The Best of Gene Wolfe

Redbeard

It doesn’t matter how Howie and I became friends, except that our friendship was unusual. I’m one of those people who’ve moved into the area since . . . Since what? I don’t know; someday I’ll have to ask Howie. Since the end of the sixties or the Truman Administration or the Second World War. Since something.

Anyway, after Mara and I came with our little boy, John, we grew conscious of an older stratum. They are the people who were living here before. Howie is one of them; his grandparents are buried in the little family cemeteries that are or used to be attached to farms—all within twenty miles of my desk. Those people are still here, practically all of them, like the old trees that stand among the new houses.

By and large we don’t mix much. We’re only dimly aware of them, and perhaps they’re only dimly aware of us. Our friends are new people too, and on Sunday mornings we cut the grass together. Their friends are the children of their parents’ friends, and their own uncles and cousins; on Sunday mornings they go to the old clapboard churches.

Howie was the exception, as I said. We were driving down U.S. 27—or rather, Howie was driving and I was sitting beside him smoking a cigar and having a look around. I saw a gate that was falling down, with a light that was leaning way over, and beyond it just glimpsed, a big, old, tumbledown wooden house with young trees sprouting in the front yard. It must have had about ten acres of ground, but there was a boarded-up fried-chicken franchise on one side of it and a service station on the other.

“That’s Redbeard’s place,” Howie told me.

I thought it was a family name, perhaps an anglicization of Barbarossa. I said, “It looks like a haunted house.”

“It is,” Howie said. “For me, anyway. I can’t go in there.”

We hit a chuckhole, and I looked over at him.

“I tried a couple times. Soon as I set my foot on that step, something says, ‘This is as far as you go, buster,’ and I turn around and head home.”

After a while I asked him who Redbeard was.

“This used to be just a country road,” Howie said. “They made it a Federal Highway back about the time I was born, and it got a lot of cars and trucks and stuff on it. Now the Interstate’s come through, and it’s going back to about what it was.

“Back before, a man name of Jackson used to live there. I don’t think anybody thought he was much different, except he didn’t get married till he was forty or so. But then, a lot of people around here used to do that. He married a girl named Sarah Sutter.”

I nodded, just to show Howie I was listening.

“She was a whole lot younger than him, nineteen or twenty. But she loved him—that’s what I always heard. Probably he was good to her, and so on. Gentle. You know?”

I said a lot of young women like that preferred older men.

“I guess. You know where Clinton is? Little place about fifteen miles over. There had been a certain amount of trouble around Clinton going on for years, and people were concerned about it. I don’t believe I said this Jackson was from Clinton, but he was. His dad had run a store there and had a farm. The one brother got the farm and the next oldest the store. This Jackson, he just got some money, but it was enough for him to come here and buy that place. It was about a hundred acres then.

“Anyhow, they caught him over in Clinton. One of those chancy things. It was winter, and dark already, and there’d been a little accident where a car hit a school bus that still had quite a few kids riding home. Nobody was killed as far as I heard or even hurt bad, but a few must have had bloody noses and so forth, and you couldn’t get by on the road. Just after the deputy’s car got there this Jackson pulled up, and the deputy told him to load some of the kids in the back and take them to the doctor’s.

“Jackson said he wouldn’t, he had to get back home. The deputy told him not to be a damned fool. The kids were hurt and he’d have to go back to Clinton anyhow to get onto Mill Road, because it would be half the night before they got that bus moved.

“Jackson still wouldn’t do it, and went to try and turn his pickup around. From the way he acted, the deputy figured there was something wrong. He shined his flash in the back, and there was something under a tarp there. When he saw that, he hollered for Jackson to stop and went over and jerked the tarp away. From what I hear, now he couldn’t do that because of not having a warrant and if he did, Jackson would have got off. Back then, nobody had heard of such foolishness. He jerked that tarp away, and there was a girl underneath, and she was dead. I don’t even know what her name was. Rosa or something like that, I guess. They were Italians that had come just a couple of years before.” Howie didn’t give Italians a long I, but there had been a trifling pause while he remembered not to. “Her dad had a little shoe place,” he said. “The family was there for years after.

“Jackson was arrested, and they took him up to the county seat. I don’t know if he told them anything or not. I think he didn’t. His wife came up to see him, and then a day or so later the sheriff came to the house with a search warrant. He went all through it, and when he got to going through the cellars one of the doors was locked. He asked her for the key, but she said she didn’t have it. He said he’d have to bust down the door, and asked her what was in there. She said she didn’t know, and after a while it all came out—I mean, all as far as her understanding went.

“She told him that door had been shut ever since she and Jackson had been married. He’d told her he felt a man was entitled to some privacy, and that right there was his private place, and if she wanted a private place of her own she could have it, but to stay out of his. She’d taken one of the upstairs bedrooms and made it her sewing room.

“Nowadays they just make a basement and put everything on top, but these old houses have cellars with walls and rooms, just like upstairs. The reason is that they didn’t have the steel beams we use to hold everything up, so they had to build masonry walls underneath; if you built a couple of these, why, you had four rooms. The foundations of all these old houses are stone.”

I nodded again.

“This one room had a big, heavy door. The sheriff tried to knock it down, but he couldn’t. Finally he had to telephone around and get a bunch of men to help him. They found three girls in there.”

“Dead?” I asked Howie.

“That’s right. I don’t know what kind of shape they were in, but not very good, I guess. One had been gone over a year. That’s what I heard.”

