Russell Banks - The Reserve

“You ever do this before?” Jordan asked.

“What? Bury somebody in the Reserve?”

“No. But, yeah, that, too. I meant, you ever dig a grave before?”

“Not in the Reserve. But yes, a couple times I’ve had to dig a grave.”

“Who for?”

“For the family,” Hubert said. “My family. In the old family plot off Hitchcock Road.”

“Who’d you bury?”

“My old man. Then my mother.”

“What about your wife?”

Hubert was silent for a moment. “She’s in the town cemetery.”

“You ever shoot anybody before?”

“I didn’t shoot her, Jordan. The answer is no.”

“What about in the war?”

“I was only seventeen, and I had to take care of my mother. So I stayed out. My brothers went over.”

“Oh. Too bad. You would’ve been a good soldier,” Jordan said.

“Why do you say that?”

“You’ve got all the necessary skills. You’d have made a good sniper. And you don’t rattle easily when someone gets shot.”

“Go to hell, Jordan. I didn’t shoot her.”

“She didn’t shoot herself.”

“What about you? You ever shoot anybody in the war?”

“I was a flyer. I shot at other airplanes, not people.”

“There must’ve been people in those planes, though.”

“True enough, Hubie. True enough.”

“Did you shoot any of those airplanes down?”

“Two. I made two kills, both on the same day. April 4, 1918.”

“So you shot people, then. You killed people.”

“Yes. Germans. But I didn’t have to bury them.”

The moldering, sunlit bed of fallen needles quilted the ground. The view of the lake and mountains was blocked by trees, Vanessa noted, but it wasn’t a bad place to be buried, she thought. Daddy might even have preferred having his ashes up here instead of in the lake. A light wind slipped delicately through the tall pines above, and sunlight fell in patches between the feathered branches of the trees and warmed the ground where she sat. She wondered if she could trust the two men equally. She decided that, under pressure, Hubert would crack before Jordan. Hubert St. Germain was a local, however, and a guide, a man more trusted by the authorities than Jordan Groves, the Red, the artist from away. They’d probably go easy on Hubert, take whatever he said at face value and search for Vanessa’s mother elsewhere. They’d check her bank records, interview the cook and housekeeper and gardener in Tuxedo Park and the doorman and housekeeper in Manhattan, they’d call all her known friends and ask them if they’d heard from Mrs. Cole in the weeks since she was last seen by Russell Kendall at the Tamarack Club going in to the Cole family camp at the Reserve with her daughter. Jordan Groves, the artist from Petersburg, they’d have no reason to question, so he’d not have to lie or cover up. Unless, of course, someone heard or saw him fly in this morning or sees or hears him flying out later today. But she wasn’t worried about Jordan. He was used to lying, despite the fact that he claimed to tell the unvarnished truth, regardless of the consequences, in those travel books of his. They were probably mostly lies, too.

Hubert was a different sort of man, however. It wasn’t that he so much loved telling the truth as that he hated lying. Keeping silent, saying no more than necessary, that was his way of avoiding both. The sheriff, or maybe a police inspector from missing persons in Manhattan, would ask him when he last saw Mrs. Cole, and he’d say the date. Where? they’d ask. Out at the Cole place. Did he see her leave the camp? No. Did he see the daughter there? Yes. Did he see the daughter leave the camp? No. Were they both still at the camp when he left? Yes. Thank you very much, Mr. St. Germain.

Vanessa doubted they’d even bother to go to the trouble of rowing out to inspect the place. Russell Kendall might send someone from his staff to Rangeview to check around for signs of anything suspicious; but he’d probably send Hubert St. Germain, since the guide knew the place so much better than anyone else and had keys to all the doors.

When the hole was nearly five feet deep and difficult to dig any deeper without needing a ladder to climb out of it, the three returned to the lake for the body. Again, Vanessa stood off a ways and watched as the men worked. They wrapped the body in the white, red, and black Hudson Bay blanket from the bedroom where Evelyn Cole had been imprisoned, making a shroud of it by tying the blanket at the ends and the middle with rope — the same pieces of clothesline Vanessa had used to bind her mother’s ankles and wrists when she was still alive. Then Hubert and Jordan grabbed on to the ropes and carried the body of Evelyn Cole, like a log, up the slope behind the compound to the grave, for it was that to them now, a grave, not a hole in the ground. They walked slowly and stayed silent, as if the two men were pallbearers and the woman coming along behind were a priest or minister.

With the body wrapped in the blanket, they could no longer see the dead woman’s face and the ugly wound in her chest and the blood, distancing them somewhat from the violence of her death and bringing them closer to the inescapable fact of her death, its finality.

That would be the hardest thing for Jordan and Hubert to lie about, Vanessa realized. The actual fact of her mother’s death. It would be far easier to lie about how she died.

Vanessa herself would have no difficulty claiming that her mother had simply disappeared, that’s all. There is no explanation for it, she’d say. The woman has vanished. One can speculate about why or how for as long as one wants; but the fact, the only fact that counts, is that the woman is gone. Vanessa would have no trouble forgetting all other facts and concentrating on that one alone, until it became the only fact that mattered. Absent a sure sense of the necessary and essential nature of the truth in all things known and unknown, it’s actually difficult to lie. It may even be impossible. In that sense, Vanessa was not a liar. She knew the meanings of the words true and false and was adept at distinguishing between a person who was a liar and one who was honest — Jordan was the first, Hubert the second — but she herself was neither. Her understanding of the truth of a given event was less of a concrete thing existing in the world — whether revealed or concealed, known or not — than of an incidental attribute. For her, the truth was more a coloration of reality than the organizing principle of its underlying structure. For her, it was utterly, and merely, contingent. Thus the truth was somewhat transient and changeable, one minute here, the next gone. It was something one could assert and a moment later turn around and deny, with no sense of there being any contradiction. Merely a correction. For Vanessa, the truth was like a bird that flies from tree to tree, so that the statement, The tree has a bird perched in it , referred to this nearby tree, then that, as the bird flew to the next tree, then that, and on through the entire forest of trees, and from there to the next forest, until the bird had flown around the globe, tree to tree, forest to forest, and had come full circle and could perch all over again in this tree nearby. By then, however, people had lost interest in the bird and its location.

The men solemnly lowered the body into the grave with two pieces of rope and when it was down dropped the ropes onto it.

“Do you want to say anything over her?” Jordan asked Vanessa.

She stood at the edge of the open grave and looked down into the darkness. “Don’t make me talk, or I’ll start crying. I don’t want to cry over her. Or Daddy either. Not yet,” she said and stepped away.

“But you will?”