The Ploughmen Read online

  “In the apple trees,” he said.

  TWENTY

  John Gload had been in the state penitentiary for five and a half years and in that time his insomnia never left him. He was eighty-two years old. He accepted his age and that the elderly seldom slept well and considering that even as a younger man he had never slept, it was little surprise to him. But he had his trickery to fool it and at times it still worked. Perhaps this night. He lay on his narrow cot, the muted noises of the prison gallery in his ears—the snores and moans, the drone of the high suspended lights that were a curse in every joint he had ever been in, the maddening slow drip of the faulty showerheads down the corridor that seemed somehow as the night deepened to grow louder, at this desolate hour clanging like rivets on the concrete floor.

  Beneath his bunk are two issues of Successful Farming. Taped to the cinder-block wall above his head the photograph of a field sent to him years ago by Valentine Millimaki—endless ripe grain and a slash of chalk sky adorned with a single bird of indeterminate species. In the photograph the bird is very small. In the uncertain enormity one could not tell its size in the actual world. It may have been vulture or crow or sparrow. In one corner of the picture is an unfocused yellow banner with black printed words which he cannot make out. On a paintless metal shelf in the cell a few swollen paperback books without covers, a comb and nail clippers, a yellow legal pad at a folding desk.

  He lay on his narrow cot thinking about the field. And in the field are things as familiar to him as his own face—the red kits outside their den; far-off butte tops, phantasmal in the summer heat-haze; roiling grasshoppers spinning from under the tires; the gulls. He went around the field, once, twice. And then the bull Doogan came by and shone his light and he was forced to begin again. The guard’s footfalls receded, the saffron light dimming, fading, gone. He took hold of the tractor’s ladder rail once again and placed his foot on the first rung but he could not pull himself up. He lay thinking, Damn, boy, lift your foot, one two three. But he could not move. The summer sun bore down and he saw his boot on the rung and his hand on the rail and the gulls came planing in, circling down and down and down until like summer insects they swarmed about his head. He could not raise a hand to warn them off nor could he call out and the cries that had haunted him awake and asleep for over seventy years drown out everything.

  * * *

  Guard Gerald Doogan carries in his belly a constant pain which he thinks is surely an ulcer and he walks down the row with his hands on his tender stomach in the posture of women who are several months pregnant. He worries about his young daughter who spends her evening hours in her room alone with the Virgin Mother and he worries about his wife whose joints are swollen and tender to the touch. In these cages are boys little older than his only child who have settled with blood disputes over vials of powder made from cold medicine and fertilizer and he worries about a world where such things happen. His daughter’s room is lit with candles and she prays on her knees in this dim place for hours. It wouldn’t hurt you to say a rosary, thinks Doogan. It has been years.

  He pauses outside a cell to remove an antacid tablet from his pocket where he carries them by the dozen like coins and he chews it woodenly while lighting a cigarette. He shines his light into the cell. John Gload lies on his side with his back to the hallway and he shifts slightly, as though the beam of light possesses substance—heat or cold or movement, like wind.

  Guard Doogan goes down the row. He stops to throw his cigarette in one of the toilets. The water in the bowl runs without stopping and the showerheads weep and spatter on the concrete.

  He lights another cigarette and smokes and thinks of his wife with her poisoned joints and of his daughter and then he turns to retrace his steps, a route he has walked five thousand nights. He imagines his Wellingtons have worn a trough in the concrete walkway and he tells his wife this as a matter of fact: I have worn a trough with my boots in the floor. He flashes his light into the old man’s cell once again and the cone of light illuminates an empty bunk, a hanging blanket. He shines it toward the cell’s toilet and sees nothing and thinks for an illogical instant that John Gload is gone. He swings the light back and then sees the old man beneath his bunk. He calls to him, says, “Gload, get up from there,” but the old man does not move and does not move, says, “Get up, old man.”

  * * *

  He sits high on the spring seat and the tractor churns through the dirt and the polished disks are small brilliant suns themselves, turning the soil in long slow serpents. The river in the distance is a shimmering knife blade and when he passes, the foxes raise their heads and follow with their anthracite eyes the young Gload on his perch and he feels the thrum of the engine in his bones, like the beat of the heart of the earth.

