The Ploughmen: A Novel Read online

  “She’d come back for that, would she not?”

  From the shadows Millimaki heard the faint creaking of the chair as Gload shifted his weight. “No,” he said, “she will not come back.”

  Millimaki said, “You never said. Is it your wife?”

  In the ensuing pause it may have been a sigh he heard or it may have been a mere exhale of smoke and then from Gload’s private darkness could be heard nothing but the faint crackle of paper and tobacco as the old man drew deeply on his cigarette. Millimaki waited, staring into the shadows, but the conversation seemed to be at an end. For these long weeks since he’d been to Gload’s house he imagined the woman back, pottering from lonely room to room and tending her frail blooms in their narrow beds, leaning at a window jamb a hundred times a day to witness her man’s return when such a returning was as improbable as resurrection.

  “My wife won’t come here,” Val said. “One time when I first come on the department and that was it. Something about this old building gave her the willies.”

  “Well, I’m on her side about that.”

  He’d thought introducing his own wife into the conversation might pry loose from the old man’s mouth words of wife and marriage but it would not. Finally he said, “Don’t you have some other family somewhere, John?”

  Blue smoke rolled into the light as the old man spoke, and his voice was newly animated. “Only one there ever was was my dad and when he died it was really the end of anything you might call a normal life for me.”

  “When did he die?”

  “Oh, well. That had to of been sixty-some years ago now.”

  “You must have been just a kid.”

  Gload in a muttering undertone toted the years and decades on his thick fingers and then said, “Sixty-four years ago to be exact. And yeah, I was just a kid, Val. But I remember it clear as yesterday.” And he began to talk and the details were, even for Millimaki, vivid as any recent memory and the old man talked without pause for a very long time.

  SIX

  They lived in east Fergus County on the Judith divide and his father ran a few black cows there in the foothills of the Little Snowies and it was there that Gload did the farming that inspired his dreams, a boy all but running the place while the elder Gload, in lieu of more conventional cash crops, kept the operation afloat primarily through poaching and poker.

  At their backs as they drove toward the neighbor’s hunting shack, late January of John Gload’s thirteenth year, was a tide of charcoal Alberta clouds, vanguard of the storm that would orphan him.

  The shack sat in a round hollow among the stunted bull pines of that country, situated to be out of the wind and with an eye toward invisibility. While his father and two other men went about butchering a pair of mule deer does and a calf elk jacklighted some days earlier in the Missouri bottoms, young John Gload sat on an upturned crate, sharpening as needed an eclectic collection of knives, his hands even at that age quick and dexterous and the blades as he passed them over the oiled stone appeared liquid as quicksilver. The men sawed and cut, drinking as they did so from a bottle stood among the chunks of meat on a table cobbled up of lengths of stove wood and a sheet of warped plywood. There were two rank-smelling cots in the shack, pushed to the outer walls to make room for the bloody work and in a dark corner a box of rags where a mongrel bitch lay watching the men through hooded eyes. At intervals she would venture out and lap at the thick black pool growing beneath the table until one or other of the men kicked her away. She looked to be part coyote, her lip curled in a perpetual leer to show wretched teeth the color of clay. Her piebald pups in the box mewled piteously at the sudden cold and young Gload stood over them counting, assessing which would thrive, which would perish.

  The storm had reached them even in that sheltered place and it sucked and moaned at the door and sent slender serpents of drift into the room. Each man’s shadow loomed and shrank beneath the penduluming lantern. Two propane heaters were set to burn but still the butchers’ breath blossomed whitely and when they could no longer feel their hands the work was halted. The boy had hoped to take home one of the pups but instead they carried out only packages of meat haphazardly wrapped in butcher paper and bound with electrical tape, the box weeping a thin vermillion trail atop the snow.

