People Live Still in Cashtown Corners

by Burgess, Tony

  The shower removes everything in seconds. Blood and mud and sweat and shit coils down my legs and makes heavy brown river deltas off my toes to the drain. My shoulders move independently for the first time. My chest heaves out and drops. I cannot change, This is not the time to change. The shower is a dangerous place. The wrong thing to do. If I change, if I reach a different idea about what is happening, then I will be destroyed. I punch the shower off and step out through steam into the bathroom.

  There are suits in a closet. I pull one out and toss it on the bed. I snap open other drawers and find socks and underwear and an undershirt. And a gun. A very old looking handgun. It is clean and loaded and I lay it on the bed beside my new clothes.

  I have noticed but not mentioned that there are family photos all through the house. There are people yet who will be coming home for dinner and I have to get ready for them.

  9

  I try to pull the large woman by the legs. I want her downstairs, too. Make it easy for God to collect them if they’re all in one room. Her legs are clearly snapped in half at the knee and when I try to pull her massive weight they thin to the point of almost popping off completely. I try pulling the carpet she lies on; she’s too heavy and I give up. Something about her just lying there bothers me. Her immensity. The sheer volume of flesh twisted and hanging from her bare legs. I take a stack of newspapers and spread them over her. I notice a clock hanging on the side of the cupboard. The only one I’ve seen in the entire house. It’s noon and I suddenly feel hungry.

  The fridge is full of rolled-up paper bags and preserves. I avoid these and find a chunk of pork shoulder wrapped in cellophane. I make a sandwich and pour myself a glass of milk. There’s a bird feeder visible through the kitchen window. As I eat I watch the finches being bullied by grackles. The grackles wait until three or four finches settle and peck then they swoop in. Once the finches have flown to a nearby apple tree, the grackles head back over a stone wall and wait to do it again. This must be what Helen was watching while she ate her toast. I rinse my dishes in the sink and stand them in the drying rack. There’s a rake leaning against the stone wall and the ground along its edge has been pulled clean. A pile of bramble and leaves sits off the end by the spindle of a clothes-drying rack. There are six or seven pairs of black socks pegged to the lines.

  I am outside. The bramble still holds tight in the corner where the wall meets the house and I drive the rake back against the stone and pull forward. This only draws the top layer off, which I kick free. The rest holds tough and I have to choke up on the rake to get any deeper. It’s frustrating work. The dense tangle of vegetation resists and holds tight to the ground. It feels good on my arms though, and I feel the food I ate quickly metabolizing into energy in my muscles. The pile near the clothes grows and eventually I have cleared the last section of the wall. I look around for where it might have been destined. In the distance on a small embankment I see three mounds of compost. The first mound is new, some green, some crunchier looking, all dead. The second pile is leaves decomposing into a fine deep brown strata. The third and final stage is black, almost delicious looking. Just behind the end of the wall there is wheelbarrow heavily caked with old concrete. I fill this about a dozen times, bouncing across the yard to the first compost mound. When the transfer is complete I clean the trail of debris with the rake. I have bent three tines up on one side. I have pushed harder on it than the previous user. Probably Helen. Probably not the husband. I wonder if he’s gone. Dead or left. I pull the socks from the line as I walk back to the house. The pegs pop off as I do this, scaring grackles from the wall. I collect the pegs scattered in the dirt and feed them into a cloth bag that hangs midway up the spindle. The grackles make mechanical squeaking noises at me as I slide open the screen to the kitchen. I have trouble drawing it closed as it catches in the rut. I hear a low gasp, a sigh from somewhere. It sounds like air brakes on a truck. Or a bus. A school bus.

  10

  I had almost forgotten. I had gotten used to something else and I wasn’t thinking. This is not good. Not good. My stomach is pitching around like a cat in a bag. I have to kill children now. It suddenly doesn’t seem real. It can’t be possible. I can’t. I run through to the back of the house along the dry blood road and reach the master bedroom. The corner of the bed. The gun sits beside the tie I didn’t put on. I pick up the gun and spin into the bathroom. My chest drops down hard across my middle and I throw up in the sink. Chewed pork shoulder makes a pink splatter pattern. My throat bucks back once, then hoses the sink with white-pink liquid. I look up. A capillary has blown in my right eye and it shines at me with shark-like robotic opacity. I blink once over the hard crimson ball.

