True or not, the contents would have certainly claimed the cover of the Everville Tribune for a couple of weeks and perhaps brought McPherson—who had lived a blameless but dull life running the city’s only Drain Rooter and Septic Service—a welcome touch of notoriety.
If that had indeed been his plan, death had foiled it. McPherson the Younger had passed from the world with only a seven-line obituary in the Tribune (five lines of which bemoaned the lack of a replacement Drain Rooter and Septic Service now that good ol’ Frank was gone) to mark his exit. The life and crimes of McPherson the Elder, however, were waiting to be discovered, and now, sitting by the window in the heat of the late August sun, their discoverer pondered how best to show them to the world.
It was certainly a good time to find himself an audience. Every year, at the last weekend of August, Everville had a festival, and for three days its otherwise quiet streets became thronged, its population (which had stood at 7403 at the previous November’s census) swelling to half that size again. Every hotel, inn, motel, and lodging house in that region of the Willamette Valley, from Aurora and Molina in the north to Sublimity and Aumsville in the south was occupied, and there was scarcely a store in town that didn’t do more business over Festival Weekend than it did in the three months preceding it. The actual substance of the festival was of variable quality. The town band, which in fact drew players from as far afield as Wilsonville, was very capable, and Saturday’s parade, featuring the band, floats, and a troupe of drum majorettes, was usually counted the highlight of the weekend. At the other end of the scale were the pig races and the frisbee-throwing contests, which were ineptly organized, and had several years ended in fistfights.
But the crowds who came to Everville in their hundreds every August didn’t come for the music, or the pig racing. They came because it was a fine excuse to drink, dance, and enjoy the last of summer before the leaves started to turn. Only once in the years Erwin had been a resident of the town had it rained on Festival Weekend. This year, if the weather reports were to be trusted, the entire week ahead would be balmy, with temperatures climbing to the low eighties by Friday. Perfect Festival weather. Dorothy Bullard, who ran the offices of the Chamber of Commerce when she wasn’t accepting cash for water bills, fronting the Tourist Board, or flirting with Jed Gilholly, the city’s police captain, had announced in last week’s Tribune that the Chamber of Commerce expected this year’s Festival to be the most popular yet. If a man wanted to drop a bombshell, there could scarcely be a better time to do it.
With that in mind, Erwin went back to the pages on his lap, and studied them for the fourth time.
Forgive me, Everville, McPherson the Elder had begun.
I don’t much like having to write these things that I’m going to write, but I got to put down the truth while I still can, being as I’m the only one left to tell it.
The fact is, everyone in town knew what we did that night, and they all was happy we did it. But there was only me, Verl Nordhoff, and Richie Dolan who knew the whole story, and now Verl’s dead and I guess Richie got so crazy he killed himself, so that leaves me.
I ain’t writing this to save my soul. I don’t believe in Heaven and Hell. They’re just words. I ain’t going anywhere when I’m dead except into the dirt. I just want to say all of it straight, just once, though it don’t show Everville up real pretty.
What happened was this. On the night of August 27, 1929, me and Nordhoff and Dolan hung three people from a tree on the mountain. One of them we hung was a cripple, and I feel more ashamed for that than I do about the other two. But they was all in it together, and the only reason he was crippled was he had bad blood in him . . .
The phone rang, and Erwin, wrapped up in his study, jumped. He waited for his answering machine to pick up the call, but it had been on the blink for weeks, and failed to do so. He let the phone go on ringing till the caller got bored, then returned to the confession. Where was he? Oh yes, the bit about the bad blood.
. . . and the way he jerked around on that rope, and hollered even though he couldn’t breathe, I believe all the things folks were saying about him and his wife and that animal child of his.
