Wingshooters (20 page)

I wish I could say my sympathy extended to Earl. I wish I could say I felt even a little sadness over his death, or horror at having witnessed it. But I didn’t. What I felt was satisfaction. For this man had done awful, inconceivable things, and now he would do them no longer. His son wouldn’t have to worry about being beaten anymore. His wife wouldn’t have to choose between her husband and her child. Mr. Garrett, whom he’d intended to be his next target, wouldn’t have to fear for his life.

But my gladness was more fundamental than that, was about more than his abuse being stopped. Earl had sinned, and I wanted him to suffer. I wanted him to feel intense, unspeakable pain. I wanted him to writhe on the ground even longer before my grandfather put an end to his misery. And I’d enjoyed it, I’d liked his agony, I wanted to see more of it. I didn’t wonder what this desire to watch another person suffer might have said about what was happening in me.

EPILOGUE

T
hey came back for Mrs. Garrett the next morning. Ray Davis drove out to the woods with the coroner, and they walked out to where the burn pile was. What they found there was Mrs. Garrett’s body wrapped in a burlap bag, which had already been doused with lighter fluid. She’d been shot just once, through the head. There were no other marks on her body, no further signs of violence or struggle. This might have been a relief to some people—Earl might have killed the woman, they said, but at least he didn’t do anything else to her—but it did not mean much to me. It seemed to me that a man who went to so much trouble to disguise the harm he’d caused his child would know how to hurt someone without leaving any visible proof. It seemed to me that Earl wasn’t the kind of man who would have let her go without making her suffer.

Earl’s body was still in the clearing too, and because there was only one coroner in town, both he and Mrs. Garrett were brought there and tended to by the same pair of hands. I can’t imagine what old Norm Holden must have thought as he went about his work. And because I knew more now about the town than I cared to, I wondered if it was difficult for him to handle Mrs. Garrett’s body, if it was harder than handling the body of the man who’d killed her.

Joe Garrett came back to Deerhorn to collect his wife’s body and to meet with the police. But other than Holden and Ray Davis and maybe the people who worked for them, nobody laid eyes on him, including me. I don’t blame Mr. Garrett for making a quick escape from the town that had taken his wife and unborn child. But the sudden absence of the people who’d been the focal point of so much attention was noticeable and dramatic. Their house had been a rental, and Mr. Garrett moved out so quickly it was as if they’d never even been there at all—but despite its good location and reasonable rent, the place would stand empty for months. After Christmas, Mrs. Hebig came back from maternity leave, and so her fifth graders finally got the teacher they’d been waiting for. Slowly, children who’d been pulled out of Deerhorn Elementary came trickling back to school, and things returned to some semblance of normal. When Joe Garrett left, nobody ever saw or heard of him again. His departure was as complete and permanent as his wife’s.

When I thought about Mrs. Garrett and Earl at the coroner’s, I sometimes wondered if their families had met. Of course, Norm Holden would have gone to great lengths to keep them separate. But sometimes I imagined Mr. Garrett and Alice Watson meeting in the waiting room. Would they have spoken? What would they have said to each other? Would they have exchanged accusations and blame? Or would they have been able to put their bitter feelings aside and unite in their common grief?

I don’t know what they would have done, but I do know that continuing to live there in Deerhorn was more than Alice Watson could bear. It wasn’t that her husband was vilified—in fact, it was just the opposite. Oh, there were a few people, Darius Gordon and Jim Riesling among them, who knew the truth about Earl and so wanted no part in the town’s collective revision of his memory. But mostly, people seemed to feel bad for him. He was under a lot of pressure at the gun shop, they said. He was having flashbacks from his war years. He finally got fed up with the accusations, they said, the false accusations about him and his son.

For that was how far they’d go in explaining his actions. It wasn’t simply that he had killed someone; it was that it was understandable, even justified, considering what the Garretts had subjected him to. Because Earl Watson, good Earl Watson, war hero and business leader and upstanding citizen, couldn’t possibly have burned and beaten his own child. The general facts of the murder had played out so publicly that they could not be covered up or disputed. And so instead people created a digestible reason for them—a justification that allowed them to remember Earl Watson in the most favorable possible light.

But Alice Watson couldn’t take part in this fiction, or maybe she just couldn’t keep living in a place where people knew so much about her family. Within six months she and Kevin had moved to her parents’ place in Wausau, which was only an hour from Deerhorn, but was far enough. Her older son, Jake, didn’t join them in the move. He continued to live in Deerhorn with one of his friends’ families, and I imagine he lives there to this day.

