When he left the cemetery and started down the hill through the darkness toward the gate to his farm, Hook found no real consolation in the knowledge that he had even more to go on now, more reason for being convinced that Elizabeth Madera and her friends had deliberately lied about Chris’s death. The same day he had flown home with the body, a letter from Chris had arrived at the farm. In the three days since then Hook had read the letter so many times he could almost have recited it from memory:
December 8
Dear Dad and the rest of youse guys,
You’re still in luck. The prodigal son isn’t ready to return home yet, though let me tell you—if every place out west here was like L.A. I’d be home before Auntsy could say “get up.” That place is really something else. I spent a week there in all, part of it staying with some hippie friends I met in New Mexico, and who knew some other friends who were staying in this house in L.A. (Out here nobody seems to buy or rent anything—they just use it. I guess it’s cheaper that way.)
Anyway, the house was in Topanga Canyon—maybe you remember the canyon, Dad, from your old Navy days in L.A., although it’s probably changed a good deal since those ancient times (joke). Now it’s mostly all hippies. And drugs. I got out of the house early each day so I could see something of the city and not have to keep explaining to all and sundry that I’m a simple farm boy from the Midwest and prefer to start the day with breakfast instead of speed or acid. The others in the house were generally so strung out I think they’ll all die of malnutrition before 25. And it’s too bad too, because they’re good people generally. Some will rob you blind—if you had anything to rob, which of course I don’t—but otherwise they’re peaceful enough, in fact one heck of a lot peacefuler (you can see I don’t need college) than the kids at Banner High. But then I guess lying around on floor mattresses stoned all day isn’t exactly peacefulness, is it? It’s just pathetic. And I think one of the reasons for it is simply that place—L.A. It is like one great feedlot 50 miles long by 50 miles wide, only with people jammed cheek-by-jowl instead of cattle. The freeways are more violent than Vietnam. Back home you read about all the riots and the killings, like the Manson thing, and you don’t understand. But here you do—at least I did, in L.A. The people are simply crazy. They’ve been driven mad by the way they live, and they don’t know it. Time and again people picked me up (the mad hitchhiker strikes again!) and these people acted and talked like they were actually, clinically, crazy. In Banner Hill, Chief Janson would have locked them up. Here, they run things.
I say here, but actually I’m not there anymore. I’m in Santa Barbara, which is ninety miles north and about a hundred million miles more liveable. I’m not saying this is another Banner Hill (Isla Vista being so close and all) but you do get the feeling here that you might be able to live through to the end of the week without being asphixiated (sp?) by smog or slaughtered on a freeway or being offered up as human sacrifice at Sunday morning services (Church of the Latter Day Warlocks).
Also I’ve got a friend here, or at least I have had for the last few days—don’t guess we’ll be pen pals after I push on tomorrow. His name is—would you believe Isaac Newton Huston? No? Then would you believe he’s shortened it to Icarus? Well, he has. It’s a kind of professional name I guess. Says he’s a photographer by trade, though I’ve yet to see him take any pictures for money. Anyway he’s a nice guy, about 21, picked me up in Ventura, and is letting me crash here with him a few days. There’s a lot to see—oceans, mountains, museums, historical buildings. And girls! Some of them almost as fantastically, breathtakingly stunning as my little sister—which, as we all know, is saying one heckuva lot. Right, Jen? (Just kidding, sis—about the conceit, I mean, not the looks. Forgiven?)
The greatest thing about staying here with Isaac (I can’t very well call him—or anybody else for that matter—Icarus, can I?—I mean with a straight face) is his bathroom. It’s got a john that works and a real honest-to-Gawd bathtub, in which I’ve been soaking at least four hours a day. I won’t say I was dirty, but the tub now has a ring that would pass for racing stripes on any track in the world.
(Got to go now. Will finish tomorrow morning.)
As you can see, I am a man of my word. Because it is morning now—and I am finishing this Epistle to the Illini at a table in a cheap restaurant right off Route 101 downtown—waiting for my ham and eggs—one of the few times I’ve parted with real cash these last few weeks. But I just couldn’t cut another Chez Icarus breakfast of Seven-Up and Hostess Twinkies. I’ll be on the road—thumb crook’d, teeth bared, eyes bright—in a very few minutes. So I thought I’d better have some real food for a change.
I plan to hit Monterey, Big Sur et al, and then on up to San Francisco to see if there is indeed a bridge there. Thereupon, I will cash my last travelers check and wing home to the frozen wastes of Macoupin County. I realize that will come as a blow to you, Bob, mon frere, since you won’t have the chores all to yourself anymore. But them’s the breaks, kid.
Seriously, I can hardly wait to see you all again, and see the farm and feel some real weather for a change. But I figure I’m here now, and I just might not pass this way again.
I miss you all. Much love.
