Killing Down the Roman Line (23 page)

Who killed the Corrigans?

“Oh Christ.” About all that Jim had to say.

Beneath the swinging man were two card tables, lit up under the flicker of the tiki lamps. Photographs lay on one tabletop, reprints of photos taken a century ago. Two young men in waistcoats and caps, one serious and the other flashing a sly grin. A tintype of a family, stiff posed and grim faced. Another of a familiar looking house from a bygone era.

The other table held what appeared to be tools but a card laying below it read:
murder weapons
. A broad axe with a brittle haft. A shillelagh with a lethal looking business end and an antique pistol. Black gunmetal and a handgrip of burled walnut. The cylinder removed and placed upright showing six chambers bored for 44 calibres. The maker’s mark, Colt.

Straddling both card tables was a crate of rough milled cedar, lined with yellowed burlap. Resting atop this was a long sooty bone, its porous surface carbonized black. Without its sister bones for context, it could have been anything. A leg bone from a horse or cow. Anything.

Above it all was Corrigan. Arms folded across his chest. Contempt set into the line of his mouth and blooms of red in his eyes. Drunk, belligerent.

A man in the crowd pointed to the bone. Belly tipping over his belt, his accent screaming Yank. Michigan maybe. “You telling me that’s an actual bone from your murdered family? Come on…”

“The crime scene was walked through and picked over by half the town before the constable dragged his drunken hide to the site. The locals took souvenirs.” Corrigan lifted the blackened bone from its nest. “Now their descendants are searching their attics and cellars, digging out these trinkets of their guilty past and returning them to me.”

“That’s just some old cow bone.”

Corrigan offered it up to the man. “It’s a femur. The leg bone from one of the men. James, John or maybe Thomas. Go on, touch it. See if it’s real.”

The man backed off, as if the bone was diseased. Others grumbled, calling him a liar. Scolding Corrigan to put that nastiness away, there’s children about.

Jim pushed in, face to face with Corrigan. “Give it a rest already. No one wants to see this stuff.”

“They blocked our road, Jim. A desperate attempt to shut me down and keep people away.” Corrigan raised his hands in false surrender. “I had no choice but to bring the truth to town.”

“This is just gruesome,” Jim said. “And cheap.”

“It’s our heritage, Jim. Our town, where crimes are buried and murderers prosper.”

A woman shouted him down, calling his story fiction. The bellied man accused him of desecrating human remains and another said he should be arrested for wielding a firearm in public. Corrigan just grinned, poking the hornet’s nest.

A lighter flicked and the little flame was set to the frayed edges of the swinging effigy. The straw man went up fast, flames licking up the rope to the leaves. More hollering and cursing as the thing was pulled down and stomped. The smell of burnt cloth and August wildfires.

“Somebody call the cops,” brayed the fat man but the cops were already here.

Constable Bauer pushed through the crowd, calling out a name but not Corrigan’s. “Jim! Jim Hawkshaw!”

Jim and Emma flinched, like they were guilty of some unknown offence. The police officer waved at them to come forward. One hand clutching Travis by the shirt collar, as if the boy might bolt.

~

The injured boy was taken to a tent and given an ice-pack to hold against his cut cheek. Francie Whitman worked at St. Mary’s Hospital in Exford but had taken the weekend off to work the first aid station for the duration of the festival. The worst she expected to encounter were skinned knees and sunstroke. The boy moaning into the ice pack would have to go to the hospital. Francie wasn’t equipped to stitch cuts in her meagre station.

Brant asked for his mom and dad but the broken tooth and swelled lip garbled his speech to a babbling mewl. Unable to decipher any of that, the nurse rubbed his back and told him to be brave.

Travis stood outside the tent with his head bowed, caught between the OPP officer and his parents. As if there was some debate as to who was taking him away. Could the cop even do that, haul him away to the paddy cell with all the drunks and brawlers? Given the absolute shitstorm he was in for when he got home, maybe the paddy was the better fate.

Emma was apoplectic, Jim red-faced. Constable Bauer provided a few details but none of it made any sense. Travis just attacked the boy out of the blue, no provocation. Assault with a weapon.

“What weapon?” Jim asked.

The constable produced a wadded paper towel, seeped damp with blood and unfolded it. The brass knuckles glinted under the patio lights.

