The Ploughmen: A Novel Read online

  “What’s all this goddamn thinking about?”

  “Well, there it is. You don’t even know.”

  “Okay,” he said. He ran his hand in a washing motion over his face again. “Okay, what do you mean ‘small’? Let’s start with that. That doesn’t even make any sense to me.”

  “It means I feel unimportant. In your life and just in general. And it’s exacerbated by this place. I feel like it’s swallowing me up.”

  He reached out to touch her crossed arms, to make some contact while reason and his own center were flying about the room. She took a half step away.

  “That’s not one of your words,” he said. “It doesn’t even sound right coming out of your mouth.”

  “It means it makes it worse here.”

  “I know what the fuck it means. But you’re not the one saying it.”

  Her words came in an exaggerated calm, as though to counteract his urgency. The room darkened suddenly, whether from a passing cloud or from some dimming behind his tortured eyes he could not tell. The exertion of mustering reason sufficient to the moment was enormous and his head swam.

  “I need to have time to think and I can’t do that here, now. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “You said it’s swallowing you up.”

  “It is. Without you here I’m more alone than alone.” This thought seemed to suddenly attenuate her resolve and she began to cry again. “You don’t know. You couldn’t, because it’s so much a part of who you are. But not me, not by myself.” She repeated, “You don’t know.”

  “What? What don’t I know?”

  “At night. At night. It’s awful.”

  “Why?”

  She’d evidently not planned to let the conversation go this way and she paused to consider her words. “At night, outside the house is inside with me. It comes in with me and it’s like I can look down at myself and all I see is me in the bed and there’s nothing between me and everything out there.” She swept her hand toward the bright day. “Val, you don’t know. You couldn’t know. I’ve been sleeping with all the lights on. And don’t you dare say anything. One night an owl was in the house.”

  “That’s just crazy.”

  “I told you, don’t say it.”

  “There isn’t a way for it to come in here, Glenda.”

  “It was above the bed and it was just up there and beating the air with its wings. Fanning the air.”

  “For Christ sake.”

  She covered her face. “I could feel the air moving.”

  “No. It couldn’t have come in the house.”

  “And then last night, on the porch, there were coyotes.”

  “It’s just nightmares, Glenda.”

  “Don’t.”

  “For Christ sake, Tom would have gone ape-shit if coyotes were on the porch.”

  She pointed toward the front door as if to present concrete proof and he could see her hand trembling. “I heard their toenails on that porch, Val. I heard them breathing.”

  “No. They wouldn’t come up there.”

  “Clicking. A clicking sound.” Her hand went to her mouth. “And that fucking door. They could have just pushed on it and come in.”

  “Okay, listen. It’s nothing. It’s the branches on that box elder rubbing against the house. That’s all it was, Glenda. I’ll cut them back. Right now, today. Just branches in the wind. I’ll cut them all the way back.”

  “Not branches,” she said. “Or the wind or anything. You will not talk me out of this because I know what I know.”

  Millimaki closed his eyes. He felt behind him for the arm of the couch and sat down heavily on it. He said, “Glenda, I’m absolutely all in. I can’t find my own ass with both hands. Can’t we just talk about this tomorrow? I just need to sleep. This isn’t fair right now. I can’t figure out what it’s all about.”

  “It’s about what I said it’s about. That’s easy enough, isn’t it? I can’t stay here. When we had it together, I felt above it or at least a part of it. But alone here I’m no more important than a bird or a tree. Whether it’s a nightmare or whether it’s real, what it means is that this place is swallowing me up. It’s a part of you, Val, but it’s swallowing me up. The more you fade the more it swallows me up.”

  Val looked at her bleakly. “You act like I’m a ghost. I’m your husband. I’m sitting right here.”

  “No. You’re right, that’s perfect. That’s exactly what you are. A ghost.” She took a long deep breath, seeking oxygen where it seemed in insufficient supply, and released it slowly. “And I don’t know where you are, Val. I think probably out with all the dead people you find out there. They’re easier. You don’t have to talk to them. You bring home their goddamn pictures like they were family or some secret girlfriend. Jesus Christ, Val, that’s what you are, no more than a ghost yourself, walking around with all those dead people in your head. I won’t stay with a ghost, Val. I won’t do that. And I won’t become one myself.”

  * * *

  When she had gone, Val stood with his coffee out on the porch in the dizzying light of late morning. He had moved about the kitchen woodenly as if in a dream and his hands seemed to him pale creatures crabbing among the cups and plates of their own accord. He realized as he stood at the sink that she must have watched him drive up and move around the yard and to the kennel and mount the stairs with his slow geriatric tread. He tried to make out in the window glass the face of the stranger she’d said inhabited her husband’s skin and saw in the silvery pane a parody of himself, got up in fard and eye black and wrinkled khaki, who in wearily ascending the steps entered the middle act of a pedestrian tragedy. Or worse, he thought, she’d seen the ghost of the man she had married, no more than a bleared outline of opaque glass in her husband’s shape through which she could see the grass, the dirt, the trees beyond.

