After Eli (23 page)

Dora blushed and looked away.

“Don’t work on the fence,” begged Rachel. “It’s Sunday. You’re bound to be tired. Rest.”

“Believe it or not, doin’ a little work’s what I need, Rachel. Just to shake off the cobwebs. Work’s good for makin’ a man think things out.”

He stepped to the door and turned back to the three women.

“There’s somethin’ more to happen,” he said. “I can feel it.”

* * *

In the following week the tension that had been released in Pullen’s Café began to build again and a premonition of fear rested over Yale like a gloom. Curtis stayed at the jail each day with George and into the night with Michael, guarding Owen. And when he was not with his patients, Garnett was also there, playing listless games of checkers with Curtis or George, or,
late at night, walking with Michael and Owen outside the jail, by the river, to assure that Owen exercised his healing body. Curtis, Garnett, George, the townspeople who stood at their street windows—all were waiting for Frank Benton to reappear. But nothing happened, and on Saturday afternoon, a week following Frank’s challenge for Owen, Curtis drove to the Benton farm. He returned at night and called Garnett and Michael outside the jail. Frank was sitting inside his home, Curtis reported, holding a Bible in his lap, staring blankly into the fireplace.

“Expectin” some kind of sign, I reckon,” Curtis said. “He wouldn’t say nothin’ to me. The girl—Shirley—told me he’d been that way. Hadn’t said hardly a word.”

“Has he taken the whip to any of them?” asked Michael.

Curtis shook his head.

“Looked to me like he was sick,” he replied.

“Maybe I’d better go up there tomorrow and check on him,” Garnett mumbled wearily. “Could be his whole behavior’s caused by something physical. A tumor, maybe. Pressure gets on the brain, it can play havoc.”

“I’ll go with you,” Curtis said. He looked solemnly at Garnett. “You hear me, Doc,” he added quietly. “Don’t you go near that place unless I’m with you.”

Garnett laughed. He pushed his hat back off his forehead.

“It’s damn good to be worried about,” he said. “Tomorrow, then. Town’ll be closed. Won’t attract as much attention.”

Curtis nodded agreement.

“You’ll need to be here, Irishman,” Garnett added. “Hate to say it, but I don’t want to leave George alone with the boy, the way George feels.”

“I’ll be here,” Michael promised.

* * *

It was one o’clock in the morning when the sheriff left the jail. Michael stood outside in the cool August air and watched him
drive away. The moon was at quarter, with its underbelly spoon of gold precariously balancing the shadowy bubble of the full globe like a cosmic trick. He could hear the monotonous swirl of the Naheela River and the night cries of night creatures. He looked down the street toward Pullen’s Café and saw Teague’s truck and, through the windows of the café, a dull light. Soon Teague would stumble out of the cafe with his friends. They would be drunk and would pile comically into the truck and roar away into the mountains, and John Pullen would close his café-tavern and slowly climb the outside steps of the building to his living quarters upstairs. Michael thought of John Pullen, whose entire life was linked by a set of stairs between his sleeping and working. He tried to remember the sound of John Pullen’s voice, but could not; he could not remember ever hearing John Pullen speak.

He went inside the jail and locked the heavy wooden door with its slip-bar. He walked to the cell where Owen slept on his cot. The rhythms of his body quickened and pumped through him in harmony and he knew it was time for the tragedian to awaken and accept his role.

“Owen,” he said quietly. “Owen, wake up.”

Owen stirred on the cot.

“Owen, wake up,” Michael repeated. “We need to talk.”

Owen lifted his head and peered sleepily toward Michael.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Shhhhh, quietly,” Michael replied. “We need to talk.”

Owen sat on the cot, pulling his legs beneath him. He looked around the jail, confused. The only light was from a table lamp on the rolltop desk.

“What’s the matter?” he whispered.

Michael lifted his hand for silence. He removed the key from the desk and opened the steel door to the cell and pulled the chair in the cell close beside Owen’s cot. Owen watched him carefully.

“You remember when we talked before?” began Michael. “I asked for your trust. You remember that, Owen?”

“Yes,” Owen replied. “I remember it.”

“Now’s the time for it. Do you still mean it?”

“Yes.”

“There’s talk,” Michael said.

“Talk? What kind of talk?”

“About a trial.”

