Turner’s Ace Hardware. And he’d flip them off again when he disappeared suddenly and went away to college. The coach at Colgate had told him to call anytime, anytime you change your mind, Mr. Poe. Well, he thought, I have changed my mind. I am going to call him.
It seemed his head was getting clear, things would be alright. Then he thought: my coat. My letter jacket is sitting in that machine shop with my name and player number on it, right next to a dead man and probably covered in blood. They would find the body it was only a matter of time and it would not be Isaac English they’d come after. It would be him, Billy Poe, the one who had a reputation, he’d nearly killed that boy from Donora, it was self- defense but that was not how anyone else saw it.
They would get his jacket and the body as well. We will drag it to the river, he thought. How many deer had he dragged out of the woods—it would be no different. Only he knew it would be. But there was no choice about it. They would have to go back.
3. Isaac
Isaac didn’t sleep and in the morning he could hear the old man moving around downstairs. When he’d come in the previous night, he and the old man had looked at each other and nodded and the old man hadn’t said anything about the stolen money.
From the window of his second- floor room he could see that the snow had already melted on all the hills. He remembered looking out this same window in the dark when the mill still ran and the night sky was enormous with fire. It was a faint memory from youth. It was not the first dead bum that year. The other they found in that old house, January. Froze to death. Except this one didn’t die—was killed. That was the difference. This is the one they won’t let go.
It was a strange time of year, not quite spring and not quite winter— certain trees were already leafed in while others were still bare. It would be a warm day. All the hills and hollows and nooks—it felt comforting. There wasn’t a flat piece of land for a hundred miles. Hidden away wherever you were. That will not help you with the Swede, he thought. They will find the Swede eventually and they will not be on your side—see a dead man, think mother father brother sister man. Think I am a man like him. Don’t let dead men lie without asking why. Dog left to rot—man is different. Do dogs look at dead dogs and wonder? No, you’ve seen it, they walk by without looking. Nature of a dog to accept a dead dog.
He could feel things were changing. This is your room but soon it won’t be. A picture of his mother over his desk, smiling, young and pretty and bashful. A few awards from the science fair, first prize in seventh, eighth, ninth grade. No more after that—they didn’t understand your projects. You knew they wouldn’t but you went ahead anyway. Quarks and leptons, string theory, and then you learned your lesson. Half of them think the earth is four thousand years old. The others aren’t much better—Colonel Boyd telling the class that humans had once had gills but the gills disappeared when we stopped using them.
He went back to looking out the window. He had always admired his sister for her easy way with people, tried to learn from her. Only now you see the cost—she lies more easily than you do. Same as the old man. No, he thought, the old man is different. Doesn’t understand or have interest in anyone but himself. Meanwhile ask yourself if you’d act any better in his shoes—spine broken at L1, progressive neuropathy. Or take Stephen Hawking—your favorite crippled genius abandons his wife. Twenty- six years of changing his bedpan and then—sorry, honey, I think it’s time for a newer model. He and the old man would understand each other well.
He looked at the clock and tried to remember when Poe was coming. Did we set a time? He couldn’t remember. That was unusual. He made a note of it.
There was the sound of a car turning up the driveway and he jumped up and ran to the window to see a white sedan—cop? No. A Mercedes. Lee’s car. She must have left Connecticut in the middle of the night to be getting in now. He watched her park next to the house. Knows you stole the money, is why. Christ. He began to feel even worse. I don’t care, he said out loud. She’s done a lot worse herself. But had she? It was hard to explain exactly what she’d done. Left you here, he thought. Promised she’d come back for you but she didn’t. Meanwhile that car she’s driving is worth more than this house.
He heard her come into the house and greet their father downstairs and a few minutes later he heard her on the stairs, coming up to see him. He slipped quietly under the covers and pretended to be asleep.
She hesitated outside the door, listening for a long time before opening it silently, just slightly. He felt the air coming in. She stood there, she must have been looking at him, he didn’t open his eyes. He felt himself choke up but he kept his breathing even. He could imagine her face, nearly the same as their mother’s, the same dark skin and short hair and high cheekbones. She was a very pretty girl.
“Isaac?” she whispered, but he didn’t answer her.
She stood a minute or two longer and then finally she closed the door and went downstairs.
Was that right? he thought. I don’t know. How many promises can someone break before you stop forgiving them? There had been a time, most of his life, really, when it had been very different. When he and his sister could finish each other’s thoughts, when at any given time each would know exactly what the other was doing, whether at school or just in a different part of the sprawling brick house. If he had a bad day, he would go to his sister’s room and sit on the foot of her bed while she read or did homework. He went to her before he went to his mother. The three of them, Isaac, Lee, and their mother, had been like a family within the family. Then their mother had killed herself. Then Lee went off to Yale. His one visit, she’d taken him around the campus, all the tall stone ivy- covered buildings, and he knew it was where she belonged, and where he would someday follow her, but here he was, twenty years old and still living in Buell. And now, he thought.
None of it was permanent. The Swede will go back to the soil, blood goes from sticky thick to dust, animals eat you back to the earth. Nice black dirt means something died here. The things you could trace— blood, hair, fingerprints, bootprints—he didn’t see how they would get away with it and there was a picture fixed in his mind of the Swede with his face shining and the bloody color of the light on him. He had never stopped looking at the spot between the Swede’s eyes, even after the shot was gone from his hand. Made it go into him. With my mind I made it hit him there. He tried to call back the Swede’s hands to see a weapon but he couldn’t. His hands had been empty. Unarmed man, worst words there are. Why did you throw that thing at him? Because he had a look on his face. Because I couldn’t get at the Mexican—might have hit Poe. The Mexican had a knife to Poe’s neck but that was not the one you killed. The dead man was the one standing there doing nothing.
Basis of everything, he thought. Pick your own over a stranger. Dead Swede for living Poe. Ten dead Swedes or a hundred. Long as it’s the enemy. Ask any general. Ask any priest—millions die in the Bible, no problem if God says thumbs- up. Babies, even—dash em on the rocks say Jesus made me do it. The Word of God and the hand of man. Done the deed now wash your hands.
In the early afternoon he saw Poe come up to the edge of the field, two hundred yards away, and he dressed quickly and put on his shoes and coat and went out the window, hanging by his fingertips before dropping the rest of the way to the ground. His sister had come up to check on him but he’d locked the door.
As he looked back at the house, a big Georgian Revival originally built for one of the steelmill’s managers, he saw the old man sitting on the back porch in his wheelchair, his broad back and thin arms and white hair, looking out over the rolling hills, forest interspersed with pastures, the deep brown of the just- tilled fields, the wandering treelines marking distant streams. It was a peaceful scene and he wasn’t sure if the old man was sleeping or awake. Like an old planter looking over his plantation— how much overtime he worked to buy this house. How proud he was of the house, and look at it now. No wonder you’re always feeling guilty.
High- stepping through the tall grass he made for the stand of trees at the bottom of the property where the spring came out, he knew them all—silver maple and white oak and shellbark hickory, ash and larch. There was the redbud he and his father had planted, in full bloom now, pink against the green of the other trees. Judas tree. Fitting name. Poe was sitting there, waiting for him in the shadows.
“You get any strange knocks on the door?” he said.
