But not this time.
“A couple of men brought their hunting dogs, with the idea that we could use them to help track, but as it turned out, it was hardly necessary. He was at the far corner of his field, furthest from my house, and the crows had found him first. Once we saw them, all circling there, we knew exactly what we would find. It’s like the scripture says: ‘Where the vultures gather.’ ”
I asked if he took his own life.
“It was that way,” said Joseph. “He had taken a round to the head. It was not easy to see. And yes, he had been drinking, and yes, drunkenness and guns are a bad mix. But I do not think it could have been an accident like that with a rifle. So, yes, he killed himself. Perhaps it would be better to say that his drunkenness took his life. He was like two different people. Quiet and thoughtful and with a strong wit, when he was sober. But he was not sober often, especially these last few years. That other Tom took them both.”
And his wife? How is she?
He shook his head. “I told Julia,” said Joseph. “Lord help me, I had wondered if it would fall to me. Tom had fewer and fewer friends over these last few years. He’d always been private, but as things got harder and harder on the farm, he had turned away from everyone. I think he spent all of his time on his computer, talking with other people who were as angry as he was. But they were not friends, not in any way that mattered. They had no family nearby. And he and Julia had stopped going to church after that fight they had with another family there.
“So yes, I told her. Went over to the Turner farm with a deputy who’d come out to help coordinate the search. She and Bess Turner were always close, or so Rachel tells me. It was hard, but who else could do it? She did not take it well.”
I said that it didn’t surprise me. It was such a hard thing.
“She,” Joseph began, and then he coughed, as if his throat had closed a little bit. He started again. “She could not stop screaming and crying. She had trouble standing. Bess had to take her upstairs, and she was still crying out when I left. It was as if she could not hear anyone anymore. I worried that it might be that way, but it was still hard to see. The children are still little, and it is so . . . hard for them to understand such things. I . . .”
And he stopped talking for a while, as the team pulled and the plow bit deep, and the rich smell of turned earth filled the air.
I did not press him.
For a minute, and two, we walked in silence, only the sounds of horses and earth filling the air.
Then he told me that they had buried Tom on his property, right out by the property line. There seemed nothing else to do.
“I said a couple of prayers over him,” Joseph said. “I do not think he would have minded.”
October 9
Thursday in the morning, Jon came riding by, with some more news. It was not good. The body of a man had been found by the roadside, near a field by Clay Road. He had been shot, many times.
No one knew who he was, and he did not seem to have any identification.
A sign had been hung around his neck. It said: LOOTER.
The men who found him buried him, even before the sheriff got there.
Before he rode off, Jon told me that no one around there remembered hearing shots. Or if they did, they were not saying.
Two men dead in two days. It is a difficult thing, and feels like an ill wind.
October 10
I woke early today, before the sun, before the cockcrow. The moon was still nearly full, and low in the sky, and the faint light cast our room in a gentle blue. Like the air in the house, it felt cool and sharp, but the bed was warm. I lay there, in the warmth of our bed, and my mind played out against the events of the last two days.
An ill wind.
I rolled to my right, to look at Hannah. I will do that sometimes, when I wake in the night and she is sleeping. I’ll just lie there in the silence, and in the darkness, and look at the shadow softly breathing next to me.
Her face was lit by the moon, cool and ghostly.
Her eyes were open.
“Good morning, Jay,” she whispered. “You can’t sleep?” Only she calls me Jay. Only she ever. It isn’t really my name, but I have never minded.
I told her that I could not.
“I can’t either. I was dreaming about Tom and that man. It wasn’t a good dream, so I woke up.” Her voice was even and matter-of-fact, but in the half-light I could see that she was distressed.
“It has been hard,” I said. “To have death moving so close, so near to us.”
“And especially with Tom. I know they had struggled, but . . .” She paused. “I just don’t know what it would be to lose you. Not just because you’d died, but because you’d died inside even before that. I just don’t know how such a thing would feel.”
I told her that I wasn’t planning on dying.
She curled in closer, and closed her eyes, and nestled on my shoulder.
“I am so glad that God brought you to me, Jacob,” she whispered.
We lay there for a while, and she fell asleep again. I did not. I lay there as she slept, until the moon’s faint light gave way to the coming day.
BILL SMITH CAME BY again later in the morning, riding his bicycle. This time, he came to thank me for the salts and the spices.
On the back of the bicycle he had fastened a couple of apple pies, and a bag of apples from his orchard. Wrapped in bloody wax paper were also a couple of good cuts of venison from a deer he’d shot just the day before. It was a generous trade for the spices, but this was no surprise. Bill was a generous man.
The apple harvest is still in full swing here, and I asked him how it was going. None of his machines were working, he replied, but the harvest was now proceeding by hand.
He said that some people from Lititz had come in a pickup, a bunch of people, all piled into the back of an old Ford that they had been able to get running. They’d helped much of the day with the harvest, picking and filling baskets. For their work? He’d fed them, then paid them in big bags of apples, and in slabs of bacon and pork from four pigs he’d slaughtered the day before.
“They still have food coming into Lititz,” he said. “But those MREs are just god-awful stuff, and canned fruit gets real old, and there’s only so much baked beans you can eat.” He grinned. “Hooo, is that true.”
I asked him if any of the other farmers around were doing the same thing, and he said that they were starting to get more and more folk coming out from the towns looking for work in the harvest in exchange for food.
“We’ve just got so much to do, and there’s so many who don’t have anything to do. It’s still hard, though, getting the word out about what we need. Some of the stores are pitching up bulletin boards, though, where we can put up what hands we need and when. And if you go by ’em, you get men standing ’round and waiting for work. Guess that was the way it used to be, eh? Everyone working together, sharing stuff.”