My grandfather’s fate was more complicated. Oh, he too was given the benefit of the doubt. Yes, he had shot Earl, people said—but only to protect his granddaughter, since Earl was crazy, and my life had been at risk. Because the shooting was seen as self-defense, he and Uncle Pete were not arrested, and there was never any talk of a trial. Charlie LeBeau had done what he had to do, and so he was forgiven.

Except he couldn’t forgive himself. He spent hours and hours alone now, sitting on the porch, or working on household projects in the basement. In the immediate aftermath of the killings he’d gone up to the coffee shop as usual, but the constant questions and morbid curiosity and even sympathy had gotten to him, and so he didn’t venture up there anymore. He had visitors—Ray Davis, Uncle Pete and Aunt Bertha, and even Jim Riesling, once. But mostly he stayed alone, not talking much to my grandmother, who made his meals and did his laundry and watched over him with a worried eye, but who didn’t know how to penetrate his sorrow.

The only person whose presence Charlie seemed to tolerate was mine. And since I was miserable and lonely and missing my dog (my clothes were still covered with his long white hair; we’d left out his bed and water bowl, still filled with water, as if he might return at any moment), I stayed around him as much as I could. One Saturday afternoon in February, Charlie called me out to the porch. He patted the couch and I scrambled up beside him. He threw an arm around my shoulders and took a gulp from his can of Pabst. Several empties stood on the table in front of him.

“In the spring,” he said, “I want you to help me plant the vegetable garden. Beans and potatoes, and cabbage and carrots, and maybe some corn and tomatoes. What do you say, Mike? Would you be interested in that?”

“Yes,” I said, and I imagined how good that would feel, working outside with my grandfather. But he had started to move more slowly now, even simple things like getting up off the couch were taking more visible effort, and it was hard to imagine him working a shovel or bending over to plant seeds in the earth.

“Or better yet—you’re getting old enough to have your own garden. Maybe we’ll give you a little patch at one end and you can plant whatever you want.”

“When will we do that, Grandpa?” I asked. We were in the heart of winter, and the ground was covered with snow, and it was hard to imagine a time when things flowered and grew instead of withering and dying.

He took another gulp and sighed. “I don’t know. When it’s warm enough. Hopefully in May. The groundhog went back into his hole, you know, so it looks like we’ll have a late spring.”

I rearranged myself so I was closer to him. “Don’t the Bombers start playing in May?” I asked. “Can we go to see a game?”

“Sure,” he said. “Sure. And maybe this summer, you and me can drive down to watch the Brewers.”

I sat up straight, excited in spite of my knowledge that Charlie did not like to travel. “Can we really, Grandpa?” I asked. And even though I knew that it would probably never happen, that he was just talking about it to please me, it made me happy anyway; it made me glad that my feelings were important enough for him to attend to.

He squeezed me tight around the shoulders and laughed. “Sure we can, Mike. Sure, kiddo. We can do whatever you want.”

We didn’t talk about the killings that day—we never did, actually—but there were things I wondered about even then, and those questions have only deepened with time. Why did Earl aim his gun at me, for instance, when he knew that Charlie would never let anyone hurt me? He must have realized that my grandfather would choose me over him, and maybe that’s why he did it. Maybe he wanted to make my grandfather choose and then have to live with his choice.

And I wondered something, too, about my grandfather’s actions. His first shot had hit Earl in the shoulder; Pete’s had hit him in the side. These did not have to be mortal blows, and they might have saved him if they’d gotten him to a hospital.

But Charlie hadn’t stopped with one shot. He’d gone after Earl a second time, and that time he’d shot for the kill.

Why did he do it? Why did he kill his best friend? Was it to save him from the shame that would surely ensue—the shame of Kevin’s scars and bruises, yes, but now also the shame of murder? Was it because he felt responsible for what Earl had done and so also felt bound to make up for it? Was it because he truly feared for my life—not only then, but into the future? Or was it because he knew something else, something that my grandmother and Father Pace and other people of faith can’t admit to—that there are sins for which there is no redemption?

