Beast of the Field (13 page)

For several seconds he lay focusing at a swath of evening sky cut off by the ceiling of the gazebo.  There were voices, around him; one of them said, "All right, Jonas.  Get him up." 
Sterno felt himself coming off the floor.  He wanted to sit, but was not allowed.  His hat was plunked onto his head.  With his free hand he felt at the blood coming from his mouth.  Though blurred, a figure could be seen walking toward the house.

"He's gone,"
came the mayor's voice.  "I told him to go cool off."

"You're safe now," Gomer Neuwald said, one side of his catfish mouth pulled up in a grin.

"That's enough of that," said the mayor.  "Get on to the house, both of you.  Leave the man alone."  Both brothers followed after the constable.  Their laughter followed after them.  "Never mind the boys," the mayor said.  Jonas Neuwald was leading Sterno across the grass.  The mayor walked beside them.  "Ol' Sheriff Jake, he's not so eliquent with words.  Let me try and speak for him, though.  Seems to me what he's trying to say is that this thing that happened with Tommy Donnan was one of those country accidents, ketch’m?  One of those small town problems, nothing more.  You know how these lawmen in little places can get, I'm sure, with their big hats and their big pistols."

Sterno was getting his feet under him again.  He looked up to see the mayor smiling down.  The mayor raised his eyebrows as if to ask Sterno, Do you get it now?  Sterno answered both the mayor's words and his look.  "I get it, Mayor," he said.  He wasn't angry about the sheriff punching him—that he deserved.  It wasn't until the mayor opened his mouth and confirmed that this was all staged that Sterno got hot.  "And if this really were a 'country accident,' like you say, then it would surely be a job for small town lawmen and small town politicians.  But even in hayseed towns in the middle of hay fields murder is a serious crime—so I thank you for letting me conduct the rest of my investigation in peace."

With this he disengaged from Jonas Neuwald to make his own way across the lawn, though the trail of shoe-flattened grass he left was not as straight as the ones before him.

17.

So after Valentine’s Day there had been no more midnight meetings in the woods.  As far as Millie knew, her lovey-dovers hadn’t been seeing each other at all.  She remembered now how this had had an effect on Tommy:
morose
is the word he would want her to use
. 
The whistling and dancing stopped.  He stopped acting out the Shakespeare in the mow with Millie.  He went to the stables in town every day still, but it was no longer him riding off on Sonnet at a gallop, more like a pot salesman on a tired old mule, hunched over and sad looking.  She tried to bring him out of it, but nothing worked.  “Just keep your nose out of my business, you little snoop,” he’d said to her through his bedroom door (this from someone who had just made her promise to keep his secret for life).  It was a new side to this disease love—you’re sick when you’re together, you’re even sicker when you’re not.

She could see from the letters how desperate they’d been becoming.

Darling,
                                          Feb. 20, 1922

Now that
Junior knows, I cannot get away from the house, not even to get the letters you’ve left at the cabin and leave you mine.  Flora, he won’t acknowledge me when I’m home, talk to me or even look at me, but he sits up all night in his rocking chair, staring through the window, making sure I don’t leave.  I feel horrible, just horrible about it, but what can I do?  I’m helpless against the love I feel for you—so much I will even hurt my big brother.   I don’t know what will become of him and me; I hope he will forgive me someday. 

In the meantime, all I can do is
sit here going crazy, like some criminal in a prison.  The thought of you in that house, and me in mine, so far from each other.  I just cannot take it.

“Tis torture, and not mercy.  Heaven is here
Where Juliet lives, and every cat and dog
And little mouse, every unworthy thing,
Live here in heaven and may look on her,
But Romeo may not."

I can do nothing but long to see you.  My every minute is planning, plotting a way for us to leave this town.  I can’t stand this
town, I can’t stand these people any longer.  This spring, my darling, this spring we will escape.

             
              …I love you, Flora.

Tommy

That was it.  Except for that Shakespeare sap he added, it read more like something a kid would pass in the schoolroom than a love letter.   

Flora had more spirit than Tommy did, in her letters, anyway; but she seemed to be spurred on by fear.  Her entire household, it seemed, was built under a cloud of bitterness and fear.  Bitterness, why?   And fear of what, exactly, Millie was still trying to figure out.

My Sweet Love,                            Feb. 25, 1922

Oh Tommy, I have waited so long to hear your sweet voice, even if it is only in my imagination as I read your words……………………. 

