Charlie’s doctor’s bag was old, the handle mended with black cloth tape, but it was the bigger kind that doctors in his early years had used to carry. He had always packed his bag too full: lollipops, a cloth doll, candy pills. He moved everything from the bag neatly into his laundry basket and tucked the basket under the bed, in case a maid should wonder why Doctor Charlie had left his stethoscope in with his dirty shirts. From the linen-supply closet on the second floor he took the oldest and shabbiest blanket, rolled it up, and stuffed it in the bag. Now the bag looked full. He took it downstairs, left it in the hallway by the sofa, and went outside to speak with Gilbert.
“I’m going over to your barn, to look again at—you know. Don’t have anyone come over there.” Gilbert said he wouldn’t. “And stay with Perdita.” Gilbert looked puzzled at that.
The top of the Knights’ barn was full of sunlight and heat. From downstairs in the barn, Charlie brought a flat heavy shovel and a dustpan and brush. He put them all down, opened the doctor’s bag, and took out the blanket. The body lay like a black scrawl in the hay. The doctor picked up the shovel from the floor, hefted it, and held it first by its handle, then like a pick, with his hands on the shaft. It felt awkward, but he lifted it over his head. He thought of Jay French, long ago, with his clear, grey, mocking eyes. It is your business, doctor, to look after the heir. Charlie sighed, lowered the shovel to the floor, and spread the shabby blanket all over the body, from head to foot. It was a grey blanket with a red edge. Then he lifted the shovel over his head and brought it down onto the blanket, over and over again. He paid special attention to the skull, which could show that this was a man’s body and not a boy’s.
When he lifted the comer of the blanket to look, there was nothing left but powder, fragments the size of a fingertip, more like old wood than bone. Charlie’s shirt was stuck to his skin with sweat and both his arms ached. He put the heavy shovel down and sat on the floor for a few minutes, feeling his heart pound and the ache twist in his arms. But he was not done. He got up from the floor again, using the shovel as a cane to help himself up. He took the dustpan and brush, folded back the blanket carefully, and on his hands and knees brushed up every fragment of cloth, every bit of bone, the powder and splinters caught in the cracks of the floorboards, and dumped everything into his doctor’s bag. It took surprisingly little room; there was still space for the blanket. The stain still darkened the floor, yes, there had been a body there, but impossible to tell how tall or how old.
As he got to his feet, he half stumbled across the shovel, which clanked on something in the hay, shifting it so that Charlie could see its shape: it was a revolver.
The gun was terribly heavy, a big machined piece of metal more than a foot long. It was not rusty: Charlie remembered, with terrible clarity, William Knight’s age-spotted hands oiling the metal. He saw the copper-green of a percussion cap still in the cylinder. One of those bullets had been heavy and strong enough to crack a chair in half. What’ll I do with this? he thought. The percussion cap would have lost its strength, the powder would not work; and what did he mean to shoot? He should throw it in the water.
Charlie put the gun in his bag with the rest, put the spade and the dustpan and brush in their places, and walked toward home. By the bridge over the Little Spruce, he turned away from the path and walked up the rocky bank to the river’s edge. Even in this hot August, the Spruce waters were racing. He knelt on the bank, which was covered with soft star moss, and, opening his bag, he took out the gun and the blanket and laid them down. Then, standing up and leaning out over the river, he held his doctor’s bag by the two ends, turned it upside down, and shook it, the way he had done dozens of times before when some mischievous child had loaded it with treasures of sand or pebbles. Sand and pebbles and powder rained down and were caught in the foam and whirled away. Some fell on the rocks, a white powder that the next rain would mix with the earth. He shook the blanket over the water, and in a moment it was clean too. A fragment of black cloth hung for a few seconds in an eddy, and then a branch came tumbling down the river, a good-sized branch still with its green leaves, and swept everything downstream.
Now the gun. It lay bright on the moss. So big, so heavy. The Spruce waters were strong and high, but it was August; this was not the spring run when the water would sweep away a man. Charlie saw how it might be, the gun tumbling over and over until it came to the rocks in the shallow water, above the Knights’ bridge, then lying there, bright and gleaming, for everyone to see.
It could go into the lake, but Charlie never went rowing. If he threw it in from the shore the metal would shine in the water; someone would see it.
He sat on the moss with the gun in front of him until the water mist made him chill; the gun seemed like a weight on him and his arms ached all across his chest. The ache spread until his eyes dazzled and it was hard to breathe. He was afraid because he was not done. He leaned back on the moss and held the blanket to him, to warm him against the chill of the mist and his own sweaty body. Not yet, he prayed; he still had a letter to write and a gun to hide.
Somehow he got back to the Clinic, inside, and up the stairs with no one seeing him. In his room he wrapped the gun in the shabby blanket and thrust both deep into the bottom of the closet, behind the shelf that the hot-air pipe made. He sat at his desk. He had to hold his left arm against his chest; it felt as though the pain were something trying to crawl out of him. The fingers of his right hand felt the size of arms, uncontrollable. He wrote.
Today, Sunday, August fifth, 1906, I have examined a corpse in Gilbert Knight’s barn. From the number of teeth and the growth of the bones, I have determined that the body is a male child of about eight years. I think this must be Richard Knight.
Charies Francis Adair, M.D.
He fell across his bed and closed his eyes, having told the lie that might make Gilbert end the search at last, and fell into a half-dream. Sometimes he thought he had not written the letter and he tried to get up and then fell back again. Once St. Peter, an old man with a white beard, came to him and told him all his sins had been forgiven him; and then St. Peter showed him the shabby blanket with the red edge, and laughed at him with Jay French’s quiet, mocking laugh. All your sins except one, Charlie. I have not confessed, Charlie thought in his dream, I will die in mortal sin. He prayed to see Father O’Connell in his dreams, Peter O’Connell who would have known God’s will in this. But he dreamed instead that he was in a confessional and asked the blessing, Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, and no one answered, no one ever answered.
When the shadows grew long he woke up again, sweaty, breathless, not in pain, but feeling as if he had been wrung dry, as if he had no more pain left to offer. The ceiling was covered with a network of cracks. Jay French was dead; Reisden was after Perdita, and would stay until Richard’s body was found. Charlie was helpless; he had nothing to offer but lies.
And he had not got rid of the gun.