Beast of the Field (27 page)

39.

In the Neuwalds’ kitchen, Geshen had emptied half of a mason jar of whisky.  He had almost cried, he had cackled, he had talked to himself the entire time.  He had gone silent.  All of it terrified Millie.  Now, he stared at Millie with wet, searching eyes.  She didn't know what he was searching for, but she was scared he'd find it.  He fell from his chair at one point, laughing, then swearing, and while on the floor called for out for Miss Flora as though she were his mother. 

Millie searched the windows for a sign of help.  She listened for someone, something to come to her.  She was too scared to know better than to not expect help to come.  Behind her back she tried to unknot the twine.  It was tight enough to pinch the air from her hands, fingers, feet and toes.  She couldn't get it to loosen even the tiniest bit.

Geshen saw her struggling against the twine.  He wrapped his hand around the front of her neck, brought his forehead in to touch hers.  His breath could almost be seen when he spoke.

"Don't you....  You stop that now.  I promise this aint going to hurt none."

She did not what “this” was, and did not know whether to be relieved  or not when she heard the dogs in the barn barking away again, then the sound of an engine and the popping and scrunching of gravel under the tires of a car.  The pickup stopped directly in front of the kitchen door.  In the headlamps' dusty light she saw the silhouette of Jonas and Gomer Neuwald.  She heard Gomer speak but did not hear what he said.  The lights of the truck snapped off, leaving
only the candle on the table in front of Millie.  Geshen straightened up in his chair as his father took the steps.  Mr. Neuwald opened the screen door, let it bang closed behind him.

"I can smell you outside, boy."

Geshen had nothing to say to this.

Outside, Gomer yelled at the dogs to shut up, but they were barking too loudly to hear him.  "Damn dogs," said Mr. Neuwald.  "Well boy, I hope you're drunk enough to go get that Pink down from that tree and disappear him."

"What about her?" Geshen said.  His head swung over so his eyes could attempt to focus on her.  He could barely find her face.

Mr. Neuwald was sober.  He stepped over to her chair.  In his hand was the cloth mask he had been wearing; he now let this flop to the kitchen table.  He then began to untie the twine around her middle.  "Gal, why you always where you aint supposed to be?" he whispered to her.  He did not look her in the eyes.  The knot came undone.  A large portion of the twine fell loose to her lap and around the back of the chair. 
"A little girl like you, snooping around."  He got to one knee, loosened the twine around her feet, which came off easily.  Lastly were her hands.  The knots were tight, and he never did get them free; but he kept her company while he tried.  "Trespassing on someone else's property is no small thing.  I would of thought your pa would have taught you a thing or two.  Maybe he aint as smart as we all thought, for all his land and fancy machines.   Maybe all the smarts he got was for farming."

"Maybe, Pa..."

"Shut it, boy.  Go get your brother."  He turned back to Millie.  He studied the handkerchief she had binding her mouth.  He decided to leave it on. "I guess that's why his kids keep dying, 'cause the man don't teach 'em how to live."  He gave up on the knot at her wrists.  Instead helped himself to a shot of whisky.  Both his sons returned to the kitchen, Gomer panting and standing at attention, Geshen propped up against the jamb of the open screen door.  "Geshen, go get that Pinkerton man down before someone comes looking for him. 
Git! 
Gomer..."  He was staring back at Millie, right into her eyes now.  "You got you a job to do too."

The dogs in the barn suddenly came out of their skin barking.  Millie saw the huge shadow within the shadows before the Neuwalds did.  She knew the walk, she knew the size.  He stopped beside the pickup, bent to the ground, picked up Geshen's discarded torch.  On it still there were writhing embers.  With one powerful breath Junior gave it flame again, showing Millie a face that was her brother's—she could tell this—but had deep cut lines across the brow and a stony mouth and a shining darkness in the eyes she had never seen before. 

Now Mr. Neuwald saw the flame in the corner of his eye.  He started, turned, dropped his whisky glass to the floor.  "Sumbitch, it's Junior.  Gomer!"

It was too late.  Junior kicked his arm back and sent that torch end over end into the window of the living room.  It showered flame into the room as it broke through the window, and it was by the light of this quickly spreading flame in the next room that Millie watched the fight in the kitchen.

At his father's command Gomer brought his rifle up to his shoulder.  In the next second he fired, missing.

