DAN TOOK Russell Ford duck hunting that winter because he wanted something from him. He had no reason to expect trouble; Russell claimed to be a pheasant hunter, and whether the game is pheasant or ducks there are certain rules.
It was just before five o’clock on a Sunday morning in November when Dan drove up to Russell’s house. Russell lived in the area known as Mixerton, which took its name from the Mixers, a utopian society that existed around the turn of the century but broke up under the strain of constant squabbling. There is nothing in Mixerton now, really, except the Mixerton Clinic and some houses.
Rain fell steadily. It was the kind of rain that might fall all day—fine weather for ducks. Dan sat in his car looking at Russell’s house. The wipers went back and forth as he unscrewed the metal lid of his thermos. Steam rose from the coffee. Hunting was considered recreational, but when you got up in the dark to go hunting, the act seemed to acquire unusual gravity. The radio played softly “Hello, It’s Me” on the second day of a Todd Rundgren weekend.
Russell came out of his house with a shotgun and a box of doughnuts. He was a fat man, and in fact his nickname used to be Fat before he got to be chairman of the board of supervisors and received once again his given name. He was dressed in the mixed greens of camouflage.
He opened the door and slid into Dan’s police car. Dan could tell that Russell’s costume was stiff and new. “Brought you some breakfast,” said Russell.
“And I thank you,” said Dan.
“I wonder about this using the cruiser for off-duty.”
“My car is broke down,” said Dan.
“You always say that.”
“It always is.”
“Why don’t you take the thing to Ronnie Lapoint and have it fixed? Good God, you make twenty-two thousand dollars a year.”
“I’ve been thinking I could cut some corners by working on the car myself. I got a Chilton’s manual and a good ratchet set, but it seems like there’s always something to sidetrack a person.”
“I know that feeling,” said Russell. He looked around the car as Dan pulled onto the road going south. “I guess you don’t have a dog.”
“No. That’s true.”
“I would have thought for some reason that you had to.”
Dan took a bite of a doughnut. “Not if you have waders and the water isn’t deep.”
Russell shook his head and folded his arms with a great scratching of material. “See, there, I’m learning,” he said.
“I used to have a dog,” said Dan.
“That right?”
“His name was Brownie.”
“I remember that dog,” said Russell.
“What ever happened to him?”
Dan slowed for a corner. “Well, that was a funny story. He ran away, and I never did find out where he went.”
“Isn’t that something.”
“He must have got in a car with somebody. Because you know dogs will always come home. I heard a thing on Paul Harvey the other day where a dog walked all the way from Florida to Quebec looking for his owner.”
“Quebec, Canada?”
“They just said Quebec. I assume it’s Canada.”
“If they didn’t say, it probably is Canada.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Son of a bitch. Now, that’s interesting. What did he do, take the interstate?”
Dan shrugged. “I don’t know. We also have the white dog on the farm. But he isn’t a retriever. I don’t really know what kind of dog he is.”
They parked on the southern end of Lapoint Slough and walked to Dan’s blind, a distance of about half a mile. They moved along with their guns resting on their shoulders. Russell was slightly ahead of Dan—he could not stand walking behind anyone. Rain drummed their hats. The sky was dark except for a line of red light on the eastern horizon. Grass batted their legs, the ground rose and fell beneath their boots.
“Be looking for a fence,” said Dan.
“What fence is that?” said Russell.
“Lee Haugen’s,” said Dan.
“That’s east of here. Way east.”
“No. We’re not talking about the same fence.”
“Hulf,” said Russell, or something like that, as he ran into the fence.
“That’s the one I mean,” said Dan.
Dan’s blind was a plywood shed separated from the water of the slough by a screen of marsh grass. He had decoys inside and with Russell’s help carried them down to the water.
Russell and Dan sat in the blind smoking cigars and watching the clouds turn gray and white. The rain seemed to fall a little harder as the light came up. Soon they could see across the water to the other side. Dan reached into the blind and brought out a bottle of blackberry brandy. They each had a drink and shuddered.
