Bag of Bones (73 page)

He was dressed in Jared Devore's clothes, but this wasn't Jared Devore. This was Jared's great-grandson Max, who had begun his career with an act of sled-theft and ended it in suicide . . . but not before arranging for the murder of his daughter-in-law, who'd had the temerity to refuse him what he had so dearly wanted.

I started toward him and he moved to the center of
the path to block me. I could feel the cold baking off him. I am saying exactly what I mean, expressing what I remember as clearly as I can: I could feel the cold baking off him. And yes, it was Max Devore all right, but got up like a logger at a costume party and looking the way he must have around the time his son Lance was born. Old but hale. The sort of man younger men might well look up to. And now, as if the thought had called them, I could see the rest shimmer into faint being behind him, standing in a line across the path. These were the ones who had been with Jared at the Fryeburg Fair, and now I knew who some of them were. Fred Dean, of course, only nineteen years old in '01, the drowning of his daughter still over thirty years away. And the one who had reminded me of myself was Harry Auster, the firstborn of my great-grandfather's sister. He would have been sixteen, barely old enough to raise a fuzz but old enough to work in the woods with Jared. Old enough to shit in the same pit as Jared. To mistake Jared's poison for wisdom. One of the others twisted his head and squinted at the same time—I'd seen that tic before. Where? Then it came to me: in the Lakeview General. This young man was the late Royce Merrill's father. The others I didn't know. Nor did I care to.

“You ain't a-passing by us,” Devore said. He held up both hands. “Don't even think about trying. Am I right, boys?”

They murmured growling agreement—the sort you could hear coming from any present-day gang of headbangers or taggers, I imagine—but their voices were distant; actually more sad than menacing. There was some substance to the man in Jared Devore's
clothes, perhaps because in life he had been a man of enormous vitality, perhaps because he was so recently dead, but the others were little more than projected images.

I started forward, moving into that baking cold, moving into the smell of him—the same invalid odors which had surrounded him when I'd met him here before.

“Where do you think you're going?” he cried.

“For a constitutional,” I said. “And no law against it. The Street's the place where good pups and vile dogs can walk side-by-side. You said so yourself.”

“You don't understand,” Max-Jared said. “You never will. You're not of that world. That was our world.”

I stopped, looking at him curiously. Time was short, I wanted to be done with this . . . but I had to know, and I thought Devore was ready to tell me.

“
Make
me understand,” I said. “Convince me that any world was your world.” I looked at him, then at the flickering, translucent figures behind him, gauze flesh heaped on shining bones. “Tell me what you did.”

“It was all different then,” Devore said. “When
you
come down here, Noonan, you might walk all three miles north to Halo Bay and see only a dozen people on The Street. After Labor Day you might not see anyone at all. This side of the lake you have to walk through the bushes that are growing up wild and around the fallen trees—there'll be even more of em after this storm—and even a deadfall or two because nowadays the townfolk don't club together to keep it neat the way they used to. But in our time—! The woods were bigger then, Noonan, distances were farther
to go, and neighboring meant something. Life itself, often enough. Back then this really
was
a street. Can you see?”

I could. If I looked through the phantom shapes of Fred Dean and Harry Auster and the others, I could. They weren't just ghosts; they were shimmerglass windows on another age. I saw

a summer afternoon in the year of . . . 1898? Perhaps 1902? 1907? Doesn't matter. This is a period when all time seems the same, as if time had stopped. This is a time the old-timers remember as a kind of golden age. It is the Land of Ago, the Kingdom of When-I-Was-a-Boy. The sun washes everything with the fine gold light of endless late July; the lake is as blue as a dream, netted with a billion sparks of reflected light. And The Street! It is as smoothly grassed as a lawn and as broad as a boulevard. It
is
a boulevard, I see, a place where the community fully realizes itself. It is the main conduit of communication, the chief cable in a township criss-crossed with them. I'd felt the existence of these cables all along—even when Jo was alive I felt them under the surface, and here is their point of origin. Folks promenade on The Street, all up and down the east side of Dark Score Lake they promenade in little groups, laughing and conversing under a cloud-stacked summer sky, and this is where the cables all begin. I look and realize how wrong I have been to think of them as Martians, as cruel and calculating aliens. East of their sunny promenade looms the darkness of the woods, glades and hollows where any miserable thing may await, from a foot lopped off in a logging accident to a birth gone wrong and a young mother dead before the doctor can arrive from Castle Rock in his buggy. These are people with no electricity, no phones, no County Rescue Unit, no one to rely upon but each other and a God some of them
have already begun to mistrust. They live in the woods and the shadows of the woods, but on fine summer afternoons they come to the edge of the lake. They come to The Street and look in each other's faces and laugh together and then they are truly on the TR—in what I have come to think of as the zone. They are not Martians; they are little lives dwelling on the edge of the dark, that's all.

