The King's Horses
Montgomery Lewis hates it when somebody comes to the door. Too much work to hoist his body from the chair that has him trapped; grip the handles of the walker; then shuffle across the floor and see who’s there. Sometimes the room spins, taking him with it. It’s either a salesman or somebody threatening consequences. Blast and damn their consequences. This morning he’s pretty sure it’s a deputy sheriff come to arrest Tommy. Montgomery told the boy to throw a tarp over that unexplained mower. Dollars to doughnuts he forgot.
Mongomery lives out in the country in a small clapboard house that used to belong to the Lightfoot farm. There’s a bad old story, best forgotten, about how he was taken advantage of by Cecil Lightfoot, brought to the poorhouse door by the tight-fisted farmer who sold out to the Amish, made a killing, wound up fat and happy in a Florida condominium where a heart attack finally put an end to his run of luck. Cecil never figured it out, but Montgomery had his sweet revenge. Did he ever.
The house and the acre it sits on have gone to seed. Wood surfaces cry out for paint, and everything that can break broke years back. The roof leaks, although last fall Tommy climbed a ladder and stretched a sheet of plastic over the trouble spot, tacked it down with roofing nails. Not a solution, but amazingly it held through the winter. It’s late May now, and the worry is hard rain. Any halfassed wind out of the south will take the plastic in a heartbeat, and then the ceiling gets a good soaking. Montgomery suspects the rot has already set in. Tommy is his grandson. He lives here, off and on. Tommy’s problem are always getting worse.
To the young woman at Montgomery’s door, the porch boards feel spongy, as though they might give way any second and she will go crashing down. Her name is Angelica Rossi, and this is the first day of her internship at Broadhope County Social Services. Mrs. Burrow, a thick-waisted African American woman wearing pearls, sent her out here to test her mettle. You think you are cut out for this work? Go try Montgomery Lewis on for size.
The mower sits in the side yard. It’s a new Cub Cadet. That telltale bright yellow can’t be mistaken. Zero turn, 60-inch cutting deck, electric starter. A handsome machine worth four grand easy. Tommy’s story does not stand up although Montgomery is not inclined to challenge the boy on it. An argument would only tire him out.
Angelica has never come this close to poverty. Her mother is a psychotherapist, her father a specialist in maritime law. They live in Philadelphia and write books. It was her mother who engineered the internship; she has a friend in the state health department in Richmond. Angelica wants to get an MSW, and two unpaid months in social services should help demonstrate her commitment.
The screen is torn at the bottom of the door. An orange tabby barrels through it, knocking into Angelica’s feet, and takes off flying down the porch steps with a contrary squawk. A sour smell wafts through the screen door. It might be the living room air, it might be the body odor of Mr. Lewis himself.
“Who are you, and what do you want?”
“Good morning, Mr. Lewis. My name is Angelica. May I come in?”
“What for?”
She is prepared for resistance. “I work for Social Services. I thought we could have a chat.”
‘Chat’ is absolutely the wrong word. Shit. She wishes she could take it back. Montgomery, hearing in her accent that she is not local, scents easy prey.
He is a slight man. His shoulders stoop. Not much hair left on his skull, just wisps like insignificant clouds that will never thicken to rain. His teeth are yellow with neglect. He needs a shave. He needs clean clothes, a thorough medical checkup, other things she cannot yet imagine.
Angelica feels the contrast intently. Her skirt and blouse combination is perfect for the first day on the job. Her chestnut hair has a kind of movement, in radiant cascades, all its own. She smells sweet but not too sweet. She has TANF in mind, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. From the looks of the place, Lewis qualifies.
“Don’t want no welfare,” Montgomery snaps. He makes a half-turn with the walker, stops, turns his head back to face her. “You want to know when this country started going downhill? It’s when they started handing out welfare checks to every Tom, Dick and Harry that stuck their hand out.”
The interview is over. Angelica visualizes Mrs. Burrow behind her desk at the office. You think you can do this job? She is not hostile, necessarily, but she is definitely curious.
