva fire.
He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a match, but before striking it he paused, unsettled by a rare flicker of conscience. He had indeed killed people before, of course—with far less provocation than Eben Larson and his family had given him—but not while they were sleeping in their beds, oblivious and helpless. The thought that some people might perceive this sort of thing as an act of cowardice vaguely troubled him, but then he recalled Seth’s talk about tying him up the day before, and how the young bitch had attacked him, and how Eben had threatened to sic the sheriff on him, and how Emma Larson had actually gone ahead and done just that, calling Sheriff Burns and sending him out to give Rufus a talking-to. Lastly, Rufus remembered how the two boys had held him at bay on their front porch with a pitchfork and a fence post, and how mouthy they’d been. The veins in his head began to throb again as he thought about each of these indignities, and in one quick blur of motion he ignited the match with his thumbnail and lit the ax handle. The makeshift torch was so saturated with gas that it caught fire instantly and singed his face.
“Son of a bitch!” he hissed in pain, jamming the burning brand through the screen of the open window.
Emma Larson opened her eyes in the darkness of her bedroom and stared at Eben’s perspiring back in the bed beside her. The night air was hot and still, and through the open windows she could hear a bullfrog croaking down by the pond. The air was fragrant, too; she could smell lilacs and roses, and Eben’s sweat and her own, and the pleasant, pervasive aroma of wild clover, overlying everything else like an invisible canopy. Emma lightly ran a finger down Eben’s spine and wondered what had awakened her. She wondered if her children were all in their beds or still out in the barn together; she wondered if Ben was still with them or had returned home.
Something isn’t right, she thought. She suddenly lifted her head from the pillow. A sense of foreboding was growing stronger in her breast with each passing second, and she abruptly sat up, her heart pounding. Something isn’t right at all.
And Julianna’s first scream shattered the silence of the night.
Emma was out of bed in an instant, but even as her feet hit the floor she heard three gunshots in quick succession, and then Ben Taylor began screaming, as well.
“Julianna!” Emma cried out, seizing her glasses from the nightstand. She knew without question that Rufus Tarwater was trying to kill her daughter at that very moment; she was terrified that Julianna may already have been shot.
“It’s Rufus!” she yelled unnecessarily at Eben, who was on his feet by that time, too, naked and struggling to get into his pants. “Where are the boys?”
Eben shouted for Seth and Michael and then stumbled to the door with his pants still unbuttoned, cursing his useless foot for slowing him down. Emma, in a night slip, tore open the top drawer of her dresser and grabbed her new revolver, then barreled after her husband. Michael—undressed, too, save for a pair of white boxer shorts—intercepted them in the darkness of the hallway between their rooms, still half asleep but yelling for Seth. Two more gunshots sounded from outside and the screams of Julianna and Ben were cut off.
Seth burst from his room at the end of the hall, bellowing Julianna’s name and racing for the staircase. He was only clad in his boxers, as well, but he was carrying the old .22 rifle he and Michael used for squirrels and rabbits, and he had a look of unbridled fury on his face. From his bedroom window he had just seen Ben Taylor—distinguishable even in the dim light by his wild mop of hair—fall to the ground halfway between the barn and the house.
“I think Rufus just shot Ben!” he howled, hurtling down the stairs. “He’s trying to shoot Julianna, too!”
“Wait, Seth!” Emma cried, torn by the ferocious need to save her daughter and the equally primal imperative to protect her sons. “Don’t go out there until we know where Rufus is!”
Seth called from the bottom of the steps as two more shots sounded outdoors. “I think he’s by the study!”
“Where’s the other revolver, Daddy?” Michael demanded, chasing down the stairs after his older brother.
“In my desk in the study, but don’t go in there!” Eben snapped, hobbling down the steps as fast as he could manage with his lame leg. “Don’t do anything without me!”
“The house is on fire!” Seth screamed from the living room. “That son of a bitch set our house on fire!”
