AHMM, September 2009 Read online

  "I'm sorry, suh,” Preacher said. “For not telling you."

  Zack didn't answer.

  Preacher glanced at Hank's whip on the corner table. “I reckon you'll have to use that on me."

  He said it without fear, without even resignation. It was almost an invitation.

  "You know me better than that,” Zack said.

  For a moment Preacher's demeanor turned gentle, almost fatherly. “You have some nice ideas, Massa Todd. But they can't work. It's just the way things are. A place like this can't run without a whip."

  "I don't need a whip to keep people in line. I can do it with this."

  From among the papers on his desk he picked up the letter he wrote last night. He handed it to Preacher.

  As Preacher read it, the words ran through Zack's mind:

  Dear William J. Randall, Esq.,

  Please make arrangements to sell my tobacco plantation and all associated assets at a fair market price. Please note that the assets will not include my slaves. They are to be manumitted upon completion of the sale.

  Preacher's hand trembled slightly when handed the letter back. “You're a good man, suh."

  "I'm a craven dog. I'm a filthy, craven dog. I could have written that letter years ago, but I didn't want to disappoint my father. My dead father. And I was afraid, afraid of being less rich. Good men suffer for their principles. I cast mine aside to live in comfort."

  "I think you suffered plenty."

  Silence stretched between them.

  "Would you like to be alone, suh?"

  Zack nodded.

  Preacher left the room. As the door closed softly behind him, Zack wiped a tear from his eye.

  He sat there for a long while. Eventually his gaze fell on the letter again. How he wished Etta could learn of this. But of course she never would. He wished even more that he could apologize for what happened between them years ago, back when they were kids—back when he was a thoughtless beast consumed with teenage lust. She never put up a fight, not once. But she wouldn't. She was a slave, he was the slave-master's son.

  It was still rape.

  His heart felt like a lump of clay. Taking up his pen, he added one last line to the letter:

  I have already given three of my slaves their freedom: the man named Joe, his wife Etta, and their daughter Priscilla.

  Copyright © 2009 Eric Rutter

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: REAL MEN DIE by John H. Dirckx

  * * * *

  Tim Foley

  * * * *

  Glosenby laid his hands on the imposing stone and felt the cool of the stone ooze into him and temper the fire of rage.

  If there was anything about Jack Glosenby to suggest a rural background, it was perhaps his air of quiet self-sufficiency and the impression he gave, at age fifty-two, of robust health and strength in reserve. But although, as a teenager, he had inherited two hundred acres that yielded him a handsome income year after year, agriculture had never been part of his personal agenda. When August came around each year he didn't even have a tan, and the crescents of black under the ends of his fingernails weren't topsoil but ink.

  Surrounded by the appurtenances of a small printing shop of a century or two ago, Glosenby was setting type by hand, picking up the letters one at a time from a type box with his right hand and placing them in a compositor's stick held in his left. The job proceeded at a dizzying pace, only a little less rapidly than keystroking at a modern computer. Each time he came to the end of a line he wiped the perspiration from the fingertips of his right hand on his canvas apron, an action that hardly broke the rhythm of his work.

  The shop occupied a one-story annex to the farmhouse. Like the rest of the house, it lacked air-conditioning, but a refreshing breeze, laden with the scents and sounds of summer, swept intermittently through screened windows, stirring curtains and rustling papers. A babel of birdsong and insect noises and the distant purr of a tractor engine didn't distract Glosenby from his work.

  The copy he was setting was skewered on a spike above the type, but he seldom looked at it because he had written it himself. From time to time he swung round on his high swiveled stool to transfer a mass of type en bloc from the compositor's stick to a frame on the imposing stone, a smooth flat sheet of marble that had once been white but was now laced with gray veins of ink spilled by generations of printers.

  "Jack?” Glosenby's wife Jan appeared at the door that led from the farmhouse to the shop.

  "Mmm?” He went on with his work, but something in the tone of her voice made him glance up briefly. She was standing motionless in the doorway, dressed in her usual summer outfit, a sleeveless print dress. Her face, without a trace of makeup and framed by long straight hair, had the worn look of waiting-room furniture.

