“Mr. Grey? Ed Grey?”
“Eh-yuh.”
“My name is Hank. I went to the Putney School, as did my mother. I am doing a project. I heard you were the farmer between ’42 and ’71—”
“Seventy-two.”
“I see—”
“Bum leg why I didn’t go to the war. Tried nine times.”
“I see—do you remember my mother, Celine Watkins?”
The man tilted his head. Hank could almost see the name working through a nest of copper tubes, like in an old still. “I do,” said the man. Hank was taken aback. How many students had worked on the farm over the decades? Hank had to remind himself again that very few people ever forgot Celine Watkins, even, he was discovering, when she was just a child. “Coltish was how you’d call her. Legs went to her neck and there weren’t much between. Had a lamb if I recall correctly.”
“Yes! Yes, she did!” Astonishing, the elephant memories of the very old.
“She had a thing for that milk-house boy.”
“Milk-house boy?”
“The one that run the dairy those years. Not much older’n she was. Slip of a kid. Good worker. Real quiet.”
“What was his name?”
“Silas Cooper-Ellis. Shyest kid I ever met.”
Hank gawped for words. “What happened to him?” he got out, finally. “Do you know?”
“Killed in Korea. Second week. Saddest thing. Went to the funeral in Sandwich.”
“New Hampshire?”
“Yep. He lies there. That pretty cemetery looks to Chocorua. You know it?”
“No, no I don’t. Thank you so much.”
“Any time.” The retired farmer blinked reflexively at the sky over the woods across the road. “Snow,” he murmured. “Can taste it.” And he rubbed his eyes with his palm, as if trying to wipe away all the work still left to do before the real snows came.
TWENTY
The truck groaned on its springs and bucked their heads into the roof. Celine pushed the Toyota to the end of an unmaintained logging road. Chicksaw lived in a shithole. The “house” may have started as a single-wide but it had been chopped up more than once. And added to with logs and steel framing and plywood. A car windshield had been framed in for a picture window. The front door itself must have been salvaged from a school—it had a push-bar latch. They pulled into the dirt turnaround with their windows down and could hear loud yelping and howls. The door jerked open and Chicksaw stepped onto the pallet porch with a shotgun. A small beagle shot out of the gap and jumped down to the dirt and began to bay. The man spoke to it sharply and it hopped back up to his side and sat, tail thumping the porch.
Chicksaw was tiny, maybe five foot three, with a long gray beard like an elf. Skinny. He was the most elfin man Celine had ever seen. They hadn’t meant to surprise him: They tapped the horn half a dozen times before they even got to the yard. He held the gun in one hand and shielded his eyes with the other. When Celine stepped out of the truck in her short Austrian felt jacket and beret, with her gold bracelets and almost every finger bejeweled with rings, his hand dropped and his face betrayed raw skepticism—as if this might be a practical joke. Or some Publishers Clearing House scam. Celine stepped carefully around dried mud cakes in her Italian calfskin boots and waved a hand at him like an old friend she’d spotted on the beach-club veranda. Pete got out a little stiffly and zipped up his barn coat and settled his tweed newsboy cap into its nest of tufts. Gave a straight-across Maine smile.
Elbie Chicksaw had seen a lot of strange things step into clearings in Montana—once he had seen a bull moose with a goshawk perched on his rack, riding it like a mobile hunting platform—but this might take the cake. He set the shotgun against the doorframe and dug a pair of thick wire-rimmed grandpa glasses out of a breast pocket and looped them over one ear then the other and squinted. For a tracker his eyesight was terrible. He crossed his arms like a jinni and waited.
When Celine and Pete got within fifteen feet of the man they stopped. “Helloo,” Celine called in her best Hail the Natives register. Elbie couldn’t take it anymore. He started to laugh. It erupted out of him and his little frame shook like one of the leaves in the aspen at the edge of the yard. “For fuck’s sake,” he managed to blurt in a voice like a truck dumping gravel. “Who the fuck are you?”
Celine blinked. This man had clearly not been to finishing school, or maybe any school. He probably inverted his fork when he ate, if he used a fork at all. “The question seems a bit vulgar,” she said. “Maybe you’d like to reconsider your greeting.” Elbie took off the glasses he had just put on and cleaned them with the tail of his dirty flannel shirt. He blinked back.
“Sorry. I meant to say, ‘Where the fuck did you all beam in from?’ You’re not going to give me shit now for ending a sentence with a preposition?”
Ahh, Celine thought, a diamond in the rough. There seemed to be a lot of those in Wyoming and Montana. She cocked her head and studied the tracker with her squinty-eye-bird look. “Where’s the library at, asshole?” she murmured.
Which set Elbie off into another fit. “Right! Right!” he breathed. “The Harvard upperclassman with argyle socks! Damn! Fuckin’ hell!”
Celine tugged her wallet out of her front jean pocket and opened it to her license card. “Celine Watkins, private eye. This”—she motioned to Pete—“I mean he, is Pete, my Watson and my husband. Actually, I may be his Watson, but no one would know because he doesn’t say much.”
Elbie widened his eyes at the new information and let another gust of laughter run through him. “Oh, God,” he breathed. He replaced his glasses and opened three old-school aluminum lawn chairs that were leaning against the indeterminate siding. “Sit,” he said. “You’ve clearly come a long fucking way. I’d invite you in but it’s Tuesday and the cleaning ladies are wreaking havoc.”
They sat. Elbie broke some dry sticks from a stack on one end of his makeshift porch and piled them with some crumpled Red Lodge Advertisers into an oversize semitruck hubcap and lit the pyre. As the flames licked and rose he held his hands over them and rubbed them together. Fun, thought Celine. We can pretend we’re homeless right here on the porch. A little like pitching a tent in the backyard.
He tapped a Camel unfiltered out of a hard pack and offered it around, then took it himself and lit it on a burning twig. He coughed once, hawked and spat, and said, “What can I do you?”
She had to admit it was pleasant sitting around the fire in the shelter of the man’s porch with a few dry snowflakes blowing onto the planks. Chicksaw seemed to be pieced together like his shack, which was growing on her. The place looked haphazard, but on closer inspection everything seemed to have a function. The fifty-five-gallon drum at the east corner, for instance, which caught water from a guttered rainspout. The scrap-lumber framework on the other side of the porch, which she thought at first might be a lattice for vines but then realized was where he tacked out and stretched his hides. There was a beaver hide under the eave, drying right now. She recognized the fur from one of Baboo’s stoles.
The same for the man: If he’d been a quilt it would look at first glance very primitive, even crazy in its pattern. But study it a little closer and one might see some fine stitching and some very curious patches. Celine began almost immediately to revise her first assessment of his education. He had clearly been to some school somewhere. The closer she listened to his fitful outbursts, the more she thought: College. Yes, definitely. Then: English lit. Then: Northeast somewhere. Then: Ivy League, probably. Ending a brief discourse on the inevitability of corrupt law enforcement, he said, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” At one point he said that winter in Red Lodge was “colder than Winter frigging Carnival.” Finally, being Celine, she interrupted him and asked point-blank, in French, if he had studied comparative literature under Professor John Rassias at Dartmouth. Chicksaw’s cigarette fell from his mouth into the fire. Stopped him cold. It was either the precision of the question or the perfect, even beautiful French.