“I thought that cattle had been shot at only once.”
“That’s all we reported to the sheriff. It’s more like seven or eight times now.”
“What kind of dogs?” I asked.
“Hell, I don’t know. Big ones. Little ones. Dirty, skulking bastards. They’re all mean as hell. But the leader—damn—now he’s something else. Looks like a cross between a German shepherd and a Doberman. Hundred pounds, maybe. Black. Fast. Smart as hell. Doesn’t matter where your father comes from, how quiet he is, that black one always sees him first. Fades away. Your old man can’t get a shot. Says that dog’s the devil himself.”
“How many in the pack?”
“Maybe a dozen at first. Your old man killed two or three. It’s down to five or six now.”
“Who killed the others?”
“That black one, I think. We found ’em with their throats torn out. All males. Rivals, I guess.”
“Jesus.”
“Yep.”
“Why aren’t you reporting the shootings?”
“Because the sheriff is useless. He was useless five years ago and he’s found no reason to change, far as I can tell. First time we called him, he walked once around the carcass, then suggested that it might be best for all concerned if your father just sold. That about settled it for your dad and me.”
“Is anybody still at the hospital?”
“They won’t let us see her, so no point hanging around. We came home a few hours ago.”
I stood up, walked to the corner of the porch. The sun was rising above the treetops. I debated how much to tell Dolf, decided he ought to know everything. “It was Zebulon Faith,” I said. “Him or Danny. They’re the ones that did it.”
Dolf was silent for a long moment. I heard his chair creak again and felt his footsteps on the old floor. He stood next to me and put his hands on the rail, looked out to where a low mist was rising from the river.
“Wasn’t Zebulon Faith,” he said.
I turned, not sure what to think; he picked a piece of tobacco off of his tongue as I waited for him to explain. He took his time about it.
“He’s mean enough to do it, I reckon, but he went in for prostate cancer three years ago.” He looked at me. “The old boy can’t get it up anymore. He’s impotent. No lead left in the pencil.”
“How can you know that?” I asked.
Dolf sighed, kept his eyes on the river. “We had the same doctor, got diagnosed about the same time; we went through it together. Not like we were friends or anything, but we talked once or twice.” He shrugged. “Just one of those things.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty much.”
I thought about Dolf fighting off a cancer while I struggled for meaning in some faraway city I had no business being in. “I’m sorry, Dolf.”
He spit out another piece of tobacco, shrugged off my sympathy. “What makes you think it was one of them?” he asked.
I told him everything I knew: Danny’s ring, the fire, my fight with Zebulon Faith.
“Maybe a good thing you didn’t kill him,” Dolf said.
“I wanted to.”
“Don’t blame you.”
“Could have been Danny that did it.”
Dolf thought about it, spoke with reluctance. “Most people have a dark streak in them somewhere. Danny is a good enough kid in a lot of ways, but his streak is closer to the surface than most.”
“What do you mean?”
He studied me. “I spent a lot of years watching you swing at shadows, Adam. Lashing out. Untouchable in a lot of ways. It killed me to see you like that, but I could understand it. You saw things no boy should see.” He paused and I looked away. “When you’d come home bloodied up, or when your dad and I bailed you out, there was always a sadness in you, a quietness. Damn, son, you’d look all but lost. That’s a hard thing for me to say to you, but there it is. Now Danny, he was different. He’d have this look of barely restrained glee. That boy, he got in fights because he enjoyed it. Big damn difference.”
I didn’t argue. In a lot of ways, Danny’s dark streak formed the bedrock of our friendship. I’d met him six months after my mother killed herself. I was already fighting, cutting school. Most of my friends had pulled away from me. They didn’t know how to handle me, had no idea what to say to a boy whose mother blew her own head off. That hurt, too, but I didn’t whine about it. I pulled deeper into myself, gave up on everybody. Danny came into my life like a brother. He had no money, bad grades, and an abusive father. He hadn’t seen his mother or a square meal in two years.
Consequence meant nothing to Danny. He flat-out did not give a shit.
I wanted to feel like he did.
We hit it off. If I got into a fight, he backed me up. I did the same. Older kids. Kids our age. It didn’t matter. Once, in the eighth grade, we stole the principal’s car and parked it in plain view at the massage parlor by the interstate. Danny went down for that: expelled for two weeks, juvenile record. He never mentioned my name.
But he was a grown man now, and his father stood to make a pile of money. I had to wonder how deep that dark streak ran.
Seven figures, Robin had said.
Deep enough, I guessed.
“You think he could have done it?” I asked. “Attacked Grace?”
Dolf thought about the question. “Maybe, but I doubt it. He’s made some mistakes, but I still say he’s a good enough kid. Are the police looking for him?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Guess we’ll see then.”
“There was a woman with Grace before she was attacked.”
“What woman?” Dolf asked.
