The Fisherman (15 page)

Rainer notices this. He sees his daughter squeezing her eyes shut against the vertigo of the situation and crosses the room to her. Catching Lottie by the shoulders, he says, “I know. I know you’re thinking, ‘Who are these crazy people, and what have they done with my mama and papa?’ It is difficult to hear us talking like this, isn’t it? Here we are, your parents, who yell at you for too much day-dreaming, and we’re saying there could be
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making dead people get up and walk around. What’s next? A witch in a gingerbread house? A handsome prince who’s been changed into a beast? A little mermaid who wants to be a real girl? It is like a storybook. It is like you’ve fallen into one of the stories we used to read you when you were a child. You don’t understand everything, but you understand enough, and that knowledge, it twists things, doesn’t it? Maybe you are afraid this is madness?” Lottie nods. He’s pretty much hit the nail on the head. Rainer goes on, “I thought the same thing, the first time I—I thought the same thing, once. I thought I could feel my sanity slipping away, the way water does when you try to hold it in your hands. I wasn’t insane, though. I wasn’t, and you aren’t. This doesn’t make a lie out of everything else. It complicates it, yes, but it’s not a lie. Do you understand?”

Lottie doesn’t, not as much as she thinks she wants to, but she nods anyway, because she isn’t sure she can keep listening to this man who looks so much like her beloved father, yet talks like someone else entirely. She wants to flee the scene, run away to her bed and hide herself in sleep, and after Rainer hugs her tightly and releases her, she makes a beeline for her bedroom. She hasn’t taken two steps before Clara catches her by the arm. “You wanted to know,” Clara says. There’s something in her mother’s voice, a kind of quaver like, that the instant Lottie hears it makes her realize that, once upon a time, her mother went through what’s happening to her now. She thinks back to those late night conversations—arguments, really—between her parents while the scandal was breaking around her father at the University. She remembers her mother walking around the house during the day in a daze. It was this, Lottie understands. Her father had been forced to tell her mother about it. Her mother had demanded and he had told her in such a way that she had no choice but to accept. “You wanted to know,” Clara says again, jerking Lottie out of her own thoughts. “So. You know. You will live with this. Do you understand? You will live with this.” Clara might be talking to herself. She says, “What is happening will be seen to. Your father will find out what needs to be done, and he will do it. He is right. This is bad business. It must be seen to. You heard about today?”

“Yes,” Lottie says.

“That is what we can expect,” Clara says, “that and worse. That foolish man started what will get worse.” Without further ado, no reassuring hug, Clara releases her, and Lottie retreats to the safety of her bedroom. As you might guess, sleep, when at last it comes, is not the cozy sanctuary she hoped for. She never said what her dreams were, but I imagine at least some of them have to do with the events of that afternoon, what Clara asked Lottie if she’d heard about and Lottie said she had. Seemed most of the camp knew about it five minutes after it happened. Helen reappeared, you see, though that was only part of the story, and not the one that set everyone’s tongue wagging.

X

I suppose we have to backtrack to Rainer and his fellows standing around George’s corpse. Once the men have determined that George has indeed shuffled off his mortal coil, most of them flee the scene. No doubt some were terrified by what they’d been part of, but likely the majority wanted out of there before anyone in authority, namely the police, shows up. The camp has its own police force, and while I don’t know that they’re much worse than any other police force at the time, I haven’t heard that they were any better. These fellows are all immigrants, besides, and the last thing they want is to be associated with a strange death. Their jobs are the best some of them have held since coming to this country, and they aren’t going to do anything to jeopardize that.

So it falls to Rainer to walk to the police station and inform them that his neighbor has passed on. As a stonemason, one of the skilled workers, he’s in a better position to convey such information, and the fact that his English is better than most doesn’t hurt. He decides to say that, as far as he can tell, George died of a fit, which is close enough to the truth for him to be able to stick to it. And stick to it he does, even though the cop he tells stares at him for an uncomfortably long time after he’s finished speaking, as if he thinks he can stare a confession out of Rainer. When the officer gets up from his chair and accompanies Rainer back to George’s, somewhat to Rainer’s surprise the officer agrees that Rainer’s assessment appears to be correct. He’ll have to send over to Woodstock for the undertaker, the cop says, Rainer’s free to go. He thanks the cop, and takes his leave.

