Beast of the Field (26 page)

37.

Millie watched the neat loop come down around Mr. Sterno's neck, but did not understand what was happening to him.  He was standing so still.  He looked so calm.  There didn't seem anything wrong.

Then he kicked the mayor right in the crotch and hell broke loose.  He got another one of them, Jonas Neuwald, she thought, right in the gut after spitting in his face.  He twisted and turned against the rope at his neck but it was that damn Gomer Neuwald who got him finally.  He yuk-yukked and got him in the ribs, it looked like, or maybe the gut, and that was when Mr. Sterno went still

Perfectly still.  He wore a face like a photograph.  This confused Millie all over again.  She just didn’t understand what was happening in front of her.  She thought maybe she should get out of there.  There was something very bad happening, and she should be at home.  Maybe she should even be warning Mr. Sterno’s “employers.” 

But she was frozen again, couldn’t budge a muscle.  Even as Millie watched three of the four men pull the rope leading to his neck taut, watched Mr. Sterno float up into the darkness, her curiosity was too strong to allow in feeling.  She heard him expel a long breath from his lungs, but felt nothing.  She was pulled into his eyes, and that look on his face—his face said it was okay.  It was all okay.  When his legs began to quiver and kick, her heart began to beat faster, she did not know why.  She felt a powerful chill travel through her, but could not explain it.  It wasn't until one of his shoes fell from a sockless foot, landed with a tiny crunch in the dry
bed below him that Millie blinked awake from her dream.  Then Mr. Neuwald said something, and it was his words that sent the understanding home with a sound like an explosion in her head.  At last she remembered what that neat little loop was called, and what they used it for.

"I be damned, Abner," Mr. Neuwald said.  "I think he was the first one that really wasn't scared of dying."

The mayor was still hunched over.  He took off his hood, revealing a red and pained face.  He scratched at his head, finally stood up straight.  He stuck the once-white cloth in his jacket pocket, looked at the hanged man.  "Yeah.  I was kinda hoping he’d a begged or cried or something.  Maybe he wasn’t a Jew after all," he said.  Then the understanding blew up inside her, so that she uttered a small sound from the shock of it.  This sound of was heard by all.  Her focus remained on the beat-up, torn-apart, floating body of Mr. Sterno, but in the corners of her eyes she saw four faces turn to her.

"Goddamnit!" said one of them.  "Get that damn girl!"

She turned to run.  The crashing footfalls of the men followed her.  She found her stride as the first torch reached the thickets, but she had been sweating in Tommy’s boots, and slipped inside them so that she fell to the ground.  She felt a hand on her arm and came up swinging.  She got him in the nose and the side of the head.  She tore off his mask, bringing his hat with it.  It was Geshen Neuwald.  She punched him again in the nose, until finally he wrapped her up in his arms.  He dragged her kicking back into the clearing.

"You let me down you shit-soaked, chicken-shit, coward, son of a stinking bitch!  Let me go—!"

Mayor Greentree stepped up and gave her a flat hand to the cheek.  It was a blow that would stop many men.  He looked down at her.  Dazed, ears ringing, she returned his gaze.  When he spoke he spoke quietly, and he sounded sad.  "Get her to the house.  Keep her there."

"What're we going to do with her?" Geshen asked. 

The mayor looked to each of the masked men, then back to her.  His eyebrows were folded down over his eyes and his mouth seemed to be thinking about something all on its own.  His voice when it came was not the same voice she knew.  It was this new voice of his, sad and frightening.  "Damn you, girl.  Why can't you ever mind your own business."  He rubbed his hand down his face, sighed.  He did not look at her anymore.  "Get her to the house, she saw the whole goddamn thing.  Christ Almighty.  Just get her to the house.  You two, get on over there to Donnan's place and take care of your business.  Leave the house alone, though.  Here," he said.  He handed Gomer his torch.  "Take this, you'll need it.  I know my way in the dark."  He and his white jacket then sunk into in the dark soup of the trees.

Millie's mouth was bound with a handkerchief.  She was flung over Geshen's shoulders, taken through the woods after the others.  She watched as Gomer and Mr. Neuwald broke off from the line, went to Mr. Neuwald's pickup,
dropped their torches into the back of it.  The engine kicked into life, the doors rattled, slammed shut.  Their pickup went a different route back out of the woods than the way Geshen took, leaving her alone with him.  His panting and his boots in the leaves.  Soon she began to hear the caged dogs in the Neuwalds' barn.  Their frenzy reached a madhouse pitch as Geshen stepped onto the yard of his house.  He yelled at them to shut up, but they kept at it.  Swearing, he tossed his still burning torch to the ground, took her into the house, sat her down in a chair in the kitchen. 