We didn’t find no human bones in the house, like we thought we might, but there was other weird stuff, like the pictures painted on the walls, and these carvings the cripple had made. That’s why we set fire to the house, so’s nobody would have to see any of that shit. And I don’t regret none of that, because the son was definitely going after innocent children, and the mother was a whore from way back. Everybody knew that. She’d had a whorehouse right here in town, only it had been closed down in the twenties, and that’s when she’d lost her mind and gone to live in the house by the creek with her crazy family.
So then when Rebecca Jenkins disappeared and her body was found in the reservoir, there wasn’t nobody doubted what had happened. They’d kidnapped her on her way from school and done whatever they’d done to her then thrown her body in the creek, and it had been washed down into the reservoir. Only there was no proof. People was talking about it, and they were saying it was pitiful that the police couldn’t pin it on the whore and her son and her damn husband, because everyone knew they’d been seen with kids before, kids they’d found in Portland, and brought back to the house at night, and if they got away with it again, with a kid from right here in Everville, nobody’s kids were going to be safe.
So that’s when the three of us decided to do something about it. Dolan had known the Jenkins girl because she’d used to come by his store, and when he’d think about what had happened to her he’d get choked up and he’d be ready to go hang the whore right there and then. Richie had a little girl of his own, who was right about Rebecca’s age, and he kept saying if we can’t keep the children safe we weren’t worth a damn. So that’s what we did. We went out to the creek, we burned the house, and then we took the three of them up the mountain and hanged them.
And everyone knew what we’d done. The house burned almost to the ground and nobody came to put out the fire. They just stayed out of sight till we’d done what we’d done and we’d come back down again.
But that wasn’t the end of it. The following year, the police caught a man from Scotts Mills who’d killed a girl in Sublimity and he told them he’d murdered Rebecca too, and dumped her in the creek.
The day I heard that I got crazy drunk, and I stayed drunk for a week. People looked at me different after that, like I’d been a hero because of what we’d done and now I was just a killer.
Dolan took it even worse, and he started getting real angry, saying it was everybody’s fault cause everybody knew, and that was true in a way. Everville was as much to blame as we were, and I hope if this ever gets read people forgive me for writing it down, but it’s the truth, I swear on my mother’s grave.
And then, in the same abrupt manner it had begun, McPherson’s testimony ended, begging more questions than it answered and all the more intriguing for that.
Reading it over again left Erwin more excited than ever. He got up and paced around his office, chewing over the options available to him. It was his duty to bring this secret to light, that was not in doubt. But if he did so in Festival Week, when the city was polishing itself to perfection, he would gain a much larger audience while making enemies of his friends and clients.
Part of him replied: So what? Hadn’t he been telling himself it was time to move on while he was still young enough to relocate? And what better calling card could he have than to be the man who had uncovered the McPherson Conspiracy? The other part of him, the part that had grown comfortable in this corner of the world, said: Have a little care for people’s feelings. Let this news out in Festival Week and you’ll be a pariah.
He paced, and he chewed, and finally he decided not to decide, at least not yet. First he’d check his facts to be certain the confession wasn’t just McPherson’s invention. Find out if a child called Rebecca Jenkins had indeed been dredged from the reservoir, if there ha
d ever been a house by the creek, and if so, what had happened to those who’d occupied it.
He made a photocopy of McPherson’s confession in Bettijane’s office (he’d given her the day off so she could drive into Portland and pick up her mother), then sealed the original in an envelope and locked it up in the safe. That done, he folded up the copy, slipped it into his jacket pocket, and went out for lunch at Kitty’s Diner. He wasn’t by nature a self-analytical man, but as he wandered down Main Street he couldn’t help but be struck by the paradox of his present mood. Murder, suicide, and the dispatch of innocents filled his head, but he could not remember when he’d last felt so utterly content with his lot in life.
TWO
I
There were those among Dr. Powell’s patients that late morning who had seen looks like this on Phoebe Cobb’s face before, and they knew from experience that caution was the byword. Woe betide the patient who reported to reception five minutes late, or worse still attempted to justify their tardiness with some lame excuse. Being carted into the waiting room in six pieces would not have won a sympathetic smile from Phoebe in her present mood.
