Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense (43 page)

“He'll never know of your approval. He died at approximately two thirty, and I regret that very much. I'd have liked to have known him better.”

He placed the rose on her desk. “For you. It's called a Bateau Blue.”

She breathed its fragrance with closed eyes. “It's beautiful. Thank you, Conner. But what about Olga—”

“Care to trade in that sticky bun raincheck for a dinner?”

She studied him for a moment. “I have the feeling that it won't be necessary to bring my mace.”

“All we'll do is talk like two sensible adults.”

She smiled. “Sounds like a dull evening, but I'll be pleased to accept, Mr. Conner.”

He met Grainger in the corridor again and held up a hand before the editor could speak.

“Don't derail my train of thought.” In his office, he slid behind his keyboard.

All of the people who had searched for Olga Bateau through the years had never thought to ask a gangly, fifteen-year-old kid if he knew anything. If they had, the kid would have made news.

He didn't write about people who made news. He wrote about people who would otherwise never be noticed.

Like a gaunt genius of a gardener with prominent ears and a blue baseball cap who grew blue roses, whose work few people had ever seen because it was on top of a hill where time had stood still for fifty years.

The mourners gathered
in small groups on the hillside, some under the red-leafed oak and others before the monuments to their own dead in the overgrown Irish cemetery. Aunt Hattie was back home in the kitchen seeing to supper for the “hungry folks after a funeral.” Aunt Sue, Uncle Joe's wife, stayed down to help her. So did Miss Tatum Harris, the telephone operator for Arkansas Bell in Republican. Miss Tatum had brought two of her lemon layer cakes to do for dessert. Her neighbor, Mrs. Loder Smith, the wife of the general store proprietor, went over to Miss Tatum's house to take the switchboard whenever trouble called the good lady away. Aunt Sue seemed low as she rolled and cut biscuits, but Aunt Hattie and the telephone operator kept up an effort to jolly her out of it.

The children—nieces and nephews of the dead man, Preacher's five young ones, and a few second cousins from Gilbert—were charged to be on their best behavior and to stay among the older graves at the top of the hill. Soon they were running through tall grass that tapped the spines of Irishmen one hundred years dead. Shrieks of happy laughter bounced off crumbling stone, and a game of marbles got under way on the bare, packed earth above Baby McDonough, 1865.

Sarah and Donald sat side by side in quiet dignity upon the granite slab of Lough MacDougal, the one stubborn old Scot to lie up in that Celtic hillock. They spoke in somber tones to honor their uncle's funeral day, and to impress their maturity on the younger children.

“Preacher says Elmo ain't goin' to heaven 'cause he's a pagan,” said Donald. At thirteen a deep furrow already showed between his brows.

“What's a pagan?” asked Sarah.

“Save they don't go to church and they're sinners, I'm not real sure,” he replied.

“Daddy said Aunt Hattie says he ain't goin' too, 'cept 'cause they cain't find him,” Sarah said.

“Uncle Abe ain't goin' to heaven neither?” asked Donald.

“No, silly, not Daddy,” she laughed, “Uncle Elmo. 'Cause they cain't find his body is how come he cain't get into heaven.”

“What difference does that make?” Donald asked.

Sarah mused the point and decided. “I guess you got to have your body with you when your soul goes.”

“'At don't sound right,” said Donald with a knowing nod. “People don't use their bodies in heaven. Only your soul goes to Jesus. Nobody'd drag along to heaven somethin' that's been in a hole.”

“All the same,” she replied, “Aunt Hattie says there cain't be no Christian burial, so he cain't go.”

“Maybe so,” Donald said, “but it don't matter none. If he was a pagan it ain't like he could of gone anyhow.”

Just then Preacher's son, Lavon, yanked Sarah's long hair. She cried out in more surprise than pain, but Donald had to beat him smartly for it anyway.

The sun was high and hot when Sarah's mother came up to get them. Marble players had to dust off the knees of their good dark britches, and Lavon had to tuck in the tail of his white shirt.

“Quieten down now,” said Mrs. Knox sternly, “and listen good.” There was a deal of drawer tugging and grimacing … and here and there a shove. “This ain't no play-party. Y'all are goin' to go down there an' stan' with your mommas. Don't stan' with Abe ner Joe, you hear? You stan' with your mommas. All a' Joe's children, you stan' with me.

“There won't be no flibbity-jibs in the prayin', neither. I plan to pray with one open eye, an' I see anybody actin' flighty, I'll pray right then an' there they get their bottoms blistered. There ain't a grave, but it's a funeral just the same.” She surveyed the group with the cold blue eye she'd probably chosen to keep open. “Anybody here wunder anythin'?” All small heads wagged no. If anyone was nursing a question, it wasn't likely to be about a point of etiquette. “Then you'll be walkin' down this hill behin' me.”

The people stood in a loose circle with Preacher at the southern end to keep the sun out of his eyes. Abe and Joe Knox were on his right, a space carefully reserved between their dark presences and the rest of the bereaved. Across the circle Donald watched them. He watched his father's jaw muscles work. He watched something still and fierce lying back in his eyes. He saw Uncle Abe pick a spot in the weeds and stare at it stolidly, standing as still as a graven man. The children switched and twisted, and had their eyes all over, only accidentally including heavenward.

Preacher dropped his chin into his bow tie and clutched the Bible in both hands up to his wheezy chest. The circle grew silent waiting for him to call Jesus to the meeting. Only the brush rustle at the edge of the woods sounded until God came loud and sudden, like near thunder. All the children and a few grown men started visibly.

