Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Fannie Mae sits down across from me, wearing a short black wool coat that has brass buttons and green cactuses and red flowers sewn on it, and stovepipe Mexican boots and dark trousers with purple stripes in them. But she doesn’t speak.

“Did I do something wrong?” I ask.

I don’t think you understand what’s going on, Pops.

“Don’t start.”

Why do you think all these people keep drifting in and out of your life?

“You got me.”

They can’t fix their problems. They want to touch your hand or maybe even your bare foot and be set free. Somebody before your time had the same problem.

“That’s foolish.”

You’re stuck, Pops. Better get yourself some sandals.

“I was afraid you had gone away. Maybe for good.”

I’m here, aren’t I?

“I went to the cemetery.”

Stay out of that place. It’s a real drag. Remember that ghoul from the church who tried to sell us a plot in Wichita? You said you had made mistakes in your life, but nothing to warrant spending eternity in Kansas with the dust and tumbleweeds bouncing across your grave. You remember what the guy said?

“No.”

“I take it you’re not from this area.”

“What are we going to do?” I ask.

Like you used to tell me when I was little: “Ease up on the batter, little guy.”

“Why are you dressed like that?”

I was down on the border again. Jimmie the Digger has given a lot of money to refugee programs. You think he’s buying his own constituency?

“Probably.”

I found out something else: Sister Ginny used to sing and play keyboard and mandolin for him. You’re not going to like this, Pops. I think both of them want the same thing from you.

“I know what’s coming. Turn off the faucet.”

You remember all those segregationist assholes out of the fifties and sixties. Every one of those bastards grew up in the Baptist or Assemblies of God Church, and all of them were scared shitless at the prospect of going to hell. That’s why every one of them made public apologies.

“You’re wrong about people seeking me out, Fannie Mae.”

You know your biggest flaw, Pops? You don’t believe the people who say you were a good dad. Anyway, I’m awful tired right now. May I sleep on your couch?

“Are you sick?”

At heart I am. Sometimes we carry it across the Divide. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? I wish I hadn’t fucked up.

I’ve lost track of the seasons and cannot make distinctions between All Saints’ Day and Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s and ceremonial carved pumpkins and Saturnalian eggnog and fruitcake and the day when, with Forest Service permission, Fannie Mae and I would drive up Lolo Pass into the national forest and cut down a huge dark-green Douglas fir, the snow shuddering on the branches with each stroke of the saw.

I feel drunk and lose my balance, although my last drink was forty-three years ago. My dreams are filled with monsters from night to dawn. I hear voices constantly, but they are not Fannie Mae’s or the voices of anyone I know. They are accusatory, strident, profane, and vulgar. My thoughts are lascivious and sometimes violent. The worst time is at twilight. If I lie down, the inside of my eyelids turns into a movie screen the color and texture of pink rose petals. I see my best friend, Saber Bledsoe, running with me through a slit trench, our chests heaving, our boots splashing, our canteens and bandoliers and ammo cans and a thirty-caliber rattling, a 105 round arching out of its trajectory with a sound like the Creator unzipping the sky.

I use any surrogate I can to remove the venomous presences inside my head. I split wood, comb out the horses’ tails and treat their feet, replace the brooder lamps in the chicken house with panel warmers, install a better security system in the house, and hire a wrangler friend to help with my chores and keep me company. But reason and coherence have departed from my life. I’ve lost contact with Jack Wetzel; for all I know, Jimmie Kale has found him and, for whatever motivation, put him through the tortures of the damned. I go out to dinner with Ruby Spotted Horse and pretend that people are not looking at us. I wonder about questions of morality and how they apply to the angst of an elderly and lonely man and his attraction to an attractive and brave and intelligent young woman. I also fear the day that Fannie Mae will leave me. At four-twenty every morning I wake and have no idea where or who I am.

It’s Saturday and raining in the hills and snowing higher up. I put on a slicker and an Australian campaign hat and feed the chickens and walk among the horses and give them their treats. During the winter in Montana we have chinooks that come upon us unexpectedly, huge gusts of warm air that blow from the southwest and drive the temperature up to seventy degrees. Today is one of those days. The horses play in the flurries and roll in the mud wallows. Wild turkeys rim the stock tanks and peck at their feathers, and now that hunting season is over, the deer and elk drift down from the mountains and are at peace with the world, as though no one has tried recently to kill them.