  EPILOGUE

  From the grassy side yard as he walked around the house a covey of Hungarian partridge flushed, sailing beyond the apple trees. Once above the leafy topmost branches they simply turned their compact bodies and set their wings and the wind took them out of sight in an eyeblink. Though he’d only been there once and that nearly eight years ago, from his many discussions with John Gload the place seemed familiar to him. He noted its disrepair, the slow decrepitude occasioned by the long vacancy since Gload’s imprisonment. Clapboards hung loose from the walls and copper gutters sagged in perilous loops from the peeling fascia. All along the bellying soffit, hornets’ nests hung like sinister fruit. Beside the back door a wooden chair, the dowels loose in their sockets, seat split and splintery from rain and sun and snow. He stood there and imagined the man whose ashes he carried biding the evening cool. The garden a tangle of weeds, strangled blooms throbbing with bees, and four enormous sunflowers leaned above the chaos, forlorn and druidical in their shabby attire.

  The screen door stood ajar, badly warped and canted from Dobek’s rough treatment when they’d first come for Gload those years ago and it made faint bird sounds as it rocked in the breeze. The door of the house was locked but he was able to push back the latch with his pocketknife blade so loose did it fit in the jamb. The door opened onto the kitchen, the linoleum there covered with a fine grit as if someone had recently sanded it for dancing. It displayed evidence of a brisk commerce of mice and packrats. Millimaki stooped to pick up a woman’s handkerchief from the floor but it proved to be only a paper napkin, its edges made curious and asymmetrical lace by tiny teeth. Curtains shifted as the wind insinuated itself through the shrunken sash sides and the brass rings on their rods clattered softly. The house creaked and moaned. The loose clapboards made a strange fluttering sound beneath a gust of wind like a deck of riffled cards.

  He went from room to room and found himself at last standing over the bed John Gload had shared with the woman he had called his wife. It was situated beneath a window and lay in a quadrangle of sallow light. He stared out the glass at the apple trees. An ashtray sat on the dusty sill. He set the metal canister down on the mattress and sat beside it and it toppled with a sound of shifting sand. A faint dust rose from the coverlet. He looked around the room. A chest of drawers, a calendar picturing a small yellow bird. In the gloom of a closet he could make out a row of paired and neatly aligned women’s shoes that might have been a rank of elderly aunts hiding in that dim place in the moments before a surprise party, gloved hands pressed to their painted lips.

  On a shelf in the garden shed as foretold he found the rusted Bag Balm can with its folded paper and he found the digging tools and he toted all down the road, so long unused it was now merely two paths separated by a windrow of wild wheat that sang on the undercarriage of his rented car when he’d arrived. He carried the spade and the spud bar over one shoulder and the canister cradled in his elbow and the dust rose beneath his feet like talcum. At the beginning of the inroad where he’d parked he stopped and leaned the tools against the car’s quarterpanel and fished in his shirt pocket for the map. He unfolded it on the hood of the car, staring down at the old killer’s rude cartography, his juvenile script. He fe
lt like a child on a treasure hunt.

  With his heels in the gravel at the edge of the county road he began pacing. And counting. He counted one hundred five steps (“normal steps, just regular walking steps”) and stopped. There beside the road a great red stone stuck above the weeds. He had no idea of its size. It may well have had its roots in hell but what he could see of it would have weighed six or eight hundred pounds. It was cracked so perfectly in half it looked to have been cut with a band saw and it was here Millimaki was instructed to turn ninety degrees east and enter the orchard trees.

  * * *

  It was an awkward business, holding the childish map and the digging implements and the canister containing the ashes of the old killer. The fallen apples crushed beneath his feet gave off a winey smell as he counted his paces through the weft of branches and the knee-deep grass that grew thick among the gray boles of the trees. But Gload had been meticulous and had rehearsed the process many times against confusion and in ten minutes’ time Millimaki nearly walked into the suspended harrow tines that marked where her bones were planted.

  There was nothing there to indicate that a hole had been dug. The grass had grown up and the trees had dropped their leaves year upon year and the neglected apples moldered in the dirt. He began to dig and despite notations on the map’s border assuring him that Francie’s bones lay some six feet down, he feared with each shovelful that he would run the spade into a leg bone or dredge into the light instead of one of the innumerable rocks a grinning skull bewigged with auburn hair.

