The Ploughmen: A Novel Read online

  He set down the lamp on the table, aligning it in the dustless circle where it had stood and he looked at his hands. He studied the small crimson mark on the wall where the dog had struck, a small runic daub like a cave marking, and he stood above the clutch of animated rag where it lay working its obscene little mouth soundlessly.

  Finally he stood over the woman. She was very pale and lay with her arms outthrown and one leg crossed beneath her as though she had only misstepped while dancing. Kneeling, he opened her robe and carefully straightened her long limbs, so light, he thought, as if the bones of her had already begun to go to dust. He raised her pale shift and examined the parts of her that boys at the orphanage had whispered about and he’d seen in nudist magazines some of them kept hidden from the nuns. He lay atop her fully clothed and after a while he put his arms around her and he spoke to her, said the name of one of the girls from the sister orphanage he’d once danced with and he said some of the things the other boys said in the locker room after gym class. The woman’s eyes were half-closed and from one nostril a single drop like a viscous red tear appeared.

  He stood up. The little Pom dog lay as before and made a snoring sound and then was still, one eye agape, slightly bulged and aglow from the long afternoon sunrays breaching the gauzy curtains. He looked at the woman again and presently went to her and arranged the folds of her robe over her breasts and withered limbs. There was a small pillow on the sofa, a purfling of white lace for a border and incomprehensible words lovingly needlepointed across its face. He placed it under her head and but for the blood at her nose and the crease above her ear that had by then begun to leak a crimson pool beside her, she may well have been asleep.

  In the kitchen he stopped and chose an apple from a turned wooden bowl and he stood in that bright clean room looking at the apple in his hand. He set it on the counter, returned to the outer room. Rummaging in a drawer he found a pair of men’s socks and he dabbed at the blood on his ankle with them and put them on. Passing the woman again he paused, looking down. He took the pillow from under her head and placed it over her face, reading again the words stitched there—foreign, hopelessly untranslatable, and for all that unforgettable, as he felt they were meant to convey a message, tidings as obscure and cataclysmic as the goldfinch’s song.

  Leaving, he took the apple from the counter, closed and locked the door, and walked west progressing unhurriedly in his strangely nautical gait under an arcature of ponderous elms, more birdsong in his ears.

  * * *

  When he had finished his long narrative, the old man sat back stiffly with a barely audible groan, whether the protest of chair slats or of old bones Millimaki could not tell. He straightened in his own seat and was himself stiff and when he checked his watch from long habit he realized his shift was nearly up. His stomach creaked and turned. The corridor was brighter now with the marginal light from the high windows, and the new day was announced with the sound of men urinating and the striking of matches. Grogan had begun to cough.

  Gload seemed to have gone far away in conjuring such memories and from his private darkness he was a long time speaking. Finally he leaned his long face out into the purple light and raised his eyes to look at the deputy as if he might read something in the younger man’s face.

  “Funny, ain’t it, Val, I started out the way I did on account of a little Pom dog?”

  “Wait,” Val said. “An apple? You ate an apple?”

  “An apple, why not? Yeah. That’s not important, Val, but here’s the deal.” He sat with his forearms upon his knees, gazing into the palms of his enormous hands as if recorded there among the ridges and cracks was the transcript of his life and he was merely reading it aloud. “Along about two miles later I sat down on a railroad berm to catch my breath. It was an interesting moment. By the time I ate that apple, I didn’t feel a thing about that woman.” He rolled his eyes up to regard Millimaki, his hands still open on his knees in a sort of offertory pose. “Val, I knew right then I’d never in my life have to do a regular day of work again.”

