Tuesday, April 1, 1930
By the time he headed out to Lake George to talk with Jonathon Ketchem’s brother, Harry McNeil was beginning to think that Mrs. Ketchem was right about not seeing her husband again.
He had started with Ketchem’s buddies, four names on the top of the list. His first call was pretty much a bust. He had scarcely descended from the Ford when Hutch Shaw’s wife, washing the windows at the front of their narrow row house, yelled, “He’s not here!” What followed was mostly a waterfall of complaints about how the economy had forced her husband into working for a road crew building up past Warrensburg, and now every day he had to travel all the way to Warrensburg, for heaven’s sake, and what kind of life was that for a man with children?
The two useful pieces of information Harry winkled out of Mrs. Shaw before escaping were that neither she nor her husband had spoken with Jonathon Ketchem since Friday before last, and that all the men Mrs. Ketchem had listed were members of the Grange and the VFW.
“So you two were in the Great War together?” he asked Arent De Grave, a blocky blond whose good-sized farm seemed unthreatened by the hard times that had sent poor Hutch Shaw up to Warrensburg.
“Ayup,” Arent said, pitching a forkful of rotted manure onto his spreader. They were standing in the cobbled yard between De Grave’s two barns, and except for the pile of crumbling manure that had been composting over the winter, everything was clean enough to eat off of, in that particularly Dutch way Harry always admired but could never achieve.
Arent continued, “That is, we were both in it. I was in Dordogne. Jon sat the whole thing out in Fort Knox, running their motor pool.”
“So you knew him before the war?”
De Grave tossed another forkful into the already heavily loaded spreader and then swept his hand past his tidy white house, past the firepond, to a notch between two hills where a many-gabled roof could be seen. “That’s the Ketchem place. My family’s been farming next door since my dad moved us from North Cossayuharie in aught- six.”
“They there? Mr. and Mrs. Ketchem?”
De Grave shook his head. “They’ve got hired hands running the place over winter. Mr. Ketchem’s been having a bad time of it with his lungs, so they went out west for the winter. I imagine they’ll be coming back right soon, but they ain’t home yet.”
“Is anyone living in the house?”
“Nope. The hands that ain’t married have their own place, back along the crick.” He paused for a moment. “You’re thinking Jon might have gone to his parents’ house. I would have seen a light there if anyone had been inside the last two nights. Besides, I can’t imagine Jon running back to his mom and pop. That’s the last thing he’d do.”
“So you know him pretty well.”
“As well as anyone, I reckon.”
Harry kicked a clump of hay-studded manure out of his way. “Tell me true now. Is he likely to be off on a bender?”
Arent De Grave rested his pitchfork against the cobbled stones and looked at Harry. “Now where would he be getting booze around here, Chief?”
Harry sighed. “I’m not asking where anybody’s getting anything. But your friend walked out on his wife in a temper and hasn’t been seen since. Most men, that means they’re either drinking or whoring.”
De Grave raised his barely there blond eyebrows.
“Or they’re bivouacking with a friend. So how ’bout it? Which category would you place Jonathon Ketchem in?”
“He’s not here.” De Grave dug his pitchfork into the manure pile and tossed another twenty pounds into the spreader. “Who-all’s on that list you got?”
Harry pulled the creased paper from his back pocket. “You, Hutch Shaw, Leslie Bain, and Garry MacEacheron.”
“We’re all of us married men. With kids. I can’t imagine any of those men’s wives not picking up the phone and letting Jane know that Jonathon was there.” He smiled, almost shyly. “I know for sure my missus would.”
“Could he be holed up in a speakeasy someplace? Maybe gone to Glens Falls, taken a room there?”
De Grave clanged the pitchfork tines against the cobbles to loosen the muck and kicked what remained off with the edge of his boot. “Help me get the team hitched up,” he said, walking into the barn. Harry followed him. For a moment, his vision shut down in the difference between the bright, chill sunshine outside and the warm animal gloom inside. Two enormous geldings, half-Percheron by the looks of them, stood patiently, and Harry was relieved to see that they were already in tack. It had been a long time since he had harnessed up his own dad’s team, and he didn’t want to look a citified fool fumbling around in front of De Grave. “This is Ned”-De Grave indicated the horse at the left-hand block-“and that one is Nick.”
Harry took Nick by the bit strap, scratched his neck, and stroked the outside of his nostrils with a light finger. From between black leather blinders, Nick looked down on him with clever brown eyes that seemed to say,
Harry led Nick out of the barn, blinking again as they emerged into the light. “Nick is the far horse,” De Grave called over his shoulder, and Harry led his charge to the right side of the rig. The gelding was so well behaved that the slightest pressure of Harry’s hand on his bit rein caused him to back neatly into his place beside the spreader’s wagon tongue. Harry and De Grave lifted the crossbar, and Harry held it steady while the farmer clipped Ned’s straps to the bar’s left ring and adjusted their tension. Then Harry did the same for Nick while De Grave returned to the tack room to retrieve the heel chains, which would attach the horses’ tack to the spreader itself.
De Grave came about the front of the team and handed Harry a three-foot chain, thick and heavy enough to break a skull open with one blow. “So how ’bout it?” Harry asked as he smoothed a hand over Nick’s broad flank. “Is Jonathon the type of man to have poured himself into a bottle? Does he have a girl somewhere who might have taken him in?”
He bent down to clip on the chain, and through the stolid stacks of the horses’ hind legs, he could catch glimpses of De Grave: muck boots and faded pants and hands that looked older than his thirty-some years, meticulously attaching chain to ring, checking the latch, checking the straps.
“Jonathon liked his whiskey as much as the next man in his younger days,” he said, his words slow and thoughtful. “He never was a temperance man, that I heard. But I haven’t seen him near liquor for… well…” He stood, resting one hand on Ned’s muscular croup. “Well, not since his children passed.”
Harry stood up, the heel chain still dangling from his hands. “What?” He could just see De Grave’s head over the horses’ rumps. “What do you mean, after his children passed? I thought he and his wife had the one daughter.”
De Grave nodded. “She was born after. They had four youngsters before. All of ’em died of the black diphtheria in ’24.”
“Good God.”
“Sometimes His will is hard. Hard to bear.” De Grave’s hand traced the leather lines of the straps crisscrossing Ned’s hip and rump. “Jonathon was different after that.”
“Different how?”
De Grave tilted his head up and squinted at the pale blue sky of early spring. “He had always been real certain about where he was going, what he wanted. He was going to make a big success of his farm, buy more land, do better than his father. After the children passed, he just sort of… spun free.”
“You mean he started acting up? Getting wild?”
“No, no, just the opposite. He didn’t have any more spark for fun in him, I think. He was more like…” Harry waited while the farmer chose his words with care. “Like a working barge that’s been set adrift on the river. You see it traveling downstream, it may look like it’s doing what it’s always done, but there’s no purpose there. No hand on the tiller.”
