Archangel by Paul Watkins Page B

apples.
    Dodge lowered his arm, uncocked the hammer and set the gunback in his belt. He breathed deeply. The sour barnyard smell filled his lungs.
    Coltrane nodded hello. “Who’d you think it was going to be?”
    “I thought …” He did not want to say what he had thought. “I came to tell you I found a bridge nail hammered into that tree, Victor.”
    So Mackenzie did the job himself, thought Coltrane. He wanted to tell Dodge the truth, but he was afraid of Mackenzie, so he said nothing and felt sick.
    “I know you said you had seen Wilbur Hazard cutting across your land and going up into the trees lately …”
    “Oh, I don’t suppose it’s him,” said Coltrane. Out of nervousness, he began emptying his pockets, inspecting bits of crumpled paper and coins and putting them away again.
    “But we should check. I’ll be back later to see if he comes by again.”
    Coltrane looked behind him, as if he’d heard a voice from somewhere else. “Last murder here was over seventy years ago.”
    “When Dabney Hanks came home from being overseas a year, fighting in World War One.” Dodge knew the story by heart.
    The fact was they both knew the story, but still took pleasure in the telling. It wasn’t so much the importance of the story as it was two men reminding each other of what they shared. And the laughter or the knowing looks that came of it were like secret handshakes in a brotherhood. It was a thing that anchored them to Abenaki Junction and the land around it. To understand the story of Dabney Hanks and the reasons it continued to echo through the town was to understand the town itself, what its people feared and what made them proud, and why the death of James Pfeiffer had sent a tremor through them which would never disappear, and would soon be a legend of its own.
    “Dabney comes home,” Coltrane continued, “and finds his wife gives birth to a son that wasn’t theirs.”
    Dodge nodded. “So he goes right over to the man he knows is the father.”
    “That was Andy Truitt.” Coltrane raised a finger.
    “And he shoots him with the same rifle that he’s been using to pick off Germans over in France.” Dodge nailed the story shut, and bothmen stood frowning for a few seconds afterward, as the memory receded into the darkness of their minds.
    Coltrane started walking back toward the screened front door of his house. He was desperate to lead the subject away from Pfeiffer and the spiked tree. I can hardly stand to keep quiet about it, he thought, but I know I can’t look Marcus Dodge in the face and lie and be believed. “Now, would you like a nice piece of Clara’s blueberry pie?” he asked hopefully. “The berries were on the bush but three hours ago.”
    Dodge saw again the gentle rolling of the berries between Clara’s fingers as they fell into the bowl. He saw the faint purple stain on her fingertips. Ten minutes later, he was finishing his second piece of pie. The full force of the summer seemed stored in each fragile berry.
    The three of them sat at the kitchen table, Clara with flour still on her apron and dusted across her hands and in her hair. She’d had three sons and three daughters, all of them grown now and moved away. Her body had given with the work, so that the angle of her bones was gentler in the curving of her skin. She kept her hair long and braided and the gray in the braids was silver shiny and did not hold the brittleness of age. Often she raised her fingers to her mouth, as if embarrassed at how time had creased her lips.
    Looking at her from the corner of his eye, Dodge wanted to tell her how beautiful she was. She seemed the kind of woman who had never heard those words from anyone. As he stared, he realized suddenly that the almost sensual rhythm he felt when he came to this valley was her doing. Victor was a part of it, but he did not create it. It streamed from this woman in the calmness of her gaze and the way she took from the land without taking more than she