The next morning, we headed north into Jackman. We got stuck waiting for a truck to reverse at the Jackman Trading Post, even in November its display of T-shirts hanging outside like laundry drying. To one side of it was an old black-and-white with a mannequin in the driver’s seat, which was as close as anyone was going to get to a sighting of a cop this far north.
“They ever have cops up here?” asked Louis.
“I think there used to be a policeman in the sixties or seventies.”
“What happened to him? He die of boredom?”
“I guess it is kinda quiet. There’s a constable now, far as I know.”
“Bet the long winter nights just fly by for him.”
“Hey, they had a killing once.”
“Once?” He didn’t sound impressed.
“It was a pretty famous story at the time. A guy named Nelson Bartley, used to own the Moose River House, got shot in the head. They found his body jammed under an uprooted tree.”
“Yeah, and when was this?”
“Nineteen nineteen. There was rum-running involved somehow, I seem to recall.”
“You telling me there’s been nothing since then?”
“Most people in this part of the world take their time about dying, if they can,” I said. “You may find that startling.”
“I guess I move in different circles.”
“I guess so. You don’t like rural life much, do you?”
“I had my fill of rural life when I was a boy. I didn’t care much for it then. Don’t figure it’s improved much since.”
There were also twin outhouses beside the trading post, one on top of the other. On the door of the upper outhouse was written the word “Conservative.” On the door of the lower one was the word “Liberal.”
“Your people,” I said to Louis.
“Not my people. I’m a liberal Republican.”
“I’ve never really understood what that means.”
“Means I believe people can do whatever they want, as long as they don’t do it anywhere near me.”
“I thought it would be more complex than that.”
“Nope, that’s about it. You think I should go in and tell them I’m gay?”
“If I was you, I wouldn’t even tell them you’re black,” said Angel, from the backseat.
“Don’t judge this place by that outhouse back there,” I said. “That’s just to give the tourists something to laugh at. A small town like this doesn’t survive, even prosper some, if the people who live here are bigots and idiots. Don’t make that mistake about them.”
Incredibly, this silenced both of them.
Beyond the trading post, and to the left, the impressive twin steeples of St. Anthony’s Church, built from local granite in 1930, loomed against the pale gray sky. The church wouldn’t have looked out of place in a big city, but it seemed incongruous here in a town of a thousand souls. Still, it had given Bennett Lumley something to aim for in the creation of Gilead, and he had determined that the spire of his church would exceed even that of St. Anthony’s.
Jackman, or Holden as it was originally known, was founded by the English and the Irish, and the French came down to join them later. Back where the Trading Post lay used to be part of an area called Little Canada, and from there to the bridge was the Catholic part of town, which was why St. Anthony’s was on the eastern side of the river. Once you crossed the bridge, that was Protestant territory. There was the Congregational church, and the Episcopalians, too, who were the Protestants it was okay to like if you were a Catholic, or so my grandfather used to say. I didn’t know how much the place had changed since then, but I was pretty certain that the old divide still remained, give or take a couple of houses.
The red Jackman station house stood by the railway line that cut through the town, but it was now privately owned. The main bridge in town was being repaired, so a detour took us over a temporary structure and into the township of Moose River. On the right was the modest Moose River Congregational Church, which bore the same relationship to St. Anthony’s as the local Little League team bore to the Red Sox.
Eventually, we came to the sign for Holden Cemetery, across from the Windfall Outdoor Center, its blue school buses, now empty, lined up sleepily outside. A dirt-and-stone road led down to the cemetery, but it looked steep and slick with ice, so we left the car at the top of the road and walked the rest of the way. The road led past a frozen pond on one side and a patch of beaver bog on the other, before the gravestones of the cemetery appeared on a hill to the left. It was small, and bordered by a wire fence, with an unlocked gate wide enough for one person to pass through at a time. The graves dated as far back as the nineteenth century, probably to the days when this was still just a settlement.
