World Made by Hand

Sixty-four

His words struck me like a blow with a shovel. Next thing I knew, I was blubbering into the clover, hardly on account of Minor alone, but because of my Daniel, and Genna, and Sandy, and all of us who had lost so much over a few years time, and the sheer accumulated discomfort of my senses. I know I was hardly in my right mind. No doubt my perceptions were off. But when at last I stopped weeping, and lifted my face back off the ground, and turned around to speak to Brother Jobe, I found nothing there but an empty chair and a hot wind blowing up the pasture, rattling the branches in the nearby trees. There wasn’t even any sign of him walking down the pasture back to the school. It was like he’d simply vanished. I assumed he was using this opportunity to make yet another pointwhich he would later deny, of course-about exactly who and what he was. But for the moment I decided to simply accept the fact that, whatever else he might be, he was a father who had lost a son.

And when I returned to my little 1904 arts-and-crafts house on Linden Street, it was at last with nothing left to do, no onerous tasks or obligations ahead of me. Britney had left a note on the table out in the summer kitchen: Dear Robert, I have heard much talk about your doings and all that went on. Not knowing when you might return, I took Sarah and we are outgathering wilds where Bright Creek meets the river. Corn bread and good cheese in the cupboard. Also some apple butter from Mr. Schmidt. In case you return before we do. We look forward to having you home. Love, Us.

Bright Creek ran into the Battenkill a half mile west of the old railroad bridge. You could follow the tracks there because the tracks ran through the whole river valley. I spotted them just where she’d said they would be. Britney was standing thigh-deep upstream of the creek junction using my fly rod to work the pool where the two streams came together. Sarah was off wading a shallow side channel behind a gravel bar, picking watercress and stuffing it in a large creel that hung off her shoulder on a strap. I left the tracks and busted my way through a slough of bracken to the gravel bar by the river proper. As I got closer I could see that Britney was dapping with earthworms, letting the hook drift downstream in the current. The trout liked the pool there at the junction of the two streams because the spring-fed water of Bright Creek was a lot cooler than the river. It energized them and they fed more. I was impressed to discover that she knew this. I sat on a driftwood stump there on the gravel bar watching. She worked the pool with her back to me. Within a minute she had hooked a large, lively trout. She brought it in without any trouble and grasped it by its lower jaw, the way experienced anglers do, to get the hook out. Then, with the butt of the rod jammed under her arm, she took a paring knife out of her creel and slit the trout’s belly from the anal vent to near its gills, like you’re supposed to. She reached in and removed its guts and flung the guts out in the current. Then she ran her thumb down along the spine inside of the rib cavity to get out the congealed blood there that can make the meat taste off if you leave it in, especially on a hot day. Finally, she slipped the fish inside the creel and washed the slime and blood off her fingers in the current. I clapped my hands in appreciation. Hearing that, she finally turned around. What a sight she was in a wet cotton dress. I kicked off my boots and waded out in the water, scooped her into my arms, and carried her to the gravel bank.

A while later we were all back at the house. The three of us ate a fine supper of grilled trout with sorrel cream sauce, and red potatoes out of Britney’s old garden behind the ruins of the Watling place, and watercress sauteed in butter for hardly a moment with a dash of vinegar, and cream custard with wild blackberries for dessert. Above all, I was starved for something I could think of only as normality, and felt I had begun to get a purchase on it as I settled down to read a chapter of The Wind in the Willows with Sarah, when there was a knock on the door. Britney answered it. Jerry Copeland was standing there, looking distracted and more morose than usual. For a moment I was seized again by the despairing nausea that had gripped me so many times in the days just passed.

“I hope it’s not about Loren,” I said.

“No, but you better come with me.”

“What is it?”

“I think you better see for yourself,” Jerry said.

We walked over to his place together. He said Loren appeared to be recovering. He didn’t show signs of serious infection. His temperature was only slightly elevated. Jerry was going to taper him off of the morphine the next day. He would not say anything more about why we were going over to his place, though. It was getting on toward darkness in town, another warm night. The sun had sunk below the treetops and swallows were dipping for bugs in the dooryard gardens. People were out on their porches, and they shouted salutations as they saw us hurry by.

When we got to Jerry’s, he led me into the springhouse out back. He lit a hanging candle lamp overhead and another plain stub in a brass saucer. The two bodies lay together side by side on the table, both now covered by the blue tarp. Jerry drew it back, exposing their heads and torsos. On the left lay Brother Minor, Wayne Karp to the right, their heads slightly elevated on wooden blocks.

“Have a look,” Jerry said. “Tell me what you see.”

I studied them a few minutes.

“Their wounds are similar,” I said.

“Think so? Look closer.”

Jerry held the candle just above their heads.

“They’re extremely similar,” I said.

“No,” he said. “They’re absolutely identical. See where the skin is split above each eye socket. Identical fractures across the supraorbital ridge and then diagonally down the malar bone. Same length of fracture to the millimeter. The eyeball itself is gone in both. Blown out or… something. Then, down below in the lower wound, see how the lip is split open with a fracture at the incisive fossa, below the nose. Same length of fracture to the millimeter. Now look here. Three teeth broken off: numbers two, three, and four. Upper lateral incisor, cuspid, first premolar. Same thing over here at this one.”

“It’s weird,” I said.

“Look real close at the teeth. See where number two, the lateral incisor is diagonally sheared off on this fellow?” Jerry said, meaning Minor.

“Yeah?”

“Now look at Wayne.”

He was right. They were absolutely identical.

“Very weird.”

“I measured it with a micrometer, by the way,” Jerry said. “I’ll tell you something else: I pulled a .38-caliber wadcutter out of this young man’s brain. And a second one down there in his neck.”

“Yes…?”

We stared at the two corpses another minute or so.

“The young man on the left there was brought in about three thirty in the morning,” he said. “Wayne here-well you brought him in yourself at noon.”

“That’s right.”

“You got any idea who killed him?”

I hesitated a moment as a whole catalog of scenarios, complications, explanations, and cockamamy stories scrolled through my imagination.

“I did,” I said.

“How come?”

“He was trying to escape.”

“What you kill him with?”

“Pistol.”

“There aren’t any bullets in Wayne’s head. Whatever did this to him, it wasn’t a bullet.”

“Maybe they passed through.”

“There aren’t any exit wounds.”

“Hmm. That’s odd too.”

“I’ll say.”

I glanced back and forth between the corpses and Jerry.

“Just thought you’d be interested,” Jerry said after an awkward interval. “He was an arrogant prick, though, wasn’t he, Wayne Karp?”

“He wasn’t a model citizen,” I said. “But he was a leader of men, in his own way.”

We stood there and gazed at the bodies a while longer, and then Jerry drew the tarp back over their faces.