Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel (30 page)

“I followed your noise out here. Got a minute?” he said.

“You help me load this, sure.”

We each carried armloads of firewood out to my pickup, then I drove him back across the field to my house.

Inside, I brewed some coffee and we sat, smelling of sweat and sawdust and motor oil, at the kitchen table.

“So anyway, I come in peace,” he said, and raised his mug in my direction.

“I gathered.”

“And you know by now that I haven’t killed anybody.”

“Very good, I’m glad.”

“Yeah, so,” he said. “Sorry about that night. Things could have been different. I’m going to have to work that one off. I know that.” I said nothing and let him squirm. “But you think it never happens? How many guys just like me, rotting in a cell for something they didn’t do?”

“I don’t know of any, personally. But I can understand your worry.”

“Fuckin Barry Nolan.”

“Indeed.”

“All over his son being, you know. With that other.”

“We don’t really know what happened.”

“I know he was a drunk, and stupid,” Danny said. “Wouldn’t have picked him for this, though. He had his pants on backward about something.”

“So how long did you know?”

“About the stiff? I didn’t.”

“Your brother did.”

“Nothing in the township he don’t know. Who do you think it was found George?”

“So did he know it was Nolan that killed him?”

“That I couldn’t say.”

Of course not. “Can I ask why were you trying to get up on the ridge?”

There was a flare-up behind Danny’s eyes, but he kept it civil. “As I recall, I told you that. Kevin Dunigan hired me to clear the trails.”

“He says he didn’t.”

“Then he’s a fuckin liar and a short-assed rascal.”

“You notice Aub’s wheels were missing?” I said.

“I’m leaving.” He stood. “All I came for was about my aunt.”

“Sit down. Please.” He obliged, though he was angry enough that the coffee trembled in his hand when he lifted it again. “So tell me.”

“My great-aunt. Helen Stiobhard. We always did want her back for a proper burial. Guess that’s out of the question now,” he grumbled.

“It’s out of my hands.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. So what’s the deal?” I asked. He made a dismissive gesture that I couldn’t read. I pressed him. “What’s the matter with the way she was buried the first time? Hey, you can tell me anything. I’m on leave.”

Danny sized me up and then spoke. “The way I heard it, she took up with Aub, and we never heard from her again. I say ‘we.’ This was when my granddaddy was just a boy.”

“Listen, I looked in the records.”

“Did you? Fine.”

“You don’t have any Aunt Helen and I think you know it.”

He slammed his mug down. “I’ll tell you what I do know: we have a claim on that land.”

“Aub’s land?”

“Aub’s land, yeah. So you need to get the dead old girl back up from Scranton so we can get a DNA sample.”

“Kevin has power of attorney now, there’s very little you can do. Aunt or no.”

“No? What about a great-grandmother? Yeah, Daddy, he don’t want to talk about it, he don’t want anyone to know. Not even if it gets him the land. But that Irishwoman was his true grandmother and direct relation. She left our great-granddaddy and lived in common law with Aub for years before she got killed. That don’t make a claim?” Danny stood up to leave.

“Hey,” I said, my wheels still turning. “Aub was your great-grandfather?”

He scoffed, and spoke slowly, as if to a dimwit. “No. I’m a damn Stiobhard. She bore my granddaddy and then ran off, left him when he was a baby.”

“Kevin know about this?”

Danny snorted. “What Kevin don’t know. And I’ll tell you something else: he hired me for one thing, but got quite another. Yeah. And you ask him where those fuckin car wheels went.”

AFTER THE FUNERAL
I went over to Ed and Liz Brennan’s for supper. It stayed light enough and warm enough that we got in a game of croquet with their kids, on their large and bumpy front lawn, before we sat down to our braised venison and roasted parsnips and carrots. I had been having trouble keeping recent events out of my mind, particularly the jolt of the .40 in my hand. In my memory, the force of the shots and the red that splashed out of Nolan’s chest had become the same thing, and in my mind I was not only hearing and seeing, but feeling him die by my hand. There was very little separating me from that memory. I had talked about it with the shrink they’d set me up with in Scranton, a pleasant fellow who needed me to say something about the way I felt. I was careful to keep it to the shooting and to my feelings about George’s death, and even when he asked me about my military service, which wasn’t any too traumatic, I thought it wasn’t safe, it wasn’t smart to start talking about things it would take me too long to finish. I did enough sharing to get back to work once the investigation was over with.

