December 19, 2007: Blue smoke trailed from a pipe in the cabin’s tin roof. His footprints had frozen like fossils in the snow, and Helen tracked them down through the prairie. The cabin belonged to Robert Joakes, who came into town once a month for supplies, and sold beaver and coon pelts to a coat maker in Northhill.
A dim light came from the cabin’s only window, a small square high up the wall. Helen stood on her numb toes and peered through the window. A lantern on a rough wood table gave a scant circle of light. A figure hunched beside an iron stove. Helen removed a glove and drew her pistol, felt its weight in her hand, adjusted her finger on the trigger. For a good while she watched the dark figure, embers glowing behind the stove grate. Then Joakes moved off into the shadows.
Helen crouched beneath the window. Whittled gray clouds raced in from the north. The wind tore through her. Her hand on the pistol grew terribly cold. A half mile away in the tree, Jocey’s body was freezing solid, and Helen felt herself at the center of something enormous and urgent, bigger than her mind could hold, and though terrified, and angry, mainly she felt desperately alone. The urge to flee, to hide, was overwhelming. This is how Jocey felt, Helen thought, and clicked off her pistol’s safety.
She eased each step through the crackling snow, past firewood stacked to the roof, on around to the door where a metal bucket gave off the stench of urine. A dog barked inside the door, heavy and loud barking that did not cease.
Christmas Eve, 2007: She followed at a safe distance, as children on inner tubes towed behind a pickup made wide tracks in the road’s new snow. More children huddled in the truck’s bed, sparklers burning in their mittens and gloves. The truck took the curve of Elm Avenue and the inner tubes swung out, the last in line dropping into the ditch before the whip cracked and yanked it back onto the road. Helen switched on the blue and red lights atop the squad car. The truck did not pull to the shoulder, but merely slowed and stopped, the inner tubes sliding forward, one knocking into the next.
Helen grabbed her flashlight and walked out into the snow, the kids splayed and breathing hard on their tubes.
“We ain’t done nothing,” said the boy on the last tube, a boy they all called Knight, his chin resting on his gloves.
“Not yet, you ain’t,” Helen said, and kept the flashlight beam on his face just to get him riled.
“You’re piss mean even at Christmas,” Knight snapped, and all the other kids laughed.
Helen passed the kids in the truck bed, their sparklers hissing glitter and glistening in their eyes. “You kids cold?”
“No’m,” said one boy. “I am,” said a girl, and the boy told her to shut up.
Then Helen was at the truck’s door, and Willie Sharpton grinned at her, the flaps of his hat down over his ears and a cigarette in the slit between his mustache and beard. Helen put a boot up on the truck’s running board and leaned in the window.
“Them kids just grabbed hold of my truck,” Willie said. “Don’t know whose they are.”
“They just lassoed your tailgate?”
“That’s about right.” Willie blew smoke back into the truck as not to blow it on Helen. He turned and studied her face and closed one of his eyes. “That eye looks like hell.”
“Our wedding pictures’ll look awful.”
It was a play on an old joke, one neither smiled at. Knight yelled for them to come on, that his nuts were freezing. Willie patted Helen’s arm and took a drag on the cigarette. He stared ahead where the snow was yet to be tracked by tires.
“Any leads?” he asked.
“No.”
Then they were quiet, and Helen stepped down from the truck’s runner and looked back at the children. The sparklers had burned out and the bed was dark. Drift snow crawled out of the ditch and sidewound over the road. She shone her flashlight on the line of tubes. The kids had their hoods pulled over their faces.
December 19, 2007: Footsteps and a man’s scolding voice came from behind the cabin door. The barking ceased. Flat against the weatherboards, she tried keeping her frozen fingers from gripping the gun too tight. The door unlatched and swung open, its shadow covering her. A large yellow-haired dog ran into the prairie, stopped, raised its head, sniffed at a briar. Joakes stepped out into the snow, shirtless, thick hair covering his shoulders and back. It’d be safer outside, where he couldn’t grab a rifle or knife, a chair or a pot. Helen held her breath, her jaw clenched. She lunged out, gun raised, yelled at him to get on the ground.
