Beast of the Field (9 page)

"Who's the dame?" Sterno asked.  He kept his eyes on the photo.  He received no answer, but did hear a chair scrape on the floor.  He turned to see Gomer slamming open the screen door, already cocking his .22.  Geshen was rubbing out his cigar in an ashtray.

"You got your whisky, that'll be one-dollar-fifty."

A shot rang out from outside, followed immediately by a dog's yelp of pain.  Another shot was fired.  Neither man in the house flinched.  Outside, far from this silence: "I got one of 'em, gawdamnit!  Look at her teats!  I got you didn't I, you gaw-damn mangy bitch!" 

The two men stood still while Gomer and the rest of the world whirled around them.  Geshen wasn't talking anymore.  Finally, Sterno reached into his pocket.  He gave him the two dollars he'd asked for in the first place.  "Keep it," he said.  "Maybe I'll come back."

11.

Millie spent Saturday night in the mow with an old quilt.  She refused to come inside.  Finally, Junior had come up in the night, with a lunch pail of cornbread, dried apples and apricots, Pa’s rabbit jerky and his own canteen from the army full of fresh water.  He sat for a long spell, just breathing,
a hand on her knee as she half-slept.  Eventually she turned under the blanket, scooted to the side.  Junior lied back with his hands folded behind his head, still just breathing.  Soon she was on her back too, head resting on her hands like he was, blinking at the roof of the barn with him.

“Hey Junior?”

“H-y.”  Almost asleep.

She had a million questions for him.  She couldn’t choose just one.  “Thanks for the grub,” she said.

He folded one arm around her.  Pretty soon he was asleep.

When he was snoring she climbed over him and got to work; she knew it wouldn’t be long before his nightmares came.  She lit the kerosene lantern to show her the arrangement of letters on the floor.  They were organized by date and author, mostly, but sometimes she clustered a few of the letters together when they were written about the same thing—the same
subject
.  Some of the letters were not as important as others, and some not important at all:  boring, day-to-day stuff, how’s your day been, how’re things at the school, you’re not going to believe what happened to me at the stables today, and so on.  The lovey-dovey stuff in these letters seemed to Millie to be put in because it was expected, like wiping your feet or feeding the dog.  Was that what love was too?  Doing day-to-day stuff every day because you’re supposed to?  Did not doing them lessen the love?   

She was still figuring it out, and she was still writing her story—The Story of Two Lovey-Dovers.  She walked among the letters with the lantern, from one letter to the next, squatting sometimes to bring a sentence closer to her eyes.  Sometimes a letter was important for obvious reasons, like when they began to plan their escape, but other times a letter struck her as important for reasons she did not know.  Something rushed about it maybe, like there was too much left out.  Or maybe something about the
handwriting, or the way it was signed.  (Tommy had once said to her, “You have to see what’s not spelled out for you.”)  She left candles in their own wax near these letters, to mark them.  She would then spend a nighttime hour or two walking among them in bare feet, standing over them, reading, remembering, feeling.  Forming the story. 

And eventually it was this shape the story would take in her head—a few little flames fighting off the dark.

My Darling Flora,
                            Price, Kan.  Oct. 1921

Flora, my angel, my sweet darling angel.
What will I do till I see you again?  I curse time for its slowness, curse every foot, every inch of earth for separating us.   I never would have dreamed this could happen to me, Flora.  I never dreamed I would really fall in love.  But oh, have I ever fallen in love with you.

As you asked, I will come for your letters in the night. Perhaps there will come a time when it is more than a letter I take with me.   Quietly to your window I will come upon my horse and take you away—if only for a stolen moment in the night.  I will build my dreams on these moments until they are something real.  Let us dream together, my darling Flora.  We have the same dreams, the same hopes for ourselves, our lives, our homes, and even our children.  Flora May, my darling, is it foolish for me to believe we can live these dreams together?

Please dream with me.

     Sincerely, Tommy

By this time it was a night-time affair.  Millie knew now, these months later, but had not yet known then that he was going to the mayor’s house after the house was asleep.  This was how they’d exchanged their letters.  Millie thought it was about the stupidest thing Tommy—who she knew was really smart—had ever done in his life.  Riding a horse up to a house to get a letter is not something you can do “quietly” no matter how good you are on a horse.  He must have tied Sonnet to a tree and snuck up on foot, though that wouldn’t fit into the fairy tale he had going on in his mind. 

For reasons Millie was still trying to figure out, they had had to keep this love of theirs a secret.  Some of it had had something to do with Junior and Miss Flora, she knew that from what happened on Valentine’s Day; but there had been another reason, a bigger reason, she felt, and she was still trying to uncover this part. 