Dan laughed. “It is pretty bad,” he said.
“It’s bitter,” said Russell.
“That brandy belonged to Earl Kellogg. And I don’t think I’ve hunted with him in two years. Every now and then I’ll have a drink, but there always seems to be the same amount left.”
Russell took out a box of shells and loaded his gun, which was a twelve-gauge with a bolt action and modest carving on the stock. A good part of hunting’s appeal is loading the shotgun. The shell is very satisfying, its coppery base and forest-green plastic. The weight and balance seem natural, as if shells grew on vines.
“Where are the ducks?” said Russell.
“You have to be patient,” said Dan. “This is the time when you can sit and think. That’s what I like about duck hunting—the thinking.”
“That’s pretty deep,” said Russell. “What do you think about?”
“I just let my mind wander,” said Dan. “But I’ll tell you what you should think about, and that’s making Paul Francis a constable.”
Russell ignored this. “Tell me what we do when the ducks come in.”
“Don’t get flustered. Don’t turn your safety off until you’re shouldering the gun. If you think something is too far away, you’re right—it is.”
A flock came in after a while with beaks and webs reaching for the water. Dan and Russell stood and fired. They got three, and Dan waded into the slough to retrieve the birds. There were two males, with green velvety heads and copper breasts, and a speckled brown female. All the wings had traces of blue. These were mallards, and Dan felt the exhilaration and sadness of having killed them, as if he were a wheel in the machine of the seasons.
Then a long time passed with no action, although they could hear gunfire from other places around the slough. Russell clipped his fingernails, Dan laid his gun down and leaned back on his elbows. He thought about Louise. She was two months pregnant, and according to a book they had, the baby was an inch and a quarter long and the heart was beating. Dan considered for a moment the outlandish fact of reproduction, and it struck him that even Russell had been a fetus at one time, hard to visualize as this might be. Then Dan thought how one day his and Louise’s child would be as old as Russell, who had to be at least sixty, and that by then he, Dan, would probably be dead, and Louise probably would be as well, and he hoped that the child would not be too upset at their deaths—wouldn’t turn to booze, or get gouged by the funeral men. A plain pine box would be fine with Dan. He considered the large number of people who would be satisfied with a plain pine box versus the fact that he had never seen such a box, let alone seen anyone buried in one, except in historical dramas on television. In this county even paupers went to their graves in a coffin that looked like it could withstand rifle fire.
Dan decided to get away from this line of thinking by lobbying for the hiring of the pilot Paul Francis as a constable.
“In the first year this would cost us twelve thousand seven hundred dollars,” said Dan. “That includes thirteen hundred for state police training school in Five Points, eight thousand for estimated part-time salary, twenty-one hundred dollars for flight insurance, and approximately thirteen hundred for medical insurance.”
“This is just the kind of thing that I’m always railing against. What in hell are we doing paying medical insurance for a constable?”
“This is a very conservative policy,” said Dan. “He has to be dying, practically, before it kicks in.”
“So why have it?”
“The state requires it.”
“That fucking state,” said Russell, and then he ranted about the state for a while.
“The way it is now, we can’t fly anywhere,” said Dan. “We used to be able to fly, but the insurance company has now decided that they will not insure our flights because Paul is freelance. So we would be able to fly again, and sometimes we need to fly. Secondly, Earl, Ed, and I all work at least sixty hours a week, without overtime. Now, for me, that’s not really a problem, because I’m management. But if AFSCME were to find out about Ed and Earl, they would definitely have a grievance, and defending that, as you know, would cost a lot more than hiring Paul Francis and giving these guys some relief. Now, I’m not going to call AFSCME, but can I guarantee they’ll never find out? No, I can’t. And the third point is, once Paul is licensed to fly as a constable—and I checked into this, so I know—he will be able to fly for other county functions too. Say you want to go to, I don’t know, a conference in the Ozarks. Well, you jump in the Piper Cub and Paul Francis takes you down there. Sounds kind of nice, doesn’t it?”
