“Pull out,” she said. “We can just leave the boat and walk.” They came around the bend and had a glimpse of Grover and Samuel. They were having the same problems with their boat, and Samuel was yelling.
“Hold on,” said Lewis. She saw a tree just under the surface ahead, and he pulled hard to the left. Her bag flew into the water. She saw her green book inside it as if it were one of Walton’s crackling X-rays, and lunged for it, and went over into cold and gravel and violence.
Under the cottonwood, she opened her eyes. She was tied to the tree and her hair and arms were being pulled from her body. She tried to push up onto her back, to get her legs up into the current, but the water held her down, and something began to wrench at her waist.
It was Lewis, underneath her and then upstream. Her feet found rocks and she gulped air before he dragged her into a sandy backwater. The bag was gone, along with the boat, their shoes, her glasses, and she wept. Lewis fished her braid out of her ripped dress and weeds out of her braid, lowered her on the warm sand, and lay down next to her, with an arm around her head.
They stayed there for a long time, and when they looked up, a boy was standing next to them. “Hey there,” said Lewis. “Do you live near here?”
“I do, sir.”
“Do you think someone could give us a ride to town?”
“I do.”
“We’ve lost our things. If you find a bag sometime, a green bag with a green book, can we give you a name, and you’d find us? It’s very important to the lady. Will you remember the name Mrs. Nash? You could take it to the Elite. Have you seen the Elite Hotel?”
The boy, a burnt gold version of Irving, said I have and I do again, and Lewis resorted to repeating himself, then pounded the point in by finding a half-dollar in his wet pocket and handing it over. “So,” he said finally, “could we find your father and ask him for a ride?”
“All right.”
“Do you understand?”
“I do,” said the boy, looking downstream.
“Do you have a problem?” said Lewis. “Can we help you with something?”
“Well, not really,” said the boy. “I was to get a hook and a rope and bring it back.”
“Back where?”
“Back to the drowned man.”
He said drown-ned . Lewis ran.
???
Grover and Samuel had made it another quarter mile before they hit a rock. The barge with the Macalesters and Rex had tried to save both men but managed neither. Samuel had swum to the bank, and they’d stopped him from going back for Grover. Clara and the people in the other barge would now be almost to Livingston, still in ignorance. Dulcy could hear people talking, asking if Grover could swim, but swimming didn’t mean a thing in a world of boulders and branches, pressure and broken bones. Grover had anyway hit his head on a rock when the boat first tipped: everyone on the close barge had seen it, and no one thought he could have survived the blow, even if they’d reached him immediately. “Not a chance,” said Macalester, sitting next to Samuel on a rock, both of them soaking wet. Margaret and Vinca wept on the beach, and the others walked up the lane to wait for Gerry and the firemen.
“Do they know where Grover is?” Dulcy asked. “Shouldn’t we be walking the shore?”
“He’s in that hole,” said Macalester, pointing. “In a whirlpool. Every few minutes you’ll see his arm rising.”
When Gerry Fenoways arrived, he asked—clearly knowing the answer—who had drowned, and then he said that he felt the world was just, and his brother was revenged: he couldn’t have made this happen, but he could be happy that it had. He watched from shore while Bixby and two firemen tied themselves off to the engine wagon and waded to the nearest rock, climbed on top, and pushed down into the pool with grappling pikes and a noose.
A single arm rose high like a dancer’s, and then the body sank again. The second time they hooked Grover and dropped the noose around one of his arms and his head, and they slapped the horses to pull the body free from the pool. His right temple was dented and bloodless, and his eyes and his mouth were open. Samuel knelt down and tried to close both.
Dies in Jail: John Kleinmittila Passes Away after Debauch
... But why should Park County’s citizens be surprised? Six men and one woman have died or endured brain injury while under Sheriff Fenoways’ care. Kleinmittila was a well-known character, often seen at all hours around the German Beer Hall. His death followed seizures on the jail floor over this last weekend, when even the other inmates, of necessity a heartless and dissolute lot, begged Sheriff Fenoways to call for medical assistance.
Other incidents: Albert Inkster, executed last month, was rendered an idiot by alcoholic seizures and rumored beatings following his arrest for the stabbing of Lawrence Peck. Mervin Knaab, a former choir director who had also fallen victim to the demon rum, was imprisoned like Kleinmittila, and had treatment denied like Kleinmittila. He has spent the last six months, vacant and ruined, sitting on the porch of the Poor Farm. He is luckier than Myrtle Duncan, arrested following an illegal operation and held on a bond too high for her family to manage, who died of infection after two days of begging for a doctor. Sheriff Fenoways chooses now to prosecute her abortionist, rather than question if his dereliction hastened her death. Finally, Lennart Falk: we provide his full story, as well as a photograph taken before he visited our city, another taken while under Chief Fenoways’ roof, and as he appears now, despite the best medical care possible.
—The Livingston Enterprise, August 1, 1905
chapter 20
The Peach Book of Lost Things
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People drowned all the time in Westfield, mostly health-seekers on Chautauqua Lake and people doing stupid things that involved the Lake Erie breakwall. Boys would leap in and be trapped against the rocks, roll like a pebble in a polishing drum until they had no skin. The men who fished out of Barcelona Harbor had been in the habit of dying, too, especially when Martha and Elam had been young, and cargo and passenger ships had still moved between Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit.
Martha had been full of stories about dead boys before Dulcy’s brothers headed off to school. Philomela had been the world’s most luxuriant stepmother, but Martha never warmed to them, and they reciprocated. Her tales were elliptical, cagey, manipulative: stories for the boys about Chester who had jumped from the mast and hit that thing in the water... There was a girl watching on the dock in every story, which made Dulcy wonder what Martha really had seen. The strangest telling had a ghostly vision appear to the Dock Girl as she walked by the harbor alone one night: Naked, but smooth all over. No parts, nothing left like that, erased with his soul by the rocks.
That got the Boys, at least until they stopped believing in anything but money.