Joakes flailed around and hit Helen with an elbow, and she slipped to one knee. He paused and glanced over his shoulder, maybe looking for the dog, maybe checking to see if there were others. Helen drove into his legs and he fell to the ground. Forearm under his chin, she pulled Mace from her belt and doused his eyes. He swung his fists. She scrambled out of his reach, then stepped forward and sprayed him again. He covered his face, Mace dripping down his fingers and chin. The dog charged in, sniffing at the man and barking. Helen approached, both pistol and Mace drawn, the dog baring its teeth, yapping, pouncing. She sprayed the dog and it recoiled, pawing its snout, then came at her again, viciously snapping at her legs. She fired the gun. The dog fell in a lump, a hole through its neck, hot blood leaching into the snow. A knee in Joakes’s back, Helen pressed the gun to his ear and said she figured to kill him for what he’d done. His eyes were shut tight. He did not move.
Spring 2008: She stared at the canopy’s sheer fabric and heard it again: hissing and what sounded like a gunshot. She rose from the Dempsys’ bed and stepped to the window. Again came the hissing. In the northern sky the pop unleashed golden sparks that willowed down. On what she knew was Macey Goff’s roof stood a silhouette, another whining flare rising from its arm and exploding high above, green sparks shimmering, falling.
Helen held the Christmas sweater to her breast and felt protected, like a child with her blanket. She stuffed it into her jacket, zipped up, and hustled down the damp hall to her boat. She hooked in the oars and began rowing around the house, making for the Goffs’. The current was strong. To keep the boat straight Helen pulled twice on the right oar for each on the left. Across the bay a silver bass boat hitched to a second-floor window thudded against the house. The man on the roof wore jeans tucked into his boots and a sleeveless flannel unbuttoned to show a mural of tattoos across his chest and abdomen. He dropped a Roman candle into the gutter, drew a fresh wand from his boot. He was Danny Martin, a young strip miner who’d been a great ball player, even had offers to play in college, but then he beat up a girl and it all went to hell.
Helen brought in the oars and the boat glided. Blue sparks fell directly above her. A flashlight beam waggled inside the house. Looters. She drew her pistol and switched on the boat’s spotlight. Inside the room a large long-haired man in black waders spun around. The spotlight threw his shadow on the back wall, and when he shielded his eyes the shadow took the appearance of a hunchback, then grew larger as he ran to the window. He clanged out into the bass boat, the hull rocking and sliding away from the house.
“Danny!” the man screamed, furiously yanking the motor’s cord.
“Stay where you’re at!” Helen yelled.
A candle shot whistled low overhead. Helen ducked, trained the spotlight on the roof. Danny toed the gutter, the wand aimed down at her. She spun off the bench and covered her head. A shot hissed into the water beside the boat.
“This is the police!” Helen yelled.
The other boat’s outboard turned over and raised an octave speeding away. Then another pop, high overhead, and Helen looked to the sky. Golden sparks rained down. Held in an eddy, her boat slowly turning, red sparks fell, and moments later the sky bled green. Then the candle was done and Danny gazed into the whitecaps thrashing the house. He teetered, raised his arms. He leapt from the roof, his legs scissoring as he hit the water.
December 20, 2007: Robert Joakes sat tied to a chair in the lantern’s pitiful light; Helen had torn bedsheets and bound his ankles, wrists, chest, and gagged his mouth so he could not scream.
She’d found Jocey’s clothes atop a mound of salted venison in the root cellar, and sat thinking on the cellar steps with the girl’s jeans across her lap. Laws on killing, even God’s demands, didn’t allow for peace. Not always. There’d still be pain; missing that child would break her parents’ hearts. But what Helen knew, what she’d seen in those woods, would be too much for them, for everybody.
She made a plan to hide it all, and knew she’d have to be careful. She’d be ruined if Joakes got loose, or if someone found him like this, or if he died too soon. Those in town, and especially those from outside Krafton, might not see grace in her methods: what she’d begun to call in her mind
the Big Peace.
Spring 2008: Danny emerged far downcurrent, pummeling the churning spate, flopping, thrashing. Helen gave chase, but the current was unpredictable and, afraid she’d brain him with the boat’s hull or the outboard’s blades, she dared not get close. His body went slack and he was swept toward the ropy tops of willow trees, disappearing into the cage of their branches.
Helen cut the motor and scrambled to the bow. She grabbed several branches as they whisked past and was jerked backward into the stern. The rush of water was amplified in the blackness. She held the ropes and took her feet and balanced herself, and with her free hand switched on the boat’s spotlight.