Emma Larson could not run as fast as her family—not even Eben—but her mind was working far more efficiently than any of theirs. The only windows in the house besides the one in Eben’s study that faced west were in Julianna’s room at the top of the stairs, and her sons and husband had just sailed right by Julianna’s doorway without realizing there might be a clear shot at Rufus from there.
“Please, God!” Emma panted, tearing into Julianna’s room. “Don’t let anything happen to my children!”
Julianna’s first scream almost made Rufus drop his rifle. He spun away from the study window and gaped across the backyard, unable to see who was making such a rumpus. The wild flare of fire on the ax handle before he’d thrown it into the house had briefly blinded him. He raised the rifle anyway—a bolt-action Enfield he’d traded a couple of gallons of moonshine for in Kansas City earlier that year—and pointed it toward the sound of the girl’s screams, then fired off three bullets as fast as he could.
More people began screaming, both inside and outside the house.
“Son of a bitch!” Rufus muttered, blinking rapidly and trying to distance himself from the bright light of the house fire. His night vision was coming back, but he still couldn’t see much of anything. He thought he could make out the girl crouched on the lawn over somebody else, but he wasn’t sure. There were definitely two voices, though, and both of them were yelling their lungs out. He pulled the bolt on the Enfield and fired off another two shots.
“It won’t open!” Seth gave up kicking at the bottom of the front door with his bare feet and began ripping at the screen as Michael caught up to him. “Rufus must’ve done something to it.”
Smoke was pouring down the hall from Eben’s study, and the two boys recoiled in horror as flames leapt out of the study door and began climbing the walls of the hallway. Rufus’s homemade torch had done its work all too well; it had landed squarely on a stack of papers on the floor by Eben’s desk and turned the entire room into a furnace in a matter of seconds.
“We need to put out the fire before it’s too late!” Michael coughed, his eyes watering from the smoke. “We have to get to the well!”
Seth shook his head and kept tearing at the screen with his hands and the barrel of the .22. “There’s no time! We’ve got to stop Rufus before he kills Julianna, then get Momma and Daddy out of here!”
They both jumped at the sound of Eben tripping down the last four steps of the staircase and sprawling onto the kitchen floor on the other side of the living room. He clambered to his feet again and limped into the living room, swearin
g.
“Get away from the door, boys!” he ordered. “You’ll get yourselves shot.”
Eben Larson couldn’t see the study from where he was standing, but he could see the faces of his sons in the light from the blaze, and he knew the fire was bad.
My revolver was in there, he realized in despair. Sweet Jesus, now what?
“He’s going to shoot Julianna, Daddy!” Seth argued, turning back to the screen and yanking out the last of it with a grunt. He grabbed a chair and hopped up on it, preparing to climb through the opening he’d made.
“Give me the twenty-two,” Michael said to Seth. “I’ll guard you while you’re getting out, then I’ll follow you.”
“No, you won’t,” Seth snapped. “You get Momma and Daddy out of here, okay?”
Michael started to argue, but then above the growing din of the fire they heard the distinct crack of a revolver shot, and then another, coming from upstairs.
“Momma must be shooting at Rufus!” Seth crowed, elated.
“Get down from there, Seth!” Eben barked, finally reaching them. The louder report from Tarwater’s rifle reached their ears and Eben’s heart almost stopped as he realized Rufus was shooting back at Emma. Everything was happening much too fast, and he didn’t know what to do about any of it. “I’ll take care of Rufus, and you boys go help your mother!”
Eben knew what his own chances against Rufus Tarwater were, but all he really had to do, he hoped, was distract him a little, and give Emma a chance to kill the son of a bitch.
Seth looked at Eben for a second as if getting ready to comply, but then handed Michael the squirrel gun and scrambled through the door frame instead, eluding Eben’s hands as his father tried to stop him. He dropped neatly onto the porch and spun around to reclaim the .22 from Michael.
“It’s got to be me, Dad,” he said. Seth would never have dreamed of defying his father under normal circumstances, but he wasn’t about to let Eben go up against Rufus with a crippled foot and a .22 rifle that didn’t always work. “You aren’t fast enough anymore.”