Chris
First there was the tone of the letter, which Hook was confident Sergeant Rider and even Mrs. Rubin would have to admit was not that of a boy with “nothing to live for.” But just as important, Hook thought, was the fact that the letter put Chris on the highway hitchhiking out of Santa Barbara a full day before Elizabeth Madera claimed to have picked him up. According to the sergeant, the death occurred December 11 at one in the morning, some fifteen hours after Miss Madera supposedly picked Chris up on 101 around nine-thirty the previous morning—the tenth. But the letter was dated December 8 and was finished the next morning—December 9—just minutes before Chris intended to be out on the highway thumbing for a ride. Further, the letter was postmarked in Santa Barbara December 9, A.M. So the ladies’ statements to Rider left an entire day unaccounted for, and Hook believed Chris had spent that day—and the next—at Mrs. Rubin’s beach house with Elizabeth Madera. That meant the two of them had been together almost forty hours, which was a long time for a young man to remain at the scene of his sexual humiliation, and an even longer time for a pair of busy unsympathetic women to tolerate his presence. No, Hook figured that Chris had spent those hours just about as he himself had whiled away his time with Mrs. Cunningham a quarter-century before, and that Elizabeth Madera’s initial objective—to give the boy lunch, to have someone to talk to—had grown into something more once she had gotten to know Chris. At any rate, she had asked him to stay. And his staying had led to trouble, possibly with Mrs. Rubin or young Ferguson. An accident had occurred, some stupid and unexpected calamity that, known, would have led to unwanted consequences for someone. So they had tried to cover it up. But what Hook could not begin to understand was why they had chosen to cover it up the way they had. Certainly they must have known that the boy had a history, a family, a background that could be checked, and that once it was, everything in that background might point in any direction except that of suicide. So why had they not done the simple, logical thing and called it an accident? The autopsy had put Chris’s blood alcohol level high enough for him to have been drunk. It was conceivable that in the darkness he could have stumbled off the cliff, just as it was conceivable that seven years before a tired half-drunk salesman could have fallen asleep at the wheel of his Pontiac and crashed head-on into another car outside Alton, Illinois. One learned to live with what was conceivable. But suicide, for Chris, was not. So why had the women insisted on it? Hook did not know. But he would find out.
When he reached the gate to his farm and started walking up the drive through the woods he was surprised at the shortness of his breath. Only four days had passed since Chief Janson delivered his message of death, yet in that time Hook felt as if he had aged twenty years, and not so much from grief, he believed, as from its denial, his refusal to face anything for the present except what lay ahead of him when he returned to California.
By the time he reached the top of the hill he was panting. Ahead, he saw lights burning in the kitchen and the family room of the house, lights that had not been on when he had gone out at around two o’clock. From the fireplace chimney a vine of woodsmoke, moonlit, climbed against the night sky. It meant that Aunt Marian was up, for she was the only other one in the family who shared his troglodytic passion for fire-gazing, and would start a fire in the fireplace as casually as most people, unable to sleep, would light a cigarette or raid a refrigerator. Hook walked slowly on, not eager to talk with anyone this night, not even Aunt Marian.
Entering by the back door, he took off his coat and shoes, and padded through the kitchen into the family room, which looked warm and comfortable with the fire raging in the fireplace he and Uncle Arnie had made out of fieldstones taken from a fence Hook’s great-grandfather, the laconic James, had built just before the turn of the century. The room was carpeted and walnut-paneled. The furniture was stout maple, an originally expensive but repossessed suite Kate had bought secondhand on one of her occasional shopping forays into the rich bedroom suburbs west of St. Louis. On the davenport, in Arnie’s bathrobe and with her gray hair braided for sleep, sat Aunt Marian, with Jennifer curled up against her shoulder. As Hook crouched before the fire, holding his hands out to it, she asked him if he had been at the cemetery.
“No. I just went for a walk. Down to the road and back.”
She studied him sadly, not believing him. “Arnie’s asleep,” she said.
“Good. He needs it.”
“Needs it, my foot. If that man never slept another wink in his life, he’d still be way ahead of everybody else.”
The remark meant nothing. They both knew her husband’s love of Chris. The only difference between Arnie and them was that he could sleep with a broken heart and they evidently could not.
Hook asked her if Bobby was in bed.
“He was up a while ago. Then he went back.”
Standing now, Hook’s knees popped like the wood in the fire. At the same time, Jennifer sat up and dropped her hands into the lap of her blue flannel pajamas. Firelight was snared in her long tousled hair and she looked to Hook not just pretty this night but beautiful, beautiful in her grief, solemn, older.
“Dad, we’ve been talking,” she said.
“Yes, honey.”
She looked at Aunt Marian, then back at Hook. “We don’t think you should go back there, to California.”
“Why not?”
“We need you here.”
Hook got out a cigarette and took his time lighting it with a faggot, trying to move slowly and carefully over this ground, for he knew that he would be going back to Santa Barbara no matter how the two of them felt about it, but he did not want to leave a divided and unhappy family behind him.
“She’s right, David,” Aunt Marian put in. “Who’ll take care of the farm? You think Arnie and Bobby could keep up with it? I don’t.”
“I’ll hire the Jonas kid to help out. Full time.”
“That costs money.”
“I know that.”
“And going out to the coast again—that could cost a fortune if you’re there any time at all.”
“We can manage.”
“But can we, Daddy?” It was Jennifer again.
“I think you can.”
“You don’t think things are a little different now? A little special? And that we might need you here?”
Hook could not remember Jennifer ever being sardonic with him except in fun, so there was no question in his mind how deeply she felt about his going. Yet he could not back away from the problem, either; he would be leaving again too soon for that.
“What else can I do?” he asked. “Can we leave it the way it is now—Chris a suicide?”
“It’s police business,” Aunt Marian said. “Why don’t you just send them the letter and let them take it from there? If there’s anything to find out, surely they’re the ones to find it.”
“I can’t take that chance.”
“And what about the chance something could happen to you?” Jennifer asked.
“Nothing will happen to me.”
“Like nothing happened to Chris?”
“I’ll be in no danger, honey. Believe me.”
