A Stranger in the Kingdom (38 page)

“Resolvèd doesn't bother me much, Charles. If you look at this from his point of view, it's not hard to see why he's so upset. He honestly believes he has a proprietary right to the girl. He may even be in love with her, in his own strange way. After all, Resolvèd's human. He probably thought he'd waked up in heaven when she walked through his door. Now she's left him for reasons he can't possibly understand, and he's lashing out at me as the person he supposes must be responsible.

“What I want to talk to you about, though, is something else that bothers me. Your local sheriff dropped by rather late last night—to do a bit more investigating, he said.”

“He ought to have. It's high time.”

“Wait and hear what he wanted. It was around eleven o'clock. I was sitting in the study reading Pliny's
History
when he came up onto the porch and knocked. He was dressed in his uniform, and he asked if we could talk. I said of course, and he suggested that we visit on the porch. I was somewhat surprised, as it was quite cool last evening, blit as you'll see, he had his reasons.

“At first White sirred me to a fare-thee-well. At the same time he grilled me like a grand inquisitor. He told me he was getting ready to make his final report to Zack Barrows so that Barrows could decide on a sentencing recommendation for Resolvèd. He said he needed some additional background information, including my exact age, education, and service dates. He claimed this was standard information, and asked to see my service discharge papers. I said I wasn't at all sure I had them here, that they were probably still in Montreal at my mother-in-law's. That was true enough, but frankly, I was hoping to brush him off. I jokingly told him to read his hometown newspaper, that all this ‘background information' and more besides was in the interview you conducted with me the week I arrived. He persevered, though, and said he needed some sort of official document to help me prove my credibility.

“That's when I got my back up. I told him I didn't need to prove anything at all, and that I'd never heard of the victim of a crime being investigated more zealously than the perpetrator. White said that he was just trying to establish that a crime had been committed in the first place. Then he said that anyone who wanted to create a local race incident for publicity purposes could have arranged a confrontation such as the one at the parsonage. I was dumbfounded. But it got worse. ‘Boy,' he said, ‘we are just trying to help you. But we have to know one thing. Do you ever, or have you ever, slept in your study?'

“I wasn't sure whom White meant by ‘we.' Himself and the prosecutor, maybe. But
I
understood the ‘boy' all too well. That was the final straw. I told him that where I slept was my own business and that I hadn't gotten much sleep at all lately because I'd been too busy standing vigil night and day to protect my home. White said that if by protecting my home I meant getting involved in a shoot-out in a settled area, he'd think I might have exercised better judgment. That's when I told him to clear off the premises straightaway, before I lost my temper.

“‘I just hope you do lose your temper and lay a finger on me, boy,' White said, ‘because that's all the excuse I'd need to bring you in for assaulting an elected peacekeeper.' I don't know what made me look out then toward that hearse he drives around in, but when I did I spotted a man, standing in the shadows by it. Of course, I can't be positive, but I believe White intended to goad me into punching him right there on my front porch, so he could hail in his deputy as a witness. At any rate, I didn't bite, though I must say I was sorely tempted. If I hadn't spotted that deputy, I might be languishing in jail this very moment.”

Listening closely to the conversation upstairs had slowed considerably my search for the articles from 1900 that Reverend Andrews wanted.

“James!” my father called down the stairs. “Haven't you located those back issues yet?”

I had just found the second article and I ran up into the shop with both.

“I thought you'd found out everything you wanted to find out about Pliny Templeton when you researched his life for the pageant,” my father said to Reverend Andrews. “What else do you want to know?”

“Well, there's still the matter of his alleged suicide. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, about the man suggests to me that he was the sort of person to throw up his hands in despair and kill himself. Especially over a mere matter of doctrine. The use of a piano, for heaven's sake. I simply can't believe that a man of his wisdom and resilience would put a bullet in his head because of a little spat over a piano.”

“Well, it's odd you should say that, because as you'll see from these articles, my father felt the same way. Dad and I didn't always agree, to say the least, but he was a shrewd newspaperman, and the whole business of Pliny's suicide bothered him until the day he died. I could never quite understand why, to tell you the trath. It's always seemed plain enough to me.”

