A Field of Darkness

by Cornelia Read

  I always experienced a little vertigo on the threshold of this room. It was the epicenter of the heartland, that terra incognita whose existence I’d intuited as a child only when I wondered if there were people who actually watched The Lawrence Welk Show on purpose.

  I envied them. Denied irony, I would have lasted about five minutes. And as an older Bavarian friend had long ago confided, “One was impressed if the men in my family knew how to shave themselves.”

  This was bedrock, all concrete utility and economy of perspective. But it was in these rooms Dean had discovered William Blake and the Velvet Underground, from here that he set off for junior year in Kathmandu.

  Dot called us to the table. She’d laid out a bounty of sliced turkey and ham and roast beef and Swiss, Jell-O salad, soft kaiser rolls, Miracle Whip, French’s mustard, homemade sweet pickles, and bowls of chips. My tabouleh looked kind of obscene.

  Cal helped himself to a courteously big serving, but he scrutinized the first forkful, halfway to his mouth, pronouncing, “When I was a kid, we called this ‘silage.’”

  I smiled weakly at him, never having had my cooking compared to grain fermented for the winter sustenance of cattle. In defense of my culinary talent, he also described all Chinese food as “dog in crankcase oil,” and Syracuse is annually among the nation’s top four cities for per capita consumption of Cool Whip.

  Cal’s mostly salt of the earth, but he’s got moments when he harshes out on whoever’s available, and to be honest he enjoys the hell out of them. Probably the closest thing he had to a hobby, an indulgence: tossing out spiky little grenades he could back away from, all innocent, if anybody yelped.

  He kept it right on that sneaky edge where it was kind of funny if it was happening to anybody else, especially if they got huffy. Then it was your turn to remember his knack for arming a joke with that rock-in-the-snowball touch of hurt.

  Firstborn Scott sat across from me, dark and pinched as a young Nixon. He was still wearing his meshback DeKalb cap and waiting, pissed off, for someone to notice his empty glass, to walk the four feet from his chair to the kitchen and rectify the oversight.

  He was older by five years, but had beaten the crap out of Dean daily until the afternoon he got his ass handed to him in the hay barn. Cal walked in to find Scott blubbering on the floor, twelve-year-old Dean all smiles and holding a pitchfork to his neck. My husband has called his big brother Wimpy ever since.

  “I was down to that car lot this morning for a new truck,” Wimpy said. “Got-damn Cuomo wants to jack up the taxes again, and then that Goldstein at the dealership wants to hose you on everything from power steering to tires.”

  Dot leapt up. “Iced tea or cranberry, Scottie?”

  He leaned his chair back and crossed his arms. “What can you expect from a Hebe?”

  Such an asshole. “Exactly what I’d expect from anyone else in the world,” I said.

  He turned to Dean. “Real sorry. Keep forgetting your wife’s one o’ them Jew-lovers.”

  Dean ignored him and found my foot with his beneath the table, tracing the very tip of his shoe slowly up the inside of my ankle. Wimpy got the farm, Dean got the balls.

  Wimpy exhaled and turned back toward his mother. “Might as well give me that cranberry, if we don’t have anything better.”

  I would have decked him and told him to take his damn hat off. She smiled and bustled to comply, pouring a winking, backlit stream of ruby liquid from the cow-covered pitcher into his cow-covered glass.

  Dot placed a second hand on the larger vessel, raised it without spilling a drop. Her neat, brisk steps toward the kitchen were first muffled by carpet, then sharp against vinyl floor. She returned to perch on the leading edge of her chair, poised for the next request.

  We all chewed, accompanied by the occasional clink of fork against plate.

  I fanned out my pitiful canasta hand of inoffensive topics: zucchini glut, humidity, recent Amtrak debacles.

  My relatives consider lack of small talk the most profound moral failure of which a woman is capable, but the Bauers didn’t mind lapses in conversation. Long silences were the norm here, punctuated with sudden and rather alarming gouts of speech, like eruptions of long-range artillery on a slow day in 1916.

  Cal put down his fork and looked us all over.

  Dean winked at me, mouthed “Incoming . . .”