Walking back to her car, which she left at the head of Mr. Lewis’s drive, Angelica worries again that the Solterra will stand out in the wrong way. It was a graduation gift from her parents. Her father chose it when she insisted on an electric vehicle. Sure enough, the hulking man stepping out from an old Dodge Charger can’t take his eyes off it. The Charger screams off, the driver going through the gears with enthusiasm, and the man says, “Cool wheels.”
Does she say thank you? That seems silly.
Finally he tears his attention away from the car to size her up.
“Who are you?”
“I work for Social Services. My name is Angelica Rossi.”
He grins. It’s a leer. “Bet the old man told you where to stick it.”
“I think he might qualify for assistance.”
She stops, realizing she has just breached her would-be client’s confidentiality, and she does not even know who this large, pale-skinned, shambling man with a moony face is. She asks. He tells her. This is Montgomery Lewis’s grandson. His T-shirt reads Whistlin’ Dixie.
There is a file on Tommy Lewis at Social Services. It’s not as thick as the file on him they keep at the sheriff’s office. Angelica does not know of the existence of either but is a good guesser.
“How much that car set you back?”
“It was a gift.”
This strikes him as improbable, but he nods as though he believes her. “Maybe you can help me out with something.”
“How?”
“I’m trying to locate my momma.”
Angelica reaches for her phone, hands it over. Tommy shakes his head.
“She ain’t got no phone. I mean, she’s got one, but it ain’t working just now.”
“Where is she?”
He makes a vague gesture she does not know how to interpret.
“Momma’s got a blood problem. I don’t understand the ins and outs of it, but I picked up some medicine in Briery, just like she asked. Now I can’t locate her. There’s just two, maybe three places she could be. Would you drive me around ‘til I find her?”
Angelica thinks she might be able to get to Montgomery through the grandson so agrees. Before they leave in her new car, he walks out to a broken-down shed with half a door, finds a tarpaulin, and throws it over the yellow lawn mower. She texts Mrs. Burrow that she will be a little later than she anticipated. In return she gets an emoji with a skeptical expression. She will explain what happened later. She needs to stay on Mrs. Burrow’s good side.
Inside the house, Montgomery listens intently but can’t make out what is being said, only that Tommy is talking to the Social Services girl, who smelled like flowers. He does not have the oomph to get up from his chair again, go out to the porch, see what’s going on. Death is thinking about him, thinking hard. He should make a list of things to be sorry for. The Lewises have been Baptist since time immemorial, but he always got restless in the service and was visited by evil thoughts. In his black heart they found a cozy nest.
Tommy offers to drive – he knows the area like the back of his hand – but Angelica understands that’s a bad idea. She spends the next hour and a half piecing together the fragments of thoughts that come out of Tommy’s mouth. He wants his grandfather to get what’s coming to him, and that includes every last penny the county owes him. He speaks with counterfeit animation meant to convince her he means what he says, he’s on her side. Both men have been shafted, she is informed. Time and again they have been shabbily treated by people and circumstances, by the law and its authorized representatives. People like Montgomery and Tommy, the deck is stacked against them.
No sign of Tommy’s mother – she’s a Gillispie, and no mention is made of his father – at the first house where they stop, or the second.
“What kind of medicine did you say it was?” Angelica asks as he directs her to a place called Scuffletown, still farther out in the country.
“It’s somethin’ for the blood. Her sickness, it’s what they call chronic, which I guess means serious. You know anything about it?”
The third place they stop is a double-wide trailer at the back end of a field so green it shouts. A Confederate flag hangs listlessly from a pole affixed to the side of the trailer. Two pit bulls locked in a run go into a frenzy as they get out of the car, and a spasm of fear goes through Angelica. It’s hot now, differently hotter than Philadelphia. The thick wet heat is a blanket that clings to her shoulders.
Tommy tells her, “You best wait here. I don’t know about them dogs. I can’t guarantee they won’t let ‘em out just to mess with us.”
