She dropped the picture as though it had seared her hand and whirled away, her face gone pale with embarrassment and anger. She walked blindly away.
Course it’s growed a inch or two since then, he called after her. Sutter was retrieving the picture where it had fluttered to the sidewalk. Can’t lose this, he mused to himself. My old mama toted this in her pocketbook till the day she died.
So long, widow Conkle, he called to her departing back.
She didn’t even halt. I’m not a widow, she said.
Not yet, Sutter said.
That stopped her. She turned and raised a hand to shade her eyes and just stared at him.
Granville Sutter lived in a tiny house he’d built himself. Twominiature rooms, a kitchen and the front room he slept in. Most nights. Other nights he slept wherever he might be when night fell on him. The house was painted white with green shutters and trim, and it looked like a little fairytale cottage or a house in a fabled wood where a gnome might live. It had a neat cobblestone walk curving toward the blacktop and a great walnut tree on the south side in whose shade he could be found on warm days taking his leisure, sitting on one Coke crate with his feet propped on another and his back leant against the trunk, watching the infrequent traffic with heavylidded eyes, the cars dropping off the grade toward the river and the Lick Creek community and ultimately the edge of the Harrikin. Sometimes a wagon creaking along behind plodding horses until the man would snap the lines and say, Come up there, and the horses would step out smartly, their shoes ringing on the macadam until they passed the house. If there were children, they would turn and stare back at this figure of nightmare dread who’d been used to scare them into behaving, but the adults would generally keep their eyes straight ahead as if something of enormous interest were about to appear around a curve in the road. Figuring perhaps it was best not to attract his attention, wary mouse easing past a drowsing cat. If you don’t look, he’s not real.
This particular gnome had estimated the time of Conkle’s arrival to within fifteen minutes. He thought: She told him at work, but he ain’t about to leave work. He’ll work on till five so as not to piss off old man Wipp or jeopardize his cushy job, and then he’ll jump in the car and head out here.
Sutter was sitting on a Coke crate with a rifle across his lap, and he had a polishing rag in his hand, and when a car passed he’d take a swipe or two at the stock, but it didn’t need it.
Conkle was driving that year a dark green ’47 Studebaker, the model that looked almost the same front or back, and when the car hove into view Sutter smiled a tight little smile to himself; it had looked for a moment as if Conkle were coming at him sixty miles an hour in reverse.
The Studebaker was still fairly rocking on its springs when Conkle leapt out and slammed the door and came striding around the car. Conkle had been in a bad fire once and his face was scarred slick and plasticlooking over his cheek and forehead and these scars were white as dead flesh against his livid face. You son of a bitch, he was saying. You’ve finally done it this time. He was already coming up the walk, he still had his druggist’s apron on and he looked slightly ridiculous.
There was a robin singing somewhere in the top branches of the walnut. Sutter was listening to it instead of Conkle when he drew the rifle to his shoulder and took aim.
Conkle saw the rifle and Sutter’s intent simultaneously and he threw up his hands as if to bat away lead with bare flesh.
Sutter shot him in the left temple and the right side of his head exploded in a pink mist of blood and bonemeal and he was flung backward and fell limp and ragged as if he’d been stuffed with sawdust. The robin hushed. It had grown very still. The echo of the rifleshot came waving back across the river bottom.
Sutter approached and with the rifle at a loose present arms bent over and stared into Conkle’s face. The eyes were open, and Sutter leant further to study these eyes as if he might see the soul fleeing out them in ectoplasmic spiral or death rise up in them like a face at a window but he didn’t seeanything at all.
He went into the house and put the rifle away. He came back out with a tow sack. He grasped Conkle’s hair and raised the head and onehanded spread the sack beneath it and released the head and it hit the cobblestones with a soft plop. The scar on Conkle’s forehead angled up into the hairline, and the hair that grew there was fine and thin.
Sutter grasped him by one leg and pulled but the other leg splayed out and kept hanging, and, breathing hard and cursing Sutter leant and took up the other foot. Conkle’s ankles were thin and he wore winecolored socks with clocks on them, they didn’t say what time, Sutter guessed they’d run down. He had to keep replacing the sack under Conkle’s head.
To get him into the front room he had to prop the screendoor wide and drag him through. He left him by the door. Conkle was studying the ceiling with a look of bemused whimsy.
He went back out with a bucket of water and a broom and dumped the water on the bloody stones and scoured hard with the bristles of the broom and threw rinsewater. He repeated it a time or two until he was satisfied.
He went back in and sat across the room on an old carseat that served him as davenport and studied the body critically as if it were some new piece of furniture he’d come by and wasn’t sure where to place. After a while he got up and took the heavy iron firepoker from behind the wood heater and laid it in Conkle’s right hand. He studied the effect. He smiled onecornered to himself and leant and moved the firepoker right hand to left.
There was a long zigzag crack in the plastered courthouse ceiling, and Sutter spent a lot of time staring at it as if somehow he were above these dull proceedings. The hard back of the oak chair against the base of his skull. Smoking wasn’t permitted, and he worried a small slice of tobacco in his jaw and swallowed the juice while the prosecution went on around him. All this ceremony. All these legalities. He paid it little mind.
The crack in the ceiling became a canyon grown with hemlock and cedar, and he was scrambling down its stony sides toward an ultimate abyss. He came out on a rocky outcropping and lay flat on his stomach on the warm stone and looked down and past the tops of trees so far away they looked like mockups of trees. A river crept like a winding silver thread drawn amongst the rocks.
Then the crack was Flint Creek, where he’d grown up long ago, and he was wandering down it in the warm June sun of youth with a rolled fishline in his pocket just looking for the right cane to cut. A world incredibly green and saturated with sun and scented with the riotous spring growth.
Sutter’s lawyer was named Wiggins. He wasn’t very good, but he was cheap, and Sutter didn’t figure he needed one anyway and had hired him simply as a matter of form. Wiggins wore plaid sportcoats of an almost audible hue, neckties with pictures of mallards flying south on them, and he had the soft indefinable manner of a professional drunk. He always seemed slightly harried, as if he’d like to get all this over with and retire somewhere behind closed doors with a bottle.
Early in the defense he spoke eloquently of the sanctity ofthe home. Of man’s God-given right to defend it. Then he put Sutter on the stand.
Sutter told his tale in a dry, emotionless voice and sat calmly awaiting cross-examination. Without saying so directly he had managed to leave the impression that the whole thing had started as an altercation over Conkle’s wife.
The state prosecutor that year was a young man named Schieweiler. He was extracted from the Swiss who’d settled Ackerman’s Field. He had intense, slightly protuberant eyes and no political debts to pay, and he adhered to a straight and narrow path. He had a great deal of difficulty understanding the fear folks in Centre had for Sutter. He was an earnest young man appalled by the story Sutter had told after laying his hand on the Holy Bible. He sensed a miscarriage of justice in the making here, and he was determined to head it off.