Beast of the Field Read Free Page B

these shell-shocked types, who smiled a stupid smile at you all day then jerked awake from a trench dream that night to snap your neck.  He’d seen it before.
    Donnan, the senior, ate well too, but steadily, and quietly, now and again wiping his fingers on the napkin tucked into his shirt.  He flattened his mouth at Sterno a couple times, which seemed to be all the smile he was allowed indoors.  Once he asked his daughter for the buttermilk, once the big man for the salt; other than this he kept his eyes on his plate.
    Then there was the girl.  Throughout the dinner, as Sterno had watched the family, a pair of eyes had been watching him in kind.  She didn’t touch her food, didn’t say a word, did nothing, in fact, except watch Sterno.  Measuring him up.  Despite this, he thought, she’s the exception.  She’s the only one wants you here.
    Truth was, none of them wanted him here, and he knew it.  Sterno had seen this before too:  blame, anger, guilt, grief—wounds re-opened and fresh with the arrival of a detective.  Suddenly, the death was alive again, right here in the room, sitting with them in a chair where the living used to sit.  This was what they thought they had wanted all this time; now they got it and they were not so sure anymore if they wanted to re-live this pain again or just let the dead lie.
    He’d seen it a thousand times.               
     

 
     
    3.
     
    After dinner, Mother made Millie work with her in the kitchen while the men smoked on the front porch.  Her dropping a coffee cup and chipping a plate didn’t make any difference to Mother: she felt there was a time for a woman to do what only a woman could do well and leave the men to their matters.  “Well, horseshit,” said Millie, under her breath; but she waited until Mother was on her way upstairs before she said it.  When she heard her mount the final creaking stair, she hung her apron, grabbed Tommy’s boots from their place by the back door and slid quietly outside.  She went around the back corner of the house, into and through a tunnel she’d made through Grandmother’s old lilac bush until she was at the front corner of the house, peering through dried, wilted little leaves at the conversation on the porch.
    Closest to her sat Pa, rocking like he was trying to start a fire with the floorboards and the runners of his chair.  Junior stood on the far end of the porch, looking the other way, out to the fields, thank God, or he’d see her for sure.  In the middle was this Mr. Sterno, this so-called “detective” from Missouri.  Blind as a bat, can’t drive for shit and scared of a twelve-year-old girl and a farm boy who can’t talk, coming out to him just to say hi.  Some detective they sent us, Millie thought.  Little chance of this palooka finding out who killed Tommy, she thought. And here was Pa, running off at the mouth like they were old pals now he finally had a grown man around to talk to.
    “…Never did know who gave him that watch,”  he was saying, “some gal I reckon.  Tommy always had a gal or two treatin’ him nice.  I’ll tell ya.  Sure was a nice one they got off with.  A Elgin watch.  A shiny silver watch, nice silver chain.”
    The Pinkerton wrote in a pad.  Smoked.  “So that was all that was missing, far as you know.  The watch and the billfold.”
    “Well, far as we know.  These thing’s might- a been fount on the road and carried off.  Or, if it was bandits, they might-a known Tommy carried cash on him most of the time and took these things from him right there when they did it.”
    “Cash.”
    “Well, he worked at the stables, in town.  But what I’m talking about is his winnings, mostly.  From racin’.” 
    "Right.   Your letter said he raced buggies," said the detective.
    "Mother’s letter.   Yessir.  He never took to motor-cars.  Ever-now and then he would get into a saddle.  He was just as good in a saddle as he was in a buggy.  He was