  The truck was a 1924 four-cylinder Chevrolet and it veered and slewed like a carnival ride along frozen ruts as they climbed through the slanting snow, the blunted trees on either side stuttering and nodding and when they came up into the open parklands the wind hit them full force. Ice crystals blown through the shrunken doorseals shimmered like mica in the green dashboard glow. Four miles out they became high-centered on a wind-scoured drift. The crust was hard as pavement and the truck with its narrow tires had rolled atop it and then simply dropped. The wind howled and the snow swooped down from the yawing treetops into the clearing and broke against the truck like an ocean surge. His father dug around the tires and the wooden spokes with a spade and he would jump in and gun the engine and move ahead a foot or two and then the truck would sink. John Gload could see his father’s face red and glistening in the headlights as he drove the spade handle down into the drift. It sank to the blade. He stood up into the light and held the shovel up to indicate the depth and shook his head. Gload remembered that his father’s hat had fallen off and his hair stood up crazily above his bone-white forehead. After an hour of digging and rocking the truck and more digging, they had progressed no more than ten feet. Neither could they go back, as the snow filled in what tracks they had made until it appeared as if the Chevy had simply been set down like a toy in the center of the drift. The storm raged out of the north and there was little to the world beyond the twinned cones of light the headlights threw and black pines at the limit of their vision stood cowled and sinister as executioners. His father stood the spade in the drift and clambered into the cab.

  “Whew, boy. I think we fell into some kind of a glacier or something. We must of drove around it coming in.” He sat in the driver’s seat panting and sweating. “I don’t think there’s no bottom to the sonofabitch.”

  He started the engine to warm them, the laboring cylinders barely audible above the wind yowling at the doors, the grainy snow like locusts seething across the metal of the hood. From beneath the seat his father retrieved a pint bottle of J&B and drank from it.

  He told his son he was going to make for a ranch house he knew to be just off to the west. “Just down through this little bit of timber,” he said. “It’s closer than the shack is.” He looked at the boy and smiled. “It’s not no more than a little hike.” He told his son to stay in the truck and for no reason to get out. If he had to pee use the empty beer bottle that had rolled from under the seat. But wait there for him. Run the engine every little while and keep the window down a crack. In the dash glow he examined the level of the bottle, dropped it into the pocket of his coat and stepped out. With his hand on the door handle he seemed to hesitate, looking once back the way they’d come, once up to the white and swirling heavens and then he’d turned and set off into the storm. Young Gload could see him clearly for a while and then as a dark shape wavering against the black pines and then with his face pressed to the clouded window glass young Gload’s father became a part of the dark itself.

  “He didn’t get too far, Val. I guess he was a little turned around because he wasn’t headed for nowhere. Nearest house in that direction, I heard some of them sonsofbitches say, was ten miles, prit-near to Grass Range. By the time they found me I was almost done in myself. I wound up losing toes on this one foot.”

  Millimaki sat staring down into the cell, hypnotized by the disembodied voice. Gload may have thought the deputy was staring at his foot or merely meant to prove the validity of his story, but he shucked off a worn brown brogan and brown sock and thrust into the slant of light a strange foot, very white, two-toed, looking more like the foot of a large, strange bird than a man’s.

  “They brought me to a ranch house and put me in
somebody’s bedroom. Guy who owned that little cabin, my dad’s partner, he found me there, come in and called me a little sonofabitch for telling them sheriffs where the meat was. But I hadn’t told them nothing. That cold bastard, kid who just lost his old man.” He sat shaking his head there in the dark. “Wasn’t long after that that I seen them carrying him.”

  Gload leaned forward into the purple lightfall and Val could see him studying the floor, his bare, strange, dead-white foot. Finally he said, “Just a little hike, is what he said. And I always remembered him sort of hesitating there by the truck and him knowing I was watching and I think he set off like he was sure just so I wouldn’t be scared. I do believe that to be true. Standing there,” Gload said, quietly. “Didn’t know north from east.”

  He had last seen his father carried between two sheriff’s deputies across the drifted ranchyard, just a shutter-blink as they passed what view he had out the window, left to right between folds of drapery behind which he sat with his black and swollen feet in a pan of water. It was a misshapen thing they carried, as brusquely as you might a hay bale or furniture piece, and it left in the unblemished snow, when they’d passed from view, a strange drag trail, as though the two men between them conveyed a fairy-book dragon, its tail and wingtips unsteady above the alien snow.

