THE TELEPHONE MESSAGE from Garnett was blunt, a simple command, and Curtis had asked no questions, though he knew immediately the trouble was Owen Benton. In thirty minutes he was standing in Garnett’s kitchen listening, as Michael, stripped of his wet clothes and wrapped in a blanket, sat at the kitchen table and retold the story of Owen’s escape.
Owen had awakened and complained of cramps in his legs and asked to walk for a few minutes outside the cell. He had been alert and more talkative than before, saying again and again how grateful he was for the care he’d been given, and then he had asked to walk beside the river, as he had done on other nights with the doctor. The night air had revived him even more and he had spoken of his sister in Atlanta, the sister named Elizabeth. He talked of how he had missed her, how they had been close, and how he yearned to see her again. And then he had asked Michael to cut him a twig from the cottonwood tree to chew on, to clean his teeth, and when Michael had pulled his knife, Owen had rushed him, striking him in the chest with his shoulder, making him drop the knife, and pushing him into the river.
“I saw him grabbin’ up the knife when I plunged in,” Michael reported regretfully. “And off he runs, like a deer, straight down the road and into the woods. And there I’m thrashin’ about in the water, freezin’, feelin’ the Devil’s own fool. It was my fault, Curtis, and I’ll take the full blame for it. I trusted him. I truly trusted him.”
“You wadn’t the only one,” Curtis replied. “Nobody on earth could’ve made me believe that boy’d up and run. Nobody. I kind of thought Frank might’ve come back and talked him into leavin’. I been expectin’ that. I reckon I was wrong.”
Garnett poured a half-glass of whiskey from a jar and shoved it across the table to Michael.
“Drink this,” he ordered. He pushed more wood into the furnace of the kitchen stove and pulled the chairs draped with Michael’s clothes close to the rising heat.
“One thing I don’t want,” Garnett said. “I don’t want a bunch of crazy damn fools after that boy. First thing people’ll be thinking is that Frank was right, that the boy did that killing. And this running off may not be that at all. It just may be that he was scared. By God, I’d be. I’d be terrified if I knew I’d been accused of murder.”
“But he got the knife, Doc,” argued Curtis.
“So what? It fell, he picked it up. That’s a natural reaction, if you ask me. What’s that supposed to prove?”
“Maybe nothin’ in court,” answered Curtis, “but it could mean a lot to people around here.”
“And that’s why you’re not to say anything about it,” the doctor countered. “We make that known and somebody’ll kill him on the spot.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Well, goddamn, Curtis, thanks for the confidence,” Garnett said incredulously. “There’s no right or wrong in this. There’s just no reason to inflame people, that’s all. Now, where do you think he’s headed? Back to his home?”
“I don’t know,” Curtis mumbled.
“I’d be doubtin’ it,” replied Michael. He stood and circled the table to stand close to the fire in the stove. He could sense Curtis and Garnett watching him intently.
“I’d say he’d be off to where his sister lives,” continued Michael. “He’d not be goin’ home, not the way he was talkin’. I’d say he’d go where he thought he could get some protection, him not havin’ much experience outside the home.”
The sheriff nodded agreement.
“Well, by God, it’ll be a trick if he can get to Atlanta on foot with men after him,” Garnett said.
“And why is that?” asked Michael. His voice was edged in nervous surprise.
“Why? There’s only two roads out these mountains, and you have to take one of the two no matter if you’re headed for the next continent,” answered Garnett. “Going over the mountains wouldn’t work. Some of those hills are about as straight up and down as a fall to Hell.”
“That don’t mean much,” Curtis replied slowly. “He knows them woods, Doc. Them people know ways of gettin’ around they don’t even tell one another about.”
The doctor smiled. He had been gently reminded that he was an outsider.
“Just find him,” Garnett said. “And do it with as few people as possible.” He paused, then added, “And try to keep from killing the boy.”
Curtis pulled his hat into a snug fit on the crown of his head.
“We’ll do it,” he mumbled. “I’ll go get Tolly Wakefield and let him get up two or three more men. Don’t see how the boy could’ve got too far. He wadn’t that strong.” He turned and left the room and the house, and Michael and Garnett listened until his car left the driveway.
“Curtis is a strange man,” the doctor sighed. “He won’t sleep a minute until Owen’s found, but you’ll never hear him complain.”
“I’ll join up with him as soon as my clothes are dry,” Michael said.
“No. I’ll take you home.”
“But Owen got away from me. I could at least help find him.”
