Clay Hand (14 page)

“You don’t have to get any authorization, Mr. Lempke. I’ll have a court order in the morning. I’m trying to cooperate in every way I can with you. I purposely didn’t mention this out there. I’ll do it as quiet as I can. But I’m going over that whole section of Number Three tomorrow.”

“All right, Sheriff. But the bill goes in to the county.” Fields saw Phil then. “Come in, McGovern.” He was introduced to Lempke, who left immediately. Fields accepted the cigaret Phil offered him. “I see you got the two widows together. How’d you manage it?”

“Their own doing completely,” Phil said. “I came in from the recess and found them there—holding hands almost. Margaret’s staying on for a while.”

“It can’t be she likes our company.” Fields studied the end of his cigaret. “Some interesting things came out in the light in there, even if they go back in hiding.”

From the next room came the sound of hammering—Dick’s remains being prepared for a final journey home.

Fields looked about the room. “I’m going to have this fixed up for temporary headquarters. One thing about being a bachelor, your home’s where you take your shoes off.” He got up. “You know, I’d like a play-by-play account of what Coffee did the last two months in Chicago—and the two weeks before he got here after leaving there. I don’t see any reason the Chicago police shouldn’t give us a hand in it. Do you?”

A knock at the door covered Phil’s answer. It was Margaret. “Mrs. O’Grady said you were here, Phil. Excuse me, Sheriff.”

Fields nodded. “Sit down, ma’am.”

“No thanks… Phil, I’ve decided to have Dick interred in Winston. I think it’s appropriate, with the work he was doing among the people here.”

“What work was he doing, Mrs. Coffee?” the sheriff asked.

Margaret looked at him. “Isn’t it pretty obvious that he was concerned with the health and conditions here?”

“Concerned, maybe,” Fields said. “I’m concerned, too. But I haven’t seen anything concrete he was doing about it.”

Margaret bridled. “If you don’t want him buried here…”

“I’m not saying that, Mrs. Coffee. It just seems to me you’re kind of anxious to put the label on the package. It ain’t wrapped up yet. Now I’ll be glad to help in any way I can, making arrangements for his funeral. But I’m going right on trying to find out how he died.”

“Thank you, Sheriff,” Margaret said coldly. “Phil, will you talk with the priest? Dick was born a Catholic.”

“I’ll talk with him,” Phil said.

Fields pinched out his cigaret. “I’ll go up with you, McGovern. I’ve got a notion it’ll take some talking to convince him he died one.”

Father Joyce surprised them, however. He readily acceded to the burial, and offered to perform the service before they asked him. The burial was to be directly from the funeral parlor.

“In view of the circumstances, I think that advisable,” he explained.

Neither Phil nor the sheriff pursued his views of the circumstances. The hour for the funeral was set for nine-thirty the following morning, and the three men went out in the gathering darkness to select a plot in the cemetery. Somewhere among the many rows of headstones was a new marker, above the grave Dick had dug for Kevin Laughlin.

“Father, just what did Coffee say to you about Laughlin?” Fields asked.

The priest pulled at the gate where it was stiffened in the frosty ground. Phil added his weight to it, and together they swung it open.

“‘I could have saved the man’s life. I could have given it to him, and I could have taken it away from him. I took it away.’ That was the gist of it. We talked a bit about Laughlin then, for the poor old man was much given to talking about the mines himself.”

“Did Coffee know Laughlin’s story,” Fields asked, “about losing his wife there, and all?”

“I told him about it when we selected a burial place for Laughlin. ‘Poor little man,’ was all he said, that and ‘
mea culpa
.’”

They selected a space at the far end of the cemetery. A single, stunted bush stood between it and the long, gray sweep of wasteland, that was gathered now into a darkened wisp at the first rise of the hills. Phil wondered who would turn the crusted sod. But he had not the heart to ask.

W
HEN THE ARRANGEMENTS WITH
Krancow were completed, Phil walked down the street to McNamara’s, reopened for the evening business. The only customer was Randy Nichols, there certainly for the company more than for a drink. “File your story, Randy?”

“I did. I’d no idea his wife was such a sentimentalist, McGovern.”

Phil ordered a drink.