  * * *

  From some distant duct-grate or from the imperfect street-level windows, a breath of air set Gload’s bare lightbulb swaying, the pull chain tinkling softly and he turned his gaze upward. At the corners of his eyes were long deep crevasses disappearing into his sparse hairline, and from his chronic sleeplessness, as if drawn with a pen, his inflamed eyes were rimmed with red.

  From the endeavor of the long narration and the reliving of the winter night that would re-create him in the world, he seemed depleted. His voice when he at last spoke again was faint and hoarse.

  He said, “I went from there to a hospital to an orphanage run by these strange ladies dressed up in black, all in the matter of a few weeks. I gotta say, it was a tough old time for a kid.”

  “I imagine it was,” Millimaki said. “My old man went down for a nap and just kept sleeping and that was bad enough.”

  Gload stared out through the bars. He sat erect in his chair and raked back the thin strands from his forehead and cleared his throat. “When did this happen?”

  “Oh, that’s been a year now. Year and a half.”

  “You lost your old man?”

  “Sixty-two years old. Died in his chair.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “He was a decent man. Had this kind of crazy temper but he only hit me once and I had it coming.”

  “Died in his chair,” Gload said. “And you felt like you should of been there.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Not so much. My cousin was there to check on him every day.”

  “Felt like you could of done something to prevent it, I imagine.”

  Val stared in at the old man. “It just happened. His life was hard.”

  “Sixty-two years of age. Lost your old man at a young age, same as me.” He paused conspicuously to allow the gravity of kindredship to fill the moment.

  “Not all that young,” Millimaki said.

  Gload went on as if he hadn’t heard. “And your mother?” he said. “Where is she?”

  “Gone a long time now.”

  “And I bet she run off on you all, didn’t she, same as mine? I bet she skipped out.”

  Millimaki stood up. “Like I said, it was a long time ago.”

  Gload’s hands appeared. He grasped the bars of his cage and leaned his face into the fluorescent light. “We’re just a couple of hard-luck orphans, ain’t we, Valentine?”

  The old man’s face was a smiling deathmask in the hard chemical light. Millimaki excused himself and picked up a small brown sack he’d had beside his chair and down the way Gload could hear him talking to one of the men. He came back shortly and set down his bag and settled into the chair. Gload raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

  “This Grogan’s got some kind of croup. I been giving him some cough dope from home. The store-bought stuff doesn’t seem to be doing much.”

  “Like a goddamn TB ward in here,” Gload said. “Been listening to him cough up his lungs all day.” He sat slowly pulling on his sock, lacing his shoe, and with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth he studied the young deputy. “Goddamn bleeding-heart cop. Christ on a crutch.” He snorted, shook his head in amused disbelief. Smoke plumed from his nostrils. He wiped the toe of each shoe on the back of his dungarees and examined them in the light.

  He said, “What time you got, Val?”

  “It’s a little after one. Ten after.” Millimaki consulted his watch and as he did the clock in the Catholic church three blocks away tolled once. “There you go. I might be a little fast.”

  “Did you eat yet?”

  “I did. Just before I came in.”

  Gload considered this. He stood and moved his chair next to the bars and arranged his smoking gear on the floor and rested the bean can on his knee.

  “Why don’t you move over just a bit closer, Val, so we don’t keep these assholes awake. Unless you got things to do.”

  Val checked his watch again out of habit and sat with his head cocked, listening for a moment to the sleeping corridor. Grogan slept on, the others slept or silently listened. “Not really,” he said. He picked up his chair and carried it nearer the bars, just beyond arm’s reach. He settled it there, sat and crossed his legs, and in the shadows Gload, still watching, smiled.

  “Still don’t trust the old man, Val.”

  “Policy, John. You ought to know that.”

  Gload leaned forward just enough to meet the deputy’s eyes. His look was fond. “Val, I’m going to tell you some things and you can tell the Old Bull but I suspect it won’t make no difference to me at this point.”

  “You know I’d be obligated to report anything concerning illegal activities, so you maybe want to just stick to safe subjects.”

  “Policy.”

  “However you want to call it.”

  “Well, you let me worry about it, Val.”

  “I just want to be clear on that.”