I see summer people from Warrington's, the men dressed in white flannels, two women in long tennis dresses still carrying their rackets. A fellow riding a tricycle with an enormous front wheel weaves shakily among them. The party of summer folk has stopped to talk with a group of young men from town; the fellows from away want to know if they can play in the townies' baseball game at Warrington's on Tuesday night. Ben Merrill, Royce's father-to-be, says
Ayuh, but we won't go easy on ya just cause you're from N'Yawk.
The young men laugh; so do the tennis girls.

A little farther on, two boys are playing catch with the sort of raw homemade baseball that is known as a horsey. Beyond them is a convention of young mothers, talking earnestly of their babies, all safely prammed and gathered in their own group. Men in overalls discuss weather and crops, politics and crops, taxes and crops. A teacher from the Consolidated High sits on the gray stone forehead I know so well, patiently tutoring a sullen boy who wants to be somewhere else and doing anything else. I think the boy will grow up to be Buddy Jellison's father.
Horn broken—watch for finger,
I think.

All along The Street folks are fishing, and they are catching plenty; the lake fairly teems with bass and trout and pickerel. An artist—another summer fellow, judging from his smock and nancy beret—has set up his easel and is painting the mountains while two ladies watch respectfully.
A giggle of girls passes, whispering about boys and clothes and school. There is beauty here, and peace. Devore's right to say this is a world I never knew. It's

“Beautiful,” I said, pulling myself back with an effort. “Yes, I see that. But what's your point?”

“My point?” Devore looked almost comically surprised. “She thought she could walk there like everyone else, that's the fucking
point
! She thought she could walk there like a white gal! Her and her big teeth and her big tits and her snotty looks. She thought she was something special, but we taught her different. She tried to walk me down and when she couldn't do that she put her filthy hands on me and tumped me over. But that was all right; we taught her her manners. Didn't we, boys?”

They growled agreement, but I thought some of them—young Harry Auster, for one—looked sick.

“We taught her her place,” Devore said. “We taught her she wasn't nothing but a

nigger. This is the word he uses over and over again when they are in the woods that summer, the summer of 1901, the summer that Sara and the Red-Tops become
the
musical act to see in this part of the world. She and her brother and their whole nigger family have been invited to Warrington's to play for the summer people; they have been fed on champagne and ersters . . . or so says Jared Devore to his little school of devoted followers as they eat their own plain lunches of bread and meat and salted cucumbers out of lard-buckets given to them by their mothers (none of the young men are married, although Oren Peebles is engaged).

Yet it isn't her growing renown that upsets Jared Devore. It isn't the fact that she has been to Warrington's; it don't cross his eyes none that she and that brother of hers have
actually sat down and eaten with white folks, taken bread from the same bowl as them with their blacknigger fingers. The folks at Warrington's are flatlanders, after all, and Devore tells the silent, attentive young men that he's heard that in places like New York and Chicago white women sometimes even
fuck
blackniggers.

Naw!
Harry Auster says, looking around nervously, as if he expected a few white women to come tripping through the woods way out here on Bowie Ridge.
No white woman'd fuck a nigger! Shoot a pickle!