The canopy was a tangle of limbs, the water topped with brown froth and swirling as if over a drain. Danny draped one arm over a thick branch, his cheek against the trunk, his shoulders beneath the water. Helen pulled the boat deeper through the mess. Danny lifted his head, managed to tilt his chin into the tree’s crotch. “We was looking for my dog,” he said, gasping.
He was a liar, but that didn’t matter now. The branch forked into the water and Helen couldn’t get to him. She leaned over the branch and reached as far as she could. Danny stared blankly at her hand. His head lolled, his elbow unhooking from the branch, and he held on with just his hand, his body dragging in the current. Helen lunged her entire body onto the branch and grabbed his wrist. She centered her weight and pulled until his elbow was hooked back safely, then dropped her feet down into what she thought would be the boat, but instead was the rush of freezing water.
The boat had drifted from beneath her, the spotlight a trailing beacon as the hull curled into the rope branches, was held briefly, then the limbs parted and fell back into place and the boat was gone. Helen hugged the branch and clutched Danny, the flood whirling darkly around them, the Christmas sweater a lump in the gathers of her jacket.
December 22, 2007: She scanned the frozen prairie, worried someone had seen her sneak through the dawn-tinged woods and into the cabin. Behind her, bound to the chair, Joakes stank of urine and shit. She carefully untied his ankles, then his legs, his waist. Three days in the chair and his legs had atrophied; they buckled as he stood, and he staggered as she walked him to a snowy swale in the river’s bend. There she took down his soiled pants and told him to relieve himself. He stood shivering, loins exposed, mouth and upper body still bound, head drooped. He fell to his knees, then onto his side, and began to weep. Helen found him pathetic, disgusting. The sunrise washed full over the eastern hills and burned through shreds of fog in the near woods, and she worried someone would see him. Helen rushed to him, trying to pull up his pants and get him to stand. But he just wept and shook, and Helen could do nothing with him.
She dragged him by his armpits, inch by inch, his pants at his ankles, bare legs wet and red with cold, heels leaving ruts in the snow. She dragged him past the pump frozen over with icicles, and past a stack of vegetable crates covered in snow, in which lived brown chickens that did not move and might be dead. The dog’s stiff body lay at the side of the stoop. It would look right that way, Helen figured; a man who kills his dog is a man who’s lost all hope.
It took half an hour to get him back in the chair. She removed his pants and covered his lower half with a heavy blanket. She carried the pants to the river, stomped a hole through the ice, and dangled the crotch in the water below. Helen returned and laid the pants over half the stove, turned her nose from the putrid steam. On the other half of the stove, she heated oats in a pot. A square blazon of sunlight flooded the window and covered Joakes’s face. His eyes, scorched by the Mace, were a deep watery red, the skin not covered by beard the color of tin.
Helen unbound his mouth and pushed oatmeal on a wooden spoon between his lips. He took the oats into his cheeks and she pushed in another spoonful. He stared through her, his red eyes narrowed in the sunlight, and for a moment she remembered what he’d done, and stood frozen before him.
He spat the oats into her face. He licked his lips. “I’m a Christian man,” he said, hoarsely, oats in the beard beneath his mouth. “I’m forgiven.”
Christmas Day, 2007: Freely sat in a lounger by the fire, a blanket over his lap, his eyelids batting, then closing. Helen sat on the hearthstone ledge, the fire hot on her back. She’d not worn her uniform for the first time in a long while, and found her old jeans to be loose in a way she’d greatly missed. On the floor by the tree a circle of children played a game where they rolled dice and moved tiny farm animals around a board. The adults sat around a long table, drinking hazelnut coffee and discussing a new foundry opening in Jasper. Helen’s feet prickled with pain and she worried they were frostbitten. Her swollen eye gave a headache aspirin could not help.
The front bell rang. Freely’s wife, Marilyn, walked to the foyer, wiping her hands on the back of her dress. She opened the door and in rushed the cold and the children sat upright to see who was there. Pastor Hamby, a bear of a man in a black overcoat, filled the doorway. Marilyn stepped aside to let him in, but he stayed where he was. He leaned down and talked quietly to Marilyn and glanced into the house at the same time. Then Marilyn turned and they both looked at Helen, and Pastor Hamby waved her over with a gloved hand.