No one person witnesses all of what happens next. Lottie pieces most of it together from the combined gossip of a dozen different people that day and the next. The substance of it is simple. The undertaker’s assistant, a young fellow by the name of Miller Jeffries, who’s sent by his boss to collect George’s body, upon his return to Woodstock shotguns his boss, then drives back to the camp to shoot his sweetheart and himself. The consensus among the camp’s population is that Jeffries lost his mind, which is what the residents of the camp tell the newspaper reporters who show up to cover the crime. I know: not the most earth-shattering of explanations. No one breathes a word about the reason for Jeffries’s insanity, although a good portion of the camp traces it to the trip he took to fetch that body. A smaller number of people know that he met Helen, the dead man’s dead wife, who was waiting in the house for him when he arrived. About an hour before Jeffries shows up, folks see her walking up the street to her house. One moment, the street is empty. The next, she’s in it, as if she turned a corner in the air and appeared. She makes her muddy way to the house, and takes a seat next to her husband’s corpse. Maybe she’s expecting the undertaker himself. He’s otherwise engaged, though, so it’s Jeffries who’s taken the black horse and wagon over from Woodstock. He’s a bit strange-looking, is Miller. The papers describe him as short, with bow-legs and long arms. Word is, he isn’t the brightest candle in the box, either. Lottie, who met him a couple of times in passing, said his face looked like he was trying to solve a difficult math problem that was beyond him. He climbs down from his wagon, enters the house, and meets what’s waiting for him.

A neighbor passing by the house a few minutes later glances in a window and sees Jeffries standing with his head bowed, Helen seated in front of him. The neighbor doesn’t hear Helen saying anything to Jeffries, but he’s in a hurry to get someplace and doesn’t pay much attention. Whatever Miller Jeffries learns in the ten minutes he spends inside that house sends him out of it with more determination in his stride than anyone could recall him ever having shown. The corpse that occasioned his trip he leaves lying. He rides back to Woodstock, to the undertaker’s, where he has a small room at the back, as well as a shotgun no one knows about tucked under the mattress of his bed. He finds his boss bending over a body he’s almost done preparing for burial. As far as anyone can tell later on, there’s no dramatic confrontation, no melodramatic scene. Jeffries simply lifts the shotgun and blows a hole in the undertaker’s back. The impact bounces the man off the coffin he’s leaning over. As he lies there, Jeffries walks over to him and empties the shotgun’s remaining barrel into his groin. He reloads, and shoots the undertaker twice more, a second time in the groin, and once in the face. When he’s finished, he takes the horse and cart and returns to the camp, to the hospital, where his sweetheart is a nurse. He finds her talking to a patient, a man recovering from the flu, raises the shotgun, and shoots her through the heart. She collapses onto her patient’s bed, and that fellow will tell the reporters he was sure he was next, but Jeffries only looked at him with dull eyes, said, “She told me everything,” and turned the shotgun on himself.

It’s a pretty sensational event. The Catskills have seen their fair share of murders over the years—more, probably, than most folks realize—but this one causes a stir far and wide. There’s even a song written about it, “She Told Him Everything.” For a short time later that year, it enjoys a measure of success. Pete Seeger used to sing it once in a while. I think he recorded it, too. The song’s written from the point of view of Jeffries’s sweetheart, and portrays her as torn between two men, Jeffries, who’s cast as a kind of schoolgirl crush, and the undertaker, who’s presented as the girl’s true love. She wants to do right by Jeffries, but she can’t deny her feelings. Finally, she tells him, tells him everything, as the title says, and that’s that. Tragedy.

Obviously, there was something going on between Jeffries’s sweetheart and his boss. Well, he thought there was, at least. What the song misses is the source of Jeffries’s information. From his final words, the songwriter, following the newspapers, assumes that Jeffries learned of his sweetheart’s betrayal from her lips, that she confessed the whole thing to him. No one told the songwriter about Jeffries’s meeting with Helen. If they had, he might have penned a different song.

