The Maid's Version Part 5

In 1932 he would spontaneously launch into a mumbled confession to the other three golfers from his Sat.u.r.day foursome while standing in the club parking lot. He said it all in an unbroken streaming with his head lowered and gave himself no quarter. He spilled what he knew and shaved nary a detail from his own role. His audience stood between parked cars to listena"Judge MacDonald Swann, J. William Etchieson, and Harlan Hudkins. The men did not react as though they were hearing shocking or even unsuspected news, exactly. The Judge heard him out and said, "To allow a banker to be charged with anything at all in the climate of this Depression, Arthur, concerning that subject in particular, with hatred of bankers running so high generally, might very well result in no trial at all and an impromptu hanging. We need you where you are, Arthur, to protect our solvency. The town needs you to do that. The gone are gone."

He walked daily from home to work to home. If others on his route wanted to speak, he paused and spoke pleasantly enough, otherwise he nodded to men when pa.s.sing and touched his hand to the crown of his hat and mimed a doffing to women, and continued on his way. His hair turned a stately white and he came to appear rather impressive, well dressed and closely contained. The heartbreak evident in his face attracted women, quite a few, but he craved only one in the grave and loved one at home and that was enough, so he doffed when approached and flirted with, but kept walking. On arriving home he would every evening go directly to the study and pour a large scotch whisky into crystal and sit in the swivel chair at his desk as night came down or evening stretched.

One day stuck at his window inside the bank, staring absently at sunbeams and movement, he observed John Paul lugging newspapers around the square and those wings took flight between his bones and he stepped out of doors in pursuit. He caught the thirteen-year-old by the arm, startling him. "I want you to consider becoming my caddy."

"I don't play that gamea"I've never even seen it played."

"You needn't playa"I playa"you caddy. That's how golf works, Dunahew."

John Paul was on the bags twice a week after that and always overpaid for his efforts, overtipped, and deep down understood why he received such largesse, but the do-re-mi came in so very handy. Glencross knew what he was doing on the links, a fine golfer, tall and limber, long off the tees, good touch around the greens. He became very informal with John Paul, made shrewdly penetrating wisecracks about his golfing companions, a few of which John Paul employed in self-defense many years later at Hudkins. The two became easy with each other and John Paul enjoyed those outings more than he believed he ought to, but a Eventually the caddy began to whack a few b.a.l.l.s along the way, and Glencross watched, then said, "You are innocent of instruction and swing freely. Learn the rules, but don't listen to anybody who tells you to change that swing."

When the Great Depression had begun to lift elsewhere, Citizens' Bank surprisingly developed a rupture, a serious crisis, and Corinne and her worried parents quietly took a huge risk and loaned two hundred thousand dollars of family money, and Glencross sweated bullets day and night but did keep the bank going and once again solvent, and few depositors ever knew of the rupture. n.o.body in town lost life savings entrusted to his care. Postwar politicians curried his favor and sought donations and in return he pushed them to open a modest extension of the state university in West Table, which was built and opened to freshmen and soph.o.m.ores in 1961. Glencross never forgot that he'd had to leave the myriad pleasures of schooling before he was ready because of money, only money, and quickly created a scholarship program for locals of high merit but no financial resources, and eight students a year had their futures buffed and worlds expanded. When apprised of the need, he personally helped recruit doctors to the area, wined and dined and otherwise inveigled enough good docs that he soon pressed for a new hospital to be built, and thus the only sizable medical facility within a sixty-mile radius then and now came about.

At the hospital's groundbreaking ceremony during August of 1963, only five months before a cerebral hemorrhage claimed him (his body fell on the square within a few paces of the spot on which his statue stands), he said to a reporter from the Scroll, "This town might grow now beyond even my own dreams for it."

In spring of 1953, John Paul had been broke, between jobs, without prospects, and his second son was newly born (born with pneumonia and something else more difficult to diagnose, and Dad was for many years knotted with deep worry that it would prove to be a repeat of the nightmare Sidney knew) while he lived miserably at Hudkins and his marriage frayed. He went for marathon walks alone to burn off excess energy and acc.u.mulating hostility, walking at high speed with his hands in his pockets and his eyes looking down, and on one such walk a black Cadillac shadowed him up Jefferson Avenue late on an inanimate Sunday afternoon, crept alongside, crept and crept until John Paul turned to face the windshield, his expression sullenly asking the question, What the sam-h.e.l.l do you want? Glencross lowered the driver's-side window, and said, "Dunahew, I've got something for you. Something I've owed you for a long timea"I forgot to give you an adequate tip on a soggy day in 1938, I believe it was. With accrued interest and substantial penalties I must absorb because of my thoughtlessness, it comes to this amounta"come over here."