I looked at the five stones nearest the gate, three large stones, two small. The first read “Hattie E., wife of John F. Childs” and gave the dates of her birth and death: April 11, 1865, and November 26, 1891. Beside her stood the two smaller stones: Clara M. and Vinal F. According to the stone, Clara M. was born on August 16, 1895, and died just over a month later on September 30, 1895. Vinal F.’s time on this earth was even briefer: born on September 5, 1903, he was dead by September 28. The fourth stone was that of Lillian L., John’s second wife and presumably the mother of Clara and Vinal. She was born on July 11, 1873, and died less than a year after her son, on May 16, 1904. The last stone was that of John F. Childs himself, born September 8, 1860, and died, having outlived two wives and two children, March 18, 1935. There were no other stones nearby. I wondered if John F. had been the last of his line. Here, in this tiny cemetery, the story of his life was laid bare in the space of five carved pieces of rock.
But the stone we were looking for stood in the farthest southern corner of the cemetery. There were no names upon it, and no dates of birth or death. It read only THE CHILDREN OF GILEAD, followed by the same word carved three times:
INFANT
INFANT
INFANT
and a plea to God to have mercy on their souls. As unbaptized children, they would originally have been laid to rest outside the cemetery, but it was clear that at some point in the past the position of the cemetery fence had been discreetly altered in this corner, and the Children of Gilead now lay within its boundaries. It said a lot about the people of the town that quietly, and without fuss, they had embraced these lost infants and allowed them to rest within the precincts of the graveyard.
“What happened to the men who did this?” asked Angel. I looked at him and saw the grief etched on his face.
“Men and women,” I corrected him. “The women must have known and colluded in what happened, for whatever reason. Two of those children died of unknown causes, but one was stabbed with a knitting needle shortly after birth. You ever hear of a man stabbing a child with a knitting needle? No, the women covered it up, whether out of fear or shame, or something else. I don’t think Dubus was lying about that much. Nobody was ever charged. The authorities examined three girls and confirmed that they’d given birth at some point in the recent past, but there was no evidence to connect those births with the bodies that they found. The community got together and claimed that the children were given up for private adoption. There was no paperwork for the births, which was a crime in itself, but one that nobody felt the urge to prosecute. Dubus told the investigators that the kids were sent to somewhere in Utah. A car came along, he said, collected them, then disappeared into the night. That was the story, and it was only years later that he recanted and claimed that the mothers of the girls who had given birth had killed the infants. Anyway, a week or so after the bodies were found, the community had already broken up, and people were going their separate ways.”
“Free to abuse somewhere else,” said Angel.
I didn’t reply. What was there to say, particularly to Angel, who had been a victim of such abuse himself, farmed out by his father to men who took their pleasures from the body of a child? That was why he was here now, in this cold cemetery in a remote northern town. That was why they were both here, these hunters among hunters. It was no longer a question of money for them, or their own convenience. That might once have been true, but it was true no longer. They were here now for the same reason that I was: because to ignore what had happened to children in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders.
“Somebody’s tended to this grave,” said Angel.
He was right. There were no weeds, and the grass had been cut back so that it would not obscure the marker. Even the words on the stone had been enhanced with black paint so that they would stand out.
“Who takes care of a fifty-year-old grave?” he asked.
“Maybe the man who now owns Gilead,” I replied. “Let’s go ask him.”
• • •
About five miles along the 201, beyond Moose River and past the Sandy Bay town line, a sign pointed north to the Bald Mountain Hiking Trail, and I knew that we were nearing Gilead. Without Angel’s prior knowledge, the site itself would have been difficult to find. The road we took had no name. It was marked only by a sign reading PRIVATE PROPERTY and, as Angel had said, an additional warning listing those who were particularly unwelcome. About a half mile up the road was a gate. It was locked, and a fence disappeared into the forest on either side.
“Gilead’s in there,” said Angel, pointing north into the woods. “Maybe another half mile or more.”
“And the house?”
“Same distance, but straight up the road. You can see it from farther up that track.” He pointed to a rutted dirt trail that followed the fence southeast.
I pulled the car to the side of the road. We climbed over the gate and immediately cut into the forest.
We had walked for fifteen or twenty minutes when we came to the clearing.