Behind them, Bobby had come into the room a short time before and had stood there listening, his face set, grim. Now he spoke:
“If Dad doesn’t go, I’m going.”
Jennifer whirled on him. “Will it change anything? Will it bring him back? Can you make him live again?”
Her vehemence shocked her brother into silence, and herself into tears. She fell against Aunt Marian and began to cry. Moving over to the davenport, Hook sat down next to her and gathered her into his arms, all five and one-half feet of her, a woman actually, but for the moment all child, all disconsolate little girl.
Softly Hook told her that one of the women in Santa Barbara had said the same thing. “And of course it’s true,” he went on. “We can’t bring him back. But they took more than Chris’s life, Jen. They took his character and his memory. They took the truth of him. And we’ve got to have it back. For him, as well as for us.”
Her head moved against his chest, a nod of understanding or acceptance, he hoped, and he hugged her. Patting his knee, then pushing against it, Aunt Marian got to her feet and told Bobby they might as well have a cup of cocoa before going back to bed. They went into the kitchen.
Hook’s bony legs did not make for much of a lap but they seemed to be sufficient for Jennifer, who fell asleep almost immediately. As Aunt Marian left, she had turned off the table lamp across the room, so he sat watching the fire in darkness now. The wood was white oak, from an old tree felled by a change in the course of the creek that ran through his acreage across the blacktop road. Using chainsaws, he and Chris and Bobby had worked on it through most of a Saturday afternoon early in November, right after they had finished harvesting the corn on the Strickler piece near town. It had been a clear, beautiful day, cold and crisp, and the noise of the saws had made the intervals of silence, when they turned them off to load the wood or just to rest, seem especially peaceful—and poignant now in retrospect, for by then Chris had made up his mind to take the trip West and see more of the country before facing his nineteenth birthday and the draft, and both boys had become unusually restrained and pensive, like lovers facing a breakup. Chris admitted hating the thought of missing Thanksgiving and Christmas at the farm, and the overburdened tables Aunt Marian would set on each occasion, but he was determined to go, and go he did.
White oak was slow-burning wood, and the logs Aunt Marian had lit were fairly large, so Hook knew he would have fire for hours yet, not that he needed it for warmth—the gas furnace in the basement furnished that without mess or effort on his part—but he liked having something to watch, especially if Jennifer were to sleep for hours. Aunt Marian came back in after a while and quietly told him that Bobby was in bed and that he should go now too.
“When she wakes,” Hook said. “Let her sleep now.”
Aunt Marian placed an afghan over her and then patted Hook on the shoulder and left, heading for her and Arnie’s bedroom on the second floor of the old part of the house, where the temperature in winter rarely rose above sixty degrees, one of the reasons Arnie was such an accomplished sleeper, Hook judged. After a time, he had to shift his legs slightly, for comfort, but Jennifer did not stir. He was amazed at the womanliness of her body, an amazement that had begun two years before, when she had first started to develop. Now there was no little girl left physically, just this child-woman breathing shallowly against his chest while her tawny hair, smelling faintly of shampoo, tickled at his face. She was the only one of his children born after he had taken over the farm, so it was the only home she had ever known. In the beginning, though, she had fancied it more an empire than a home, with herself as undisputed empress. Hook remembered her at a year old, plump and cute, with the short wispy white hair of an old man and an air of absolute authority. She was walking by then, but she preferred to be carried, especially on Hook’s shoulders, and her technique for bringing this about was simply to raise her arms and inform him what his orders were: “Carrurdaddy!” some of the time, and “Wouldjaholdja?” at others, though still without the slightest intonation of a plea. Hook and Kate had never worried much about this early arrogance, for it was more than counterbalanced by her brothers’ capacity for meting out to her a justice of great clarity and swiftness, though in time all three of them got along with a reasonable degree of amity, probably because their mother watched over their egos as some women did their own laugh lines. Every now and then she would tell Hook that one of the children was “down” about something and that it would be a good idea if he treated that one with a little extra consideration for a few days. Hook sometimes worried that this attitude, and practice, might leave the children unprepared for the rocky, unsmoothed life outside the family, especially at school, but the only evidence was that it had made them happier and stronger and better able to cope, probably because there had never been anything oppressive or cloying in Kate’s solicitude.
But he did not want to think about her now. Nor Chris. His spirit begged for rest. And there were other practical matters requiring his attention. The farm would not run itself in his absence. He had to anticipate problems.
The Jonas boy would agree to come to work full time for a while, he figured. There just was not that much to do on his father’s place, and the boy usually needed money. But Hook would have to warn him about smoking in the buildings; that could not be tolerated. He would tell Arnie to watch him. As for the farm itself, the Strickler piece was planted to wheat. He would seed clover on top of it in February and plow it down after the wheat was combined in the summer. Then it would be ready for corn again, at least three years of it. But that meant he would have to buy corn next fall to fatten his steers. The price was low now, after harvest, but he did not like to deal in futures; he did not like to spend money he had not yet made except when it was absolutely necessary, and that was often enough so that he would resist the temptation now, when it was a matter of choice. If the price of corn was too high by fall, he would simply sell the steers as feeders and let someone else do his gambling for him. There were no other pressing problems he could think of. There was plenty of silage and hay and feed; the mill was working properly; Arnie had finished tuning the big John Deere, and the honey wagons had been reconditioned, so he did not see any problems for the men in keeping up with the feedlot manure, unless the weather stayed mild and the ground soft. That also could mean some footrot among the feeders, but Arnie knew enough to watch for it. The most important thing, of course, was simply to check the herd out in the field every day, watch for the slightest sign of injury or disease, especially pneumonia in weather as wet as they had been having. All it took was the loss of a few head to drive operating costs out of sight; and of course anything serious, like a spate of blackleg, and a man could be out of business within a very short time.