He handed John Paul a wad of greenbacks that appeared to have been grabbed blindly out of a bag, an unordered nest of crinkled bills that when straightened were tallied at more than seven hundred dollars.

"I can't take this, Arthur."

"Hogwash."

"It's too much."

"No, no, you earned ita"I beg you to let me pay my debts and feel freed of them."

A memory that had come to mind so often and that he mentioned many times to Corinne during dwindling, melancholy hours, was about how close he'd come to being murdered for love, actually murdered for lovea"that when James Dunahew stabbed him, he recognized how deeply bound together he'd become with this family from a shack, as James wore a shirt he knew, he was being stabbed to death for reasons rooted in love by someone wearing his own old shirt, a shirt he'd given Buster, who he'd failed so, and as the boy sat atop him and the blade went in again, their two breaths were joined as a cloud in the cold air between them and hung there, just hung there, a cloud.

It just started coming. The story poured from her in dollops and cascades and drips of known details, vintage innuendo and flat-out guesses. She gave her summation of the tragedy while lying in bed, sick at the stomach (too many ears of sweet corn), with pillows stacked behind to prop her at a reclined angle, long hair unbraided and released to drape onto the hardwood floor with the surplus spread there as pooling below a waterfall. She told me to fetch a gla.s.s of water and mix in a teaspoon of baking soda. The sun was still up but diving so that stripes of light glamorized the ceiling and made a loamy glowing there. It was Friday and I'd be going home on Sunday and she had more to tell, more for me to know, more to remember. She drank the water, waited for a good burp to erupt and be relished, beat the pillows into shape, sat a little taller and tied it all together for me.

On this, the day of her death, Ruby DeGeer came to recognize her true feelings and feel compromised by the truth they revealeda"she still loved the bigwig sonofab.i.t.c.h, she must, since forgiveness is one of the signs, right? Forgiveness felt so icky, slimed at its core, but she'd achieved some perspective without intending to do so and unhappily conceded that there hadn't truly been much point in Arthur courting utter ruin, though what he did that day Buster died and how would always stink of base treachery and mar him in her mind, but a she woke that Sat.u.r.day at the farmhouse of Captain Reg Gower, late of the U.S. Army, who'd resigned his commission at Fort Dix upon the death of his widower father and come home to tend the family spread of seven hundred acres out along Lost Spaniard Creek. She made him breakfast, one arm in a cast, one whipping eggs in a skillet, and as he ate she saw Arthur with his sleepy way of looking at her from a soiled bed, that tip of tongue, and wished so that he was the man now swallowing her biscuits. The thought made her feel weak, weak, weak without honor, yes, and though this weakness might well be a treason sprung by her heart, it felt too honest as love to argue with much. She'd never had feelings strong enough to override momentary whims or avarice before, or known a man she wasn't willing to drop from her life casually or cruelly at a moment of her own choosing and laugh or sing as she sallied away.

Captain Gower said, "One heck of a spread you set, kiddoa"great biscuits. Your mama sure showed you how to do."

The house was large, plain and tidy, with big windows to let in light, and the bottomland just below was dark and excellent growing dirt, with plenty of decent pasture up the slope and around the ridge.

"My mother didn't have a nose."

"She what?"

"Only half a nosea"more coffee?"

"How'd that happen?"

"Just living. Something you don't see got her."

"Maybe one more cup."

Alma was fond of many country sayings and she said a favorite here: "A wolf will always look to the woods, no matter what you feed it."

Freddy Poltz stood in the garage under the Arbor, washing automobile parts in a bucket of gasoline, rubbing them dry with rags he tossed when sopped into an old washtub in the corner. He worked alone on Sat.u.r.days, and three vehicles were parked in the bay for him to diagnose and repair and slap back together. The old and wide dairy barn doors were open and the day was sunny and he saw two long shadows growing tighter on the floor as they drew near. Two men wearing brim hats and sagged expressions. The smaller man said, "Did you kill my brother?"

"Is he dead?"