It was the first secret Tommy ever kept from Millie.  In the beginning she had had no idea what he was doing, but looking back on it now the clues were everywhere.  He had seemed to be moving faster than everyone around him.  He had talked louder, sang in his bedroom, laughed at the drop of a hat, helped Pa without being asked, and whistled and danced in the kitchen with Mother.  He had taken Millie to school on the back of his new filly almost every day; whether she liked it or not.  Miss Flora had something to do with it, she had by and by figured out; but Tommy never went a day in his life he didn’t have some girl or another on his mind, so Millie had not given it much thought, had not thought this girl was any different than any other girl.  It wasn’t until he started Millie on the early morning Shakespeare—whether she liked it or not—that she had begun to realize this was something more than just some girl.  Something was really taking ahold of him.  He was moving around in this world, on this farm, but had begun to become obvious he was slowly and surely drifting away.  Real life was suddenly not mattering to him—only his love life mattered.

"...'Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and--' something else, I forget--"

"'Pale
,'" Millie mumbled.  She sat next to a lantern early one morning with his gigantic
Complete Works of William Shakespeare
on her lap, a quilt over her shoulders.  He had been out again the night before, but had still been at her bedside before the sun was up, getting her up for school.  Only on this morning, like on a few others during these autumn weeks last year, he forced her up to the mow to read with him.  "But you forgot a little bit of the line."

"Ahem.  '...That thou are far more fair than she.'"  Tommy came down from the wooden crate he had placed upside down in the middle of the floor.  "Isn't that something, Mil?"

"What's it mean?"

"It means…it means he's comparing Juliet to the sun, and saying she is more beautiful than the moon.  He's probably comparing her to Diana, the goddess of the moon."

"More beautiful than the moon?  Not me.  I like the moon better than that hot ol’ sun."

"Well, you're not a love-struck Italian teenager either.  You're nothing but a prairie dog, a dirty little rodent, rooting around in the ground."

"The sun looks different in Italy than it does in Kansas?"

"What a pain in the neck you are.  Aren't you reading any Shakespeare at school?"

From the book strap at her side, Millie pulled a tattered book with a faded cover, held together in some points with string.  "We're reading this," she said.

He took the reader from her, holding it like a used handkerchief.  He held it up to the lanternlight. 
"'
Little Women
?'"  He groaned.  "How do you stand it?"

"I asked her if I could read it," Millie snapped.  She snatched the book from his hand.  "It's what the older kids are reading.  We aint got any books for kids my age, Mister Snobby, so I asked her myself for this one.  She has to read to the kids my age, because we only have one of every book until they get that new schoolhouse done."

Tommy heaved the Shakespeare from her lap, went back to his stage.  "'We aint got no gawl-dang books,'" he said.  “Why do you talk like such a yokel when I know you don’t think like one?”

“You don’t know how I think, mister.”

“Oh yes I do.  You think like I.”  He was searching the heavy volume for a good line.  "Hey, listen to this one.  This is Cleopatra talking...."  He put on a woman's voice and fell back against a beam with the heel of his wrist to his forehead.  "'Give me my robe, put on my crown.  I have immortal longings in me.'"

"Hey, that one’s not bad.  What's it mean?  She's gonna die?"

"Yes, sort of, but we're all going to die.  It means a lot more than that.  It means she's going to kill herself, too.  It also means she understands how small life is, and how grand and forever death is.  And how some of us are a lot more important after we die than we ever were when we were alive."  He slapped the book shut, leapt down from the crate.  "Now let's get going, it's time for school."

"You're taking me again, aint you?"

"'Aren't,' soldier—it's 'aren't.'  And yes I am.  I think maybe I need to have a talk with this school teacher of yours about this tripe she's got you studying.  Who is it, anyway, that crusty old crone Miller still?"

"You know
good and goddamn well it aint Mrs. Miller," Millie said, pushing past him to the trap door with her book strap under her arm.

*

The letters went back and forth through the autumn and into the winter, each one stickier than the one before it.  Maybe it was the schoolhouse and all those squirrely, love-sick girls that had put a spell over Miss Flora, but her letters were full of “XOXOXO” stuff and “LOVELOVELOVE” stuff and wild punctuation marks and sing-songy words that should come from one of those girls in the upper classes, like Ada Wilkes, with her little corkscrew hair pieces hanging down and her breathy voice, not a teacher (though, to be fair, Miss Flora was barely in her twenties).