"Goddamnit, Gomer.  You almost shot me—!" his brother said, or started to say.  In his drunkenness he was slow to see what was unfolding around him.  Before he could get any answers, he was yanked back from the threshold, eyes wide in surprise.  Junior had him by the back of his shirt.  With another hand he took the back of Geshen's britches, threw him into the
grill of the pickup with a sound like a flopping catfish into the well of a boat.  Geshen fell in a heap to the dirt before the bumper.  He stayed there, a heap, moaning to himself.

The screen door was next, and went flying onto the dirt of the yard.  Gomer tried to get off another shot, but this was no hare, no whelping bitch, and his hands were shaking too hard to chamber another round.  Junior grabbed the barrel with both hands, pulled it from him.  He swung it back behind him like Ty Cobb and brought it forward again.  The heel corner of the wooden butt entered the side of Gomer's skull as it would a watermelon, leaving an impression true to its shape.  Gomer Neuwald uttered one off-key, goat-like sound before he fell; but he had nothing to do with this sound.  This was only the air leaving his lungs on its own.

"Junior!"  Millie cried through her bound mouth.  Mr. Neuwald's pistol was up and firing, and landing shots in the big target.

"
H-y!
"

He did not stop though.  His fist drew back and shot forward into the rib cage of the other man.  The sound this contact issued was as loud as the gunshots still echoing in Millie's head.  The pistol fell to the floor.  Junior took Mr. Neuwald by the front of his neck then, lifted him until he almost touched the ceiling; then with one sideways step he threw the man into the kitchen wall.  Mr. Neuwald was tough though, and already scrabbling for his pistol in the light of the spreading fire.

Junior finished undoing the twine around Millie's hands, freeing her completely from the chair.  He ripped the handkerchief from her mouth into two pieces.  Then, as Mr. Neuwald crawled across the floor behind him, Junior's vocabulary doubled.  He fell to his knees, panting.  His mouth was filled with blood, his chin was streaked with it.  He had dark spots on the shirt at his side and the upper part of his pant leg.  He made eye contact with Millie, and though his eyes had regained some softness, his face was still framed in the madness that had been there when he did this to these men.

"Home," he said.  If he had yelled it she would have argued, but he barely whispered it, and this scared the hell out of her.

All that was left of her after that were the swinging leaves of some bushes at the edge of the yard, righting themselves in her wake as she passed.

*

They knew her and let her pass.  Most of them did not even turn their heads to watch her.  It was the fire that had their interest.  They watched, sniffing, as it ate up the house to the roof.  Another gunshot was heard from within, then another, followed by a human making a sound inhuman.  Finally two figures fell through the doorway.  One pushed the other before him, both of them toppling to the ground.  The dogs approached, necks long, heads low, then skittered back a few feet when one of the men stood.  He busied himself around one of the vehicles for a minute, dumping bodies into the bed of the pick-up and tying their hands.  He then finally stomped by the dogs, a successful hunt all around. 

They let him pass too, of course.  There was something cooking inside that house and it smelled delicious, and they had to be quick.

*

Millie sat in the hollow of the same fallen tree she knew from the winter nights spying on Tommy.  Her breathing was just now returning to something close to normal.  She had run at full speed toward home until she saw through the trees the distant fire in front of her.  She lost her balance staring at it and stumbled to the ground.  She knew how far it was to the farm; she knew there was nothing else out there but their hay barn that could make a fire that big.  And now the fire behind her was big too, the dirty, sharp smell from it filling the woods.  Tears were coming as Millie crawled on hand and knee to her fallen tree, but she didn't know why.  She wrapped her arms around her knees and stared out from her hiding place.  If she wanted to, she could put her hands out, flat out at her sides like Jesus on the cross, and have a fire at each fingertip like she and Tommy used to do with the stars, but she didn't do this.  She was stuck there in the dark between two fires, staring straight ahead at the limp body of Mr. Sterno.  His face was covered in dirty blood.  His jaw looked like a wad of river clay stuck to his face.  His hands were curled up at his sides and looked huge and boney to her.  The dogs had torn up his feet to the bone.  His clothes were ripped and dirty too.  He hanged there without moving, facing her, his head tilted right at her, his eyes closed.  Through the dry brown blood on his face she could make out something on his face that looked almost like a smile, if she didn’t know him better.