“In a blue canoe, one of the old wooden ones like you never see anymore. She had white hair, but looked too young for that, somehow. They were talking.”
“Were they?” His eyebrows came together.
“Do you know her?”
“I do.”
“Who is she?”
“Did you tell the police about her?”
“I did.”
He spit over the rail. “Sarah Yates. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
“Who is she?”
“I haven’t spoken to Sarah in a long time. She lives across the river.”
“You can do better than that,” I said.
“That’s really all that I can tell you, Adam. Now come here. I’ll show you something.”
I let it go, followed him off of the porch and into the yard. He led me to the barn and put a hand on the old MG that sat on blocks in the center of it. “You know, until this car, Grace has never asked me for a single thing. She’d wear the seat out of her pants before she complained of a draft.” He rubbed his hand on the car’s fender. “This is the cheapest convertible she could find. It’s temperamental and undependable, but she wouldn’t trade it for the world.” He studied me again. “Do those words describe anything else in this barn? Temperamental. Undependable.”
I knew what he meant.
“She loves you, Adam; even though you left, and even though the leaving damn near killed her. She wouldn’t trade you for anything else.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because she’s going to need you now more than ever.” He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Don’t leave again. That’s what I’m telling you.”
I stepped back, so that his hand fell away; and for a moment there was a twitch in his gnarled fingers. “That’s never been up to me, Dolf.”
“Your dad’s a good man who’s made mistakes. That’s all he is. Just like you. Just like me.”
“And last night?” I asked. “When he threatened to kill me?”
“It’s like I said. Violent and more than a little blind. The two of you. Just the same.”
“It’s not the same,” I said.
Dolf straightened and turned up his lips in the most forced smile I’d ever seen. “Ah, forget it. You know your own mind well enough. Let’s go eat some breakfast.”
He turned and walked away.
“That’s the second time you’ve lectured me about my father in the past twelve hours. He doesn’t need you fighting his battles.”
“It’s not supposed to be a battle,” he said, and kept walking.
I looked at the sky, then at the barn, but in the end I had nowhere else to go. We returned to the house, and I sat at his kitchen table and watched as he poured two coffees and took bacon and eggs out of the refrigerator. He cracked six eggs into a bowl, added some milk, and whipped it all with a fork. He put the bowl aside and opened the bacon.
It took a few minutes for us both to calm down.
“Dolf,” I finally said. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.” His voice was as calm as could be.
“What’s the longest you’ve ever heard of a deer living?”
“A whitetail?”
“Yes.”
Dolf dropped half the side of bacon into the pan. “Ten years in the wild, longer in captivity.”
“You ever heard of one living twenty years?”
Dolf put the pan on the stove, and the bacon began to snap and sizzle. “Not a normal one.”
Light fingered through the window to place a pale square on the near black wood. When I looked up, he was studying me with open curiosity. “Do you remember the last time my father took me hunting?” I asked. “That white buck I shot at and missed?”
“It’s one of your old man’s favorite stories. He says that the two of you reached an understanding out there in the woods. A thing unspoken, he’d call it. A commitment to life in the shadow of death, or something like that. Damn poetic, I always thought.”
I thought of the photograph my father kept in his study, the one taken on the day we saw the white deer. It was taken in the driveway after a long, silent walk back from the deep woods. My father thought it was a new beginning. I was just trying not to cry.
“He was wrong, you know. There was no commitment.”
“What do you mean?” Dolf asked.
“I wanted to kill that deer.”
“I don’t understand.”
I looked up at Dolf and felt the same overwhelming emotions I’d felt in the woods. Comfort. Pain. “My father said that deer was a sign. He meant that it was a sign from her.”
“Adam—”
“That’s why I wanted to hurt it.” I squeezed my hands, feeling pain as the bones ground together. “That’s why I wanted to kill it. I was angry. I was furious.”
“But why?”
“Because I knew it was over.”
“What was?”
I couldn’t meet his eyes. “Everything good.”
Dolf did not speak, but I understood. What could he possibly say? She’d left me, and I did not even know why.
“I saw a deer this morning,” I said. “A white one.”
Dolf sat down on the other side of the table. “And you think that maybe it’s the same?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe. I used to dream about the first one.”
“Do you want it to be the same?”
I did not answer him directly. “I read up on white deer a few years back, the mythology of white deer. There’s quite a bit of it, going back a thousand years. They’re very rare.”
“What kind of mythology?”
“Christians talk of a white stag that carried a vision of Christ between his antlers. They believe it’s a sign of impending salvation.”
“That sounds nice.”
“There are legends that go back much further. The ancient Celts believed something entirely different. Their legends speak of white deer leading travelers deep into the secret parts of the forest. They say a white deer can lead a man to new understanding.”
“That’s not too bad, either.”
I looked up. “They say it’s a messenger from the dead.”