  Which door will they come to? I don’t want to see them. I want to shoot them in darkness. From somewhere I can’t see them. I stand in the archway leading out of the ballroom to the hallway. I hear keys and run to the centre front door. I stand flat against the wall so that when the door opens I am behind it. Unseen. Unseeing. The door pulls in. It doesn’t open inward. I am exposed here. I am not behind anything when the girl backs in and drops a knapsack on the rug. She has her back to me. I just don’t want to be seen. I don’t want to hear her. I raise the gun when I sense she will turn and I fire into the back of her head. She drops but is stopped and sent forward when her hips lock on the way down. I reach out and grab her hair, pulling back to prevent her from falling out the open door. Her body rests curved back toward the hall. I kick the knapsack halfway up the hall and drag her by the ankles. I am in a hurry to get her into a sleeping bag. I do not want to see her face. She leaves a thinner lighter line of red that comes out the front, not the back, of her head. I plant her beside a bag next to her mother and I roll her onto her back. Her face flips up to the ceiling and it’s not as bad as I thought. The bullet exited between her eyebrows and burst open the bottom half of her forehead. Her face is fine. Her eyes are half closed. Drowsy looking. I zip her in quickly and become aware that I have been speaking rapidly to myself. About what, I don’t know. Then I stand and actually pump my arms up over my head and yell.

  Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

  “Hello? You left a door open!”

  Another one. That’s fine. It’s better if this all happens fast. Where’s my gun? I slip in the fresh blood as I turn into the hall and have to push on a pillar to not fall. The gun is on the floor by the knapsack. I scoop it up and see the boy. He’s on one knee untying a shoe. He’s a big kid. The older. The bullet drives through the side of his head, pushing it into the closed door. He dies pulling his laces to either side of his shoe. I fire the gun back up the hallway as if there were someone coming from the kitchen. I fire four times, emptying the gun. Noise downstairs. Someone is downstairs. I drop the gun to the floor and step briskly but as silent as I can to the stairs leading to the basement. The youngest. I descend the stairs without a gun. A short wall stops me from being seen. I look frantically for a weapon. It seems that I am afraid that the young boy will kill me if he sees me. There is nothing here. A laundry basket. A jug of detergent. I try to picture beating someone with it. I even test its weight with my toe. No good. I step out into the open and he’s there. Back to me, putting a backpack on a hook. I move forward. scanning the floor from edge to edge. A small sack of washers. Three bags of fertilizer. A short bat. Thin. A kid’s bat, but wooden at least. I lift it and it feels too light, but I have no time left. I swing and it bounces. Again. Swing and bounce. Swing and bounce. I’m just going to have to keep doing this without saying it every time.

  Crime Scene Photos

  Bodies laid out on sleeping bags by Bob Clark in the “ballroom.”

  The bodies (in order) of Jeffrey Jr., Alma Faruzi, and Patty Lerner. These photos were found on Helen Lerner’s camera. The faces of the victims are extremely distressing, and have been blurred at the family’s request.

  The real Jeffrey Lerner with Helen in happier times. Lerner, a deeply religious man, left his family and moved, without telling the
m where he was going, to a trailer park in Denver,Colorado. He claimed his family had “abandoned God” and has remained silent about the slayings.

  Helen Lerner worked at a vinegar factory to support her family.

  “I think there’s more than one,” pump jockey Jeffrey answered ominously when asked by police about his boss, Bob Clark.

  The gas station at Cashtown Corners owned and operated by Bob Clark. The bodies of Miriam Holly and Constable McCormack were discovered on this property.

  Decorative scarecrows are popular in the region. On at least three occasions, police fired their weapons into these often life-like figures while searching the cornfields.

  The Lerner home became Bob Clark’s slaughterhouse and hideout. Clearview Township is so named because of its bucolic panoramas. Clark was, ironically, hiding in plain view—the Lerner House was visible for miles and could, in fact, be seen clearly from the intersection where the killing began.

  Charlie Baker is an art teacher, rugby coach, and musician at Duntroon Secondary School.

  Patty Lerner was one of his favourite students. A talented visual artist whose work appeared in numerous student shows.

  This sculpture was created by Patty Lerner in Charlie Baker’s grade 12 art class. The World Trade Center Birdhouse was, according to Baker, her “moving tribute” to the events of September 11, 2001. She created her tribute to those who died one month before she would lose her own life to a madman.

  Charlie Baker remains a popular teacher. He had several bizarre encounters with Bob Clark who pretended to be Jeffrey Lerner while living, sleeping, and eating in the Lerner home.

  The Duntroon Secondary School Yearbook, which came out after the murders, contained numerous moving homages produced by Charlie Baker’s art class. Depicted here is an image of Patty Lerner. Charlie himself set the example: life must go on.

  Patty Lerner, top left, in a dramatic production mounted by the Duntroon Secondary School Drama Club.

  The Lerner House. A haunted shell that still sends shivers through Clearview Township.

  The “vintage” pickup truck that Bob Clark claimed to have won through a local raffle. Local officials were quick to set the record straight when national media erroneously repeated Clark’s claim.

  One of the weapons used by Bob Clark to destroy an innocent family. Like many things the police discovered that day, it had the appearance of a prop in a tragic stage production.

  The Lerner ballroom.

  When police moved in to arrest Clark, he was blasting Mozart’s “Requiem” at earsplitting volumes. One officer on the scene later described it as the strangest setting for an arrest he’d ever experienced, claiming that “it felt like an actual nightmare. It even had its own soundtrack!”