“I just cannot see adding a constable when all the county towns are getting police of their own.”
“You’re wrong about that, Russ,” said Dan. “Five of the towns don’t have any police coverage at all. Ever.”
“The trend is toward town police.”
“Like where? Grafton?”
“I’m not talking about Grafton, or Boris, or Pinville, or any of those ghost towns—Lunenberg is another—where they can’t sell houses.”
“We are in those towns all the time,” said Dan. “They are the county.”
“Let me tell you something, Dan,” said Russell. “Twenty years down the road, there won’t be a sheriff’s department as we think of it now.” And as he said this he made a slashing gesture with his right hand. “There might be a sheriff, and I say might, but he’ll be mostly a figurehead. And this was ordained many years ago, when Otto Nicolette had the opportunity to solve the Vince Hartwell murder but could not before the Morrisville police stumbled on the weapon by pure chance. Ever since that time, the sheriff’s department has been like, like, well, you know what it’s like. And I don’t mind telling you that, because I said the same exact thing when you first ran for sheriff back in… whenever it was.”
“You and that Hartwell business,” said Dan. “Living in the past.”
“Don’t slight the past. People were better back then. I remember those times with great fondness. Today I look around me and I don’t see much. By the way, did you know that Johnny White is thinking about running against you next year?”
“Good,” said Dan. “He’s not much of a threat.” This was a fairly common opinion to have about Johnny White. When you looked at his experience it was hard to see what it was that might justify his being sheriff. He had run that restaurant in Cleveland that went bust. He had been an assistant in the county clerk’s office. And he now ran the Room, but he didn’t get much respect for this position of authority because his father, Jack White, was on the board of directors and provided a lot of the money to run the thing.
“Well, Jack is a friend of mine,” said Russell. “We often play pool together at the cigar store in Chesley. Eight-ball, last-pocket, scratch-you-lose. He may seem scattered, but I wouldn’t sell him short.”
“You mean Jack.”
“Yeah,” said Russell. “You’re right, by and large, about Johnny. He was a file clerk for the county there for a while, and I happen to know that some pretty important papers have yet to turn up. But he’s not doing that anymore. He’s leading that group of addicts called the Wall or the Hall or something. They have taken the abuse issue and are running with it.”
“The operation seems pretty specious,” said Dan, “but who knows? Maybe they do some people good.”
“They do Johnny good,” said Russell. “You know who his partner is over there, don’t you? Tiny Darling.”
“I’ve heard that,” said Dan.
Probably they should have left earlier than they did. That’s easy enough to say in retrospect. Either way, everything would have been all right had Russell followed Dan’s advice about not shooting at distant targets. After the first few passes by the mallards and teals, the banks of the slough were more or less exploding with gunfire, and no duck with any instinct at all was going to come near the water until sundown. But unable to leave well enough alone, Russell raised his gun to the sky and fired at something overhead, then swore that he had brought a duck down at the curve of the slough to the north of them.
Dan was skeptical. “It would just fall,” he said.
“No, it coasted.”
“Then you didn’t hit it.”
“I’m pretty sure I did.”
“If you hit it, it would fall.”
They retrieved the decoys, put them away, gathered their things, and went looking for the duck that Russell claimed to have hit. They never did find it, but they did scatter a dozen or so red-winged blackbirds and a large and unfortunate waterfowl, which got up with a slow and graceful ripple of wings only to have Russell Ford shoot it.
“Russell, quit shooting.”
“Got you, son of a bitch.”
“Don’t shoot anymore.”
Russell walked over to the bird and picked it up by the neck. It was gray and brown with a long body, reedy legs, a black patch on the head. “It’s a goose,” guessed Russell.
“I don’t think so.”
“It might be in the goose family.”
“It’s a crane, I’ll bet you anything.”
Russell folded the bird carefully in his arm. “You’ve been hard to get along with this whole trip,” he said.
