“Why?” he wondered out loud.
Birds and crickets and the breeze in the leaves offered their own replies, but none told him the answer he sought.
Maybe his achy body needed a rest, or he longed for another morning or two with running water. Whatever the reason, he would stay a few more days.
And why not fill the coffers first, his father would say?
With a few bucks, Jesse could buy a new pair of shoes. He could easily pilfer a few items that would never be missed.
He walked back to the house.
The house was desolate and, Jesse paused at the thought, almost hostile. Even the midday sun did little to warm its dark façade. Patches of moss coated the once black shingles on the roof. The porch looked rotted in spots, paint peeling from its rails and beams.
Perhaps most of all, Jesse noticed the overgrowth. Vines crawled up the house’s exterior as if trying to squirm into the tightly shut windows. Bushes, likely once manicured, were heaping and bushy. They rolled out from the house in prickly waves.
Yes, the house had been abandoned, and Jesse wanted to know why.
The third-floor bedroom held clothes in a size just about perfect for Jesse. They were dated items, but good quality. Tailored jackets and pressed white shirts hung from satin-covered hangers.
The boy who’d worn them clearly lived a life of privilege. Jesse doubted a few pairs of trousers would be missed.
He grabbed a clean leather suitcase and headed for the dining room, selecting four silver candlesticks and a handful of sterling silver cutlery. He added an antique-looking mantel clock, which he wrapped in a towel.
Wearing the young man’s clothes, Jesse walked into town and, using the last few dollars to his name, he bought a train ticket for Harrison.
“Jesse K., what brings you to these parts?” The man eyed him up and down with fast, dark eyes that reminded Jesse of a watchful owl.
“I need to move a few things, Rockie,” Jesse murmured, glancing toward the other men sitting at tables drinking hooch and playing cards. The man’s name was not actually Rockie. Jesse didn’t know his true name, but he knew how Rockie used to chisel holes in rocks and slip papers inside to smuggle them into the prison during his ten long years at the Southern Michigan State Prison.
“Come into some inheritance?” Rockie smirked.
“Seems so.” Jesse tilted the suitcase so Rockie could see the candlesticks and silverware.
“Come on back.” Rockie led Jesse into the back room.
The room held only a single wooden table. Beyond the first back room stood two more, one with merchandise and the last with a safe. Rockie had drunkenly showed Jesse the interior rooms after a long poker game several months before. Jesse doubted that Rockie remembered. The man had passed out, face pressed against a full house, and not woken. Jesse had joined him in sleep, happy to be indoors, opting to stretch out on the sticky floor rather than suffer the backache of sleeping over the table.
Rockie gave him a handful of bills and slapped him on the back.
“Guys are fixin’ to start a game. Care to join us? Sees how you got some cash to work with.” Rockie winked at the money, but Jesse shook his head.
“I’m fixing to travel south.”
Jesse slipped out the door and down the alley, heading to catch his return bus.
By the time he reached Gaylord, the storm had come.
He stepped from the bus and hurried out of town.
Somehow in the downpour, Jesse could breathe again. As if the oxygen from all that water bled into the air, and he gulped it like an alcoholic who’d almost made it, but then found the bottle again and relieved a thirst that felt thousands of years in the making.
He rushed beneath canopies of willows and maples, ash and pine. Some held the water high, nature’s way of scrimping and saving for the big drought. Others just let it go, and it poured onto his head and flattened his carefully parted hair. It roared over his face and soaked the lapels of his stiff jacket.
He paused beneath a willow. It was like standing inside a waterfall. Miserably, he remembered one such moment, years before, when he stood beneath a waterfall in the Upper Peninsula with his wife. She had leaned into him, her breath moist against his ear, and whispered that he was going to be a father.
Sorrow stole the joy from his memory.
Jesse ran, and soon his slacks and socks were soaked to his skin and his shining shoes had gone from black to muddy brown. He ripped off the stranger’s jacket and left it laying in a tangle of brush.
After a while, he found a river. He sat on a sledge of rock, flat and dulled by the sun. The water ran off its edges, and he clenched his eyes against the rain that continued to pour.
He wished to close his brain as tightly as his eyelids, but it fluttered and thrashed until the images he’d run so hard to escape began to slip back in.
Gabriel, his child, in his dark suit with his face a white mask of indifference bedded in the satin-lined casket Jesse had chosen. Gabriel, God is my strength. His name had been his wife’s choice, and Jesse complied. He hardly counted himself devoted to God, but in Nell and Gabriel, he had found his elusive creator.
And almost as quickly lost him again.
Jesse laid back and let the rain wash over him. If it picked up, it might sweep him into the river.
An appropriate death, he thought. Nell and Gabriel had both drowned. Not on a rainy, gloomy day, but in the peak of summer, when death crept in without a whisper of warning.
Who noticed the angel of death on a sunny Monday afternoon at a little lake in the woods?
The rain slowed to a drizzle.
Jesse stared into the overcast sky, the gray of sodden clay, and wished he could fill the emptiness inside him. If he gulped the river until he was near to exploding, he wondered if he might find a moment of relief from the constant hollow within.
He returned to the house and emptied the money he’d tucked into the pocket of another man’s pants.
Jesse looked at the wet bills spread across the table and considered lighting a fire in one of the home’s three fireplaces and burning them.
Objects that once held value, that ruled his life, had become obsolete. The bills conjured no joy, no dread, no anything. They merely represented his likelihood of surviving, eating, getting a bath. If he selected a few more items, he’d have a grubstake. He could buy a train ticket south, land somewhere warm before winter returned to Michigan.
He could head for Mississippi or to the Florida Keys.
No, not there.
Nell loved to dream of Florida. Mangoes that grow in your backyard, she used to whisper. Oranges the size of melons. But they’d never had more than a few pennies to rub together between them. They’d both grown up poor, his father a drunk and hers a farmer.
Jesse didn’t dream the way Nell had. He’d watched his father do so for years, but his dreams never came true. Not even the small ones, such as winning the poker game so they could get a motel for the night.
Sometimes Jesse wondered if they weren’t the lucky ones - Nell and Gabriel. They got out early.
In his forty-one years, Jesse had seen mostly disappointment and despair. His seven years with Nell, two that included Gabriel, had been the only years of happiness he’d known. But their happiness had not included wealth. They lived in an old farmhouse with a big garden out back that they rented from an old man who’d moved in with his children years before. Jesse worked long hours drilling and servicing oil refineries. Before Gabe came along, Nell worked four days a week cleaning rooms at the Doherty Hotel.
They made ends meet, never went hungry, and for the two years they had their boy, they saved enough for big Christmas celebrations and a red tricycle on his second birthday.