The lodge was constructed around a hollow, with the bar and reception building on the higher ground by the road, and the rooms and cabins at the bottom of the slope beyond it. It wasn’t difficult to find out where the resident homophobes were staying, as each guest was forced to carry his key on a fob cut from the trunk of a small tree. The key had been lying in front of the two guys as they taunted Angel. They were in cabin number fourteen. They left the table about fifteen minutes after their meal was over. By that time, Angel and Louis were gone. The two men didn’t look at me as they departed, but I could feel their anger simmering. They had drunk seven pints of beer between them during and after their meal, and it was only a matter of time before they decided to seek some form of retribution for being bested at the bar.
The temperature had dropped suddenly with nightfall. In the shaded places, that morning’s frost had not yet melted. The two men walked quickly back to their cabin, the bigger man leading, the small bearded man behind. They entered to find that their hunting rifles had been disassembled and now lay in pieces on the floor. Their bags were beside the guns, packed and locked. To their immediate left stood Louis. Angel was seated at the table beside the stove. Phil and Steve from Hoboken took in the two men. Phil, the larger and more aggressive of the two, seemed about to say something when he saw the guns in the hands of the two visitors. He closed his mouth again.
“You know there isn’t a cabin number thirteen?” said Angel.
“What?” said Phil.
“I said, you know that there isn’t a cabin number thirteen in this place? The numbers jump from twelve to fourteen, on account of how nobody wants to be in number thirteen. But this is still the thirteenth cabin, so you’re really in number thirteen after all, which is how come you’re so unlucky.”
“Why are we unlucky?” Phil’s natural animosity was returning, beefed up with some of the Dutch courage from the bar. “All I see is two shitheads wandered into the wrong cabin and started to fuck with the wrong guys. You’re the unlucky ones. You have no idea who you’re screwing with here.”
Beside him, Steve shifted uneasily on his feet. Appearances to the contrary, he was smart enough, or sober enough, to realize that it wasn’t a good idea to rile two men with guns when you had no guns at all, at least none that could be reassembled in time to make them useful. Angel took the wallets from his pocket and waved them at the two men.
“But we do,” he said. “We know just who you are. We know where you live, where you work. We know what your wife looks like, Steve, and we know that Phil seems to be separated from the mother of his children. Sad, Phil. Pictures of the kids, but no sign of Mommy. Still, you are kind of a prick, so it’s hard to blame her for giving you the bullet.
“You, on the other hand, know nothing about us other than the fact that we’re here now, and we got good reason to be aggrieved with you on account of your big mouths. So this is what we propose: you put your shit in your car, and you start heading south. Your buddy there can do the driving, Phil, ’cause I can tell you’ve had a few more than he has. When you’ve driven, oh, maybe a hundred miles, you stop and find yourselves a room. Get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, you head back to Hoboken, and you’ll never see us again. Well, you’ll probably never see us again. You never know. We might feel the urge to visit someday. Maybe there’s a Sinatra tour we can take. Gives us an excuse to drop by and say ‘hi’ to you and Steve. Unless, of course, you’d like to give us a more pressing reason to follow you down there.”
Phil made one last play. His pigheadedness was almost admirable.
“We got friends in Jersey,” he said meaningfully.
Angel looked genuinely puzzled. His reply, when it came, could have come only from a New Yorker.
“Why would somebody boast about something like that?” he asked. “Who the fuck wants to visit Jersey anyway?”
“Man means,” said Louis, “that he got ‘friends’ in Jersey.”
“Oh,” said Angel. “Oh, I get it. Hey, we watch The Sopranos too. The bad news for you, Phil, is even if that were true, which I know it’s not, we are the kind of people that the friends in Jersey call, if you catch my drift. It’s easy to tell, if you look hard enough. You see, we have pistols. You have hunting rifles. You came here to hunt deer. We didn’t come here to hunt deer. You don’t hunt deer with a Glock. You hunt other things with a Glock, but not deer.”
Phil’s shoulders slumped. It was time to admit defeat. “Let’s go,” he said to Steve. Angel tossed him the wallets. He and Louis watched as the two men loaded up their bags and the pieces of the rifles, minus the firing pins, which Angel had thrown into the forest. When they were done, Steve took the driver’s seat, and Phil stood at the passenger door. Angel and Louis leaned casually on the rail of the cabin, only the guns suggesting that this wasn’t merely a quartet of acquaintances exchanging final farewells.
“All of this because we were having a little fun with you at the bar,” said Phil.
“No,” said Angel. “All of this because you’re assholes.”
Phil got in the car, and they drove away. Louis waited until their lights had faded, then tapped Angel gently on the back of the hand.
“Hey,” he said, “we never get calls from Jersey.”
“I know,” said Angel. “Why would we want to talk to anyone in Jersey?”
And, their work done, they retired to bed.