There are strange things happening at my house.  Men from far away places like Mississippi and Texas come to visit Daddy.  They go to the barn to talk privately—all of it is very confusing.  They ride off in their cars at night, sometimes with guns.  Guns for what?   Daddy feels like the world is against him, and he has become suspicious too.  He watches me like a hawk.   

What will I do if I cannot see you, my love…………………..?  We
must
find a way to be together………...  Until then I will keep writing.  I will write every day.  I will find some way to get to the cabin—perhaps when I go riding, or when Daddy is in town.  But even then it will be hard, because I always feel like someone is following me.  Not the way it was with Junior, not in a good way—this feeling is the opposite of feeling safe.  I will do it though, I will get to the cabin, I promise.  And who knows?  Maybe we will happen by each other in town, if the fates will have it.

…"'Tis twenty years till then," my Sweet Romeo…

                                          Flora

Millie wondered if there had really been something for Miss Flora to be scared about, or if she were getting a little crazy, suspicious for no reason, like everyone was watching her
.
  Then, maybe because she was scared of something, Miss Flora began to take control of the sneaking around, and made a plan so they can see each other at the schoolhouse on Saturdays.  Or who knows, maybe Miss Flora had been in control of the sneaking all along. 

At the time, Millie had had to figure out on her own they were meeting in the schoolhouse.  Sitting in the schoolroom each day she would gaze out the steamed-up windows into the freezing sunshine and swear she saw a horse in the woods behind the schoolhouse.  She then knew she had, and began to look for it every day, and began to see it every day—the mopey old hang-dog pot salesman on his mule.  Sometimes Miss Flora would wander over
to the window near the back of the schoolroom, wipe off the steam with her arm, stare out towards the woods.  When Millie saw this, it also occurred to her that the past few Saturdays Tommy had been disappearing on his horse, a little more bounce in his step than was normal at the time, and staying disappeared for the whole day.

So the next Saturday she had made cheese and jelly sandwiches for herself, and ham and mustard for Tommy, in case she saw him.  She got on the bicycle before anyone could stop her and made off to town.  It was March by then and the carts and wagons were beginning to come back into town for the Saturday market.  She had to avoid Main Street, go around Fleming Lumber and Mr. Huber’s Ford garage, cross Main in a hurry to the hardware store which was next to the schoolhouse.  The other side of the schoolhouse was where the new school building was being built, but on this side was just an open field with see-saws and tractor tires to jump on. 
From here Millie’d had a good view of the schoolhouse and the woods…and the big brown-black filly tied to a tree in the woods.

“Well well well.”

She had gone around the other side of the hardware store, left her bike against the wall and went right into the woods.  Sonnet tossed her head once when she heard Millie coming, but got her nose on her and calmed down.  “It’s only me,” Millie whispered.  She ran her hand along her nose, neck and mane.  In one of the saddle bags were some oat cakes Mother made for her; Millie idly broke off pieces to hold to Sonnet’s lips as she watched the back of the schoolhouse.

The air was so still around her it was like being indoors.  She was alone in the trees, only the sounds of the woods to keep her company, birdcalls, mice and moles underfoot.  Before long, a sound scratched itself into her head.  Maybe it had been there all along, a branch rubbing in the wind.

But there was no wind.

She stopped feeding Sonnet.  She waited until Sonnet had finished crunching the oat cake,
then pushed her snout away when she wanted more.  Whatever was making the sound seemed to know by instinct she was listening for it.  It stopped.  She heard some movement in last year's leaf fall, then a dragging sound.

"Who is that?" she called.  Her courage was loud in her head but a squeak in the trees.  She turned to put her back to the horse, but quickly turned back lest something or someone be on Sonnet's other side.

She looked to the schoolhouse.  She considered calling to Tommy.

Sonnet blew her lips, stomped her forefoot.  The dragging sound came again, this time with what sounded like breathing.  She thought there was breathing, anyway:  there was her
breath, Sonnet's breath, and yes, something else was taking air, and it was on the other side of Sonnet.  She got on her toes to peek over the saddle.

To come within a foot of the eyes of Gomer Neuwald.

Millie yelped, but could not move a muscle otherwise.

"Don't be scared, girlie," Gomer said.  He dragged his foot around the front end of the horse.  As he did, he ran his hand across her nose.  He hung his dirty little varmint gun on his shoulder. 
"Hey, aint you that Donnan girl?”

She only looked at him.

“Yep.  That little Donnan girl.  Well gaw-damn, this is a lot of horse for a little girl like you.  What’r'you doing out here all by yourself?"