  The patriarch cleared his throat. “So I hear they’re selling everything off up to Johnston’s Tuesday,” he said.

  Dot sucked in her breath, no longer smiling.

  I tried to catch her eye but she had become entirely focused on a fold crease in the tablecloth. She frowned at it. Tried to iron it flat with her palms.

  This was a woman, her younger daughter once remarked, who took Tilex and an old toothbrush with her for her daily bath, scrubbing and whitening the grout instead of relaxing into the water and steam. I wished her drive would rub off on me, that I could have absorbed it by osmosis, proximity—a little Calvinism to buttress my overbred moral laxity.

  With dogs the hips go first. With people it’s the backbone.

  “Johnston’s gettin’ on,” said Cal, reaching across to spear some turkey slices. “Funny he should sell right around the fair. We’ve been leasing most of the place since he had that stroke.”

  “I still wish you wouldn’t ever’ve set foot on it,” said Dot. She twisted in her seat but wouldn’t look up, had to make that tablecloth behave.

  A wicked grin started at one corner of Cal’s mouth. “Decent price. Good land for corn. Don’t see why you’d complain.”

  “Izzy running the auction?” asked Dean.

  Cal nodded.

  Dean laughed. “Size, shtyle, condition, und breed-ing.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said.

  “There’s this great old auctioneer,” Dean explained. “Izzy Fleischmann. Used to push heifers on us when I was a kid. He’d slap one on the back and say, ‘This one, she’s the one for you . . . size, shtyle, condition, und breed-ing.’ Kind of like you, Bunny.”

  “I’m so flattered.”

  He smiled at me. “Izzy used to butter up Uncle Weasel something fierce. Knew exactly how to work him. ‘I vant you to know you’re a schmaht man, Vendell,’ he’d say.”

  “Only time anybody ever said it,” Dot murmured, good humor creeping back.

  Dean had a feel for diplomacy. No topic could bond the people around this table more profoundly than Why Weasel Is Such a Jerk. All you had to do was speculate on the number of socket wrenches gone missing after he walked through the farm shop and heads would bob in happy unison.

  Dean leaned back. “Guy could sell Weasel anything. He’d have a truckload of these cows all humped up and shivering, snot dripping out their noses, three tits and skinny and everything. Weasel’d buy ’em all.”

  I took a bite of tabouleh, which was magnificent, I’ll have you know: lemony with a lot of cracked black pepper and minced flatleaf parsley.

  “Izzy knows his business,” Dean said. “He’ll make sure Johnston sees some solid cash out of the deal.”

  Dot started sweeping up crumbs with the edge of her hand. She made little square piles of them. “I just don’t like to think about that place.”

  I wanted to ask her why but Cal turned to me and said, “So, you work for that paper—maybe you’d be interested in something I found up to Johnston’s a couple years back. . . .”

  Next to Dean, the best thing about living here was my job: staff writer downtown at The Syracuse Weekly.

  Dot looked up. “Now, Cal—”

  He waved a hand to cut her off. “Back in 1969 there were two girls got their throats cut. Last seen alive with a pair of soldiers at the state fair. Johnston found the bodies.”

  Dot shoved away from the table and stood up.

  Cal took a long sip of iced tea and smiled at me. As she marched for the kitchen, he swiveled to follow her progress, draping an arm across the back of his chair.

  “I remembe
r seeing him later that week,” he said. “I’m driving the tractor back down the road and there he was, sitting on a stump, piss still knocked out of him.”

  Dot cranked the kitchen sink taps open. Cal raised his voice to compensate. “He was trying to finish up in that field and couldn’t do it. Just stopped in the middle of a row.”

  He paused while Dot snapped on rubber gloves, so she wouldn’t have to miss a word. “Told me those cuts were so deep you could see bone at the back of their necks. Couldn’t stop picturing it every time he shut his eyes. Got sick as a dog right there in front of me.”

  Dot looked back toward the table and I could tell she wanted to clear but Wimpy was still eating, so instead she walked to the stove, knelt, yanked the broiler door open, and pulled out the drip pan.

  She walked the thing back to the sink, shoving it under sudsy water so hot it turned her forearms pink despite the gloves.