  This photograph was taken by Sophy Pollack, a classmate of Patty Lerner, in the late autumn following the killings. Sophy claims, and many believe her, that Patty can be seen in the picture turning toward the camera. The Lerner house has not been occupied since the murders and is now firmly established as a haunted structure according to local lore.

  In the year following the murders, Charlie Baker tasked his class with making copies of Patty’s tribute to 9/11 for a section of his course covering multiples in sculpture. He said they were tributes to a tribute.

  11

  The moon is halved by darkness. Its silver falls as gold onto corn seas. The seas are calm and carried through the night on long swells. No ships. No land. Nothing under the sky but infinite yellow vegetation in shining sleeves. Where the sun has caught the moon there are no stars but against its invisible profile furious sets of foam turn and spill. A torn cloud grows sideways along the moon’s eye. A fine oil is scattered out from the white crawlspace of a half galaxy. The oil is orange and green and gold that sprays behind the moon and emerges toward the unseen sun as a brief map. Black scratched lines that hold for a second then scatter as a million tiny viruses vibrating on the scalp of a whale. Foxes turn their teeth into the ground and slice through the faces of grubs. The insides of headless worms drift up and make cold wet rings around the tiny holes where they had been. People in Creemore have died. Slaughtered. A bomb has gone off in the Foodland and quartered people slam against its beams. The silver path down to the river from Avening is clogged with bleating pigs that can gain no footing in their neighbours’ slippery livers. In New Lowell people drink rare cancer and it flows down their cheeks into the dishes of dogs anxious to die. And here in my new house in the corn with my nostrils and lungs frosted red from such deep blood breathing, I drop a stylus into a lizard black pool of vinyl. The speakers hammer to life. Not just the ones here beside me, but from speakers hidden throughout the house, assaulting every cube of air. The voices surge and fall as complete oceans. Despairing and terrible oceans. Entire choirs meet across deep trenches, pitched across time-angry distances into each other. The Bible marches slowly through the house. Its crashing boots throw salt water up the windows. Its tiny armadillo face pokes out from between mountain arms. Religious music. I check. Mozart’s Requiem. I look back over the dead five. We have set a trap for God.

  The voices soften as I reach the bottom of the stairs. Not human. Each bevelled pipe selects a child and enters his back to blow through bones. Mothers’ screams chase past me as I ascend. The kitchen light. Eyes. I open the fridge. Beards. The fridge light. Teeth. The bathroom light. Fingers. The hall light. Shoulders. The bedroom light. Throats and shoulders. Back down stairs over bent spines and open ribs. The hall light. The kitchen. The bathroom. The master bedroom. Another bedroom. Another. Another.

  The windows are being pulled inward by a choir that has just drawn its final breath and the glass bows outward driven by the force of my ten thousand lights. I step past the bodies on the beach and lower myself on the pink settee. I face the large window and can see myself again.

  And now I wait to see who I can catch first: God or the rest of you.

  12

  It is morning and I am asleep. In my dream a grackle is pecking rhythmically on the crown on my head. Tchsk. Tchsk. Tchsk. Tchsk. I wake and straighten my head. My neck has pulled painfully tight by sleeping in this position. I blink my eyes open. The sun is just above the window top but the light is powerful enough to hurt my eyes. The grackle is still etching away. I turn to the record player and see the stylus snipping back and forth at the end of the album. I rise slowly, stiffly. Without bothering to lift the arm I just shut the entire system down by depressing a silver dome with two fingers. Silence. The floor is cold on my bare feet as I take a wide path around the bodies in sleeping bags. I am thankful now that I had done this. It’s too early to be looking at dead people’s faces.

  In the kitchen I find some bread in the freezer and push the hard slices into the toaster. There are no birds at the feeder. I let my mind wander a little but am cautious. It was her. That woman who wouldn’t obey the green. I try to remember what I thought about what I had done back then. I can’t recall. It seemed I had made smallish explanations. And now, no matter what I thought I had done or why I did it, it has become completely untrue because of what I have done since. The toast snaps up and I stop thinking. It is hot in my fingers and the cold butter I push across it liquefies. It is splendid to eat. I devour the first slice in three bites then carry the second back into the hall. I am better this morning and consider bringing this all to an end. It’s clear to me that the father isn’t part of the picture. And for some reason the police haven’t bothered to look beyond their immediate surroundings. I am the one who has to act. To bring it to a close. The idea of dying occurs again. I can’t seem to get a picture of how this would happen. I have no gun anymore and even if I did, I can’t imagine deliberately pulling the trigger and setting into motion events that end in my brains getting pushed out. I could hang. There are railings and beams in here. Trees and roof edges out there. But then I come to the same moment. The decision to step into air and be suspended by my neck. It’s the decision. The simple stepping off. The light squee
ze of a finger. It appalls me and makes me shiver. I am calmed by the idea of not being here but I cannot stomach the mechanism that takes me away. I will not die.