The Far Side of the Dollar

Chapter 16

THEIR FARM, GREEN and golden in the slanting light, lay in a curve of the river. I drove down a dusty lane to the farmhouse. It was built of white brick, without ornament of any kind. The barn, unpainted, was weathered gray and in poor repair.

The late afternoon was windless. The trees surrounding the fenced yard were as still as watercolors. The heat was oppressive, in spite of the river nearby, even worse than it had been in Vegas.

It was a far cry from Vegas to here, and difficult to believe that Harley had come home, or ever would. But the possibility had to be checked out.

A black and white farm collie with just one eye barked at me through the yard fence when I stepped out of the car. I tried to calm him down by talking to him, but he was afraid of me and he wouldn’t be calmed. Eventually an old woman wearing an apron came out of the house and silenced the dog with a word. She called to me: “Mr. Harley’s in the barn.”

I let myself in through the wire gate. “May I talk to you?”

“That depends what the talk’s about.”

“Family matters.”

“If that’s another way to sell insurance, Mr. Harley doesn’t believe in insurance.”

“I’m not selling anything. Are you Mrs. Harley?”

“I am.”

She was a gaunt woman of seventy, square-shouldered in a long-sleeved, striped shirtwaist. Her gray hair was drawn back severely from her face. I liked her face, in spite of the brokenness in and around the eyes. There was humor in it, and suffering half transformed into understanding.

“Who are you?” she said.

“A friend of your son Harold’s. My name is Archer.”

“Isn’t that nice? We’re going to sit down to supper as soon as Mr. Harley finishes up the milking. Why don’t you stay and have some supper with us?”

“You’re very kind.”

But I didn’t want to eat with them.

“How is Harold?” she said. “We don’t hear from him so often since he married his wife. Lila.”

Evidently she hadn’t heard the trouble her sons were in. I hesitated to tell her, and she noticed my hesitation.

“Is something the matter with Harold?” she said sharply.

“The matter is with Mike. Have you seen him?”

Her large rough hands began to wipe themselves over and over on the front of her apron. “We haven’t seen Mike in twenty years. We don’t expect to see him again in this life.”

“You may, though. He told a man he was coming home.”

“This is not his home. It hasn’t been since he was a boy. He turned his back on us then. He went off to Pocatello to live with a man named Brown, and that was his downfall.”

“How so?”

“That daughter of Brown was a Jezebel. She ruined my son. She taught him all the filthy ways of the world.”

Her voice had changed. It sounded as if the voice of somebody slightly crazy was ranting ventriloquially through her. I said with deliberate intent to stop it:

“Carol’s been paid back for whatever she did to him. She was murdered in California on Monday.”

Her hands stopped wiping themselves and flew up in front of her. She looked at their raw ugliness with her broken eyes.

“Did Mike do it to her?”

“We think so. We’re not sure.”

“And you’re a policeman,” she stated.

“More or less.”

“Why do you come to us? We did our best, but we couldn’t control him. He passed out of our control long ago.”

Her hands dropped to her sides.

“If he gets desperate enough, he may head this way.”

“No, he never will. Mr. Harley said he would kill him if he ever set foot on our property again. That was twenty years ago, when he ran away from the Navy. Mr. Harley meant it, too. Mr. Harley never could abide a lawbreaker. It isn’t true that Mr. Harley treated him cruelly. Mr. Harley was only trying to save him from the Devil.”

The ranting, ventriloquial note had entered her voice again. Apparently she knew nothing about her son, and if she did she couldn’t talk about him in realistic terms. It was beginning to look like a dry run.

I left her and went to the barn to find her husband. He was in the stable under the barn, sitting on a milking stool with his forehead against the black and white flank of a Holstein cow. His hands were busy at her teats, and her milk surged in the pail between his knees. Its sweet fresh smell penetrated the smell of dung that hung like corruption in the heated air.

“Mr. Harley?”

“I’m busy,” he said morosely. “This is the last one, if you want to wait.”

I backed away and looked at the other cows. There were ten or twelve of them, moving uneasily in their stanchions as I moved. Somewhere out of sight a horse blew and stamped.

“You’re disturbing the livestock,” Mr. Harley said. “Stand still if you want to stay.”

I stood still for five minutes. The one-eyed collie drifted into the stable and did a thorough job of smelling my shoes. But he still wouldn’t let me touch him. When I reached down, he moved back.

Mr. Harley got up and emptied his pail into a ten-gallon can; the foaming milk almost overflowed. He was a tall old man wearing overalls and a straw hat which almost brushed the low rafters. His eyes were as flat and angry and his mouth as sternly righteous as in Harold’s portrait of him. The dog retreated whining as he came near.

“You’re not from around here. Are you on the road?”

“No.”

I told him who I was. “And I’ll get to the point right away. Your son Mike’s in very serious trouble.”

“Mike is not my son,” he intoned solemnly, “and I have no wish to hear about him or his trouble.”

“But he may be coming here. He said he was. If he does, you’ll have to inform the police.”

“You don’t have to instruct me in what I ought to do. I get my instructions from a higher power. He gives me my instructions direct in my heart.”

He thumped his chest with a gnarled fist.

“That must be convenient.”

“Don’t blaspheme or make mock, or you’ll regret it. I can call down the punishment.”

He reached for a pitchfork leaning against the wall. The dog ran out of the stable with his tail down. I became aware suddenly that my shirt was sticking to my back and I was intensely uncomfortable. The three tines of the pitchfork were sharp and gleaming, and they were pointed at my stomach.

“Get out of here,” the old man said. “I’ve been fighting the Devil all my life, and I know one of his cohorts when I see one.”

So do I, I said, but not out loud. I backed as far as the door, stumbled on the high threshold, and went out. Mrs. Harley was standing near my car, just inside the wire gate. Her hands were quiet on her meager breast.

“I’m sorry,” she said to me. “I’m sorry for Carol Brown. She wasn’t a bad little girl, but I hardened my heart against her.”

“It doesn’t matter now. She’s dead.”

“It matters in the sight of heaven.”

She raised her eyes to the arching sky as if she imagined a literal heaven like a second story above it. Just now it was easier for me to imagine a literal hell, just over the horizon, where the sunset fires were burning.

“I’ve done so many wrong things,” she said, “and closed my eyes to so many others. But don’t you see, I had to make a choice.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“A choice between Mr. Harley and my sons. I knew that he was a hard man. A cruel man, maybe not quite right in the head. But what could I do? I had to stick with my husband. And I wasn’t strong enough to stand up to him. Nobody is. I had to stand by while he drove our sons out of our home. Harold was the soft one, he forgave us in the end. But Mike never did. He’s like his father. I never even got to see my grandson.”

Tears ran in the gullies of her face. Her husband came out of the barn carrying the ten-gallon can in his left hand and the pitchfork in his right.

“Go in the house, Martha. This man is a cohort of the Devil. I won’t allow you to talk to him.”

“Don’t hurt him. Please.”

“Go in the house,” he repeated.

She went, with her gray head down and her feet dragging.

“As for you, cohort,” he said, “you get off my farm or I’ll call down the punishment on you.”

He shook his pitchfork at the reddening sky. I was already in the car and turning up the windows.

I turned them down again as soon as I got a few hundred yards up the lane. My shirt was wet through now, and I could feel sweat running down my legs. Looking back, I caught a glimpse of the river, flowing sleek and solid in the failing light, and it refreshed me.