Clay Hand (12 page)

Nat bit his underlip while he thought about it. “Most off, he was walking. Sometimes he stopped and looked.”

“Could you tell what he was looking at?”

“No. He’d just stand and look around.”

“Did you ever see him with anyone, Nat?”

The boy nodded. “The woman and her goats, a couple of times.”

“What were they doing?”

“Talking.”

“Did you ever overhear their conversation?”

“Once.”

“What were they saying?”

The boy hunched in the chair. “They were talking about love. I ran away.”

It was a few seconds before the room quieted. “Nat,” Handy said quietly, “you just heard the word ‘love.’ They might have been talking about a youngster, a father, a boy’s love for a dog. Isn’t that so?”

“I guess so,” the boy said. “But I wouldn’t of run away if they were talking about a dog.”

Handy nodded. Certainly the boy had scored with his logic. “Now,” the coroner continued, “did you ever see him with anyone else?”

“Once I did. I saw him with a woman with green wings, only the sheriff don’t believe me.”

Handy showed no surprise. “Green wings,” he repeated. “I don’t recollect ever seeing a woman like that myself. But sometimes I’ve seen a person put on their coat in the wind, and it looked for all the world like wings. Could that have been what you saw?”

“No, she had wings.”

“You didn’t see her flying, though,” Handy said.

“People can’t fly.”

“That’s a fact,” the coroner said. “Did you see her face, Nat?”

“No. It was getting dark, and she was moving close along with him.”

Fields laid his hand on the coroner’s arm. Handy nodded for him to go ahead. “Nat,” the sheriff said, “Sunday morning when you were out there, that was around seven o’clock, wasn’t it?”

The boy nodded.

“Were you skipping Mass, lad?”

“I got to Mass,” the boy said in quick defense.

“But you didn’t always make it when you were sent, did you, lad?”

Phil, watching the elder Watkins, wondered if this was not unnecessarily cruel to the boy.

“Maybe I missed a time or two.”

“Nat, you know that angel just inside the church door?”

The boy’s eyes bulged. “Yes sir.”

“Did your lady with green wings look anything like that?”

“Just like it. I dreamed of it once, too. Only it was flying.”

“Chasing you?”

“I don’t know. I fell out of bed so I guess it was chasing me.”

A nervous titter of laughter escaped one of the jurors, and the witnesses and spectators joined it. Nat grinned with relief himself until his father caught his eye. The boy was dismissed and Watkins took him out of the room immediately. Before the next witness was sworn in, the father returned. Phil thought that with luck Nat might escape punishment in the prestige he had brought upon the family as a witness.

Archie Freebach came before the coroner and his jury. Phil recognized him as the owner of the Sunnyside tavern. He described the evening Mr. Clauson and Coffee had spent in his place the night before Coffee died. He told of the discussion between the deceased and the old man of the beauty and virtues of his daughter.

The deputy standing next to Phil answered: “That guy must of been blind of one eye.” His own eyes were shifting from Margaret to Rebecca Glasgow.

“Was it a friendly discussion?” Handy asked the witness.

“Oh, they were very congenial.” Freebach fidgeted in the chair. “I thought to myself, and I said to my wife when I went upstairs to her afterwards, they sounded like they were making a marriage. They were very merry.”

His last words were lost in a burst of comment among the spectators. Handy pounded for quiet, and Freebach looked miserable. He would talk on in his nervousness, scarcely aware of his words.

“Mr. Freebach,” the coroner said, “did they mention names? Did you know who they were talking about?”

“I told you, his daughter, and I took for granted the second party…”

“You took for granted,” Handy interrupted.

“Well, I know, I imagine …” Freebach flustered, “only a man in love is so excited.”

Clauson, for the first time, reacted to the testimony. He shook his head and murmured, “No, no, no.”

“Stay with what you heard, Mr. Freebach,” the coroner said curtly.

Glasgow looked at his father-in-law contemptuously. Freebach, seeing the old man, became more excited. He looked from him to the coroner helplessly. “But I’m telling only what I thought. I’m not saying it was so. I see now the young man had a wife, a lovely wife he loved, as Mrs. O’Grady told us—I don’t know. I’m mixed up.” His voice trailed off.