“Irishman, let me tell you something,” replied Garnett. “You’re just like me in one way: You weren’t born here. There’s some things they do by themselves, and you wait and see what happens. Believe me, the future of that boy is out of your hands now.”
* * *
Owen dropped to his knees in the cover of the island of trees below the Pettit house, breathing hard, trembling, cowering at the sudden, scurrying sounds around him. His face twitched. He realized that he held the knife in his hand. His palm perspired around the handle of the knife and he threw it on the ground and stared at it. He could not remember carrying the knife as he ran. He wiped the palm of his hand across his trousers, then cautiously picked up the knife and slipped it into his belt.
Since he had left Michael at the jail, he had not stopped running, and now he was spent. His lungs ached and his eyes burned. He did not know if he was at the right place, where Michael had said the provisions would be hidden. He wondered what time it was. It was dark but he could feel morning rushing like an army over the eastern hills, pursuing him with its dangerous light. In the deep black forest above the Pettit house, he heard an owl. The voice of the owl was an omen, was it not? He remembered stories of the ancient, demented Indian, the last of his people, who spoke to the owls as if they were his brothers. The Indian had wandered the woods at night, hooting, chasing after sounds like echoes, and weeping for the sad messages he had heard from those secretive, seeing birds. It was part of the lore of the mountains that the Indian had died and had been swept away on the wings of owls, which had buried him in the nest of a tall beech tree. A woodsman had found the bones in the nest, as soft and white as chalk, covered with feathers. There were those who believed, for all those years, that the Indian was still alive in the voice of the owls.
Owen was afraid, more afraid than he had ever been. Afraid of the owl and the night and the house where he must hide. He crawled on his hands and knees to the center of the island of trees. The rock was there, as Michael had promised. It was the size of a wagon body and dull white in the bare light of the quarter-moon. He stood and made his way quietly behind the rock. He saw a mound of limbs covered with pine straw and he began carefully to uncover the camouflage. The sack was there and he opened it and found that it contained a blanket and biscuits and potatoes. The food was fresh and he wondered about Michael’s story of replenishing the supplies: Was it true, what he had said, or had he planned the night of the escape? Owen tied the top of the sack securely into a knot and lifted it over his shoulder. He knew he could not rest; he had four miles to go before the house, perhaps six. He could travel the road by night, but if he waited until sunrise he would have to slip through the woods and it would be risky, even on a Sunday morning. He stepped quickly into the road. He heard the owl, far off. He looked once at the Pettit house. It was a blot, a silhouette, against the skirt of the woods.
The blue steel of morning was beginning to seep over the mountains as he passed hurriedly by Floyd Crider’s house. He heard a dog bark and another answer and he broke into a steady run until he was far from the house. He wondered if the dogs had awakened Floyd.
He was hurting inside. His nose had begun to bleed and he wiped at it absently with the sleeve of his shirt. He tried to set the distance to the farmhouse where Lester and Mary Caufield had been murdered. He had been to the house once with his father, when he was very young, before his father had begun to punish them for their unknown sins. The house had then belonged to a man named Alton King, who was Lester’s grandfather and who had outlived three wives and six of his ten children. Owen remembered the story he had heard from his father about Alton King. His third wife was only thirteen when he married her, more child than woman, and she still played with dolls. To please her, Alton King, who was nearing seventy, had built a dollhouse for her in the backyard—a dollhouse with doll rooms and doll furniture. In the daytime, when Alton was in the fields working, she would play in her dollhouse, and at night she would be his wife. The girl had died at fifteen in labor. The child was stillborn.
Suddenly, Owen felt the seizure of a chill.
He stopped in the road and looked around him. To his left, above him, was the house. He could hear the water-song of the stream that ran into Deepstep Creek and the soft crush of sand as he turned slowly in the track of the road. He imagined that he heard a wind, but there was no wind, only the early yawning of the day as it unfolded like the sleepy opening of an eye. He took two steps and stopped. He thought of Lester Caufield. They had been friends. They had talked of going away to work together. Lester was always laughing. Always.
The house seemed to grow larger as Owen approached it. It was gray and silent. There was a look of waste about it, like any abandoned thing. He looked at the windows that had been coated with the frost of cobwebs. Under one window, at the front of the house, there was a windowbox containing one dead flower stalk.