Millie said, "Riding," but with a dry throat.

The smile of a jack-o-lantern gone rotten spread across the bottom half of Gomer's face.  "Ridin’," he said.  "Your brother's big ol' racin' horse."

She did not know which of his eyes to look into; she was not sure which one was looking at her, either.  "Riding," she tried again.

His smile flattened out as a thought finally made it to the front of his head.  "All alone," he said.  He wiped some mucus from his moustache.  "A little girl like you, out horseback ridin' all alone in the woods."  He took a plug from the breast pocket of his flannel, ripped off a hunk.  The wet tobacco smell was an improvement to his breath.  "These are Neuwald woods, you know."

"You live on the other side of town.  Yonder, that's Mr. Steube's house."

"That don't mean a thing."

He studied her.  He chewed tobacco.

"A little girl like you," he said, "all alone and so far from home on a Saturday morning.  All the ways over here at the schoolhouse.  You don't go to school on no Saturday, do you?"

She didn't answer him.

Gomer worked the chaw around in his mouth.  Spat.  "Hmm," he said.  His eyes found the schoolhouse.  He squinted hard at the schoolhouse, his upper lip scrunching up to show his juicy black gums.  He spat again as he came closer to Millie.  Close enough that their coats touched.  "Come on, girlie," he said, bending to offer her his hands.  "You best ride on home now.  These woods aint no place for you no more."

She stepped into his hands and was lifted into the saddle.  It was something she could have managed with the stirrup; and he held her shoe a little too tightly and for a little too long.

"Don't you come into these woods no more, girlie.  This here is Neuwald property."

She took the reins, pulled them away from him.  Sonnet was stubborn about moving.

"I say, don't come into these woods.  Did you hear me?"

"I heard you."

"Don't you know when to say 'yessir' or 'no-sir?'"

"Yep."

He waited, then gave it up.  His gaze was on the schoolhouse again.  "Now, get on home," he said. 

She reined Sonnet forward.  They left the woods along the broad side of the school house, slowly.  Still, there was no sign from inside the windows.  Before she disappeared from sight, she turned back to the woods to see the face of Gomer Neuwald staring out of the woods.  She had kept her head turned that way, kept her eyes on him, until the horse had taken her out of sight.

18.

From the God Rock, Millie watched the last light in the house switch off, leaving only the black rectangles of the windows.  She had been out in this field with Tommy’s Shakespeare book since sunset.  She had been using a candle to see by in the September dusk, but now that had burned down too, so she was sitting there in the dark thinking, the book open on her crossed legs.

The night sky overhead seemed to be made up more of stars and milky dust than it was dark space.  Millie lifted her brow to the breeze, took in the stars.  The breeze felt good in her long hair.  She was suddenly inspired to do something she hadn't done in a long time, something she and Tommy used to do together.  She placed the still open book on the rock, stood facing the east.  She held out her hands like Jesus on the cross, rigid though, and straight.  She turned her elbows back so her forearms and palms were facing the ground.  Her fingers pointed straight out, due north, due south, and resting on the tip of either middle finger was a star.  A complete domed ceiling of space arched overhead to connect the fingers of her left hand to the fingers of her right hand. 
A perfect half-world of stars, fingertip to fingertip.  Tommy taught her this.  He had told her that it made him feel like a giant and a gnat at the same time.  It had sounded like something magical to her, though she had tittered when he said it.  She re-spoke the words to herself now, "a giant and a gnat," out loud into the cricket noise of night, but there was no giggling tonight, but a sad sort of magic.

“Horseshit,” she said, but it had nothing behind it. 

Maybe she didn’t know from horseshit.  How could she look for the truth when she didn’t know what it was anymore?  Was Shakespeare real?  Was life a bunch of magic tricks and poetry?  Was anything real?  What was the point of life at all if nothing was real.   “Aw, horseshit to all that too!” she said, her arms flapping down to their sides.  She kicked the Shakespeare off the rock into the hay, where it made a dark square hole in the grasstops.

It was then she saw the headlamps of a car, far off in the distance, moving north from town.  They shone like the eyes of a rat, tiny and close together, but she knew with no doubt what they were and which way they were headed.  With her eyes she tracked the dots of light and the skinny, sideways cones of light shooting out into the darkness in front of the car.  They were moving fast.  They disappeared behind some corn, giving her only the faint flicker of light to follow.  The headlamps suddenly came into view again, and just as suddenly came to a stop.  For a handful of seconds they swerved around on the road, until finally they were pointing the other way.

