Rodney de Groot’s house sat on an unpaved road that ran along the southern edge of Sterling Lake, a mile-long ribbon of oily black water that had begun to see recent gentrification along its northern shore but that at Rodney’s end remained firmly mired in the early nineteenth century. Although the property extended to the waterline, a thick stand of cedars shielded the house from the lake, as if any desire Rodney de Groot may have had for a lake view had been summarily sacrificed for the sake of privacy.
The cabin itself was two stories high. The exterior was covered with tar paper, which, in places, had peeled away, revealing the house’s original white cedar shingles. The overgrown yard was decorated with seven cars. One up on blocks. Two on their sides. The newest, which looked like it probably ran, was a piebald twenty-year-old Chevy Impala parked over by the front door. Apparently Rodney saw fit to keep his collection of personal memorabilia nestled outside among the autos, as a couple of old refrigerators, a hand-wringer washing machine, a vacuum cleaner, and what appeared to be the remains of a pinball machine lay scattered about the grass. Despite the sensory overload, what caught Corso’s eye was the central incongruity: the red hand pump standing on a small wooden platform in the yard and the satellite dish atop the ten-foot steel pole right there next to it.
Corso braked the Ford to a halt behind a restored red and black Studebaker pickup. Through the oval rear window, he could see a high-powered rifle with a scope, hanging from a gun rack. Corso got out, looked over at the pump again, and smirked.
To the left of the front door, a thick plank spanned a pair of five-gallon cans. A man with long tangled hair sat on the plank hand-rolling a cigarette.
Rosen did not approach. Instead he cupped a hand around his mouth.
“You Rodney de Groot?” he shouted.
The man on the porch gave a nearly imperceptible shake of his head and then looked down at the partially rolled smoke in his hand.
“Hey,” Rosen tried again. The guy brought the smoke to his mouth and licked the paper. His body language said the head shake was all they were going to get.
A white-haired African-American man appeared in the doorway. He was muscular and well built and moved with an economy of motion belying his advanced years. He wore a faded red T-shirt that had long ago had its pocket torn free and a pair of grimy white boxer shorts. When he spoke, the warm air in his lungs became a thick white plume in the cold air. “Don’t just stand out there shoutin’,” he hollered. “Come the hell in.” With that pronouncement, he turned and quickly disappeared inside. The wispy trails of his floating breath were all that remained.
Single file, they picked their way along an uneven bark path to the front steps. The man on the porch didn’t move a muscle until Rosen stepped up onto the porch. His head seemed abnormally small for his body. He had a thin, pointed face and bright blue eyes. From close range, he was younger than he’d appeared from the car. He wore a visored leather cap that had become dark with age. His shirt was coarse-woven and had eyelets down the front through which he had woven a leather thong. Below the waist he wore canvas trousers and a battered pair of Red Wing work boots.
As the trio stepped up onto the porch, he turned his undersized head away, refusing to acknowledge their presence. “Nice day,” Corso ventured on his way past. The man looked up, pinning Corso with a pair of defiant eyes. “If you say so.” His mustache and fingers were stained yellow by nicotine. In a much practiced move, he flipped the cigarette in the air, caught it in the corner of his mouth, and simultaneously used his thumb to fire a kitchen match and light it. Pleased with his little trick, he took a big pull, expelling the smoke through his nose. Still holding Corso’s gaze, he spat a thick brown stream onto the ground and then, with a narrow smile, turned his back to the doorway. Corso followed the others inside. He reached to close the door.
“Leave it open,” Rodney de Groot called. “I favor the air.”
The cabin was L-shaped. Straight ahead was the kitchen, where Rodney sat at a yellow linoleum table chomping a pork chop, fried potatoes, and white bread. At the center of the space was a huge coal stove, from whose stout black body shimmers of heat radiated in all directions. The room to the right was lined with threadbare but comfortable-looking couches and chairs of all sorts. At the far end, a thirty-six-inch Toshiba flat-screen TV squatted in the corner like a shiny silver elephant. CNN. Close-captioned. Yasir Arafat making a speech.
De Groot asked each of them in turn if he could cook them a pork chop. Said they could have as much bread as they wanted, but seemed a little relieved when nobody took him up on it. “Don’t believe in eatin’ till I’m hungry,” Rodney declared. “Hope you don’t mind if I finish up here.” He shoveled another forkful of potatoes into his mouth and then swallowed and made a circular gesture with the fork. “Find yourselves a seat,” he said. “Don’t get many visitors. Especially not people lookin’ for me. Get some lost lowlanders…maybe some of those new folk from up-lake…but nobody lookin’ for Rodney de Groot.”
As bidden, Corso, Rosen, and Dougherty found themselves a place to sit. For the next five minutes they watched in silence as Rodney methodically made his way through his meal. On two occasions he stopped eating long enough to refill his glass from the gallon jug of water on the table and then went back to his repast. When the plate was empty, he pushed it away and leaned back in his chair until the front legs came off the floor. “Well,” he said, lacing his fingers over his middle, “you folks came a long way off the beaten path. What can I help you with?”
“We were hoping you could tell us a few things about Smithville,” Rosen said. Rodney de Groot’s eyes widened. He slowly set the front legs back on the floor and got to his feet. His deeply lined face was hard and blank.
“Dead and gone,” he said. “Nothin’ at all left there anymore.”
His tone carried a finality devoid of hope. As if Smithville had somehow reached a state of nonexistence where its mere mention was moot. He put his hands on his hips and stared out through the open doorway until Corso cut into his remembrance.
“That’s what we want to talk about,” he said. “Back at the end of the sixties when that Parker guy killed the girl and Smithville came undone.”
