“What Rich did was stupid,” he said. “It was unforgivable. But he was on guard duty. They’ll take that into consideration. They’ve got to.”
At first Stone tried to shame them all, calling them everything from cowards to murderers to Judas goats. And when that got him nowhere, he tried sweet reason, telling them that sacrificing one of their own would buy nothing from the Mau Mau except the few minutes it would take them to torture and execute him—after which they would promptly present their next demand.
“Suppose they ask for women?” he said. “Ruby, Eve, Annabelle—what do we do, just give them up too?”
He called upon Eddie and the O’Briens to back him up, saying that they, like him, had seen the victims of the Mau Mau—the mutilated victims—but none of them said a word. He thought of telling everyone what had happened to Eve at the hands of the General. But because she had not seen fit to mention the incident herself, he did not see how he could.
Finally he tried a simple appeal to the group’s humanity. “Let’s say you do save your skins here today—by sacrificing Rich Kelleher’s. How do you justify it? How do you go on living with yourselves?”
There was no shortage of persons to rebut him. This last point was the kind that Jagger and Tocco—suddenly and miraculously a team—would take on. They called him a fool and a dreamer, saying that he should come down out of the clouds and try the real world for a change. They were talking about survival, that was all. Just survival. Morality and decency didn’t compute when you were staring down the barrel of a gun.
“Rich shot that Mau Mau’s ass,” Tocco said. “So now I say let them shoot his ass—as long as it saves mine.”
Newman and Dawson predictably took the high road. Newman tried to dress up the whole matter as some kind of legitimate judicial proceeding in which due process would be observed. Rich Kelleher had killed one of the Mau Mau, he said, so it was only natural that he be tried for the crime in whatever court they chose. As for his execution being a foregone conclusion, Newman simply could not buy that.
“In their own style, they’ll give him due process,” he said. “Just you wait.”
Stone sneered at him. “Oh, you bet, you fucker. ‘In their own style.’”
Dawson at least was troubled by what they were doing. He did not pretend that the Mau Mau had any right to young Kelleher or that they would set up some sort of legitimate court and slap the malefactor on the wrist. Instead he did something that infuriated Stone even more than Newman and his sophistries—he laid the problem in the lap of the Almighty, saying that God would not have “forced this heavy burden upon us except for good reason.” Dawson was big enough to admit that he personally didn’t know what the Lord wanted or what He was intending, nevertheless there was one possible interpretation which Awesome felt constrained to point out.
“The Lord may very well have put Rich here, and had him do what he did, for this very purpose—that is, to save us. Just as Jesus Himself laid down His life so that we might live in eternity, so the Lord may have caused young Rich to be here now, as a sacrifice for the rest of us.”
Mama Dawson and Flossie Baggs thought that was the God’s truth, and said so. But Stone’s one ally, frail old Edna Goff, had a contrary opinion. Facing Dawson, standing no higher than his collarbone, she called him a sanctimonious shit.
Desperate by now, Stone pleaded with the silent ones again, hoping for a break. But he got nowhere. Even Tracy Kelleher put him off, telling him that it was “up to Daddy.” Nor was Annabelle moved by young Kelleher’s plight.
“You heard what they said. They try him now or afterwards—after we’re all dead. Some choice.”
Eve too was indifferent. “Why ask me about it? No one’s asked my opinion about anything else.”
Going back into the main room, Stone came upon Newman whispering confidentially to Dawson.
“Let’s get it over with,” he was saying. “Why don’t you and Spider get him now?”
Stone could feel himself losing control. He started after Newman but wound up shoving Dawson, who had come in between them. And as Awesome staggered backwards, trying to keep his balance, Stone only shoved him again, and harder this time, knocking him into a Kennedy rocker, which splintered as he crashed through it to the floor. Stone was already drawing his pistol. His idea, if he even had one, was simply to assert himself as their leader, long enough anyway to keep them all from murdering young Kelleher. But he had barely pulled the gun out of his belt when a pair of powerful arms seized him from behind, crushing his own arms to his sides and making him drop the gun. The arms then lifted him into the air and body-slammed him onto the rugless floor.