The sounds of someone in the woods came from the direction of the burning Neuwalds' house.  Millie held her breath, inched back into the tree.  The figure came unsteadily through the branches.

"H-y," Junior said, coughing blood.

He stopped in front of Mr. Sterno.  He looked at him for a full minute, swaying more from the ground than the hanging body did from the branch.  From the bib pocket of his overalls he brought his pocketknife.  He cut the rope leading from where it was tethered to a neighboring trunk to where it looped over the bough.  Mr. Sterno came down into his arms.  Junior took him gently, kneeled to the dry leaves.  By now Millie was standing next to them.  She took the knife from Junior so he could loosen the noose.  When he had freed his neck, he pulled the body to his breast, grunted, and stood.  He carried Mr. Sterno before him, Millie at his side, and like this the three of them went home.

40.

A fleet of Fords had amassed around the house.  Men in fedoras and derbies stood around these cars and trucks, chewing tobacco and some of them smoking it in the breezy evening.  Some of them cleaned their guns, others had the hoods of their cars open, oil cans in hand.  A newspaper man from Wichita moved around with a camera and a three-legged stand, snapping smoky pictures of the men in threes and fours.  The men did not smile for the camera, but did hold up their guns.  Many of them stood near the barn, which was now only jagged, burnt planks, piled on top of each other like a giant's campfire.  For nearly two days the barn had burned.  For another day it had been smoldering.  Something about this barn made the men glum, like it was a symbol of something to them.

Millie was in the southeast field, away from the men, alone with her filly and her pa.  Pa stood off by himself, his shotgun balanced in the fold of his elbow.  He took slow steps through the hay as if grazing, looking down most of the time, sometimes gazing up,
his eyes on something very far away—the mayor’s house, maybe, where the mayor was hiding with a small army of Klansmen outside just like the small army outside this one.  Millie watched him carefully.  She was worried about him: she had never seen him so quiet.

That night, three nights ago, when he saw
Junior limping from the darkness into the light cast by the burning barn, a limp body in his hands, Millie by his side, a change came over Pa.  After getting Junior into bed, sending someone for the doctor and listening to a quick but tired account from Millie, he and some men who had come to help with the fire had gotten in their pick-ups and driven over to the Neuwalds’ house to confirm Millie's story.  They found Mr. Neuwald and Geshen lying in the back of Mr. Neuwald’s pickup, both of them beat up, burned a little and bound with twine, Geshen covered in his own moonshine vomit.  Eventually, the cut noose was found in the woods, and the bodies under the dirt at the bottom of the pond, and in the cabin next to the pond a trilby hat everyone in Price knew as Tommy’s.

Through the next few days, as the truth kept revealing itself—not only the truth about what happened to Mr. Sterno, Junior and Millie at the hands of Mayor Greentree, but Tommy too—Pa didn’t say a word.  He slammed around in his duties, putting out the fire, hauling the surviving livestock to Cecil Penny's farm, some to the Fitzmorris farm, moving the box with Mr. Sterno’s body to the cellar, then back out when the ambulance truck came for him.  He spent most of his time
sitting with Junior.  Junior lay in his room naked save a blanket across his private area.  Pa had taken the metal from the lockbox in his drawer and given it to him to hold in his sleep.  For two days he lay still like this.  The holes in his ribs wept pink fluid, sometimes blood when he coughed.  Doc Rosenzweig had removed the bullets while Junior was unconscious—though even in that state Junior had winced and said "h-y!" as the doctor dug with his metal pincers.  After two flattened slugs from Mr. Neuwald's gun were taken out—the third, in his leg, was too deep, and would remain there—Junior slept, and was still sleeping.  The fever came and broke, but the pain stayed.  Pa stayed too, right there by his side.  He changed Junior's dressings, gave him a bedpan, he wiped his sweat and his drool, he fanned him with a newspaper, he fed him spoonfuls of apple sauce and mashed potatoes and lemonade.  When Millie had to leave the room, she could sometimes hear Pa talking to him, real low, real soft, a funny kind of sound coming from Pa.  If she was in the room he didn’t say a word.  And once, when he had thought Millie was asleep in the corner chair, he took a wrist of Junior's in each hand, turned them so the palms faced the ceiling, looked for a long time at the worked-raw hands of his son.  He squeezed out tiny little tears as he put Junior’s hands back on the mattress.

