The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (15 page)

“Stay here, boy,” she told him, resting a hand on top of his head. He wore a tattered shirt and pants given by church women from the last county they'd lived in, just over a week before. Barefooted, he stood shivering with his back to the fire, hands behind him, the way his father liked to stand.

On the porch, she pulled the latch closed behind her and peered into the weakly starred night. Movement. Then a lantern raised and a man in a duster coat and derby hat seemed to form out of the fabric of darkness. He wore a beard and spectacles that reflected the light he held above him.

“Would you tell me your name, miss?” he asked her.

She said it, her knuckles cold at her throat. She heard the door open behind her and stepped in front of it to shield Clay.

“This is my land you're on,” the man said, “and that's one of my tenant houses y'all are camped out in.”

Bess felt relief.
He's only here about the property.

“My husband,” she said. “He ain't home.”

“Miss,” the man said, “I believe I know that.”

Fear again. She came forward on the porch, boards loose beneath her feet, and stopped on the first step. The horse shook its head and stamped against the cold. “Easy,” the man whispered. He set the brake and stepped from the seat into the back of the wagon, holding the lantern aloft. He bent and began pushing something heavy. Bess came down the first step. Behind her, Clay slipped out the door.

The man climbed from the tailgate of the wagon and took a few steps toward her. He was shorter than she was, even with his hat and in his boots. Now she could see his eyes.

“My name is Mister Bolton,” he said. “Could you walk over here, miss?”

She seemed unable to move. The dirt was cold, her toes numb. He waited a moment, gazing past her at Clay. Then he looked down, shaking his head. He came toward her and she recoiled as if he might hit her, but he only placed a gloved hand on her back and pushed her forward, not roughly but firmly. They went that way to the wagon, where she looked in and, in the light of his lantern, saw her husband.

E. J. was dead. He was dead. His jacket opened and his shirtfront red with blood. His fingers were squeezed into fists and his head thrown back, mouth open. His hair covered his eyes.

“He was stealing from me,” Bolton said. “I seen somebody down in my smokehouse and thought it was a nigger. I yelled at him to stop but he took off running.”

“Stealing what?” she whispered.

“A ham,” Bolton said.

Bess's knees began to give way; she grasped the wagon edge. Her shawl fell off and she stood in her thin dress. Bolton steadied her, his arm going around her shoulders. He set the lantern on the floor of the wagon, by E. J.'s boot.

“I am sorry, miss,” Bolton said, a hand now at each of her shoulders. “I wish . . .”

Clay had appeared behind her, hugging himself, his toes curling in the dirt.

“Go on in, boy,” she told him. “Now.”

He didn't move.

“Do like your momma says,” Bolton ordered, and Clay turned and ran up the stairs and went inside, pulling the door to.

Bolton led Bess back to the porch and she slumped on the steps. He retrieved her shawl and hung it across her shoulders.

“My own blame fault,” he said. “I knew y'all was out here. Just ain't had time to come see you. Run you off.”

No longer able to hold back, Bess was sobbing into her hands, which smelled of smoke. Some fraction of her, she knew, was glad E. J. was gone, glad he'd no longer pull them from place to place, only to be threatened off at gunpoint by some landowner again and again. No more of the sudden rages or the beatings he gave her or Clay or some bystander. But, she thought, for all his violence, there were the nights he got only half drunk and they slept enmeshed in one another's limbs, her gown up high where she'd pulled it and his long johns around one ankle. His quiet snoring. The marvelous lightness between her legs and the mattress wet beneath them. There were those nights. And there was the boy, her darling son, who needed a stern hand, a father, even if what he got was one like E. J., prone to temper and meanness when he drank too much whiskey. Where would they go now, she asked herself, the two of them?

“Miss?” Bolton tugged at his beard.

She looked up. It had begun to rain, cold drops on her face, in her eyes.

“You want me to leave him here?” Bolton asked her. “I don't know what else to do with him. I'll go fetch the sheriff directly. He'll ride out tomorrow, I expect.”

“Yeah,” Bess said. She blinked. “Would you wait . . . ?” She looked toward the window where Clay's face ducked out of sight.

“Go on ahead,” he said.

