What the Dead Men Say Read online

  “I’m not forgetting.”

  “I don’t often ask that you pray with me but I don’t see how fifteen minutes one night a week is going to help.”

  “And just what is it we’re praying for?”

  She paused and looked down at her poor worn hands. She worked so hard and sometimes he felt terrible for resenting her prayerfulness. She looked up then. “I had the dream again last night.”

  “I see.”

  “Don’t you want to know which one?”

  “I know which one.”

  “The son we would’ve had. I saw him plain on a hill right at dawn. He was running right toward us. We were on a buckboard on a dusty road and we didn’t hear him or see him. He kept running and running and shouting and shouting but we didn’t see him or hear him. Finally, he fell down in the long grass and all the animals came to him at night and comforted him-because we wouldn’t comfort him.”

  Kittredge sighed. “I won’t be gone too long.”

  “Don’t you know what the dream could mean?”

  “No. I guess I don’t.”

  “Why, it could mean that He’s forgiven us, that the Lord has forgiven us for sinning before we were married, and that now He’s ready to let us have children.”

  “I see.”

  “Don’t you believe that, Dennis?”

  “I’m not sure just what I do believe,” he said, and pulled the door open. The sounds and smells of dusk-the robins and jays in the trees, a hard relentless chorus, the scent of flowers as they cooled in the dusk-he took all this in with great affection. He wanted to be out in the night, a part of all this.

  “I won’t be gone too long,” he said again, and before she could respond he was out the door and moving fast toward the sidewalk.

  ***

  He liked walking downtown at night. He liked the way the lamplight glowed and the way women in picture hats and bustles walked on the arms of their gentlemen to the opera house where shiny coaches and rigs stood outside waiting. He liked the sound of player pianos on the lonely midwestern darkness and he liked the smell of brewer’s yeast that you picked up as you passed tavern doors. He liked the sound of pinochle and poker hands being slapped down on the table, and the sweet high giggle of tavern maids. This was, by God, 1901 and this was, by God, civilized and he took a curious pride in this, as if he were personally responsible for it all.

  It was not quite eight o’clock, so he walked down to the roundhouse tavern where the railroad men drank. It was his favorite place unless there were too many Mexicans in there from some road crew. He hated the way Mexicans resorted to their knives so quickly; he’d seen it too many times. A man stabbed was much worse than a man shot-at least to the man watching it all.

  The place was nearly empty. At the far end of the plank bar two Mexes drank from a bucket of suds, and at the other a white man played blackjack with the bartender. In the corner a player piano rolled out the melody to “My Sweet Brown Eyes” while an old man, nodding off in his cups, lay facedown on the pianos keys, spittle running silver from his mouth to the floor. The bartender paid him no mind.

  A maid appeared from the back and served Kittredge his beer. He stood there with his schooner, enjoying the player piano. It was playing Stephen Foster songs now, a medley, and his toe tapped and in just a few swallows he felt buzzy, not drunk, but buzzy and blessedly so. He forgot that in an hour he would meet Griff and Carlyle and that together they would have to decide what to do about Septemus Ryan. That was the funny thing about the whole event: he did not feel responsible. It had been an accident, though obviously most people had chosen not to believe that, an accident because Dennis Kittredge was a good and responsible man and had been all his life.

  He felt that if he could open his heart and look inside he would find fine things-patience and courage and understanding. He was not the sort of man who cut up other men the way Mexes did and he was certainly not the sort of man who killed young girls. It all had a dreamy quality to it. He would always be, in his heart, the little kid making his first communion-why couldn’t people understand that?

  “Nice night for a walk.”

  Kittredge turned around and saw Sheriff Dodds standing there. The sheriff tossed a nickel on the bar plank. The maid brought him a schooner with a good foamy head on it.

  “Sure is,” Kittredge said.

  The sheriff sipped his beer, studying Kittredge as he did so. “You still think about the days when the wagon works was up and runnin’?”

  “Sure. Everybody does.”