Lottie knows about that meeting, as do Clara and Rainer. For Lottie’s parents, there’s no doubting what happened. Helen told Miller Jeffries his sweetheart’s secret, and, in so doing, signed the death warrants for the girl and both her lovers. If they required any further proof of the urgency of the situation, this is it, in spades.

As it so happens, they’re going to receive still more evidence, whether they want it or not. While Rainer pores over his books late into the night, sleeping an hour, the dead woman continues her mischief. She isn’t around when the second undertaker comes from Wiltwyck for her husband’s body. I guess she had her fill of morticians. George’s mortal remains are carted off to Wiltwyck. I don’t know what becomes of him. Buried in a pauper’s grave, most likely. I think he’d drunk what little savings the family had. The children, though—whom I guess you’d have to call orphans, despite the fact that their mother was up and moving around—they receive another visit from Helen. The kids’ve stayed on at Italo and Regina’s, which is where their late mother finds them later the same day Miller Jeffries sends himself to his eternal reward. The day is just getting on to dusk. Italo is on his way home from work when he sees Helen ahead, lurching towards his house. Right away, he knows what she’s after, and, as he’ll tell Rainer the following morning, he’s simultaneously furious and afraid. Furious, because here’s the woman—the thing—that threatened his wife and children, not to mention the orphans, whom he’s already thinking of as his own. Afraid, because of the secret words she’s whispered through the door to Regina. He speeds up his pace, rushing past Helen to his house. Once inside, he doesn’t waste any time. He bolts the door and begins piling objects in front of it, the kitchen table, a trunk, a couple of chairs. The children he sends into the back room. Regina refuses to accompany them. I think she wants another crack at Helen.

They wait there behind Italo’s makeshift barricade, him clutching a hammer and chisel, Regina a cast-iron pan. His heart is pounding so hard he’s dizzy, Italo will report, and no doubt Regina felt the same. They wait there, and as the minutes drag by, they look at one another, confused. Granted, Helen moves slowly, but she should have been knocking on the door by now, uttering her request. Unless Italo was mistaken about her destination, which seems impossible. You know that line from the movies: “It’s quiet. Too quiet.” That’s how they feel. They wait, their nerves screaming with the strain. When they hear the crack at the back of the house, and the children shrieking, it’s almost a relief.

She went around the house, Helen, until she was outside the room where the children are huddled. She felt along the wall, and found a board that was loose and weak. While Italo and Regina stood ready at the front door, Helen worked her fingers under that loose board, gained a decent grip on it. She was quiet. None of the children noticed her fingers sliding steadily across the wood. None of them heard her easing the board back. It isn’t until she tears the board free, all at once, thrusting her arm inside and catching one of the children, Giovanni, by the hair, that the children are aware of their danger. Helen jerks her arm back, smashing Giovanni against the wall. She releases him, and he falls to the floor, motionless. She swipes at one of her own children, who dances away from her grip, and then she starts pressing on the board to the right of the one she ripped away. She’s coming in.

Before she can pry off that second board, however, Italo and Regina are in the room. The sight of their son lying in a heap on the floor tears a pair of wails from them, and they rush at the place where Helen has broken through, knocking over several of the children in their haste. Helen tries to withdraw her arm, but she isn’t fast enough, and hammer and pan blows rain down on it. More bones splinter and crack, one of them puncturing her white skin and spilling black blood. Italo stops his attack to grab Giovanni by his shirt and drag him out of harm’s reach, but Regina continues to pound Helen’s arm. When Italo relates these events to Rainer the following morning, Rainer will think that the sight of his wife’s fury unnerved his friend. By the time Regina pauses her assault long enough for Helen to draw her arm out, it isn’t so much an arm anymore as more of a flipper. Regina strikes the wall once, twice, screaming, “What words do you have for me now?” Helen doesn’t answer. Regina hits the wall a third time and throws the pan clattering down. She turns to tend Giovanni, who’s unconscious but alive, while Italo goes to check outside. He can think of few things he’s less inclined to, but he doesn’t know what else to do. Helen is gone. Italo follows the trail of her strange blood and muddy footprints out into the street, where it ceases, as if she’s walked off the earth.