“It takes a lot of sentiment to bury him out on the lone prairie,” Nichols drawled. “A bucket of it. Or a bucket of something else.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Oh, I’m touched. Deeply touched. And I know the whole town of Winston’s going to be touched the same way. Maybe they’ll make a crown of coal for their martyr. Look, McGovern. I’ve been around a long time. I know a good reporter when I see one, even when he’s called a journalist. That’s what Coffee was, a good reporter. No more, no less, in his work. What he was in his private life I don’t know. I’ve a notion he was a right guy. That’s beside the point. But when she sits up there like the world’s holy mother and says: ‘Dick always felt his most important work was in the coal mines,’ I got a dirty word for it. Dick felt his most important work was where there was a good story. Mark my words, that’s what brought him to Winston.”

Nichols finished off his drink and almost choked on it. “Why the devil can’t you carry a bottle of milk, Mac?”

“You bring the cow and I’ll milk it for you.” McNamara looked at Phil. “She’s staying with the widow, is she?”

“She is. They make a fine pair.”

“She’ll meet her match there, I’ll wager that, my boyo.”

“Where are the customers, Mac?”

“They’re by the union hall in a meeting. They’ll be busting in here any minute now, crying or singing. I’m sending next door for my supper. Do you want them to bring you in something?”

Within an hour the men began drifting down the street from the union hall. Billy Riordon, who, at the inquest, had told of the coal dust in the spittle of miners, danced into the tavern. “Let me have one little one more on the book, Mac, this for the celebration. We’re hoisting in the morning.”

McNamara emptied his coffee cup before going behind the bar, and Riordon danced to the piano. He played a weird tremolo with the thumb and little finger of his right hand. “If I’d the rest of my fingers I’d play a fandango.” He turned to Phil and Nichols. “Is there one of youse play at all?”

“Here’s your drink, Billy,” McNamara said. “It’s on the house and not on the books. Your wife’s too good an auditor of them. Was it a unanimous vote, Billy?”

Riordon lifted his glass to those present and emptied it. “Aw now, Mac, you’re not the one to be asking that. Did you ever hear of a unanimous vote from a bunch of Irishmen in your life? Well. I’ll go home with the news and it may be the old lady’ll parcel me out a nickel in cash for the evening. My thanks to you, Mac. You’re a darling rebel. The best of evenings to all of youse!”

He raised his hat along with his voice in a song and bounced jauntily out of the tavern.

As the evening wore on the men wandered into the tavern from their suppers. A card game was resumed. There was laughter, and a bit of song, although through it all Phil sensed an uneasy gaiety. Above all he felt a stranger to it himself. He looked at the yellowing-keyed piano and wondered where the youngsters of the town hung out, and if they had a juke box. Was the only such machine at the Sunnyside, the only music tunes that came to the town in an early migration? He put on his coat and went out, walking as far as the theatre…the Majestic Theatre…how unmajestically majestic… You paid your money and went in…no tickets, no waiting…
Tarzan
now,
The Frozen North
tomorrow … Next door, Nick’s confectionery. Half a dozen teen-agers, and the varicolored juke box, a thin peal of jive weaving through the closed door to him.

Here at least were the symbols of normalcy in Winston. But somewhere in the town, things were far from normal…the alliance at the widow’s, which he was reluctant to face yet…and the Clausons. He walked across the town and past the railway station, in semi-darkness now. A murky half-moon was rising above the giant cliff. He cut across the field to the Clauson house.

Even as he stood a few seconds at their door, glimpsing the cluttered living room, he could believe that here Dick found a happy companionship in the barrenness of Winston. The old magician was reading in front of a coal-burning grate, a shawl about his shoulders. He laid down his book at the sound of Phil’s knock, threw off the shawl and came to the door.

He looked up at Phil as though trying to place him. “Ah yes,” he said in sudden recollection. “I saw you this afternoon.”

“My name is Phil McGovern. I was a friend of Dick Coffee’s.”

“Come in then, by all means.”

It was the room which held him first—a mass, indeed, he thought, almost a mess of color, but not quite—gaudy paintings that, on being looked twice upon, took definition, and invited study, books in ancient bindings piled on the table, with naked shelves in the case from which they had been taken, woven Indian rugs on the floor, and bits of statuary without order of style or position on the mantle, on the shelves, even on the floor. In a bay window at the side of the room a large worktable was cluttered with bits of wood, cloth and tin sheeting.

