Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Two

The worst day in my life began the first of August and has continued as though it has no end, no direction, no resolution, no meaning, no purpose. My daughter’s name was Fannie Mae Holland Broussard. She was fifty-four when she died. Her body was not discovered for three days. The medics had to put on hazmat suits before they entered the house.

In the early hours of each morning I wake with that image in my mind and a hole as big as a pie plate in the center of my chest. I cannot breathe. I feel I’m living in a nightmare that belongs in the mind of someone else. I close my eyes and see through the hole into a blue sky that offers no respite and is filled with the cacophony and the fury of carrion birds, like a dirty infection of the firmament itself.

Fannie Mae’s mother was killed in a car accident when our daughter was three. Fannie Mae had no siblings and I never married again. She never loved a man; she married one and lived with others and remained friends with some but, for good or bad, had no romantic feelings toward any of them. She loved animals more than human beings. Regardless of her age, she remained a girl and never grew completely into a woman. The interior of her home was coated with animal fur and smelled like a barn; birds flew in and out the doors; the counters and tabletops were chained with seat smears from her cats and sometimes the dogs. She brought a pair of goats, Okie and Dokie, into the living room to watch television with her. An industrial cleaning service burned out its machines trying to vacuum the rugs and couches. Her favorite song was “Me and Bobbie McGee.”

That’s the anecdotal story, the one that makes everyone smile. Her life was made forfeit by alcohol and Ambien and, when that wasn’t enough, by sojourners who posed as friends and took from her every dollar they could.

After the officer has left, I walk up the slope through the maple trees that are both yellow and aflame with the season and cross the veranda and go inside, the wind following me, the joists and walls creaking. In the hallway is a glass cabinet where I keep the guns I have collected since I was a boy, although I no longer shoot them. That does not mean they lack power over me. I like to touch the coldness of the steel and smell the gun oil in the dark grain of the wood. The same with the heft of the stock against my shoulder. The same with wrapping the sling around my left forearm and aiming through the peep sight of my M1. Sometimes I touch my guns and bite my lip in a salacious way and feel a tingle in my loins.

I drink a can of soda in the kitchen in one long chug without sitting down and throw it harder than I should into the trash. There are snow clouds above the Bitterroots, bristling with electricity, and I hear a sound like the rumbling of bowling pins.

Fannie Mae was buried with a solitary rose clutched in her right hand, a framed photo of me and her two cats tucked face-out under her forearm. The surrounding hills were green and bare and beautiful as velvet. In the sunset I could see the Rattlesnake Mountains and wisps of red and purple clouds strung across a valley. I wanted to rope Fannie Mae’s casket on my back and take the two of us deep into the wilderness and never return. I did not want condolences or handshakes or food or flowers brought to my house. Nor did I wish Fannie Mae’s fellow dead binding her to the earth, robbing her of the life that should have been hers and maybe was still available for her, perhaps even for us.

Please don’t think me mad. I have been among the dead. Legions of them. Their quilted uniforms pocked with machine-gun rounds, their faces bloodless and waxy under the trip flares swaying above them, their eyes eight-balled by a marching barrage of 105s. I will tell you what I have learned about the dead. They are not to be feared. In fact, they are sad creatures, and the silence in their faces begs for our pity, but sometimes I long to sleep among them, even those I killed.

I will not accept my daughter’s death. I will find a way to pull her back through the veil or untether myself and lie down in the bottom of a boat that has no oars and float down the Columbia and into the Pacific, where she will be waiting for me somewhere beyond the sun.

I wake on the sofa in the morning, still dressed, and sit in the coldness of the dawn and try to catch my breath, as though I spent the night running uphill. I try not to have thoughts about my daughter’s physical preparation for an open-casket viewing. I try not to think about the men who gang-raped her when she was nineteen, and the couple who more recently beat her outside a nightclub and went unpunished.

I drink a pot of coffee and eat an egg sandwich in the kitchen and think about the boy who vandalized my barn while two adults waited in the cab of the pickup truck.

Where had I seen the boy? The rural post office? A place where some of the recalcitrant and the unteachable refuse to wear masks no matter how many warning signs are posted by the employees? In fact, they take pleasure in tearing the warning signs off the glass doors.

Several of them live in a dip on a back road down in the Bitterroot Valley, among a tangle of half-dead trees and ancient outbuildings and dirt-floor garages too tight for contemporary vehicles, their houses eaten by carpenter ants, the lawns choked with dandelions and pieces of rusted cars and piles of moldy debris the garbage service will not pick up, the windows flapping with torn sheets of lead-colored plastic.

I was there last week, returning from a fishing trip, and saw a house in a grove of pine trees and a bare-chested young man shooting arrows at an upended hay bale, the muscles in his back knotting when he pulled back the bowstring, his face filled with delight when his arrow smacked the paper bull’s-eye. I also remember a red truck in the yard.

I wash my dishes and dry my hands and thumb-pop the business card given me by the trooper. My telephone is on the kitchen counter. A column of light is shining on it through the window. But I do not call the trooper. Instead I drive into the Bitterroot Valley, a warning bell clanging and a red light flashing at the train crossing near my house, although no train has burnished the rails in years.