Hook had gotten into farming more by accident than design. After his discharge from the Navy he had studied at the University of Illinois, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English and comparative literature in the spring of 1952, just four months after he had met Kate Larson there, in the corridor of the humanities building between classes. Carrying a handful of books, he had been struggling to get into his great drooping stormcoat when suddenly, miraculously, there was this hand holding his coat up for him so he could slip his arm into the sleeve. Turning, he found that the hand belonged to a girl who looked as if she had just stepped out of a fjord somewhere, a lovely smiling nordic Venus, with clothes. They were married that June and spent the summer in Greenwich Village exploring each other more than Manhattan, yet still managed to be insolvent by fall, and Hook took a job teaching junior English at a suburban Milwaukee high school. The three years he spent there were also the first years of his marriage, a time of candlelit love and laughter and happiness so perfect it was not even aware of its own existence, and a time of dazzling accomplishment too, for these were the years his sons were born, so it took him all that time to realize that he loathed the job of teaching. He liked the students as individuals and he enjoyed modern literature, but the two things, the students and the literature, made no vital connection in his mind. It was simply not important to him how the kids felt about books. So he was at best an indifferent teacher. Worse, he was an unhappy one, feeling anachronistic and unreal in the puerile school atmosphere, like a grownup who had accidentally stumbled into the center of a child’s game. He felt diminished by it. And so he quit.
He and Kate had spent one month each summer at the farm with his widowed grandfather and Aunt Marian and Uncle Arnie, who lived with the old man and helped him run his small dairy-herd operation. That third summer, with no job ahead in the fall, and with Bobby an infant and Chris two years old, Hook had worked on a daily basis for other farmers in the area while he tried to think of what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. His fourth week there, combining wheat on a hot July day, his grandfather helped give him an answer. They had stopped working at noon—Hook, his grandfather, and Arnie—and had gone back to the house to restore their energies with one of Aunt Marian’s typically huge noontime meals. Afterwards, the old man went out on the porch and sat down in his favorite rocker—and died. In his will he left the farm to Aunt Marian and to Hook’s father, neither of whom knew quite what to do with it. Aunt Marian did not want to leave the farm, and yet Arnie, who lived in mortal fear of debt and responsibility, would not take out the needed mortgage to buy out Hook’s father’s half of the farm. So Hook stepped in, first as their tenant—their sharecropper, Kate ruefully called him—but by his third year there, he had been able to negotiate a loan to buy them out and have the farm in his own name.
Though farming had given him a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment over the years, he could not pretend even to himself that there was no dark side to this bright harvest moon. Always there was the small but persistent doubt that he had done his best, had become all the man his intelligence and education would have permitted him to become. To a degree, he felt monastic, as if he had withdrawn from the “world,” the city-suburban white-collar arena where the substantive life of his time supposedly was being lived. And yet he could not think of any particular kind of work he might have done in that arena that would have been any more important or significant than that which he did. He never could have confused the fortunes and interests of a corporation with his own; he had already proven his unfitness for the education industry; and as for some sort of work in communications, the possibility of his having added to that cacophony of the forgettable did not excite him. Perhaps he might have done something in social work or government, but he did not know what. As it was, he produced enough protein to feed hundreds of people each year; he was a conscientious steward of slightly over one thousand acres of the planet’s limited land surface; and he had raised children who would more likely contribute to society than tear it down or live off it. Yet the doubt lived on.
Now, though, watching the dying fire settle into the fireplace grate, Hook had more pressing problems. His left leg had gone to sleep and the other pained him. He squirmed slightly and kissed the top of his daughter’s head, until she moved finally, waking. She muttered something unintelligible and then, seeing where she was, smiled sadly up at him.
“I fell asleep,” she said.
“Yes, you did.”
“Wasn’t I heavy?”
“Yes, you were.”
“Dad?”
“Yes, honey.”
She told him that she was sorry about what she had said earlier and that if he felt he had to go back to California, then that was what she wanted too, whatever he wanted. He kissed her gratefully, and then they both got up, he on legs that felt like boards. Putting his arm around her, he walked her to her bedroom and tucked her in, and then went to his own room, where the luminous dials of his Big Ben clock put the time at a few minutes after four in the morning. It would soon be dawn.
In the afternoon, with Arnie and Bobby, Hook began moving the herd between the two pastures on the other side of the blacktop road. It was a job they had to do throughout the year, rotating the cattle between these two fields and the main pasture every few weeks—in the warm months to permit the grazed grass to recover, and in the winter simply to distribute the animals’ manure as widely as possible. Hook had automated their winter feeding system to the point where one man could handle it in a pinch. Silage from the big Harvestore silos was combined with protein supplement and power-loaded into low, wheeled feed-bunks he had designed and built himself, a train of them, which he or Arnie would then tow by tractor out into the pasture, along with a “car” or two of haybales to give the animals dry roughage to protect them against bloat. Thus in winter as well as summer all the cattle except the bulls and feeders were kept out in the field, which greatly minimized the amount of work that went into their care and feeding. But at the same time it made them wilder and less tractable than feedlot cattle, so that even as simple a thing as moving them from one pasture to another could become a delicate operation. There were almost three hundred head in the main herd, slightly over half of them cows and the rest calves, and you had to be firm enough to keep them moving ahead, yet not so firm you caused a cow to turn on you or made it stampede the rest of the herd.
