The Ploughmen: A Novel (3 page)

It was dark among the trees and when the young man came into a clearing the snow lay deep and untrammeled, lit softly blue from the quarter moon and the stars swarming in the cloudless vault above the peaks. After a while the boles of the ponderosa and lodgepole revealed themselves from the blackness and then soon the lower branches hung with moss like hag’s hair, and small birds began to rouse and dart out before them like vanguards. The small stream he followed muttered beneath a thin pane of ice and among the topmost branches of the trees a faint wind was another secret voice and he stopped to listen. He peered ahead to the black rampart of timber. Maybe today, he thought. Maybe it will be today.

It was the first week in April and the deputy sheriff and his dog tracked a young woman separated from her skiing companions during a brief and vicious early spring storm at a forked drainage in the Crazy Mountains. A night and a day and another night had passed and on the following morning Valentine Millimaki on snowshoes set out from the trailhead in frigid darkness.

In the course of his duties with the Copper County Sheriff’s Department he spent time investigating rural crimes and he endured his required hours in the old jail building adjacent to the county courthouse, a grim edifice of sandstone blocks hewn by Croatian masons which in its earliest days had held cattle rustlers and horse thieves. But it was work outdoors that he loved, with the three-year-old shepherd dog tracking through the woods and brush and sudden canyons in wildlands where maps of some blank and forgotten corners were still mere suggestions of one’s place in the world.

Some he found scratched and bruised or limping aimlessly atop a fractured ankle with a tree branch for a crutch, some in the late stages of hypothermia doddering half-naked through drifts in pursuit of ghosts and visions. Hunters, hikers, felons afoot from stolen vehicles at the dead ends of logging roads. All alive. Thirteen months ago he’d found an autistic child, scratched and shivering in the timber in the rain with his lapdog clinched beneath his arm like a shabby carnival prize, limp and strangled. That had been the last. For over a year now there had been only bodies.

The dog was working well, lunging with difficulty through the heavy snow, and Millimaki told him so. “Good Tom. Find the girl.” The shepherd stopped to look at him, his tongue already hanging long from his mouth, and he lapped once at the snow and went on.

Millimaki halted briefly to examine new tracks quartering across their path. Prints of deer stove into the virgin snow, overlaid with those of a big cat. The hair along the dog’s back rose and his lip turned back quivering to show his gleaming teeth and Millimaki spoke to him again. Other tracks atop the new snow, hieroglyphics of mice and squirrels—frantic senseless diasporas into the perilous open where owls swept down spectral and silent as the night itself. Today, Millimaki thought again. Our luck may change today.

Some ten miles in she lay on her back in a trail under a dusting of new snow with a topographical map spread atop her chest as if in her bed she had fallen asleep reading. Tom sat on his haunches at the side of the trail cocking his ears at Millimaki, who squatted beside the woman, brushing away the snow from her face. He sat looking at her, so white, white as porcelain, her blue lips drawn tight as though in deep concentration, but for all that a peaceful sylvan sleeper, her skis and poles arrayed beside her neatly to be taken up after that brief consultation of the map.

The day was utterly silent and brilliant now, the sun at that hour straight overhead and the sky above the clearing where the woman had stopped was galleried by a coven of ghostly pinetops. Perhaps she’d stood gazing uncomprehendingly at the emerging stars, in their milky light superimposing the enormous order wheeling overhead onto the map that seemed to hold her life in its obtuse loops and lines. Perhaps she would lie down and from that vantage Polaris might appear, or another far sun that could reinstate her in the paradoxical world. For just a moment, a few short minutes. The unknowable stars looking down. A brief nap in the clearing in the starlight.

These are the things Valentine Millimaki imagined. A small bird came to sit on the branch of a tree and took in the scene—dog, man, statue—then flew. He watched it disappear into the sun. The young woman had lost a mitten and her bare hand lay atop the map. Wearing the snowshoes, Millimaki squatted with some difficulty. The dog sat watching him. He removed his own mitten and extended his hand and touched her wrist. As he touched all of them. What remained, he told himself, was not what they had been.