• • •
Most of the buildings still remained. In a place where wood was the main building material, Lumley had chosen to use stone for a number of the houses, so confident was he that his ideal community would last. The dwellings varied in size from two-room cottages to larger structures comfortably capable of housing families of six or more. Most had fallen into ruin, and some had clearly been burned, but one appeared to have been restored to some degree. It had a roof, and its four windows were barred. The front door, a solid piece of rough-hewn oak, was locked. All told, the community could not have numbered more than a dozen families at its peak. There were many such places in Maine: forgotten villages, towns that had withered away and died, settlements founded on misplaced faith in a charismatic leader. I thought of the ruins of Sanctuary, out on Casco Bay, and of Faulkner and his slaughtered flock in Aroostook. Gilead was another in a long and ignominious line of failed ventures, doomed by unscrupulous men and base instincts.
And above it all loomed the great steeple of the Savior’s Church, Lumley’s rival to St. Anthony’s. The walls had been built, the steeple raised, but the roof had never been placed upon it, and no one had ever worshiped within its walls. It was less a tribute to God than a monument to one man’s vanity. Now the forest had claimed it for its own. It was smothered in ivy, so that it appeared as though nature itself had built it, creating a temple from leaves and tendrils, with grass and weeds for its floor and a tree for a tabernacle, for a shag-bark hickory had grown where the altar might have stood, spreading its bare arms like the skeletal remains of a deranged preacher, stripped of his flesh by the cold wind as he railed against the world, his bones browned by the actions of the sun and the rain.
Everything about Gilead spoke of loss and decay and corruption. Had I not been aware of the crimes that were committed here, the children who had suffered, and the infants who had died, it would still have left me feeling uneasy and soiled. True, there was a kind of grandeur to the half-built church, but it was without beauty, and even nature itself seemed to have been corrupted by its contact with this place. Dubus was right. Lumley had chosen badly for the site of his community.
As Angel moved to examine the church more closely, I stopped him with my hand.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“Don’t touch any of the plants,” I said.
“Why not?”
“They’re all poisonous.”
And it was true: it was as though every foul weed, every noxious flower, had found a home here, some of which I had never seen before this far north, or clustered together in this way. There was mountain laurel, with its shredded, rusty bark, its pink-and-white flowers, dotted with red like the blood of insects and with stamens that responded to the touch like insects or animals, now absent. I saw white snakeroot, some of its flowers still in their final bloom, that could render cow’s milk fatal to drink if the animal fed upon the plant. Near a patch of marsh, iced over at its banks, water hemlock, all toothed leaves and streaked stems, beckoned, each part of it potentially lethal. There was jimson weed, which belonged more properly in fields, and celandine, and stinging nettles. Even the ivy was poison. No birds would ever come here, I thought, not even in summer. It would always be a silent, desolate place.
We stared up at the massive steeple, its peak higher even than the trees around it. Sections of the alcove windows glared darkly over the forest through layers of ivy, and the empty alcove intended to house the bell was now almost entirely covered by the plant. There were no doors, merely rectangular gaps at the base of the steeple and at one side of the church itself, and no glass filled the windows. Even to attempt to enter would be to invite cuts and stings from the weeds and nettles that blocked the way, although when I looked closer it did appear that someone had, at some point, cut a way through, for the weeds were taller and thicker at the sides. To the west of the church, I saw the remains of a trail that had been cut through the forest, its path clear from the absence of tall trees. That was how they had transported the building materials into the forest, but half a century later all that was left was a divide conquered by shrubs.
We walked over to the intact house. I nodded to Angel, and he began working on the lock.
“Hasn’t been opened in a while,” he said. He took a small can of WD-40 from his jacket pocket, sprayed the lock, then went at it again. After several minutes, we heard a click. He applied pressure to the door with his shoulder, and it creaked open.
There were two rooms inside, both empty. The floor was concrete, and was clearly not part of the original structure. The sun, which had struggled for so long to shine through the filthy glass, now took the opportunity afforded by the open door to bathe the interior with light, but there was nothing to see and nothing to illuminate. Louis tapped one of the windows lightly with his knuckle.