“Sorry about that,” Tocco said, looking down at him. “But you’re out of order, man. Majority rules here, and we already decided—the kid goes.”
Jagger meanwhile had picked up the thirty-eight. He checked it for bullets and spun the chamber. Then he pointed the weapon at Stone.
“Get up,” he said. “You and old Edna are going in the back room, where I’m gonna watch over you.” He glanced at Dawson, who had just struggled to his feet.
“That okay with you?”
Looking shocked and bewildered, Dawson nodded. As Stone got to his feet, Jagger prodded him with the gun, at the same time gesturing for Mrs. Goff to go ahead of them, toward the bedroom. Her husband began to blubber and plead with Jagger not to shoot her.
“She meant no harm!” he cried.
“Relax, Pops,” Jagger told him. “I won’t shoot her unless she blinks.”
Dawson tried to reassure the old man. “Nobody’s gonna get hurt.”
“Except for young Kelleher,” Edna Goff said.
Jagger at least was not a hypocrite. “Yeah. Except for him.”
In the bedroom, Stone found Flossie still stationed at the window, with a rifle propped on the sill. Beyond her considerable bulk he could see the front of Tocco’s cabin and the wooded area behind it. He noticed that the General still did not trust them, for his “soldiers” remained carefully hidden from view. Jagger told Flossie that she could “take five,” that he would handle the window as well as “these two.”
“Well, I sure could use a break,” Flossie said. “Fact is, I could use something to eat.”
Her legs popped and creaked as she got to her feet. Edna Goff gave her a look of wintry contempt.
“Why don’t you make a sandwich for the boy too, Flossie?” she said. “He’s going to need it.”
Flossie wagged her head regretfully. “You just been something else lately, Edna. You been nothing but trouble, so help me God.”
When Flossie was gone, Mrs. Goff looked at Stone with bleak and rheumy eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I was right. About us. About them.”
Stone said nothing.
Jagger was still standing at the door, not fool enough to go to the window and turn his back on them. “Just don’t keep sweating the thing,” he advised. “It’ll be over soon, and if that doesn’t satisfy them—”
“Yeah—what happens then?” Stone asked. “Who goes next?”
Mrs. Goff was sitting next to Stone on the bed and she kept looking down at her hands nested like dead crabs in her bony lap. Suddenly she was weeping.
“It just isn’t worth it,” she said. “No matter how you add it up, life just isn’t worth the trouble.”
Jagger forced a laugh. “Jesus, what a thing to say. Such pessimism from such a noble soul.” Sneering contentedly, he looked over at Stone. “That’s what kills me about you two. You are such noble souls, aren’t you? So much better than the rest of us. At least, that’s what you want everybody to think, isn’t it? Like when you came along after the plane crash and helped get us here, eating my shit all the way. Just another act of nobility, wasn’t it, Stone? Noblesse oblige.” Jagger’s sneer hardened. “Like hell it was. You didn’t fool me, buster. It was pussy, that’s all—Eve’s sweet-smelling cunt that kept you with us. But of course you still had to play it noble, didn’t yo
u? Like now, putting on this big act, this great show of outrage. Why? Because you can afford it, isn’t that right? Because you know the rest of us will do your dirty work for you. And you get to come out all squeaky clean and noble.” Jagger shook his head in contempt. “You make me sick. Both of you.”
Stone barely heard all this, for there were sounds coming from the basement now: a man whimpering, then a scuffle, a door breaking, followed by whimpering again and the rasping breaths of exhausted men. Then he heard them on the stairway. He heard young Kelleher crying No! over and over, and he heard his sister Tracy sobbing. Finally even John Kelleher’s voice broke in, crying and shouting that they could not take his “only son,” he would not let them do it. There was some more scuffling and then the father’s voice again, broken now, keening, repeating the same words.