He stood and considered the long trek out and eventual return leg after hours of delay while protocol was satisfied. His day was just begun. His ungloved hand was numb and pale and he stood thwacking it clublike against his leg, the whop whop whop unreasonably loud in the sepulchral stillness. The dog looked at him quizzically. He said, “Let’s go, Tom.” The dog stood and circled once and looked from him to the woman in the snow. She slept on. “Come on. She’s all right now.”

*   *   *

Fifteen hours later, at home in his bed, Millimaki thought again of the woman sleeping alone beneath her cold white counterpane in the woods. His wife had stirred when he crawled in beside her, the chill still gripping his bones, phantom pack straps furrowing his back.

“I’m home,” he whispered. He shifted closer for the warmth of her, for the life in her. “I found her.”

“What?” She spoke from the edge of a dream, her words slurred. “Who?”

“The woman I was after, in the Crazies.”

“That’s good.” From far away, barely audible, she said, “That’s nice.”

“I didn’t get there in time.” In the darkness above his head he was seeing the woman again, blanched and rigid. “I didn’t make it.”

He’d wanted his wife to say she was sorry, that this epidemic of woodenness would soon end. That the next one would be alive and breathing and grateful. To say, “It wasn’t your fault, Val. It’s not ever your fault.”

“Oh, Val,” she said, “Please. Go to sleep. I need to sleep.”

He put his hand on his wife’s warm back and soon he felt through the heave of her ribs the slow rhythm of sleep. After a long while he slept. A wind out of the prairies of Alberta rattled the branches of the box elder trees against the house eaves and the cabin door shuddered in its jamb. It blew and drifted deep all night and the country in the clear blue dawn would be new and immaculate and anything lost in it would be lost until there was little to be found but bones.

He had saved her from that. He had done that at least.

*   *   *

The day following was Monday and after four scant hours of shallow sleep he dressed in the dark to not wake his wife. Lying beside her he was visited that night by the dream that in recent weeks was never far away. In it his mother’s mouth was not blue like the woman’s he had found earlier nor did it look as it did when as a boy he’d found her but was instead painted the color of cherries or of blood, horrible against the white of her doll’s-face.

Palsied and leaden he drove the blank white country through the coming dawn to assume his shift as court security for the old man who had recently taken up residence in the Copper County jail. The hills’ incipient green, so faint and tenuous it may have been merely a trick of the eye after months of white on gray, was utterly erased by the storm. Songbirds gathered stunned and mute in the cottonwoods along the creek and on the right-of-way fence wires and the roadway was smeared and littered with gore, deer come to feed on weeds exposed by the county’s plows grotesquely disassembled by tractor trailers careening through the dark toward Billings and Cheyenne. Millimaki stopped once to drag a young doe from the centerline of the highway, among the gray and glistening ropes of her umbles a tiny fawn spilling from its caul. Crows and magpies swarmed the humming powerlines overhead, awaiting the tender carrion and greeting with caws and croaks the plenitude of the refulgent day.

*   *   *

The day they’d gone for him, one week earlier, was a day so fine that Millimaki drove with his window rolled down, the ruddy road dust from the patrol car in front of him that seeped into the cab of little consequence because it made him believe in the possibility of spring.

The old man stood up from his chair as if to greet old friends. Millimaki walked down the short length of road behind the other men as instructed, Dobek advancing with his piece drawn and aimed at the man’s midsection, Wexler beside him with the shotgun, the barrel wandering dangerously as he quick-stepped through the grass grown up in the center of the lane. It was a mild day but Dobek’s shaved head gleamed with sweat. Wexler was pale, his prominent adam’s apple jerking in his throat.

Dobek called out as they approached, “Sit in the chair, asshole.” Gload showed his hands front and back like a magician and resumed his seat.

“Now on your feet.” Dobek and Wexler stopped ten feet short, their guns upraised. They were breathing hard as if they’d run a great distance. The old man put his hands on his thighs and rose with an air of detachment or boredom, unconcerned with the two black boreholes wavering lethally in front of him, his eyes instead searching the pale blue vault above in the direction of the river where he seemed to be expecting something to appear.

“Down on the fucking ground.”

“Up, down, up, down,” the old man said.

“Down in the fucking dirt, now,” Dobek bellowed. “Hands behind. Millimaki, get the bracelets on him.” Millimaki knelt and snapped the handcuffs in place. They were barely large enough to fit over the old man’s massive wrists, only two teeth of the ratchet end engaging the pawl.