There was nowhere to go now but the Leventhaler farm. Bev and Tim lived in a cedar house on Route 29 north of the slough. They were very proud of their house, and when they invited you there they would mention it specifically, as if it were something marvelous that had just appeared one day.
The rain had stopped and the sun was coming through the clouds in discernible rays. The Leventhalers had just got back from church. They attended the Methodist church in Margo. Their children were running across the wet grass in green and red coats.
Being the county extension woman, Bev was practical and utilitarian, but she loved birds with a passion. It was brave of Russell to go to Bev with an illegal kill, but she was the only one Dan or Russell could think of who would know the species.
Bev and Tim asked Russell and Dan into the kitchen for waffles and coffee. The waffles were from a real iron—Bev showed how easy it was to keep the batter from sticking and burning. Tim, a serious-looking young man with wire-rim glasses, was known as the Tile Doctor, because he ran crews who installed drainage tiles in fields around the state. He spoke about the uncertainties of the tiling business and about a kid who had mashed his fingers between two tiles not that long ago but was back in school and playing the clarinet in the University of Wisconsin marching band.
Then Russell said, “Bev, we got a problem. There’s something in the trunk of the car. Well, it’s a bird. There’s a bird in the trunk of the car that perished by accident.”
Bev wiped her mouth with a red and white napkin. “What happened?”
“I shot it,” said Russell. “I think it’s a goose. I hope it’s a goose.
I don’t know what it is. Dan doesn’t agree with me. We need to get some kind of ID on this bird. So naturally we thought of you.”
Bev’s radiant smile had faded, making everyone sad. She left the room. Tim said, “Where did this happen?”
“At the slough,” said Dan.
“Maybe I’ll call the kids in,” said Tim.
“Why not,” said Russell.
Bev came into the kitchen with a bird book and an old sheet, and they all went outside. Dan opened the trunk. The lid came up with a soft whoosh. The bird did not look bad. A shotgun from medium range often does little apparent damage.
“It’s a great blue heron,” said Bev.
“It doesn’t seem that blue,” said Russell.
Bev sighed. “They’re not.”
“Well, what’s the sense of that?” said Russell. “Why call something blue if it isn’t? I mean, I should have known. I should have made sure. I’ll admit that. But it’s not like I went out of my way to shoot a great blue heron.”
“They’re really beautiful when they fly,” said Bev. “The neck folds into an S, and the wings move so slowly you can’t understand what keeps them in the air. Do you know what I mean?”
“It was over in a heartbeat,” said Russell.
“They are just intensely beautiful birds.”
“All right. I fucked up.”
“Shh,” said Bev. She wrapped the bird in the sheet. “We’ll bury him underneath the willow tree. There’s a shovel by the side door of the garage.”
“I’ll grab it,” said Russell. He hurried off.
“Well, I guess I’d better report this,” said Dan. “I mean, you can’t not report it because it’s Russell Ford, can you? There are game laws and that’s that. Maybe I should take the bird for evidence.”
“Oh, Dan, no,” said Bev. “I mean, no. And what? Put it in a room, on a table, with a bright light? No.”
So they buried the heron under the willow tree at the Leventhaler farm. Dan and Russell drove away without talking. The day had been a fiasco. On the radio Todd Rundgren sang “Can We Still Be Friends?”
Russell pleaded not guilty to killing the heron. He said it was an accident, and that the county had no case without intent. The law did not require intent, but Russell didn’t care; he had public relations in mind. He said he and Dan had been searching for wounded game when the heron burst from the grass. He said he had merely raised his gun as any sensible hunter might have, positioning the animal in his sights in case it was something legal to shoot, and that his gun somehow went off, fired itself, an accident. People were doubtful. “A gun just doesn’t up and fire itself,” said Mary Montrose. “No gun I’ve ever seen.” A hearing was scheduled for February.