It was enough to make Millie want to be a nun.  It was like Miss Flora was in a play too, playing the part of a woman who was exactly what men wanted her to be.  At dances she wore catalogue dresses and bobbed her hair and painted her face and sipped from flasks and in her daylight hours it was limp gingham and washerwoman shoes and her bobbed hair in a tight knot behind her head and no makeup at all.  In these letters, she was a teenage girl, reading a love story and putting herself inside it, dizzy and starry-eyed over the handsome horse champion with the icy blue eyes who wants to whisk her away. 

Hell, Millie thought, maybe women ought not to have the vote.  What good is it if we’re just going to do exactly what men want us to do anyway?

Still, there was something about her that turned Tommy into a little boy.  Shy.  Quiet.  When he took Millie to school, he never brought Millie right up to the schoolhouse.  When they rounded the site where new brick school building and the old wooden schoolhouse came into view, he reined the filly back, moved her along the other side of the building frame to the woods than ran along the backside of both schools, old and new, stopped there just inside the trees staring at the schoolhouse with his hands crossed on the pommel of the saddle.  He wouldn't go any closer.  Couldn't:  so it was in glimpses he saw her—tromping across a window, standing at the entrance, staring at her through the fog and bare branches while she readied the privy behind the schoolhouse.  She imagined him collecting these parts of her and using them to build something bigger and a little different than the real thing, like she had done with Junior’s letters.

Pretty soon it had been every day that Millie would look through the windows and
catch a glimpse of that black-brown filly in the woods.  It was every night he was leaving the house.  Creeping by her bedroom door with his boots in his hand.  Baiting and tacking up the new filly—Peaceful Sonnet, he’d named her—in the pitch black darkness of the barn, then walking her out to the twin elms before mounting her and racing down the road towards town.             

Every night, she had laid in her bed thinking:  The sneaky sonbitch, who’s he think he’s fooling?  Her ear would be tuned to the creaking floorboards outside her bedroom door, and when she heard them she was at the window before she was awake, watching the sneak sneaking around in the night with his secrets.  At the time it had made her red-in-the-face mad; even through all that had happened she still remembered how mad at him she had been.  Keeping a secret from her was one thing, but a secret involving a girl was more than she could allow. 

So, come winter, Millie had decided to out-sneak the sneak.  Hell, if he was going to keep secrets from them, his own family, then she’d find out what he was up to her own way.

12.

Sterno leaned against a column in front of the Old Price Hotel.  His hands were busy at waist level with tobacco and a paper.  His eyes meanwhile were cast across the street and down a few buildings.  He was watching the well-dressed townspeople emerging from the German Lutheran Church into the white sunlight.  He was tired and gazing.  The women busied themselves against the wind—their hats, their dresses.  The men gathered in a circle and stuffed big pinches of snuff into their mouths.  When he lit his cigarette his mind came back to life.

Abner Greentree saw him, watched him for a few seconds.  Finally gave him a big friendly wave.  Sterno dipped the brim of his fedora in response.  He stayed there like that for two cigarettes, waiting for all the churchgoers to be on their ways before he resumed his work. 

Truth be known, he didn't know where to go next.  The trip out to the Neuwald boys’ house had been a good one.  He had left there with a few loose little patches to carry around with him, and a few little holes as well.  The problem was that the patches didn’t fit the holes, and the holes needed patches he didn’t have, so he would have to just carry them around until he found them a fit.

Mayor Greentree and his straw-haired, heavy-bottomed wife were the last to leave for home.  A young Negro pulled a large white sedan around for the couple.  He leapt out to open doors for them.  As they passed by Sterno, the driver must have felt some instinct to slow the car.  It rolled nearly to a stop in front of him.  Slow enough for Sterno to get a good look at the face the Negro made when Mayor Greentree said to him, "What're you slowin' down for, Jove?  Come on, boy, I’m hungry."  Then, through the open window, with a much different manner of speaking:  "Morning there, Mr. Sterno!  Careful those cigarettes in this wind, now!"

The car sped up the road, leaving Sterno in the relative silence offered by the wind sucking between the buildings. 

Looks like a ghost town, he thought.  Welcome back to small town Sundays. 

Then a quick flash of light in one of the windows across the street caught his eye.  He looked carefully.  He rubbed his eyes.  The glare remained in his eye for a few seconds.  It was not his imagination.

He stepped out from the shade of the hotel.  He stamped out his cigarettes between two of the bricks on Main Street.   He stopped in the middle of the street, waited.  It didn't come again.  In the lull between gusts, Sterno heard some music coming from a phonograph.  The sound came from behind him, not from where he had seen the flash.  He turned to see white curtains billowing out from the second floor of the Old Price Hotel.  It had not been a flash but the reflection of a flash that he had seen, coming from Dr. Rosenzweig's office.

