Dewey Defeats Truman (35 page)

It was simple, Peter realized, as Ferguson gave way to Governor Sigler; he’d get Mrs. Bruce to kill Riley, just take her in his arms one night next week after turning out the lights in the Matthews Building.
Mrs. Bruce, there’s something I need you to do …

“AND STRUCK TERROR INTO THE HEART OF EVERY THUG IN THE GREAT, BELEAGUERED CITY OF NEW YORK—”

That was it. His eye was throbbing and Sigler’s shouts made his ear want to fold over on itself. He was getting out of here. He could listen to Dewey’s speech on his car radio and get a picture of himself shaking the anointed’s hand at Christ Episcopal tomorrow morning.

“Excuse me, please. Excuse me.” He did it with the elegant stealth he’d once used to such good effect at parties in Grosvenor Square, at the perfectly judged moment for an assignation to get under way. “Pardon me, thank you, pardon me …” Barely missed, he reached the four wooden stairs and nodded to the cop who was giving a safe conduct to somebody coming up.

Riley?
Harold Feller was waving him up past Peter and around the last row on the platform, where Anne took charge and brought him, practically in a crouch, toward the little patch of ground behind the podium, where Dewey was holding a discreet levee as the speeches continued.

After a whisper from Carol, Annie Dewey lit up in pleasure,
as if she’d been waiting for ages to meet this beau belonging to Miss Macmurray, who had clearly been wonderful company as they rode the victorious rails from Jackson. And then, sure enough—this was more unbelievable than Harvey P. Angell—it was time for Jack Riley, this goddamn Taft-Hartley-repealing pugilist, to politely offer his hand to the real next President of the United States, not the lame duck he’d met on Labor Day—and for Thomas E. Dewey, still eager to please mama, to give a warm clap on the back to this obviously splendid fellow.

“W
E DON
’
T SMEAR OUR OPPONENT
. W
E DON
’
T ABUSE HIM
. W
E
don’t call him the ugly names we hear poured out in recent years by zealots.”

Dewey’s words slid through the ten sets of phone circuits strung along South Washington and out of Peter’s car radio as he drove his ’49 Ford north up the deserted street. Streamers, handbills and tufts of cotton candy blew about in the night, getting caught in his wipers as they brushed the windshield’s freezing damp.

“In Owosso, nobody has succeeded in setting labor against management or making people think in terms of classes. ‘Class warfare’ and ‘social distinctions’ are terms that have no meaning here. Nobody has succeeded in setting the farmer against the storekeeper, the factory man or the laboring man. Everybody works for a living, we’re all useful, we all depend on each other and we know it.”

The beautiful, plummy voice seemed to be coming from the huge pictures in every window. A corner of the
DEWEY
:
HONESTY
,
STRENGTH
sign above the door to Feller, Terry &
Nast was flapping in the chill breeze, but across the street Leo Abner had taken care to keep all decoration inside his bookshop. A warm electric light fell upon red-white-and-blue cloth swaddling a 1944 campaign poster of the governor.

Just before 10:36 Peter looked at his watch, crossed Main Street and drove on toward Exchange. Here, too, all was deserted, as if some piper of the night had led the whole town, children and grown-ups, away from their hearths and into a forest. Peter parked the car on Water Street, across from the Armory and high school, and walked through the space between the buildings, as quietly as he could, until the ground began sloping downward toward the Shiawassee. There he paused. Only two lights were visible: one across the river in a room at the top of the castle, the other a lantern beside a boat tied up at the bank on this side.

The old man was digging, as Peter knew he would be. The other night, once he’d opened the buckram box and scanned the papers inside, all of it—the shovels and the colonel’s depth of feeling against the Dewey Walk and his disappointment in Wright George—had made sense. And what better time would there be for him to go down and dig than late on the night when every person in town was sure to be two miles away?

Even so, the old man was running out of time. It was 10:40 now, just five minutes before Dewey would make his precision finish and the population of Owosso, on foot and in cars, would start coming back north. Peter could hear the colonel’s grunts, his plaintive exhalations after piling each shovelful of wet earth upon the others. He was up to his chest in the hole he’d dug, wondering if he’d remembered the right spot. Peter debated whether to stop him, to lift him
out of the pit before his heart gave out, but as the old man’s cries grew louder, more and more alive with pain, Peter decided to let him play out this last act of his secret drama.

Another shovelful, and another cry; another and another, until Peter could feel his feet beginning to intervene with a will of their own. But they stopped dead when Horace let out a long, high wail. He thumped the shovel, two, three times on what it had struck, and began a new, more frantic series of scoops, less vertical than horizontal. Each one made a scraping sound, as another few square inches of coffin came visible. Before two more minutes passed, Horace threw the shovel against the pile of soil he’d removed and began trying to lift one end of the box with his bare hands. Nothing budged, but he kept trying, until he sobbed with frustration. He paused to look at his pocket watch and fell backwards onto the still half-buried coffin. He cried out against his own foolishness.

All at once a splash, and then a ripple in the water, and then a wake, human-sized, traveling across the narrow river from the castle side. Taking advantage of the sound, which had caught Horace’s attention and brought his head warily above the earth’s surface, Peter crept lower down the bank to a clump of bushes, waiting for what would come up near the rowboat.

It was a boy, clad only in a pair of summer shorts, his wet hair shining in the moonlight. He was racing up the bank to the open grave, pulling the old man out of it.

The colonel, no doubt thinking he was in a dream or past his death, protested not at all as the boy picked up the shovel and finished digging out enough dirt to free the casket. “Come on,” he said to the old man, dragging the box by
its handles to the water’s edge. With a small assist from the exhausted colonel, he loaded it into the rowboat. Then he helped the old man get in and took hold of the oars. He gestured with his head for Horace to unfasten the rope.