Owen’s face opened in fear.

“It’s bein’ kept quiet,” Michael added quickly. “Nobody knows about it but the sheriff and the doctor and me. The sheriff went up to talk to your father. Seems there’s somebody—I don’t know his name—claimin’ he saw you up near that farm the day that young couple was murdered.”

“I—I wadn’t,” Owen stammered. “The sheriff asked me about that. Asked me where I was. I was at home. I told him that.”

Michael waved down Owen’s protest with his hands. He pulled the chair closer to Owen and leaned to him.

“I know it’s the truth you’re tellin’,” he whispered. “But the sheriff’s caught between what he believes and his duty as a peace officer. You’re not supposed to know about it, and I’d have my tongue ripped out for sayin’ it, but the sheriff and the doctor are plannin’ on goin’ back tomorrow for some more questions, to ask your family to try and remember where you might’ve been durin’ that time. And they’ll be lookin’ over your things for a knife.”

Owen began to shake his head. He tried to speak but there was no sound in him.

“You’re not to be afraid,” Michael assured him. “We’ll work it out. I’ve made you my own promise that nothin’ll happen, and I’m a man of my word, as I’m hopin’ you know.” He paused and rubbed his hands together. Then he said, “Answer me somethin’, Owen. Is there a knife? Somewhere in your things, is there a knife?”

Owen nodded slowly. “My—my pocket knife,” he said weakly. “Used to be my daddy’s. He give it to me when he got him a new one.”

Michael leaned heavily against the back of the chair. He stared at his hands as if in deep thought.

“I was afraid of it,” he said. “And that could be enough, along with somebody’s lyin’, to make a case. It could, at that, and that’s the damnin’ part of it. Everybody’s got a knife, who’s a man. For God’s sake, I’ve got a knife, long as a sword and sharp as a Turk’s razor. Keep it with me everywhere I go, strapped to my side or my leg.” He pulled up the right leg of his trousers. The sheath of the long hunting knife was tied to the calf of his leg by a strip of canvas, with its point tucked into his sock. “A knife’s a thing a man needs, off in the woods, travelin’ about,” he added. He pulled the knife free and held it up for Owen to see. Its fine cutting edge caught the dull light of the table lamp on the rolltop desk and flashed in Owen’s widened eyes like a silver scratch.

Michael rolled the knife once in his hand, as he would play with a toy, and slipped it back into its sheath. He said, “But it’ll not matter much, if there’s wildfire gossip when it gets out. There’ll be people willin’ to believe anythin’ told by anybody.”

“I didn’t do nothin’. I didn’t,” Owen mumbled.

“True. You did not,” Michael said. He touched Owen’s arm. “I know it, in my heart. And that’s why I’m takin’ you away with me, as my travelin’ partner.” He squeezed Owen’s arm. “You’ll like it, Owen, believe me. We’ll follow the circus and I’ll show you sights your mind’s eye could never see. Buildin’s as high as these mountains, people as fancy as lace. Ah, Owen, it’ll be a wonder for you, a true wonder.”

Owen said nothing. He bowed his head and crossed his arms tight against his body.

“Owen,” Michael said gently, “I’m runnin’ off with my stories again, not mindin’ what you’d be feelin’. It’s like I said before, leavin’s not easy. It never is. Sometimes you have to do it. You have to take it on yourself to put aside all those things that’s been a part of you, cut it off like an arm, and go on livin’ the best way you can. But leavin’s not the endin’. It’s the beginnin’. People can’t see that. They may not like what they’ve lived in, or the way they’ve lived, but it’s what they know, and bad as it may be, it’s a warm tit to be pullin’ on, even if there’s a dry bag at the nipple. Take you: You stay here and face the threat of a murderer’s trial and they could put you to death for somethin’ you’ve never done. Or, worse, you could live with all the chains of your surroundin’s hangin’ on you forever. And that I can’t let you do. Not and live right with myself.”

Owen sat very still, his head down, thinking. Then he said, “When we goin’?”

“Tonight. Now.”

Owen looked up with surprise.

“How?” he asked. “We—we just walk out?”

Michael shook his head.

“It’d be too risky that way,” he answered. “We’ll stage it—like it was a play we were doin’. You makin’ off, leavin’ me lookin’ dumbstruck by what happened, and then I’ll put them that search for you on the wrong track and we’ll meet up in a day or so and go off in the opposite way.”