He circled the back of the house to the porch stoop, and mounted the steps. The board that had been nailed across the screen door was loose—Michael, he thought—and he pried it off easily. He stood at the door, his hands poised inches away from the smooth knob of mountain laurel. The house seemed to resist him, to warn him. He knew it had been cleared and boarded quickly by men who were frightened and he knew it was a house no one would ever live in again. It would decay like a buried thing and the roof would fall around its chimneys and people traveling along the road would not stop to look at it, but would rush past as though skirting an evil that could never be put to rest. It was a house of murder and a house of murder was an ominous place, with screams that had been driven into the walls like hidden nails.
He touched the knob and opened the screen door and then turned the handle of the wooden door. It was unlocked. Owen opened it and stepped inside the kitchen. The room was empty and he could feel his breathing and his heartbeat echoing, thundering in his temples. He moved slowly into the house, his arms outstretched before him, groping blindly. The house was the same as the house he had lived in all his life, the same as dozens of other houses in the mountains: the kitchen, the sideroom off the kitchen, the living room with its brick fireplace, the bedrooms along the back of the house.
He slipped numbly through the doorways of the rooms, a dull hypnotic lured by a voice outside his mind. His body felt leaden. His vision was blurred. He could sense an obscure presence, like sleep, choking his brain and he shook his head to clear the trance. His eyes narrowed and focused and he realized in horror that he was standing in the bedroom where Lester and Mary had been murdered. His eyes were fixed on the single piece of furniture still in the house—the frame of the bed. He felt the ice of fear crawling over his skin, under his shirt, and his mind flashed to a scene that he had heard described the day after Lester and Mary had been discovered, before the people of the valley quit speaking of the murder: Lester on the floor, his head hinged back, his throat open like a wide mouth, and Mary, her face covered with one pillow and her naked body lifted under the lower back by the other pillow, her legs bent at the knees and spread, as though stopped in the middle of a leap.
“God,” he muttered. He tried to tear his eyes from the bed frame, but could not.
He heard a flitting, scratching noise in the corner of the room and he jerked the knife from his belt and whirled to the sound. The light of the coming morning poured through the window in a silver fog and he saw a field mouse dive into a crack in the wall, and he heard the mouse race inside the wall.
He began to tremble. He sank weakly to his knees and caught the knife in both hands and held it tight to his abdomen. A painful guttural cry rose in him, turning shrill in his mouth, and he began jabbing the knife into the hard oak wood of the floor.
* * *
At sunrise, Garnett and Michael left Yale to drive to the Pettit house. They rode in silence until they crossed the bridge at Deepstep Creek and then Michael asked, “Will they find him, Doc?”
Garnett shrugged and twisted his hands on the steering wheel of the car.
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “There’s a good chance. Curtis did what I thought he would. He has only those four men, but I know them. They live in the woods. Come out maybe once or twice a year and then only to Yale. You’d never find one of them in Pullen’s, that’s for sure. If they do any drinking, they drink their own and they do it alone, or with each other.”
“Would they have any idea where the boy’ll likely be found?”
“They know it better than a pack of bloodhounds,” answered Garnett. “There’s one of them—Tolly Wakefield, the one Curtis mentioned last night—who could go off and live in those woods and never lift a hand at planting a seed. Only man I know who could feed you a seven-course meal of nothing but berries and find every damn one of them within a half-mile radius.”
Michael smiled. The doctor was easily awed, he thought.
“The boy. Will they harm him?” he asked.
Garnett shook his head. He said, “Not likely. Not unless he forces it. Even then I doubt it. The one that worries me is George. It’s a good thing Curtis left him at the jail, but no matter what I say to him now, or what Curtis says, George feels justified in being angry. He thinks he was right all along. He won’t keep quiet about this. He’ll have it all over the valley before sunset, but, God knows, as much as I hate to say it, I understand the poor bastard. One thing I’ve learned, Irishman—these people may be simple, but they’re noble in their own way. They damn well may kill one another, and they do if they feel vengeance, but they’d never do some of the things you and I have seen. I remember a boy in Boston, when I was studying medicine. He was brutalized by another man. Sodomy. Well, by God, that wouldn’t happen here. Never. You’d find a man like that pinned to a tree, drying out like a rabbit skin.”
“I’d say you’re right,” replied Michael.
“Damn right I am.”
Garnett thought for a moment, then laughed softly. He said, “Tolly once killed a bear with a woodaxe, and that’s not one of the tall tales you always hear. It’s the truth. He was cutting wood one day when this bear appeared out of nowhere, standing on its hind legs, ready to rip him apart. Tolly had a piece of wood in one hand and the axe in the other. He threw the wood at the bear—just tossed it like a ball—and when the bear reached to catch it with its front paws, Tolly drove the axe a half-foot into its heart.”