  "Cole Blanchard is here."

  "He's here?"

  "In the kitchen. Says he wants to talk to you."

  Glosenby sat up straight, put down his stick, and wiped both hands on his apron. “Sure I'll talk to him. I didn't think that horse thief had the guts—"

  "That horse thief,” said Blanchard, who hadn't waited in the kitchen for a formal invitation, “is here to talk turkey.” He stepped past Jan and strode into the shop, casting his eyes to right and left as if he were appraising the furniture.

  "I'm not making any deals with you, Blanchard."

  "Don't be too sure of that.” Below average height despite his elevator shoes, Cole Blanchard dressed like a dandy of the 1920s and wore a wide-brimmed black hat like the bad guy in an old Western, which he hadn't bothered to remove on entering the house.

  Glosenby laid his hands, palms down, on the imposing stone before him and felt the cool of the stone ooze into him and temper the fire of rage that the very sight of Blanchard had ignited.

  "If this is about your landfill scheme, there's only one answer you'll ever hear from me, and that's No. Everybody knows you bought those parcels of swamp land along Merrick Road for practically nothing because they're useless for farming, and then turned around and tried to lease them to the county to start a landfill."

  "It's a perfectly legitimate transaction.” Blanchard was chewing a toothpick. From time to time he removed it and spat a splinter off to one side or the other as if he were outdoors. “And the voters of the county are ready to approve it unless they're turned away by your reactionary newsletters and handouts and signs."

  "They won't approve it if they have all the facts. That's why somebody needs to tell them what you're planning to dump into that ground."

  "Dead trees, stumps, cornstalks, chaff, boulders, scrap iron, maybe a tractor tire or two..."

  "And maybe a whole lot of nonbiodegradable toxic waste from the Spivakov plant in Monroe—enough to turn every man, woman, and child in this county into a bald, babbling—"

  "All right, what's it going to take to square you, Glosenby? Name your price."

  Glosenby's hands turned to fists on the stone. “I know this is going to be hard for a chiseling, double-dealing swindler like you to grasp, Blanchard,” he said, “but I haven't got a price. This landfill idea of yours is a menace to the public welfare, and nothing you or anybody else could offer me would make me back down and let you get away with it. So how do you like that?"

  "How do I like that?” replied Blanchard, from whose thick hide Glosenby's insults had bounced off like marshmallows. “Oh, about as well as I like eating cold soup and playing golf in the rain.” Then, abandoning his mood of nonchalance, he waved his hand in contemptuous dismissal of Glosenby and his printing plant. “You think you can manipulate and control people with the power of the press. But some day you just might come to a fence that's too high for you to climb."

  Glosenby stood up and leaned across the workbench to bark his answer. “Hear this, Blanchard. Real men don't climb fences—they tear them down."

  * * * *

  Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn laid the last of a series of yellowed newspaper clippings, each in a protective
sleeve of transparent plastic, on the desk in front of his supervisor, Lieutenant Savage.

  "Couldn't you just fax these to him?” asked Savage.

  "I don't think a fax would show the type clearly enough. Besides, he doesn't have a fax machine. I'm not even sure he has a computer. I mean, the guy is still setting type by hand like Benjamin Franklin—"

  Savage shrugged. “You could mail them..."

  Auburn matched his shrug. “Chain of custody...?"

  The case, though not exactly trivial, didn't involve murder, grand larceny, or child abuse. Moreover, the Public Safety Department had been enjoying a slump in activity, probably related to an August heat wave. Auburn and Savage's mood was correspondingly lighthearted as they discussed a trip Auburn proposed to make in the line of duty.

  Savage gathered the newspaper clippings into a neat stack and sat back in his chair. “What so draws you up there to Hicksville, Cy? Does this guy Glosenby whip up a superior grade of moonshine, or has he got a knockout of a daughter who's never been to the big city?"

  "You're stereotyping again, Lieutenant."

  Savage peered at him narrowly. “What do you mean again?"