"Don't move a muscle," he said.  He went through a kitchen drawer, found twine.  He used it to tie her to the chair—her feet, her shoulders, her middle.  He lit a candle, placed it on the otherwise bare kitchen table.  He poured himself a whisky.  After drinking this one off, he poured another.  He sat in another chair he had scooted over to her from the table.  He was breathing heavily, but with every breath he took he was regaining the calm she knew him for.  He leaned toward Millie, moved some hair back from her face.  He studied the red mark from the mayor's hand. 

He leaned in close, gave her a slow, fumy smile.  It was not a friendly smile.  They were alone in the kitchen and it was quiet in there.  His hand released the loose cup it had on her chin.  It traveled down the side of her neck, down her chest to her side, where it stayed.  She was forgetting to be angry, felt herself shaking, saw the tears coming into her eyes.  Outside, through the windows, there was only the dark of night, blemished now and again with a small, short swell of orange light from Geshen's discarded torch. 

38.

Jumpy heard the engine when it was still a mote of sound like something an internal combustion mosquito would make.  He did not want to get up.  He moved the flap of one ear a tad to get a better listen.  The sound was moving.  It was moving toward his house.  He expelled a long breath through his nose.  After a stretch on his side he got to his elbows, then his front paws.  Pushing up, he managed one leg underneath him—but he couldn't do much with it.  He scrabbled out with his left paw until he got the leg on that same side to tremble and straighten almost vertically beneath him.  The other leg had no choice but to follow suit.  He was on all his pads now, but breathing too hard to do anything else just yet.  By the time this process was completed, he could see the headlamps of the car approaching, but still a good span away.  He would wait until it was closer, see what happened.  

At that moment the headlamps went off; they disappeared and left behind only the darkness.  He jolted in his skin.  His pupils dilated.  His blood was tingling into spots it hadn't gone in a long time.  He was wide awake now, listening, looking, but still not speaking.  He sniffed the air, nothing; but when was the last time he smelled anything he wasn't right on top of it?

A sound from the barn startled him.  He realized it was that sound that had awakened him, not the car.  It came again—a loud thump, a stall being kicked.  Those mules got their noses on something, Jumpy thought.  He turned back to the road.  What he saw did not make sense:  two faces like coons floating in the darkness, bouncing out of rhythm with each other in the direction of the barn.  They're walking on my land, he thought, and he hollered at them to stop.

"Shht," one of the coons said. 

Jumpy knew then they were not coons at all, but only dressed like coons.  They were men.  He hollered some more.  He came down off the porch hollering, but they continued on toward the barn.  They stopped short of the barn, faced each other.  One of them flicked open a lighter, put it to the long clubs they each held with pitch-covered rags wrapped tightly around their far ends.  The yard was no longer dark, but it went dark again when the men disappeared inside the barn. 

Jumpy came off the ground hollering, like he had in his youth.
  He at least expected the big fella to be down by now.  From inside the barn he heard the bawling of the cows.  He heard the pigs grunting, then squealing.  One of the mules swung skipping and hopping out into the darkness behind the barn, followed by the other.

Where’s the horse?  That horse ought to be there too.

The fire had reached the open windows and doors of the barn.  Now at last Jumpy heard the mother’s voice from her bedroom:  “
Fire fire fire!
” she yelled. “Braun, the barn! Junior!  Millie!  Everybody up!”  Then, just a second after that:  “My God, where is Millie!”  Then finally the big fella came crashing through the front door.  Jumpy kept hollering even though it didn't matter anymore who came out of the house.  The barn was on fire and the coons who did it were long gone down the road.

The big fella kicked the bay doors open, letting the last burning, squealing mule out into the night—the mule ran in a straight line for a hundred yards then dropped into the grass.  The big fella went straight for the hayloft, maybe to see if that girl was sleeping up in there again. 
She wasn’t, and the big fella was back down with the animals.  He came tumbling out from the barn with two young pigs, carrying them like town  poodles.  On his next trip was another pig, a big, wriggling, smoldering sow which took both his arms. 

"Jesus
please-us!"  This was the old man, who came up next to the mother, buttoning his pants.  He ran in after the big fella.  The flames were coming from the lower windows already, showing brightly in the upper windows.  Through the bay doors Jumpy saw the little fiery pieces of hay and straw buzzing around the heads of the two men.  They ran back and forth hollering at one another.  It took them both to get a cow out of her stall.  The big fella pulled her and the old man threw canvas over the burning patch on her hide.  The other cow was on her side, dead under burning bales.

The big fella ran back inside.  Jumpy saw him take the ladder to the hayloft again, almost as fast as he had the first time.  Seconds later he leapt from the second-story hay door to the grass with a handful of burning paper.  His hair and clothes were on fire too.