Then this morning, still without a word, he took up his shotgun.  He just suddenly stood up as if something had bitten him, took the shotgun from the spot on the wall in Junior's room, where he had been cleaning it, he filled his pockets full of shells and walked out into the sunshine for all to see.  He stood with t
he gun in both hands, facing the barn, staring at his burned out tractors, his threshers and balers, his destroyed barn.  There had been concern among the men and women who had gathered to help.  Even when the lawmen—even Sheriff Jake, who had everything else in the world to deal with—had asked him to set it back down, he did not listen.  Everyone watched as he loaded the gun, pointed at the barn, fired it in the direction of the smoke as though he could put out the fire that way.  He shot up the barn, then the blackened, blanched, ashed-out metal of what used to be his machines and finally the smoldering frame of Tommy's buggy; he spent a whole box of shells on the buggy.  Loading it, emptying it, again and again.  Each report and clank of buckshot off metal loped off into the fields, came back to them from the trees as tiny cracking-ringing sounds.  Then he would load it again, empty it.  Load it again.  He did this without hurrying.  He thought hard about each shot before putting his finger on the trigger, like he was painting a picture with the tiny holes in the metal and wood and the smoking pin beams of daylight slanting through them.  The last two shells he kept.  Put them in the pocket of his shirt.  Held them for now, for this quiet evening, with a fleet of Fords on the front lawn.   He saved them because he had found out the truth.

Through all of this he didn't say a word.

Mother on the other hand hadn’t stopped talking, moving, bustling around the house, into town, back and forth to neighboring farms in Pa’s pick-up.  She had no choice.  There had been much to do even before all the Pinkertons and Topeka lawmen started showing up; there was much to do just to get them all here.

Millie had given Sterno’s notes and the instructions to Mother, and had told her story, the whole story, not just what had happened to Mr. Sterno in the woods, but The Story of her Lovey-Dovers as well.  Mother took the instructions from her and took over all tasks from that point forward.  She followed the instructions exactly as they were written.  She and Millie went into town to make 'phone calls to St. Louis, to Wichita and to Topeka.  Millie stood next to her idly rubbing the twine marks on her wrists as Mother called the men whose names were on the instructions, to tell them what had happened:  Mr. Sterno was dead.  No, we've got his body, for now.  No, but my daughter saw them hang him, with her own eyes.  Yes, you can speak to her, but not yet.  One of the men who did it is dead.  No, it was my son Braun who killed him; two more are hurt.  The son is in jail, Geshen is his name. 
Neuwald, yes, n-e-u-w-a-l-d.  Yes, like the sheriff, but he had nothing to do with it.  The father—Jonas, the sheriff’s younger brother—has been taken to the hospital in Wichita.  Yes, Braun Jr. is hurt badly, but he is healing; he was shot three times, and burned.  They burned down our barn—yes, completely gone.  They tried to take Millie, our daughter, but she is fine, except for her concern for Braun Jr.  The mayor has not been seen or heard from, but the men here say he is holing up in his house.  Yes, he was the one who killed Mr. Sterno.  Yes, he was the man who killed my Tommy.  Millie knows everything.  She saw everything.  What's that? oh, she's twelve.  Yes, they understand everything is depended upon her testimony; they're keeping a close eye on her. 

Yes, absolutely, she can tell you the whole story.

That was two days ago.  Today, the newspaper man and the state lawmen were here.  Sheriff Jake was here too.  Millie was keeping an eye on him.  The skin on his face looked like wet plaster.  His eyes sagged with dark bruises.  He was one of the men who smoked.  Millie felt sorry for him.  He had lost a nephew, and would lose another to prison, and his own brother too, if he survived.  But earlier, before Millie had gone out back for Sonnet, she had been with Sheriff Jake and Mother in the kitchen as they drank coffee, and he had said this was not what was bothering him.  Mostly what was eating him was what they had done to her family. 

"I aint sure why they are what they are.
  I aint sure why they did this.  I knew something wrong had happened that night—I should have known, anyhow.  It was a pretty crazy night, with that twister that come through.  I went out looking for them, but couldn’t find them anywhere.  I don’t know.  I believed them—their story—because they’re kin.  I had to believe them.  Damn, if I could only have ten seconds with that Mr. Sterno, I'd sure tell him how sorry I was.  Excuse my language."