  "Wasn't it just last week that you asked me if we ate neck bones and collard greens and watermelon when I was a kid?"

  "Cy, I never said anything like that to you in my life!” said Savage, as nearly aghast as his stern self-discipline permitted.

  "Well, then, it must have been some other guy. You know how all white dudes look alike to us. It's been a couple of years since I went up to Passavant, a k a Hicksville. And what draws me there is Jack Glosenby's files of old newspaper typefaces. The FBI and the Smithsonian send him stuff to identify—"

  "By mail."

  Auburn left early next morning so as to arrive in Passavant well before noontime. The day was bright, hot, and excessively humid. Patches of milky fog hung in the still air above creeks and ponds and in the low places, until the rays of the sun found them out and boiled them away. As Auburn passed beyond the city limits, he felt an almost physical liberation from the mantle of responsibility that had lain on him as a sworn peace officer operating within his own bailiwick.

  Passavant Pike wound hither and yon like a maze, skirting fields that had first been surveyed and staked out by men wearing knee breeches. Stalks of chicory with bright blue blossoms grew on the very shoulders of the road, while farther back, beyond the roadside ditches, clumps of ironweed with brushes of royal purple presaged the approach of autumn. Colossal machines, dwarfed by the vast flat fields in which they were operating, carried on harvesting and haybailing activities.

  Long before he reached Passavant, Auburn began noticing recurring evidences of some local controversy. On one residential site or farmstead after another he saw signs, some rudely painted on wooden boards and others professionally lettered and printed: No Landfill. no landfill. No Merrick-Dampiere Landfill. Stop Landfill. no landfill.

  It was ten twenty-five a.m. when he pulled off the road and started along the driveway that led to Glosenby's farm and printing shop. The name on the mailbox was Glosenby, but the sign for the shop called it Jack Horner's Printery.

  When he was halfway to the house he had to pull partly onto the grass to allow a white van to pass him. Its driver, a huge man with a bald head like a prize squash, responded to Auburn's nod by showing his teeth in a grin that might have been either a sign of unfailing good nature or a grimace of indignation. As the vehicles passed, Auburn noted that the van belonged to the local gas and electric company.

  The farmhouse and the barn behind it were both big and well maintained. The shop occupied a one-story outbuilding attached to the house by a breezeway. The farmyard, partly grass and partly gravel, contained two cars, a truck, a Jeep, and a tractor with a mowing machine attached. Auburn parked among them and headed for the house. As he drew near the tractor he could feel heat radiating from its engine and hear its insulated exhaust pipe clucking metallically as it cooled.

  Presuming on several years of friendship, he headed for the kitchen door. Through an open window came the sounds of a friendly dispute—more friendly than disputatious—between a man and a woman. The female voice he recognized as that of Jan Glosenby, but the other certainly wasn't Jack's.

  When he started up the kitchen steps in the bright sunshine he became visible to the two in the kitchen long before he could see them. Out of the shadows the male voice squawked an aggressively friendly “Die, mite,” which Auburn swiftly deciphered as “'Day, mate."

  Jan's “Well, hello, stranger!” followed immediately after. She opened the screen door to admit him to the cool, dark, cavernous kitchen, where an ancient oscillating fan hummed unobtrusively on a wooden pedestal. Except for the modern appliances, few changes had been made in the decor here since the house was built. The formidable array of empty glass jars and equipment on the big worktable and the rich syrupy tang in the air made it obvious that Jan was making blackberry jelly the hard way.

  The man who sat hunched over a cup of coffee in the breakfast nook was thin as a fence rail, with sunbaked skin stretched taut over prominent cheekbones, a diamond earring, and more teeth than a ten-speed bike. The same sun that had darkened his skin had faded his clothes to a muted neutral shade of pastel gray.

  "Cy, this is Alf Chickering. From Australia, as if you couldn't tell."

  Chickering half rose, shook hands with Auburn, and repeated his greeting. Since he hardly moved his lips when he spoke, most of the sound came through his nose, taking on a reedy timbre in the process. He looked wild, reckless, and dangerous, with the kind of exotic charm that exerts a fatal appeal on women.