Emma covered her mouth. Jim snatched Travis by the collar. “You used this on that kid? Where the hell did you get this?” When the boy said nothing, Jim shook him. “Where did you get this!”

“I found it.”

“Bullshit! Who did you get it from?”

“Easy.” The constable put a hand on Jim’s shoulder. “Let’s not make this any worse.”

Emma rubbed her temple. “How could this get any worse?”

“This wasn’t just a schoolyard fight,” Constable Bauer said. “The Coogan boy is seriously hurt. I don’t know how his parents will react but they’d be within their rights to charge your son with assault.”

“Oh god.” The blood drained out of Emma’s already paling face. She felt dizzy.

Two people rushed past them to the nurse’s station. The injured boy’s parents.

Jim held his breath and pushed down the rage rumbling up his throat. He leaned down eye-level to Travis and said, “We need to fix this right now. Apologize to that boy.”

Travis didn’t move.
Just take me to jail. Anything but apologize to that sack of shit
. He felt his dad’s hand grip his shoulder, turn him around and march him to the tent.

The Coogan boy was a mess. Strings of red drool swung off his chin, snot running down his broken nose. Francie the nurse lifted away the ice-pack from the boy’s cheek. A deep cut, still welling up with blood. It didn’t seem real to Jim. How could his son have done that?

Jim cleared his throat, spoke up. “Mr. Coogan, my son would like to apologize…”

“Get that little bastard away from my son!” Mrs. Coogan lashed out with so much rage, Jim leaned back, thinking she was going to swing. Her teeth bared. “Look at what your son did! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

Mr. Coogan said nothing, just patted his son’s back. Emma stepped up, hoping to talk the mother down. “Liz, I’m sorry. I don’t understand how this—”

“What kind of people are you? Raising such a vicious child. Brant’s lost a tooth for God’s sakes!”

Francie stepped between them, defusing the whole thing. “Is your car close by? You need to take Brant to the hospital. He’ll need a few stitches for that cut.”

Mrs. Coogan wailed at the thought. Brant’s father helped his son up and walked him out of the tent. He looked at Jim and Emma and, in an icy tone, told them he was laying charges against their son.

Constable Bauer watched the boy limp away before turning back to Jim and Emma. “Take the boy home. If I see him back here or in town, I’ll drive him straight to juvenile lockup. Understand?”

Escorting their son to the parking lot, Jim wondered if they could pack the boy off to his grandmother’s for the rest of the summer.

~

Nothing was said on the drive home, away from the twinkling lights and prom night haze. Back to the old farmhouse with its worn out floors and houseflies buzzing against the windows. Jim driving too fast, Emma unable to shake the image of the boy’s broken face. Travis withered between them like a spooked hermit crab.

When he got out, Travis ran for the house. Letting the screen door bang behind him, marching for the stairs. The haven of his room. Jim barked at him to stop, take a seat. Good or bad, it all came to a head around the kitchen table. Emma chewed her lip, the whole drive home debating how to deal with this. Calm and cool, detach her emotions and get the boy to talk. Draw it out of him. Yelling at Travis would only make him withdraw into a silent shell. She needed to pull Jim aside and tell him how to broach this but he didn’t give her a chance. Unloading on the boy, he’d already blown any chance at getting to the bottom of this. The rage of the father trumping the needs of the child.

Jim leaned against the counter and pinned the boy with a stare. Minutes ticked over and still Jim said nothing, just squaring Travis until a bead of sweat stung the boy’s eye. And then Jim laid into him. Why did he attack that boy? Sneaking up and sucker-punching him like a weasel. Where had he gotten the brass knuckles and had his brains completely fallen out of his fucking head for brutalizing someone like that?

Travis wilted. His eyes glassed over, mentally fleeing somewhere far, far away. The barking of his father melding into the white noise of crickets. Isn’t that how torture victims dealt with their torment?

Emma stepped in when her husband’s rage was spent. She knelt down eye-level with Travis and told him they need to understand what had happened. What had that boy done to him? How had Brant Coogan hurt him to provoke that kind of anger?

Travis gave up nothing. He wasn’t even in the room.