The main problem, of course, was simply the stupidity of the bovine animal. Just as generation after generation of Andalusian bulls were never acute enough to see that their enemy was not the bright muleta but the man holding it, so an Aberdeen Angus cow could stand for hours at a barbed wire fence staring at the greener grass on the other side and never think to wander along that fence in search of an opening. They had to be led.
Today, Arnie was doing the leading. Using the GM pickup, he was spreading a load of ear corn from the open fence gap between the two pastures on into the west pasture, making a kind of maize trail for the cattle to follow. At the same time Hook and Bobby in the Jeep were driving back and forth along the perimeter of the field, pushing the herd toward the distant gap. Occasionally, as a cow or calf straggled behind, Bobby would leap out and chase it back into the herd. Hook had to be careful to keep the Jeep on grass as he drove, for the day was bright and sunny, almost forty degrees, and in the bare spots the ground had turned soft as mush, no footing even for a four-wheel-drive vehicle. He was pleased at how fine the cattle looked, especially the calves. Whatever runts there had been in the beginning, last spring and summer, evidently had caught up by now, for there was not one of them that appeared to be under three hundred pounds. And the males looked best of all, that fortunate ten or fifteen percent he had judged good enough to sell eventually as breeding stock, and had thus escaped the castrater’s knife. Hook could think of no animal except possibly the big jungle cats that rivaled the beauty and majesty of a full-grown Black Angus bull, with its massive head and chest and the long cinched flanks under which its male sac swung as nobly as a bishop’s censer. Beautiful but dumb, Hook thought, watching as the animals moved obediently toward the fence gap and its carpet of corn.
Finally they all made it through and it was time for the men to pause a few minutes and celebrate the event with a smoke, time for Hook at least, since Bobby was not allowed to indulge yet, and Arnie was almost never without a cigarette, though he did not smoke them so much as just let them dangle from his lips and burn, which caused him to hold his head back and to keep his right eye squinted, giving him the look of a man who regarded the world with unflagging cynicism, which in fact was how he did regard it. Small and sinewy, he was the possessor of an amazing constitution; in twenty years Hook had never known the man to be sick, even with a cold. Now, after closing the fence gap he came over and scooted up onto the hood of the Jeep.
“Duck soup,” he said, wiping the sweat off his forehead.
“Not a hitch,” Hook agreed.
“You got one very mean little bull in there, though. You see him?”
“No.”
“Attacked the truck, he did. Tried to stove in the door.”
Hook grinned. “You talked him out of it?”
“Hell no. I kicked him. I figure you better kick ’em while you can.” For a time Arnie sat there wagging his head reflectively, and then suddenly tears were standing in his eyes. “It just ain’t the same anymore, goddamn it!” he said. “Nothin’ll be the same around here again! Ever!”
Hook looked at Bobby sitting next to him, but the boy had turned away.
“I just wish I was goin’ out there with you, Dave!” the old man went on. “I’d show them lying bastards a thing or two!”
“Don’t worry,” Hook said. “We’ll get the truth.”
“That ain’t enough! Somebody should pay!” Arnie—mild, easy-going Uncle Arnie—slammed his fist into the Jeep hood so hard he almost dented it.
“We’ll see,” Hook said. “It depends on what happened.”
“I still say, you oughta get that girl Bobby says Chris put it to and make her testify. You can, you know. What’s the word—?”
“Subpoena.”
“That’s it. Use it.”
In the days since he had returned with the body, Hook had learned from Bobby that Chris, along with a half-dozen other boys his age, had had sexual intercourse with the daughter of a Banner Hill grocer, a man who was a deacon in the First Baptist Church, a Kiwanian, a community pillar of sorts. But Hook considered it highly unlikely that this man would permit his daughter to make a deposition declaring herself the town tramp. Bobby also had revealed that another girl Chris had dated, a girl whose family Hook knew and liked, had regularly made the boy come with her hand, though she had denied him anything more than that. Hook planned to tell Rider about both girls and if the sergeant considered the testimony important they could do something about it then, possibly get corroboration from the girls personally, without having to cause them or their families embarrassment. And then, of course, there was the letter. Hook was not worried. He would not be going back empty-handed.
“And if she denies it all,” Arnie said now, “subpoena the other kids that was layin’ her. They’ll back up Bobby’s word, believe me. Nothin’ they’d be happier to do than brag about gettin’ a little. It’s only human.”
“Maybe later on. We’ll see what develops.” Hook restarted the Jeep’s engine.
Arnie slid off the hood and headed for the pickup, which he had driven back into the cleared pasture before closing the fence gap. Hook drove slowly back across the pasture and through the trees that separated it from the road. It was a beautiful woodland, almost parklike in its lack of undergrowth, which was kept down by the cattle as they used the trees for shade in the summer and shelter in the winter. Coming to the gate, Hook stopped the Jeep and Bobby jumped out to open it. As the boy swung it wide, the battered pickup of Ralph Metzler, whose small farm bordered Hook’s, came rattling around a curve in the blacktop and braked sharply in front of the gate. Rolling down his window, Metzler told Hook that one of his calves had been killed that night. He had been at work, Metzler said-he worked nights at the glass factory in Alton—but his wife had been home, though of course she had not heard a thing, deaf as she was.