“Your coat, Mr. McGovern.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Clauson.” He had been staring about the room.

“You find it interesting?”

“I haven’t seen this much color in the whole of Winston.”

“There are colors in the town all the same. Wherever there are people there are colors. Sit down, please.” He hung the coat on a hall tree near the door.

A staircase ran along the inside wall. From the back of the house came the sound of dishes, and as Phil went near the fire he could see a light beneath the dining-room door. The dining room itself had long since ceased seating diners. It, too, was a workroom. A table against the wall held many tubes of paint. A green smock hung over the back of a chair.

“My daughter will come in presently unless you wish me to call her now?”

“No,” Phil said. “I only want to talk.”

“Only?”

“My semantics are bad. I wanted to talk with you about Dick, Mr. Clauson.”

The old man nodded. He brushed the thinning hair at his temples with nervous fingers. He seemed then to pull himself up to the task, but he smiled. “Dick only wanted to talk, too. There was no end to the things he wanted to talk about.”

Phil could believe that, having known Dick from his early curiosities, the nights at school, overseas, in bars, restaurants, parks. “He was the sort of guy would stop a farmer in the field and ask him the depth he was ploughing. He would end up knowing the rotation of his crops, how many cows he had milking, and about the time the pig got struck by lightning.”

Clauson folded the long hands. “And it was never quite idle curiosity, was it?”

“Sometimes it was. I remember his talking twenty minutes to a park attendant once. Nonsensical stuff. It turned out the man had just one tooth left in his head, and Dick was fascinated with the things he could do with it.”

Clauson smiled. “Even that takes a special kind of curiosity, or, at least of patience.”

“Yes,” Phil said. “Dick was long on patience.”

The old man did not answer. He sat, his mouth a little pursed, his eyes upon the coals in the grate. Phil, conscious of the books strewn about the room, the paintings, a writing portfolio on the table with a pen beside it, experienced a strange sensation. He was eager for Rebecca to come from the kitchen, for the old man to tell him about the books, about the work that was obviously done in this house. He could not ask it. He did not have the easy, casual manner that would permit him to say: “That’s nice work there above the fireplace. Who did it?” It was strange to be jealous of the dead, but in this house he was jealous of Dick. It would never be open to him as it was to Dick. He would ask his questions and receive a polite answer. He might even have a cup of tea here some day. But he would have to probe for each thing he learned from it. It would never unfold itself to him.

Clauson got up from his chair. “I will call my daughter.” He went to the kitchen door and said a few words Phil did not hear.

He looked at the painting above the mantle. It was like a large tumbleweed, upright, a tawny yellow, yet with fragments of blue and green and a thin sliver of red. It was the color of twilight with the last stings of sun. At the core of the whorled thing he named tumbleweed for want of better definition, there were the solid lines of a human shape. A candelabra sat on the mantle below the picture, the candles in it half burned. He wanted very much to see them lighted, their softness playing among the colors of the picture… He was standing beneath the picture when Clauson and his daughter returned.

“Forgive me,” he said, hoping to be told about the painting.

The old man merely nodded. “Mr. McGovern, Rebecca…. My daughter, Mrs. Glasgow.”

Rebecca, too, only nodded, her eyes frank upon him.

Phil groped in his pocket for a cigaret. “This visit may be presumptuous,” he started awkwardly.

“If you are a friend of Dick’s it is not presumptuous,” Clauson said.

“There is an uncompleted job here in Winston that Dick was doing. I should like to find out what it was and finish it, if I can.”

They sat down then. “I shall give you every help in my power, Mr. McGovern. I’m sure my daughter feels the same.”

If she did, Phil thought, she would have to know him a lot better before so committing herself. She waited without comment.

“I know the general tenor of your conversations, as you described them today,” Phil said. “But perhaps the little things…the way you would meet a friend and say: ‘Well, what did you do today?’ That sort of thing might give us a clue to his reason for being here. When did he first come to the house?”

“He came the first night after we spoke,” Rebecca said. “Do you remember the date, Papa?”