“I’m sorry, Rich. Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
The tumult worked its way through the lodge, and then there was silence. Stone continued to sit where he was on the bed instead of going to the window for a better view. But it turned out that he did not even have to move. Within a few minutes he was able to see them anyway—Dawson and Spider, with Rich Kelleher in between them, his hands tied behind his back as he stumbled along, sometimes falling and being picked up by the massive Dawson, finally being dragged by him, as if he were already a corpse.
Others were crowding into the bedroom now. Stone wanted to remain where he was, separate from them, but it seemed he had no choice finally except to stand himself. Somehow he had to watch it all, had to see it out there in the world instead of just in his own mind, where it was already over and done.
In time, Dawson and Spider got the prisoner to his destination, an area just beyond Tocco’s cabin, where a nucleus of Mau Mau had gathered. Others were still positioned around the perimeter of the Point, loafing behind trees and sitting here and there, weapons in their laps. Dawson and Spider had a short conversation with the General and turned to start back for the lodge, but he called after them and they returned reluctantly to his presence. And then the inevitable began to unwind and show itself, like some great hideous snake. The General and his second-in-command each spoke with young Kelleher, almost as if they were inquiring after his health. The General, who was carrying a forty-five automatic, made the youth kneel by prodding him behind the knees. Then he began to circle him, smiling and talking all the while. Once he tapped him on the head with the forty-five, like a teacher reprimanding a delinquent pupil. And finally he walked over to Dawson and Spider and had a few smiling words with them, which he broke off suddenly by turning and firing the gun point-blank into the back of Rich’s head.
Eleven
For long hours after the murder of young Kelleher the Mau Mau went on with their fun and games. Someone found a rope in the barn and climbed with it high up into an oak tree behind the cabins. He looped it over a stout limb and fed it down, and moments later the body of Rich appeared, naked and mutilated and hanging by its heels, turning slowly back and forth as it inched up into the tree, high enough so that those in the lodge could see it over the roofs of the cabins.
And the Mau Mau continued to feast, throwing out of the cabin windows empty canning jars and cow bones and half-eaten, still feathery chickens. They had target practice with Rich’s body and with the Ball jars, throwing some of them up into the air and shooting others on the ground. Others still, both empty and full of food, came crashing onto the roof of the lodge. There was the sweet odor of running applesauce.
The Kellehers’ motor home and all the cars were shot up, every window broken and every tire flattened. And toward the middle of the afternoon the fires began, with the barn going up first and then the cabins one by one, scorching the trees around them and forcing the defenders stationed at the windows in the lodge to pull back from the heat blast. There was also despair in the lodge now. There was crying and praying, and everyone kept asking what would happen next.
Most of this time Stone sat off by himself in a corner of the dining room, no longer really interested in what was going on outside. The night before, when he had stood guard over the water gatherers, he had made it a point to get his backpack and other gear out of his cabin and move it to the lodge. Now he readied it for travel, solitary travel, even though he had no great expectation of getting out alive. Despite this peril, however, he could not bring himself to participate anymore in the defense of the place, because that would have meant allying himself with the others, the murderers of Richard Kelleher. The revulsion he felt toward them seemed almost as much physical as it was intellectual. He could not bear to look at them or listen to them: Eve the same as Jagger, Annabelle the same as Tocco and Newman. To him, they were all alike now. They even looked alike: two-legged creatures with the heads of swine and dogs, no different from the Carters and the Nixons of the world, no different from himself finally. If he had really cared, he could have stopped them somehow. Certainly there had to have been a way. Only he had not found it, had not had the guts to find it, had not had the voice to outshout the timid beating of his heart.
But then none of it mattered anymore. It was over and done. There was no way to breathe life back into that thing hanging head-down in the trees. All Stone could do now was wait, stay off by himself and try not to meet anyone’s eyes. He did not want to see in them his own ignominy. So he sat alone or he wandered aimlessly, sometimes going out onto the porch and even down onto the dead lawn and out past the edge of the lodge, so he could watch the General and his army carrying on. If one of them had shot him, he doubted that he would have cared.