There were even one or two of the doctor’s regulars—Mrs. Converse, here for a fresh supply of blood pressure pills, and Arnold Heacock, in need of suppositories—who were familiar enough with Phoebe to have guessed the reason for her demeanor, and would have been correct in their assumptions.
Five and a half pounds. How was that possible? She’d not touched a candy or a doughnut in three weeks. She hadn’t allowed herself even to inhale near a plate of fried chicken. How was it possible to eat so frugally, to deny her body everything it craved, and still put on five and a half pounds? Was the air in Everville fattening these days?
Audrey Laidlaw had just stalked in, holding her belly.
“I have to see Dr. Powell,” she said, before she’d even reached the counter.
“Is it an emergency?” Phoebe wanted to know, floating the question so as not to betray the trap beneath.
“Yes! Absolutely!”
“Then you should have someone drive you over to Silverton,” Phoebe replied. “They deal with emergencies there.”
“It’s not that much of an emergency,” the Laidlaw woman snapped.
“Then you’ll have to make an appointment.” Phoebe consulted her diary. “Tomorrow at ten forty-five?”
Audrey Laidlaw narrowed her eyes. “Tomorrow?” she said. Phoebe kept smiling, which was a reliable irritant, and was pleased to see the woman grinding her teeth. Only two months before, under circumstances not unlike these, the thin and neurotic Miss Laidlaw had marched out of the waiting room muttering fat bitch just loudly enough to be heard. Phoebe had thought there and then: You wait.
“Will you just tell Dr. Powell I’m here?” Audrey said. “I’m sure he’ll see me.”
“He’s with a patient,” Phoebe said. “If you want to take a seat—”
“This is intolerable,” the woman replied, but she had little choice in the matter. The round lost, she retired to a chair by the window, and fumed. Phoebe didn’t stare, in case she looked triumphant, but went back to sorting the mail.
“Where have you been all my life?”
She looked up, and Joe was leaning over the counter, his words little more than a whisper. She glanced past his broad frame to see that everyone in the waiting room was looking their way, the same question in every gaze: What is a black man in paint-spattered overalls doing whispering to a married woman like Phoebe Cobb?
“What time are you finished here?” he asked her softly.
“You’ve got paint in your hair.”
“I’ll shower. What time?”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
He shrugged and smiled. Oh, how he smiled.
“Around three,” she said.
“You got a date.”
With that he was gone, and she was left meeting half a dozen stares from around the room. She knew better than to look away. It would instantly be construed as guilt. Instead, she gave her audience a gracious little smile and stared back, hard, until they had all dropped their gazes. Then, and only then, did she return to the mail, though her hands were trembling so badly she was butterfingered for the next hour, and her mood so much sweetened, she even found a few minutes for Audrey Laidlaw to be given something for her dyspepsia.
* * *
II
Joe could do that to her: Come in and change her way of being in a matter of moments. It was wonderful of course, but it was also dangerous. Sooner or later, Morton would look up at her from his meatloaf and ask her why she was sparkling tonight and she wouldn’t be able to keep the truth from her lips.
“Joe,” she’d say. “Joe Flicker. You know who he is. You can’t miss him.”
“What about him?” Morton would reply, his tight little mouth getting tighter as he spoke. He didn’t like blacks.
“I’m spending a lot of time with him,” she’d say.
“What the hell for?” he’d say, and she’d look up at the face she’d married, the face she’d loved, and while she was wondering when it had become so sour and sad, he’d start yelling, “I don’t want you talking with a nigger!”
And she’d say, “I don’t just talk to him, Morton.” Oh yes, she’d love to say that. “We kiss, Morton, and we get naked, and we do—”
“Phoebe?”
She snapped out of her reverie to find Dr. Powell at her side with the morning’s files.
“Oh—I’m sorry.”
“We’re all done. Are you all right? You look a little flushed.”