“And I tell you, it must’ve been something big that done it,” he went on. “The calf was only a week old, but it’s a Holstein and must’ve weighed one-twenty at least. But whatever it was, this thing, it dragged that calf right out beyond the fence. Killed it at the throat, it looked like. Ate through its belly, and tore one whole leg clean off. My dogs wasn’t even scratched, so I figured they was just too scared to take it on, whatever it was, so it had to be mighty goddamn big, I’d say—a wolf or some big dogs gone wild or somethin’ like that.”
Arnie had pulled up behind them in time to hear most of the tale.
“What wolf?” he laughed. “There ain’t no wolves around here, Ralph. You know that.”
Metzler, always short-tempered, took Arnie’s objection personally. “Well, what then? You tell me! A mountain lion? It sure wasn’t no coon!”
“Dogs probably,” Hook said. “And thanks for telling us, Ralph.”
“Well, I thought you ought to know, all the cattle you got. Whatever it is, it could cost you plenty. I wouldn’ta bothered you otherwise, I mean so soon after the funeral and all.”
“That’s all right. We appreciate it.”
“Gonna get me some woven wire fence now,” he said. “I got four more calves just like that one. On buckets. And I don’t want to lose any more.”
“Of course not.”
Metzler drove off then, nodding to Hook and Bobby but pointedly ignoring Arnie, who he evidently felt had looked a gift horse in the mouth.
“Buckets!” Arnie scoffed. “Can you beat that? Handfeeding calves this day and age. That man’s a real tycoon.”
But Hook was more concerned about Metzler’s dead calf than his live ones. “What about the killing? You got any ideas?”
“Like you said—dogs.”
“Whose? If we can’t find them, we’re going to have to baby-sit the herd.”
Arnie sagged dejectedly against the pickup. “I was afraid of that.”
But Bobby had better news. “It was just one dog,” he said.
“And I know where he is.”
From the beginning, the hunt for the killer dog did not seem like the real thing to Hook, probably for the same reason that Arnie had declined to go along with them.
“There ain’t no dog there,” he had said. “The boy’s been seein’ things. Why, the Olsons wouldn’t let a dove roost free on their property, let alone a dog big as that critter was.”
Nevertheless Hook went along with the boy, mostly just to be alone with him. Ever since Hook had returned from the coast with Chris’s body he had watched Bobby going deeper into himself, as if he were drowning in the thing, and except for those few moments in the snow the day before, he seemed to have reached some dark cold depth to his liking now, a place where no one would reach him. As they drove, Hook glanced over at him occasionally, at his strong-boned face and mane of over-the-collar blond hair blowing in the wind, and especially at his eyes, which had the haunted look of a youth come home from combat in Vietnam, someone who had seen and done things beyond his power to understand or communicate. Driving past the cemetery, Hook tried again to reach him.
“I came here last night.”
“I figured you did.”
Hook slowed the Jeep. “You want to stop in now?”
“Why? What’s in there? He’s not in there.”
Having no answer to that, Hook drove on.
A mile farther he pulled onto the shoulder and parked at the point where the blacktop joined the county road, a flat and barren intersection in which a corncrib and equipment shed stood by themselves in the center of a neatly plowed field. Until that fall the buildings had been part of the farm of Emma Danker, an old widow who had lived there alone for almost thirty years, renting out her land and raising roses and stray dogs. Helpless finally, she had been committed to a state institution by her relatives, who then had sold the farm to the neighboring Olson brothers, a sale and takeover that impressed Hook as truly Carthaginian, for the brothers had not only razed Emma’s house and barn and garden and felled her trees but had plowed the ground where it all had stood, leaving just the distant corncrib and shed, in which they stored their combine and cornpicker.
Getting out of the Jeep, Hook checked the rifles he had picked up at the farm, both war surplus Mi’s.
“That’s where I saw him last week,” Bobby pointed. “Next to the shed, just lying out there in the sun. All that’s happened, I forgot about it.”
Hook shook his head thoughtfully. “Christ, when did they commit the old lady? October, wasn’t it?”
“Why? Don’t you believe I saw him there?”
“Sure. It’s just hard to figure, that’s all. It’s been a long time. And I thought the humane society had picked up all her dogs.”
“Not him.”
“Let’s hope he’s still here.”
The dog was one of the dozens Emma had taken in and cared for over the years. Only where most of her strays had been small mongrels, this one had been a spectacular crossbreed, German shepherd and great Dane, Hook had judged by the look and size of it.
He handed one of the rifles to Bobby. “You go around on that side. I’ll move in from here. And remember—keep each other in view. And aim low. These things carry.”
Bobby nodded impatiently. He was not a novice with a gun.
“When you’re near enough, start throwing clods on the roof. That ought to bring him out. If he’s in there.”
“He’s in there.” The boy started across the plowed field, heading toward a point to the right of the shed.
