Читать книгу The Strange Death of Manny Square - A. B. Cunningham - Страница 3

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Only once in a blue moon had anything stirred Deer Lick like the strange death of Manny Square. Once long ago there had been an eclipse of the sun, and twilight had fallen when there should have been light. The legislature was in session, and drew up a solemn resolution that now was prophecy being fulfilled—the sun was refusing to give her light and the moon would be turned to blood. The citizens of the commonwealth were exhorted to prepare for the end of the world. Almost simultaneously Latobe, the blind prophet, tapped his way with his blacksnake cane to the crag below his mountain cabin, and muttering strange ritual through toothless gums, leapt into the air to fly to his home in the skies, but met a violent death in the treetops below. The epidemic struck Deer Lick, where Preacher Busk first sucked the ends of his handlebar mustache and then screamed the need of repentance, his voice shrill and cracked; while small boys ran wild in the tumult and sinners stormed the altar and received the gift of tongues. The excitement eventually subsided, but the event lived long in the minds of the old. Many a crone spoke of it with glittering eyes; and to the jeers of the young who said 10 that the world hadn’t come to an end, she would hint spitefully of irreverence and rock back and forth in her chimney-corner seat as if nursing a secret wisdom withheld from the young and unbelieving.

Again and much later excitement in Deer Lick had approached the proportions of a Great Fear. William McKinley had been assassinated, and Gus Luker had galloped down the bottom on a fleet sorrel dry under the saddle blanket, and had spread the news that his grandmother had foretold the event, having read it in the webs of spiders. She had seen the letters WM woven in a great web like a shawl. The spiders themselves were of a new kind—blood red in the torso and dragging fat bags the size of the end of the thumb; portentous spiders, weaving the prophecy with seriousness and unnatural wisdom. Gus Luker’s message flew like a swallow, and soon others recalled having seen the strange spider symbols. The spiders grew in size with the multiplication of the stories until eventually they hung big as bats in their cabalistic webs, themselves unnatural creatures introduced to earth as bearers of the terrible portent.

The peculiar death of Manny Square almost instantly took its place as one of the great happenings in the county. Only here was none of the super-natural which defies explanation and precludes the possibility 11 of satisfying the curiosity. For Manny Square had been flesh and blood, and the imprint of the muleshoe on his face was something that could be seen and touched. Here was a thing that had been done, with the doer lurking in the background doubtless watching the progress of the manhunt; and Deer Lick, not being able to see him but knowing he was there, watched the comings and goings of Sheriff Jess Roden with an absorption amounting almost to hysteria.

For the Squares were important people. The fertile rolling fields of the Manny Square farm on the ridge overlooking Green River were one of the showplaces of the county. The rail fences were of chestnut wood, so neatly split that they might have been sawn; and they were fences which were never broken, but wormed high and tight and secure, up hill and down. Nor were the rows allowed to grow up in weeds or briers, but were kept clean as a lawn. The great house stood just at the apex of the point—a white house with rambling ells of different floor levels, commanding a view of the watershed as far away as the bend of the river below Niggertown. The paint of the weatherboarding was faded to the dull color of dogwood bloom, and gave the house an air, not of newness and hospital efficiency, but of mellowness and contentment.

Over the point to the south, and out of the sweep of the winter winds which tore down from the north, was the Square barn, enormous and fat with abundance. It was red, with a rolling roof above the huge mow bursting with timothy and clover hay. Toward the hill were the cow stalls where sleek Guernseys lay bedded in wheat straw and lazily chewed their cuds. To the south and toward the greater light were the horse stalls in which dun draft horses stamped their heavy feet; and three box stalls where the purebreds which Manny Square entered in the Pine Ridge races pranced and turned, whinnying, their heads high.

It was a farm of abundance and great local prestige, to which the cabins of the hillmen might have been as slave quarters to a plantation. Nor would the hillmen have heard the comparison with resentment, for the Squares were recognized as different and commanding.

Mrs. Lou Square, mother of Manny—called Ma’m to her face and Old Lou behind her back—was the recognized driving force of the household and the pre-eminent social arbiter of the community. At sixty-two her hair was still carrot-colored and vital. She had lost the suppleness of her youth but had gained a certain commanding power. Day after day she made her rounds through the rooms seeing that they were correct; 13 she worked occasionally among her flowers, wearing gauntlet gloves, snipping, reprimanding the hired man. She subscribed for magazines and read a great deal. Once she had journeyed all the way to Bennington to lecture to a federated club on the landscaping of a flower garden.

