Everybody stood silent for thirty seconds that seemed like that many minutes.
Then Jubal looked straight into Roger’s eyes.
“If I tell you, you won’t cut down my trees?” he asked.
“Not if you tell me the truth.”
Jubal paused again. “It’s wrapped in an oilskin in a metal box buried in the first stall down at the barn. There’s a load of manure and some straw on top of it,” he said at last.
Roger Dale turned to Louise Taylor. “Give him his rights,” he told her.
The sheriff took out a pocket card and read the Miranda litany.
“Why’d you do it?” Fornby asked.
He had learned long ago that if you ask a man like Scroggs, “Did you do it?” he’s liable not to answer. But if you ask, “Why’d you do it?” he just might tell you. Jubal did.
“He was messing with my wife,” Scroggs said. “Everybody in the Cove must have knowed it but me. Then I heard somebody laughing about it down at the hardware store when they didn’t know I was there. They was laughing at me. Talking about her and the breadman. So I made one of them tell me what was going on. Then I found out he came every Friday.”
“So that’s why you killed him?” Fornby asked.
“Yeah,” Jubal said. “Don’t you see, Roger Dale? I had to do it. She was my wife.”
“And where is she now, Jubal? We checked with her sister. She hasn’t talked to her in months.”
Again there was a long minute of silence. At last Jubal spoke. “She’s buried down in the first stall too.”
“Your boy!” Roger shouted. “You didn’t kill your boy!”
“No.” Jubal didn’t hesitate this time. “No, I didn’t kill my boy. This place,” he gestured expansively, “this is all for him.”
“Where is he, Jubal?” Roger Dale asked.
“Over at the reservation. I’ve got an Indian woman looking after him. I give her my other car to do it.”
Roger motioned to Davis to come up the steps. “Cuff him, Bud. Seth! Billy! Lose that saw and stuff. Y’all take Jubal on downtown and come back with some shovels.”
As the deputies led Scroggs away, Fornby turned back to the sheriff. “I’d rather be in Hell with my back broke than be Jubal Scroggs when he finds out he killed the wrong breadman.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But at least he killed the wife he meant to.”
As they talked, they walked on down the stairs to the sheriff’s car. Bud Davis was waiting in the driver’s seat.
“We had better follow them, hadn’t we?” the sheriff asked. “I mean, we still haven’t found Britt, and it’s not out of the question that he might try to shoot Jubal right there between my deputies.”
Davis shook his head. “That’s what I thought, too. But I just got a radio call from the Tennessee state police responding to that bulletin we sent out. They found Britt at home, loading everything he owns into a pickup. Had a map marked up on how to get to California. He was just fixin’ to go by the bakery and draw his pay. Reckon he’s a lover, not a fighter.”
“I suppose that night patrol was a waste,” said the sheriff.
“No, it wasn’t,” said Fornby. “If you had needed it and not sent it, that would have been a waste.”
The next morning Roger Dale called his supervisor again.
“Bossman, we’re in luck. We got a collar out of it. The state’s taking murder one for him killing his wife. The breadman he shot from federal parkway land, and we’ve charged crime on a federal enclave for that one.”
“Good,” Maloney told him. “You ready to quit playing sheriff and be an FBI agent again?”
“Bossman,” Roger said, “I think Gibson County is in very good hands.”
“That’s very comforting,” said Maloney.
“Just one thing, bossman. There’s three other counties in my territory.”
Jonathan Frederick Johnson III and the Boogeyman
by Robert Loy
Kee-rash!
Jonathan Frederick Johnson III’s Tinkertoy tower toppled to the floor.
“Damn it!” he yelled. He had been attempting to construct a skyscraper, or more accurately a ceilingscraper, and this was the fourth time it had fallen. “Damn it! Damn it!”
Jonathan Frederick Johnson III did not know what “damn it!” meant, but he knew he was forbidden to say it — had in fact been sentenced to his room the last time Mother had heard him — and he knew Father always said it whenever something happened that he didn’t want to happen.
And that was good enough for Jonathan Frederick Johnson III. It must be a very powerful incantation even if it didn’t mean anything. He was tucking his tongue behind his two front teeth to say it again — just to hear its wondrous resonance and feel its delicious magic on his lips — when something grabbed the back of his shirt and lifted him clean off the carpet.
“Young man, don’t you never let me hear you talk like that again, you hear?” Miss Rosella Washington said to him in a voice that sounded soft but felt like a holler. “That is bad language. You know what happens to little boys what use the bad language, don’t you? The Boogeyman comes in the nighttime, grabs ’em up, and hauls ’em off. That’s what happens to those boys.”
Jonathan waited until his housekeeper returned him to the floor before asking: “Who is the Boogeyman? What does he look like?”
“Don’t you go worryin’ ’bout what he looks like. Believe you me, you do not wanna know what that ugly old Boogeyman looks like.”
Jonathan Frederick Johnson III considered this for a moment and then, because he had been taught to always tell the truth, he said, “Yes, I do.”
Miss Rosella Washington scrunched up her forehead the way she did when she wanted to pretend she hadn’t really heard what she had just heard.
“No, you don’t, young man. He’s mean and horrible. He comes and carries off bad children in the nighttime — and they never come back.”
“I don’t care. I want to see him,” Jonathan said.
It’s true that most children are terrified of the Boogeyman and will do just about anything to keep their names off his kids-to-grab-and-carry-kicking-and-screaming-into-the-nighttime-never-to-be-seen-or-heard-from-again list, but Jonathan Frederick Johnson III was not scared of the Boogeyman. He was not scared of anything.
Well, actually, he was scared of one thing, but he didn’t know he was and couldn’t have told you what this fear was even had he been aware of its existence. What Jonathan was scared of was that maybe Miss Rosella Washington was wrong and there really was no Boogeyman. He was afraid there might truly be no ghosts in his closet, no witch under his bed, that Batman and Bugs Bunny were just big fat lies and, despite his friends’ fiscal evidence to the contrary, there was no fairy interested in purchasing people’s newly detached baby teeth. He was terrified that Mother and Father were right and that life was real, life was earnest, life was magicless and mundane. There was nothing at the end of the rainbow but a puddle of mud.
When he was born, his parents — Mother, a clinical psychologist; Father, a textbook proofreader and editor — decided, with the best of intentions, of course, to isolate their only child from the nymphs and gnomes we all grow up with.
They called it not filling his impressionable young mind with the same old childhood nonsense.
FATHER: Why should we teach him all the silly balderdash children are fed about Easter bunnies, Santa Claus, and Superman and so on when he’s just going to have to unlearn it all when he grows up?
MOTHER: Not only that, but he’ll undoubtedly have deep-seated unresolved animosities and a subconscious mistrust of authority figures to work through if his principal caregivers consistently lie to him in his early years while his personal paradigm is still being formed.