He's at the turn in the road.  Whoever he is.

"Well, sonbitch, let's go find out," she said.  She leapt from the God Rock, scooped up Tommy’s book and sprinted for the barn, where a squeaky bicycle waited for her against a paddock wall.

*

Sterno had left the mayor's house, drove first south, back to town.  He drank, skipping his pocket flask to drink straight from one of the mason jars he had bought that morning.  He got a notion as he reached the hotel, turned the car around, headed north on the state road, back into
the darkness of the fields.   He went off the road twice.  The second time he went off the road, he sat there drinking.  The pain in his jaw was finally giving way to the alcohol. 

He found the turn in the road by running off it.  He backed up, parked. 
"Okey-doke.  Let's see," he said as the dust in front of the headlamps settled.  Sterno fought with his door for a second before emerging swooning from the car.  From his back seat he grabbed his torch.

"Okey-goddamn-dokey, Tommy, whad'j'you leave for Uncle Chuckles?"

His headlamps' beams lit up the long grass but made a striped jumble of what was beyond that, and further beyond that was the black of night.  Sterno started with the area around the tractor path, but didn’t make it too far.  After a few minutes he heard a noise coming from the opposite direction of town.  It sounded like an army of rats.  Sterno turned his head to listen.  As he did this he realized that while he had switched off his torch, he had left his car headlamps blazing.  He stomped back to the car, turned the switch.  The darkness that followed was like a blanket over the world.  As the squeaking plague arrived within feet of the car, Sterno thought about his revolver in his ankle strap.  It was too late though:  the rats had arrived.  Instead of his .38, Sterno aimed his torch at the sound.  Just as the sound ceased, he switched on the beam.

"Get that shit-blasted light out of my eyes!"

*

Millie rubbed the red blindness from her visio to see Mr. Sterno standing next to his car, the beam from his flashlight now pointing to the ground.

"I saw you clear back there, why in hell did you turn off your car lights?  Sonbitch!  What in hell happened to your face?"  She dropped the bicycle to the road, tromped towards him.

He reached back in to turn his headlamps back on, turned back to the hay field.

"Mr. Sterno!" she said.  She ran to his side.  "You aint mad, are you?"

"For such a little girl, you sure have a way scaring the hell out of me," he said, holding his jaw.

Despite his using this
g
word she was starting to hate, she took some delight in this.  A smell in the air changed her tune.  She said, "Pee-yew, you're drunk."

He ignored her.  He was looking through the grass with his flashlight.

"I'm just sayin',” she said. 

One hand on his jaw, he continued to ignore her while he looked for something.  What’re you doing?" she said. 

He stopped, looked at her.  He spat some blood, wiped his mouth.  "I think..." he said.  He took off his hat and rubbed his head, replaced his hat.  "I think maybe right here at the road,” he said.  “Highwaymen.  Drifters.”  He stopped talking, but was thinking hard about something.  His lips were moving.  Then his feet were moving, following his finger as it floated on air in front of him.  He took a few steps towards the woods.  He studied the woods without moving for a full minute.  From his jacket pocket he brought a flask.  After he drank, he spat more blood.

“Random,” he said.  “
Strangers, or highwaymen.  Had to be.” 

Millie said, “Why do you say it like that? 
‘Had to be.’”

Mr. Sterno suddenly stopped, looked down at her.

“Motive.  There’s no motive.  A motive is the reason—“

“I know what a motive is.”

Mr. Sterno took another drink from his flask.  “Then I don’t need to tell you, there was no one around here that had any reason to kill him.”  He looked her square in the eye.  “Was there?”

She looked him back, square in the eye.  “How would I know?”

“I don’t know.  I just thought that if you did know something.  Maybe you’d want to help.”

Millie was quiet.

“Help your brother.  The way you get around…maybe you saw something?” 

The letters were in neat rows on the floor of Pa’s hayloft.  Was there anything in them that could help the Pinkerton?  She didn’t think so.  It was all lovey-dovey manure, and that was no help.  Was it?  Should she mention Tommy and Miss Flora to
him.  Should she tell the Pinkerton about the letters?  About the fight he had with Geshen Neuwald the day of the dance?  Was it possible Geshen Neuwald had something to do with Tommy getting killed?  Geshen and Miss Flora had been sweet on each other once, hadn’t they?

“Somebody he was going around with.”

You made a promise.  Don’t say a word.

“A girl, maybe?”

It was a panting night.  The breeze was strong when it came, then it died away as if there was no such a thing as wind.