She is happy to wait. She watches as he knocks on the door, a skinny guy festooned with tattoos steps out, and something is exchanged between the two men. Angelica gets it now; late and slow, but she gets it. Tommy Lewis may or may not have a mother who may or may not have a chronic blood condition. But he definitely needs to score. He has been jonesing all morning, which might explain his incoherence. She does not wait to hear the excuse he concocts. She backs out of the gravel drive and heads for the office in Briery.
🁐
Angelica gets busy at work, and Montgomery listens with increasing attentiveness for footsteps.
At Social Services, orientation and training eat up Angelica’s hours and days. One day Mrs. Burrow sends her next door to Prince Edward County for a workshop on interviewing techniques, where she feels her outsider status acutely. She rents a small apartment but chooses not to furnish or decorate it. She will get by with the basics. Simple seems good. She is not seeking virtue, only clarity.
Aaron wants to visit, her first weekend in Briery. He is going to the Wharton School in the fall and pressured her relentlessly to take the summer off, go with him to a stone cottage outside of Dijon that his family owns. When she tells him not to come for the weekend, he takes it as a permanent dismissal. Such it may prove to be.
It’s on the weekend, too – Saturday morning before the heat is unbearable, and the patient ticking of insects foretells no doom – when Montgomery hears a commotion outside. He forces himself to get up and go investigate. Blast and damn. It’s not the undertaker come to collect the body, it’s two Broadhope deputies. One of them pulls the tarp from the Cub Cadet. The other snaps a picture of the machine, then one of the serial number. Evidence. They make their way to the porch. Montgomery Lewis is a known quantity.
“Mornin’, Mr. Lewis. We’re looking for your grandson.”
“I ain’t got no goddamn grandson.”
Spitting out the words, he has a vague memory of somebody in the Bible denying kinship, but he can’t bring back the story.
Both deputies are beef-bodied, with slab faces and blue eyes that have seen their fair share of crime and criminals. Can’t help but affect a person.
“Tommy Lewis ain’t your grandson?”
“He ain’t here.”
“Any idea where he’s at?”
“None whatsoever. I can’t be expected to look after a grown man, not in my condition.”
That’s another echo from the Bible, dim as the first and with the same prickle. It strengthens his conviction that he is due to meet his Unmaker.
Montgomery does not ask why they want him. It will open up a discussion of the stolen mower that he would just as soon steer clear of. When the deputies drive off he wishes he had paid the phone bill. He’d like to give Tommy a heads up. The boy carries a cell phone. Where he gets the money to keep it turned on, God knows. But Verizon killed Montgomery’s landline months ago.
Years. Maybe it has been a couple of years without the phone. His sense of time is doughy.
Tommy claims Rex Armiger bought the mower cheap off a guy who lost his job, Tommy is only keeping it for him until he can sell it for a quick profit. You can’t say no to your best friend.
Tommy is an idiot. If you’re going to be a thief, at least take the trouble to hide your haul.
It’s the drugs, has to be. They make the boy stupid. This is another conversation he would just as soon not have.
Montgomery goes back to his chair. He naps.
The following Tuesday his name comes up when Mrs. Burrow and Angelica go to lunch. The supervisor takes her intern to a place in Briery called The Newsroom, located in an old brick building that used to house the local paper. The sandwiches are named for famous journalists. Angelica chooses the Judy Woodruff because it contains no meat.
The two women have decided they like each other well enough. Angelica admires the way Mrs. Burrow – Agatha – runs the office. She is both firm and flexible, brooking no challenge to her authority. Agatha, for her part, sees in the composed young person of obvious privilege an intelligence that has something to do with how she listens.
“I’d like to try again with Mr. Lewis,” Angelica tells her boss.
Agatha chose the Bob Woodward. Pulled pork on a brioche, with sweet potato fries. She studies her intern between bites.
“You know I sent you out there in the first place to make a point.”
“The point being, not everybody is reachable.”
“Something like that. Montgomery Lewis…” She puts down her sandwich. She wants to get this right. “You remember Humpty Dumpty?”
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put him together again.”