“My God,” Michael whispered in amazement.
“They’re not ordinary men, Irishman. Not at all. We’re ordinary. You and me.”
“I’d believe it,” Michael agreed. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and began to drum his fingers on the dashboard of the car.
“What’s bothering you, Irishman?” asked Garnett. “You’ve been uncommonly quiet for the last couple of hours.”
Michael laughed wearily.
“Nothin’ important, I don’t suppose,” he said. “Just thinkin’ about the boy. Some of the things he said in the last few nights, when the two of us would sit around talkin’.”
“Such as?”
“Well, like—like his talkin’ about Eli.”
“Eli?”
“True,” answered Michael. “Surprised me, too. But you’ve got to remember, Doc, you’re the only one who knows the facts of that. To a man, everybody else believes I’m kin to Eli. And the boy especially. Said I even reminded him of Eli. Said he remembered Eli comin’ around when he was little, and how alike we was, tellin’ outlandish stories.”
“Well, by God, there’s some truth in that,” exclaimed Garnett. “You could’ve come from the same belly, if that’s a measure of it.”
Michael laughed again. He rolled his head against the back of the car seat. He knew he must be careful what he said to the doctor.
“Anyway,” he continued, “Owen got onto the money Eli was supposed to have buried somewhere on the farm.”
“There is no money,” Garnett said firmly.
“Maybe not, Doc, but you’d never prove it by the men in town. I’ve heard many a jest about it.”
“I told you you would. It’s a good story.”
“It is, indeed,” agreed Michael. “But the boy seemed preoccupied by it. Kept sayin’ I should be lookin’ for it in different places, like it was a game he was playin’ in his head. Like a lad on a treasure hunt.”
Garnett frowned. He mumbled, “Sounds funny, coming from him.”
“I thought the same,” Michael said. “He told me once that he’d be off to Europe if he had that money. Asked a lot about Ireland. Said we ought to go there together.”
“Seems strange,” Garnett replied.
“It was. Him goin’ through what he’d suffered. I’d try changin’ the subject, but he’d guide me back to it, askin’ if I’d looked under the house, or in the chimney, or in the loft of the barn.”
“You wouldn’t think it’d ever cross his mind.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Not in the least.”
“What’d you tell him, Irishman?”
“About what?”
“The money,” Garnett said, smiling. “Where you’d looked. You have looked?”
Michael broke into a tired laugh.
“Looked?” he said in mock seriousness. “Doc, I’ve torn the place apart. Looked everywhere any kind of sane man would’ve hid such a grand prize, but it must’ve been that Eli was a genius of sorts.”
Garnett turned the car into the road leading to the Pettit house. He motioned with his hand to the blue ribbon of smoke rising from the kitchen chimney. The smile was still on his face. His eyes sparkled.
“There’s your money, Irishman, burning away, cooking bacon,” he said lightly. “That’s the kind of genius Eli was. There’s not any money. Never has been.”
“Did you ever think there was, Doc? Ever? When it was first mentioned?”
Garnett thought for a moment, then replied, “Maybe. Maybe. Eli was a persuasive man and there were times when he had me believing him. But I’ve never seen any evidence of the money, and it’s been a long time. That’s why people want to believe it so bad, because they still haven’t seen it. It’s like anything, Michael; people believe what fascinates them. Owen must’ve been fascinated by it. Hell, he’s been dirt poor all his life, like everybody else up here. Who wouldn’t want something like that? The only thing I’ve ever wanted so bad it hurt was a woman I met in Boston. Most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen, but bound up in that damn straitjacket of convention. She was Catholic and I wasn’t and, God, what a waste it was—and I don’t mean that against the Catholics, because I know that’s your persuasion; it was just a goddamn waste. No matter how much I wanted her—and I would’ve given up everything; tried to, in fact—I couldn’t have her. So, I know how they feel. It’s a dream, Irishman, but you don’t know it’s a dream because it seems so damn real, and you find yourself saying, ‘It’s got to be real; I can touch it. It’s got to be real.’ But it’s not, Irishman. It’s not.”
Garnett stopped the car in front of the house. He sat staring through the windshield, remembering. He could see the girl again, turning her face as he leaned to kiss her. He could hear her voice saying no and he could see the ice in her eyes.
“Doc?”
“Yeah,” Garnett said. He wiped at a small necklace of perspiration under his chin.
“That why you came here?” Michael asked softly.
Garnett leaned against the seat and smiled.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “Maybe. I don’t know, Irishman. I’ve been here too long to remember.”