Steven James - Opening Moves

They gave a hotline number.

As Joshua had thought, Hendrich had been off duty yesterday and no one was sure why he’d been in the train yard in the first place.

The coverage was extensive enough for Joshua to realize that it was all possibly a coincidence after all.

But then how did he get in after you locked the gate? You really think he crawled in under the fence? Or was he in there already?

Yes, there were still questions. A lot of questions. But Joshua had enough information right now to move forward with his plans, right after a visit to the bookshelf to remind himself why he did what he did.

Yesterday he’d thought about the cache he’d found stashed under the basement steps at Timothy Griffin’s house in Fort Atkinson.

Now, he went to look at the cache of his own.

Over the years he’d kept a memento from each victim, all the way back to that first time in the barn when his father gave him one of Kenneth’s teeth.

Coincidently, his collection was in the basement, just like Griffin’s was, but Joshua’s wasn’t in a fake cabinet under the steps, but rather in a small enclosed space behind a bookcase that he’d built when he first moved into the house, before he and Sylvia got married.

Nomads in the Sahara value their freedom and their ability to pitch their tents wherever they please so much that they call houses “graves of the living.”

In the United States we call a nice big home the Great American Dream.

A grave or a dream. Depending on your perspective.

Two truths piercing each other: freedom and security. And you end up with the great irony of American life-living in the grave you have always dreamt of owning.

He slid the bookcase aside and looked at the crate that bristled with bones. He didn’t know how many there were, the statistics of it all were, perhaps surprisingly, one of the things he hadn’t kept track of. It was as if a part of his mind needed to shut that out in order for him to live as normal a life as he could.

But even though he couldn’t remember the name of each victim, just seeing the bones brought the flood of images and memories back again, merging across each other, faces pulled from time in an order that didn’t make sense but that played out in his mind as real, just the same.

They were mostly images of things that’d happened beneath the barn, in that secret place his father took him to. Images of the victims, and the most striking memories of all-of the last day Joshua ever went down there.

He reached into the box and picked up the tractor keys.

Curled his hand around them.

And remembered.

It all.

The day he’d left, the day he’d locked that trapdoor shut, leaving those two people behind him-one, a corpse; the other, soon to become one.

You saw what your father was doing, Joshua. You had to do something. You were finally old enough to take action. Fourteen years old. You had to do it. You know you did.

Yes-running up the steps that day, out of the secret place, into the barn.

You were scared. You had to stop him.

Yes-hearing his father pound up the stairs after him, knowing he was going to make him do things that he didn’t want to do, that he would always hate himself for doing.

Yes-closing the trapdoor and locking it quickly, then standing beside it for a long time, listening to his father bang on it from the bottom and yell. Yell so many things. Bargaining. Threatening. Cursing. And then screaming.

And then the banging started all over again.

His father had handed him the knife before he ran up the stairs, so he knew his father wouldn’t be able to use it to chip away at the thick wood of the trapdoor to escape.

But still, to make sure there was no way for him to get out, Joshua had positioned a long piece of sheet metal over the opening and then drove the tractor over the two ends, positioning the tires, just so, to hold the metal firmly in place. No one else knew about the place beneath the barn. No one else came to their ranch. No one would be moving that tractor.

Now he uncurled his fingers and looked at the keys.

He’d gone out there every day for three weeks, spent long hours sitting in the barn on the seat of the tractor listening to the muted sounds coming from beneath him. The screaming, the pounding. Eventually the crying. His father had a lot of meat down there and it took him a while to die. But eventually, with time, the sounds stopped.

Joshua went out there for another week after that, listening to the enduring stretches of silence, then he left the house for good and never went back.

You were brave to stop him. You were right to leave.

But another voice inside his head convicted him of his sins and would not stop recounting them, naming them, would not let him rest, never rest, for sealing his father in that earthen tomb with the man he’d just killed.

Thinking of what it would have been like for his father down there made Joshua remember an article he’d read so many times.

He replaced the keys in the crate, closed up the bookcase, and then removed from the shelf his well-worn copy of Wisconsin Death Trip, Michael Lesy’s cult classic first published in 1973.

The entire book was a collection of reproduced newspaper clippings from the 1890s and obscure, somewhat troubling turn-of-the-century black-and-white photographs.

Nearly all of the articles were reports of pestilence, suicide, murder, arson, and announcements of people being declared insane and committed to a nearby asylum. It seemed there’d been an inexplicable outbreak of madness in that area of the state around the turn of the century.

No one knew why, but it was well documented.

Black River Falls, Wisconsin.

The 1890s.

The photographs showed life in Wisconsin at the time. Some photos were the typical tired-looking nineteenth-century women in somber dresses, scowling ministers, and stern, thickly mustached men in work clothes. But most of the photos skewed toward the bizarre-a woman with a malicious grin holding two snakes with a third draped around her neck, lithographs of dwarfs and deer heads and a one-legged man, and young children who’d died and were lying in small tragic caskets laid out in a neat row on the wooden floor of a funeral home.

The book had no page numbers, but Joshua had dog-eared the page that contained a copy of the newspaper article from the Badger State Banner on April 14, 1898:

A horrifying discovery was made at the Rosedale Cemetery in Pardeeville. The grave of Mrs. Sarah Smith was unearthed for the purpose of removing the remains and, on opening the coffin, it was discovered that she had been buried while in a trance.

The body was partly turned over and the right hand was drawn up to the face. The fingers indicated that they had been bitten by the woman on finding herself buried alive.

The fingers had been bitten-not the fingernails.

That was the line Joshua had always found the most intriguing.

How much of her fingers did Sarah Smith chew off after she woke up in that coffin?

How much meat did she swallow?

You are a lost and evil man, Joshua. A man beyond redemption!

Beyond atonement!

You did that to your own father!

That thought jarred him back to the present. He closed the book. Put it back on the shelf.

And went to pray.

Perhaps he would find a way not to go scout out the bank today. Perhaps he would find a way not to go rent the moving truck he would need when he took the children tomorrow. Perhaps he would find a way to stop all this before it went too far.

It’s already gone too far, Joshua. There’s no turning back. You’re going to finish this. It’s who you’ve become.