"It's not your fault, Jake."

"I liked that boy a yours, Marnie.  I really did.  He was a fine young man."

"It'll be okay, Jake."

"Anyhow," he said, "I guess it's going to be fun putting that esteemed mayor of ours away.  Cousin or no cousin."

Mother had had nothing to say to this.

"Fun, in a lawman kind of way.  That is, if your husband hasn’t already took care of him for us."  He sipped from his cup.  There was a long pause.  "You going to go out and see that girl of his after this?"

She nodded.

Sheriff Jake looked around the kitchen, sure of something.  "She'll like it here, Marnie."

He had then been called out to the yard.  Millie had gone around back for Sonnet, brought her out so she’d be ready when Pa was ready.  He was going alone to the mayor's, before everyone else went.  He wanted some words with him before they took him away.  He wanted to do it alone—he owed that to Tommy, and nothing would stop him.  Still, Sheriff Jake was still trying to talk him out of it.

"Abner aint alone over there," Sheriff Jake said. 

Pa didn’t say a word.  Millie guessed,
then understood, that after all that had happened, Pa was done talking.

"These men aren't going to let you just come up and pull him out of his house by his ear like a schoolboy."

Pa nodded his head a little, then shook it a little.  Said nothing.

They moved out to the road as they talked.  Millie reined Sonnet after them.  Once on the road, Pa cracked his shotgun, dropped in two green, gold-capped shells.  There was only a little wind, so both men were smoking cigarettes.  She had never seen Pa smoke a cigarette before, but from the looks of it he knew his way around one.  She was learning about her Pa, her real Pa. 

Now the men traded looks and Millie knew it was time.  Pa took the reins from Millie, helped her down from the saddle, got up on it himself.  He looked down at her with that same face he had made before he had cried that time in Junior’s room--not a sad face but an angry one.  His voice sounded sick and dry.

"Git on back to your Mother," he said.  "She'll be shaky till I get back."

"When're you coming back, Pa?"

"Go on."

"Why don't you go in a car?  With the other men."

He shook his head. 
"Git."

"We'll give you an hour, Braun," said Sheriff Jake, before he started back to the other men. 
"Hour-and-a-half.  And I hope it aint you I'm hauling away in this car when I leave his place."

Pa took the horse down the road at a walk, then finally a trot.  Millie was joined in the front yard by Mother, who rested a hand on her shoulder and watched him go.  Pa was alone on that road tonight, but that’s how he wanted it.  Even though he had the best horse in the county with him, a man never looked more alone.

*

. 

Months from now winter would have come and gone.  It would be the anniversary of Tommy's death.  The sun would be setting in almost the same position as it was now, over the God Rock in the south field.  On that evening Millie would be on the God Rock, waiting for everyone to gather around her.  She would have that last letter of Junior's from the war in her hand, to read to Tommy.  It was the only letter left; the rest had burned up in the barn.  Flora and little Maggie would be there too, already waiting on the rock—a fat baby with a friar's shock of hair low on the head and icy blue eyes.  Jumpy would be out there too, sitting on the rock cleaning his hind end.  There because Junior had lifted him from the porch and carried him to the rock, limping the whole way on his “bullet leg” as Pa called it.  Junior would have Sonnet out too—pulling grass, tail swishing.  The animals were always family in Junior’s
eyes, he never forgot to include them.

With the day’s last color collecting behind her, Millie would signal to everyone it was time to read the letter.  This would be their gift to Tommy in heaven on this special day.  Millie imagined Tommy, among the angels, listening with that look of blinking concentration he used to get every time he read one of his brother's letters from the front.  This letter, like those, would be of courage and fear, of love and of hate, of wood and field.  Today, Millie would omit the swear words her oldest brother had taught her so well, because she knew Tommy didn't like them coming from her mouth.  Pa would be sitting on the porch next to Mother.  He would have a newspaper and a pipe.  Mother would be working on another new dress for Millie, who would be getting a chest by then, and was not a little proud of it—like a joke played on the world by the world.  When it was time, Mother would put the back of her needle wielding hand to her mouth, smile at this thought,
then look over at her husband behind his newspaper.  Together they would rise, cross the field of ankle-high spring hay, find a place on the rock to listen.

*

Little Brother,                                                                               France, Oct. ‘18