Dobek, his round smooth dome gleaming, stood off several feet with his sidearm leveled at the old man’s broad back. One of the older deputies on the force, he wore a tailored uniform that now fit too tightly across his gut, and the short sleeves he favored revealed a faded USMC tattoo on one biceps and on the other some snarling animal—wolf or panther—it, too, indistinct, whether from age or maladroit artistry, but its message of predation was clear. He was an enforcer, a departmental bogeyman to be conjured when all reason failed to mollify prisoners gone mad in their cages. Now he motioned with his chin and the two younger men got Gload to his feet and Wexler began patting him down. In his agitated state he’d leaned the scattergun carelessly against the chair’s seat where it teetered, and Millimaki stepped around him and took it up and punched the safety on. Wexler ran his hands up and down the old man’s faded shirt and beneath his arms and moved to his feet, slapping and chopping up the bowed legs and finally leering up at the two other men as he squeezed the old man’s genitals, saying, “Nothing.”

“Who’s inside?” Dobek asked.

“No need to holler. I can hear as good as you.”

“I said, Who’s inside, goddamn it.”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody’s ass. We’ll see.” Dobek nodded to Wexler, who took up the shotgun, and they moved toward the rear door of the house. “Millimaki, keep your piece on this fuck.” He jerked the screen door open savagely and nodded Wexler to the fore and they banged through the main door in combat positions. The screen door, weather-checked and paintless, hung askew, the top hinge screws pulled nearly loose.

Gload had watched them enter his house and when he turned to Millimaki he wore an expression of deep sadness. “Now look what they done to that door.”

“That can be fixed easy enough.”

“It’s got some dry rot. You got to be gentle with it.”

Millimaki said, “Is anyone here?”

“Like I said, nobody.”

The deputy brushed the dirt and grass from the old man’s shirtfront and trousers and brought forward the chair for him to sit. Millimaki turned and looked at the wild orchard where spring was foretold by minute buds and the presence of tiny birds among the brambles. He noted crocuses in bloom along the walk and bright yellow flowers turned toward the sun.

“What are these?” he said. “Daffodils?”

The old man shrugged. He’d begun to watch the young deputy with interest.

Millimaki turned his back to the old man and studied the tangle of trees. “You might have wanted to cut these trees back without any mercy. It’s out of control in there.”

The old man stared at him with his mouth ajar.

Millimaki said, “What kind of apples are they?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” Gload said.

Millimaki ducked into the trees and, reaching to a high branch, picked an apple from the previous year that had somehow not fallen, shrunken and hard as ornamental fruit. He rolled it in his palms, sniffed it. Around him the small birds swirled, their tiny black eyes following his every move. John Gload watched him. He looked to the young man in the trees and he glanced at the door of his house where the two deputies had gone and he looked down the narrow lane to the county road beyond.

Millimaki came out of the trees. “Best guess is they’re some kind of old McIntosh,” he said.

Before the old man could reply, Dobek and Wexler banged out of the house, the older deputy at ease now and smirking and eating a pear he’d found inside. When he saw the two other men conversing, the older man sitting cross-legged in his chair, Millimaki once again examining the apple, the pear exploded out of his mouth. He sputtered, “Christ, Millimaki, I said put your piece on him. Did I not say that?” He’d holstered his sidearm and now he had it out again and pointed at the old man in the chair. “Wexler, did I not say to him, Put your piece on this piece of shit?”

“You did, Voyle. Definitely.”

“The fuck’s the matter with you?”

“Cuffed and sitting in a chair,” Millimaki said. “Where’s he gonna go?”

“Fuck.” Dobek looked from the young deputy to the old man, who placidly sat in his chair, cocking his long equine head carelessly to the trills and frantic fluttering of the springtime birds in his arbor. The old man’s insouciance seemed to enrage the veteran deputy and the flesh of his neck bulged above his uniform collar red as a coxcomb. “Fuck,” he said again. Wexler’s small blue eyes swung from Dobek to Gload and to Dobek again, reading the veteran’s face. He raised the scattergun to his waist, his finger massaging the trigger guard nervously. With his free hand Dobek thumbed a line of sweat from his forehead and slung it to the side.