His eyes were washstands draining. From swollen orbs, the saline solution of his tears formed rivulets down his cheeks, collected at his chin and fell in a stream.
Chapter Ninety-Three
Careful not to strike Pelee’s torso or head against the car frame, Abel eased his daughter out of the vehicle stopped in the CC parking lot. Arms curled to his chest, carrying the body tight against him to ward of the wind, he turned to the south and slogged in the snow across the expanse of the village green to the cabins, shuffling at a sloth’s pace to the bathhouse.
From windows fronting the buildings, faces appeared to watch the death promenade. Doors opened. People disgorged from the structures intent on following Abel.
In the moist heat of the bathhouse interior, Abel picked up several towels before stepping through the door to the men’s bath. He spread a single towel down at the edge of the small steaming pool and gently rested Pelee upon it. With utmost care, Abel removed the child’s garments, folded them with precision and laid them aside. He then stripped away his gruesome threads, folded them neatly, as well, and left them in an orderly, bloody stack.
Expressionless and with little awareness of the heat of the pool water, Abel descended naked into the liquid and turned to ease his daughter up off the towel at the bath’s tile rim. Cradling Pelee’s form, a towel on his shoulder, Abel shuffled to the center of the bath, water reaching his chest. There he let the buoyancy of the warm fluid lift the child’s body, freeing it from the tyranny of gravity. He closed his eyes to quiet the cacophony in his head.
Word spread through the community as fast as any telecommunications miracle. In minutes the bath filled with souls. None dare break the silence. The first souls in the building discovered Abel at the center of the pool in the men’s bath. As at a funeral procession for a dignitary, people filed silently into the modest moist chamber and assembled along its west wall to bear witness.
Abel did not acknowledge the assembled. He wetted the towel and, with a slow, almost feminine grace, swabbed the clotted blood from his daughter’s skin. He was sobbing. The sound of his quiet anguish disarmed most. Tears swelled in the eyes of each face in turn. Low murmurs of grief mingled together and rose in volume into a sustained moan, chant-like, voices amplified, reverberating as if let free in the grand interior spaces of a gothic cathedral of the Old World.
Clutching his daughter firmly, Abel submerged in the blood-stained gallonage, taking his daughter down with him in a baptismal gesture. Below the surface, in amniotic warmth, in the dim light and free from earthly sound, Abel kissed Pelee’s cheek and uttered a simple sonnet he had written years earlier, blessing her for having shared her brief life with him.
Word bubbles surfaced and vanished one by one. Winnie, sitting cross-legged at the edge of the pool, observed the bubbles break the plane of the water, popping pink from the stain of countless blood cells. She brought her hands up to her face to dam the tears bursting from her. Her fingers were useless against the torrent.
Chapter Ninety-Four
In a vacuous state, Abel dressed his daughter in a simple white smock, inserted dried flowers in her hair and placed her body in her bed. No fire was lit in the downstairs stove, so that the cold could steal into the cabin home.
The despondent father went to the Beaver Den woodworking shop. There he spent the day hand-planing red pine boards and fashioning a simple coffin held together with hand-whittled pegs. When the box was complete, he spent the evening hand-carving images of flower pedals and his daughter’s name into the softwood surface of the coffin lid. Abel did not stop when his woodwork was complete. He pulled a shovel and mattock from the community’s tool cache and disappeared into the night. Bobcat followed him as Abel trudged to the community cemetery plot, tools over his shoulder. There the man shoveled snow and ash from unfrozen soil that a few days earlier had been snow free. Abel chose the highest point in the graveyard, and there he began to dig and pick at the ground. For half an hour, Bobcat watched the founder of the town toil, throwing dirt onto a single growing pile as he descended into the earth. Bobcat figured it would take Abel half the night to dig a burial chamber as deep as the man was tall.
Abel accepted no help and never slackened from his toil. He did tell Bobcat that he would preside over a funeral service for his daughter in the morning at 10 a.m. and that Bobcat should inform the members of the community, should they wish to attend.
Two hours after midnight, Abel cast off his shovel and walked through a brightening night to his cabin. There he built a fire, collected pen and paper, and sat by the flames crafting a funeral oration to his daughter. Scribbling the last word, he laid it aside and spent another hour sketching an elaborate design for a headstone. He would start work hand chiseling a slab of granite once he could manage to bring himself to begin the task.
Following the morning funeral ceremony, despite freezing temperatures, every soul at Independency stayed to help Abel close the grave. All wanted to participate, using bare hands to move earth, to show solidarity with Abel and to in some way begin their own healing process. When the plot was sealed and covered with hay to dampen the effects of the coming winter freeze on bare earth, Abel thanked the many gathered, then turned and walked away alone, retiring to his cabin to mourn and fast. Winnie watched him go. He locked his door, something he never did.
Chapter Ninety-Five
Half an inch of skim ice plated the shore margins of Big Stone Lake, imprisoning the body of Andy Regas within its frozen armor. Bobcat and Oleg stood at the shore gazing at the dead man, suspended face down, his back frozen into the surface layer.
Oleg, in barn waders, tested the thin ice, slammed a foot down on it and cracked through. He kept at it until he was close enough to the body to swing an ax and break out the corpse. It rolled over, presenting a frozen skim-milk face to the sky.
The farm director grabbed Regas by his collar and floated him to shore. With great effort, the two pulled the corpse up off the ground with the rope and flopped the lifeless soul into the bottom of a canoe. The other dead man who had joined in the assault on the town, lay in a second canoe lashed to the first.
Paddling in close to shore and breaking ice sheets when they had to, Bobcat and Oleg managed to reach the hollow to the south, where Regas’ weathered camp stood 200 feet from the water’s edge. They struggled with the heaviest body again, dumped it on the ground, and dragged it over the snow and ash with ropes. They pulled the body to the house, up the porch stairs and laid Regas out on the kitchen floor. They brought the other man in a few minutes later and deposited him in the living room.
For half an hour, Bobcat and Oleg removed boxes of stolen foodstuffs from the basement and filled the canoes with them. They estimated they moved more than a quarter ton of provisions. After the final box was placed, Bobcat walked back to the house with a five-gallon gasoline can topped-off with community-distilled ethyl alcohol. He descended to the basement and emptied half the contents into the trash on one side of the confinement, then ran a stream of fluid up the stairs and around the perimeter of the outside walls, slinking through the kitchen, living area and other rooms. He saved a quart of the alcohol so he could pour a stream of it out the door, down the steps and on toward the lake.