Handy reached over and laid his hand on the witness’s arm. “Quiet down, Mr. Freebach. It doesn’t matter here whether you understand it or not. The important thing is what you heard. It is for the jury and me to decide what it means.”

“Thank you very much,” Freebach said. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed his hands vigorously.

“You did know that Mr. Clauson’s daughter had a husband, didn’t you?” Handy pursued.

“I heard. I thought I might be mistaken. I remember how long… I remember her in school… I asked my wife about that, too. Then I was more mixed up.”

And this was the man, Phil thought, who spoke so lucidly in his tavern, of superstition and of the opiate the discovery of one hoax might be upon a crowd.

“Does it always seem so important to you to know what your customers are talking about when they are drinking?” Handy asked.

“I have ears. I like to listen, if it’s interesting.”

“Why was this interesting, Mr. Freebach?”

“When a man describes a beautiful woman—it is interesting.”

“Thank you, Mr. Freebach. If the jury has no questions, you are excused.”

He called Henry Clauson.

Handy announced that there would be a fifteen-minute recess after the testimony of the witness, and asked for patience and quiet. It was an unnecessary request. As Clauson reached the table, Phil could hear the breathing of the deputy next to him. The old magician raised his hand as though it were a warning. “I will not take the customary oath,” he said. “I give you my solemn promise to tell the truth.”

In a few seconds the townspeople realized that he had deviated from the procedure, and there was grumbling.

Handy silenced it. “He is within his rights. Please sit down, Mr. Clauson. Will you tell us the circumstances under which you met the deceased?”

“My daughter met him among the hills about five weeks ago. She invited him to call. Or perhaps it was that he asked to call. He was a well-traveled man, and we had many things to talk about.” He chose his words carefully, and made some effort to speak more loudly than was his custom, Phil thought. He looked above the people as he spoke.

“Just what did you talk about, Mr. Clauson?”

“What does one man talk to another about of a quiet evening and a drink? We spoke of the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, and two revolutions in Latin America which Mr. Coffee had witnessed. We spoke of Polish mines and African diamonds, and of the new state of Israel. We spoke of people and money and bread. We spoke of scriptures and detective stories.” He looked at the coroner then. “There was nothing sinister in our conversations, even in Mr. Freebach’s tavern, Friday night.”

“Suppose you tell us what was said there, then.”

“I drank more that night than I am accustomed to drinking,” Clauson said simply. “I think my young friend did, too. The discussion was rather a flight of fancy. Mr. Freebach told you that Mr. Coffee was trying to persuade me that my daughter was the most beautiful person in the world. Obviously, my daughter is not, although she is many things to me. It is not a kind thing to her for me to tell now; but there have been, and will be, greater unkindnesses done her than one by her father. So to illustrate, I will tell you a story told me by Mr. Coffee that evening.

“He told me of an Irish legend about an ugly old lady who sat by a village well. Within sight of her, an old man was telling a child about the beautiful woman he had once courted in Spain. She had refused his true love, and accepted instead the marriage offer of a prince without honor even among his own people. But on her wedding day, she disappeared. The child asked, naturally, what had become of her. The story teller pointed to the old one sitting by the well. ‘The good people caught her up and brought her to my own village, setting her down where you see her, as ugly as she is today.’ ‘That old witch?’ the child said. ‘She’s enchanted,’ the old man explained. ‘If I were to propose marriage again to her this minute, it would break the enchantment, and you would see how beautiful she really is.’ The child demanded that he do it. ‘Oh no. If she were that beautiful again, do you think she’d give a bundle of bones like myself a second look?’”

Clauson folded his hands. “Forgive me if this has taken up your time, but that is the kind of talk there was between Richard Coffee and me.”

“Ha! Glory to God,” Mrs. O’Grady said aloud, and although Handy slapped the desk, he was not frowning. Either Clauson was an absolutely guileless man, Phil thought, or he was touched with genius. He had taken the only possible entry to the hearts of these people, giving them back one of their own stories.

“You are a magician by trade, Mr. Clauson?” Handy said with some irony.

“I was in my youth. Now I manufacture pieces for hands more nimble than my own.”

