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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The announcements were complex, running like electric tremors though the small valley town. Within an hour of the discovery of Hank’s body at midday by two other hunters, the streets were filled with merchants discussing the tragedy. Traffic increased. And then a shock settled over the town, the streets emptied, traffic thinned, and all the shops closed their doors. Funeral clothes were brought out and scrutinized.
There were no clues to Hank Shelton’s “untimely death.” There were welts of boot tracks, but everybody in the town wore the same kind of rubber boots, irrigators boots, brought from the same store, Archie Shepherd’s Dry Goods. The theories of the murder were as many as the theorizers. Utah hunters, most likely. Telephone lines hummed with speculation. Rumors became crossbred. Directionless suspicions were hauled out on the strength of real or remembered insults or injuries. One could feel the poisons surfacing, the spiteful innuendo of class as the bedrock of suspicion. Merchant, farmer, petty politician, housewives, schoolteachers, and those on the county dole all looked toward one of the other class, because there was no “person” upon which to fix the blame. Utah hunters. Beneath the surface everything itched and was scratched in whispered phone calls.
With the killer, or killers at large the town became an armed camp. The most intense manhunt in the history of the county began and then blew over like a sudden summer thunderstorm for everyone except for Willy, Max, Biff, Clayton and Andrew Lattimore.
There was no place to hide. The town was so insular there was no refuge. Suspicious eyes in school, at Pete’s gas station, and eyes lined up in row after row in church like so many hard marbles, probing with the sharp vision of geese. The smallest privacy was an intense luxury.
Pete Olson took me into the garage. His question seemed to me to be precise, and I answered him with precision. “Did you do it Andy?” he asked, his eyes unwavering. And I told him the truth. “No sir,” I said. He never asked the next question– Do you know who did it? I have always wondered if it was a deliberate omission, as if he knew. “It’s just too damn bad,” he said to his wife. I was in hell with the shame of the secret.
Old man Calvin Callaghan, who owned the drugstore, looked at me and knew. When I entered the soda fountain his eyes were sinister, heart-stopping.
“Never know, do you Andy,” Calvin observed.
“About what, sir?”
“You just take that for fate. Too many accidents in this valley, and now Hank Shelton gits killed on an innocent hunting trip. Couldn’t have been deliberate. Everybody liked Hank– well maybe LeGrande Smith had a grudge, but too many accidents, I say. Remember that airliner that crashed on Midnight Mountain? That was a lulu for an accident. ‘Course they was all foreigners, but people just the same.”
I cringed. Some one in the valley had located the wreckage in the spring. When officials finally arrived all of the bodies had been stripped of wallets, rings, watches and even clothes by some of the good people of Immigration Valley. It was never talked about. Of course this ghoulishness was the act of a few, but it tainted the many.
“Guess that’s right, Mr. Callaghan. My mother wants her heart pills. She said to put it on the bill.”
“Accidents just don’t happen, do they? When the Sheriff finds out who them hunters was he’ll get the truth out of them. Law is what this country was built on. We keep having accidents like that and the next thing you know the Guv’ment will be stepping in and taking away our guns. Every since that damn Harry Truman, damn democrats . . . Thank God for Ike . . . and the whole country gone to hell in a hand basket. Damn war-mongering democrats, whoever heard of Korea? Deputy was in just the other day, and he said he had tracks, oh yeh, we got evidence. Said it looked like three men . . . or maybe boys that was in that blind across the field from Hank.”
“I’m in kind of a hurry, sir.” My face was bloodless.
“Funniest dam thing,” Calvin said, ignoring me. “Johnny Winters was set to go out and hunt with Hank that very morning, then he comes up with some sick stock and couldn’t go. If he’d been there maybe he could’ve saved Hank’s life. Doc Rich was saying that to me just the other day. If the person, or persons, that shot him had taken him to the hospital over in Appelton he mighta’ been saved, according to the Doc, more than likely . . . Although he’d have lived the rest of his life like a rutabaga.”
I knew that was a lie. Hank Shelton was killed instantly.
“Yes sir, that’s what I heard too, but I gotta go now. You’ll charge these won’t you?”
“Sure thing Andy, but you remind your mother she’s in to me for sixteen dollars and Social Security checks are due this week, I happen to know. Damn Truman, damn Democrats. ‘Trust me’s dead, charge-it killed him.’ Say, I haven’t seen you in church. Bishop said that even Jesus Christ himself would have a hard time forgiving those that left Hank to die. Where was you, by the way?”
“I, uh, was sick last Sunday.”
“Can’t be sick on Sundays. The Lord gives you six days of the week to fill the storehouse or heal-up. The seventh day is for him. Shouldn’t hunt or fish neither. You know your father wouldn’t like it if he was still with us.”
“Yes sir, but . . .”
“But me no buts, Andrew Lattimore.”
We numbly walked through the winter of our senior year. Ruby Shelton was indeed my mother’s best friend, and now mutual widowhood strengthened the bond. To my utter horror, Ruby Shelton moved into our house a week after the funeral. I remember Hank’s funeral. His face was covered with a black handkerchief. Ruby and my mother were in a prostration of grief. I was speechless, and began to have nightmares, and heard voices with throats that sounded like the pipes of an organ. My mother assumed a virtuous manner, almost smug because she was an experienced widow. Ruby slept in the room next to mine.
“The Brethren” is copyrighted © 2001 by T. O. McCallister. All rights reserved. You may not republish or reproduce this work without the expressed written permission of the author by any means mechanical, electronic, graphic, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems. Permission can be granted by writing the author at alimed42@yahoo.com. He also welcomes your feedback to this story. All violators will be persecuted.
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