Inside, she told the boy to take his quilt into the next room and wait for her.

When she came out, Bolton was wrestling E. J. to the edge of the wagon. Bess helped him and together they dragged him up the steps.

“You want to leave him on the porch?” Bolton huffed. “He'll keep better.”

“No,” she said. “Inside.”

He looked doubtful but helped her pull him into the house. They rolled him over on a torn sheet on the floor by the hearth. In the soft flickering firelight, her husband seemed somehow even more dead, a ghost, the way the shadows moved on his still features, his flat nose, the dark hollows under his eyes that Clay would likely have as well. She pushed his hair back. She touched his lower jaw and closed his mouth. Tried to remember the last thing he'd said to her when he left that afternoon. His mouth had slowly fallen back open, and she put one of the sweet potatoes under his chin as a prop.

Bolton was gazing around the room, still wearing his gloves, hands on his hips. Abruptly he walked across the floor and went outside, closing the door behind him. When he came back in, she jumped up and stared at him.

In one arm he held a bundle.

“This is the ham,” he said, casting about for somewhere to set it. When nowhere seemed right, he knelt and laid it beside the door. “Reckon it's paid for.”

He waited a few moments, his breath misting, then went outside, shutting the door. She heard it latch. Heard the wagon's brake released and the creak of hinges and the horse whinny and stamp and the wheels click as Mr. Bolton rolled off into the night. She went to the window and outside was only darkness. She turned.

Her fingers trembling, Bess unwrapped the cloth sack from around the ham, a good ten-pounder, the bone still in it. A pang of guilt turned in her chest when her mouth watered. Already its smoked smell filled the tiny room. She touched the cold, hard surface, saw four strange pockmarks in its red skin. Horrified, she used a fingernail to dig out a pellet of buckshot. It dropped and rolled over the floor. She looked at her husband's bloody shirt.

“Oh, E. J.,” she whispered.

The next morning, as Bolton predicted, Waite arrived. She left Clay in the back, eating ham with his fingers.

“I'm the sheriff,” he said, walking past her into the cold front room. He didn't take off his hat. His cheeks were clean-shaven and red from wind and he wore a red mustache with the ends twisted into tiny waxed tips. The silver star pinned to his shirt was askew, its topmost point aimed at his left shoulder.

Moving through the room, he seemed angry. When he saw E. J.'s old single-barrel shotgun he took it up from the corner where it stood and unbreeched it and removed the shell and dropped it in his pocket. He snapped the gun closed and replaced it. The door to the back room was shut, and glancing her way, he pushed aside his coat to reveal the white wood handle of a sidearm on his gun belt. Pistol in hand, he eased open the door and peered in. The little boy he saw must not have seemed threatening, because he closed the door and holstered his pistol. He brushed past Bess where she stood by the window and clopped in his boots to the hearth and squatted by E. J. and studied him. He patted the dead man's pockets, withdrew a plug of tobacco, and set it on the hearthstones. Watching, she felt a sting of anger at E. J., buying tobacco when the boy needed feeding. In E. J.'s right boot the sheriff found the knife her husband always carried. He glanced at her and laid it on the rocks beside the plug but found nothing else.

Waite squatted a moment longer, as if considering the height and weight of the dead man, then rose and stepped past the body to be closer to her. He cleared his throat and asked where they'd come from. She told him Tennessee. He asked how long they'd been here
illegally
on Mr. Bolton's property and she told him that too. Then he asked what she planned to do now.

She said, “I don't know.”

Then she said, “I want my husband's pistol back. And that shotgun shell too.”

“That's a bold request,” he said. “For someone in your position.”

“My ‘position.' ”

“Trespasser. Mr. Bolton shot a thief. There are those would argue that sidearm belongs to him now.”

Unable to meet his eyes, she glared at his boots. Muddied at the tips, along the heels.

“I'll leave the shell when I go,” he said, “but I won't have a loaded gun while I'm here.”

“You think I'd shoot you?”

“No, I don't. But you won't get the chance. The undertaker will be here directly. I passed him back yonder at the bridge.”

“I can't afford no undertaker.”

“Mr. Bolton's already paid him.”