  SEVEN

  He stood at the top of the steps taking in the morning. The birds in the elms across the street in the courthouse park sang and the sun through the branches mottled the damp walkway paving stones, in the periodic light the newly cut grass gleaming as if sown with diamond parings. Having emerged from the chill and artificial light of the jail into a golden April day of birdsong, Millimaki felt more than ever like a prisoner himself. A place of perpetual dark, where even on a glorious spring day the gloom did not abate entirely but merely withdrew, receding like a fog to linger near the ceiling where the light chains were hung. When he shaved in the late afternoon the outlier’s eyes that stared back were braided in red, the skin pasty, even yellow. He examined the backs of his hands in the daylight and they seemed to him soft and pale as a child’s. He worried that some jailhouse pathogen had invaded his body, contracted from a handshake, a cough, a sneeze. Or that he was simply becoming Gload. He wondered, too, if he had caught insomnia like a virus from the old man and could blame him for the sleeplessness that seemed without remedy.

  Uniforms were arriving for their shifts and he watched as Weldon Wexler parked his car in the lot across the street. He watched as he righted his nightstick and holstered sidearm and stooped to adjust his hair using the car window as a mirror. Then he stood and turned. He set off across the street and then he began to affect a slight limp.

  Val met him at the bottom of the stairs.

  “You can go home to your wife now, Millimaki,” Wexler said. “She’s a little wore out but otherwise just fine.”

  “You know, Wexler, even if I liked you that wouldn’t be funny.”

  “I think we might of woke the neighbors with all the moaning and screaming and carrying on. But I just went out and told them, ‘Go back to sleep, I’m an officer of the law.’”

  “Technically I guess it could be said that you are. You have the uniform.”

  “You might try a little spit and polish yourself, pardner. You look like you just come from milking the cows.”

  “What do you know about Dobek paying a call to Gload?”

  “So that’s your problem? What, did we upset your pet killer?”

  “There’s no need for that.”

  “Listen, pardner.” Wexler ascended two steps that he might look down on Millimaki and when he spoke it was to the air above his head. “Let me put it thisaway. I intend to get information out of this Gload that could clear up God knows how many open cases. If by scaring this suspect we can get him to talk about some of these things then I will do that.”

  “For Christ sake. Scare him? This guy has been letting blood out of people for a half a century. He’s seen and done about every shitty nasty terrible thing there is to do. Do you really think you can scare anything out of a man like that?”

  Wexler’s smile was thin and insincere. He put one hand atop his holstered pistol and the other on the knob of his nightstick and stood erect and spraddle-legged, a pose perhaps seen on television and practiced in front of a mirror. He said the name Valentine in a way Millimaki had not heard since his days on a playground. A sneer, a taunt. “Valentine,” he said, “if I can’t scare him, I’ll be his buddy. Just like you.” He leaned down and held two crossed fingers in front of Millimaki’s face. “This tight. Asshole buddies.”

  * * *

  The river was two miles from the jailhouse and he drove there, parking beside the riprapped bank where, beyond, the water lay flat and calm as a lake. Everywhere movement filled the morning sky, rafts of ducks rising up and ducks moving back from stubble fields on the benchland and their cries came to him sounding all the world like the cries of young children, as if playing pirates they stood off there on a raft on the smooth water. The river’s organic smell rose to his nostrils like the breath of a living thing. On the far shore the rusted stacks of a refinery stood ranked and steaming against the sky like artillery and with the coming of blue twilight the compound there,
with its pulsing lights and tongues of ultramarine flame, would look like a city besieged by war.

  It was nine o’clock in the morning and he drank a beer, watching the ducks move off the river and circle and gather and in hundreds and thousands, in a cacophony of chatter, drift north toward the marshes and potholes of Canada. He lapsed briefly into addled sleep and the choir of waterfowl became in his dream the voices of people calling his name from a senseless otherworld of dark trees as animated as snakes from whose coils the pallid victims of his searches reached out, weeping.

  He awoke with a jolt to find a city patrolman standing beside his half-opened window.

  “What’s up there, Millimeter?”

  “Officer Moon. Jesus.” Millimaki pawed at his hair and wiped at the sheen of clammy sweat that had formed on his forehead during his brief sleep. “You’re like a goddamn thief in the night.”