  “You are perfectly clear, Deputy.”

  “Okay.”

  Having shifted forward, Gload now sat half in light, half in dark, and he looked to have been sheared in two and set for display, head and shoulders of a taxidermied felon, a trophy displayed for tourists or schoolchildren in a diorama of prison life: table, chair, cot. Killer.

  * * *

  He lasted no more than six months at the Catholic orphanage where he was remanded as a ward of the neighboring state where the bones of his mother were buried. The first months there were marked by long gloomy silences and merciless teasing as the boy sought for his solitude the comforting dark of closets and gardening sheds and kitchen pantries. Then he began to fight. For young John Gload there was nothing of sport in these contests, and almost from the first, blood was the common consequence, as if like some pagan sacrament they could not be otherwise consummated. Boys three and four years older and twenty pounds heavier went about with torn ears and gouged eyes, the corners of their mouths split where Gload had jammed in his fingers and simply pulled, as though trying to tear a gunnysack. The screams of his dorm mates or threats from nuns or priests went unheard and Gload was more than once blindsided with a sap by one of the tough old Jesuits as he worked blood-speckled and stoical atop a boy who may have simply laughed at the wrong time.

  Few of the residents or staff was saddened by his departure and when he set out under a shard of moon wending westward on his barely healed feet he was neither sought nor reported missing. He progressed across that state afoot and by car. He shared the back of a pickup with a six-year-old girl alone with her 4-H hog which was so huge it might have crushed and eaten her. He rode in an Oldsmobile with a candy salesman from Duluth, Minnesota, who offered him twenty dollars to show his underwear. There were two phlegm
atic wheat farmers, brothers and perhaps twins, so preoccupied with the clouds marshaled in the skies over Canada just to the north that they abandoned the road altogether and drove cross-country through fallow and farm toward a strange metal structure bristling with antennae which they called the Weather Temple of Christ Jesus and offered to let him stay and pray if he could prove the purity of his heart and he rode with a half-mad rancher’s wife abroad at midday drinking, who would have killed them both on a bridge abutment had not Gload taken the wheel as she nodded into unconsciousness. By these and other such means he crossed the border back into the state of Montana in the summer of 1947.

  In the little town he arrived at that afternoon, boys his age on bicycles stared after him and there were boys walking toward the river with fishing poles on their shoulders and except for the filthiness of his clothes and the look of the wolf in his eye he may have been just another of them.

  He was hot and tired, having walked several miles that morning from the highway where a car had dropped him off. The air was syrupy with the smell of roadside sweet clover and his pants cuffs were yellow from it as though he’d walked through a field of chalk.

  He had seen her as he passed down a neighborhood, an older woman in her bathrobe kneeling on a gardening pad behind a wire fence and turning the soil in her flowerbeds with a hand trowel. A tiny ivory Pomeranian attended her and sat panting in the shade of a lilac. Gload went down the street and returned and as he did he saw her get up and put her hands to the small of her back and look up at the sun. She bent to speak to the dog and it rose and began yammering and running in circles like a wind-up toy.

  He went in through a back gate, pausing under a hanging feeder where small yellow birds fluttered, raining tiny seeds down on him. A bird flew up onto an overhead branch gaudy with purple plum blossom and began a long sweet canzonet as if in greeting.

  He went silently in the door and among the rooms looking for he knew not what. He pocketed a hairbrush, a watch, change from a china bowl on a nightstand. He felt comfortable there, as though these smells and plaster saints and faintly ticking and chiming clocks were the things of his own childhood, the ghosts of forgotten longings. When the old woman came into the room, young John Gload stood before a mantelpiece studying the faces in framed photographs as though among those grainy images he might find his own staring back. She did not speak but only gazed openmouthed to find this ragged boy in her house. The Pomeranian began to yelp and it lunged and sank its needle teeth into John Gload’s bare ankle and without thinking he snatched it up and threw it against the wall. It was only then she began to scream. Young Gload in one motion picked up a table lamp, swung, and hit her above her left ear with its heavy leaded base. He was surprised that she went down as hard and as fast as she did and she lay on the carpet in the summer sunlight perfectly still.