“Lord!” Preacher boomed out sharply. “Hear your children callin' your precious name in a wilderness of sorrow. Help this poor sinner to find the words that will open their hearts to you, so they can feel your healing power today. Show mercy to the soul of Elmo Knox. I pray, Lord Jesus, that when he was layin' out in that ditch somewhere, he had time to repent and ask you to come into his life. I pray that any wrong he ever did is forgiven …”

Sarah listened at first, just like Sunday. The litany of Uncle Elmo's sins rolled out with the same cadence as mankind's from the pulpit, the sins written down in dark letters in Peter's book, the one he'll read from on the last day. Elmo Knox didn't go to church. He feared God so little that he didn't care who heard him blaspheme. He said God lived in trees and mountains and spoke in birdsong. He said river water was God's own blood. He said he was, himself, an animal no finer than a wood duck or worse than a bobcat. When he died off in the woods last summer, he lacked the foresight to make his remains available to box in fragrant Arkansas pine against the day of judgment. After a while Sarah ignored Preacher, just like Sunday, and dwelled in her mind on the dead man. She remembered the clear June day when she'd seen him last.…

T
HEY SAT IN
the shade with their backs against an outcrop of stone halfway down Sugarloaf. Sarah appreciated the many colors of sunlighted green and blue before her, though she formed no thoughts about it. Elmo watched a redtailed hawk make wide circles above a bend in Latter's Run, and he thought about the hawk as he watched it.

“Hawks are patient birds,” he said aloud. “They'll lay on the wind all day just waitin' for their best chance.” Sarah began to watch the hawk, too. “They don't kill very often,” he continued absently, “'cause it's hard. Try to kill somethin' with sharp eyes an' quick feet.” In a while the hawk drifted off his circle and headed east, away from the sun. Uncle Elmo spoke very pointedly then, and seemed to Sarah to be talking to the bird. “But sooner or later he'll kill. You can be sure of that. He has to.”

He turned suddenly to the girl. “Good hunters are patient. You remember that. Your daddy an' Uncle Joe an' me are all good hunters. It's patience makes it so. You gotta watch hawks.”

“I don't wanna kill animals,” Sarah spoke solemnly. “I wanna catch 'um like you do. Just catch 'um to look at, see 'um up close, an' turn 'um loose.”

“That's a good way,” he agreed. “It gives all the fun of huntin' without hurtin' anybody. Seems like you hurt ever'thin' if you hurt one thin'. Now an' again I don't even like to walk on grass. Did you ever try to figger how many little grubs an' bugs are under your feet when you tramp aroun'? Or that the grass itself could maybe holler, only you cain't hear?” He shook his head and looked out to where the hawk had been, but Sarah was sure he was seeing inside his own head. “You gotta be real careful, though,” he murmured. “Some animals ain't proper to catch.”

“We oughta get on, Uncle Elmo,” Sarah said half an hour later. “Momma'll have dinner on time we get there.”

They walked together down Sugarloaf and out the dirt road toward home. Elmo showed her a nuthatch. “Any time you see a little bird headin' nose down a tree trunk like a fly, you know it's a nuthatch.” He told her about the soft, pink pockets to be found in the pale belly fur of mother 'possums, and about their fearsome teeth and claws.

“You know, we could sure catch us a 'possum an' have a look,” he said. “A box trap's all we'd need if we get real familiar with a partic'lar 'possum.”

“We could fix up that ol' 'coon cage while we're waitin' to get to know a 'possum,” Sarah suggested brightly, already able to see the small gray creature snug behind chicken wire.

“Knoxes start learnin' patience an' thinkin' ahead when they're little-biddy baby birds …” said Uncle Elmo. His mouth smiled but his eyes didn't.

It was the next day that he walked alone into the woods. Even when her father and Uncle Joe had searched and come back without him, Sarah set about collecting a vegetable crate, heavy cord, and a stout stick to make a box trap for a mother 'possum.

P
REACHER WAS
making his closing salvos on the flown spirit of Elmo Knox while the assembled mourners “amened” and praised God. The child, Sarah, was the only crier on the hillside.

After the funeral everyone drove back down the hill to Republican. Aunt Hattie had dinner waiting: fried chicken and frog legs, baked bass and biscuits, rice and gravy, greens … everything steaming in crockery bowls on the big kitchen table. There were sliced tomatoes, fruit salad, and cold milk in a tall pitcher.

The women and babies ate in the kitchen. The men ate outside, some sitting on their running boards and others hunkered down nearby. The children sat on the gray, planked porch crosslegged like Indians or dangling skinny ankles off the sides. Sarah and Donald had the north end of the porch to themselves.

“I been thinkin',” Sarah mused aloud between bites of chicken leg. “I figger Uncle Elmo ain't dead.”

“'Course he's dead,” Donald returned flatly. “We were just to his funeral.”

“Yeah, but we didn't bury nobody, now did we?” she said with her little pointed chin tilted smugly. “We didn't have no box 'cause we didn't have no body, an' we didn't have no body 'cause he ain't dead.”

Donald considered this new thought carefully as his jaws worked over his plate.

“Looky here,” continued Sarah reasonably. “Uncle Elmo never could of got lost in the woods on account of him knowing woods so good. And he'd have to of got bad lost for my daddy not to find him, on account of him bein' such a good tracker. Hey, even your daddy'd of found him 'cept he was bad lost, an' he cain't get lost! You see! It's just simple that he ain't dead.”

“Well, where is he then?” asked Donald after a few moments to clear his mouth.

“New Orleans, I reckon,” she said with an airy shrug. “He always said how he'd like to see that big causeway over Lake Ponchetrain.”

The boy's eyebrows puckered and his lips pinched as he concentrated on Sarah's argument. At last he shook his head, slowly at first and then with violence.

“'At's stupid. 'At's just real stupid!”