As soon as I said it, I felt like a half-wit, but I was thinking of all the others, of John Gacy and Jack the Ripper and the dead black children of Atlanta, and I said, “Three? That was all he killed?”

“Four,” Howie told me, “counting the Italian girl in the truck. Most people thought it was enough. Only there was some others missing too, you know, in various places around the state, so the sheriff and some deputies tore everything up looking for more bodies. Dug in the yard and out in the fields and so on.”

“But they didn’t find any more?”

“No, they didn’t. Not then,” Howie said. “Meantime, Jackson was in jail like I told you. He had kind of reddish hair, so the paper called him Redbeard. Because of Bluebeard, you know, and him not wanting his wife to look inside that cellar room. They called the house Redbeard’s Castle.

“They did things a whole lot quicker in those times, and it wasn’t much more than a month before he was tried. Naturally, his wife had to get up on the stand.”

I said, “A wife can’t be forced to testify against her husband.”

“She wasn’t testifying against him; she was testifying for him. What a good man he was, and all that. Who else would do it? Of course when she’d had her say, the district attorney got to go to work on her. You know how they do.

“He asked her about that room and she told him just about what I told you. Jackson, he said he wanted a place for himself and told her not to go in there. She said she hadn’t even known the door was locked till the sheriff tried to open it. Then the district attorney said, ‘Didn’t you know he was asking for your help, that your husband was asking for your help, that the whole room there was a cry for help, and he wanted you to go in there and find those bodies so he wouldn’t have to kill again?’ ”

Howie fell silent for a mile or two. I tossed the butt of my cigar out the window and sat wondering if I would hear any more about those old and only too commonplace murders.

When Howie began talking again, it was as though he had never stopped. “That was the first time anybody from around here had heard that kind of talk, I think. Up till then, I guess everybody thought if a man wanted to get caught he’d just go to the police and say he did it. I always felt sorry for her, because of that. She was—I don’t know—like an owl in daylight. You know what I mean?”

I didn’t, and I told him so.

“The way she’d been raised, a man meant what he said. Then too, the man was the boss. Today when they get married there isn’t hardly a woman that promises to obey, but back then they all did it. If they’d asked the minister to leave that out, most likely he’d have told them he wouldn’t perform the ceremony. Now the rules were all changed, only nobody’d told her that.

“I believe she took it pretty hard, and of course it didn’t do any good, her getting on the stand or the district attorney talking like that to her either. The jury came back in about as quick as they’d gone out, and they said he was guilty, and the judge said sentencing would be next day. He was going to hang him, and everybody knew it. They hanged them back then.”

“Sure,” I said.

“That next morning his wife came to see him in the jail. I guess he knew she would, because he asked the old man that swept out to lend him a razor and so forth. Said he wanted to look good. He shaved and then he waited till he heard her step.”

Howie paused to let me comment or ask a question. I thought I knew what was coming, and there didn’t seem to be much point in saying anything.

“When he heard her coming, he cut his throat with the razor blade. The old man was with her, and he told the paper about it afterward. He said they came up in front of the cell and Jackson was standing there with blood all running down his shirt. He really was Redbeard for true then. After a little bit, his knees gave out and he fell down in a heap.

“His wife tried to sell the farm, but nobody wanted that house. She moved back with her folks, quit calling herself Sarah Jackson. She was a good-looking woman, and the land brought her some money. After a year or so she got married again and had a baby. Everybody forgot, I suppose you could say, except maybe for the families of the girls that had died. And the house, it’s still standing back there. You just saw it yourself.”

Howie pronounced the final words as though the story were over and he wanted to talk of something else, but I said, “You said there were more bodies found later.”

“Just one. Some kids were playing in that old house. It’s funny, isn’t it, that kids would find it when the sheriff and all those deputies didn’t.”

“Where was it?”

“Upstairs. In her sewing room. You remember I told you how he’d said she could have a room to herself too? Of course, the sheriff had looked in there, but it hadn’t been there when he looked. It was her, and she’d hung herself from a hook in the wall. Who do you think killed her?”

I glanced at him to see if he were serious. “I thought you said she killed herself?”

“That’s what they would have said, back when she married Jackson. But who killed her now? Jackson—Redbeard—when he killed those other girls and cut his throat like that? Or was it when he loved her? Or that district attorney? Or the sheriff? Or the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters of the girls Jackson got? Or her other husband, maybe some things he said to her? Or maybe it was just having her baby that killed her—baby blues, they call it. I’ve heard that too.”

“Postnatal depression,” I said. I shook my head. “I don’t suppose it makes much difference now.”

“It does to me,” Howie said. “She was my mother.” He pushed the lighter into the dashboard and lit a cigarette. “I thought I ought to tell you before somebody else does.”

For a moment I supposed that we had left the highway and circled back along some secondary road. To our right was another ruined gate, another outdated house collapsing slowly among young trees.

Long, long ago, when Rosemary and I were still a young couple with small children, we moved to a tiny town out in the country. If I remember right, the population was under three hundred. Everyone in town—except for us—knew everyone else. Half the time, they’d gone to kindergarten together. More than half the time, they were at least distantly related. Rosemary and I were outsiders, and very much so. It was much lonelier than an isolated house would have been, and lonelier too than any city apartment.

Often I drove past a big white house in which no one lived. Most of its windows were broken; one shutter hung from a single hinge. The yard was full of weeds. I never found out why the house had been abandoned or who had abandoned it, but it has come to haunt my fiction.