  The officer smiled, revealing movie-star teeth. He was a farm kid from the Hi-Line. They’d spoken a few times at cop functions and found they had in common a desire to see nothing more of lean cattle or machinery stitched together with baling wire and prayer or to wake to the sound of flies snarling at the window glass. Despite his gym-rat physique, Millimaki knew him to be a gentle man and a good cop. He wore mirrored sunglasses and Millimaki could see his own bleary face in them, a newspaper crumpled on the seat, the beer can between his thighs.

  “You were twitching there like you had jumper cables hooked to your ass.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yes you were. You doing okay?”

  Millimaki attempted to smooth his uniform shirt. The cruel light pierced his eyes and he pressed his thumbs to them to damp the pain.

  “Except that I can’t sleep anymore,” he said. “I get off, my wife’s gone to work, I go home and I can’t sleep. I just got off shift.” He looked at his watch. “Well, two hours ago. I get home and I’m dead-ass tired but I’m wound up tight as a two-dollar watch.”

  Moon stood up and surveyed the brilliant day and the silken river with its myriad birds and he looked back to his idling patrol car. His uniform shirt was tailored, the sleeves cuffed up to show his biceps. He removed a small notebook from his breast pocket and began to write in it. “Used to take me about six of them sonsofbitches to fall asleep,” he said. “It was terrible.” He turned the tablet for Millimaki to read, running his finger beneath the printed letters as if instructing a child. “So this here’s the answer. It’s herbal, all natural, no side effects, nothing. It’s goddamn magic.”

  He tore loose the sheet and held it through the window with two fingers like a traffic citation. “Yeah,” he said, “I was starting to get a belly on me.” He rubbed his hands over his flat shirtfront. “Knocking out eight hundred sit-ups a day and still getting fat. All that beer.” He had been bending down to talk to Millimaki through the side window. He stood again and put his hands on the roof of Millimaki’s truck. “Course, I was drinking in the bosom of my own home, not down by the river like a high school punk.”

  “Well, Patrolman Moon, maybe I will just pick me up some of these hippie pills. Then I can catch up on my sleep in the Daylite Donuts parking lot during duty hours like you.”

  Moon backed away from the car. “Please step out of the vehicle, sir. I’m afraid I’m going to have to crush your head.”

  “Moon, man, listen to yourself.” Millimaki ran a hand over his eyes and suddenly felt he could sleep there or anywhere for a day and a night and intersect the right world of diurnal creatures the bright morning that followed. “If you’re this way with a fellow officer, I can’t imagine you’re too cool with the citizenry.”

  Moon smiled. “Seriously, Val, get you some of those things and go home and get some sleep.” He reached in suddenly and took the beer from between Millimaki’s legs and pitched it into the willows. “You fucking rummy.”

  * * *

  He made the hour’s drive home in a haze. All along the creek the cottonwoods and alder were in a frenzy of new leaf and calves ran and leapt along the banks where their mothers stood feeding, drowsy and hock deep in the vivid turf. He drove with the window down. Meadowlarks and red-winged blackbirds sang on the fence posts at the road edge and from the willows along the stream. Through the window the bright notes he had heard all his life fell garbled and indistinct on Millimaki’s ears like the song of some alien species.

  At home there was not the usual note from his wife and there was no dinner made and there was little to indicate she had even been there recently. He sat in his chair in front of the fireplace. There were bone-white ashes stirring on the cold grate. He sat for a long time looking into the white jailhouse hands in his lap.

  * * *

  “He’s not a carpenter, Mother, and he’s not a mechanic and not a whatever they are, road worker to fix the road.”