  “Them was good times.”

  “Sure was.”

  “Hell,” Dodds said, “I remember seein’ you and Griff and Carlyle everywhere I went. You three was some friends.”

  “Some friends is right,” Kittredge said, then swigged some of his own beer. For some reason, his stomach was knotting and he had started having some problems swallowing, the way he did sometimes when he got nervous. Dodds came in there often enough, had a schooner or two a night, nothing to scandalize even church ladies, and often as not he spoke to Dennis, too. But there was something about his tone tonight, as if he were saying one thing but meaning quite another. Kittredge wondered what the hell Dodds was driving at.

  “You boys don’t hang around each other much anymore, do you?”

  “Guess we don’t, Sheriff.”

  “Too bad. You bein’ such good friends and all. At one time, I mean.” He said this over the rim of his schooner. He was still watching Kittredge very closely.

  Kittredge looked toward the door. “Well,” he said.

  Dodds followed his gaze to the front of the tavern. “Going on home now?”

  Kittredge met his glance. “Thought I might finish my walk.”

  “I’d be careful if I were you.”

  “Careful?”

  Dodds drained off his beer. “Hear there are some strangers in town.”

  “Why would strangers bother me?”

  “Well, you know how it is with strangers. You can never be sure what they want.”

  Now Kittredge finished his own beer. He belched a little because he’d put it down too fast. “Well, guess I’ll be saying goodnight, Sheriff.”

  But Dodds wasn’t done. Not quite. “Too bad you don’t have any children, Kittredge.”

  “Yep. I suppose it is.” What the hell was Dodds getting at, anyway?

  “Man who don’t have no children of his own don’t know what it means to lose one. Take this man a while back, this Ryan fella, over in Council Bluffs. His little girl got killed in the course of a bank robbery.”

  “I guess I heard about that. Don’t remember it all, quite.”

  “Little girl’s father went insane, some people said. Just couldn’t get over it. Hired an investigator fella to start backtrackin’ the robbers. Guess the investigator fella had some good luck.”

  Kittredge felt faint. Actually, literally faint, the way women got. He put a hand for steadiness on the plank bar. “Sure hope they catch those thieves.”

  And all the while, remorseless, Dodds staring at him. Staring.

  “If I was them boys, I’d be a lot more scared of Septemus Ryan than the law.”

  “Oh?”

  “Law’ll give them boys a fair hearing. If it was an accident that the little girl got killed, which some of the witnesses say it was, law’ll take that into account.”

  “But not the little girl’s father?”

  “Oh, not the little girl’s father at all. Put yourself in his place, Kittredge. Say you had a pretty little girl and one day she got killed like that. Wouldn’t make no difference to you if it was an accident or not. Least it wouldn’t to most fathers. All they’d want to do is kill the men who killed their pretty little girl. You ever think of it that way?”

  “Ain’t thought about it much one way or the other, Sheriff,” Kittredge said. His voice was so dry he could barely speak, but he didn’t want to order another schooner because then he’d have to stand there and drink it with Dodds.

/>   Dodds nodded. “Well, if you ever do sit down and start thinking it over, Kittredge, that’s just how I’d figure it-that I’d have me a much better chance with the lawn ’n I would a grief-crazy father. You might pass that along to Griff and Carlyle, too?”

  “Now why would they care about that, Sheriff?”

  Dodds made a face. “Carlyle, he’s too dumb and too shiftless to care. But Griff, well, he’s smart. You tell him what I told you and he’s likely to agree with me.”

  So he knew, Dodds did. There could be no mistaking. Somehow he’d found out about the robbery and the little girl and knew that it was the three of them who were involved.

  Dodds said, “You have yourself a nice walk, Kittredge.”

  “I will.”

  “And you say hello to Mae. She’s a fine woman; but I guess you know that.”

  “She is a fine woman, Sheriff, and I appreciate you sayin’ that.”

  Imagine what Mae would think of him if she ever found out he was involved in the robbery of that bank and the death of that little girl.