  The day was mild and the wind found him even in that sheltered place but he was soon sweating nonetheless. Smooth round rocks from that ancient riverbed clanged under the spade’s blade and roots as obdurate as reinforcing bar appeared and he chopped at them until his hands burned. He stopped once and laid his jacket aside in the grass and resumed digging. When the hole was three feet deep he stopped. It was less a grave than a posthole, like so many he had dug in the poor soil of his father’s dryland operation under the buffalo jump. He leaned the spade and the metal bar in the crotch of a tree and ran a sleeve across his forehead. Above the faint rattle of dry leaves he thought he heard a cry but he stood listening and there was nothing. For an instant clear as crystal the far metronomic rofe rofe rofe of a dog. Then nothing. In the higher branches beyond the reach of deer a few small apples hung tenaciously on among the leaves, desiccated red gourds like Christmastime ornaments that seemed out of place among the gnarled phalanges of the feral trees—gray limbs, pale grass, pale sky.

  When he tipped the can into the hole he was surprised at the rasping sound it made. He reversed the shovel and with the handle stirred among the ashes. He lay down and put his face close to be sure. Dust rose in the hole. A root cellar smell. Ashes, bits of charred bone. Finally he reached into the cool maw and sifted the mixture through his fingers but there were no teeth. He stood and wiped John Gload’s ashes in a pale gray smear on his pants. It occurred to him that the old man would have approved of the exquisite anonymity of his own grave. Perhaps after all it was his plan—devout practitioner of his craft even at the end.

  Millimaki stood looking down into the hole. After a while he removed Gload’s last letter from the snap-button pocket of his shirt. He smiled grimly, remembering the brevity of Gload’s summons, arriving six days into the old man’s permanent and uninterruptible slumber: “Val, I’m ready for you now. In the tool shed in the Bag Balm can is everything you will need.” It had come addressed simply to Deputy Valentine Millimaki, ATF, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and contained a check drawn on the Deer Lodge State Bank for $420.14. Note and check went into the hole. He had set the map aside in the long grass and now he took it up and threw it in. He stood for a long time with the wind cooling him and in the end he took the tiny silver charm on its silver chain from his pocket, weighed it in his palm and dropped it in.

  Last he read the letter that had been written on yellow legal paper and folded and refolded until the page was small enough to fit through the hole in the top of the can:

  Thanks for coming, Valentine. If you didn’t come whoevers reading this can go ahead and burn the whole deal cause it won’t make no sense but I figure you would. I told you Wexler was ambitious he could of turned these in to the Bull and that would of been that but he wanted the glory if thats what youd call it. Like I said About him. But now there yours and you can find some bones and everybodys happy. None of these is Wexler just so you know. I knew you were tired of finding bones and such so you can let the pogues at the Sheriffs take care of that part Just a little payback for putting up with an old man You were good to me Valentine. I hope you have a good life from here on in.

  Your FRIEND John X Gload

  PS I was yours even if you wasnt mine.

  He put the letter in his breast pocket along with the topographical maps similarly folded, on them five clear Xs noting the location of graves in the breaks country north of the Missouri River and of the smelterworks and the city. Nameless bones—skulls without teeth, arms without hands—he knew would be dredged from their repose to occupy another hole under other stones, the plastic flowers planted there pale replicas of the wild blooms of prairie spring.

  He began to throw dirt into the hole when he heard clearly then the high thin cry. He saw them drifting up from the river. At first they seemed mere wisps of smoke, like traces of fireworks in the flat white sky but they came on, riding thermals with infinitesimal movements of their chevron wings and soon enough they became clear, their breasts the color of dirty bandages. They came nearer and began to circle, two or three. A dozen. He dropped the shovel and moved into a clearing, his arms upheld and waving like the limbs of the orchard trees themselves. “Git,” he called. He made shooing motions in the air and looked like a man trying to rid himself of something. He cried up at the birds. “Sonsofbitches. Git.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KIM ZUPAN, a native Montanan, grew up in and around Great Falls, where much of the novel is set. For twenty-five years Zupan made a living as a carpenter while pursuing his writing. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana and has also worked as a smelterman, pro rodeo bareback rider, ranch hand, and Alaska salmon fisherman. Presently he teaches carpentry at the University of Montana’s Missoula College. He lives in Missoula.

  THE PLOUGHMEN. Copyright © 2014 by Kim J. Zupan. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y., 10010.

  www.henryholt.com

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Zupan, Kim J.

  The ploughmen : a novel / Kim J. Zupan.—First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-8050-9951-5 (hard cover)—ISBN 978-0-8050-9952-2 (electronic book)

  1. Murderers—Fiction. 2. Police—Fiction. 3. Intimacy (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Montana—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3626.U63P56 2014

  813'.6—dc23

  2013025013

  e-ISBN 9780805099522

  First Edition: August 2014

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.