  He shuffled from the bedroom in his bare feet. His hair stood up on his head in a ragged coiffure and his eyeballs felt as if they’d been rolled in sand. Her back was to him and she leaned over the supper table, supporting herself on one arm, the phone pressed to her shoulder. He could see the boyish outline of her narrow back through the tight yellow T-shirt, the bones of her spine, the effect vaguely serpentine, and he fought the urge to run his hands down the length of it.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It is the way it is.” She stood listening. “I’ll have to live with it. Yes, Mother, thank you, that’s very sound advice.”

  She held the receiver six inches away from her ear as though it had suddenly become hot.

  “No, I’m sorry.” She said it again, weakly, resignedly. “Yes. It’s the way it is.” She listened. “Yes. Love to Daddy, too.”

  She set the phone deliberately in its cradle and stood leaning with her fists balled atop the table, her head bowed.

  To her back Millimaki said, “Who says I’m not a carpenter?”

  She spun quickly. A gold strand of her hair caught up on her angry mouth and she swept it away. “Jesus, Val, don’t do that.” She glanced down at the phone on the table as if it had betrayed her and looked back at him. “I thought you were asleep. You should be.”

  “If you need a carpenter I can give you plumb and level till hell won’t have it.” Like a supplicant he stood before her in his ragged pajama pants, his hands upturned, his eyes from the luminous April daytime asquint after the shuttered gloom of their bedroom. He studied her face. Too often lately it had been a geometry of sharp lines and hard shapes and in the brief and infrequent intersecting of their lives she had been immune to his teasing, which in their marriage had been the ice breaker, the mender of rifts, the poultice on the inflamed wound of an argument.

  “Is it too much to ask, Val, that a door actually works?”

  “No,” he said. “It is not. Most definitely not asking too much.”

  “I’ve fought that door since day one. I practically broke my thumb trying to open it today.” She held up her left thumb as she spoke. “And it lets in the dirt and the snow and God knows what else. Bugs. Snakes. Absolutely from day one. I hate it.”

  “Okay, Glenda. But not snakes.”

  “I detest it.”

  He was smiling at her. “It’s an awful thing to hate something as lovely and practical as a door.”

  “I’m just not in that kind of mood. I’m just not.” She glared down at his bare feet. “And, God, where are your slippers?”

  “I’m all over that door,” he said. “Like white on rice.”

  “Just don’t. I’m not kidding, really.”

  He spent two hours planing the door edge with his grandfather’s old jack plane until the door swung freely on its medieval hinges. The bright excelsior from the plane lay in ribbons about his feet. His palms were raw. The cabin atop its unmortared foundation stones heaved and shifted like a trawler with each frost and thaw. In a few months the door would come untrued. He had learned to wait it out. October would see it stuck again in its skewed and unplumb jamb.

  They ate dinner in near silence, th
e sound of fork on porcelain overloud in the still room, and then, as was their habit, left the table with its unwashed plates and empty wineglasses to take a drive. In Glenda’s pale yellow Datsun they wove slowly down the hill, negotiating ruts and rocks exposed by the rains of spring, and onto the highway blacktop. Twelve miles on they turned onto gravel that wound south and east toward the old mining town of Hughesville. The sun burned in the mirrors and dust rose roiling bloodred behind them. From the limestone canyon walls, grave ill-formed statues and faces took shape among the shadowed clefts and spires. Glenda stared out the side window. Cow elk with their speckled calves stood off in the sparse lodgepole and reddening willow and sumac along the stream, eyeing them warily, and when Val pointed them out her head did not move and she did not speak.

  They parked in the barrow ditch and wove through the trelliswork of brush to the small creek. She took his hand mutely. At the bank they stretched out in the grass, the burbling lullaby of the water in their ears. In a very short time he fell asleep. He awoke from a sumptuous dreamless nap and Glenda was gone. He found her in the car, curled on the backseat like a child. He got in and eased shut the door. She did not wake, or pretended not to, as he drove home through a cool blue light descended upon the canyon. Above, the day diminished in a brilliant unfurling of color, the tottering pines atop the ridges as vivid as candle flames.