“May of ’68,” Rodney said. “We were comin’ off a drought winter. Wasn’t even summer yet and the woods were burning,” he mused.
He went on for twenty minutes. Seemed like he talked about every person in Smithville, their kids, their kin. All of it. How it was that spring of ’68. He picked at his teeth with a yellow twist-tie and gabbed right up to May 1968, when all of a sudden his conviction seemed to waver. He began to look as if he were suddenly hearing other voices from other rooms. He squared his shoulders and bowed his neck. “Just a bunch of people living life the way they’d always lived it before. The way their folks and their folks…all the way back…the way they all lived it.” He said it with emphasis, as if his pronouncement were the end of the matter. And then his eyes wavered. He seemed embarrassed now, as if his prior recitation had somehow been in bad taste and he now regretted having said anything at all.
Rodney took a deep breath. Worked up some bluster. “Then all of a sudden they couldn’t do anything right. Wasn’t nothing to be done, neither. Those that didn’t move off…ended up dead or ended up in jail.” He was doing indignant, but his words carried no conviction. Corso picked up on it immediately. Dougherty also. She scooted forward on the couch and met Rodney’s gaze.
“Jail for what?” she asked.
Rodney fanned the air in front of his face as if shooing a fly. “Whole raft of stuff,” he said. “Things got out of hand.” He said it again as if a simple repetition would eliminate the need for further explanation.
“Out of hand how?” Dougherty pressed.
“People turning on each other. Kin comin’ down against kin. Kids turning on parents…social workers callin’ in the law.” He shook his head in disgust. “Whole thing just come apart.” He snapped his strong-looking fingers. “Just like that.”
“During that time,” Corso began, “was there a fire up there in Smithville? Something like where maybe a whole family burned up in a house?”
Rodney frowned hard and brought a finger to his lips. The room fell silent as he tiptoed over, took the door in hand as if to close it, and then, on second thought, peeked out. His relief was palpable. Leaving the door ajar, he turned back to his guests. “Boy up and left,” he said. “He’s like that. One minute he’s here, next minute he’s off in the woods someplace.” Rodney walked to the table. He turned the back of his chair toward the visitors and sat down with his arms atop the seat back. “That’s Tommie de Groot,” he explained. “My cousin Jeannine’s boy. He’s the only one left, ’cause he was down on the flats in the hospital when it all happened.”
Rodney looked from one confused face to the next. “Food poisoning,” he said. “Damn thing saved his life.” When his words again failed to produce a glimmer of recognition, he sighed. “Right about that time”—he waved a hand—“when the whole town was coming apart”—he stopped to make sure they were with him—“his entire damn family burned up. My cousin Jeannine and her husband, Paul. Three of the four kids too.” He used his fingers to count them. “The boys, James and Christopher, and the little girl, Leslie Louise.” He snapped his fingers again. “All of ’em gone…just like that.”
“How old was the little girl?” Dougherty asked.
Rodney acted as if he hadn’t heard the question. “I always told myself it was maybe for the best.” He looked at his guests for validation but didn’t find any. “They was right in the middle of the whole mess.” He made a pained face. “Wasn’t nothing good gonna come of it anyway. Might have been better that none of them was there for the end…the way it panned out and all.” His eyes took on a distant look. “Might be better off up there in the graveyard, with the family,” he said.
“Better than what?” Corso prodded.
Again Rodney de Groot ignored the question. “Only one still alive when it was over was poor Tommie there. By the time the dust settled, I was the only kin he had left around here. The welfare folks had him for a coupla years. After that, it was me. I raised him up since he was six.” Rodney cast a defiant eye at his visitors. “Wasn’t nothin’ else I could do. I was the only family he had. Couldn’t very well be turning a blind eye to the boy, could I?” He pointed out over Rosen’s head. “Got him a little cabin over on the other side of the rise there, but he spends most of his time over here with me.” He made a sad face. “Can’t blame him for wanting a little company, can ya? After what happened to him and all. It’s just natural.”
This time Rodney got the agreement he’d been looking for. Thus validated, he seemed to feel a need to explain. “Tommie was in the Marine Corps for a while. Been around some, he has. He’s a hell of a woodsman, though, that boy. Best damn shot you ever seen too! Knows every squirrel hole in the whole damn mountains,” he enthused. “Takes that fancy old truck of his every summer and goes out to visit friends in Idaho. Kids he went to school with. Gets him a regular haircut and a shave and all.” His eyes traveled inward for a moment. “He ain’t like the others. They get away from these mountains, and they stay gone….” He wandered toward the door and looked out. Tommie’s absence seemed to trouble him. “Yeah…Tommy gets around some now and then, but he comes back. Coupla weeks later. He always comes back.”
Corso jumped in. “I’m still a little unclear about—”
Rodney waved him off and then stepped out onto the porch. He’d had enough of talking. “I’m gettin’ old,” he said. “Sittin’ here blabbering like an old woman. Talkin’ about the dead instead of getting on with my business.” He walked over and stood by the door. He was too polite to ask them to leave, but the interview was over.
He thanked each of them for the visit. As the others started back to the car, Corso walked to the pump. A blue metal cup hung from the well by a rusted piece of chain. A coffee can full of water rested next to the handle. Corso used the coffee can to prime the pump, then refilled the can before pumping himself a cup of water. He drank deeply, allowing some of the cold liquid to run down over his chin.
He replaced the cup, nodded at Rodney de Groot, and started for the car. “Thanks for the drink,” Corso said on his way by.
The old man laughed. “Ain’t my water,” he said. “It’s the Lord’s water is what it is. You want to be thankin’ anybody for the drink…you be thankin’ Him.”