  “So of course now Johnston’s gettin’ on,” drawled Cal, “and we started leasing from him, couple-three years ago. I was fittin’ ground that first spring, and when I knocked off for lunch I noticed something shiny caught in the spring-tooth of the drag. Turned out it was a set of dog tags. Same field where I’d seen him that time, right along where he’d found the bodies.”

  Dot pulled out a box of Brillo, grim, but Cal was undeterred.

  He turned to zero in on me. “Still got those tags down-cellar. You’re a writer. Might be some use to you.”

  I almost said no, thanks. Not just because I didn’t want to further rile my mother-in-law, but because I really wasn’t the investigative type. I did the puff-piece stuff: book reviews, food columns, articles on city lore, events calendar “picks.” You’d never have found me with a press card in my fedora, jostling to the front of the pack. I wasn’t built with that kind of hustle.

  So I was about to tell him not to bother, but he was already heading for the garage, clapping Dot on the shoulder as he passed. The cellar steps were out there, railing partitioned neatly off with plywood, shelf across the top stacked with cases of Mason jars. Cal’s descending footfalls echoed back, lug-soled boots on the riserless plank of each tread.

  Wimpy shoved his chair away from the table, off to commandeer the bathroom.

  I looked at Dot. “Cal never gave those tags to the police?”

  She pressed her lips tighter and started clearing.

  I stood to help her, walked from chair to chair, stacking plates.

  Reaching for Dean’s, I leaned down close and said, “Why the hell didn’t he?”

  “Busy guy,” he said, enclosing the phrase that followed in air quotes: “‘Hay to get in and we’re burnin’ daylight.’”

  Dot returned for the condiments, the platter of luncheon meat. I became fiercely concerned with the harvest of those remaining plates and forks.

  When she was back in the kitchen, unfurling Saran Wrap with the water running again, I squatted down by Dean for another second. “Something like this, I’d picture him getting on the horn lickety-split.”

  “Fast Cal?” He laughed, shaking his head. “Thinks cops’re about as useful as tits on a bull. Government boys.”

  I mulled that over as I went to scrape the plates and load the dishwasher.

  When she thought I wasn’t looking, Dot grabbed all the silverware back out of the Maytag’s little cutlery basket and put it in the sink to hand wash. Didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

  An intricate dance, this in-law thing.

  The dishwasher’s industrious hum masked Cal’s return. I flinched when I looked up and saw him across the table, a strand of cobweb in his hair.

  He stretched his arm across to me. I held up my hand and he let the chained bits of metal slither and clink into my palm.

  I looked down. The name “Lapthorne Townsend” glinted up in stamped relief.

  All the blood dropped out of my head and coursed, rank and sour, into my gut. The little letters got blurry and I blinked a couple of times, hard.

  Lapthorne Townsend. My second cousin. My favorite.

  Must have read it wrong.

  But when I looked down again, there was only that exact name, a serial number, and the words “B Neg,” and “Episcopalian.”

  Dean stepped up behind me, trying to get a look. I snapped my fist shut.

  Think fast. Of course we were all Episcopalians in my family, it went with the rest of the Mayflower bullshit. But weren’t a lot of people? Maybe Lapthorne wasn’t that weird of a name?

  I wanted to wish it all away, but Rh-negative type B blood is the second rarest in the world. I have it too.

  I turned back to my father-in-law, trying to sound casual. “So you never showed these to anyone?”

  Cal shrugged.

  I stepped into the kitchen and grabbed the notepad and pencil kept next to the phone. Turning away from everyone, I did a rubbing of both tags, then shoved the slip of paper into my pocket.

  When I felt a little steadier, I looked around with what I hoped was a grateful smile on my face. Normal. Relaxed.

  “I don’t know if I can do anything with these,” I said to Cal, “but I appreciate your thinking of me.”

  I gave them back, looking straight in his eye with all the sincerity I could muster.

  He shrugged again.

  Dean and I walked silent along Collamer Road, uphill toward the farmyard in its moat of jadeite corn. Cars shot by close and fast, buffeting us with air so muggy it felt like getting towel-snapped with a hot wet sheepskin.

  All I could think was Lapthorne . . . no way.

