The farmer cradled his wife in his arms and carried her out into the night. The bonfire was inviting, warm, brilliant, and sparking lively. Neighbors had delivered their loved ones to the flames already. Traumatized by their struggle in Yellowstone hell, ill feed, and suffering chronic maladies of their own, citizens gave up the arduous task of hand-digging graves. Cremation made difficult work so much easier, faster. Fire was efficient. Fire could handle all that could be heaped upon it. So many had died in Sweetly from the mysterious plague that searing flames became the mode of disposal for the living; otherwise the bodies of the deceased would stack up as one stacked cordwood. No soul remaining had the energy for anything else. Well fed, the pyre burned with a spirited crackle.
With the help of several Sweetly natives, Harland heaved his wife’s body upon the burning mass and retreated to cool air so his skin would not blister. He didn’t know why he stayed to watch the blaze work its awful magic—out of respect, maybe. He couldn’t be sure. Wishing a soul peace and bidding the body adieu was supposed to be a collective exercise, wasn’t it? Friends and neighbors pulled together in grief, listened to a few well-chosen words over the grave, prayed a minute to a higher authority, placed a flower on the casket, and filed away slowly. That’s the way it was done. But the bonfire required none of that. So Harland stayed on, husbanding the flames hour after hour.
“Harland.”
A familiar rasping croak got through to the farmer, the voice of Jim Bottomly.
“Harland.” Bottomly approached, wrapped in a soiled blanket, sleet pellets spinning about the man. The coop manager’s fever had broken in the morning hours. He was feeling well enough to lift himself from his sweat-soaked schoolhouse bunk and go in search of his neighbors. “I got word.”
“Huh?” Harland mumbled. “What’d ya got?”
“The train, the Guard, they’re coming. Won’t be long now.”
Chapter Eighty-Eight
Dawn brought a lull in the icy sleet but not the wind. Caked white with driven frost and steaming sweat vapor from exertion, Winnie could not gain her bearings among the swirling ground clouds. First light was flat at every compass point. Wind direction hadn’t shifted all night, so west must still be directly ahead.
Between gusts, a smudge on the horizon materialized into the roof of a small home. Spent from the relentless night march against the elements and her leg muscles burning, the woman left the track and made for the building. Maybe someone would let her rest a while and help her orient, that is if anyone was still about. There had been no sign of life all night in any of the tiny communities she had passed through since leaving Morris.
Ice plaster stuck to a swayback home sandwiched into the folds of the bluffs four miles south of Independency village. A rusting pickup in the yard huddled under a shell of ice, spotty snow and ash burden. Beyond the roof of the truck Winnie could make out a black ribbon stretching lean and long behind a tree break. It was lake water: Big Stone Lake.
No lamp filaments aglow, the house slumped uninviting in the snowscape. Winnie leaned heavily against a window sash, quaking with cold and lack of sustenance from her nightlong slog against the storm. She ogled the dim interior and rapped hard on the windowpane. Silence greeted her in return. Pushing through a weathered door, Winnie entered a grime-encrusted environment.
The entry opened onto a filthy kitchen, a chipped linoleum print coating the floor, popular in kitchens a decade after the Second World War. Cold white enameled steel dressed out the wall cabinets. The table and chairs were of tubular steel. A single lifeless florescent fixture clung to a stapled fiberboard ceiling, lacquered with fat and cooking oil stains. Every surface labored under dirty utensils, cups, dishes, empty cans, paper, tools and scores of glass beer and spirit bottles.
Winnie determined at once she had entered the domain of several people, males with particular habits. The phantoms of the kitchen didn’t wash silverware; they boiled it clean. They did not use the oven, preferring to cook everything in a skillet and in blackened pots atop the stove. There was no apron about and not a potholder. A grease slick hand towel lay on the counter by the burners. The room spoke not at all of a feminine touch. Nowhere was there hand cream, a potted plant, display of family photos, dish of hard candy. Not a single magnet graced the refrigerator, holding up cutout bits of humor, the portrait of a child, an inspirational poem. Everywhere there was grime.
A quick run through the house revealed that several bedrooms had been occupied recently. The sheets on the single bed and pillow in one room were stained mustard; they hadn’t been washed clean in months. On the floor beside the bed were old copies of Field and Stream magazine, Smack Down and Hustler. She read the name on the mailing label on several of the publications: Andrew Regas.
The living room was uninhabitable. Crowding the floor were automobile parts, small engines in differing stages of dismemberment, boxes of power tools, a chainsaw, piles of clothing, and a pile of spilt cordwood next to a warm wood burning stove. It did little to slake the chill in her.
Returning to the kitchen, Winnie opened an interior door onto a basement stairwell. She descended to have a look below. Most of the cobweb-infested catacomb was smothered with bottle, can and cardboard trash, but a far corner was more orderly. There stood an old-fashioned cold locker, workbench, floor-to-ceiling cabinetry, stakes of boxes and a trunk.
In the dim light filtering through the casement windows, the woman pushed through the debris and went to the cabinets, opening each door. Behind them, standing upright and arrayed in neat order were bird guns and deer rifles, boxes full of ammunition stacked about, scopes and other minutia of the hunting craft. The weapon on the far right in the cabinet held her gaze, a Browning 30-06 semiautomatic rifle, highly polished, obviously the center of someone’s attention. Next to the semiautomatic were two empty weapon slots. Either there were no other rifles to fill them, or someone had taken them.
Instinctively, Winnie ran her fingers over the little Beretta Px4 Storm pistol in her parka pocket. She gave it a little pat to reassure herself.
On the workbench beside the gun cabinet several objects distracted her. More ammunition clips rested on the bench. Adjacent to the magazines were short sections of steel pipe and a pipe threader. Each pipe boasted shiny new threads. Winnie turned to the trunk and opened the lid. Filling it to capacity were cylindrical tins of black powder, fusing material, and metal caps. She pulled a cap out and threaded it over one of the pipes. They wedded perfectly.
Arrayed along the length of one concrete wall were dozens of cardboard boxes, stacked one above the other, rising to the ceiling. A glimpse revealed a motley collection of canned and bottled products. They weren’t case goods but single items jumbled together, a jar of tomato paste, a box of spaghetti, a can of baked beans, a half-full box of Bisquick, a quarter bottle of pancake syrup. There was no rhyme to it. Winnie thought she knew why. The foods had been stolen—not from stores where all like goods would be stocked together—but from individual households. This Andrew Regas, and whoever else frequented the home, was stealing from people in the local communities. He had to be.
Winnie sought out the old cold locker, a cement block room in the north corner built into many homes predating the World War II. The small space, well below ground level, acted as a natural refrigerated area where perishable foods could be kept six to seven months a year. Pulling the door open revealed a space with shelving crammed with large blocks and rounds of unpackaged cheese. There were baskets of potatoes and root crops. Where did this food come from? Starving, she yanked a large crumb from one block of cheese and tasted it. It was delicious. She stuffed the rest into her mouth.