“Yes,” I lied. “Lost them from a gum infection.”
“When I came out that day just after she ran off, your boy said she took her good jewelry.”
“Yes.” The jewelry that was now in the well.
“When I asked if she could have laid her hands on any money, you mentioned 200 dollars. Isn’t that right?”
Ah yes. The fictional money Arlette had supposedly taken from my dresser. “That’s right.”
He was nodding. “Well, there you go, there you go. Some jewelry and some money. That explains everything, wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t see—”
“Because you’re not looking at it from a lawman’s point of view. She was robbed on the road, that’s all. Some bad egg spied a woman hitch-hiking between Hemingford and Lyme Biska, picked her up, killed her, robbed her of her money and her jewelry, then carried her body far enough into the nearest field so it couldn’t be seen from the road.” From his long face I could see he was thinking she had probably been raped as well as robbed, and that it was probably a good thing that there wasn’t enough of her left to tell for sure.
“That’s probably it, then,” I said, and somehow I was able to keep a straight face until he was gone. Then I turned over, and although I thumped my stump in doing so, I began to laugh. I buried my face in my pillow, but not even that would stifle the sound. When the nurse—an ugly old battle-axe—came in and saw the tears streaking my face, she assumed (which makes an ass out of you and me) that I had been crying. She softened, a thing I would have thought impossible, and gave me an extra morphine pill. I was, after all, the grieving husband and bereft father. I deserved comfort.
And do you know why I was laughing? Was it Jones’s well-meaning stupidity? The fortuitous appearance of a dead female hobo who might have been killed by her male traveling companion while they were drunk? It was both of those things, but mostly it was the shoe. The farmer had only stopped to investigate what the coydogs were fighting over because he’d seen a ladies’ patent leather shoe in the ditch. But when Sheriff Jones had asked about footwear that day at the house the previous summer, I’d told him Arlette’s canvas shoes were the ones that were gone. The idiot had forgotten.
And he never remembered.
When I got back to the farm, almost all my livestock was dead. The only survivor was Achelois, who looked at me with reproachful, starveling eyes and lowed plaintively. I fed her as lovingly as you might feed a pet, and really, that was all she was. What else would you call an animal that can no longer contribute to a family’s livelihood?
There was a time when Harlan, assisted by his wife, would have taken care of my place while I was in the hospital; it’s how we neighbored out in the middle. But even after the mournful blat of my dying cows started drifting across the fields to him while he sat down to his supper, he stayed away. If I’d been in his place, I might have done the same. In Harl Cotterie’s view (and the world’s), my son hadn’t been content just to ruin his daughter; he’d followed her to what should have been a place of refuge, stolen her away, and forced her into a life of crime. How that “Sweetheart Bandits” stuff must have eaten into her father! Like acid! Ha!
The following week—around the time the Christmas decorations were going up in farmhouses and along Main Street in Hemingford Home—Sheriff Jones came out to the farm again. One look at his face told me what his news was, and I began to shake my head. “No. No more. I won’t have it. I can’t have it. Go away.”
I went back in the house and tried to bar the door against him, but I was both weak and one-handed, and he forced his way in easily enough. “Take hold, Wilf,” he said. “You’ll get through this.” As if he knew what he was talking about.
He looked in the cabinet with the decorative ceramic beer stein on top of it, found my sadly depleted bottle of whiskey, poured the last finger into the stein, and handed it to me. “Doctor wouldn’t approve,” he said, “but he’s not here and you’re going to need it.”
The Sweetheart Bandits had been discovered in their final hideout, Shannon dead of the counterman’s bullet, Henry of one he had put into his own brain. The bodies had been taken to the Elko mortuary, pending instructions. Harlan Cotterie would see to his daughter, but would have nothing to do with my son. Of course not. I did that myself. Henry arrived in Hemingford by train on the eighteenth of December, and I was at the depot, along with a black funeral hack from Castings Brothers. My picture was taken repeatedly. I was asked questions which I didn’t even try to answer. The headlines in both the World-Herald and the much humbler Hemingford Weekly featured the phrase GRIEVING FATHER.
If the reporters had seen me at the funeral home, however, when the cheap pine box was opened, they would have seen real grief; they could have featured the phrase SCREAMING FATHER. The bullet my son fired into his temple as he sat with Shannon’s head on his lap had mushroomed as it crossed his brain and taken out a large chunk of his skull on the left side. But that wasn’t the worst. His eyes were gone. His lower lip was chewed away so that his teeth jutted in a grim grin. All that remained of his nose was a red stub. Before some cop or sheriff’s deputy had discovered the bodies, the rats had made a merry meal of my son and his dear love.
“Fix him up,” I told Herbert Castings when I could talk rationally again.
“Mr. James… sir… the damage is…”
“I see what the damage is. Fix him up. And get him out of that shitting box. Put him in the finest coffin you have. I don’t care what it costs. I have money.” I bent and kissed his torn cheek. No father should have to kiss his son for the last time, but if any father ever deserved such a fate, it was I.
Shannon and Henry were both buried out of the Hemingford Glory of God Methodist Church, Shannon on the twenty-second and Henry on Christmas Eve. The church was full for Shannon, and the weeping was almost loud enough to raise the roof. I know, because I was there, at least for a little while. I stood in the back, unnoticed, then slunk out halfway through Reverend Thursby’s eulogy. Rev. Thursby also presided at Henry’s funeral, but I hardly need tell you that the attendance was much smaller. Thursby saw only one, but there was another. Arlette was there, too, sitting next to me, unseen and smiling. Whispering in my ear.
Do you like how things have turned out, Wilf? Was it worth it?
Adding in the funeral cost, the burial expenses, the mortuary expenses, and the cost of shipping the body home, the disposal of my son’s earthly remains cost just over $300. I paid out of the mortgage money. What else did I have? When the funeral was finished, I went home to an empty house. But first I bought a fresh bottle of whiskey.
1922 had one more trick left in its bag. The day after Christmas, a huge blizzard roared out of the Rockies, socking us with a foot of snow and gale-force winds. As dark came down, the snow turned first to sleet and then to driving rain. Around midnight, as I sat in the darkened parlor, doctoring my bellowing stump with little sips of whiskey, a grinding, rending sound came from the back of the house. It was the roof coming down on that side—the part I’d taken out the mortgage, at least in part, to fix. I toasted it with my glass, then had another sip. When the cold wind began to blow in around my shoulders, I took my coat from its hook in the mudroom, put it on, then sat back down and drank a little more whiskey. At some point I dozed. Another of those grinding crashes woke me around three o’clock. This time it was the front half of the barn that had collapsed. Achelois survived yet again, and the next night I took her into the house with me. Why? you might ask me, and my answer would be, Why not? Just why the hell not? We were the survivors. We were the survivors.
On Christmas morning (which I spent sipping whiskey in my cold sitting room, with my surviving cow for company), I counted what was left of the mortgage money, and realized it would not begin to cover the damage done by the storm. I didn’t much care, because I had lost my taste for the farming life, but the thought of the Farrington Company putting up a hog butchery and polluting the stream still made me grind my teeth in rage. Especially after the high cost I had paid for keeping those triple-goddamned 100 acres out of the company’s hands.