This would be, as it happened, Russell’s second prosecution in the many years that he had been a supervisor. The first was in 1970, for assaulting a young teacher whose political opinions Russell did not agree with. Russell had a restaurant in Stone City at the time, and the teacher, Mr. Robins, and a seventh-grade class were picketing the restaurant for using paper napkins with blue dye, which would pollute the water when the napkins were thrown away, instead of white napkins with no dye. Russell ended up paying a seventy-five-dollar fine on that one.
Both of these cases were embarrassing to Russell, and one might wonder why they were allowed to proceed, since he was such a big shot. But people in Grouse County have an enduring mistrust of those who would put themselves above others, and they are vigilant. There used to be a saying painted on the railroad bridge south of Stone City: “Better to be Nobody who does Nothing than Somebody who does Everybody.” And it was only in the last ten or twelve years that this had faded so you couldn’t read it.
• • •
If Russell Ford was angry at Dan for pushing the issue of the dead heron, he did not let on. In fact, he saw to it that the board of supervisors sent Paul Francis to the state police training school at a time when Russell was still being ridden pretty hard by the Stone City newspaper, which printed, for example, a large illustration showing the many differences between the mallard duck and the great blue heron, including size, coloration, shape, and manner of flight.
The police school at Five Points was situated in a former Baptist Bible camp in the southern part of the state. Dan went along as Paul’s sponsor on the first day of the two-week course. He did not have to appear in person, but his father lived in Five Points and Dan figured he would take the opportunity to see him.
To get to the main lodge of the police campus you had to cross a ravine on a rope bridge. The bridge swayed as Dan and Paul crossed it, and Paul accidentally dropped his shaving kit into the ravine. The office was not open when the two men arrived, and they stood under a large oak tree in the dead grass. With a pilot’s sense of curiosity Paul spied something red in a knothole on the tree and reached in and brought out a moldy pocket version of the New Testament that must have been there since the days when the camp was occupied by Baptist children. Being a religious man, although a Methodist and not a Baptist, Paul felt that this discovery meant he was on the right track. But Dan could not shake the uneasy feeling that the police and trainees milling around in sunglasses and the uniforms of their respective towns were about to be asked to sing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” and so once the lodge had opened he delivered the check that was signed by Russell Ford, shook Paul’s hand, wished him luck, and left.
Dan’s father was a retired pharmaceutical salesman named Joseph Norman. A stern, sorrowful man, he lived in a yellow bungalow on two acres of thick and untended trees. His first wife had drowned while on a picnic at Lake Margo in 1949, at the age of nineteen. His second wife, Dan’s mother, was also dead. She died five years ago. Joe Norman’s job had taken him all over the upper Midwest but had seemed a relatively small position in a region where many men, through no special effort of their own, had wound up running farms of hundreds of acres. He was once reprimanded for failure to account for some pharmaceuticals but there were no hard feelings, and he retired on a full pension.
Joe Norman had tried various hobbies, but few had worked out. He had golfed but his eyesight was not good, and when he ran a motorized cart into the corner of the clubhouse, his membership was restricted. Then he tried woodburning, but lost interest once he had put decorative brands on every wooden item in the house. Now he carried a video camera everywhere, and so far nothing terrible had happened. When Dan visited, which was not often, his father would play tapes for him on the television. “This is a Buick LeSabre bought by a friend of mine, and here he is washing it… This is Denny Jorgensen, who delivers the mail… Some people don’t like Denny. Denny and I get along fine.”
This time Joe played a tape of wild animals eating white bread and cinnamon rolls at night under a floodlight in the back yard. This was fascinating at first, and then weirdly monotonous.
“Look at the raccoon, how he uses his hands,” said Joe.
“Boy, I guess,” said Dan.
“They call him the little thief,” said Joe. “Well, I say ‘they.’ I don’t really know who calls him that. I guess I do.”
“We missed you at the wedding,” said Dan.
“I wasn’t feeling that good.”
“I’ve got a picture,” said Dan, reaching into the pocket of his shirt.
“There’s a pain that comes and goes in my eye. I don’t know what that’s about.”