I know little of theology, but I believe the big cathedral is the one I’m standing in. That’s why I’m so disturbed when I see Jimmie Kale’s Cadillac come up my lane. I go through the back door, stop at the gun cabinet, and go out the front before he can exit his vehicle. He rolls down the window. “You look like you’re fixing to wet your pants,” he says.

“Off my property, Mr. Kale.”

He pushes open the car door and gets out. He’s dressed western, wearing the same type of black Stetson I have, his coat open, his stomach squeezing against a silver-and-gold buckle the size of a heliograph. “Pull your stiff one-eye out of the light socket, son,” he says. “I’m here on a peaceful mission.”

“Mr. Kale, if you call me ‘son’ again, I will knock you down.”

“Go ahead. Then you’ll never find out why I’m here. That don’t sound too smart.”

“I’m not interested in your message. Write that on your forehead. Or text yourself. Or stick a note up your cheeks.”

“This is about Ray Bronson, the ex of that little gal you been squiring around town. What’s her name? Spotted Heifer?”

The pistol I took from my gun cabinet and stuck behind my belt is my grandfather’s .45 single-action Peacemaker. It’s a heavy gun, with six fat bullets in the cylinder, and has sharp angles and is pressing painfully into my spine.

“Bronson thinks he’s still got his brand on her. He says he’s gonna hang you upside down and cut off your toes. Half-breeds sometimes combine the worst of both races. That’s Ray Bronson. Thought you ought to know.”

“Here’s my problem with that, Mr. Kale: I heard he was your friend.”

“Call me Jimmie. Everybody does. I bought a couple of pieces of land from Bronson. Which is what I want to do with you.” He gazes admiringly at the house. “Name your price.”

“For my ranch?”

“No, your grease trap. Have you had your hearing checked recently? I’ll give you two million. Cash money or any way you want it.” He raises a hand before I can speak. “I know you’re a rich man, but I can make you a lot richer. I know you got meadowland up Lolo Pass. I’ll take that, too. Top dollar. Know why? Because Ted Turner ain’t nobody’s fool. That ole boy has got himself over a hunnert and fifty thousand acres of Montana land, which translates into the best land in the U.S. of A.”

“I’ll say good evening to you, Mr. Kale.”

“You got a gun stuck in your belt, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“You ever shoot anybody with it?”

I work the Peacemaker out of my belt and let it hang from my right hand, my fingers outside the trigger guard. “No.”

“But you’ve shot people?”

“I can’t remember.”

He puts a piece of ball gum in his mouth and crunches it with his molars. “You’ve probably heard a lot of tales about me. But tales is all they are.”

“Have you seen Jack Wetzel?”

“I have not seen the little shit.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Kale.”

“Boy, you’re a hard-nosed son of a bitch.”

I start to walk away.

“Hold on,” he says.

“What?”

“You’re from Texas?”

“Texas and Louisiana.”

“Your middle name is Holland?”

“That’s correct.”

“Your family ain’t from around Yoakum and Victoria, are they?”

“They are.”

He looks sideways, then back at me; he huffs air out his nose. “You related to Sam Morgan Holland, the preacher and gunman who was pastor at the New Hebron Baptist Church?”

“He was my great-grandfather.”

“I declare.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“He killed my great-grandfather over a whore named the Cimarron Rose.”

“She wasn’t a whore. So watch your damn mouth, Kale.”

He bows to me, opening his palms as though in supplication. “My mama always taught me not to get above my raising. Thank you for taking me down a notch, kind sir. You are a true gentleman of the Old South. Didn’t your ancestor kill a bunch of Indians in Oklahoma?”

“They were comancheros.”

“Have you explained that to Miss Spotted Turtle?” He glances at the Peacemaker. “Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Let the church roll on, boy, and remember, a family that prays together, stays together.”

Then he drives away, his radio blaring out Little Jimmy Dickens’s recording of “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose.”

I experience two kinds of blackout that aren’t chemically induced. The first is not harmful. I cannot remember writing what is written in my books. When I look back at the printed pages, it is as though someone else wrote them. Hemingway and Faulkner spoke of having the same experience, so I have never worried about my obvious neurological flaw. The second kind of blackout is a different matter. I step into a hole in my memory bank that operates like a cocoon and leaves me with no memory of my actions or events that have occurred outside my skin, sometimes for as long as two days. Neurologists and psychologists have been of no value. One analyst, a nice man at LSU, said my history was consistent with multiple personality disorder.