“Pliny was a battler, wasn't he?”

“Sure was a battler. But the business over the piano wasn't just a little spat, Walter. Trouble had been building for a couple of years, and as I've told you, it finally attained the proportions of a schism, with some of Pliny's closest friends, including my own grandfather, on the opposite side of the issue. The lines were drawn. Reformed Presbyterians were actually yanking their kids out of his school, you know. They say he was suffering from melancholia as a result of the dispute.”

“I still can't picture Pliny Templeton putting a bullet through his head.”

“Well, the way I see it, Pliny was an idealist. In my admittedly limited experience in that area, when an idealist comes up against a hard reality that contradicts the ideals he's believed in all his life, sometimes he can't cope with the discrepancy. No doubt that's what happened in Pliny's case.”

“I suppose so,” Reverend Andrews said. “But I'd still like to study these newspaper articles describing his death. This won't make Elijah Kinneson very happy, I fancy.”

“To hell with Elijah,” my father said. “He's probably the guy who cast the one vote against you over at the church this morning. But don't take it personally. Elijah wouldn't like
anybody
who replaced him in the pulpit. I don't think he's ever forgiven you for getting the job. The man's something of a fanatic and always has been, but it isn't him you've got to worry about. It sounds as though your biggest concern is that self-serving ass Mason White and his sidekick the nonprosecuting prosecutor. I can't imagine what they've got up their sleeves, Walt, but I damn well intend to find out.”

“Small towns!” Reverend Andrews said. “Their ways are more mysterious than the armed services'!”

He looked at me and winked again. “Good to see you boys taking such an interest in the church, Jim. It isn't really so boring after all, is it?”

“Dad,” I said after Reverend Andrews had left with the newspapers, “what's going on around here? I mean with these secret meetings and the sheriff threatening Reverend Andrews and everything?”

“You overheard that, did you?” my father said. He stood up, straightened his tie, and put on his suit jacket. “I'm not sure, but I certainly intend to find out. Come on, James. You and I have business with Kingdom County's chief elected peacekeepers.”

 

Although it was nearly noon when we arrived at the courthouse, Zack Barrows was nowhere to be found Not that this was so very unusual—Dad had told me that two or three days a week the old boozer didn't bother to show up until after lunch. But Mason White was sitting at Zack's desk in the prosecutor's big sunny first-floor office, drinking coffee and reading the Boston paper.

“Tell me something, Mason,” Dad said, cutting off the sheriff's effusive greetings, “why did you want to run for office in the first place?”

Tipping back in Zack's swivel chair and splaying his long fingers out on the edge of the desk, Mason chuckled. “Well now, editor, if you'd been raised out to Lord Hollow, you'd have wanted to get your
A
out—pardon my French, Jimbo—and ran for something, too. I don't mean this personally, now, but you and your boys, Brother Charlie and young Jimbo here,
you
never had anything to prove to anybody. You and your boys grew up speaking good English and contributing to the community. Out in the Hollow, it weren't like that. Oh no, it was not! It was root, hog, or starve, with maybe a country cowboy song or two throwed into it to make us proud of being poor. Now, I, for one, was never all that proud of being poor. Not one little bit. Do you know what ‘poor eyes' are, Jimbo? Well, I shall tell you. Poor eyes are all washed-out, drained-out, lived-out-looking eyes, like the eyes on a real old sick person getting ready to die. My brothers had poor eyes. My sisters had poor eyes, too. There was no hope in them a-tall. The only one in my family that
didn't
have poor eyes was Uncle C. V. White. You probably don't remember him, Jimbo, he was a little before your time, but Uncle C.V. ran the undertaking parlor here in town for years. He drove a big new Buick automobile and he never ventured out to the Hollow except to fetch in a client, and then only if you was prepared to pay him cash on the barrel head when he made the pickup. Now there was a man I admired. I can't say I liked him—he never had any more human feeling than one of his own clients. But I did greatly admire him.
And
his Buick automobiles. A brand-new shiny one every year. How old would you be, Jimbo?”

Mason asked this question so suddenly that he caught me off guard. “Twelve,” I said. “No, thirteen.”