  "Good to meet you, sir,” said Auburn. He turned to Jan. “Is Jack around?"

  "Sure. Is he expecting you?"

  "No, I didn't call. Is he in the shop?"

  "He's always in the shop. And so am I except when he gives me a day off to can or make jelly. You know the way, don't you?"

  As Auburn moved toward the print shop, Chickering finished his coffee, stood up, screwed a broad-brimmed straw hat onto his tall narrow head like a bottle cap, and went outside.

  A twelve-foot breezeway, mostly windows, eased the transition from nineteenth-century farmhouse to eighteenth-century print shop.

  "Hey, Jack!” called Auburn, as he tapped lightly on the frame of the doorway. Getting no answer, he moved on into the shop but stopped frozen in his tracks by the sight that greeted him there. The lifeless form of Jack Glosenby sprawled facedown over one of his presses. A shotgun blast at close quarters had carried away the back of his head, spattering the wall beyond with blood and peppering it with shot. Gouts and splashes of blood gleamed wetly on walls, furniture, and floor.

  Recovering from his momentary mental and physical paralysis, Auburn looked at his watch and compared it with the antique pendulum clock on the wall. Both agreed, within a minute, on 10:34. Without moving farther into the room, he made a swift and critical survey of his surroundings.

  During his years as a beat cop he had been present at the discovery of a couple of undoubted suicides, but he didn't remember ever having been first on the scene of a murder. Chance had cast him today in the role, not of a homicide detective, but of a member of the general public.

  Stand still. Look, listen, and smell. Don't touch.

  Two ceiling lights and a gooseneck lamp over the work area were all burning. Both sash windows stood wide open, with screens in place. The aluminum screen in one of the windows, which was situated some six feet behind the position of the body, showed a neat round hole a little less than two inches in diameter.

  Apart from the presence of a dead body, there was little evidence of any disturbance within the room. In toppling forward Glosenby had overturned the stool on which he had apparently been sitting, so that it lay awry under his legs. He had also dropped or spilled several dozen pieces of type, which now lay strewn like a handful of shiny new nails over the rug beneath him.

  During its many years of service,
that rug had soaked up countless large and small spills of ink, most of them black but a few in a half dozen other colors. The rug also showed a deeply worn traffic pattern of ground-in dirt and ground-away pile. But despite its threadbare condition, it retained the marks made by the four legs of a piece of furniture that must have stood in the same position for months or years, but wasn't there now.

  Auburn squatted and, without touching anything, satisfied himself that the marks had been left by a heavy, high-backed chair, the only piece of nonfunctional furniture in the room, which must have been displaced fairly recently and now stood about half a yard from its former position. Displaced exactly when? By whom? For what purpose?

  Auburn stood up. Closing his eyes, he heard the leisurely and impersonal ticking of the clock, the twittering of birds in the orchard behind the shop and, away across the fields, the growl of a tractor, presumably piloted by Alf Chickering. His nose detected the smells of ink, machine oil, gunpowder, and freshly spilled gore.

  In a cold sweat he made his way back to the kitchen.

  "Jan, I've got bad news. I mean, really bad."

  "Jack? He's not—?"

  Auburn nodded. “I'm so sorry. He's dead, Jan."

  "But he can't be. Are you sure? Oh, I have to see—” She put a steaming pan down on the table and was around him and through the door before he knew it.

  "Wait a minute,” he called as he dashed after her. “Don't touch him. Don't touch anything."

  She turned in the breezeway, her expression of grief changing to one of apprehension. “Why not?"

  "Because Jack was shot."

  "Oh, no! No! Oh, that crazy, crazy fool!” She rushed on into the shop, and before Auburn caught up with her he heard her scream of anguish and horror. Eager to spare her the suffering of remaining with that appalling vision before her, and intent on preventing any disturbance of evidence at the crime scene, he urged her back toward the kitchen with clumsy expressions of sympathy and support.