Knife River, page 21
“Likewise, Monsignor,” I said, and he chuckled aloud.
“I was sorry to hear of the recent misfortune out in the woods. I understand it was a fatal malfunction of some kind. Is that what brings you here?”
“I promised someone I’d light a candle for the deceased.”
“I’ve always appreciated that you are a man of your word,” he said and gestured toward the transept. “As you know, the votive stand is just over there. You’ll find the oratory in the small space next to it.”
I slid a few bills into the offering box and lit three candles contained in pebbled glass vessels of deep crimson. I lit a fourth one for Ian Swann, then stood silently, watching the wick take the flame. In the distance, I could hear the faint echoes of the choir rehearsing the upcoming Easter mass, and I moved through the nave toward the door.
“Go in peace, Sheriff,” Monsignor Turner called out as I reached for the cold iron handhold.
“Thank you, Monsignor, I intend to,” I said. “But it doesn’t always work out that way.”
INTERLUDE V
(1964)
THE AFTERNOON was rapidly fading, and Shane Swanson had begun to feel the familiar press of anxiety that arose when he was left alone too long. It used to be a rare occasion when neither his brother nor father were home to keep him company, but it was happening more and more now that Paul had made the high school baseball team and his father had been taking on odd jobs and pickup work as a handyman for extra money.
It wasn’t all bad, though, to have the house all to himself. He could pretty much do what he wanted, like play a record on the hi-fi, or take a drink of milk right out of the bottle. He just didn’t like it when it started to get dark.
Shane tried to distract himself by watching television, but the picture was all crumpled up. He tried to adjust the rabbit ear antenna but only seemed to make the Portland stations even more fuzzy than they were before. He switched it off, watched the tiny blue dot at the center of the picture tube fade away. When Shane was little, his brother Paul told him to gently rub the dot with his forefinger to erase it. Now that he was older, he knew that Paul was just making a joke. But Shane still remembered it.
He had to get his mind off the thoughts that were starting to swirl inside his head. The train sounds and the car sounds, all the scary noises from outside. Shane wandered to his father’s room, where he had recently discovered a small collection of men’s magazines underneath his bed. He slid one from the pile and thumbed through the pictures inside; soon, he started to feel light-headed and an uncertain heat rose up his neck. Shane didn’t know very many girls in real life. He really didn’t know any girls. Except for Paul’s girlfriend, Heather. She was pretty. And only a bike ride away. A long ride, but worth it.
Shane replaced the magazine where he’d found it, thought about playing the radio and singing along with it, like his brother did sometimes. But then he got a better idea.
Half an hour later, he was crouching in the low shrubs, his bicycle stashed inside the shadows thrown by the low ebb of the sun as it began to slide behind the mountains.
THE WINDOWS of her house were warm and yellow, woodsmoke streaming from the chimney. The nights were getting longer now, and it dawned on him that soon it would be too cold and rainy to do much of this kind of thing for a while. At least, not until it was summertime again.
Shane knew which room was Heather’s, which window to watch and wait for. Sometimes he would see her there, talking on the phone, or dancing by herself in front of her record player, or sometimes, if he was lucky, changing her clothes. Once he had even seen her stepping out from the shower and brushing her wet hair before the full-length mirror on her wall.
Shane felt that weird feeling down there again, the heat in his stomach, and the dryness in his mouth. There was so much he didn’t understand, so many changes happening and the thoughts that crossed his mind, thinking different things now than he used to. But tonight it seemed like there was something else. She wore a strange expression on her face, and he could see her exposed breasts between the open buttons of her blouse. And that weird feeling again down there. She looked so unhappy, though. Scared, even. Shane couldn’t be sure.
He stepped closer to Heather’s window, knowing better than to stand so close that the light wash from indoors would reveal his presence. He couldn’t help it, but the feelings in his loins grew more intense as he watched, blood rushing through his veins and making his skin feel warm and clammy like it had the last time.
Then all at once, the heat in his stomach turned to ice and his scalp constricted as if a length of bale wire had been torqued tight across his head. Someone else was inside the room with her. Someone he thought he recognized.
Shane’s own astonishment and curiosity drew him closer to the glass, and he couldn’t help himself, even though he risked being revealed in the glow. But it all happened so fast after that.
The window sash was suddenly thrown open, squealing in protest as it was thrust beyond the checkrail, and Shane recoiled backward into the trees, too late.
Shane retrieved his bike and began to push it through the undergrowth, vines and creepers tangling the forest floor as he made his escape through the woods, and an angry voice called out from Heather’s open window.
“I saw you out there, you little sonofabitch! If you say one goddamn word about this, I will gut you like a pig. I swear to god, I will gut you like a goddamn pig!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I GAVE UP PACING back and forth across the living room floor at about four o’clock that morning, quietly got dressed, and took Wyatt the dog with me down the path to Caleb’s cabin. The predawn air was chilled, my breath clouding in the dark, the atmosphere dead silent but for a pair of owls calling to each other out of the depths of the old-growth forest. Overhead, the moonless sky was so clear I could see the Milky Way. I switched on my flashlight, cut it back and forth across the path, and let Wyatt take the lead along the incline that led up to Caleb’s porch.