Charlie didn’t make it to spring. He got up to plow the driveway one morning in March, and I was awakened by the familiar sound of the snowblower being started. But when that sound wasn’t followed by the usual noise of the machine making its long sweeps down the driveway, I knew that something was wrong. My grandmother and I both rushed out together and found him lying just inside the garage. She cried out, “Charlie!” and fell to her knees. His hands were clasped over his chest and his eyes were half-open. When I touched his face I felt the rough stubble there. The skin on his cheek was still warm.

It would be easy to say his death was of natural causes. It would be easy to say that years of eating fatty foods and drinking beer had hardened his arteries and weakened his heart, and maybe there would have been some truth to that explanation. But I believe that my grandfather died of heartbreak. He had already, for all intents and purposes, lost his only son, and the events of the last eight months had created an unbridgeable divide between him and the people who loved him most. He had sided with Earl Watson, stood by his friend and even stoked his anger—and then watched him die by his own hand. No one would ever know what these choices had cost him. But eventually, they might have cost him his life.

That summer, the summer of ’75, I moved out of my grandparents’ house. In the wake of Charlie’s death, my grandmother’s health began to fail; she could barely even take care of herself, let alone an unhappy child. At the end of the school year I was placed in the county group home just outside the town border with half a dozen other leftover children. For months, I hadn’t been doing my schoolwork or answering my teacher, and after Charlie died, I stopped speaking altogether. This wasn’t because of anything that anyone did—after what happened in the clearing, people left me alone, out of sympathy or because they no longer cared. Or maybe everyone was finally just tired of creating conflict where it didn’t need to be.

There was one exception, and that was Jeannie Allen. She left me alone all winter and spring, but one morning in late May, she stepped out on the sidewalk in front of her house and said, “Don’t think you’re off the hook.” I lowered my eyes and tried to walk by, but she took a step sideways to block me. “You don’t belong here,” she said. “Don’t think I forgot you!” I moved forward again, and now she shoved me with both hands. “Go on home! Go back to your country!” she insisted. “Nobody wants you, don’t you get it? That’s why your parents dumped you here.” And I didn’t move but Jeannie shoved me again, so hard I almost lost my footing. “I heard your
grandparents
didn’t even want you, but they
had
to take you in, ’cos no one else would take care of a half-breed. They—”

She didn’t finish, because I was on her. Although I was smaller, the combination of my anger and her surprise made it easy to knock her over. I hit her like a linebacker, both arms around her body, and shoved her down onto the pavement. I straddled her chest and held her hands and punched her twice, three times in the face. Then I wrapped my hands around her throat, digging my thumbs so deeply into her flesh that the nails drew blood. I felt her try to pull my hands away, saw her eyes bulge with pain and fear. I watched all of this calmly, quietly, and I don’t know what would have happened if her father hadn’t come out and pulled me off.

My encounter with Jeannie led to a conclusion that my silence had not—that something was seriously wrong with me. It was said that I’d endured too much for a child to handle—the deaths of Earl Watson, Mrs. Garrett, my dog, and my grandfather; a gun pointed straight at my head. It was said that my mind was addled because my parents had abandoned me—and since we hadn’t heard from my father in seven months now, there was no way to tell him what had happened. It was said that the group home would be good for me; I would have structure and the very best counseling there, which would help me come to terms with all the things that had happened and eventually improve my behavior.

The truth was, my behavior had started to change even before my grandfather died. It could be that the therapists were partially right, that I’d been altered and numbed by all the deaths. But the biggest loss was more complex than that, and harder to define. For weeks after that night in the clearing, something had bothered me, something beyond all the obvious traumas. And after that day on the porch with my grandfather, I finally understood what it was. It was what my grandfather had said as he held Earl’s body, the anguished cry that Earl shouldn’t have let it get this far, it wasn’t worth it, that he’d done it all for nothing. He had shot Earl to keep him from shooting me—I knew that, everybody knew that. But by what he said to Earl’s body in his moment of despair, it was clear that the Garretts weren’t a part of it. He was not avenging them or defending them or punishing Earl; he didn’t think about the Garretts at all. For Charlie, the equation had been simple—his grandchild or his friend. That the Garretts were involved was incidental.

This, to me, was unbearable. It was unbearable because my grandfather didn’t care for a human life, for a woman—and a couple—who had been kind to me. It was unbearable because Mrs. Garrett’s death meant as little to him as the deaths of the deer he had hunted. Yes, he’d been willing to turn Earl in, but that had more to do with his innate sense of justice than with the value of the life that was lost.