“It’s Plexiglas,” he said. He traced his finger around the edge of the frame. It looked like someone had once tried to chip away at the cement holding it in place. They hadn’t gotten far, but the evidence of the failed attempt still remained.
He leaned in closer to the glass, then knelt, trying to get a clearer look at something that his sharp eyes had picked out.
“Look here,” he said.
There were tiny marks scratched upon it in the bottom right-hand corner. I moved my head in an effort to see what they might be, but it was Angel who deciphered them first.
“L. M.,” he said.
“Lucy Merrick,” I said. It had to be. There were no other markings on the walls or the windows. Had the letters been carved by a kid seeking a thrill, there would have been other initials, too, other names. But Gilead was not a place to come to alone, not willingly.
And I knew then that this was where they had taken Andy Kellog and, later, Merrick’s daughter. Andy Kellog had come back damaged, traumatized, but still alive. Lucy Merrick, though, had never returned. Instantly, the air in the house smelled stale and dead to me, infected by what I knew in my heart had occurred in its rooms.
“Why here?” said Louis, softly. “Why did they bring them here?”
“Because of what happened before,” said Angel. He touched his finger to the marks made by Lucy on the glass, tracing each one carefully and tenderly in an act of remembrance. I thought of my own actions in the attic of my house, reading a message written in dust. “It added to the pleasure, knowing they were repeating something that had been done in the past, like they were continuing a tradition.”
His words echoed Christian’s talk of “clusters.” Was that what lay behind Clay’s fascination with Gilead? Did he want to re-create the events of half a century before, or did he help others to do so? Then again, perhaps his interest was not prurient or lascivious. Maybe he wasn’t to blame in any way for what had happened, and only his professional curiosity drew him to this site deep in the woods, haunting his memory and finding form in the pictures that Merrick had torn apart on Joel Harmon’s wall, and that Mason Dubus proudly displayed on his. But I was starting to believe that less and less. If men had sought to re-create the original crimes here, then perhaps they would have sought out their instigator, Mason Dubus. I was aware that we were following a path trodden by Clay, tracing the marks that he had left as he moved north. He had given one of his precious artworks to Dubus. It did not seem like a mere act of thanks. It was closer to a gesture of respect, almost of affection.
I walked through the two rooms, looking for any further trace of Lucy Merrick’s presence in that house, but there was none. There had probably been mattresses once, blankets, even some books or magazines. There were light switches on the walls, but the sockets were bare of bulbs. I saw marks in the upper corner of the second room, where a metal plate of some kind had been held in place, a neat hole drilled below them. A larger hole in the wall, since filled in but its shape still visible, indicated the spot where a stove had once stood, and the fireplace had long ago been bricked up. Lucy Merrick had disappeared in September. It must already have been cold up here. How did she stay warm, if this was where they had kept her? I could find no answer. Everything had been removed, and it was clear too that these rooms had not been used for many years.
“They killed her here, didn’t they?” asked Angel. He was still by the window, his fingers maintaining contact with the carved letters on the glass, as though by doing so he could somehow touch Lucy Merrick herself and comfort her, so that, wherever she was, she might know that someone had found the marks she had left and was grieving for her. The letters were small, barely there. She did not want the men who had abducted her to see them. Perhaps she believed they would provide proof of her story when she was released, or did she fear, even then, that she might never be freed, and she hoped these letters might provide some sign in case anyone cared enough about her to try to discover her fate?
“They didn’t kill any of the others,” I said. “That’s why they wore masks, so they could let them go without worrying about being identified. They might have taken it a step further, or something could just have gone wrong. Somehow, she died, and they cleared away any sign that anyone had ever been here, then locked it up and never came back again.”
Angel let his fingers drop.
“Caswell, the guy who owns the land, he must have known what was happening.”
“Yes,” I said softly. “He must have known.”
I turned to leave. Louis was ahead of me. He stood, framed in the doorway, dark against the morning sunlight. He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped. The sound had carried clearly to each of us. It was a shotgun shell being jacked. A voice spoke. It said: “Boy, you better not move an inch, or I’ll blow your damn head off.”