Clay Hand (19 page)

The men were leaving when he went downstairs, and he got a civil greeting from them—because he had put heart into his greeting, he realized. The widow watched him through the first decent meal he had eaten in her house.

“There,” she said, pulling a napkin from the glass and giving it to him, “that’ll stay the morning with you. I never knew a one could put a decent face on him with an empty stomach.”

Phil emptied his coffee cup and permitted her to fill it. She half refilled her own. “I’ve often thought to myself, the reason we get hell and chastisement of a Sunday morning is the unfortunate priest having to preach without a morsel between him and salvation. You don’t hear the Protestants preaching hell and damnation in the morning, do you now?”

“I haven’t listened very often,” Phil said.

She shook her head. “I remember my mother saying at home, it’s the easy religion to live in, but the hard one to die in.” She thought about that a moment. “They’ve the queer sayings, for my own notion is when you’re ready to die, it’s small matter the one seeing you out. It’s the one seeing you in that counts. Do you know I was thinking of my Tim the whole night?”

She rubbed at the marks left by dirty sleeves on the oilcloth, and then looked up at him. “Do you think when my time’s come he’ll recognize me at all?”

“You’ll stand out in a hundred million souls, old lady,” he said, getting up.

She grinned at him gratefully. “I’ve done a few good things in my day along with the bad, although there’s times I’m hard put to account them. Where are you off to?”

He got his coat from the living room. “I don’t know for sure. I’m going back up that hill first—just to look again, and to think.”

She pulled herself up and followed him to the door. “And listen, Philip. Just listen. There’s things you hear listening, you’d never hear talking.”

“Speaking of hearing things, you’ve mice in the attic. I heard them this morning.”

“What?”

“Mice,” he repeated. “I think they’re in the attic.”

“Will you stop by Lavery’s then and have him save me a kitten? He’s having them round the store every week or so. And throw open the door to the chicken coop there on your way out.”

He stopped first at Lavery’s. On the porch, the milk cans were lined up, and beside them a wired bundle of newspapers. Through the front window he could see Lavery stoking the stove. He picked up the papers and carried them in. “Can I have one of these?”

“Help yourself. There’s a clipper there on the counter for the wire.”

Phil opened the bundle and then paged the Cincinnati paper. Nichols’ wire story was on page two. Tomorrow, page sixteen, he thought.

Lavery wiped his hands on his trousers and took one of the papers himself.

“Page two,” Phil said. “‘Sheriff orders search of inactive coal mine in journalist’s death.’”

“Bad business,” Lavery said. “The men are nervous as wild birds in a cage. Fields ought not have done that.”

“Even if it means solving Coffee’s death?”

“I’ll lay you ten to one it don’t solve it. And I say: even so, if it means the men are going out again and the closing of the whole mine in the end. There’s people who’ll starve over that, and all it is is a slower way of dying. It’s all very well for outsiders like yourself to come down here crying for justice over a man. There’s some of them down here crying for justice fifty years or more, and they’re miserable when they’ve got it in their hands.” Lavery folded the paper and put it back with the stack. “Life ain’t so damned expensive around here as it is some places.”

“What the devil kind of logic is that?” Phil said. “If Coffee was doing a job down here it was for the men’s good. He wasn’t the sort to come here to exploit them.”

Lavery aimed at the spittoon, missed it, and rubbed his foot viciously on the floor. “Didn’t he? Don’t tell me about Naperville. I know all about it. He went in there when the explosion was done. He did up a fine story on it and got a medal for it. Congressmen went down and shook their heads over it, John L. Lewis shouted himself hoarse and proclaimed a mourning. A hundred high mucky-mucks beat their breasts in front of the world, and donated enough money to keep the families alive for the year. There were seventy-seven men died. Four hundred and seventy-seven lived. What happened to them? Did they go back to a better, safer place to work? They did not. The mine was closed. So don’t talk to me about Naperville.”

“It was you who brought it up,” Phil said. “Give me a package of cigarets.”

Lavery went round the counter and gave him the brand he pointed to. “Do you see the sense of what I’m saying, man?”