That night at Liz and Ed’s was the first time I’d had something strong enough to distract me, and I stayed later than I should have, drinking and calling tune after tune. Eventually, Ed passed out on the couch with his eyes open—it’s alarming the first time you see it, but perfectly natural when you know it is his wont—leaving me and Liz to run through rarities in our back catalogs. She got out her fretless gourd banjo that never stays in tune, and we moved into some very ancient modal material, which reminded me of “The Still Hunter,” which Aub had played for me that once.

Liz had never heard that title either. “What is a still hunter, even? Like a revenuer?”

“A still hunter goes out on his own,” I said, “and doesn’t have anyone to drive game his way. He knows where the deer will be. He’s not actually still, he sneaks around a bit. He’s on a footing with the game.”

We tried the song with me in the drop tuning, and I actually remembered it; I wasn’t sure I would. After running through it a couple times, Liz was able to plunk along and then it became music, and we were not ourselves but the same small part of something that was beyond everything. It’s strange how the universe can open up at times, isn’t it? From just a scrap of music that nobody but one old man knew, you start to think about the possibilities you have missed, and the possibilities to come.

As I stepped in the vehicle, the sheriff’s manila envelope was sitting there on the passenger seat. I opened it up and found not just one report, but several medical documents pertaining to Aub Dunigan’s condition, and something from Wy Brophy and a Scranton forensics expert about Helen Stiobhard, or Eibhilín Aodaoin ó Baoill, if you will. In the report she was referred to as Jane Doe. In my boozy state I didn’t trust myself to make sense of them, and I took them in for Liz to read.

“His liver is almost gone,” she said, after reading through them. “Where did he get the money for alcohol?”

I had some ideas about who would have liked to keep Aub drunk, but didn’t share them.

“This is interesting,” she said. “They looked at his brain. There’s a pattern of strokes, increasing in severity over time, as they do. It’s common, and it certainly would account for his dementia.”

“Is that the only thing? What I mean is, we’re never going to know now. But hearing him talk, I had the impression he, he had particular delusions. Strong ones.”

“That might result from the strokes, or from a lifetime of drinking, or both. What delusions?”

“Ah. A woman who visited him.”

Liz kind of shivered and set Aub’s records aside, and looked to her sleeping husband’s face for reassurance.

“What about the Jane Doe, please? What do they say?”

Liz scanned the report, which was several pages. “This is amazing. They don’t know how long she’d been buried, decades. She was so well preserved that when they opened her up, they found tumors. Cancer, from her ovaries straight into her brain.” She frowned. “There was also the suggestion of trauma around the throat which might indicate . . . strangulation. But they aren’t sure.”

“Had she ever given birth, what do they know about that?”

“They don’t say. Listen, sleep here if you want, once I get this lummox off the couch.” Ed raised his head, told us hello, and laid it down again.

“Nah, I’ve got to go.” Though I shouldn’t have in my condition, I drove home.

DANNY STIOBHARD NEVER
got his DNA sample from the lady of the swamp; the state destroyed her before she could cause any more trouble. Aub died in his sleep just a couple weeks later.

One thing that has bothered me since: over in neighboring Susquehanna County, in St. Francis Xavier’s churchyard, there’s a woman buried who lived just twenty years, never married, had no known relatives in the area, and died in 1936. The name on her stone is Evelyn Bailley and I still wonder about her.

T
HE PSYCHIATRIST
in Scranton told me feelings of shame and depression were normal following an officer-involved shooting. I had to forgive myself because if I wasn’t careful, I could turn those feelings—curdle them—into a rage that would consume me. He said it in many more words, but that was the message.

The days got longer and warmer and I kept feeling those four shots hit home in the cool dusk. I pulled over DUIs and saw Barry Nolan, Jr.’s far-off face behind the wheel of his car. I ran into old men in their formless baseball caps bloviating over coffee at the HO Mart, and I thought of Aub Dunigan, and what had made him so alone. The investigation was, after all my worry, a perfunctory afternoon in the company of the county DA and a judge in a courthouse conference room, with Dally there for moral support. Shelly Bray showed up to corroborate certain aspects. The DA and judge asked me some questions about why I didn’t wait for support before going after Nolan, and I choked out an answer about the allocation of resources in the county and in my township, and reminded them that my deputy was dead. I was cleared, and Nolan’s death was ruled suicide-by-cop.