"He ain't been home for supper in seven months."

"That's not the same thing as bein' dead."

(Sheriff Adderly testified at the first and only Citizens' Commission Inquiry that he'd been visited on that morning by a St. Louis-acting man, if you catch my drift, who asked about the unidentified body that had been found at Saunders Camp the previous November. Shot located the only evidence, a hat, in the storage closet, and handed it over for inspection. There was bloodied muck dried at the crown and on the brim. The man slowly looked inside, read the label, raised the hat to his nose and inhaled several times without speaking. He held the hat at his face with his eyes closed quite a while before handing it back. He stood from his chair and said, "No, that ain't Mikey's.") "It probably is."

"Why are you askin' me, anyhow?"

"I got myself locked up in the county until four days back, Plug, or I woulda been in the boondocks here askin' you sooner, when your memory mighta been better. This here, see, is the last place anybody knows Mikey was, and he mentioned to another guy who ain't personally dead yet that he seen you here in this p.i.s.s-hole, big as life."

"What do you want?"

"That bank up there. I went broke sittin' in the can, Pluga"you know how that song goes. So we're here on a scout and plan on bustin' that thing open tomorrow night. We came here with enough juice to blow that boxa"they got a thick onea"and maybe four more joints this trip round the sticks, and we're parkin' our car out of sight in here so n.o.body starts wonderin' about it."

"There's a dance upstairs tonight."

"I didn't ask to park upstairs."

"The place'll be jam-packed and jumpin'."

"Clear us a G.o.ddam s.p.a.ce, Plug. And play nicea"you got a wife called Mae and two midgets, don't you? I heard you did."

Alma put another country saying here: "Times there ain't nothin' for it, but a body must hie to the toothache tree and sc.r.a.pe hisself a cure."

There was on that day a garden luncheon down Curry Street at the home of Judge Swann. Tables were arranged on the gra.s.s beneath the shade trees, with festive tablecloths and complete place settings and a menu of cold potato soup, spring lamb with mint jelly, early greens, pickled corn, creamed English peas and black walnut pie. Alma and Kate Daiches were present as wait staff and kept the courses coming. At the rear of the yard (a yard two witnesses would that night later spot Arthur Glencross running across with a panicked look) a small stage of rough planks and two-by-fours had been hammered together, with canvas spread on the flooring and a bedsheet suspended as a curtain on a rope tied between two bent trees. Once the dessert was served, the younger children of those couples a.s.sembled therea"Swann, Glencross, Etchieson, Haas, Barry, Josselin, Powell, Dacre, Heenana"appeared from behind the curtain to unleash a backyard theatrical, a common feature at gatherings of these families.

Glencross groaned at his table, not in the mood, wearing white linen, not eating, obviously out of sorts. The sight of his own children performing failed to buoy him and he was impatient for the show now started to come to an end. The theatrical was a patched-together melange of novelty songs presented by a coed group of elementary school hoboes sitting around a campfire made of crumpled red wrapping paper. They had blacking on their cheeks and chins to suggest whiskers and dressed in raffish rags and sashes and held sticks onto which plumped kerchiefs were tied. It was expected that the children would guilelessly deliver songs that were sa.s.sy or saucy and containing multiple meanings they didn't suspect and sang of with unknowing purity, and these sly ditties always earned the largest eruptions of laughter and subsequent applause. The hoboes opened the show with "The Men Will Wear Kimonos By and By."

Glencross excused himself to go indoors, where he found the den unoccupied and helped himself to a tumbler of the Judge's bourbon whisky, not his preferred libationa"too sweeta"but he drank it down in one long movement. He was pouring another of equal measure when he saw Alma pa.s.s in the hallway. He called her to him: "Where is she?"

"Couldn't say."

"You've got to tell me. Tell me now."

"I imagine she's with her new fella."

"Does she already love him, you think?"