The light fixture beside the door flicked on as soon as my boot soles touched the top step, and I heard the throw of the deadbolt from inside. The door cracked open slightly, with Caleb standing in the narrow breach gripping a Winchester .30-.30 in his right hand, its barrel poking out into the cold, aimed squarely at my chest. He lowered the Winchester when he recognized it was only Wyatt and me standing in the yellow wash of light.
“Well, look who drifted back to his own ranch,” Caleb said, his vocal cords rusty with sleep.
He had two days of gray stubble on his chin, was wearing a heavy wool bathrobe over his nightshirt and had stepped into deerskin slippers, his battered gray Stetson hat screwed onto his head. Caleb pulled the door just wide enough to let us pass inside, then shut it tight against the nearly freezing morning. He leaned the Winchester against the wall and I followed him as he ambled into his kitchen, watched him scoop coffee out of a tin can and into the percolator.
“I see you dropped by empty-handed,” Caleb said as he filled the pitcher with tap water and plugged it in.
“The ladies were still sleeping, and I didn’t want to wake them.”
“Everybody’s still sleeping,” he said and cocked an unruly eyebrow at me. “You may not have noticed that while you and your dog were taking your hike out there in the dark.”
I started to speak, but he cut me off before I had uttered my first word.
“Hold on for a minute,” he said. “My brain’s still wearing its pajamas, and I ain’t had my coffee yet.”
Caleb moved into the living room, then knelt and swung open the door of the woodstove. He struck a lucifer match on the stone hearth, blew on the kindling, and adjusted the air vent as he warmed his palms against the growing flames before shutting the door.
“Coffee ought to be ready by now,” he said. “How ’bout you go pour us a couple of mugs and bring ’em in here. It’s hard to get motivated to move too far away from this fireplace.”
I did as he asked and came back and took a seat on the hearth, the riverstone already warmed by the blaze.
“Lily Firecloud came to see me yesterday,” I said.
“Is that so? I always liked that girl—she’s got backbone,” Caleb said. “How’s she doing? How’s her little boy? What’s his name again?”
“Charlie. They both seem good. Little Charlie isn’t so little anymore; he’s ten or eleven years old now.”
“Goddamn, but time moves along, don’t it?”
“That’s why I came down to see you this morning.”
“Can’t help you stop time, son. Wish’d I could.”
“Lily said she had a dream that she needed to see me about. Said she needed to tell me she thought maybe the accident the other night had something to do with what happened all those years ago at the McEvoy farm.”
“The place that just burned down?”
“Yep.”
He closed his eyes, but only for a moment. The traces of a personal thought crossed his features, then he looked up at me and shook his head.
“I assume Ms. Firecloud was referring to the girl they found dead there, back in the sixties?”
I nodded.
“Thing is, I don’t remember anything about it,” I said. It was becoming an increasing source of frustration to me that I had no recollection of an incident as perverse and gruesome as this was proving itself to be.
“No reason you should remember,” Caleb said. “You and Jesse had just got married and were raising a little girl. On top of that, you’d just come back here, taking the reins of the ranch from your daddy after he died. I think you had your hands full, Ty. Besides, there wasn’t nobody too excited to dwell on the matter anyhow. If you didn’t study the newspaper or drink in the bars every day, you wouldn’t have heard much about it. This country had just had a president murdered by some idiot in Dallas, and we were all watching the Vietnam body count on the news every goddamn night of the week; we didn’t need to go looking for more misery.”
Caleb’s reminder contained the ring of truth. I had turned away from gossip back then, my sleep already burdened by nightmares I’d brought home from overseas, and I had never been one to borrow trouble in the first place. I appreciated the absolution Caleb was offering me now, but I was still troubled by a vague sense that those years of my absence from this place had taken something irreplaceable from me.
“From what I understand,” I said. “The victim was just a kid, a teenager. Seems like somebody should have done something about that.”
“People make choices,” Caleb said simply.
“Not everybody gets to choose from good options.”
“That’s a fact,” he said. “Still, everybody knew that girl’s death wasn’t a blister that came up after a short walk, I can tell you that much.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“A lot of the scuttlebutt around town was just that: nothing more than rumor and speculation. But in my experience, that young girl’s daddy, Gavin Lomax, was a belligerent hothead; and that Jacob Swanson was simple white trash. Nobody liked either of ’em overly much, and them two men didn’t like each other. When it was all said and done, nobody in town really cared about them either way. Sure it was sad, but after they found that girl in the tree, the sheriff could hardly wait for the whole thing to go away. I figure most of the town agreed with him for one reason or another.”
“I saw a photo of the scene in an old copy of the Post. Lloyd Skadden was in it, together with somebody else, but I couldn’t tell who the other man was.”
“Probably Doc Brawley,” Caleb said. “He was the only doctor around here back then. Also served as the coroner at the time; chief cook and bottle washer, too, most likely.”
“Nobody in town thought it was strange there was no follow-up on the case?”