*

Dr. Rosenzweig looked flustered upon opening the door, but was then pleased to see that it was Sterno and his extended masseter who had knocked.

             
"Mr. Sterno."

"Everyone else is at church," Sterno said. 
"Pretty sleepy out there.  Wonder if I might take a look at those Donnan pictures again."

The doctor held the door open for him.  He might have been smiling at Sterno as he walked by, or he might have been lifting his face to keep his glasses from falling; it was hard to tell.  A sight made Sterno stop as he entered.  On a white-sheeted top of a table against one wall was a dead animal. 
A coyote.  It lay on its side with its skin pulled back from ankle to ear to expose the pink and white muscle underneath.  Dr. Rosenzweig had hung one of his cameras from the ceiling so that it pointed down at the animal.  When Sterno knocked, the doctor had been in the process of changing the flash powder.

"
Ja, ja, I have them close by," the doctor said.  Sterno smelled wine and pipe tobacco on him as he stepped to the desk.  "I figured, with you still in town, I should keep them where I can find them.  Your investigation is proceeding well, Mr. Sterno?”  His “Sterno” sounded like “Schterno.”

“It’s proceeding,” Sterno answered.

“Very well, very well.  Please, make yourself comfortable.  You will not mind if I continue to work?"

Sterno sat down at the desk.  He opened the folder to the grim image of Tommy Donnan alive and well, smiling after a race.  Sterno put it aside.  He went through the other pictures, with more care this time.  A loud click-and-flash caused him to flinch, the doctor at work.  Coughing, Rosenzweig fanned the flash smoke toward the window.

"Does the music bother you?" he asked as he fanned.

"I didn't notice," Sterno said coughing.

"It is Mendelssohn.  He is a German too.  Not the same kind of German we have around here, I fear.  He was a Lutheran, like they are, although he was born into a Jewish family.  ‘Sterno.’  I know this name.  ‘Sternau,’ am I right?  You have Jewish blood in you, as well, Mr. Sterno, am I right?”

Sterno didn’t answer; he was still waving the white smoke from his face.

The doctor leaned in to him, speaking low.  “Well, Mr. Sterno, if you would like to keep it in you, not answering this question is the correct way to answer this question.”  Then, loud again, the winey, gusty doctor, scientist, photographer and music connoisseur:  “Ja, this recording is only two years old, recorded in London, England, and already it is on a phonograph in Price, Kansas, the United States of America.  These modern times, Mr. Sterno, are sometimes frightening.  I have American Ragtime, if you like."

Sterno wiped his eyes, turned his face back to the pictures.  He suddenly smelled something in this folder he had missed a couple days ago. He looked over every inch of the pictures of Tommy, his clothing, the buggy,
his remains.  Nothing was jumping out at him.  But something about these photos was stirring up that old gritty feeling in his gut.  Disappointed, he put down the last of the pictures taken of the body.

Another flash from behind him blinded him,
then left him blinking at a photograph of a road.  Running down the middle of this road was a black string of beads.  Blood.  Sterno looked at the next photo, this one was of a piece of clothing, also bloodied, on the side of the road.  The next photo was of a rock perhaps the size of a melon.  It had been slightly dislodged from the road and was marked with fine splatters of blood. 

Sterno stared out the window.  He nodded,
then shook his head at the one word hanging like an electric bulb:  blood. 

"It was likely a stone much like this one that killed him," Rosenzweig said from over his shoulder.  "This one marked the first sign of blood on the road leading to the farm."

"Can you take me to where these were taken?"

The doctor clinched his goatee at the question, lines of thought forming across his forehead.  "Of course," he said finally.

"Now?"

Dr. Rosenzweig took off his glasses.  He rubbed the smoke from his eyes as he made his way over to the window.  He replaced them, held one of his blowing curtains aside as he looked down at the street.  "Very well," he said.  "But let us be careful.  These
kind of Germans are the staunch Protestant kind of Germans, und they frown on any sort of activity being carried out on Sundays, unless it pertains to God or food."

*

They took a road from town Sterno was beginning to know well.  This time, however, Dr. Rosenzweig gave him the nickel tour along the way.

"...Let us see.  That is the old township hall und annex," he said, pointing to a mass of charred wood heaped on the dry grass like a shipwreck.  "It burnt down, when was it?
maybe five or six years ago."  He showed him farms, houses, more farms.  At one point he poked a finger down a tree lined road at a large white house with black shutters.  "That is the manse of our once future governor out there," he said.  "Abner has added quite a bit to it in recent years.  Of course, all this land belongs to the mayor too.  Or most of it does, anyhow."