But this is the way I feel about it today: What’s the big deal? We all get to the same barn.

We’re in the New Year now. The pandemic is still with us, but Ruby Spotted Horse and I got our vaccines and we have a new president and the days are longer and there are buds on my apple trees. Most importantly, Fannie Mae has stayed with me. I’m one of those who like to believe that the passage of time will heal all wounds. Unfortunately, that is not always true. The murders of Clayton Wetzel and the two waitresses remain unsolved, and a night does not pass without Major Baker and his colleagues leaving a hint of their presence — ball lightning inside the woods above my house, a U.S. Army cavalry spur jutting from the dirt in the pasture, 45–70 shells of the kind used in the trapdoor Springfields of the era, a finger bone that could have belonged to a child.

I had hoped to make a change in Jack Wetzel’s life, but I have heard nothing from him, and none of his friends at the Poverello have any knowledge of him, either. I can only pray that he has not become a victim inside Montana’s transient subculture. We have to remember that Montana was the home of the Unabomber. Because of its size and small population and lack of regulation or widespread law enforcement, it is also the sheltering place of psychopaths on the drift, child murderers, neo-Nazis, self-declared militiamen, meth heads, gun fanatics, and people who are off the grid and so crazy there is no category for their neuroses, although they are not here in great number.

Sound like an exaggeration? Our sister state is Idaho.

The kid I hoped to help the most has turned out to be the biggest disappointment. Leigh Culpepper made good grades at the vocational college and was liked by his instructors. The tutor I subsidized not only helped him with his textbooks but introduced him to the Missoula City Library and had him reading Huckleberry Finn and The Hunters by James Salter. Then something went wrong. Leigh missed classes without explanation, then two days ago got into a shoving match in a campus restroom and mimicked an instructor’s stutter in front of the class.

I asked the tutor about Leigh and drugs.

“He told me he had spells. I asked him if he’d been smoking any weed. He said no. I asked him about the harder stuff. He wouldn’t answer.”

At noon today I called his father and left a message. It’s now ten after three. My front windows are open, and my veranda is flooded with sunshine, and baskets of petunias hang from the eaves, and the Bitterroot River is high and slate green and running fast through the cattails.

The phone rings. I look at the caller ID and don’t want to pick up. Then I take a breath and put the receiver to my ear. “Thanks for returning my call, Mr. Culpepper.”

“Is this about Leigh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The college expelled him. I don’t know how it happened. Leigh was doing so good at everything.”

“What do you think the problem is?”

“A couple of times lately he came in drunk.”

“Just drunk?”

“Or maybe hopped up.”

“Know a kid named Jack Wetzel?”

“Kind of a rodent-lookin’ kid? Yeah, he was hanging around awhile. You think he has something to do with Leigh drinking or drugging?”

“Jack Wetzel is a troubled young man, Mr. Culpepper.”

He waits for me to continue. Now is the moment I have to make the choice: Do I inform on Jack and Leigh or walk away? A man like Culpepper could have many reactions. The world in which he grew up was one of superstition, fear, violence, misogyny, racism, lynching, and medical practices that are literally out of the Dark Ages.

“Jack told me Leigh gave him LSD,” I say.

I can hear Culpepper breathing against the receiver.

“Mr. Culpepper?”

“He said my boy’s a drug dealer?”

“No, sir, he didn’t say that.”

“Then what was he saying?” he says, his voice taking on an edge.

“He said Leigh was heavy into it. But Jack is not always honest. Maybe Jack was giving hallucinogens to Leigh.”

“Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?”

“I try to stay out of other people’s business.”

“You’re talking about the kind of drugs Charlie Manson used to make killers out of those kids in California. You’re telling me my boy is like them kind of people. That’s hard to take.”

“Jack and Leigh aren’t Manson and Leary. Kids make mistakes, Mr. Culpepper. Don’t judge them too harshly.”

“Mr. Broussard, if I catch somebody giving my boy LSD, they ain’t gonna be around long enough to judge.”

“What if your boy was the giver?”

“I’d hate to say. I really would.”

I cannot see his expression through the phone, but his tone creates an image I remember from my days as a reporter in a southern state: firelight flickering on the faces of white-robed men staring up at a burning cross, their humanity and ability to reason given over to a sick ethos invented for them by others.