"I'd say soa"they spent two days last week layin' out there in the country thinkin' up baby names. He likes Lloyd or Mabel, but shea"

He rushed through the hall, out the front door and onto the sidewalk, found his Phaeton at the curb, and drove furiously away toward Lost Spaniard Creek. Several people who knew him saw Glencross speed past without so much as looking to the sides in traffic or pausing at crossroads, just held his eyes straight ahead and kept speeding. Three miles short of the Gower spread, Glencross ran over a farm dog that gave chase, the impact and squealing shaking him alert as he clipped a fence pole and found the ditch where two tires burst. He staggered out from behind the wheel and leaned against the rear fender. The dog wasn't dead yet. The dog he'd run over had mashed hindquarters and wasn't dead yet or quieted, and Glencross began to weep, sob, shudder. The nearest farmer came from his house still energetically chewing something, with a shotgun in hand, approached the dog, did the loud and merciful thing, then negotiated a fat fee of seven dollars to drive this dapper crybabya"it's only a dog, mistera"back to town and leave him off near the bank.

About then the Dunahew boys were in the yard outside their shack, James experimentally smoking a green stogie-stub he'd found in the gutter, Sidney and John Paul envisioning the trees as castles and climbing high onto the parapets to claim this palace and all its lands for the one and true king, whoever he was. The bark had been worn from the limbs by scrambling kids at play, skinned to whitened lengths that shined and were slick to climb across, adding more danger to the amus.e.m.e.nta"kids fell, kids sniffled, kids moaned on the dirt, then stood, shook their heads, and climbed whichever tree again.

Alma returned from the luncheon carrying treats for her boys, and they feasted on wedges of black walnut pie presented to them with only a bite or two already gone, and shared a large bowl of creamed English peas. Tummies pretty full, grins alive, all was well. When Ruby dropped by later that afternoon, the women went indoors to talk and stood beside the tilted sink. Ruby said to her sister what she felt she must, she had to be honest though she knew there'd be hurt piggybacking on this honesty, but what she felt was real, sister, real, and rose up from deeper inside than she ever knew she went, and she spoke her heart aloud.

Alma responded, "No, you won't, either."

"But it's what I feel."

"If you do, you best start lookin' for a new sister, *cause you won't have one here no more."

"You don't mean that."

"Do I seem like I don't?"

Toward dusk the crowd began to gather at the Arbor Dance Hall, as couples and foursomes and lonesome hopefuls walked down from the Stockman's Cafe or the Two-Way on the square, drove in from the countryside or strolled over from homes nearby. The street was soon lined with cars parked faced in both directions, and new arrivals pulled onto the gra.s.s across the street. The manager of the Alhambra Hotel was firm that no cars could park blocking his entrance or in his small lot and stood on the veranda, arms crossed, watching. Preacher Willard, with his flock in tow, sat on a fence rail down the street and waited for his usual audience of blasphemers and swaggering pagans and trollops with painted faces to a.s.semble in sufficient number.

Arthur Glencross snuck along early with a wavering roll to his steps, and on the advice of the booze within entered Freddy's garage and found himself a hiding spot. He needed to sit and soon but not where he could be seen. There was an interior stairway to the dance hall and the door upstairs was kept locked from this side, but he sat on the top step in perfect shadow and listened as folks entered and shuffled their feet on the squeaky floor and the band warmed up their instruments. He soon fell asleep with his head thrown backwards against the locked door and his legs stretched two steps down.

He woke in darkness to the sounds of jumped-up music, the flying feet, the bubbly roar of communal fun. The carefree music accompanying belonged to those who could be happy on this night, and he was not among that crowda"no way to be happy, maybe never would be again, as heartbreak can take hold and last far longer than mere scars and he sensed that to be true without quite knowing it from experience yet. He listened with his ear to the door for her voice, didn't hear it, her laughter, no, someone shouting her name, huh-uh, pondered the pleasing possibility that she might not have attended the dance after all, but decided to a then, there it was in the sudden ebb of sound between songs, her voice, her voice and her smell, he was certain he smelled her as well as heard her say, "Oh, no, I don't, Captain, but it's pretty decent of you to say so." He pulled the Teacher's bottle from a stretched and misshapen coat pocket, raised the rump and chugged some cure for what presently ailed him and might lame him now and forever, and a he must put a stop to this humiliation of his own making, these discordant feelings squabbling inside his chest while his thoughts turned now to meanly belittling himself for those d.a.m.ned effeminate responsesa"the schoolgirl weeping, sobs in front of a dirt farmer, for G.o.d's sake, while the generalized joy upstairs was insufferable, and demeaning to his person that so much pleasure came to so many nincomp.o.o.ps on this night when he would know none at all, and he was the one who counted, G.o.ddam a If they smelled smoke the pleasure would stop, the music would stop, they'd abandon the dance floor and chase down the outside steps coughing into the street, where Preacher Willard would blister them with his Old Testament tongue, and they might maybe blame the preacher, too. He could pull a prank like that, and when the smoke was more or less cleared they'd return upstairs but it wouldn't be the same, not after a sudden dose of fear had run in their veins and trembled their hearts.