Directly under her in authority, and indeed sometimes at war with her imperious will, was Manny Square, the elder of her two sons. He was a small man, slight as a woman, but he made up in strength of character whatever he might have lacked in bodily power. He accepted his position of leadership in the community without arrogance, thinking not so much of his standing as of the things he wished to do—developing a better breed of hogs, writing to the state experiment station for leaflets on soil building, pacing his purebred saddlers over an improvised track down in the river bottom.

No one ever thought of speaking of Manny’s wife in the same terms as of Manny and his mother, yet she constituted the third member of the household. For she had been the family hired girl back in the days before the death of old Emanuel Square; and Manny had married her in defiance of the wishes of his mother, who had chosen for her son the haughty and impeccable Gwen Dixon, daughter of a proud family of 14 Riverside. The girl had been Lizzie Bogle; and although after her marriage with Manny the last name had been discarded and the first changed to Beth, she was unable to make the transition to aristocracy. Only in her middle twenties and beautiful in her own way, she preferred to go on practically in an unchanged status. She worked diligently in the kitchen, in spite of the fact that there was a new hired girl to do the work; she donned her husband’s old coat and hat and went out to do the chores at the chicken houses and at the barn; and she responded to Old Lou’s occasional catechism with a smiling humility.

There always had been just enough going on up at the Square place to keep it in the public eye. Before the death of old Emanuel, his vast appetite for biscuits and honey served periodically as the starting point for a new legend—how the huge egg-shaped body would settle on a breakfast chair, the voluminous abdomen folded over the rim of the table, and how the small soft hands would butter biscuit after biscuit, building up a stack of them on his plate, the yellow butter dripping from the neatly broken folds. And then, with a comb of white-clover honey from one of his own ranking hives, Emanuel Square would breakfast; methodically, on and on, his rosy lips glistening with the butter and honey combined.

A maid would bring the story off the hill, or a hired man who had watched through a window; and small boys, seeing old Emanuel swinging his belly as if it were a feather tick wrapped around his middle, or eyeing it spread out over the saddle of a horse, looked at him in wonder; and their elders would wink at each other and declare that some day the old man would eat one too many, which he did.

And then at his passing came the intriguing affair of the will. All told, the estate consisted of three sections of land—the lower, on which the big house stood; the upper, with a rambling old house falling into decay but with a good stand of valuable timber; and the back section, which lay to the east. Old Emanuel Square had considered the sections as of approximately equal value, and in a sense they were; although to arrive at such an appraisal, it was necessary to take into consideration a certain number of if’s and when’s. If one were seeking a homestead, the lower section would be the most attractive. If immediate profit, the heavy stand of timber on the upper tract waited only the woodsman’s axe to turn it into ready cash. But if one were not immediately pressed, and had in addition a place to live, the land to the east constituted the most promising investment. It had never been cleared: under the protecting underbrush the soil lay rich and 16 deep. The little creek that cut the hollow made available a perpetual water supply. And as soon as some enterprising lumberman decided that the tract was accessible to his oxen and trucks, the valuable timber would provide capital for developing the acres and stocking them with purebred cattle.

Such thoughts as these were in the mind of old Emanuel Square when he made his will. And because Lou his wife would not be immediately pressed, and because she seemed content to live part of the year with one son and part with the other, he gave her the section to the east.

But the circumstance which set Deer Lick to gabbing was that he gave Wayne the choice of the other two sections. Wayne was the younger by two years, and even his cronies could not say much for him. He was large and fat and soft, with the small hands of his father, but with a fondness for drink which the old man had never had. Yet he had been Emanuel’s favorite, for reasons no one had ever divined. Perhaps it was because the son had the courage to live the dissolute life which the father had always secretly coveted for himself. Or perhaps it was because of a vein of humor in Wayne: he occasionally told jokes at breakfast, droll and risqué, at which his father roared, shaking like a mountain of jelly in his chair, biscuit 17 crumbs from his red mouth spraying the table. Or it may have been that Wayne was favored because the old man shrewdly understood that he needed help more than Manny ever would.

