“Means I believe people can do whatever they want, as long as they don’t do it anywhere near me.”
“I thought it would be more complex than that.”
“Nope, that’s about it. You think I should go in and tell them I’m gay?”
“If I was you, I wouldn’t even tell them you’re black,” said Angel, from the backseat.
“Don’t judge this place by that outhouse back there,” I said. “That’s just to give the tourists something to laugh at. A small town like this doesn’t survive, even prosper some, if the people who live here are bigots and idiots. Don’t make that mistake about them.”
Incredibly, this silenced both of them.
Beyond the trading post, and to the left, the impressive twin steeples of St. Anthony’s Church, built from local granite in 1930, loomed against the pale gray sky. The church wouldn’t have looked out of place in a big city, but it seemed incongruous here in a town of a thousand souls. Still, it had given Bennett Lumley something to aim for in the creation of Gilead, and he had determined that the spire of his church would exceed even that of St. Anthony’s.
Jackman, or Holden as it was originally known, was founded by the English and the Irish, and the French came down to join them later. Back where the Trading Post lay used to be part of an area called Little Canada, and from there to the bridge was the Catholic part of town, which was why St. Anthony’s was on the eastern side of the river. Once you crossed the bridge, that was Protestant territory. There was the Congregational church, and the Episcopalians, too, who were the Protestants it was okay to like if you were a Catholic, or so my grandfather used to say. I didn’t know how much the place had changed since then, but I was pretty certain that the old divide still remained, give or take a couple of houses.
The red Jackman station house stood by the railway line that cut through the town, but it was now privately owned. The main bridge in town was being repaired, so a detour took us over a temporary structure and into the township of Moose River. On the right was the modest Moose River Congregational Church, which bore the same relationship to St. Anthony’s as the local Little League team bore to the Red Sox.
Eventually, we came to the sign for Holden Cemetery, across from the Windfall Outdoor Center, its blue school buses, now empty, lined up sleepily outside. A dirt-and-stone road led down to the cemetery, but it looked steep and slick with ice, so we left the car at the top of the road and walked the rest of the way. The road led past a frozen pond on one side and a patch of beaver bog on the other, before the gravestones of the cemetery appeared on a hill to the left. It was small, and bordered by a wire fence, with an unlocked gate wide enough for one person to pass through at a time. The graves dated as far back as the nineteenth century, probably to the days when this was still just a settlement.
I looked at the five stones nearest the gate, three large stones, two small. The first read “Hattie E., wife of John F. Childs” and gave the dates of her birth and death: April 11, 1865, and November 26, 1891. Beside her stood the two smaller stones: Clara M. and Vinal F. According to the stone, Clara M. was born on August 16, 1895, and died just over a month later on September 30, 1895. Vinal F.’s time on this earth was even briefer: born on September 5, 1903, he was dead by September 28. The fourth stone was that of Lillian L., John’s second wife and presumably the mother of Clara and Vinal. She was born on July 11, 1873, and died less than a year after her son, on May 16, 1904. The last stone was that of John F. Childs himself, born September 8, 1860, and died, having outlived two wives and two children, March 18, 1935. There were no other stones nearby. I wondered if John F. had been the last of his line. Here, in this tiny cemetery, the story of his life was laid bare in the space of five carved pieces of rock.
But the stone we were looking for stood in the farthest southern corner of the cemetery. There were no names upon it, and no dates of birth or death. It read only the children of gilead, followed by the same word carved three times:
INFANT
INFANT
INFANT
and a plea to God to have mercy on their souls. As unbaptized children, they would originally have been laid to rest outside the cemetery, but it was clear that at some point in the past the position of the cemetery fence had been discreetly altered in this corner, and the Children of Gilead now lay within its boundaries. It said a lot about the people of the town that quietly, and without fuss, they had embraced these lost infants and allowed them to rest within the precincts of the graveyard.
“What happened to the men who did this?” asked Angel. I looked at him and saw the grief etched on his face.
“Men and women,” I corrected him. “The women must have known and colluded in what happened, for whatever reason. Two of those children died of unknown causes, but one was stabbed with a knitting needle shortly after birth. You ever hear of a man stabbing a child with a knitting needle? No, the women covered it up, whether out of fear or shame, or something else. I don’t think Dubus was lying about that much. Nobody was ever charged. The authorities examined three girls and confirmed that they’d given birth at some point in the recent past, but there was no evidence to connect those births with the bodies that they found. The community got together and claimed that the children were given up for private adoption. There was no paperwork for the births, which was a crime in itself, but one that nobody felt the urge to prosecute. Dubus told the investigators that the kids were sent to somewhere in Utah. A car came along, he said, collected them, then disappeared into the night. That was the story, and it was only years later that he recanted and claimed that the mothers of the girls who had given birth had killed the infants. Anyway, a week or so after the bodies were found, the community had already broken up, and people were going their separate ways.”
“Free to abuse somewhere else,” said Angel.
I didn’t reply. What was there to say, particularly to Angel, who had been a victim of such abuse himself, farmed out by his father to men who took their pleasures from the body of a child? That was why he was here now, in this cold cemetery in a remote northern town. That was why they were both here, these hunters among hunters. It was no longer a question of money for them, or their own convenience. That might once have been true, but it was true no longer. They were here now for the same reason that I was: because to ignore what had happened to children in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders.
“Somebody’s tended to this grave,” said Angel.
He was right. There were no weeds, and the grass had been cut back so that it would not obscure the marker. Even the words on the stone had been enhanced with black paint so that they would stand out.
“Who takes care of a fifty-year-old grave?” he asked.
“Maybe the man who now owns Gilead,” I replied. “Let’s go ask him.”
About five miles along the 201, beyond Moose River and past the Sandy Bay town line, a sign pointed north to the Bald Mountain Hiking Trail, and I knew that we were nearing Gilead. Without Angel’s prior knowledge, the site itself would have been difficult to find. The road we took had no name. It was marked only by a sign reading private property and, as Angel had said, an additional warning listing those who were particularly unwelcome. About a half mile up the road was a gate. It was locked, and a fence disappeared into the forest on either side.
“ Gilead ’s in there,” said Angel, pointing north into the woods. “Maybe another half mile or more.”
“And the house?”
“Same distance, but straight up the road. You can see it from farther up that track.” He pointed to a rutted dirt trail that followed the fence southeast.