Robert Lautner - The Road to Reckoning

I hesitated before my hand reached the door. I realized I had not spoken to anyone since last night and that I had not thought of what I was to say or why I was to say it. I was childishly embarrassed. I was used to not piping up when I got the small piece of pie, to be thankful for the warm buttermilk. I sat quietly in corners and let adults talk. But I knew I needed the company and security of good men. I would say it all just as it was. They would know the right thing to do and I would go back to sitting quietly in corners while they made the world right again. I opened the door.

Mister Baker was behind his counter, I doubted if the town recognized him without a bar of wood in front of him. He stopped wiping something and fixed me with a questioning look, then recalled me and looked over my head for my father’s shape. I had frozen in the doorway for I had heard lewd laughter and the chime of glass from the dark area. I had not thought on the possibility that I was coming back into the den where I had first seen beasts.

The change in me had not gone unnoticed and mister Baker came closer to me along his counter.

‘What is it, son?’

I took off my hat and stepped up to the brass rail along the foot of the bar.

‘My father,’ I said. My voice was dry and I swallowed to moisten my throat but I had nothing in me to wet it. ‘He has been shot and killed. I would like to go home now.’

Mister Baker had no wife but he found a neighbor who held me tight to her bosom when she heard and gave me a good stew and dumplings, which I did prefer more. She had no children, which was to the good. I would not know how to address myself to them now, my usual shyness of other children presently deepened by my horrors. She called me ‘dear’ at every word and made me a cot in her parlor. I kept the sofkee bag with the guns beside me.

I was a little fearful when mister Baker left to take care of Jude Brown but I comforted myself that he was only across the street. The neighbor did not leave me a light when she ‘deared’ me good night, which at first worried me, but I realized that no-one would have reason to look in through the window of a darkened room. Before settling I got out from under the four-patch quilt and checked the locks on the windows. I slept a little. I dreamed a lot. I do not want to write about them dreams.

There was no law in Milton. That would come when they got a post office. The bank had men on a payroll of a dollar and a half a day to protect its interests and they could be persuaded to keep order on a Saturday night. Mister Baker informed me in the morning after he had opened and set me down in a chair with my bag by my feet that we would have to apply to a judge in Lewisburg and make Thomas Heywood a matter for the marshals.

I dreaded the concept of repeating my entire story to a man in black who did not know my father from a hole in the ground but I trusted mister Baker as a man who had at least conversed and traded with my father. He was kin to me now. Even today every shopkeeper reminds of him whenever I see a white apron and cuff protectors. I have found most of them to be polite and warm. They are the few of us who often see all walks of life and unlike with a doctor or a lawman it is mostly a happy event when someone purchases something, and they meet us at our best, which must be good for their souls. They become the begrudging kind when they have been taken advantage of or stolen from too often. I have met these also.

The evil men who had done this to me had left me with Jude Brown and our Brewster and our clothes. I had no money in the world and was dependent on strangers. I expressed to mister Baker that I wanted to get back to New York.

‘What about your father’s body, Thomas?’ he asked. ‘Would you not like to give him a Christian burial?’

I thought on the blankets I had left over my father’s body. I thought on the snuffling and howls of unseen things.

‘I would like that, sir, but … it has been some time … and it will be more time to get back to …’

Bless mister Chet Baker. I saw my uncompleted thoughts trawl across his face. I had burdened him with my dilemmas unfairly. I had asked to go home and now this poor man had to spend part of his precious day considering my future, which had walked into his store. A good shopkeeper finds it hard to say no. As I understand it, in China, if one walks into a store and asks for something that the store does not stock, rather than say no and disappoint, that little Chinaman will keep nodding and bringing out things that you may like instead. I guess mister Baker was of this tradition. No was not a word for him.

The bell broke our cabal and I jumped at the door swinging wide. A tall man blew in and hung holding the door as if Odysseus had returned. He had a gray greatcoat that did not suit the warmer weather that April was bringing. He looked at mister Baker and me like furniture and walked to the counter with a grunt.

He wore a weak hat that could have been his grandpa’s for it certainly looked older than him but his beard made him older. He could have been seventy with them whiskers. He had those same black-flapped holsters around his belt that I had come to fear and smaller ones that probably held just as terrifying devices.

‘I have a list, Chet, if you please,’ he said, and occupied the counter with a great familiarity as if he owned the place.

Mister Baker tapped my knee and stood and brushed his hands down his apron. He went to his stage. The man looked back at me with a cocked head and sniffed and turned away.

‘Right with you, Henry.’ Mister Baker’s voice was friendly and I relaxed a bit. He took the list and perused it with a squint. I guessed the man to have bad script. ‘Are you stopping a spell, Henry?’

‘No, I am not,’ the man said. ‘I am on to Cherry Hill. They may have some loose prisoners to fetch. Men like to escape for the summer. Let me try your jerky.’

Mister Baker handed him a strip of the beef that was strung on a cord above and the man leaned on the counter and surveyed the room and me.

I knew of Cherry Hill. This was the Philadelphia state prison shaped like a wagon’s wheel. It was the largest jail in America and freshly built. Pennsylvania was famous throughout the world for its efficiency of handling criminals for reform and punishment, and the Pennsylvania system of separate confinement would become the model for the world. It even had flush toilets in each cell. Even President Buren did not have one of those, although with the state of the country he had gained from Jackson he probably had need of it.

My face must have lit up at the sound of places close to home for this man Henry studied me more.

‘You making opinion on me, boy?’

‘No, sir.’

He snorted and went back to his business. ‘I have tobacco twists to sell, Chet. Virginian. Don’t want to take it with me.’

‘I know, I know, Henry.’ Mister Baker waved him down and went about with his cans and bags to the counter. ‘Store-pay or coin?’

‘What you will. What is with the boy, Chet? You a wet nurse now?’

On this morning I had no opinion on Henry Stands. He was of those rough-and-ready, broad, fat men we tended to elect as presidents and senators when they were too old to do anything else and too ornery to lie down. He had that same military bearing and attitude of patience that they had seen it all and leaned on the seasons like fences and watched the rest of the world cluck and run around.

Mister Baker stopped in his actions and lowered his voice. ‘His father has been killed. Not two days gone.’

‘Killed by who?’ I still think that a strange, direct questioning.

‘Thomas Heywood. He was working on the canal building last I knew. Do you know him?’