  “So long, Kittredge,” Dodds said, then swung back so that he was facing the tavern maid. He ordered himself another schooner. Kittredge left.

  2

  When James was younger, just after his father’s funeral, his mother’s sister, a shy and unmarried woman named Nella, stayed with the family for three months till, as she put it, Mrs. Hogan “saw that there were things still worth living for.” It was Nella’s habit to bathe in the downstairs bathroom, where the tub with the claws and the wall with the nymphs on it sat in the rear of the house. Nella always waited till everyone had gone to sleep before bathing. The family was too polite to ask why, of course, respecting their aunt as they did, even if she was “eccentric” as their mother had rather shamefully said of her one day.

  One night, when he badly needed a drink, and had found his mother in the upstairs bathroom, James had gone downstairs, thinking he’d get water from the kitchen, which the colored maid had cleaned only that afternoon. He descended the stairs in darkness, liking the way winter moonlight played silver and frosty through the front window. Then he heard the sighing from the back of the house, from the bathroom.

  At first the sound reminded him of pain. But why would Nella inflict pain on herself?

  On tiptoe, sensing he should not do what he was about to do, James went down the hall to the bathroom. The closer he got the more pronounced the moaning and the signing became.

  He was about to raise his hand and let it gently fall against the door when she said, “Oh, Donald; Donald.” And that stopped him. Was there a man in there with her?

  He did not knock. Instead he did what so many comedians in vaudeville did. He fell to one knee and peered through the key hole.

  Aunt Nella was nude. The body she had kept modestly hidden was beautiful and womanly and overwhelming to him. She leaned against the wall with the nymphs so that he could see her clearly, her eyes closed so tightly, her mouth open and gasping, her hand fallen and moving quicksilver fast at the part in her white legs. “Oh, Donald; Donald.” And he saw now that she was alone and only summoning the man as if he were a ghost who could pass through walls and visit her, touch her as she now touched herself.

  He never forgot how Aunt Nella looked that night; she would forever be the woman with whom he compared all other women, and for many years after, in stern midwestern February and in soft mid-western October, he would see her there projected on his ceiling. Oh, Nella; Nella (just as she’d called out for Donald). Nella.

  Just after his third drink, just after Uncle Septemus disappeared down the hall, just after the door closed and the girl came in and dropped her shabby dress to her wide hips, James thought of Nella, thinking the most forbidden thought of all, that he wished it were Nella he was with on this most important of nights, and not some chubby farm girl with bleached hair and the smell of too-sweet perfume.

  The whorehouse shook with the relentless happiness of player pianos (one up, one down) and the even more relentless happiness of girls determined in their somewhat sad way to show the men a good time. He could smell whiskey and cigar smoke and sweat, and could see the flickering shadows cast by the kerosene lamp on the sentimental painting of the innocent but somehow erotic young prairie girl above the brass bed. James supposed that that was how all the girls saw themselves-idealized and vulnerable in that way, not crude and harsh and defeated as they really were.

  She came over and stood by him and said, “My name’s Liz.”

  “Hi, Liz.”

  She smiled. “It’s all right if you look at them. That’s why I took my dress down. So you could see them.”

  He couldn’t stop staring at her breasts. He’d raise his eyes and look into her eyes or he’d glance up at the painting above the bed but always his eyes would drop back down to her breasts.

  She reached out and took his hand. Touched it in such a way that he could tell she was making some character judgment about him. “You’re not a farm boy, are you?”

  “No, ma’m.”

  She giggled. “I ain’t no ’ma’m,’ I bet I’m younger than you. I’m fourteen.”

  He didn’t say anything. Stood straight and still, heart hammering.

  “You want to kiss first?”

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “You don’t know what to do, do you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “You look mighty scared.”

  He said nothing.

  “If you just relax, you’ll enjoy yourself.”

  He said nothing.

  “You kinda remind me of my brother and that’s kinda sweet.” She leaned forward and kissed him gently on the lips. “That feel good?”