“This is Louise.”
“She’s a very pretty girl, son.”
“You can keep that,” said Dan.
His father got up and stuck the picture to the refrigerator with a magnet. On the television, skunks were shimmying around with slices of bread in their jaws. “Well, have you been to the doctor?” said Dan.
“What is a doctor going to say?” said Joe.
“Maybe he’ll be able to figure out what’s wrong.”
Joe pulled out a drawer in the kitchen counter and rummaged through it. “I’m old,” he said.
“That’s no attitude,” said Dan. He took from a coffee table an orange rubber ball covered with spiky nubs. “Didn’t they use these for something in the Middle Ages?”
Joe looked up. “That’s for my circulation. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“As weapons,” said Dan.
Joe finally found what he was looking for and brought it into the living room. It was a Polaroid of the headstone of Dan’s mother’s grave.
“See a difference?” said Joe.
“What am I looking for?”
“I had them redo the letters.”
“Oh… O.K. How did that come about?”
“I happened to be at the cemetery when some fellows came by offering the service. And do you know what the problem is? Acid rain. It turns out that acid rain is eating away at the stones. It’s the same thing that’s happening to the statues in Rome and Vienna.”
“So what did they do exactly?” said Dan.
“Well, they had what I would call a router.”
“And it helped?”
“I’m not saying it leaps at you across the cemetery, but yes, there’s a difference.”
“What does a thing like that run you?”
“It’s paid for.”
“Well, it sounds a little bit like a con.”
“You could see the erosion.”
“I believe you,” said Dan. On the television the animals scattered and Joe himself came onscreen, casting more bread into the yard. His back and arms seemed stiff. He wore a red plaid shirt, gray pants with suspenders.
“When did you film this?” said Dan.
“Last night,” said Joe.
Dan left his father watching the tape of the greedy animals, and on his way back to the highway he visited the cemetery where his mother was buried. He knelt and examined her stone but could not tell any difference in the letters, which said, “Jessica Lowry Norman, 1922-1987. What a Friend we have in Jesus.” His mother had died of a heart attack on Flag Day in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. One of Dan’s strongest memories of her was the time she broke a knife. The three of them were eating supper one evening when there was a loud clatter and his mother inhaled sharply. A stainless steel table knife had broken in the middle, separated blade from handle, cutting her hand. She cupped the base of her thumb in a napkin and hurried to the sink. There was a perfect silence in the house except for the running of the water. Dan had never heard of a table knife breaking under normal use, or any use, and the whole thing seemed to suggest or represent some deep psychic turbulence in his mother.
The cold weather took a long time coming that winter. It snowed maybe three times before Christmas, and the snow did not stick. The fire department wore shirtsleeves while stringing lights across Main Street in Grafton. It was sixty-three degrees for the football game between the Stone City Fighting Cats and the Morrisville-Wylie Plowmen, and the game drew nine hundred fans, although Stone City had a bad team that could do nothing with a conventional approach and was reduced to trying desperate sleight-of-hand plays that resulted in losses of six to thirty-six yards. Dan waited until two weeks before Christmas to cut a tree. He paid twenty dollars and walked across the hills of a tree farm outside Romyla. The sky blazed with a blue so strong that he could hardly take his eyes away long enough to look where he was going. Louise was three months pregnant, beginning to show. Accordingly Dan selected a full and abundantly branched tree. “Tree” is maybe even the wrong word; it was more like a hedge. Dan lay with his back on needles, sawing through the trunk. He dragged the thing over the grassy fields and struggled to confine it to the bed of a borrowed pickup.