Bess felt her cheeks redden. “I don't understand.”

“Miss,” he said, folding his arms, “the fact is, some of us has too little conscience, and some has too much.” He raised his chin to indicate E. J. “I expect your husband yonder chose the right man to try and rob.”

She refused to cry. She folded her arms over her chest and wished the shawl could swallow her whole.

“I have but one piece of advice for you,” the sheriff said, lowering his voice, “and you should take it. Travis Bolton is a damn good man. I've known him for over ten years. If I was you I would get the hell out of this county. And wherever it is you end up, I wouldn't tell that young one of yours who pulled the trigger on his daddy. 'Cause if this thing goes any farther, even if it's ten years from now, fifteen, twenty years, I'll be the one that ends it.” He looked at E. J. as he might look at a slop jar, then turned to go.

From the window, she had watched him toss the shotgun shell onto the frozen dirt and swing into his saddle and spur his horse to a trot, as if he couldn't get away from such business fast enough. From such people.

“Travis Bolton's a good man,” Waite repeated now, these years later, putting his hat back on. “And it ain't that he's my wife's brother. Which I reckon you know. And it ain't that he's turned into a preacher, neither. If he needed hanging, I'd do it. Hanged a preacher in Dickinson one time—least he said he was a preacher. Didn't stop him from stealing horses. Hanged my second cousin's oldest boy once too. A murderer, that one. Duty's a thing I ain't never shied from, is what I'm saying. And what I said back then, in case you've forgot, is that you better not tell that boy who killed his daddy. 'Cause if you do, he'll be bound to avengement.”

“Wasn't me told him,” she said. So quietly he had to lean in and ask her to repeat herself, which she did.

“Who told him, then?”

“The preacher's son hisself did.”

Waite straightened, his arms dangling. Fingers flexing. He looked at her dead boy. He looked back at her. “Well, Glaine ain't the man his daddy is. I'm first to admit that. Preacher's sons,” he said, but didn't finish.

“Told him at school, sheriff. Walked up to my boy in the schoolyard and said, ‘My daddy kilt your daddy, what'll you say about that, trash.' It was five years ago it happened. When my boy wasn't but thirteen years old. Five years he had to live with that knowing and do nothing. Five years I was able to keep him from doing something. And all the time that Glaine Bolton looking at him like he was a coward. Him and that whole bunch of boys from town.”

Waite took off his hat again. Flies had drifted over and he swatted at them. He rubbed a finger under his nose, along his mustache, which was going gray. “Thing is, Missus Freemont, that there ain't against the law. Young fellows being mean. It ain't fair, it ain't right, but it ain't illegal, either. What is illegal is your boy taking up that Colt that I never should've give you back and waving it around at the church like I heard he done last Sunday. Threatening everbody. Saying he was gone kill the man killed his daddy, even if he is a preacher.”

Last Sunday, yes. Clay'd gone out before dawn without telling her. Soon as she'd awakened to such an empty house, soon as she opened the drawer where they kept the pistol and saw nothing but her needle and thread there, the box of cartridges gone too, she'd known. Known. But then he'd come home, come home and said no, he didn't kill nobody, you have to be a man to kill somebody, and he reckoned all he was was a coward, like everybody said.

Thank God, she'd whispered, hugging him.

Waite dug a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his forehead. “Only thing I wish,” he said, “is that somebody'd come told me. If somebody did, I'd have rode out and got him myself. Put him in jail a spell, try to talk some sense into him. Told him all killing Bolton'd do is get him hanged. Or shot one. But nobody warned me. You yourself didn't come tell me. Travis neither. And I'm just a fellow by hisself with a lot of county to mind. One river to the other. Why I count on folks to help me. Tell me things.”

He looked again at her son, shook his head. “If he'd had a daddy, might've been a different end. You don't know. But when a fellow says—in hearing of a lot of witnesses, mind you—that he's gone walk to a man's house and shoot him, well, that's enough cause for Glaine Bolton and Marcus Eady to take up a post in the bushes and wait. I'd have done the same thing myself, you want the truth. And if your boy come along, toting that pistol, heading up toward my house, well, miss, I'd a shot him too.”