“The sense but not the solution,” Phil said. It was the old two-headed monster: progress and obsoleteness. Men didn’t change skills the way they changed shirts. Nor did industries convert themselves, although their chance was better. He opened the cigaret package. “Mrs. O’Grady wants a kitten from your next batch.”

“I can give her choice now of five generations.”

H
E SAT ATOP THE CLIFF
a long time, watching the rise of smoke above Number Two and along the tracks. He heard the trains rattle as cars coupled and uncoupled, and the occasional shouts of men. All the sounds seemed to come to him in twos. The sun was trying to break through a barrage of clouds. He saw Rebecca Glasgow come out of the house far below him, and flattened himself to the ground lest she look up and see him, and decide not to graze the goats that day. He heard the thin bleat of the animals at the sight of her, and saw them prance around her as she threw the gate open. She herded them out toward the valley. Waiting, he rolled over on his back on the hard frosty ground. A flight of sparrows rose into the sky, moving soundlessly above him.

Listen, the widow had told him. He had listened and watched for over an hour. He closed his eyes. Sound was a little different when sight did not locate it. He heard a crow, two crows, and mentally traced their flight. Opening his eyes, he was amazed not to see them where he expected. There was only one crow flying, and it was at the opposite end of the valley from where he had expected it to be.

He stood up then and called out to Rebecca Glasgow. His voice rode round the hills. She looked at him, her hand flying up to wave and then falling away. He had startled her. Dick had called to her in this fashion, perhaps. He called again, sending the words “Answer me,” after her name.

She cupped her hands and called “Hello.” Her voice came, thin and strident, without echo.

He waved her toward him between the end of the cliff and the low slope that ran to the railroad sidings. Catching something of his excitement, she hurried the goats before her. One of them leaped over the first rise of the rocks and fled toward the track. Rebecca followed him and turned him back.

“Call me from there,” Phil shouted.

He heard his own voice coming back, apparently before she heard it at all. Then she called out, “Hello, up there.”

He saw her cup her hands, but it was several seconds before her voice reached him. He turned to the direction from which it seemed to come—the hill opposite the mine drift mouth. The experience was like seeing a sound film that was inaccurately synchronized. A moment’s wariness froze him where he stood. No one could have known these hills, the sound, the smell and the feel of them better than Rebecca Glasgow. But seeing her eager haste that he had awakened, he ran down the hill to meet her. The goats eyed him a moment and then skipped off.

“Let them go,” she said. “What is it?”

“Have you ever heard the echoes up there?”

“Many times.”

“Your voice came from the hill over there, not from where you were at all. I want to find out if the same thing happens calling out from there.”

“I’ll go,” she said. “Tell me where you want me to call from.”

“We’ll try it several places, both of us.”

He watched her long, sure strides down the slope. The goats bleated and trotted after her a way, and then settled in the valley near the drift mouth to munch their meager grazings. The echoes of their exchanges from different points varied in intensity. They moved along the hills, parallel to each other, and then zigzag. Several times he saw her draw a sight on him, lining him up with some familiar object. He did not know the landscape that well. It would only add confusion if he were to try it. Finally they met near the abandoned mouth. Her eyes upon him were intense. He wondered if his own were as wild.

“Could there be another entry to this section, Rebecca?”

“More than one. There’s one between our place and the face of the cliff.”

“That wouldn’t do. There’s no echo reaches the top there from your place. They’re all back here.”

Without speaking, she led the way through the valley. For a time Phil traced in his mind the mine entry beneath him. That, too, was confusion. He could not begin to be accurate in his recollection of the course they had taken underground. After several hundred yards, they came upon another entry, this one almost obscured by the shaggy overgrowth. A rabbit darted out from it. Phil jumped. For an instant a quick, nervous smile played across the woman’s face. It was the first time he had seen a trace of one in her.

“Did you ever see Laughlin around here?”

“No. Your friend was never here, either, that I know of. I had forgotten about it.”

Phil examined the rotting boards without touching them. They looked to have been undisturbed for many years. It was Rebecca who hunted through the scrub around it and broke off a good-sized stick. She brought it back and pried it between one of the boards and the frame. The board gave before the stick did.