“Did the deceased ever speak to you of his reasons for being in Winston?”

“No, he did not, although it seemed to me he was looking for something, something he could find only here. There were times I thought all he was seeking was peace of mind, for there were times he seemed on fire. Hearing Father Joyce’s testimony this morning, I was more convinced of that than ever.”

“Was there anything he said or did, Friday night, that would lead you to think he intended to take his own life?”

“Nothing.”

“When you were asked to leave McNamara’s, Friday night, Mr. Clauson, you knew the reason?”

The old man looked down at his hands. “I knew it.”

“Why didn’t you try to stop it?”

“I have learned long ago, Mr. Coroner, you do not put out a fire with spit.”

The witness was excused then, and the inquest adjourned for fifteen minutes.

T
HE TEMPER OF THE
people now was milder than at any time since Phil had been in Winston. How often it had changed that day, he thought. As he stood on the porch with Randy Nichols, he could hear bits of their comment as little groups of them huddled together against the wind.

“Funny,” Nichols said, “they’re all pretending to be thinking this out. And all they’re doing is trying to justify a change in their feelings.”

“Are we doing any differently, Randy?”

“Of course not, though we think we are. I hope that either the sheriff or the coroner is. But I doubt it. There is nothing so rare as a thinking man—unless it’s a thinking woman. I wonder if there isn’t one here.”

“Do you make anything out of the inquest yet?”

The older man pulled at his cigar. “My guess is that it’s two stories, one he was intending to write and one he was living. It’s a tossup which one he died of.”

Phil threw away a half-smoked cigaret and went indoors. The only people in the room at the moment were Mrs. O’Grady and Margaret Coffee. Margaret was standing beside the widow and they were talking easily, Mrs. O’Grady’s teeth showing in a smile. She saw him then and motioned to him to join them. “Philip! I’ve asked Mrs. Coffee to stay with me while she’s in Winston. Will you bring her things up?”

There was no trace in Margaret’s face of her knowledge of the widow’s early and fierce antagonism. “I want to stay where Dick did,” she said serenely.

“I’ll be glad to let you have his room,” Phil said, “the one where the wind lay down beside him at night.”

For a moment there was real hatred for him in her eyes. His own eyes fell away from hers. The impulse to hurt her seemed to grow stronger, and his control over it weaker.

The widow watched them, grinning. “Well, will you bring her up or no?”

“Of course.”

The jurors filed back into the room, one of the men wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. They had been served refreshments. Presently the witnesses returned, and the sheriff, the coroner and the clerk took their places. Margaret sat down beside Mrs. O’Grady, and the girl, Anna, came in and sat at her cane side, the stick clattering to the floor and the widow cursing at her clumsiness. Phil moved back to the hall where Nichols stood.

“Pals, huh?” the reporter said.

“Bosom.”

“Hmmm. What you can’t pull into the dance, playing the tarantella!”

Handy checked his watch and looked up. “Mrs. Norman Glasgow, please.”

The tall, gawky woman made a painfully self-conscious journey to the coroner’s table. She wore a brown tailored suit and a white blouse open at the throat, accentuating the length of her neck and face. Many times, Phil thought, the children must have called her “horse face.” He found himself pulling desperately for her. Even her father had said before all of them that she was not beautiful. But seeing her eyes move from one hostile face to the other of the jurors, and flash across the witnesses then to meet his own for a long second, he sensed a deep beauty in the woman. He would not have needed to be drunk to take Dick’s side in that extraordinary discussion. He waited to hear her voice, and hoped that in some way his eyes conveyed to her his wish to give her courage.

“Mrs. Glasgow, will you please tell us the circumstances when you met the deceased?”

“I often graze my goats among the hills,” she said. Her voice had all the color her face lacked, Phil thought, low, a little tremulous now, but richer as she gained confidence. “It was five weeks ago. I don’t remember the day, except that it was windy. But most days are, in Winston. He called out to me, and I waited where I was until he came. He said that he’d been watching me for several days. He wondered what I thought about day in, day out. We talked. I’ve forgotten what about. The clouds, perhaps. They hang very low up there, and sometimes we talked about them. I told him of my father and he asked if he might visit us.”