“I’m fine.” She relieved him of the files and he started to pick through his mail. “Don’t forget you’ve got a Festival meeting.”
He glanced up at the clock. “I’ll grab a sandwich and go straight over. Damn Festival. I’ll be glad when it’s—oh, I’ve referred Audrey Laidlaw to a specialist in Salem.”
“Is it something serious?”
He tossed the letters back onto the desk. “Maybe cancer,” he said.
“Oh Lord.”
“Will you lock up?”
That happened, over and over. People came in to see the doctor with a headache or a backache or a bellyache and it turned out to be something terminal. They’d fight it, of course: pills, scans, injections. And once in a while they’d win. But more often than not she’d watch them deteriorate, week in, week out, and it was still hard after seven years, seeing that happen; seeing people’s strength and hope and faith in things slip away. There was always such emptiness towards the end; such bitter looks on their faces, as though they’d been cheated of something and they couldn’t quite figure out what. Even the church-goers, the ones she’d see in front of the tree in the square at Christmas singing hallelujahs, had that look. God wanted them in his bosom, but they didn’t want to go; not until they’d made sense of things here.
But suppose there was no sense to be made? That was what she had come to believe more and more: that things happened, and there was no real reason why. You weren’t being tested, you weren’t being rewarded, you were just being. And so was everybody and everything else, including tumors and bad hearts: all just being.
She had found the simplicity of this strangely comforting, and she’d made her own little religion of it.
Then Joe Flicker had been hired to paint the hallway outside the surgery, and her homemade temple had cracked. It wasn’t love, she’d told herself from the start. In fact, it wasn’t anything important at all. He was an opportunist who’d taken a passing fancy to her, and she’d played along because she was flattered and she always felt sexier in the summer months, so why not flirt with him a little? But the flirting got serious, and secret, and before very long she was ready to scream if he didn’t kiss her. Then, he did, and she was ready to scream if they didn’t go all the way. Then they had, and she’d gone home with paint marks on her breasts and her belly, and sat in the bath and cried for a solid hour, because it felt like this was a reward and a test a
nd a punishment all in one.
It still did. She was thirty-six years old, twenty pounds overweight (her estimation, not Joe’s), with small features on a moonish face, pale skin that freckled in the sun, ginger hair (with a few strands of gray already), and a mean streak she had from her mother. Not, she had long ago decided, a particularly attractive package. In Morton, she’d found a husband who didn’t know or care what he’d married, for better or worse, as long as he was fed and the television worked. A man who’d decided at thirty that the best was over and only a fool would look beyond tomorrow, who increasingly defined himself by his bigotries, and who had not touched her between her legs in thirteen months.
So how then—how, how?—had she come to her present state of grace? How was it possible that this man from North Carolina, this Joe, who’d had a life of adventuring—he’d been stationed in Germany while he was in the army, he’d lived in Washington, D.C., for a while, Kentucky for a while, California for a while—how was it possible that this man had become so devoted to her?
When they talked, and they talked a lot, she wondered sometimes if he was quizzing her about her life the way he did because the same question vexed him; as though he was digging around for some clue as to what it was in her that drew him. Then again, perhaps he was simply curious.
“I can’t get enough of you,” he’d say over and over, and kiss her in ways and places that would have appalled Morton.
She thought of those kisses now, as she let herself into the house. It was six minutes to three. He was always on time (army training, he’d said once); six minutes and he’d be here. She’d read in a magazine a couple of weeks ago that scientists were saying time was like putty; it could be pulled and pushed, and she’d thought I could have told them that. Six minutes was six hours waiting on the back doorstep (Joe never used the front, it was too conspicuous, but the house was the last on the row and there was just wooded land beyond, so it was easy to come in from that direction unseen); waiting for a glimpse of him between the trees, knowing that once he arrived time would be squeezed in the other direction, and an hour, or an hour and a half, would fly by in a matter of moments.