“Um.”
“Did he examine you a bit?”
“He did.”
“What did he have to say?”
“Dust pneumonia. I got it. Ain’t going away.”
“Are you feeling well enough to walk down a few flights of stairs and go over to the CC?”
“What do you want now?”
“I’d like to show you something. I think it’s something you should see.”
“What?”
“It’s difficult to describe. Best to see for yourself.”
The men slowly tramped the stair treads and made their way to the CC kitchen. In the dark interior of the building, Abel led Harland to the unlit dining hall, crossed the room and pushed open double doors to the main meeting hall. A cloud of cold air muscled through the opening as the men stepped through. Abel closed the doors.
The floor and scores of chairs flickered with the haunted colors of the aurora cascading through the windows. Engulfed in the pure reds and greens of electromagnetic radiation streaming into the room, Harland sensed the place was in utter disarray, chairs scattered, tipped over, the once orderly rows wildly askew. The to-the-marrow cold in the great-enclosed space suggested malfunction, the black shadows, malevolence.
Narrow shafts of color hijacked Harland’s attention. Across the space, beams of aurora pigments ran laser straight, entering from holes in one of the walls and racing through the dimensions. Intrigued by the lines of light, Harland went to the dark interior plaster surface and pressed his fingers against one of the entrance points where the photons invaded. Harland sensed what he was feeling was actually a bullet hole.
“You brought me here to see this?” Harland said, spinning about searching for Abel. The host had his back to the doors the men had entered.
“Yes, I did.” At that, Abel threw light switches by the doors and the room blossomed with electric light.
Having spent hours in feeble light, Harland squinted beneath the hard glare of the fully illuminated hall. With the brilliant rays of light came reflections from plaster rubble and dust, wood siding fragments, glittering glass shards, brown pools of coagulated fluid and spatter droplets of rust color on white satin latex paint.
“Jesus, this looks like something out of Nam,” blurted Harland. “What happened here?”
Abel flipped the lights off again to let the aurora borealis back in the room. Several slow steps and the Abel closed in on the farmer, too close, and made direct eye contact. Harland looked way. “I thought you could tell me, Harland.”
Surprised, Harland returned the man’s gaze. “What? Me?”
Abel sidestepped to the ruined exterior wall and padded along it, thrusting an arm through the naked spaces where window glass and frames had been. Silhouetted against the billowing colors of the aurora, the town founder held up a fist and snarled into the cold. “Who did this, Harland?”
The farmer stood stone quiet.
Abel emptied his lungs. “You know who is responsible for this!”
Apprehension welling up in flood, Harland backed away from the black form hanging in a window opening.
“Don’t move a damn muscle,” Abel vented in tones sharp with threat. “We had people die here in this room.”
Harland welded his mouth shut and frantically scanned the walls of the hall to see if others were lurking in the recesses ready to pounce.
“Farmer, tomorrow we are going back to your town with a shipment of our food. We agreed to it. It’s going to happen. But you and I aren’t leaving this little corner of hell until you make clear to me why, okay, why it was necessary for your son to come here and murder my daughter and two others.”
Abel’s words struck like a prizefighter blow to the stomach.
“Two men came here and opened fire on us. One of them was Andy Regas. My daughter was stuck down by a bullet. She bled to death in an hour. Why?”
“Where is Andy?” Harland whispered.
Abel grabbed a chair, lifted it, and winged it into a far corner of the room. “Who gives a good goddamn where he is? What did you have to do with this?”
“Nothing,” Harland stammered. “I haven’t seen Andy in weeks.”
Spittle spurted from Abel’s mouth. “Farmer, I’m a man of principle. I want to beat you to within an inch of your life. But that’s not possible. I’m sworn never to strike a person in anger.”
Abel kicked a chair out of his way to vent frustration.
“A month ago I come to your doorstep to talk to you and took a shotgun blast an inch from my ear.”
“That was Andy’s doing.”
“Yes, and you held a gun me, too.”
“Maybe I did, but I could no more hurt you than you can hurt me.”
“Enlighten me, will you?” Abel rumbled sarcastically.
“I’m a Christian man, raised up with the good book over me. I believe in the good in people.”
“You do, do you?”
“Me and Eda, we took Andy in. He needed care, some tough love, and guidance that only Jesus can provide.”
“Then why all this?” Abel spread his arms to encompass the carnage throughout the room.
“Andy had always been trouble, ever since he came to us. I worked the boy hard on the farm to try to straighten him out, but I couldn’t reach him, not much anyway. Just a week or two ago, I found him butchering out some of your animals.”
“Our milking goats.”
“That’s what they were. I told him then and there to leave you people alone. We didn’t have a quarrel with you no more. I needed him to help put off the National Guard that was coming, so we could hold on to the grain in the silos. But he didn’t show.”
Abel turned to face out the devastated window, drinking in the fluttering aurora colors but taking no delight in them. “He didn’t come into Sweetly to assist you?”
“No.”
“He could not have made it.”
“I see that now; he was here. I had no idea. I don’t know what to say.”
“Harland, your son didn’t come to your aid in Sweetly because he lost his life here.”
“That’s not so.”
“He perished in Big Stone Lake.”
“No.”
“He died of hypothermia in the icy water.”
The farmer shuttered and took a seat on one of the chairs, head bowed forward. The color circus of the electric magnetic radiation played over his slumped form, painting his body with Fauve pigments. For a full minute he stared at the wasteland of the meeting hall floor before drawing a breath to speak.
“Everything’s come to no good.”
Chapter One Hundred-Thirteen
A segmented waterborne creation strained against the biting prairie wind hustling over Big Stone Lake. A stubby open steam craft with a simple canopy covering a rudimentary steam boiler labored on the waters, trailing puffs of wood smoke. To keep the craft’s steam-driven propeller shaft spinning, Max fed split logs into the steamboat’s tiny firebox one by one.
The little craft was a tow vessel pulling a hastily rigged raft comprised of canoes and kayaks lashed to a rough timber frame supporting a pine board deck and gunwales. The deck of the little barge held stacked crates loaded down with fresh foodstuffs harvested by many hands at Independency and shuttled down to the lake. All the goods rested securely under blankets and tarps to prevent the cold from freezing the perishables. Half a dozen crew members from the bluffs rode aboard the contraption. Winnie joined Abel and the others on the slow voyage to Sweetly.
Harland stood forward, brooding, hands clasping a canopy post, scanning the south shore of the lake for signs of a pulse within Sweetly’s architecture. The bonfire, lit behind the Sweetly Primary School and kept going so many days and nights, had cooled to weak embers, giving off a lacy curl of colorless haze.