Devore only gives him a look, the kind that says
When you're my age.
Besides, he doesn't care what goes on in New York and Chicago; he saw all the flatland he wanted to during the Civil War . . . and, he will tell you, he never fought that war to free the damned slaves. They can keep slaves down there in the land of cotton until the end of the eternity, as far as Jared Lancelot Devore is concerned. No, he fought in the war to teach those cracker sons of bitches south of Mason and Dixon that you don't pull out of the game just because you don't like some of the rules. He went down to scratch the scab off the end of old Johnny Reb's nose. Tried to leave the United States of America, they had! The Lord!

No, he doesn't care about slaves and he doesn't care about the land of cotton and he doesn't care about blackniggers who sing dirty songs and then get treated to champagne and ersters (Jared always says
oysters
in just that sarcastic way) in payment for their smut. He doesn't care about anything so long as they keep in their place and let him keep in his.

But she won't do it. The uppity bitch will not do it. She has been warned to stay off The Street, but she will not listen. She goes anyway, walking along in her white dress just
as if there was a white person inside it, sometimes with her son, who has a blacknigger African name and no daddy—his daddy probably just spent the one night with his mommy in a haystack somewhere down Alabama and now she walks around with the get of that just as bold as a brass monkey. She walks The Street as if she has a right to be there, even though not a soul will talk to her—

“But that's not true, is it?” I asked Devore. “That's what really stuck in old great-granddaddy's craw, wasn't it? They
did
talk to her. She had a way about her—that laugh, maybe. Men talked to her about crops and the women showed off their babies. In fact they gave her their babies to hold and when she laughed down at them, they laughed back up at her. The girls asked her advice about boys. The boys . . . they just looked. But
how
they looked, huh? They filled up their eyes, and I expect most of them thought about her when they went out to the privy and filled up their palms.”

Devore glowered. He was aging in front of me, the lines drawing themselves deeper and deeper into his face; he was becoming the man who had knocked me into the lake because he couldn't bear to be crossed. And as he grew older he began to fade.

“That was what Jared hated most of all, wasn't it? That they didn't turn aside, didn't turn away. She walked on The Street and no one treated her like a nigger. They treated her like a neighbor.”

I was in the zone, deeper in than I'd ever been, down where the town's unconscious seemed to run like a buried river. I could drink from that river while I was in the zone, could fill my mouth and throat and belly with its cold minerally taste.

All that summer Devore had talked to them. They were more than his crew, they were his boys: Fred and Harry and Ben and Oren and George Armbruster and Draper Finney, who would break his neck and drown the next summer trying to dive into Eades Quarry while he was drunk. Only it was the sort of accident that's kind of on purpose. Draper Finney drank a lot between July of 1901 and August of 1902, because it was the only way he could sleep. The only way he could get the hand out of his mind, that hand sticking straight out of the water, clenching and unclenching until you wanted to scream
Won't it stop, won't it ever stop doing that.

All summer long Jared Devore filled their ears with nigger bitch and uppity bitch. All summer long he told them about their responsibility as men, their duty to keep the community pure, and how they must see what others didn't and do what others wouldn't.

It was a Sunday afternoon in August, a time when traffic along The Street dropped steeply. Later on, by five or so, things would begin to pick up again, and from six to sunset the broad path along the lake would be thronged. But three in the afternoon was low tide. The Methodists were back in session over in Harlow for their afternoon Song Service; at Warrington's the assembled company of vacationing flat-landers was sitting down to a heavy mid-afternoon Sabbath meal of roast chicken or ham; all over the township families were addressing their own Sunday dinners. Those who had already finished were snoozing through the heat of the day—in a hammock, wherever possible. Sara liked this quiet time. Loved
it, really. She had spent a great deal of her life on carny midways and in smoky gin-joints, shouting out her songs in order to be heard above the voices of red-faced, unruly drunks, and while part of her loved the excitement and unpredictability of that life, part of her loved the serenity of this one, too. The peace of these walks. She wasn't getting any younger, after all; she had a kid who had now left purt near all his babyhood behind him. On that particular Sunday she must have thought The Street almost
too
quiet. She walked a mile south from the meadow without seeing a soul—even Kito was gone by then, having stopped off to pick berries. It was as if the whole township were