“What if they don’t believe you?” Owen asked. His voice trembled.

“I’m trustin’ they will, Owen,” answered Michael. “I’m trustin’ they will. Mind you, it’s not somethin’ I like doin’, the kind way I’ve been treated here, but I’m the only one to do it, me bein’ a stranger. The sheriff would do the same if he could, but he’s born to this place; he can’t. The doctor would—I’m sure of it—but he’s put in too many years carin’ for all the people around and he’s needed, no matter how he feels. And that leaves me, a stranger, and much as I dislike it, I’ve seen too much wrong done in the name of the law to take the chance with any man’s life.”

“What—what are we gonna do?”

Michael again leaned close to Owen and spoke in a whisper. “I’ll take you outside, to stretch your legs like we’ve been doin’ with the doc—the sheriff’ll go along with that—and then you’ll take off and I’ll jump in the river and say you pushed me in and started runnin’ off south, into the woods. But it’ll not be south you’ll be goin’; it’ll be north.”

“It’ll make me show up like I done what they said,” Owen whined.

“It will, yes. For the time bein’. When we’re clear away, someplace like Chicago, I’ll write the doctor and explain the truth, tell him it was my doin’. More’n likely he’ll understand, though it’s a chance we’ll be takin’. But you won’t be dead, Owen, and that’s the chance you’re takin’ now.”

Owen nodded. He looked around the cell. He rose from the cot and moved absently to the cell bars. He stood, with his arms still crossed tight to his body, and leaned his forehead against the cold steel of the bars.

“Owen, you tell me no and I’ll drop it,” Michael said evenly. “Maybe I’m wrong about it all. Maybe there’s nothin’ to it. Maybe I’m thinkin’ of too many other times. It’s you that has to give the answer.”

Owen rolled his head against the bars.

“No,” he replied. “I’ll do what you say. It don’t matter. Not no more.”

* * *

They moved quietly outside, staying in the shadows beside the jail, until they reached the cluster of scrub trees growing on the bank of the river. They sat beside the river under the trees and listened to the lusty bellowing of treefrogs and the shrieking of crickets and to the rushing of water. After a few minutes, they heard laughter and then the roar of Teague’s truck sputtering out of town, and then there was quiet.

“It’s time,” Michael whispered. He reached for his leg and
pulled his knife from its sheath. “Take this,” he said. “You may be needin’ it.”

Owen looked at the knife in horror.

“Take it,” Michael said bluntly. “They’ll not know, and you’ll be needin’ it.” He shoved the knife into Owen’s hand.

“Now this is what you’re to
do,” Michael continued. “Follow by the river, goin’ north. Cut off by the creek road, leadin’ up by the Pettit place. There’s a patch of small pines nearby the road cuttin’ up to the house, with a big rock in the center. I’ve put a sack of things there—provisions—in case I’d ever be needin’ to leave quick. I change out the food every few days when the ladies are busy, just to be sure. It’s under some limbs and pine straw. Take it with you.”

“Where’m I goin’?” Owen asked nervously.

Michael moved closer to Owen and stared deep into his face.

“A place where they’ll never look, and I know it’ll make you a bit queasy, but it’s the best place around,” he said.

“Where?”

“That old house, where the young couple lived.”

“That—?”

“That house,” Michael repeated firmly. “It’s been closed up. I took a walk up there not long back and looked it over. You can pry out a board on the back door and get in.”

“I—I can’t go there,” Owen stuttered. “Not where they was killed.”

“Dammit, man, it’s the best place,” Michael insisted. “Believe me, I’ve been around these things before. I know what they’re bound to do.”

“I ain’t—I—”

“What?”

“I ain’t never been in a killin’ house.”

“It’s the place,” Michael said. “You stay there, hid, and I’ll come for you in a day or two, and then we’ll make our way out, after I’ve got things goin’ the other way.”

Owen breathed hard. His heart was pounding. He wanted to run, to be in the cell, protected, but he was afraid.

“Listen. Listen, Owen,” Michael said gently. “It’ll only be for a short time. And there’s nothin’ there. Nothin’. Just a place where you’ll not be found. Now go. Be gone, and keep out of sight. I’ll give you time to clear town before I give the signal.”