Robert Stone - Death of the Black-Haired Girl

“If you could, Eddie. It would be the best, I think, and soon, know what I mean? And us, we’ll sit down quietly.”

“Something I have to do first. I have to put Maud with her mother.”

“That’s good, Eddie. I’m so sorry. Call me and we’ll talk.”

AS JOHN CLAMMER DROVE THROUGH the deep woods, the sound of his sickly engine raised inquiring lights and groans in houses off the road. This was the accursed national forest famous for its tangled kudzu, its meth reek and the outlaw lives played out on the pulses of the strong, the failing and the weak among its inhabitants. No one had been meant to actually live there.

Of that place an arguably wise man once said: “This here is the Sherwood Forest. This here is the fucking Hole in the Wall where none but the strongest minds and wills fucking prevail in.”

John drove to the Church of the Savior, where the U.S. government’s road met the county highway, a neat assembly of metallic prefabs. There was a less neat double-wide positioned beside it where Dr. Russell Fumes, the church’s pastor, lived with his young wife. The cleric’s wife was not at home for John Clammer’s visit, but Fumes himself was awake in bed, made uneasy by the sound of Clammer parking his vehicle.

“John!” the pastor exclaimed when his security lights caught Clammer about to knock on his door. “Lemme unlock it. I thought you was in the hospital, John. I thought your mother said you was under the weather.”

As they sat by a lamp in the living room section, John explained himself. The lampshade had a deer-hunting scene printed on it: a hunter in an orange hat, his scope-enabled rifle, bright green trees, some sky. As far from the hunter as possible stood a twelve-point buck, an eastern deer, flag-tail up, poised to flee. The scene was made to fit two and a half times on the amount of plastic shade around the lamp.

“No, sir,” John Clammer said. He told of how he had gone to the very so-called college his posturing wife had left him to attend. There he made an example of how the Lord would not be mocked with impunity. He had found the bitch who lived with his wife for evil writings.

“This!” he said. “Read it!” He trembled. He raised his fine eyes from the hunting scene on the lampshade and stared into the darkness under the artificial eaves. “For it is a screed! Yes, my good Reverend Fumes! A screed! But the little bitch is dead.”

“You killed somebody, John? You didn’t kill somebody.”

John Clammer laughed and handed him a copy of a tabloid-size newspaper. The Gazette.

“Oh, yes! Oh, yes, my good doctor.”

“Take it easy, John boy,” Reverend Dr. Fumes said.

“She saw the glint of my rifle before I brought her down. And she fled me through the streets of that city screaming. She fled me. Down the nights and down the days!” John yelled, and it might have been a rebel yell or even a scream, as if in imitation of the young woman victim. “Down the labyrinthine ways!”

“Fuck sake,” the preacher said, “take it easy.” He put the newspaper aside. “What are you gonna do?”

“I’ll turn myself in. I’ll accept the penalties.”

“Jesus, John, did you really do this?” Reverend Fumes looked away from the lamp and began to turn slow circles where he stood. “O Lord, my heart is troubled. My heart is blazing.”

The reverend, a small man, was overwhelmed by John Clammer’s presence and his declarations.

“I’ll help you, John,” he said. But how? He hoped that God might be seen as glorified in the events he was hearing about. He tried hard to find the workings of the divine will. He wondered if there was some way in which he himself could be seen as an instrument of glory.

Reverend Fumes sat back down beside the deer-hunting lamp and listened breathlessly while John Clammer told and retold the story of Maud’s murder.

He presented the image of Maud clinging to his knees. After the echo of the last shot died, she had fallen at his feet in a posture of repentance. He had pitied her.

“I have forgiven the woman,” John Clammer said. “That’s what’s most important.”

John told Reverend Fumes he was in agony but would resolve it by accepting responsibility for his crime.

“Where’s your rifle, John?” Dr. Fumes asked.

He said he had disposed of it in the forest. He said he invoked John Brown. He made Reverend Fumes swear to keep the secret of his blood guilt until he had presented himself to the police. He made the reverend bless him. As John Clammer poured forth his story, the reverend reflected more and more deeply on the role in which the Almighty had placed him. It might be that God had elected him to be the medium through which the work of his dread instrument John Clammer was made manifest to a chastened world. That the reading of the sacred dice cast behind the temple veil and enacted by this boy be announced from the Church of the Savior by its humble pastor. That it must fall to John to confess his blessed vengeance from within its precincts.

When John Clammer rose to go back to his pickup, Reverend Fumes blocked his path.

“Rest, John Clammer. We’ll speak to the cops from the garden of Naboth while the dogs lick that bitch’s blood.”

He had hoped to please Clammer and persuade him that his wife or his wife’s friend would be Jezebel. And there in the land where John Brown was being respected anew in a way not necessarily associated with people of color, there might be a singing of John’s favorite hymn, “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow.” Then Fumes would be Elijah-like and the church would be Naboth’s vineyard and television’s millions would bear witness and Fumes and the church would be exalted and theirs would be the kingdom and the power and the glory and the television exposure and the publicity and maybe the reality show. Michaiahjeroboamramethgileadsabaoth.

“Call from here, John. Surrender here in God’s house. It’ll be like…” Fumes thought about what it would be like. “It would be like sanctuary! Yeah! It would be like sanctuary. And they’d come out and like a hostage situation, Johnny!”

But John Clammer flung him aside like an old blanket and marched out the door and drove away toward town.

So Reverend Fumes had no choice but to get on the phone and call the sheriff’s department.

“He confessed to me!” he shouted into the phone. “He’s armed to the death on the county road! He confessed that evil woman’s killing. He’s armed to the teeth and headed for town.”

STACK PUT OFF CALLING Salmone and the idea of going to the college. Attacks of dizziness kept striking him down, and in his grief, in despair, he felt older than he had ever been.

Then one day Salmone called him and said, “Eddie, I owe you the trip down. We still don’t have the driver.”

In another time and season they would have gone to Belmont or Shea from Stack’s house. They had gone to those places on one or another of Salmone’s visits years before, when Maud and her mother were alive.

Stack embraced his ex-partner and said there was nothing to drink; he was doing one day at a time. So they drank coffee, which agreed with neither of them terribly well.

Before they had talked very much Stack asked his dreadful question.

“You knew my brother-in-law?” Stack asked. “Charlie K.?”

“Yeah, yeah. I didn’t know him. I heard about him years ago. I guess I knew he was your in-law.”

“What did you hear about him, Sal? I have to ask this.”

“Years ago, you know. Long time. Just who he was. Who he knew. Like his exploits.”

“Listen. What I’m asking. Is there, was there — as far as you’re aware — any possibility of malice against this family? Maybe Maud paid for a mistake.”