For Manny was a hustler, an organizer, a demon for work and system. He was his mother’s son; put him in a shack on a barren hillside eroded to ruts and grown up with broomsedge, and he would skimp and save and plan. Slowly the ruts would be filled with stone and the stone overlaid with a fertile drift. Gradually legumes would be planted and the ground allowed to lie fallow, until in the end the barren soil would lose its gray sandy texture and turn black with its own richness. And little Manny Square, crushing a handful of it and allowing it to fall through his caressing fingers, would smile his small triumphant smile before flying to bend his back to new labors. The stone itself, curse of the shallow ground, would be hauled and chipped and mortared into walls and the walls would become a house and deep barns replacing the shacks.

Perhaps old Emanuel Square knew all this. At any rate, after his death it was Wayne’s privilege to wander for a few days over the two sections, making up his mind; sighting down a slope, stepping off distances. There were two factors, he finally decided, which inclined him to choose the upper section. One 18 was the stone quarry of Grady Heard which disfigured the home place, and the other was the timber. On the high ridge was an excellent stand—whiteoak and chestnut, principally—and it was directly accessible to the river. In it Wayne saw a chance of quick profit out of the question for the one living down on the point.

So he had settled in the rambling big house below the ridge; and Deer Lick had witnessed a two-year circus while Wayne ran through with his patrimony. Those were gay times up in the house under the three pines, with an almost constant party on, and red wheels rolling in with the bigbugs from Leatherwood, and Wayne always half stewed playing the boisterous host, and young girls from Riverside and Pine Ridge walking in pink dresses and saucer parasols down the laurel-bordered paths, and fiddlers up from Niggertown to strum through the night.

It was all enough to keep Deer Lick a-chatter without the unexpected marriage of Manny Square to Lizzie Bogle the hired girl. Manny was then forty-one, and seemed destined to a permanent bachelorhood. Old Lou, not displeased at being the undisputed mistress of the big house during the time of her stay with Manny—it had been decided that she should live six months with one son and then go for a like period with the other—had nevertheless felt that eventually Manny 19 would marry; and to provide against the inevitable, she had chosen Gwen Dixon as the woman for him. Gwen was not much younger than Manny, and was in every way fitted for him. She was proud, cool, perfectly poised. And save for the fact that her cheeks were too full and gave to her face a certain ground-squirrel puffiness, she was pretty.

But one day, saying nothing to his mother but with Lizzie Bogle riding behind him on a big rangy sorrel, Manny had set out for Pine Ridge; and when he returned at nightfall they were man and wife. Old Lou had taken her defeat heroically, the only sign being a thinning of the lips and a squaring of jaw. She had even set about to make a lady of Lizzie. It was she who changed the Lizzie to Beth, using the new name so constantly that it gradually became the accepted address. She also strove to induct Beth into the uses of leisure, teaching her to crochet and make needlepoint.

But Beth did not respond with any readiness. Although but twenty-six, she seemed already set in the ways of her people. She listened meekly and a little eagerly; she pretended interest. But as soon as the dominating presence of Old Lou was removed, she drifted quite happily to the kitchen and scraped the new potatoes preparatory to creaming them the way 20 Manny liked them. And when, as occasionally happened, Old Lou invited Gwen Dixon down for an afternoon, Beth was cordial enough; but after a half hour or so of groping for conversation, she would escape to the kitchen and later serve the women tea, tendering an oatmeal cookie for which she was famous.

All of which Deer Lick knew. Manny had always commanded respect. But he came near being a hero when he defied his mother in the marriage, both because he had stood up to the old lady and because he married Lizzie. Lizzie was one of them; her home was two miles down the river in a sycamore bottom. And when she stepped into the Square mansion as Manny’s wife, it just showed that she was as good as the Squares. Why, anybody, given the Square money, could put on airs. They needn’t think they were so high and mighty!

And just because the Squares were important people whose lives supplied a needed interest and glamor, the death of Manny fell upon the community like a thunderbolt. He had been killed by a smashing kick from Lige, the great white mule; and many a man, after the first moment of mute astonishment, had recovered to say that he knew all along Lige would bide his time. A mule was treacherous; it would wait twenty years for a crack at a man.

There was enough hubbub as it was. But when Sheriff Jess Roden said that Manny had not been killed by Lige but had been murdered, he might as well have touched off dynamite under the county. There was not only amazement, but a certain eerie apprehension, as though some incorporeal Death were stalking the countryside and might strike at anyone anywhere.