Chapter XXXI
T he next morning, we headed north into Jackman. We got stuck waiting for a truck to reverse at the Jackman Trading Post, even in November its display of T-shirts hanging outside like laundry drying. To one side of it was an old black-and-white with a mannequin in the driver’s seat, which was as close as anyone was going to get to a sighting of a cop this far north.
“They ever have cops up here?” asked Louis.
“I think there used to be a policeman in the sixties or seventies.”
“What happened to him? He die of boredom?”
“I guess it is kinda quiet. There’s a constable now, far as I know.”
“Bet the long winter nights just fly by for him.”
“Hey, they had a killing once.”
“Once?” He didn’t sound impressed.
“It was a pretty famous story at the time. A guy named Nelson Bart-ley, used to own the Moose River House, got shot in the head. They found his body jammed under an uprooted tree.”
“Yeah, and when was this?”
“Nineteen nineteen. There was rum-running involved somehow, I seem to recall.”
“You telling me there’s been nothing since then?”
“Most people in this part of the world take their time about dying, if they can,” I said. “You may find that startling.”
“I guess I move in different circles.”
“I guess so. You don’t like rural life much, do you?”
“I had my fill of rural life when I was a boy. I didn’t care much for it then. Don’t figure it’s improved much since.”
There were also twin outhouses beside the trading post, one on top of the other. On the door of the upper outhouse was written the word “Conservative.” On the door of the lower one was the word “Liberal.”
“Your people,” I said to Louis.
“Not my people. I’m a liberal Republican.”
“I’ve never really understood what that means.”
“Means I believe people can do whatever they want, as long as they don’t do it anywhere near me.”
“I thought it would be more complex than that.”
“Nope, that’s about it. You think I should go in and tell them I’m gay?”
“If I was you, I wouldn’t even tell them you’re black,” said Angel, from the backseat.
“Don’t judge this place by that outhouse back there,” I said. “That’s just to give the tourists something to laugh at. A small town like this doesn’t survive, even prosper some, if the people who live here are bigots and idiots. Don’t make that mistake about them.”
Incredibly, this silenced both of them.
Beyond the trading post, and to the left, the impressive twin steeples of St. Anthony’s Church, built from local granite in 1930, loomed against the pale gray sky. The church wouldn’t have looked out of place in a big city, but it seemed incongruous here in a town of a thousand souls. Still, it had given Bennett Lumley something to aim for in the creation of Gilead, and he had determined that the spire of his church would exceed even that of St. Anthony’s. Jackman, or Holden as it was originally known, was founded by the English and the Irish, and the French came down to join them later. Back where the Trading Post lay used to be part of an area called Little Canada, and from there to the bridge was the Catholic part of town, which was why St. Anthony’s was on the eastern side of the river. Once you crossed the bridge, that was Protestant territory. There was the Congregational church, and the Episcopalians, too, who were the Protestants it was okay to like if you were a Catholic, or so my grandfather used to say. I didn’t know how much the place had changed since then, but I was pretty certain that the old divide still remained, give or take a couple of houses.
The red Jackman station house stood by the railway line that cut through the town, but it was now privately owned. The main bridge in town was being repaired, so a detour took us over a temporary structure and into the township of Moose River. On the right was the modest Moose River Congregational Church, which bore the same relationship to St. Anthony’s as the local Little League team bore to the Red Sox.
Eventually, we came to the sign for Holden Cemetery, across from the Windfall Outdoor Center, its blue school buses, now empty, lined up sleepily outside. A dirt-and-stone road led down to the cemetery, but it looked steep and slick with ice, so we left the car at the top of the road and walked the rest of the way. The road led past a frozen pond on one side and a patch of beaver bog on the other, before the gravestones of the cemetery appeared on a hill to the left. It was small, and bordered by a wire fence, with an unlocked gate wide enough for one person to pass through at a time. The graves dated as far back as the nineteenth century, probably to the days when this was still just a settlement.
I looked at the five stones nearest the gate, three large stones, two small. The first read “Hattie E., wife of John F. Childs” and gave the dates of her birth and death: April 11, 1865, and November 26, 1891. Beside her stood the two smaller stones: Clara M. and Vinal F. According to the stone, Clara M. was born on August 16, 1895, and died just over a month later on September 30, 1895. Vinal F.’s time on this earth was even briefer: born on September 5, 1903, he was dead by September 28. The fourth stone was that of Lillian L., John’s second wife and presumably the mother of Clara and Vinal. She was born on July 11, 1873, and died less than a year after her son, on May 16, 1904. The last stone was that of John F. Childs himself, born September 8, 1860, and died, having outlived two wives and two children, March 18, 1935. There were no other stones nearby. I wondered if John F. had been the last of his line. Here, in this tiny cemetery, the story of his life was laid bare in the space of five carved pieces of rock. But the stone we were looking for stood in the farthest southern corner of the cemetery. There were no names upon it, and no dates of birth or death. It read only the children of gilead, followed by the same word carved three times: