Why? A word so small, and yet large enough to drive us insane. But then a mind as pathologically sinister as Faunia's murderer's is not easy to probe. At the root of the cravings that drove this man, there is an impenetrable darkness that those who are not violent by nature or vengeful by design — those who have made their peace with the restraints imposed by civilization on what is raw and untrammeled in us all — can never know. The heart of human darkness is inexplicable. But that their car accident was no accident, that I do know, as sure as I know that I am united in grief with all who mourn the death of Athena's Faunia Farley, whose oppression began in the earliest days of her innocence and lasted to the instant of her death. That accident was no accident: it was what Coleman Silk yearned to do with all his might. Why? This “why” I can answer and I will answer. So as to annihilate not only the two of them, but, with them, all trace of his history as her ultimate tormentor. It was to prevent Faunia from exposing him for what he was that Coleman Silk took her with him to the bottom of the river.
One is left to imagine just how heinous were the crimes that he was determined to hide.
The next day Coleman was buried beside his wife in the orderly garden of a cemetery across from the level green sea of the college athletic fields, at the foot of the oak grove behind North Hall and its landmark hexagonal clock tower. I couldn't sleep the night before, and when I got up that morning, I was still so agitated over how the accident and its meaning was being systematically distorted and broadcast to the world that I was unable to sit quietly long enough even to drink my coffee. How can one possibly roll back all these lies? Even if you demonstrate something's a lie, in a place like Athena, once it's out there, it stays. Instead of pacing restlessly around the house until it was time to head for the cemetery, I dressed in a tie and jacket and went down to Town Street to hang around there — down to where I could nurse the illusion that there was something to be done with my disgust.
And with my shock. I was not prepared to think of him as dead, let alone to see him buried. Everything else aside, the death in a freak accident of a strong, healthy man already into his seventies had its own awful poignancy — there would at least have been a higher degree of rationality had he been carried off by a heart attack or cancer or a stroke. What's more, I was convinced by then — I was convinced as soon as I heard the news — that it was impossible for the accident to have occurred without the presence somewhere nearby of Les Farley and his pickup truck. Of course nothing that befalls anyone is ever too senseless to have happened, and yet with Les Farley in the picture, with Farley as primary
To me, reaching this conclusion didn't seem at all motivated by a disinclination to accept the inexplicable for what it is — though it seemed precisely that to the state police the morning after Coleman's funeral, when I went to talk to the two officers who'd been first at the scene of the accident and who'd found the bodies. Their examination of the crash vehicle revealed nothing that could corroborate in any way the scenario I was imagining. The information I gave them — about Farley's stalking of Faunia, about his spying on Coleman, about the near-violent confrontation, just beyond the kitchen door, when Farley came roaring at the two of them out of the dark — was all patiently taken down, as were my name, address, and telephone number. I was then thanked for my cooperation, assured that everything would be held in strictest confidence, and told that if it seemed warranted they would be back in touch with me.
They never were.
On the way out, I turned and said, “Can I ask one question? Can I ask about the disposition of the bodies in the car?”
“What do you want to know, sir?” said Officer Balich, the senior of the two young men, a poker-faced, quietly officious fellow whose Croatian family, I remembered, used to own the Madamaska Inn.
“What exactly did you find when you found them? Their placement. Their posture. The rumor in Athena —”
“No, sir,” Balich said, shaking his head, “that was not the case. None of that's true, sir.”
“You know what I'm referring to?”
“I do, sir. This was clearly a case of speeding. You can't take that curve at that speed. Jeff Gordon couldn't have taken that curve at that speed. For an old guy with a couple glasses of wine playing tricks on his brain to drive round that bend like a hot-rodder—”
“I don't think Coleman Silk ever in his life drove like a hot-rodder, Officer.”
“Well...,” Balich said, and put his hands up in the air, the palms to me, suggesting that, with all due respect, neither he nor I could possibly know that. “It was the professor who was behind the wheel, sir.”
The moment had arrived when I was expected by Officer Balich not to insert myself foolishly as an amateur detective, not to press my contention further, but politely to take my leave. He had called me sir more than enough times for me to have no hallucinations about who was running the show, and so I did leave, and, as I say, that was the end of it.
The day Coleman was to be buried was another unseasonably warm, crisply lit November day. With the last of the leaves having fallen from the trees during the previous week, the hard bedrock contour of the mountain landscape was now nakedly exposed by the sunlight, its joints and striations etched in the fine hatched lines of an old engraving, and as I headed to Athena for the funeral that morning, a sense of reemergence, of renewed possibility, was inappropriately aroused in me by the illuminated roughness of a distant view obscured by foliage since last spring. The no-nonsense organization of the earth's surface, to be admired and deferred to now for the first time in months, was a reminder of the terrific abrasive force of the glacier onslaught that had scoured these mountains on the far edge of its booming southward slide. Passing just miles from Coleman's house, it had spat out boulders the size of restaurant refrigerators the way an automatic pitching machine throws fastball strikes, and when I passed the steep wooded slope that is known locally as “the rock garden” and saw, starkly, undappled by the summer leaves and their gliding shadows, those mammoth rocks all tumbled sideways like a ravaged Stonehenge, crushed together and yet hugely intact, I was once again horrified by the thought of the moment of impact that had separated Coleman and Faunia from their lives in time and catapulted them into the earth's past. They were now as remote as the glaciers. As the creation of the planet. As creation itself.
This was when I decided to go to the state police. That I didn't get out there that day, that very morning, even before the funeral, was in part because, while parking my car across from the green in town, I saw in the window of Pauline's Place, eating his breakfast, Faunia's father — saw him seated at a table with the woman who'd been steering his wheelchair up at the mountain cemetery the day before. I immediately went inside, took the empty table beside theirs, ordered, and, while pretending to read the
They were talking about a diary. Among the things of hers that Sally and Peg had turned over to Faunia's father, there had been Faunia's diary.
“You don't want to read it, Harry. You just don't want to.”
“I have to,” he said.
“You don't have to,” the woman said. “Believe me you don't.”
“It can't be more awful than everything else.”
“You don't want to read it.”
Most people innate themselves and lie about accomplishments they have only dreamed of achieving; Faunia had lied about failing to reach proficiency at a skill so fundamental that, in a matter of a year or two, it is acquired at least crudely by nearly every school-child in the world.
And this I learned before even finishing my juice. The illiteracy had been an act, something she decided her situation demanded. But why? A source of power? Her one and only source of power? But a power purchased at what price? Think about it. Afflicts herself with illiteracy too. Takes it on voluntarily. Not to infantilize herself, however, not to present herself as a dependent kid, but just the opposite: to spotlight the barbaric self befitting the world. Not rejecting learning as a stifling form of propriety but trumping learning by a knowledge that is stronger and prior. She has nothing against reading per se — it's that pretending not to be able to feels right to her. It spices things up. She just cannot get enough of the toxins: of all that you're not supposed to be, to show, to say, to think but that you are and show and say and think whether you like it or not.
“I can't burn it,” Faunia's father said. “It's hers. I can't just throw it in the trash.”
“Well, I can,” the woman said.
“It's not right.”
“You have been walking through this mine field all your life. You don't need more.”