The tree took up the whole north side of the living room. Dan had to run guy wires from the window frames on either side of the tree to keep it from falling. At first the large tree seemed wrong somehow in the house. Why this was so Dan could not explain. Either it seemed like the tree of a showoff or, by its sheer expanse, it revealed something sinister and previously unknown about the whole concept of having a Christmas tree. The only thing to do was decorate it. Being the kind of people they were, Louise and Dan had not really considered what they would use for decorations. Louise found some ornaments that dated back to her days with Tiny, but they decided not to use these, and in fact burned or at least melted them in the trash burner. They went over to see Mary, who gave them six boxes of bird ornaments that she had got years ago and never opened. Louise hung these one afternoon while Dan straightened a snarled ball of lights that had been seized in a drug raid and stored for several years in a closet at the sheriff’s office. Louise glided around the tree, breasts and belly pressing sweetly against a long colorful dress. The flimsy silver birds responded to air currents, turning and glittering when doors were opened or closed.
So all in all it was a good Christmas, though Louise was still spending her nights in the trailer by the garage. Robin Otis had advised against changing anything that was working and especially not during the holidays, a stressful and for many people a hideous time to begin with. So it was that Dan woke alone on a windy Christmas morning and made bacon, eggs, and coffee with “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” playing quietly on the radio. The broadcast had that strange, nobody-at-the-station quality that you don’t find at any other time of the year. Louise came over at about seven forty-five in a nightgown, robe, and sneakers. There was no snow on the ground. She kissed Dan on the neck, and the smell of sleep in her hair made him shiver. Out the window above the sink, the sky was the yellow color of dust.
They exchanged presents at the breakfast table. He gave her a coral necklace and earrings, and she put them on, and she gave him a long gray and purple scarf that she had knitted, and he put that on. They went upstairs to bed and stayed there until one o’clock, when it was time to watch college football. Louise had turned into a dedicated fan of college football since becoming pregnant. She felt that the college boys played a better game than the pros, because in college the plays seemed more earnest and at the same time less likely to work, and therefore more poignant when they failed.
She had watched the games every Saturday and knew the names of eight or ten colleges in Arkansas alone. She had developed a science of upsets. California teams always upset Great Lakes teams. Any college with “A & M” in the name could upset any college whose name ended in “State.” Teams called something “Poly,” on the other hand, might come close to an upset but would always lose in the end. The higher the male cheerleaders could throw the female cheerleaders, the more likely a team was to be upset, all else being equal. Michigan State was in a class by itself, a school that existed for no other purpose than to have its football team upset. As her pregnancy progressed, Louise was both emotional and forgetful. She could not keep track of the score and grew pensive whenever a kicker, with his forlorn minimal face guard, squared his shoulders to try a field goal.
In the middle of the afternoon Dan and Louise walked up to Henry Hamilton’s place with a bottle of Grand Marnier. They all sat on the sun porch drinking it—even Louise had half a glass—and listened to the strange unseasonal wind.
Elsewhere in the county the public forms of Christmas were being observed. Paul Francis had drawn his first flying assignment since becoming a certified constable, playing Santa’s pilot to Russell Ford’s Santa for the benefit of a group of poor children from the Children’s Farm gathered on the tarmac at the Stone City airport. The plane rolled from wing to wing as it came down to land, leading the children to speculate with genuine excitement about the prospect of Santa crashing in flames before their eyes. But Paul got the plane down all right, and Russell climbed out in a red suit and white beard and that shiny black vinyl belt that seemed to have been added to Santa’s wardrobe sometime in the seventies. He gave out dolls and footballs and colored pencils, and one little boy said, “We already got colored pencils,” so Russell took back the gift, boarded Paul Francis’s plane, and, grabbing a microphone that did not work, said, “Clear the runway for departure.”
And over at the Little Church of the Redeemer in Margo, Johnny White and Tiny Darling were trying to cook Christmas goose for forty-five declared alcohol and drug abusers who participated in the programs offered by the Room. Two things that people fail to understand until it’s too late about the cooking of goose are how long it takes and how much grease is produced. So at four-thirty, with a church full of hungry addicts, Tiny and Johnny huddled in front of an oven, stabbing at a tough goose in a gently swirling lake of grease. “Probably we should spoon some of this off,” said Tiny, and using an oven mitt that looked like the head of a goat, he attempted to pull the pan toward him. This little bit of motion spilled grease onto the grate of the oven, where it ignited with a fiery gust that singed Tiny’s forearms. Johnny shoved Tiny away from the oven door and blasted the goose with a fire extinguisher. When the fire was out, they tried to scrape the foam and ash from the main course, but this proved futile and the celebrants had deviled ham instead of goose with their string beans and sweet potatoes. But they had waited so long that even deviled ham seemed good, and they ate hungrily in the basement of the church.