  Far below through the greening trees he could almost see the place along the creek where they’d swum one afternoon in their courting days. To get there they pushed through undergrowth and came out near the creek and from the tall grass and thin willow stems at their elbows rose a cloud of small orange butterflies and they went before them on the warm air like a blizzard of flower petals strewn before heroes. The stream swung fast and clear out of impenetrable brush as if emerging from a cave, curved languidly and pushed murmuring against a steep cutbank where the roots of a toppled cottonwood splayed above the current. They spread a blanket on the warm sandy shingle and while Val was making a fire he heard a splash and saw her golden head bobbing with the current and then as he watched she rose glistening from the stream below the bend like some fabled huntress, dripping and naked and all but aglow from the sun and the cold water. He stood with a stick in his hand staring foolishly. From habit, as he’d done as a boy when there was something he desperately wanted, he said a prayer: dear God let this woman stay with me, let me not ruin this, let her marry me and I will be good and pure forever and then as she came on, placing her tender feet carefully on the gravel, milk-white skin bejeweled in the sun, all prayers evaporated and in the center of all the universe was only her. And he would at that moment have done anything to have her.

  Now as he stood on the porch he realized he would do it yet, if he could only discover the correct god, tender the proper coin. He gazed at the creek far below, chromium glintings through the cottonwood and willow. He slung the coffee out onto the dirt. The dog Tom from the fenced run sat watching him and when Millimaki went inside he turned to stare down the narrow lane where the car had passed and where a veil of dust hovered yet above the tracks like mist. In the creek bottom the crowns of the cottonwood trees were gilded by the sun’s rising above the coulee rim, so bright and substantial they looked to have been held by the roots and dipped in a vat of molten gold. Sparrows had come to peck like yardfowl in the spare expanse of lawn and their shadows lay long across the grass in the shape of exotic giants—egrets, flamingos.

  * * *

  In the coming days and nights he went about his duties
mechanically and at home he could not bring himself to sleep in the empty bed. He awoke late afternoons dull and sore from the recliner or the couch and found the only thing good about his life then was that he did not have to speak to a living soul. Even Gload left him to his thoughts during his interminable shift and required from him only his presence, as if like a hearth fire the young man’s bleak thoughts and brooding were a comfort to him. He sat for many hours beyond the bars transfixed by the disembodied brutal hands hanging in the light and before long they began to articulate some feeling within him. Sitting around the cabin in the mercurial spring days among his wife’s things, the scent of her still lingering in the bedding and closets, he found to his horror that he missed the old man’s company.

  He watched the storms roll in from the west, erasing the sun as fully as an eclipse, and then the rain slashed down, ripping at the new leaves on the box elder and lilacs and gouging troughs in the road. Then as suddenly the day was brilliant again, even as the rain sluiced from the porch roof in an effulgent cataract. Looking out it was as though the two hemispheres of his brain were at war, each eye viewing different worlds—one brilliant, the other black and violent. What peace he had came upon him in the mausolean dark in the company of caged men where speech was not required of him—there among sociopaths he was disburdened of the weight of sociability.

  Once during this time he called his wife. While he waited for her to take the phone he could hear through the vacant earpiece garbled voices speaking the idiolect of the ICU. Another language entirely to speak of the ill and dying. When she came on the line he realized that he had nothing to say. He asked how she was. She was fine. He asked when she could be coming home. She didn’t know. Silence. He pictured her standing impatiently at the nurses’ station, beyond her the enshadowed ranks of beds and their still tenants in thin cotton habiliment festooned with luminous tubes. For reasons he wasn’t sure of, he told her he and the dog had found a young girl in the river who had been raped and strangled. It wasn’t true. After a pause she said, “How awful.” Someone spoke to her and he heard her say, “Bed Seven,” and she said to him, “Val, I’ve got to go now.”

  “She was eight, this girl. Did I say that?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I have to go, Val.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll see you.”

  “You’ll see me when?”

  “I can’t say a time. I’ll just see you.”

  “I could come by there.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not a good idea, Val.”

  “Then come by the jail. I’ve got nothing but time there.”

  “Val, you know I hate that place. I won’t come there.”

  “I know.”

  “Val. I have to go.”

  “Fine.”

  He waited for her to say something more. In the long pause before she ended the connection he could hear in the background the chirps and bleeps of the machines that became for the people lying there as much a part of them as their skin or veins. He waited. He heard a man’s voice say her name and then she was gone.

  From the couch among his twisted bedclothes he heard the tree limbs rubbing along the house eaves, a sound that to her had been the vile nails of predators seeking her innermost part was for him a balm and a caress on his troubled ear. Nothing, though, seemed to touch his sleeplessness. It was as durable as stone and had become as chronic as Gload’s but without even the soporific of the plowed fields of his youth to remedy it. He considered her accusation that he consorted with ghosts and it was certainly true. But the dead were a part of her work, too. She seemed to be able to leave them, though, and at the moment of their passing they became as inanimate finally as the burbling machines whose tubes and wires were meant to keep them alive. She’d told him that they were gone for her then and that was the end of it. And in telling him he sensed even an animosity toward them as if, as the unreliable cog in the mechanism, they had betrayed her. She was not to be blamed for wanting to forget her failures. Certainly, he thought, some of it was professional bluster, but still she seemed as dispassionate in her way as Gload. He envied them both.

