Dead Echo

  *

  The 1950s and 60s also passed without obvious acts of malice, as if the land itself knew the modern world was closing in and its powers were not enough to keep it safe. Yet. Still, it took what it could for whatever purpose it conceived. March, 1953, a vagrant’s body was found along a stretch of what would eventually become Highway 27, Old Perkins Way. He’d been trampled to death, apparently, by horses, crushed into a bloody pulp of gravel, blood, and bones. October of the same year, Halloween night, a group of three boys living within walking distance of the old Illinois Central line did not return home. To this day they are still delinquent. And then nothing till June of 1965 when a farm truck was found planted into the side of a gigantic live oak near the newly-paved Highway 27, the four passengers in its bed tossed into oblivion, the driver impaled through the throat by a branch, his passenger, the only survivor, broken-backed and babbling incessantly about “things in the road.” Of course the newspapers reported it as a drunken accident (there was no doubt as to the number and contents of the wild scattering of cans) but some of the oldsters took a moment to pause and thumb their lip, recalling this or that story from years before, bringing a shiver along their spines until they turned the page and got on with lighter reading.

  And it remained quite a task to keep livestock and other animals in the vicinity of the Boundary. A vague sense of unease accompanied any discussion of its worth and future, and it sat unclaimed, a prisoner to the federal government, so to speak, until a Polish extract, Karol Leszno, bought the whole plot from a room in the Angle Sides Manor, two days after arriving from the airport in New York. Sight-unseen. He was sixty-four years old.

  The date was May 17, 1975.