Phil nodded. “It’s been used lately, all right. I don’t think we’d better go any further without the sheriff.”

Already the dankness from within the mine escaped to them. “Will you go up toward the cliff… No, I’ll go. You stay here and listen.”

“I’ll go,” she said. “I’m used to climbing.”

No word had passed between them yet as to the meaning of their exploration. But Phil was well aware of it the moment he heard her voice bounce back from the opposite hill, where she was standing near the cliff from which Dick had fallen. He waved with both hands, a signal of satisfaction, and went to meet her.

He offered her a cigaret. “Do you smoke, Rebecca?” He realized then he had used her first name before without thinking about it.

“I’d like a cigaret now, if you please.” The fingers in which she took it trembled.

As he cupped the match for her and held it, he saw that she was crying. She could not cry easily, he thought. Nor would her tears come from some transient emotion…because she would not permit herself such emotional indulgence in his presence. He did not meet her eyes when they rose to his above the match. He lighted his own cigaret and then pointed to the hill opposite the cliff. “What’s over behind there, Rebecca?”

“Another hill.”

“But between them are the railroad tracks?”

“Yes.”

“Does this hill have as abrupt a drop as the one Dick fell from?”

“No. The rise is about the same, but the decline is more gradual. Only near the tracks there’s a drop of about twelve feet.”

Phil nodded. “Then if Dick came out this entry—say he came out in a hurry, thinking it was the one at the other end of the valley—if he had come out here and it was dark, he might have run up the hill toward your place, thinking he was going in the opposite direction.”

“Yes. That could very well have happened,” she said. “He was probably guiding himself by the sound of the train, and was actually following the echo.”

“It isn’t too farfetched to suppose that he was following someone, is it?” Phil said evenly, although he felt the tension straightening every fiber of him.

“No. It’s not farfetched. Dick knew these hills well. He must have been rather desperate to take the chance.”

“The person he was following must have known the deception of the hills, too.”

“I don’t know that,” Rebecca said.

“You know it as well as I do,” Phil said. “We’re both trying to get at the truth by looking at all the possibilities. Aren’t we?”

She did not answer him.

How great was her loyalty to Glasgow, he wondered. Before he and Margaret had come to Winston, it was common knowledge that Fields had started on that tack, Glasgow’s having killed him, using the time alibi of his work. Randy Nichols had picked it up within an hour of getting into town. His next question was abrupt, but he hoped that her thinking might parallel his own and make it seem a natural part of their combined exploration.

“Why did you marry Glasgow?”

“Because he asked me. Because I was sick of my father’s solicitude and the town’s contempt. I thought a husband—I don’t know what I thought a husband was. Happiness, I guess.”

“Have you been happy with him?”

She looked at him then, her long face old and homely in its bitterness. She brushed the tears away without shame. “Dick asked me that, too. I’ll tell you the truth, Mr. McGovern. I’d like to see him hang for Dick’s murder.” She turned her back on him and hurried through the valley. Nor would she wait when he called to her. Instead, she began running, and he could imagine the tears falling freely. He walked in the opposite direction, past the newly found entry, coming presently to the highway. There he hitched a ride into town in the first farm truck passing.

T
HE SHERIFF WAS AT
his desk when Phil reached Krancow’s. He listened to Phil’s story without interruption, but his face showed no enthusiasm for it. “I thought about that some,” he said finally. “I didn’t get it worked out like you did, of course. But the truth is, I’ve been afraid of it coming out that way.”

“Why?”

Fields rubbed his chin with the flat of his hand. “How do you think you can bring an indictment for murder against an echo?”

“At least we can prove it wasn’t suicide,” Phil said.

Fields looked at him. “Would you settle for that?”

“Not if it was murder.”

Fields shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe before we’re done we’ll both be glad to settle for it. Now I’ll give you some more information on your friend. He did a lot of traveling between the sixth of December and coming down here. Last night I checked it with the stories you brought me of his. He flew to Los Angeles December eighth, and from there to New Orleans, December fifteenth. Between then and January eleventh, he covered every doggone town on your list except Detroit. Everyone since after the war, that is.”