Jim watched his son sit there like a stump. He could taste the contempt in the back of his throat, the simmering rage fire back up. It sickened him the way she mollycoddled the little prince and in a crystal flash he saw how this was all her fault. She had prissied and babied the boy into this state, still wiping his ass and indulging his limitless egotism, his infantile tantrums. Jim thought of his own father and all the harsh lessons the old man had taught him. His body held testimony to those lessons. The bent index finger, broken after he’d backed the family car into a tree. The gap in his jaw where a fist had knocked a molar loose. The lip of scar tissue trailing up his back.

The schooling hurt but the lessons stuck, seared fast with pain.

And here was his own son, the inheritor of the Hawkshaw legacy, spoiled into milquetoast by this overbearing woman and all her TV-fed, Oprah, feel-good bullshit. It wasn’t her fault, he realized. Emma simply hadn’t been raised right. He saw the flaw in her bloodline. She too had been mollycoddled and indulged. It explained why she had no stomach for harsh lessons or ugly truths. But he’d be damned if she would poison their son with it any longer.

“Travis.” His voice cold, cutting off Emma. “Answer your mother or so help me God you will end up worse than that boy you bludgeoned.”

Travis bounced his heel off the chair leg. “Now you act all tough. You act like a coward with bullies in town but you get all big man with me? Real tough, dad.”

Like a hot needle prodding an exposed nerve. Jim launched off the counter and threw Travis against the table. His hand came down hard across the boy’s face, snapping his head back like a tetherball. Cables popped up Jim’s neck. His teeth snapped, raging at the boy to never speak to him like that again.

Travis sunk to the floor. Emma screamed at him to stop, pushing him away but Jim didn’t budge, chewing the boy’s ear. “You’re too old to hide behind your mother anymore.”

Emma knocked Jim backwards. Travis bolted for the stairs, rabbiting up to his room. Jim sidled back like an accident victim, unsure of what had just happened. The look of pure revulsion on his wife’s face was something he’d never seen before.

“What is wrong with you?” Emma, coming at him fast. She slammed her palms into him, knocking him back another step. “Don’t you
ever
hit that boy!”

“Calm down.”

“Or what, you’ll smack me around too?”

Jim took another shove. Told himself to stay calm, let Emma get it out of her system.

Keep your hands down.

Be still.

Get out.
Before something bad happens.

He walked away, banging out the screen door and across the yard. Emma still roaring at hin. He climbed into the truck and barrelled out the driveway.

Emma paced the floor until she cooled. Splashed cold water over her face.

Overhead, a thud. She crossed to the landing and hollered up the staircase for Travis to come down.

No response. The stairs rose into darkness, the hallway light off. His door still closed.

She went up the stairs. Slow, like an old woman. The adrenaline burned off, leaving her hands shaky.

“Travis?” Tapping on his door, her toes caught in the band of light at the sill. “I’m coming in, honey.”

The room wasn’t empty, just the opposite. Cluttered with a twelve-year old boy’s things. Dirty clothes on the floor, a stack of comics near the bed. A desk meant for homework but piled high with anything but. Firecrackers and a jackknife.

The only thing missing was Travis. The window pushed open, the threadbare curtain blowing. The sound of bullfrogs tumbling in with the breeze.

22

A TWELVE FOOT drop from the eave to his mother’s vegetable patch. Travis’ bedroom window fed out onto the pitched roof of the mudroom. The shingles broke and slipped under his kicks, crabwalking down to the eaves trough. No other way down. He dangled his feet and jumped. Crashed onto the tomatoes and rolled through the leeks. The soil was soft but the landing was all wrong. He cursed through the sting in his ankle and walked it off.

Shit, shit, shit!

Limping to the barn, one curse every time his bent ankle came down. Travis spaz-walked through the barn doors and blinked.
Fuck
. His bike wasn’t here. His dad had tossed it into the back of the truck at the fairgrounds and no one had unloaded when they got home. His old man drove off with his only means of escape rattling around in the box.

What now? Hide out in the barn all night? His nearest friend was back in town, a two hour hike on good legs in daylight. How long would it take limping in the dark?

There was only one place to go and Travis realized he’d been thinking of it the moment he decided to crawl out the window. The only friend within two miles. He limped back out of the barn and hobbled west into the clover. Swinging his legs over the old stone fence and wincing all the way through the ditch and up the field to the neighbour’s house.