  I was jittery, suddenly longing for the ocean. Everything smelled of melting tar, aromatic as summer dock-piling creosote but without the soothing counterpoint of brine.

  Two lead-heavy boxes of shells pulled at my left hand. I’d checked to make sure my shotgun wasn’t loaded, but still cradled it “broken” over my right arm—veed open at the hinge for safety.

  I walked faster.

  The farm outbuildings betrayed no quaint Vermont-calendar or Shaker-coffee-table-book conceit. These were barracks for hay and tractors, old cars and older tools. They got swabbed down twice a decade with a soup of household paint-job tailings. Different batch of colors every time, but it always came out Cream of Ugly—baby shit or mustard or day-old guacamole.

  I reached the shop’s cinder-block wall and leaned back against it, closing my eyes in the thin stripe of blessed shade.

  “I remember Cal talking about how he’d found those tags,” Dean said from beside me, “but today’s the first he ever dragged them out to show.”

  A single drop of sweat rolled down the inside of my left forearm, quick and twitchy as a ball of mercury.

  Dean nudged against me, making my shirt stick to my skin.

  “You’ve got a Cousin Lapthorne,” he said, no lilt of question in his voice.

  He’d seen the name. I was totally screwed.

  CHAPTER 3

  Dean laid a hand on my shoulder. His voice was gentle. “You want to tell anyone? The cops?”

  Still leaning back against the shop, I didn’t open my eyes. A breeze came up, rushing through the corn. It sounded like water and I wanted to savor the illusion.

  “Bunny?”

  I blinked and looked up at him. “The cops? Okay, this is going to sound so . . . Jesus . . .”

  He eyed me, patient.

  “It’s just that . . .” I said. “He’s a really good guy, Lapthorne.”

  “Good meaning like, what, in this instance?” he asked.

  “Good meaning . . .”

  I could see Lapthorne’s face, another grownup leaning down to shake my hand when I got sent east for custody visits as a little kid, but he’d actually looked at me after asking how I was. We’d probably spent a total of seven hours together in our whole lives: one game of chess around when I was eight, then—maybe the following summer—an afternoon fishing for trout in an Adirondack guide boat.

  Last time I’d seen him was for half of some other cousin’s
bridal dinner, right before I started senior year of boarding school.

  Dean was still waiting for me to finish.

  “I can’t give you a concrete reason,” I said, “except, if it were anyone else, the rest of the clan? You could pretty much take your pick and I would’ve called the cops from your parents’ kitchen. Just not Lapthorne.”

  Dean looked out toward the horizon, considering. “This guy come to our wedding?”

  “His mother did. Binty.”

  “Blonde strip of beef jerky, plays too much tennis?”

  I had to smile at that. “Exactly.”

  He shivered, shaking out his arms. “Bitch needs a cheeseburger.”

  I pressed a toe against his shin. “Please don’t make me laugh, it’s too damn hot.”

  “Swear to God, your family—”

  “Oh, right, and Jesus wants Wimpy for a sunbeam.”

  He shrugged in concession and cracked a grin at me.

  I looked up into his eyes, wide set, the clear caramel of strong tea. He leaned down to nuzzle into my neck.

  “You’re crazy,” I said.

  He pulled back a couple of inches. “Why exactly?”

  “Kissing a sweaty chick with a gun, exactly.”

  “A sweaty chick with a gun who’s avoiding the issue of whether or not her favorite cousin got away with murder.” He nipped my earlobe with his eyeteeth.

  I straightened up, moved away from him. “Oh, so suddenly this is my responsibility?”

  “What, suddenly?”

  “Well, I mean, how many years has Cal had those dog tags? Doesn’t seem like any of you were in a great hurry. Now it’s this huge looming issue because my cousin’s name comes up?”

  “Who said huge and looming? I’m just broaching the idea of the cops.”

  I looked away from him, out across the inland sea of corn, toward the scrim of dark woods. The piles of cargo inside my head shifted, just the tiniest bit.

  Because, hey, if I was absolutely convinced of my cousin’s innocence, why wouldn’t I call the cops, just march inside the farm shop and pick up that old black Bakelite receiver and dial away? Indeed, if he were innocent, what would it matter if I called them or not?