Timothy Johnston - The Current

Deputies and cops and sheriffs sat in their uniforms, Ed Moran among them, a sheriff down in Iowa now, and Wayne Halsey, Sutter’s replacement up here. Halsey taking the podium now to tell a quick story, with the mic pushed aside because he didn’t need a mic, and though the story had some laughs built into it, by the end Halsey had to wrap up and step away from the podium before his voice let him down. He was followed by Sutter’s older brother, John, a talky guy with a tanned face, telling about when they were boys, then young men, then men… and when he finally went back to his seat in the front row Gordon saw what he guessed was the back of the girl’s head. Dark, glossy hair combed down straight. More family seated to either side of her. Grandparents, maybe. He expected the girl to get up and talk but she didn’t. Finally the director walked to the podium and asked for the pallbearers to meet him at the side of the building.

Gordon sat in the van until the last of the cars and trucks and cruisers had filed out behind the hearse and then he pulled out of the lot and brought up the rear at a good distance, and when they reached the grounds he parked on the shoulder with a few other cars. The mourners ahead of him all took the path to the right but he turned left, following a path that had not been cleared, and when he reached the intersection of a third path he swept the snow from the iron bench there and sat and watched from that distance as the mourners gathered under the blue canopy, some taking chairs, the rest standing.

Old brown leaves chattering in the oak trees. The far-off call of a crow somewhere.

The coffin had already been placed on the straps over the vault and there was no dirt in sight but only the apron of AstroTurf around the grave, bright green and fake in the snow, in the cold. The skirt of the canopy rippling like the side fins of a fish, the roof filling with wind and whopping as though it would pull free of its ropes and fly, but it didn’t, it held. The preacher or whatever he was stood before them in a black overcoat, and Gordon could hear the man’s voice if not his words, and anyway he didn’t speak long before all said amen and then came the ratcheting sound of the lowering mechanism carrying loud and clear across the snow, and he stood up from the bench and walked on.

The stand of oaks that once marked the far border of the cemetery now marked the border between the old grounds and the new grounds, and a white marble stone that had once been the only one out here, ten years ago, had since been joined by twenty-three other stones, all shapes and colors. None of them as old as hers and none of the souls they named as young.

He got down on his haunches and ran his bare fingertips over the engraved words.

Two dates and a dash between them. A whole life in that dash. From first breath with blood on her little face to her last. From water to water. Nineteen when she died and almost a stranger by then, but here she is no age at all. She is a smile, she is big green eyes looking up at you. She is giggles. She is the limp little body fitted to your chest, the head that falls into place on your neck as you carry her up the stairs. She is the smell of her face when you kiss her good night.

You could curse God if there was anything left of him to curse. If he were not already dead and gone. In the end it’s you. Just you. You had one thing to do with your life and that was to protect her. To keep her safe.

And you did not. You did not.

WHEN THE KNOCK came at the aluminum door, a quick rap on the square of glass, the man at the desk looked up from his work and did not wave the other man in until he’d bent once again to his calculator and his receipts. The room was in fact the interior of an old worksite trailer that had been converted into an office, and whenever a body was added or subtracted from it, or crossed from one end to the other, it teetered on its tires like a balance scale. The trailer made its corrections now and grew steady again, and still the man, whose name was Ben Holden, did not look up but instead finished entering a last sequence of numbers into the old calculator, set its works into motion, held the length of paper as it rose from the printhead, ripped it free and said, fussing with the coil of paper, “Yeah.”

Danny Young, having removed his cap, ran his hand through his hair front to back and pressed his fingertips into the cords at the back of his neck. Behind him at a small workbench sat old Billy Ramos, working on an old Hitachi nail gun. Billy had worked for Holden’s father since he was fourteen, and some of the men said he was Holden’s half brother by a Mexican señorita, covering their mouths when they said it because the old deaf bugger could read lips at a hundred yards.

Holden looked up at last and Danny said, “I just came in to tell you I gotta take off, Ben.”

“You gotta take off.”

“Yes, sir.”

Holden looked at the punch clock on the wall, and Danny turned to look too. The clock said 3:45.

Holden said, “You’re telling me you can’t wait fifteen minutes and finish out the day?”

“No, sir. I’m telling you I gotta take off as in I can’t keep this job. I wrapped up early so I could come in here and let you know.”

Holden leaned back in his chair and began a slow rocking, raising the same birdy chirp from the chair’s spring with each backward tilt. Danny watched him, then looked up, as if to inspect at close range the rivets in the metallic ceiling. Outside, in the hollows of the building, men were gathering tools, shutting down compressors, coiling cords and air hoses—all men, this crew, no women. You could hear in their voices that it was Friday. Payday.

Holden said, “I don’t even consider a raise till a man’s been with me six months, but I might make an exception if I knew you were gonna stick around. And I wouldn’t say that to just anyone, so.”

“I appreciate that,” Danny said. “But it’s not the money. This has been a good job. I wouldn’t leave if I didn’t have to.”

Holden’s eyes narrowed. “You in some kind of jam?”

“Jam?”

“Jam. Like the kind where some man comes knocking on that door tomorrow flashing me his badge.”

Danny looked back at Billy Ramos. Working on the nail gun, not watching, feeling the vibrations of the trailer, of Holden’s voice.

“Don’t mind him,” Holden said. “He’s just in here for ballast.”

“No, sir,” Danny said, turning back. “Nothing like that. I just have to go, that’s all.”

“Just go.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You gonna tell me where you’re just going to?”

“Just heading home.”

“Home, as in Minnesota home?”

“Yes, sir. My dog died.”

Holden’s chair stopped chirping. Billy, behind him, paused too in his tinkering.

“Did you say your dog ?” Holden said.

“Yes.”

“Thought so. Well.” He resumed rocking. “A man can get close to his dog, sure enough. Can be a real loss. I remember a dog I had as a boy, just an old dumb mutt from God knows where, but the day he died, oh boy…”

The letter was folded back into its envelope, and the envelope was folded into the back pocket of his jeans. It had come the day before but he’d opened it today on his lunch break, sitting alone on the far side of the building. Familiar paper, familiar handwriting—even the smell of the air that escaped the opened envelope. Writing first of the weather as she always did and then of the farm, any repairs that had needed doing and how they’d gotten done or if they would have to wait—not mentioning money, never mentioning money, in case he thought she was asking him to send more, had told him over and over not to send any, to take care of himself and not worry—and then writing a little about Marky, one funny thing or other he’d said, before moving on to tell him some news she wasn’t sure she should include but just wanted him to hear it from her first, and this was the two college girls who’d gone into the river in their car, just a few miles south, into the ice, and one of them, the one who lived, was Audrey Sutter, Sheriff Tom Sutter’s daughter, and not a week later Tom Sutter himself, who was in stage four cancer, was dead from a heart attack. The funeral two days ago, the man buried in the same cemetery where so many had been buried: her father and mother, her grandparents, Danny’s father.