“Nothing’s adding up.  It’s all just too random.” 

Don't you do it, Millie Margaret.  You put your hand on the Bible.

“But then, why was he out in his buggy on the night of a tornado?”

Then the wind returned strong.

He asked you not to—he even said if he died not to. 
Your own brother.  You swore on his Shakespeare.

This heavy stop-and-go breathing of the night air took turns twice before Millie answered.

"I don’t know nothing."

He stopped his search.  He was about fifteen-twenty feet from her.  He turned to look at her but said nothing.

“I’m only twelve-years-old.”

In the light from the headlamps, she could see something like a grin almost lift the unbruised side of his face.  "Only twelve," he said.

"Twelve," she said quietly.  How did adults do it?  Look each other in the face and tell all those lies?

The smile-like thing faded from his face.  He knew she was lying.

She cleared her throat and tried again.  "I really don't know nothing."

He drank from his flask one more time.  He said, "I'm sorry.  I'll wait till your folks are up and ask them about it."  As he tried to put it back, he stumbled on a clump of dirt.  He let out a growl of a laugh, then decided he wasn't finished drinking.  He pulled from the flask until it was empty this time, then it slipped from his fingers and fell to his feet.  He stared down at it.

"No matter," he said.  “Thieves have one motive.  His billfold and watch were taken.  There you have it.  Highwaymen.  I’ll telegraph the office tomorrow.”

Millie didn’t believe any of this horseshit about highwaymen and
thieves, didn’t believe he believed it either.  This brought some heat to her cheeks.  She locked her arms in a fold across her chest, stood rigid.  Without warning, she tromped through the grass to him, swooped down for the flask, threw it high and far into the darkness. 

He studied her but said nothing.  In fact, he showed no trace of an emotion at all, which just boiled her red.

*

The girl knows something, alright, Sterno thought. 

He resumed his search in the long grass.  He walked in straight lines while swinging the torch to and fro like a pendulum.  His feet kicked up and pushed around the soil, in case it had been buried.  Whatever "it" might be—he still didn't know what he was looking for out here.  The girl's throwing of his flask got him to thinking, though:  the same thing could have been done that night—with something of Tommy's, his wallet maybe, flung out by someone to be lost in the dirt and forgotten.  He'd seen it before—panic in the moment.  Sterno broadened his search.  Once in a while, he cast an eye to the car, where the girl stood silhouetted by the beams of light from the headlamps.

She must have seen him, because she yelled to him over a gust of wind, "What makes you so sure I know something, anyway?"

Sterno spat.  The blood was coming less now but the pain was back.  About a hundred paces from the woods he turned and like a farmer behind the plow he started back in a straight line towards the road.

"He didn’t go around blabbing about his life to just anyone, you know!"  This came from the girl.  She was standing next to the car yelling with both hands around her mouth.  “He was a sneak too, just like the rest of you!”

Sterno stepped on his flask. He lifted it up to show it to her before he pocketed it.  He resumed his search.  His flask was not what he had been looking for.  He made it nearly to the road when a dead tree stump surrounded by weeds caught his eye.  In the daytime, from the road, the high grass hid the rotten cottonwood stump; he had not noticed it.  He stopped.  The battery on the torch was beginning to fail, so he clicked it off.

"Just because you come here to help me find out who killed Tommy, that
don't mean I have to tell you everything—anything!"

He approached the stump.  He studied it.  He took another long look around him--the road, the woods,
the field.  He shook his head.  The plow would bring it up, or one of those mutts, if it was the field.  If it was near the road then someone else made off with it like old man Donnan said.

"A person makes a promise, it's a promise.  It's as simple as that!  Maybe you folks over in Missouri aint heard of such a thing as a promise, huh?"

His chin fell to his chest; he was looking at the stump again.  Come on now, he thought, only a halfwit would hide something in such a perfect hidey-hole as that.

A halfwit.

Sterno clicked on the torch.  He got down on one knee and began to push the long weeds grown up around the stump to one side or another.  They were thick as jungle weeds.

"What in all of hell's fires are you doing over
there!  You aint chucking up all that whisky, are you?"

He heard the girl tromping through the weeds towards him.  "I might know something," the girl said.  She spoke in a normal tone of voice now, for she stood right next to him. 
"Might.  But I aint going to tell you till
you
tell
me
what's going on with this investigation."

Sterno took off his jacket.  He rolled up his sleeve.  He got way down so he could root around in the rotted away cavity of the stump.