  But he was at home with the dead, she was right. And whether they sought the open country for their death, or death sought them there, it little mattered. In either case kindred souls, Millimaki and the dead, met under a companionable sky and the encounter was good for all. In the reticence of their company Millimaki found peace and for their part the dead would be brought home to rest among their kin beneath the verdancy and perdurable headstones of cemeteries. Their bones would not be gnawed and broadcast like fallen branches down anonymous canyons. And that, too, was a comfort to him.

  Without the woman around and in the absence of work in the woods, the dog Tom became possessive and if Val stood anywhere for any length of time came to nuzzle his hand. He took the dog walking in the trees behind the house and Tom loped ahead, leaping and running his nose under the leaves and pine duff and then came back and went to heel when he saw Val unaccountably standing still as stone, as if he required guidance through foreign terrain.

  NINE

  Seen from the street they may have been a young man and his grandfather, taking the spring air among the elms in pale leaf. Millimaki in escorting the old man back to his cell at day’s end allowed him to sit on one of the benches in the courthouse park and smoke. They sat side by side, Gload in his orange county jumpsuit emblazoned with PRISONER on its back and the deputy with his arms over the bench back listening. The great gray trees and the wind in them moving the leaves seemed to evoke memories in the old man and he sat with his cuffed wrists upon his knees and he would occasionally lift his head and draw in a great breath and expel it, savoring the air of freedom as though from a mine shaft he had risen to safety from the corrosive dark.

  Val took the old man’s Camels from the breast pocket of the garish suit and shook one out and when Gload selected one he lit it for him. They sat watching the cars pass on the street and the birds flare overhead. Finally Millimaki said, “John, you know Sid White took them to a body up north of town.”

  Gload sat with his head back following the birds with his eyes. He raised his paired hands to his lips and drew on the cigarette, expelling a long slow plume.

  “Yeah, I heard that.”

  “They’re saying they can tie you to this guy.”

  The old man lowered his head and sat erect and strangely formal, staring into the middle distance. “Don’t think so, Val,” he said. “They can’t bank their whole case on White. For one, he’s got a record. Not what you might call a credible witness.” He snorted, shook his head in disgust, or amusement. “And look at him, sitting there in his Grand Ole Opry suit.”

  “No. Beyond just White’s say-so.”

  Gload said casually, “It’s just bones, Val. Could be anybody.”

  “There’s some identifying feature.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “The thing is, he had open-heart surgery. They tell me that every surgeon has a kind of signature way of putting the guy back together. They string wire across his breastbone in a particular way. They’re saying they can tell who it is from that.”

  Gload rocked forward and turned to Millimaki with a bemused smile. “The hell,” he said.

  “They’ll be talking about it this week. Charts, photographs, the whole deal.”

  “Well, by God, I got to say that’s a new one on me.”

  “Did your lawyer not say anything about it to you?”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ, Val. You seen him. That man is three sheets to the wind right this second I guarantee you and we’ve been out of court for, what is it?”

  “An hour. Little more.”

  “There you go. Right now, drunker than ten Indians. Guaranteed.”

  “You could petition for different counsel.”

  “What, a P.D.?” He snorted, smoke erupting from his nostrils. “No, it don’t make any difference, Deputy.” He cast a sidelong glance at Millima
ki. “Ain’t you on some kind of ethical thin ice, here, Valentine? Offering legal advice to a felon?”

  “Like you said once, we’re just talking.”

  The old killer sat staring at Millimaki’s profile. He looked down at the handgun and baton on the deputy’s belt and he looked over at the old sandstone jailhouse across the street. He looked for a long time at Millimaki again.

  “You look like a goddamn scarecrow, Val, you know that?”

  “I’ve been hearing that a lot lately.”

  “Your missus not taking care of you? Is that the deal?”

  Millimaki turned to stare after a car passing on the street and the old man watched him closely. “Something like that.”

  “Smoke me, will you please, Deputy?”

  When he had smoked for a time Gload said, “Your friend Weldon come a-courting me.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Wants to be my boyfriend. And he seems pretty intent on stealing your thunder.”

  Millimaki laughed tiredly. “I don’t have any thunder to steal, John.”

  Gload swung one knee up and clasped it with his manacled hands. He gazed into the rustling dome of greenery overhead. “You got to see all this through that shitbird’s eyes. He knows you have the Old Bull’s ear and any fool can see he’s got some kind of soft spot for you. This turd Wexler, he figures it ought to be him who’s the number one son, being as he’s been around longer. And him being such a spit-and-polish troop.”

  Val turned to him. “And how would you come to know all this?”

  Gload thrust his chin in the direction of the jail, some hundred feet from where they sat. At that moment the topmost course of stones was awash in rose light. “It’s a small town in there, Val.”

  “Well, in any case, he has been on the force longer than me,” Val said. “That doesn’t change.”

  Gload looked once more into the treetops. He was smiling. He said, “It was Weldon’s day off today.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m here in the wonderful light of day.”