He nodded. “Thirteen years old. When I was thirteen years old, I moved into an unheated back chamber off Uncle C.V.'s basement workroom over to the undertaking parlor. That's when I began working for old C.V. after school in exchange for my room and board. Five years I did that. Five years I filled in at funerals when the bereaved family was shorthanded and needed an extra bearer, and rode out with Uncle C.V. to fetch in clients, and helped Cousin Elijah dig graves over to the churchyard. Five years.”

Mason looked out the window onto the common, reflecting with evident satisfaction on the sacrifice of those five years. I didn't see what any of this had to do with his running for sheriff. And why in heaven's name was he addressing me? I hadn't asked him any questions.

“Now, truthfully, Jimbo, most folks back in those days didn't think much about Mason White one way or the other, but even without having to think about it, folks knew old Mason was different. They knew he was one of those poor Whites from Lord Hollow. And Mason knew he was different too and never doubted that he was going to be successful eventually. So he lugged corpses and dug graves and stood in at funerals and bided his time.

“Problem was . . .” the sheriff continued, flexing and unflexing his great hands, “I knew I'd have to go away and become successful
out
of this town first if I was ever going to become successful
in
it. So that's what I did. I went in the service and bided my time and saved up every penny I could. I got an honorable discharge and went straight over to the Simmons School of Mortuary Science in Syracuse, New York, and graduated from that school with honors. And then and only then did I come back here to work for C.V., saved up some more, and bided my time. The truth is, I did a whole lot of biding.

“Now, Jimbo, you know what I used to think whenever a client of Uncle C.V.'s came in that I figured had looked down on me because I was different? Well sir, I'd lay them all out just so, and then I'd think to myself, or maybe even say right out loud, ‘Mr Jones or Mrs. Smith you used to look down on me. Now the tables are turned. Here I am a-looking down on you, naked as a jaybird with a slit in your side. And do you know something, you poor old buzzard? There's
still
a difference between us. A great big
H
of a difference. And would you like to know what that difference is? I shall tell you. You're dead, Mr. Jones, and I'm not.'”

I noticed my father's jaw getting tighter and his lips thinner. He had been flinching visibly during parts of Mason's story, but he was very still now.

Mason gave a great sudden high horselaugh. “‘I'm not,' I'd say. ‘I'm alive, and what's more, a going places. You're dead, Mr. Jones, and I'm alive, and overcoming early obstacles and
on the rise.'
”

But my father had heard enough of the sheriff's poor-boy-makes-good story. “Mason, I didn't come here to do a human interest story. I came to find out why, if you want to be reelected, you and Zack haven't charged Resolvèd with anything more serious than disturbing the peace. What the hell's going on here?”

“Well, editor,” Mason said, “the trouble is, we really don't know exactly what did happen over at the parsonage the other night. So far, all we know for a fact is that when I got there your minister friend was holding a smoking gun, and poor Cousin R was missing part of his trigger finger.”

“Poor Cousin R! Poor Cousin R had just fired two loads of buckshot through the Andrews' front windows.”

“Don't misunderstand me, editor,” Mason said quickly. “You know I'd love nothing better than to nail R's A to the courthouse door. But like Zacker told me the other day, we just can't leap to conclusions on this one. For one thing, there's that girl staying with your colored man. No doubt she has
all kinds
of unsavory connections in her background—beginning with that girlie show I closed down.”

Mason got out a cigar and lit it. It made him look like the quintessential small-town sheriff in the movies: self-satisfied, sly, knowing more than he said yet somehow managing to hint at more than he really knew.

“Mason,” my father said, “you know that Resolvèd Kinneson fired that shotgun at Walt Andrews and could easily have killed him. You know that he used the train as cover, just the way the bank robbers did. That's probably where he got the idea. You know that Resolvèd or one of his commission sales cronies called you and disguised his voice and decoyed you to the other end of town just before the highball went through. If you and Zack don't get to the bottom of all this immediately, I'm going to call the attorney general in Montpelier and urge him to send up a special investigator, or better yet come up himself with one or two smart state policemen, and look into this whole situation. And that isn't a threat, it's a promise.”