Another Kind of Eden (Holland Family Saga 3)

HE WAS SILENT most of the way to the Lowry farm.

“Why did Stoney’s mention of the Indians bother you?” I asked.

“Who said it did?”

“You told me the Comanche did some bad things up the hill behind your house.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. I was speaking in the past tense. The Comanche are dead, we’re alive. End of story.”

“I think you’re not being truthful with me, Wade.”

“Good way to get yourself a pop in the face.”

“You asked me to help you,” I said. “You shouldn’t be talking to me like that, sir.”

He didn’t reply. That was all right with me. I was sick of the conversation. We had reached the turnoff to the farm. A mile-long freight train was wobbling down the tracks, headed toward Ratón Pass and the grinding slide into New Mexico. For just a moment I wished I had high-balled on through Colorado on the flat-wheeler that had brought me to the Lowry farm. Were it not for Jo Anne, I might have given my jalopy to Cotton or Spud and climbed aboard a hotshot and let the click-a-dee-clack of the wheels roll my troubles away.

“I’ve seen them,” Wade said.

“Say again?”

“I didn’t see them just dancing, either. It was in the middle of the night. I saw firelight up in the trees. I thought maybe dry lightning had sparked a fire, except there hadn’t been any lightning. I took a fire extinguisher up there and saw more than I was planning on.”

I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “What did you see, Wade??

?

A solitary drop of rain hit the windshield. He leaned over the wheel, lifting his eyes at the sky as though hoping for a cloud to burst and drench the hardpan and the hills. “I told myself I had a nightmare, one that went back to the death camp in Germany. I’m going to keep believing that.”

“What about Stoney’s story?”

“He’s probably on angel dust or brown skag or both. That coven stuff is dog shit.”

“What were the Comanche doing behind your house?”

His eyes were shiny. “There’s times when you don’t want to belong to the human race. There’re times when you’d rather eat a bullet than see certain kinds of things. Or talk about them. Now shut up.”

* * *

BENBOW DROVE ME to the bunkhouse. I know I have concentrated on the conflicts of Wade Benbow. This is because I had not dealt with my own. Earlier in the day, Spud Caudill had told me he’d gotten the fresh scratches on his face in Mrs. Lowry’s garden. How did a man who had spent a lifetime doing dangerous work of every kind manage to remodel his face pruning a rosebush?

“You got something on your mind?” Benbow said.

My heart was racing. “No.”

“Then why are you looking at me like that?”

“No reason.”

“A word to the wise. You’re young. All these problems will drop away one day. Don’t let the shitheads of the world pull you under with them.”

“Thomas Aquinas?”

“I owe you one, kid. Watch your butt,” he said, and drove away.

I looked up the grade at the Lowry house, its immaculate, lacquered, battleship-gray Victorian presence couched among flowers and forest greenery like a testimony to a more innocent time. But it was not a more innocent time, and the sweatshops and textile mills and coal mines and the murder of striking workers were far more honest symbols of the Industrial Age.

I walked up the hill, wondering how I would explain my presence without lying if Mr. or Mrs. Lowry came outside. I paused when I reached the piked fence and the flagstones that led to the gallery. I could see no one inside. The side yard, the one that had the most sun, contained a gazebo threaded with clematis and trumpet vine. There was a ladder by the side wall and a half-broken trellis leaning in pieces against it. Rose petals were sprinkled all over the grass and the bed.