When Gus pulled into the church lot and parked his motorcycle I was in the garage with my bicycle flipped upside down working on removing the tube of a flat tire. Gus walked across the street so focused on my mother that he didn’t see me. There were cobwebs across the garage window and the panes were in need of washing but even so I had a pretty good view of the front porch and could hear what transpired there.
At the bottom step Gus stopped. “Nathan around, Ruth?”
“Gone,” she said and blew a flourish of smoke.
“Know when he’ll be back?”
“I have no idea. He’s getting everything ready to bury Ariel. Do you have news from your friend Doyle? Is that why you’re looking for Nathan?”
“I’d rather talk directly to Nathan.”
“If you know something, I’d rather you talked to me.”
Gus looked up at the woman rocking slowly in the shadow of the porch. “All right,” he finally said. He took the steps and faced her. “According to Doyle,” he said, “the sheriff had been hoping to find the instrument used to crack Ariel’s skull before she was thrown into the river. He believed it might be a tire iron and that Karl might still have it somewhere in his possession. But the county attorney has refused to petition a judge. Says there’s not enough evidence. The sheriff thinks it’s more a lack of backbone on the part of the county attorney.”
Smoke vined from my mother’s nostrils as she spoke: “Arthur Mendelsohn has always been a toad. He was a toad as a child and he’s a toad as a man. He would never stand up to Axel Brandt.”
She put her cigarette to her lips and her eyes held on Gus’s face.
She asked, “What do you think of the tire iron?”
Gus seemed to weigh his response or perhaps simply the advisability of any response. He said, “It’s handy and would be effective, I imagine.”
“Have you ever wielded a tire iron as a weapon?”
“No,” he said, “but I’d guess that it does a lot of damage.”
“You’ve killed people, Gus. In the war.”
He didn’t answer but watched her closely.
“Is it a hard thing?”
“I killed people at a distance. They were shapes to me, never faces. I imagine it would be a different thing killing someone whose face you could see.”
“It would take a cold heart, don’t you think?”
“Yes, ma’am, I imagine it would.”
“People can fool you can’t they, Gus.”
“I guess they can.”
“Is there anything else you wanted to tell Nathan?”
“No, that’s pretty much everything.”
“I’ll let him know.”
My father’s friend left the porch and went to the church where he disappeared through the side door that led to his basement room. My mother finished her cigarette and lit another.
Within the hour my father returned from van der Waal’s. It was almost lunchtime and he went directly to the kitchen to prepare the meal. My mother followed him and I drifted in after them. My father was relaying the final plans for the funeral which my mother had refused to have any part in. I saw her—maybe we all saw her—retreating, her world daily becoming a smaller and smaller box. She sat with her elbows propped on the table and a cigarette in her hand and she listened as my father pulled items from the refrigerator and told her the details. He’d acknowledged my entrance but my mother paid me no heed.
When she had apparently listened enough she said abruptly, “The sheriff tried to get a warrant to search the Brandt property for whatever it was that Karl used to shatter Ariel’s skull. The county attorney refused to help him.”
My father turned from the refrigerator with a half-gallon bottle of milk in his hand. “How do you know this?”
“Gus came by while you were gone.”
“Doyle?”
“Yes.”
My father set the milk on the table. “Ruth, we don’t know at all Karl’s part in Ariel’s death.”
She put a curtain of smoke in the air between them. “Oh, but I do,” she said.
“Look, I’m going to give the sheriff a call.”
“You do that.”
When he’d left the room my mother finally looked where I stood by the screen door. She raised an eyebrow and said, “Do you know your Old Testament, Frankie?”
I watched her but didn’t answer.
She said, “Let the battle cry be heard in the land, a shout of great destruction.”
She drew on her cigarette and breathed out smoke.
28
Mother disappeared after dinner and only a short while before dark. She said she was going for a walk. My grandfather, who along with Liz had taken to eating with us regularly, had asked where she was headed. They’d all been sitting on the front porch, my parents and Liz and my grandfather, trying to get some benefit from a cooling breeze that had blown in with the evening. I’d been lying in the yard grass watching the light dissolve from the sky above the valley. My mother had said, “Around the block.” And got up and just like that she was gone before anyone could object or offer companionship. Afterward my grandparents and my father talked about her. They were worried. Hell, we all were.
When she didn’t come back by hard dark my father left in the Packard and my grandfather left in his big Buick and they went looking. Liz stayed with us. She kept near the telephone in case someone called with information. Jake had been upstairs all evening working on one of his model airplanes and after the men drove off he came down and when I told him what was going on he said that he’d seen Mother walking along the railroad tracks headed toward the trestle outside town.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
He shrugged and looked chagrined and answered, “She was just walking.”
“Along the tracks? Have you ever seen her walk along the tracks? Jesus.”
I hurried to the kitchen and told Liz and then I said I would go and find Mother.
“No,” Liz replied. “I don’t want you on those railroad tracks at night.”
“I’ll take a flashlight and I’ll be careful.”
“I’ll g-g-g-go with him,” Jake stuttered and I figured he must be pretty scared.
Liz clearly wasn’t happy with the idea but I pointed out that if somebody didn’t go soon who knew what might happen and she gave in.