"Quite a piece of land."

"There was some oil interest in Hope County not too long ago.  Last year, in fact.  The mayor thought it a good idea if he bought up as many farms as he could.  He wanted bargaining leverage against the oil company, when they finally decided to invest—that was his plan.  He believed one landowner would get them much more money.  He also believed he was going to fund his campaign on that oil. 

“We agreed with him, mostly, I believe; it would have been good for us.  Suddenly, boop!
those oil men left as fast as they had arrived.  Unfortunate, I liked them; they stayed at the hotel, of course.  I am not sure what happened.  They checked out and drove away and then we heard they had disappeared.  A fire at the refinery in Oklahoma.  Some newspaper men were here to ask around, but of course no one knew anything.  So, we never see those oil men again und the mayor is no farmer, so now all this good farmland is being wasted.  Here we are, stop anywhere after this turn in the road."

The highroad had become a farm road with two rows of car ruts running like tracks in the dirt.  The Model T bounced around the sharp curve, stopped in the grass by the road.  Sterno knew this turn as the same one that nearly ran him off the road his first time out here.  The men had just stepped out of the car when a gust took Dr. Rosenzweig's bowler from him, sent it tumbling down the road.  This gave Sterno a few seconds to look around him.  To the east, about two hundred feet from the road was a wood’s edge running north-south as did the road before the turn, reaching in each direction for at least a mile.  Opposite this view, in the western distance, over a shallow and gradual rise in the land, Sterno could just make out the twin elms—one dead, one leafed—that marked Donnan's farm.

The doctor returned, hat in hand; he was looking around the road for something.  "Let us see, I do not see that big rock anywhere," he said over the wind.  "I can tell you however, it was right about where you are standing.  I was coming back from taking photos of the body, riding with Abner.  I just happened to see the bloodied rock.  He did not want to stop, but I made him—I am quite glad I did."

"The rock was covered in blood, then."

"I would not say ‘covered.’  It was not covered completely.  It was early enough in the day that it was still brownish-red, but the rock was spotted, or splattered, more than covered, I would say.” 

Red blood, Sterno thought.

“There was a pattern of splattered blood spraying from here—" Dr. Rosensweig said, stooping, "to here," indicating about three feet of space fanning outward in the direction the horse would be going. 

"These pictures," Sterno said, "lead this way, towards Braun Donnan's farm."

"Ja.  Yes." 

"What about this way?" Sterno asked.  He pointed down the road from where they had come, toward town.  “How much blood was there on the road from that way?” 

The doctor's shoes seemed to take him that same way of their own volition.  Sterno could see on his face he was following not just Sterno's pointing finger, but his train of thought, as well.  "None," he said.

Sterno slid the picture of the piece of ripped sleeve onto the top of the pile he held in his hand.  "Where was this one taken?"

The doctor seemed to be doing math in his head.  His face stayed focused on something invisible at his feet.

"Doctor?"

"Excuse me."

"This one."
 

"Oh,
ja, yes.  Here," the doctor said.  He led Sterno to exactly where the road made its turn.  "Here," he said again.  He made an
X
in the dirt with his foot.

Sterno stepped on the
X
on his way into the grass.  Buffalo grass, wild barley and a few patches of wild sunflowers, all wilted from the drought, covered the small, fallow field.  The field ran from the road to the wood on one side, and a row of trees that marked a brook on the other.  Underfoot, he just made out two narrow, worn paths, impossible to see from the road.  The path, if realized, would make the upside-down-
L-
shaped turn in the road into a
T-
shaped turn, and this new arm of the road would lead east, right into the woods.

He turned to the doctor.  "Whose woods are those?"

Dr. Rosenzweig searched the wood's edge, thought about it, shrugged.  "I stay in town, mostly.”

Sterno rubbed his jaw.  He had more questions for the doctor, but he wasn’t about to ask them yet:  one, the one that brought him out here, why is there dry red blood all over the road and all over Tommy Donnan if he were killed in the middle of a rain storm?  
and two, a new one since coming out here, why is there no blood leading from town, from where the horse had come?  And now a third, and it involved those woods.

"There is a detailed map of the county," the doctor offered.  "It was made just a few years ago."

"You said the annex burned down with the township hall."

"It did.  It did.  But almost all of the records were moved beforehand.  Herbert Price moved them himself.  Not too many people of the town know about that, actually.  This is because not too many people of the town care, I assume."

"So where are the records now?" Sterno asked.