The old man and the mother patted at him until the fires were out; smoke still smoldered from the live embers on his flannel shirt.  They stood panting in front of the barn.  There were many hundreds of bales of hay inside the barn, on three levels.  Those bales were catching now, sending flame and brown smoke high into the night sky. 

The old man turned to the house.  "Let's get to the well," he said.  "We'll need some water to keep it off the house."  He looked up at the flame again. "Won't be long till the whole town is out here, I reckon. 
Thank you God for no wind tonight.   Come on, Junior."

The big fella was not listening to him.  He was not watching the fire either.  He was looking all around the yard, and to the house, and to the yard again.  Jumpy then saw what the
big fella saw—the horse.  She wore a bridle but had no rider, and coming from the gate, giving the burning barn a wide berth. 

The mother understood, and caught her breath.  "Millie," she said.

"H-y."

Now the old man was looking around too.

"She was not in her room," the mother said.  "And she wasn't in the hayloft either, was she Junior?"

"
H-y!
" the big fella boomed.

"Hellfire!
  She went after that Pinkerton fella, didn't she?" the old man asked.

They each knew the answer to this.  Two of them stood thinking about it.  One of them was already running.  The old man tried like mad to call him back, even limped after him across the yard, pointing behind him to the barn, but there was nothing keeping the big fella here this time.

*

Unrest in the trees.
 

Blood in the air tonight.
  Then the hanging meat—at last something for the teeth.  The dogs had gone mad tearing at the feet and ankles of the hanging body, but the real meat was beyond their reach, and this was cause for frustration, for snapping, for fights and for more blood.

One among them was the strongest.  In brain and in brawn he led them.  The pack's frustration tonight fell upon his shoulders.  His nose was the strongest too, and it was he who
smelled the fire first.  There was no wind tonight, so he set out to follow the scent.  His pack followed.  He led them along the dry treefall to where the wood met the grassland.  In the distance, over the windbreaks and barbed wire and fields, a tall flame licked at the bowl of night.  It was far, far away, but close enough that after a few minutes of watching, the scent of hay and wood and burning hide came to all of them.  As another snarling facedown unfolded behind him, his nose bobbed at the air; the smell of flesh was too powerful to ignore.  They would leave the wood tonight.

They heard it then.  It was not in the flames in that distant field but close to the trees. 
Footfalls.  Coming closer.  Heavy legs and heavy feet moving at a quick and steady pace.  Their ears told them it was not human, it couldn't be, but their noses could not place the smell of that smoking flesh as anything else but human.  This confusion was reason enough to hang low in the bush, watch and measure, perhaps plan an attack, perhaps a retreat.  All at once they saw it, black against the far off tower of flame.

They recognized it, from years past and from more recently, that day of the storm, when it came in after the calf.  It had found the calf just as they were about to pounce.  It kicked one of their pack, threw stones at the others until they scattered.  The wind ended the battle for them.  A tree bough swung down and knocked him from his feet.  The calf bolted, further east and out of sight.  They would have followed, but now this thing—much bigger than the calf—was on the ground and not getting up.  It seemed an easier meal, but as they moved in the wind became too strong.  Their numbers dwindled one at a time until there
was not enough of them left to take the thing, which was starting to wake again.  They had had to find shelter instead.

Yes, some of them thought they recognized it, but they had never seen it move like this, never smelled it like this.  Their ancestors might have thought it a bison, but these days those
were gone from here.  The way the smoke rolled from its shoulders and head, it reminded the oldest among them of the smoky black engines that used to pass through here with such frequency, just ten years earlier.  It moved quick and steady, unafraid of predators, and this affected them.  They respected it now.  They even feared it.  On the whole, they didn't know what to think of it.  Some of them stood, ready for action; some rested on their bellies, already submitting.  Perfectly still save their necks, they watched it pass them by, their gazes trained on its legs, following its progress in unison like the heads of the Hydra.  It did not stop at the car in the weeds, though it turned its head that way; nor did it break stride at the meat hanging under the tree branch:  it had someplace to go and nothing was stopping it from going there.

When it had passed, and the smoke was fading over their heads, the strongest among them stepped out onto his trail.  He sniffed the ground first, to determine once and for all it was a human.  He sniffed the air then, the smoke, smelled human hair and human flesh and human clothing and grass and the scent of livestock.  He decided by the way it moved it was hunting something, and decided to follow him.  The others followed.  Soon they were moving quietly alongside the human-like thing.  The purpose in its steps infected their pack mind.  They liked it.  If it was hunting, it was silently agreed among them,
then they were hunting too. 

So through the trees they went. 
The smoking giant and his trotting phalanx of rib-skinny mongrels. 

Hunting.