Hook walked straight toward it, his gun still on safety. Both buildings were freshly painted a bright barn red, like the main part of the Olsons’ farm lying a half-mile distant, in the direction Bobby was walking. The shed roof was covered with corrugated aluminum sheeting that shone brilliantly in the sunlight. Beyond it a swath of black woods, following the creek that would eventually run through Hook’s farm, divided the gray of the plowed field from the harsh cerulean sky, in which a pair of hawks, far apart, wheeled patiently. Hook continued to move across the rough plowed ground toward the two structures until finally he was close enough to see a kind of opening, a tunneling, under one of the shed’s sliding doors, and for the first time he began to believe that the dog Bobby had seen might indeed have been Emma Danker’s huge beast and not just some other canine wandering through. Closer yet, Hook kicked a clod of plowed ground loose and hurled it onto the roof of the shed. Bobby did the same. But nothing happened. They waited for a few moments and then repeated the process, and this time the dog came snarling out of the tunnel, a blur of bared white teeth and shaggy black-and-tan hair, and it was obvious that the animal was not just fleeing the shed but was attacking, moving in a high blind rage toward Bobby, not even thirty yards away. At the moment Hook sighted and fired, the dog caught sight of Bobby’s weapon and abruptly stopped, whirling in panic. Hook’s shot missed. But Bobby’s did not. It hit the animal in the hindquarters, knocking him over and spinning him around. Immediately the dog began pawing desperately at the ground with its front legs, trying to drag itself back to the tunnel under the door. This time Hook did not miss.
As they walked up to it, Hook was shocked by the size of the dog. He once had killed a deer in Wisconsin and had been surprised at how small the animal had looked in death. The dog, though, if anything looked larger, almost the size of a great Dane but heavier in the body and with the long hair and wolflike snout of a shepherd.
“Go around and look in the window,” Hook told Bobby. “See if you can see anything.”
It was the only way they had to check, for the doors were padlocked shut. But Hook was not worried. Even if there was no sign of the calf or any other killings, he felt they had done the right thing in destroying the dog. It had been on its own and apparently was not starving, so it had to have done some killing somewhere, which made it a threat to all the livestock in the area.
Bobby came back around the building. “It’s in there, the hoof and part of the legs. Other bones too. You gonna tell the Olsons?”
“Later.”
“I’ll get the shovel.” Bobby headed for the Jeep. Bringing it had been his idea, not Hook’s. The boy had been that certain.
While he was gone, Hook dragged the dog around to the back of the shed, where they would not be seen by anybody driving past on the county road. Bobby returned with the shovel and Hook told him to dig in the plowed ground, which would be easier going than the strip of hardpan the Olsons had had to leave around the perimeter of the building. Hook lit another cigarette and smoked it halfway down while Bobby worked at the hole, rapidly, almost savagely, as if it too had a life that circumstances required their taking. Hook tried to spell him but the boy insisted on doing it all himself and finished the job in less than ten minutes. The hole was about five feet long and two feet down, deep enough so the Olsons’ disks would not turn up what was left of the carcass in the spring.
Together, Hook and Bobby placed the dog into the hole, turning it so its legs were folded under it. Hook tried to take the shovel to fill in the grave, but again Bobby insisted on doing the work himself, only now he felt like talking as he labored, and his words came in spurts, between the heavy bellows of his breathing.
“All he did was what he had to do, right? As a dog?”
“That’s right.”
“And we did what we had to do?”
“Yes.”
The boy shook his head. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
“That people who find something to believe in are just lying to themselves. Things like church. Or the flag. Or art. Or anything.”
“That’s kind of pessimistic.”
“You look at life clear—I mean, just the way it is—and there’s no purpose.”
“That we can perceive.”
“What do you mean?”
“Only that maybe we can’t see the whole picture. Like him.” Hook indicated the grave.
“I don’t believe that. We’re the highest animals. And the way we see life is the way it is.” Bobby looked at Hook almost accusingly. “And there’s nothing.”
“Including certainty.”
But Bobby was adamant. “There’s nothing,” he said.
He finished filling in the grave in silence, then walked on ahead toward the Jeep.
Hook was the last to go to bed that night. As he went around turning out the lights and locking up, he stepped out onto the porch and looked through the black-limbed maples of the lawn at the main pasture, which was frost-covered, silver in the moonlight. The same clearness of sky that had made the day warmer now deepened the night cold, so that his breath plumed in front of him. In the summer the porch was screened and when he was finished working in the evening he would sit out in his favorite wicker chair reading until the light failed or talking with the children or Arnie or Aunt Marian, who sat in the chain-hung swing squeaking slowly back and forth, measuring the passing of the day as evenly as a clock’s pendulum. Finally, as the others turned in, he would remain there alone in the darkness drinking wine or beer and eating pistachio nuts, sometimes watching the herd out in the pasture if the moon was bright enough. Often the boys would be out somewhere, and in time he would hear their car—the Jeep usually—on the blacktop and then he would see its lights shining in the tops of the trees and then finally the headlights themselves as the vehicle crested the hill and came on toward the house. A few times this past summer the boys had arrived home less than sober, and on those occasions there was almost nothing they had not found hilarious, including their father. Most of their commentary had to do with his sitting in the dark drinking wine all by himself, sallies like “Well, it’s better than in the closet” or “My father, the wino” or “You sure you can make it home, Dad?”—but a good deal of it was their own exclusive humor, an idiom that went safely over, under, around, and through him, and which they seemed to find doubly funny because of it. Usually one or both of them would sit with him for a while and he would gently probe them about what was going on in their world, seeking reassurance that girls and booze and sports were still the order of the day and that the two of them were not nightly driving off to do business with some friendly neighborhood drug pusher. He still found it preposterous that the drug plague had reached even the Banner Hills of America, but it had, and he watched his children—their arms, their eyes, their attitude and stamina—for the slightest sign of the plague. With Jenny, both boys expressed repeatedly the opinion that drug users were “creeps and losers” and he believed they meant it. Nevertheless, just as Hook’s own mother had anxiously watched him for any sign of sore throat or backache during the peak polio season in late summer, so he watched his children the year around for symptoms of the dread contemporary disease.