Back in the lodge, he settled into his corner again, packed and ready to go, if the time should ever come. He had his sleeping bag and pup tent, his axe and cooking utensils and binoculars. He had five jars of canned vegetables, and he had his thirty-eight pistol again, had simply walked up to Jagger and taken it from him. In fact, all he lacked was the freedom to leave—and finally even that was granted him late in the afternoon. He was standing at the dining room windows looking out at the sun sinking toward the bluffs across the lake, when he heard Jagger in the kitchen.
“They’re leaving! They’re leaving!”
Others in the bedrooms and in the main room picked up the cry.
“They’re leaving—we’re saved!”
“They’re going!”
“It worked! We made it! We made it!”
“Thank God! Oh thank you, Jesus! Praise His name!”
Stone went outside to have a look. From the corner of the building he could see just a few Mau Mau on the driveway leading to the blacktop. And then the main body of them came into view on the blacktop itself, as it curved around the cove. There were only sixteen in this group, which meant that they numbered only nineteen or twenty in all. Fifth in line he saw the familiar red stocking cap and jacket—one more general who did not believe in leading his troops into battle. Stone looked up from the Mau Mau to Valhalla itself, hoping to see someone on its ramparts, the girls or their brother, or even their father out jogging, anyone, just so they would see the gang of animals bearing down upon them and have time to prepare. But there was no one. The lights were not on yet. The outdoor stereo was silent. He went back inside.
It was carnival time. Everyone was hugging and kissing, some were laughing, most were crying. Harlan O’Brien was doing a little jig. Pam and Kim were embracing and jumping up and down. Jagger was crowing.
“Didn’t I tell you it’d work? They’re gone! They’re on the way to Valhalla!”
Eddie came up to Stone. “Hey, don’t look so down. We didn’t have a choice. We had to give him up.”
Stone looked over at Eve, who was watching him. She at least had the sense not to smile.
“Sure, we did,” he said.
Dawson, ever the pastor, was raising his hands for silence. “Let us pray,” he intoned. “Let us give thanks for our deliverance.”
Stone turned and headed out of the suddenly airless room. Mr. Goff got in his way and he
shoved him. He ran down the porch stairs and headed back around the lodge, not even knowing yet what he was doing or where he was going. He saw that his cabin, like the others, now was only ash and embers and blackened timbers surrounding a potbellied stove. Going on toward the barn, he forced himself not to look up at the dangling corpse in the trees. The heavy smoke made his eyes run and he began to cough. He came upon the two cows, dead, missing their hind quarters. They looked as if they had been butchered by lumberjacks. Walleyed, they seemed terrified even in death. Chickens were everywhere, some alive and strutting among the dead and half-dead, clucking in disapproval. Most were partially eaten, roasted on sticks without first being gutted and plucked. Feather quills stuck out of their singed flesh like the spines of a porcupine. The air was acrid with the odor of burned and decaying meat.
Stone was surprised to find the corn crib intact, and still full of field corn. He wondered if the Mau Mau did not know that the stuff was edible or whether they simply could not be bothered with a food that required grinding and cooking. As he came back past the smoldering barn he saw for the first time under burning timbers the body of the Mexican youth Rich Kelleher had shot. And the sight angered him all the more. The Mau Mau had not considered the youth worth burying, yet they had to have his killer. It was not justice they sought, only blood.
Stone covered his nose and mouth and proceeded back through the thicker smoke behind the cabins. He came to the tree where Rich was hanging and located the end of the rope holding him in the air. It was tied to a low branch on another tree, but he felt he could not let him down yet, not until the smoke had abated and he had a shovel for burying the body. Also there was still Valhalla. He imagined that the Mau Mau were already near the top. And he knew that he did not have it in him just to take off in the opposite direction, not only away from the stinking mess around him but also from the one to come, across the cove. He could not stop thinking of the two young girls up on the rampart, smiling and laughing and throwing kisses and paper airplane messages down upon him. Though he had never even spoken with them, his heart ached for their safety, which he knew he could do nothing to secure, not now, not alone with his little thirty-eight pistol. He prayed that Newman had been right about the defenses there. He prayed that the Mau Mau would be beaten back.
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