He needed rags. Or straw. Rags or straw or a piece of tire and some newspaper pages. He stepped down into nearly complete darkness, only one small light shined above the opened doors, and began to feel around on the garage floor, walked over the stains from leaks and spills, into the corners, and found a sc.r.a.p of cardboard, a grocery sack wadded, and a washtub with rags inside. He built his fire on the second step from the top, sack underneath, cardboard on sack, then rags to make ugly black air that would be sucked through the gap at the bottom of the door and stream plumes of black stink in among all the twirling Jacks-and-Jills with their puny joy, and he held a match to the sack, hustled toward the outside door. He turned to watch the fire make black smoke, and it might've made some, he couldn't tell, but those rags popped with flames in only seconds.

He decided to get away and aimed for the door again, but of a sudden felt awful, small, silly and small and awful, and turned around to go kick out the flames he'd made but didn't want now. He stumbled on the first stair, wobbled backwards reaching for anything to hold him upright and heard three men snapping at each other in the alley just outside the doora""No, you won't, either."

"I can't have you parking that juice in here, soa""

"For chrissake, grab him, you Irish donkey." Then the same voice said several words so snarled and low their specifics were lost, but the tenor of the snarling was easily understood, and Glencross began again to fall and reached out, knocking something made of thin metal to the floor at the same moment that two gunshots were fired near the door, their reports lost in the music to those upstairs, maybe, but not in the garage, and the men with guns heard the metal clank and spin on concrete, saw a silhouette of Glencross, and shot. It felt like a shove, a hard nudge in the arm, but he raised a hand and touched blood and the suddenly burning staircase tapped heat to ground and a thin trickle of blue flames ate grease stains, gas stains, any stains on the floor and moved fast as a bad idea to the vehicles parked inside. He crawled toward escape in white linen, not exactly hidden, bottle cracked in his pocket, whisky running down his legs, past tires that were already holding flames, and stood then, and would always feel certain he was at that instant shot at again, at least once, but he made the door and ran. He looked back and saw them coming while flames behind began to rear up and hiss. He went into the alleya"he was seen by folks sitting in the upper windows to catch a cooling breeze, but none who survived understood what they were seeing or who was runninga"and the gunmen were so near he leapt sideways over fences and scooted on gra.s.s across yards, under bushes, but did not feel hidden and ran on in a whitish crouch. He heard the hoodlums searching, but turned onto Curry Street and dove into a backyard. (Judge Swann's, and both Mrs. Swann and her hired girl, Bettina Wenders, saw him from the back porch so clearly that Bettina thought he was calling on the Judge and said, "No, no, he's resting now.") He went over another fence and pushed up Hill Street and the world behind him broke open and flew into the air, and he turned to the sky fired by a risen fount of orange that swayed in a tower much taller than the skyline, and became still, saw a building crumpled to bits flung in the air and people falling, and he was unable to move, unable to move or look away, heard the enormous shrieks, the cries, the roasting in their agony, and would never know a day or a night when he didn't.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Daniel Woodrell was born in the Missouri Ozarks, left school and enlisted in the marines the week he turned seventeen, received his bachelor's degree at age twenty-seven, graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and spent a year on a Michener Fellowship. The Maid's Version is his ninth novel. Winter's Bone, his eighth novel, was made into a film that won the Sundance Film Festival's Best Picture Prize in 2001 and was nominated for four Academy Awards. Five of his novels were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the year. Tomato Red won the PEN West Award for the Novel in 1999, and The Death of Sweet Mister received the 2011 Clifton Fadiman Medal from the Center for Fiction. The Outlaw Alb.u.m was Woodrell's first collection of stories. He lives in the Ozarks near the Arkansas line with his wife, Katie Estill.

Also By Daniel Woodrell.

The Outlaw Alb.u.m.

Winter's Bone.

The Death of Sweet Mister.

Tomato Red.

Give us a Kiss: A Country Noir.

The Ones You Do.

Muscle for the Wing.

Woe to Live On (reissued as Ride With the Devil).

Under the Bright Lights.