  “I guess so.”

  She laughed. “You sure ‘guess’ about a lot of things.”

  He said nothing.

  She took his hand again. She led him over to the bed. They sat on the edge of it, the springs squeaking. She was prettier in profile than straight on. He wanted her to be pretty. On a night like this you wanted your girl to be pretty. He wondered if he’d be so scared now if he were sitting here with Marietta. Or Nella. That was a terrible thought and he tried not to think it, about sitting there with his own aunt, but he couldn’t help it.

  He said, “Do you go to school?”

  She turned and looked at him. “Do I go to school?” She smiled and patted his hand. “Honey, they wouldn’t let girls like me in school.”

  “You got folks?”

  “In South Dakota.”

  “Do they-”

  “Do they know what I do? Was that what you were gonna ask me?”

  “I guess.”

  “No. They don’t know. A year ago I run off. This was as far as I got. I wrote ’em and tole ’em I’m working for this nice woman.” She laughed. “Miss Susan is nice; that part of it ain’t a lie.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed and stared down at his hands. They were trembling. “We don’t have to do anything. I wouldn’t ask for my money back, I mean.”

  “You afraid you can’t do it?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “A lot of men are like that. Even when they’ve been doin’ it regular all their lives. They just get kinda scared and they get worried if they’re gonna make fools of themselves but, heck, you’ll be fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure. I mean, we’ll take it real slow. We’ll lay back on the bed and just kind of hold each other and take it real slow. I like it better that way anyway.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. More like we care about each other.”

  “You want to lie back now?”

  “You talk good, don’t you?”

  “Good?”

  “Proper-like.”

  “English is one of my best subjects.”

  “She laughed. “Honey, none of ’em was my best subject. I’m thick as a log.”

  “You ready?”

  “Any time you are.”

&nbs
p; “And I just lie back?”

  “You just lie back.”

  “I don’t take my clothes off yet?”

  “Not yet. I’ll do that for you later.”

  “And then we just… do it?”

  “That’s right. Then we just… do it. But maybe I should teach you a little trick.”

  “A trick?”

  “I ain’t a beautiful girl, honey. I know that. I got a nice set of milk jugs but that’s about it. So Miss Sue tole me about this little trick to pass on to men.”

  “What sort of trick?”

  She giggled. “You’re getting scared again, honey. It’s nothing to be scared about at all.” She leaned over and touched his chest. He liked the weight and warmth of her pressed against him. “You got a sweetheart?”

  James thought about it. Should he even mention Marietta’s name to a girl like this? “I guess.”

  “Well, then, while we’re doin’ it, you close your eyes and pretend I’m her. It’ll be a lot better for you that way.”

  “But isn’t that kind of-” He shook his head.

  “Kind of what?”

  “Won’t that kind of hurt your feelings?”

  She looked up at him in the soft flicking lampglow. How hard she seemed, and yet there was a weariness in her young gaze that made him sad for her. She was fourteen and no fourteen year old he knew looked this weary. “Nope,” she said. “It won’t hurt my feelings at all.”

  But for some reason he didn’t think she was telling him the truth. For some reason he thought she might be happy to hear what he said next.

  “I’m happy to be with you,” he said.

  “You are?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, that’s nice of you to say.” She pointed to her mouth. “Let me finish chewin’ my gum so my breath gets good and sweet.” She finished chewing her gum, then set it with surprising delicacy on the edge of the bureau and lay back down next to him.

  “Would you like it better if I turned the lamp out?” she said.

  “Yeah, maybe that would be better.”

  So she turned the lamp out.

  He lay there in the darkness listening to both of them breathe.

  After a time she kissed him and it was awkward and he felt nervous and afraid but then she kissed him a second and a third time and it felt very nice and he began stroking her bleached hair and she took one of his hands and set it to her breast and then everything was fine, just fine, and all the whorehouse noise faded and it was just them in the soft shared prairie shadows.