“I know you,” said the frightened Horace Sinclair.

The boy just nodded, and at 10:48 Peter watched the old man and Tim Herrick set off with the body of Jonathan Adams Darrell on a half-minute sail to Curwood Castle.

B
Y THE TIME HE CRAWLED OUT OF THE ROWBOAT
, H
ORACE
was so dazed with exhaustion and disbelief he barely realized he was being led, along with Jon’s bones, inside the sixteen-inch stone walls of old man Curwood’s folly. Horace had already been middle-aged when the writer built the place in 1922; after getting over his initial fear that something to match it would soon go up on the other side of the river, he had continued to dislike the pile for its simple incongruity, though he would admit, before too many years went by, that it had grown on him. In fact, this summer another old-timer had reminded Horace of that change of heart, suggesting he might eventually make peace with the Dewey Walk, too.

The boy dragged the muddy coffin and the lantern into the middle of the castle’s big room. The peaked rafters and flickering light reminded Horace of the church in which Jon’s coffin might have had its funeral years before, if he and Wright and Boyd hadn’t lost their heads, though the ecclesiastical look of the place actually had to do with Curwood’s worship of himself. There were flags all around the room, for every nation that had sent a guest to the castle; to entertain them the best-selling author would project the tame movies made from his wild printed yarns.

Horace was thoroughly confused. He knew he was with the Herrick boy, the one who’d been missing, but he could not keep straight how the boy had gotten home and how long he’d been in the castle. It was easier for Horace to convey the story of “this guy,” as the boy referred to Jon, or at least his bones. After so many years of rehearsing it to himself, the tale came out as automatically as the Our Father on a Sunday morning.

“So you dug him up before the guys digging the Dewey Walk could find him?”

Horace nodded and asked the only question he would all night. “What can I do with him now?”

His own plan had been to sail the coffin a third of a mile up the river, to hide it away from the Walk site and rebury it another night. But it was too late for that: through the stone walls and the cracked window he and the boy could hear the honking horns and singing voices of the crowd returning from Willman Field.

“I know a place outside town where we could bring it.”

Horace could sense that the boy was used to being no longer himself; his febrile enthusiasm showed that he judged Horace a daft kindred spirit. “But we’ve got to wait until the coast is clear. I’ll telephone you, someday soon, probably in the middle of the night. But for now I’ve got to lie low. I’ll put him up in the turret, and I’ll clean the carpet down here so nobody who comes in gets suspicious. Some men from the school board have come by twice, in the afternoons. They talk about their plan to fix up the castle, but they never go upstairs. I listen to them from the top of the winding stairs. Can you walk home all right?” He seemed amazed by Horace’s lack of a car, which was, to say the least, going to complicate the reburial possibilities.

Horace, so tired that for one terrible moment he was unsure he wasn’t talking to Jon himself, said yes. And Tim (for that was his name, not Arnie, as Horace kept thinking) promised he would keep Mr. Sinclair’s secret if Mr. Sinclair would keep his.

Pursued by the voices and horns, Horace made his way to the bridge on Shiawassee Street, trying to avoid the eyes of his neighbors. He detoured all the way to King before turning east. Once home, he collapsed upon his sofa, and realized that he had left his shovel and lantern with the boy. Would Tim keep them well hidden from the school board? And remember to bring them when they reburied Jon? Would he really remember his pledge and come?

O
N
S
UNDAY MORNING
,
THE GOVERNOR WALKED DOWN THE
aisle of Christ Episcopal right on time and then took a seat in his mother’s pew, about three-quarters of the way down the right side. The church fairly shone with elbow grease and excitement, but no mention of the candidate’s presence was ever made from the pulpit. The service was like a game of exegesis. One listened to the eighty-fourth Psalm and tried to figure out its applicability to the occasion. The hymn, “Lead Us, Heavenly Father, O’er the World’s Tempestuous Sea,” was a giveaway, but Reverend Davis’s sermon conveyed only the most covert blessing on Dewey’s polite crusade to retake Jerusalem from the New-Dealing infidels: “In this solemn hour when the fate of the world is in the balance, ‘Let us take care to maintain a conscience that is void of offense toward God and man.’ ” A truly attentive listener might have found some holes in the tropes: “It is mandatory that we say what we mean, and mean what we say,” declared the minister, not considering
that it was Truman who excelled at the first and Dewey the second.

Peter had been attending church regularly since Labor Day, but this morning he was so preoccupied by other matters that when the organist began playing the recessional, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” he thought for a moment he was back in Grosvenor Square drinking the health of George VI. What he’d witnessed down on the riverbank twelve hours before kept his mind off the immediate scene. Was the Herrick kid still holed up in the castle with the bones of Jonathan Adams Darrell? Did his crazy mother have any idea he was there, or even alive? Peter searched the pews behind Dewey for Horace Sinclair but saw no sign of him. Presumably he was at home sleeping off his night’s labor; after the service, he was not on the church steps to hear Peter’s
Sun-Times
friend, as promised, ask the governor if he felt entirely comfortable with the money Owosso would soon be spending on its monument to his political success. The candidate replied, serenely: “I regard it as a delightful tribute to democracy and the wonderful town that produced me. I’m quite unworthy of it, but the people of Owosso have the good sense to decide such things for themselves.” And now, if you would excuse him, he was ready to escort Mrs. Dewey and their sons to the portion of the weekend they’d been looking forward to most: a turkey dinner at his mother’s house. “Good morning, gentlemen!” The departing worshipers applauded and set off after him down to 421 West Oliver, where some stayed all afternoon, gawking through Annie Dewey’s lace curtains.