“Expectations regarding law enforcement was pretty low in those days, Ty. Lloyd Skadden wasn’t a lawman, he was a two-bit politician. He wouldn’t know to pour piss out of a boot if it had instructions wrote right there on the heel. He only got the sheriff’s job as a favor to his daddy.”
What Caleb was describing was just as Lily Firecloud had told it to me: a rural population with a negligible expectation of investigation, or even a simple explanation of what happened, neither of which had ever been delivered. And as is the tendency in small towns, legends grow larger with time, facts get lost and metastasize to rumor, innuendo, and outright fabrication. It came as no surprise to hear that both the Swanson and Lomax families moved away in the wake of the tragedy, and I had little doubt that both households expected the entire county to come after one or the other of them with pitchforks and torches if they’d stuck around.
“What was the pronouncement as to the cause of death?” I asked.
“Pronouncement?” Caleb said, his tone freighted with irony. “Wasn’t no pronouncement. But I do recall the fancy language from the newspaper. Doc said it was death by ‘external pressure on the neck.’ Why in the hell do they have to talk like that? Why not just say hanging?”
“Those words don’t mean the poor girl hung herself,” I said. “Somebody else could have done it to her. Or could have strangled her beforehand and obscured it with a rope. Still, they labeled it a suicide? And that was the end of it? Simple as that?”
“They said there wasn’t no way to know for sure, there being no note or nothing like that left behind. Ruled it a ‘death by misadventure.’ Ain’t that something? Misadventure.” Caleb sipped at his coffee and his attention wandered out beyond the darkened window for several seconds before he continued. “When Sheriff Skadden cleared everybody involved of wrongdoing, they all skedaddled out of here right damn quick.”
“Where to?”
Wyatt sidled up beside me and curled up at my feet, and Caleb’s train of thought appeared to glide away again.
“Where’d they go, Caleb?” I repeated.
Caleb shrugged and gazed into the firebox as he opened the door and fed a branch of cut cedar into the flames and watched them sputter to life.
“Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t pay attention to it anymore. The whole episode was so sad and pointless. I was glad to see an end to it. I suspect everybody else around here was, too.”
Caleb set down his coffee cup, stretched his arms, and yawned. He combed his mustache with his fingers and looked into my face.
“Why’s this thing got you fussed up so much, Ty? That happened a long time ago.”
“I don’t know for sure. Lily Firecloud thinks she recognizes the musician, Ian Swann, from years ago. Thinks she saw him here in Meridian back in the day. Swann, Swanson. Wouldn’t be much of a stretch. Performers use stage names all the time.”
“Anybody else think the same thing as you?”
“I talked to Lankard Downing.”
Caleb chuffed and took another gulp of his coffee.
“What’d that old bastard have to say about it?” Caleb asked.
“Said he was a drunk back then and didn’t remember too many details about it.”
“He ain’t lying about that, that’s for damn sure.”
“Downing said he didn’t recognize the kid, but he didn’t want to talk about it, either.”
I reached down and scratched Wyatt behind the ears. He groaned and wagged his tail once and sprawled out on his side.
“You might want to try and speak with ol’ Doc Brawley’s widow,” Caleb said. “Assuming you ain’t done it already. Ruth was his nurse, you remember.”
“I was thinking I might do that,” I said.
Outside the window, the purple luminosity of false dawn paled the sky, the winking constellations disappearing one by one. The horned owls continued hooting to each other as the silhouettes of towering sequoias revealed themselves against a background of speckled velvet.
“You know,” Caleb said, “somebody told me once that horses’ brains are wired differently from you and me. Something about the way they see things allows them to see two completely different images of their surroundings at the same time. Can you imagine that?”
“That’s got to be a might confusing, but I’m beginning to feel a little bit that way myself.”
“You’d think it would be, wouldn’t you? Sit down and I’ll fix you some breakfast, son. You’re looking peaked, and by the expression on your face, I strongly suspect you’re fixing to have another long day ahead of you.”
CALEB AND I finished a breakfast of fried eggs, biscuits, and bacon; then we washed the pots, pans, and plates and left them to air-dry in the sink. By the time we had finished, it was full light outside, the sounds of horses and hired hands already busying themselves at the snubbing pen.
Morning had broken across the valley at once, a sudden incursion of daybreak, golden sunlight and white clouds floating low on the blue sky as we stepped outside. Off to the west, a layer of brown dust hung in the air above the North Pasture, where Taj Caldwell was disking the soil behind the Massey Ferguson, turning under the red clover we’d planted as a crop rotation, the breeze redolent with the smell of damp earth and cut grass.
“Let’s hobble on over and see what them boys are up to,” Caleb said. “Whatever you’ve got on your list can wait a few more minutes.”
Caleb and I wandered down to the corral, where three of my men were saddling an unwilling and unsettled mustang. I leaned my elbows on the fence and watched New Guy fit a hackamore over the horse’s recalcitrant head. I wondered again at the singular life of a cowboy, their culture and customs utterly unique to this life, this world of cattle and horses and wide open country, viewing their world from between the ears of a horse. These are men who work hard at a difficult, demanding, and dangerous job. Their hours are long, their wages are low, but their lifestyle is one that none of us would ever trade for anything else in the world.