Hook remembered one of the last late-night conversations he had had with Chris on the porch. It was a summer Saturday night and the boy had driven in slightly before midnight, probably from a date with the Baptist grocer’s daughter. The herd was in the main pasture and for some reason had settled in for the night just beyond the drive fence, and the sounds of their snorting and breathing, their quarreling and moving about, combined with the usual insectival racket, had made the night seem almost African, aswarm with life. Chris parked the car in the driveway loop and came up the six stairs in two long strides, all legs still, but easy and graceful, surprised for a moment at finding his father up so late, but then smiling his quick, slightly crooked smile. Even then he had begun to wear his dark blond hair down over his ears and Hook had suffered the length in silence, remembering the futile fuss his own father had made over his mid-forties’ crewcut, calling him Himmler and Bristles. They talked for a few minutes about the cattle being up so close to the house and about the condition of the corn on the Strickler hundred, which Chris had stopped to check on his way to Banner Hill, and about their neighbor Joe Silas miring two tractors one after the other trying to pull his three-gang disk out of a slough, and finally having to hire a contractor with a bulldozer to pull all three pieces out, an ignominy Silas probably would never live down. Then they got around to the subject: college and the draft. Chris had already been accepted for admission to the University of Illinois and could have gotten in at least a semester of study before his nineteenth birthday in February, when he would have been eligible for the draft. But his number was a low one; there was no question that he would be called up. So Hook was not surprised at the decision the boy announced that night.
“I’ve definitely decided, Dad. I don’t want to go. Not for just one semester. I’d rather start after I get out of service.”
Hook was not against the decision. “Okay. I’ll call them Monday. What do you want to do this fall, then? Just work?”
Chris grinned. “Not exactly.”
“What then? Lie around and eat Auntsy’s coffee cake?”
“That’d be all right.”
Hook studied his look, his smile, in the darkness. The boy had something on his mind. “But not that either, huh?”
Chris shook his head. “No. I’ve been thinking I might take a trip. Go down South and out West. See some of the country.”
Hook considered it. One of his worries was that as a widower he had been overprotective of the boys, had inhibited the growth of their self-reliance. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “You’re a little young, though.”
“Nineteen?”
“Eighteen.”
“I pass for twenty-one.”
“So I’ve gathered.”
Chris grinned guiltily.
“How would you go? In the Jeep?”
“No, hitchhike. Everybody hitchhikes these days.”
“I don’t.”
“Come on, you know what I mean.”
“Okay, you’d hitchhike.”
“And I’d take my pack and sleeping bag. I’d get along.”
“When would you go? And how long?”
“This fall sometime. And as long as it takes.”
Hook smiled ruefully. “You’d freeze your butt off, you know. Even down South and out in California it can get pretty cold in the winter, especially at night.”
“Not like here.”
“Here there’s a roof over your head.”
Now Chris looked serious, determined. “I can do it.”
Watching him, Hook lit a cigarette. “I know you can, son. I’m not doubting that. It’s just that it’s all still pretty new. I want time to think about it.”
Chris shook his head despairingly. “You still think I’m a kid, don’t you?”
Hook did not answer immediately. He had an idea what the boy was getting at. “You mean you’ll go no matter what I say.”
Chris met his gaze for a few moments and then he turned away, looking out through the screens at the sleeping cattle. He nodded solemnly. “I’m afraid so.”
“Then I guess you’d better go with my blessing.”
Chris looked surprised for a moment. Then he smiled. “That’d be better.”
“I think so too.”
“It’s just something I have to do, Dad. I’ve been thinking about it all summer.”
Hook tried to appear enthusiastic. “Be good for you, I guess—getting away for a while, on your own.”
“There’s just so much going on in the country right now,” the boy said. “And I feel like, you know, like we’re kind of out of it here. Like there’s a flood all around us and we’re sitting up here on our hill all nice and dry looking down on the poor slobs who are losing everything or trying to save something. You know what I mean?”
Hook drained the last of his can of beer. It was warm. “High and dry,” he said. “Not a bad place to be during a flood.”
Chris would not accept that. “Come on, Dad. You know what I mean.”
Hook allowed that he did.
Chris was silent for a while then, sitting back against the parapet that surrounded the porch. Finally he said, “You could’ve been just about anything you wanted.”
“Hardly.”
“But you chose this.”
“You sorry I did?”
Chris looked out into the darkness, the swarming night. “No, I love it here. I really do. Most of the kids, they can’t wait to split and never come back. But I want to someday. I really do. After service and college and maybe knocking around a while. I can’t see a desk job for me. I love the farm, and the cattle, and being out all the time. I guess I’m crazy. And I hope Bobby stays too.”
Hook said nothing. His son casually had filled the vessel of his life to overflowing and he did not trust his voice to shape a word. He got to his feet, starting for bed, and gave Chris an equally casual clap on the shoulder, because that was the American way.
Now, in the clear and cold winter night, he wished with all his heart that he had taken the boy in his arms and kissed him as warmly and naturally as some old-time Jewish or Italian father would have. But it was too late now. This night no headlights shone through the trees or came stabbing over the crest of the hill. In fact, besides the moon and stars, the only lights he saw anywhere were on the wingtips of a jet already descending to land at St. Louis forty miles away. And suddenly he knew that tomorrow, not the day after, he would be returning to California.