I parked the cart, with Shawn in it, among the daylilies along the road at the Black Creek Bridge where we’d met up earlier that day, and climbed down under the bridge and tucked the gun up along one of the old steel girders underneath where the swallows made their nests. It was dim under there even with the sun blazing like an ingot in the sky. I doubted anybody would find it.
The Schmidt farm lay more than a mile up the junction there, uphill the whole way, and I didn’t want to leave Shawn in the cart, drawing flies in the lilies while I went up for help, so I decided to get him the rest of the way to town myself. I couldn’t imagine just bringing the body directly to his house and presenting it to his wife and child. Freer’s funeral home was long shuttered because both Freer brothers were carried off by encephalitis and nobody took up their business, so I couldn’t bring Shawn there. Besides, there was no refrigeration in their morgue with the electricity off. In recent years, most of our funerals took place in the church. There hadn’t been a police department for years and Heath Rucker, the constable, didn’t have an office and was a useless drunk on top of that. I decided to take Shawn’s body directly to Dr. Copeland’s house, since he might be called upon to act as a medical examiner in any legal proceeding.
As I passed by the old high school, nobody was left out in the garden in the midday heat, nor was the roofing crew still at work. I assumed they were inside at lunch, or prayer, or just preserving their energy for the cooler hours of the day. The streets of town were deserted too, though I heard the sound of hammer blows from Doug Sweetland’s wheel shop and saw Linda Allison hanging wash in her yard. The smell of something sweet emanated from Russo’s bakery. It nauseated me in the heat. Finally, I hauled the cart up behind what had once been the driveway to Dr. Copeland’s office, formerly a carriage house and garage. I left Shawn beside the yew hedge there and went in to find the doctor.
He had no patients in his waiting room. I called out and his voice said come into the back. He had a lab behind his examining room. He was in there pouring off a jug of grain alcohol into an odd lot of smaller bottles and jars. He had become an adept herbalist through the years. He had to make his own antiseptic, like everything else. The room was heavy with fumes.
“Heat getting you, Robert?” he said without looking at me.
“There’s been a terrible accident, Jerry.”
He looked up, peering over the rim of his eyeglasses while he managed to finish filling an old soda pop bottle without spilling a drop.
“What sort of accident?”
“Shawn Watling got shot up at the general supply.”
“That doesn’t sound like an accident.”
“I’ve got him in a cart outside.”
Jerry, lean and lithe at thirty-nine, slipped past me and I followed. He knelt beside the cart. He had the shirt off Shawn’s face and was studying him, feeling for a pulse on his neck, though anyone could see that he was beyond saving. Pretty soon, Jerry began cursing, saying “goddammit, goddammit” over and over in a harsh whisper. Sweat dripped off the end of his nose onto Shawn’s chest. “You didn’t say he was dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Goddammit… How did this happen?”
I told him everything I had seen up at the general, but I seemed to be blabbering. The simple truth was, I didn’t know.
“Goddammit!”
Out of nowhere, the doctor’s older son, Jasper, ten, appeared. I heard him gasp as he saw Shawn’s body.
“Go to the rectory and get Reverend Holder,” Jerry said. “And don’t talk to another soul on your way over or back about what you saw here, understand?”
Jasper nodded but remained fixed in his footsteps like a statue.
“Go on!” Jerry said and the boy finally obeyed him. “Robert, help me move the body into the springhouse.”
The springhouse was spacious inside and carefully built. I know because I had helped build it a few years earlier. This was how people kept perishable things cool in the days before mechanical refrigeration, and this was how we did it now-if you happened to be lucky enough to have a spring on your property. The fieldstone structure was bermed into the hill behind Jerry’s house. The Copelands had about a half acre of fruit trees above it. At the time we built it, there had been many deaths in town, and I understood that he had designed it to receive human bodies awaiting burial as well as for everyday things.
It must have been thirty degrees cooler inside. Meager light seeped through a small triple-pane transom window above the door. I remember fitting it into the fieldstones there, scribing the wooden sashes. Now, the light filtered through an additional layer of cobwebs. A long wooden slab table stood inside with trugs and wooden bowels of the year’s first peas and radishes, along with shelves of preserved fruit, straw-filled bins where they kept onions and squashes, and hams hanging from the ceiling with their protective coats of mold. Even under the circumstances, you couldn’t fail to notice that the Copeland’s food supply was impressive. As the town’s only doctor, he received a bounty in barter for his services.
“Let’s get him onto the table,” Jerry said. Shawn weighed well over two hundred pounds. The two of us struggled to lift him out of the dog cart. Jerry bent to examine the ugly wound that had left half the jaw hanging by a few tendons. The shot had also severed the carotid artery, he said. Then, still cursing under his breath, he pulled a bottle out from behind a five-gallon stoneware crock, took a pull on it, and passed it to me. It was a very fine pear brandy, and very powerful. We didn’t have to make any lame excuses about why we needed it. Between the brandy and the cool air, the situation began to clarify. Loren found us in the springhouse easily enough. Jerry told his boy to stay outside.
“Oh hell,” Loren said when his eyes adjusted and he saw Shawn laid out on the table. He let out a sound like a gulp or a sob. Jerry passed him the bottle too. Loren had baptized Shawn’s child.
“God help that son of a bitch if he ever comes to me for help,” Jerry said, and I assumed he meant Wayne.
I repeated to Loren what happened at the general supply, and he said we three should all go together to Shawn’s house and tell his wife, and Loren said he would see that everybody in town was notified so we could have a funeral tomorrow. I realized that I would be up all night making the coffin.
Eleven
Britney Watling was picking black currants with her seven-yearold girl, Sarah, pale like her mother and barefoot, at the back of the garden as we approached. Both of them seemed to flinch at the sight of us. Loren didn’t even have to say anything. He went over to where she stood and guided her gently by the elbow to the shade beside the barn and sat her down on a marble slab bench that had probably been there for a hundred years. Jerry hoisted the child up and carried her down there hitched up on his waist, as he would a child of his own.
Once we were all there in the shade of the barn, where the family cow took refuge from the heat, and where the hostas that Shawn’s mother planted long ago bloomed purple, Loren explained to Britney that her husband was not just hurt but dead. The little girl, Sarah, seemed to search for a cue from her mother, whose mouth fell open without producing any sound. The child repeated, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” and began keening. It was left to me to try to briefly tell Britney what had happened, making it clear I hadn’t actually witnessed the incident. She did not ask me any questions about it. For the longest time, nothing was said. Finally Loren began to quietly explain what would happen next, how the funeral would be arranged and the sequence of events that would entail. Britney took it in stoically. She was a young person who herself had endured large losses, including parents incinerated in Los Angeles, a brother and many friends gone, and one child stillborn. She gave the impression of great solidity even though she was petite and pale. She asked if she could see her husband’s body. Jerry warned her that the wound was awful.