It’s almost too easy to find the kid who pissed in my cattle guard and shot me the bone, and I wonder if I am on the edge of making an irreversible mistake over a minuscule issue, the kind that haunts your days and steals your sleep for the rest of your life. The boy is trying to handsaw a broken tree limb that has crashed on the roof of a desiccated frame house and now lies wedged inside the shingles like a giant celery stalk. The red Ford F-150 is parked on the grass, the pocked hole in the rear window. I turn into the yard and get out of my Avalon.

“Hi,” the boy says, looking down.

“Got a minute?” I reply.

“Yes, sir.”

“I look familiar to you?”

He squints one eye and muses on the question. “No, sir, I don’t think so.”

“I own the barn you decorated.”

“Decorate for Halloween or something?”

“You painted a swastika on the door. Why would you do that?”

He tugs on the bill of his olive-green cap; his eyes seem full of light, yet they’re empty of thought. The rows in the cornfield next to the house look dry and unmaintained and hard as iron, and the stalks whisper when the wind gusts. “Got to get back to work. We had mighty high winds last night.”

“I know,” I say. “My barn door slammed all night. The one with the Nazi swastika on it.”

A muscular man wearing a floppy wide-brimmed hat comes out on the porch and lets the door slam behind him. He lifts his chin, allowing the sunlight to expose his face, and I realize I’m looking at the man who was in the passenger seat of the Ford pickup that visited my house. The wood steps squeak under his weight; his hand slides down the rail as audibly as emery paper. He takes my measure, a faint smile on his mouth, like a man deciding whether he should peel a tangerine. “He’p you?”

“Is that your boy up there?” I ask.

“Was when I woke up this morning.”

“Do you know why he would want to vandalize my barn?”

“I didn’t catch that.”

“Late yesterday evening. I think you were with him. Is that your pickup yonder? You were in the passenger seat.”

I’m speaking too fast. I have no doubt I’ve borrowed trouble from the wrong man.

“I know who you are,” he says. “You own that big ranch the Mormons used to own.”

“That’s correct.”

“The Mormons are good people.” He says it with a merry light in his eyes, and I’m reminded of many a confrontation where the accent was the same, the disingenuousness equally corrosive, the venomous suggestion on the tip of the tongue.

“You went right past me,” I say.

He screws a cigarette in his mouth but doesn’t light it. “Come down here, Leigh.”

“What’s your name, sir?” I say.

“John Fenimore Culpepper. My friends call me Johnny B. Goode. That’s because I’m not too bad on the guitar.” He smiles as though sharing a joke. His son climbs down the ladder and wipes his face on his sleeve, although the morning is too cool for him to be sweating.

“Tell this man what we was doing last night,” the father says.

“Went to the men’s-only Bible class.”

“I said ‘yesterday evening,’ not ‘last night,’ ” I say.

Leigh’s cheeks are as red as apples, his eyes shiny from either fear or embarrassment. He looks at his father, unsure what he should say. “It’s all right, boy,” his father says. “Go in the house. Tell your mother she can start lunch.”

“Yes, sir.”

The father doesn’t speak until he hears the screen door bang shut behind him. “You had your say. Now get moving.”

“What have you got against me, Mr. Culpepper?”

He fishes a Zippo out of his slacks and lights his cigarette, taking his time, the flame whipping in the wind, singeing his cupped palms. He lets a wad of smoke the size of a cotton boll float from his mouth. “Who says I got anything against you?”

“I won’t file charges if you’ll promise to repaint my barn door. How about it, partner? Let’s get this out of our headlights.”

I can hear him breathing. “You ask me what I have against you? My boy has special needs. I had to sell off most of my acreage so he could get on Medicaid. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. But you got a fine ranch you probably bought with your credit card. Your Hollywood friends tell jokes about us on Saturday Night Live. That’s why we don’t like you. Does that seem unreasonable to you?”

“I’ll be going, Mr. Culpepper. I hope all good things come to you.”

“Talk down to me like that again, I’ll take a switch to you, old man or not.”

I feel my face twitch, as though a bottle fly has settled on it. I open and close my hand against my thigh. I try to look through him and not indicate any animus toward him. The phenomenon I’m experiencing has been with me for many years, and it leads me into blackouts and places I never want to visit again.

I step backward, my eyelids stitched to my brow. But my expression has no connection with the images in my head. A twig breaks under my boot. I hear a stream swollen with melting snow and roaring with torrents of water and eroded earth and pebbles and loosed stones and broken beaver dams and uprooted trees that cascade and bounce over boulders like pogo sticks. I experience these images because if I allow their symbolic representation to become real, I will commit deeds I cannot undo. The violence of the Hollands is well known, both to others and to them, often by gunshot. And all the thoughts I just described have occurred within five seconds.

“You look like you’re fixing to do something both of us might regret,” Culpepper says.

I cough into my palm. “I have a number of serious character defects, Mr. Culpepper.”

“You have what?” he says, a fleck of his spittle striking my face.

“Holes in my memory, almost six years of them, but I don’t drink. I was in a southern prison when I was eighteen. I wasn’t a criminal, but I was genuinely insane. My greatest enemy is sleep. I see the men and boys I killed many years ago in a foreign land, and I’m filled with sorrow. Have you had those experiences, sir? Please tell me that is indeed the case and that you wish to get them out of your life. Can you do that for me, sir?”