In February, as scheduled, Russell Ford went to Wildlife Court to face the charge of shooting a protected species. Wildlife Court met on the second Tuesday of every month, presided over by Ken Hemphill, a retired judge and permanently tanned outdoorsman who ran his court in the affable style of Curt Gowdy on The American Sportsman. In the summer months the court mainly concerned itself with fishing violations, but during the winter most of the defendants were young or middle-aged men who had been keeping illegal trap lines. One innovative step taken by Ken Hemphill had been to order the surrender of any trap line deployed without a trap stamp, and defendants were accordingly required to bring their traps to court in case the verdict should go against them. Thus it was that in the cold months Wildlife Court became a sort of purgatory of downcast men wearing Red Wing boots and orange coats and clinking their chains up and down the aisles of the courthouse. Dan ordinarily enjoyed this spectacle, but today he was testifying.
Russell’s lawyer was Ned Kuhlers, a mousy man who represented so many people in Grouse County that he more or less ran the court docket, and when he went on vacation the system slowed to a crawl. Ned’s strategy was simple. He tried to show that the witnesses for the prosecution could not know what they claimed to know. First he emphasized that Bev had not been at the slough and so could not say firsthand who shot what. Her response was typical of the flustered citizen trying to defend her common-sense conclusions only to be told that common sense has no place in the judicial system. “But he told me,” she said. “We had just finished our waffles and he said that he had shot this bird that he could not identify. I mean, I suppose that’s hearsay, but for heaven’s sakes, it’s hearsay from the guy who did the shooting.”
“I’m afraid I object to that,” said Ned.
Judge Ken Hemphill chuckled softly. “Overruled,” he said.
Dan took the stand next. Ned spoke to the bailiff, who went out and returned after several minutes with a large stuffed bird. There was a moment of surprise as Ned held the bird up before the members of the jury.
The jury foreman, who had seemed uncertain of his role throughout the trial, said, “Excellent taxidermy.”
“Sheriff,” said Ned. “You have testified that Russell shot a waterfowl. I would ask you now to look very carefully at this example, who comes to us courtesy of the folks at the Stone City Museum of Natural History. Please take your time, because this is important. Is this the same species as the bird that you have testified was shot by Russell?”
Dan looked at the bird. It was gray and spindly with a red mark over the eye. The courtroom was hushed. “I don’t know,” said Dan.
“In other words,” said Ned, “it might be, or it might not be? What kind of answer is that? Don’t look at Bev. We want your opinion, Sheriff. Isn’t it true that you don’t know what kind of bird Russell shot?”
“I’m not an ornithologist,” said Dan. “I think the two birds are similar. But whether it was this exact one, no, I don’t know.”
“Sheriff,” said Ned Kuhlers, “what if I were to tell you that this is a sandhill crane, who spends his winters in Texas and Mexico. And what if I were to tell you there is virtually no way a sandhill crane could have been in Lapoint Slough on that day in November.”
“What does that prove?” said Dan.
“What indeed,” said Ned. “The defense rests.”
The jury deliberated all morning and all afternoon. At twelve-thirty they were given a lunch of deli sandwiches, cole slaw, and chips. At three they requested a snack and received two bags of pretzels and some Rolos. At four-thirty a message came from the foreman informing Judge Hemphill that one of the jurors was on a salt-free diet and that this should be kept in mind when ordering the evening meal. At this point Russell entered a plea of nolo, or no contest, and Ken Hemphill called the jury in and told them they were free to go home and make their own suppers.