CHAPTER 11
We ate in silence. Dolf left and I got myself cleaned up. In the mirror, I looked haggard, my eyes somehow older than the rest of me. I pulled on jeans and a linen shirt, then I walked back outside, where I found Robin sitting on the picnic table holding part of a carburetor. She stood when she saw me. I stopped on the porch.
“Nobody answered when I knocked,” she said. “I heard the water running and decided to wait.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I came to apologize.”
“If it’s about earlier—”
“It’s not,” she said.
“What then?”
A shadow crossed her face. “It was Grantham’s call.” She looked down and her shoulders drew in. “But that’s no excuse. I should not have let it go this far.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If this had been in the city, or in some crowded place, he probably would not have felt the need—”
“Robin.”
She straightened, as if to receive punishment. “She wasn’t raped.”
I was speechless.
“She was attacked, but not raped. Grantham wanted that kept quiet until he saw how you all reacted.”
Not raped.
My voice grated. “How who reacted?”
“You. Jamie. Your father. Any of the men who could have done it. He was watching you.”
“Why?”
“Because sexual assault doesn’t always end in rape, because it is not always as random as people might think, and because of where it happened. The odds of a chance encounter way out here are slim.”
“And because he thinks I’m capable.”
“Most people are bad liars. If you knew that there had been no rape, it might have shown. Grantham wanted a look.”
“And you went along with it.”
She looked miserable. “It’s not an uncommon tactic, withholding information. I had no choice.”
“Bullshit.”
“That’s your emotion talking.”
“Why did you decide to tell me?”
She looked around as if for some kind of help. Her palms turned to catch light from the low-hanging sun. “Because things look different in the light of day. Because I made a mistake.”
“Zebulon Faith is impotent,” I said. “Maybe that’s why she wasn’t actually raped.”
“I don’t want to talk about the case,” she said. “I want to talk about us. You need to understand why I did what I did.”
“I understand perfectly.”
“I don’t think that you do.”
I stepped away from her and my hand found the edge of the open door. She knew that I was going to close it between us. Maybe that’s why she said what she did. “There’s something that you should probably hear,” she said.
“What?”
Robin looked up. “Grace has never been sexually active.”
“But she told me—”
“The doctor confirmed it, Adam. In spite of what she said to you, it’s pretty clear that she has not had a lot of boyfriends.”
“Why would she tell me that?”
“I think it’s like you said, Adam.”
“What?”
“I think she wanted to hurt you.”
The road to my father’s house was baked hard, and red dust settled on my shoes as I walked it. The road bent to the north and then rounded east before cresting the small rise that eventually sloped to the river. I looked down on the house and on the cars parked before it. There were a few of them, and one I recognized. Not the car itself, but the license plate, J-19C, a J tag, the kind issued to sitting judges.
I walked down, stood next to the car. There was a Twinkie wrapper on the seat.
I knew the bastard.
Gilbert T. Rathburn.
Judge G.
Gilley Rat.
I stepped away from the car as the front door to the house swung open. The judge backed through it like a dog was after him. One hand clutched a sheaf of papers, the other, his belt. He was a tall man and fat, with a fine, woven hairpiece and glasses that flashed small and gold
on his red, round face. His suit was expensive enough to camouflage much of his size, but his tie still looked narrow. My father followed him outside.
“I think you should reconsider, Jacob,” the judge said. “It makes all of the sense in the world. If you would just let me explain further—”
“Is there some problem with my diction?” The judge deflated slightly and my father, sensing this, took his eyes off of him and saw me standing in the drive. Surprise flashed across his face, and his voice dropped as he pointed a finger at me. “I’d like to see you in my study,” he said, then turned back to the judge. “And don’t you go talking to Dolf about this, either. What I say goes for him, too.” Without waiting for a reply he turned back into the house.
The screen door slammed shut behind him, and the judge shook his head before turning to face me as I stood in the shade of a pecan tree. He looked me up and down, studied me over the top of his glasses, as his neck swelled out and over his collar. We’d known each other for years. I’d appeared in his courtroom once or twice back when I was young and he still sat on the bench of the lower court. The charges had never been very serious, mostly drinking and brawling. We’d never had a real problem, until five years ago, when he signed off on the felony arrest warrant for Gray Wilson’s murder. He could not hide the contempt in his eyes. “This is an unfortunate decision,” he said. “You showing your face in Rowan County again.”
“Whatever happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty,’ you fat bastard?”
He stepped closer, topping my height by a good four inches. Moisture beaded on his face and in the hair along the side of his head. “The boy was killed on this farm, and your own mother identified you leaving the scene.”
“Stepmother,” I said, and matched the man’s hard stare.
“You were seen covered in his blood.”
“Seen by one person,” I said.
“A reliable witness.”
“Jesus,” I said in disgust.
He smiled.
“What are you doing here, Rathburn?”