It had been six weeks since Nolan, but I hadn’t slept for running the film over and over in my head. I knew that someone else had to forgive me because I was in no condition to do it myself.

In the first week of June, I stumbled into the middle of Shelly Bray’s marriage, and into her bed. I justified it several ways: that she’d been mocking her husband to me with subtle remarks, implying the marriage was drying up, an unmistakable preamble. That I’d been celibate so long, I couldn’t let an opportunity pass. Even, Polly, that you’d told me to be happy and that I should try.

On a hot June midmorning that we both knew would end in our first assignation, when the fields buzzed with insects, and her kids were still in school, Shelly took me out riding on trails that connected her place with Aub’s and Nolan’s. In so doing I felt she was telling me that what had happened out there was all right, that the world—and that ridge in particular—was a place where I could still belong. It was as much for this forgiveness as anything else that I went to bed with her. She was a decent person and wouldn’t take on somebody who wasn’t.

In the cool shade of the woods, we passed through where a dry-stacked wall had toppled down, and onto Aub’s land. I stopped, dismounted, and moved along the stones. Soon enough I found a turquoise glass insulator, then another and another. I dislodged one and held it up to Shelly.

“Why are they there?” she asked.

I shook my head and put the dome back where it was, and managed to climb back in the saddle in one try. Actually, I have a theory about the insulators that may sound far-fetched. Aub was old, demented, and suffering strokes with no way to understand what was happening to him. The strokes and Helen’s visitations may have seemed to him to come from the same place, or even to be the same thing. I think he was keeping her out, or trying to keep her in.

They say you shouldn’t talk about the old days and how much better everything used to be, but my old days are still on the young side, and I often think about them. For instance, I still remember summertime out in front of my parents’ home, the lime-green ranch house that looked like it could have been rolled from the department store on logs. I was three or four probably, and Ma was giving me a bath in a white plastic tub full of water that had been warming in the sun. Daylilies milled in the ditch like they were waiting for a ride. The road was dirt, still is, and the house is occupied by a new family now, with my folks in North Carolina. But I do remember that an electric-blue dragonfly landed on the edge of the white plastic tub, and those daylilies, wow! Orange, and how when I looked up everything was green, green, and big blue sky, and we seemed all of a sudden to have slipped into a slower stream of time.

You don’t get very many moments like that, I find. So you have to be open to them, even knowing that you won’t get many, and even knowing that when you remember them it’ll only feel like you’ve lost something important, instead of gained something you can keep.

When Shelly and I passed close enough to Aub’s place on our horses—mine a solid old-timer named Wurlitzer—I decided I would look in. The house hardly appeared any different from the outside. Just before we reached the edge of the field behind, we came across a couple of blue and white ribbons tied to the trailhead, bright against the dark green brush. We crossed the field at a lazy pace. Shelly held my reins and waited with the horses in the dooryard.

Inside the house I was confronted with Kevin Dunigan’s decision to let things go. It was as empty as an abandoned house ever is. The kitchen table remained but it was bare. The refrigerator door was open and a hinge was loose. Quiet. I looked around and in the top southeast corner of the kitchen, right up near the ceiling, a milk snake had extended itself about a foot from between the walls, where a tear in the wallpaper had left an opening. The snake swayed in waltz time, smelling the air with its tongue. As I watched, it slid backward into the wall, and I was alone again.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following friends, neighbors, and colleagues:

Lou Beach, Adrienne Brodeur, Nick Capodice, George and Jeanne Capwell, Tristan Davies, Dante Di Stefano, Brenna Farrell, Timothy Holman, Jenna Johnson, Spenser Lee, John McNamara, Margaret Mitchell, Andy Mullen, Danny Mulligan, Bruce Nichols, Ayan Babi Pal, Frank Philbrick, Becky Saletan, Andrea Schulz, and Kirk and Lesli Van Zandbergen.