The hippies came two years ago. Twenty or so of them stayed in the main house, the white one; another fifteen or so stayed in the smaller, yellow house. Some of them worked in town; some of them raised a good share of the food they ate; and a handful, from my observation, were so stoned most of the time that they couldn’t do much more than tell you what they’d seen in their last acid vision.
Peace and love, brother. Age of Aquarius. Brotherhood of Man. Every once in a while, stoned on nothing stronger than beer, I’d get caught up in one of the many rock songs that espoused those precepts. But then I’d remember Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, both of whom had died earlier this year, and I’d remind myself of how naive it all was. There was no peace and love in the slaughter of Vietnam or in the streets of bloody Detroit or Los Angeles.
In some respects I felt sorry for the hippies. I understood in a theoretical way what they were rebelling against. Our country was war-happy and our culture was pure Madison Avenue. What I didn’t understand were the ways they’d gone about expressing their distrust of society. I’d look at their babies and wonder what kind of lives the little ones would have. The same for the sanctimony of their language. Without seeming to realize it they were just as doctrinaire as the straight people they put down.
Then there were the drugs, which was how I’d gotten involved with the hippies. Since no other lawyer in town wanted to deal with them, and since the public defender’s office had only two attorneys, who worked eighteen-hour days as it was, I decided to help as many as I could. Clifford Sykes, our police chief, was jailing everybody who even looked as if he could spell marijuana (something I doubt Cliffie himself could do).
Marijuana I had no problem with. But I couldn’t see the social or spiritual benefits of dropping acid. I’d heard too many stories from the emergency room about young people who never quite recovered from their trips. In March two high schoolers had contrived a suicide plan and had, while acid fractured their minds, locked hands and jumped off Indian Point. They were skewered on the jagged rocks below.
These days chickens, cats, and an arthritic old dog had declared the weedy yard in front of the larger, two- story white farmhouse their private domain. A rusted plow and an old-fashioned refrigerator with the cooling coils on top sat on the edge of the yard, remnants from the farm before it had been deserted by the owners long ago. The enormous garden was in back. They were dutiful about keeping it plentiful. No matter how much pot, acid, and cheap wine filled the night they were up early to work their land. They’d planted corn, carrots, beets, spinach, lettuce, and cabbage. Using a battered wood-fired stove, they also baked bread. That was another surprise. One of them gave me a slice with strawberry jam on it one day, and damned if it didn’t taste good.
I snapped off the ignition key and slid out of the new Ford convertible I’d bought after my old Ford ragtop got too expensive to keep fixing up. Or maybe I got it to signal my father, who’d died three years ago, that in my thirties I was finally becoming the man he’d wanted me to be.
Now, as I stood under the glowing span of moon and stars, a song by Crosby, Stills, Nash amp; Young began streaming from the main house. A breeze fresh as a first kiss made me close my eyes for a moment and ride along with it to long-ago summers when my red Ford ragtop and the lovely Pamela Forrest had been my primary concerns.
When I turned to look at the house I saw Richard Donovan coming down the steps. His father was a colonel in the army, and Richard had inherited his military bearing. Richard even had a uniform of sorts-blue work shirt, brown or black corduroy trousers. They were always clean. The girls usually wound up doing the laundry for the boys-feminism, the new “ism,” had yet to make its mark on this commune-but Richard did his own. I’d seen him hanging his own shirt and a pair of trousers on the clothesline one day. He told me he didn’t trust anybody else to keep his stuff the way he wanted it.
In the windows on either side of the front door, faces watched us silently. Whatever had happened out here, everybody knew about it and they were waiting to see how I was going to react when Richard finally told me what was going on.
He was handsome in a severe, gaunt way. There was something of the Old West in the face, pioneer stock I suppose, and now anxiety filled the blue eyes and bulged the hinges of his jaw.
“We have an audience, Richard.”
“They’re scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of what I’m going to show you. They’re like little children. If I wasn’t here this place wouldn’t exist.”
Nobody would ever accuse Donovan of being modest. Or having a sense of humor. He was the absolute lord and master of this place as well as the final arbiter. The first few times he paid me to represent him-he didn’t seem to have a job so I wondered where the cash came from-he lectured me on how the country was going to be once the government “abdicated” and people like him took over. I didn’t like him much, and I suspected the feeling was mutual.
His gaze roamed to the tumbledown, once-red barn downslope from us. In my high school summers I’d detasseled corn, the hottest and hardest work I’d ever done, eight a.m. to seven p.m., in temperatures frequently rising to one hundred. By noon you’d eaten your weight in bugs. At the end of the day, waiting for the bus to take us day laborers back to town, I’d always throw myself on any amount of hay I could find in the cooling barn and go instantly to sleep. This barn, however, looked as though it might collapse on me while I slept.
He nodded in the direction of the lopsided structure and started walking. The ground here was hard and lightly sand-covered. The voices from the watchers grew louder as the music stopped. Some of them were on the porch now. They knew a lot more about what was going on than I did.
The barn was within several yards of the woods and the woods were less than a city block deep. Behind them ran a two-lane gravel county road. High school kids wanting to raise some hell had gotten on the commune property by coming up this way. They waited till late at night when the hippies were asleep and a good share of them stoned as well. They smashed a few windows and spray-painted some swastikas on the houses. Donovan was the only one who confronted them. He jumped on the leader of the kids and broke his nose and arm. Cliffie Sykes had been persuaded to charge only the kids. But the parents of the boy who Donovan had hurt had now sued him in civil court. I’d handle the trial when it came up.
There was no door on the barn. Shadows deeper than night awaited us inside. Donovan stalked right in. I lost him for a few seconds. That’s how dark it was. Then suddenly there was light in the form of a dusty kerosene lantern put to life with a stick match he blew out a second too late. He’d burned his fingers and cursed about it.
It was a conventional barn layout with stalls for animals and space for storing equipment. The haymow above us was accessible only by a ladder. The stalls were packed with boxes. This was a storage area. Since a good share of these kids-like some of the other hippies across the land-came from prosperous families, I wondered if they’d brought along some of the goodies from the old days.
The smells ranged from old manure to wood soaked by decades of rain. A few brittle bridles hung from posts; horses had probably been commonplace. As had a leaky ceiling; ruts from tractor tires still gouged the dirt floor in places. Tin signs from the thirties had been nailed to the walls, pop and cigarettes and chewing tobacco and gasoline. This was a time trap; if you stayed here long enough you could probably hear ghost music from that era.
“Nobody here knows anything about this. I want to make that clear.”
“I take it somebody’s dead.”
“Yes.” His face was taut with sudden anger. “They’ll probably be out here with pitchforks and torches when they find out.”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself. Calm down.”
“Yeah, calm down. All the bullshit we have to put up with just trying to live our lives. You live in a shithole of a town.”
He was already getting tiresome. “Show me where the body is.” He looked as if he was going to start preaching at me again. “Now.”
Donovan walked to a stall that held fewer boxes than the others. “Here.” Then: “Superdog kept barking so loud I had to see what was wrong. He brought me over here. At first I thought he was crazy. I mean, who cared about these boxes? But then I took them down. I should trust our dog more.”
The boxes were quickly stacked outside the stall. A filthy brown blanket had been thrown over a human body. A small, slender foot with a very white sock protruded from the bottom of the blanket.
I started forward but he stopped me. “I know who she is. She came out here a lot. The whole commune is in