“Seems to me, if a person wants to do this work, make a career of it, they had better recognize that first, there are a bunch of Montgomery Lewises out there, and second, how they feel about that.”
“Does that mean you think I shouldn’t try again?”
Agatha slowly shakes her head, meaning go ahead, give it your best shot.
That’s why Angelica is out at the Lewis house the next morning when a police car pulls in, followed by a pickup truck with a trailer. Two burly deputies get out of the cruiser. An equally burly bald man in overalls with a curly black beard gets out of the truck. He leans against the hood with his arms crossed, waiting to be told to do what he has been contracted to do.
The deputies approach the porch alertly, hands near their holstered guns but not touching the grips. Montgomery has come outside on his walker, the better to tell the social worker to piss off. It’s another hot morning in Southside, Virginia. Corn plants are leaping up in their fields, straining for sunlight. Birds carry nourishment in their beaks to babies in cleverly concealed nests. In a field adjacent to Montgomery Lewis’s useless acre, a young Amish boy guides a team of draught horses hauling a wagon down a path. He wears his father’s straw hat, and sober dark clothes. His family’s disciplined hard work has made the old Lightfoot farm produce as it never did back when Montgomery worked there, managing the hands.
A deputy says calmly, “Morning, Montgomery.”
“I don’t guess me telling you to get the hell off my land is gonna accomplish anything.”
“We need to talk to Tommy.”
“He ain’t here.”
“We know he’s here. We just had us an interesting conversation with Rex Armiger. Him and Tommy, they’re best buds, right?”
In fact Tommy got trashed the night before with Rex and lies asleep on his grandfather’s sofa. No reasonable conversation in a reasonable tone of voice will wake him regardless of subject.
“Ma’am,” one of the deputies says to Angelica. “I need you to come down off the porch. That your car out there? The safest thing is for you to go have a seat there while we do what we got to do.”
Stupidly, she tells him she works for Social Services. He repeats the command. She steps down into the yard but does not go to her car. In that moment she gets a text from Aaron but does not look at it. A stone cottage in rural France. Climb the hill behind, and you see a restored seventeenth-century chateau. Why is the world like this?
There is something quivery in the human constitution that causes Tommy to wake the instant the first deputy’s foot touches the porch boards. There is a leaden heaviness in the way events arrange themselves. There is no perfect sunlight that answers longing. Tommy gets up off the couch, walks over and stares through the screen door. He has no pants on. His dick shrivels in recognition of the inescapable fact of his impending arrest. No need, really, for either deputy to go for a gun.
Angelica watches Montgomery who watches his grandson handcuffed and escorted to the back door of the cruiser, where he gets in talking a mile a minute, not a single word of the spew worth the breath he spends on it. The bald man pulls down a ramp on his trailer and drives the Cub Cadet up onto the bed. He lashes it down with straps that tighten by pulley. Five minutes later, she is alone with the old man.
Montgomery lowers his body onto the porch floor, legs on the second-to-top step.
“What are you lookin’ at?”
Grandmother Rossi’s expression comes to her. “You look a little green around the gills. Can I get you something? A glass of water?”
He shakes his head. She approaches the steps. His eyes are wet. She feels sorry for him. He feels sorry for himself.
“I won’t see Tommy again. He’s been incarcerated one too many times. Last time they give him a warning. They are not about to let him out on bail, not any more.”
“Do you have someone who can come by and help you out? Some family, a friend?”
The look he gives her indicates how dumb he finds the question.
“It ain’t like he done all that much around here. Cuts firewood in the winter, I’ll give him that. And he shaves me now and then. Boy’s got a nice light touch with the razor. Never nicked me once, all these years.”
He rubs the palm of his hand thoughtfully across his chin.
“You can do me a favor, if you are wanting to do something.”
“Of course.”
“See that ATV off yonder? You ever drove one of them?”
“No.”
“It’s easy.”
He gives her instructions. She listens carefully. The main thing is not to flood the engine. She has no idea what he is up to, but she walks out to the all-terrain vehicle by the shed. It has knobby tires, no roof, a simple clutch. She gets it started.
He wants a little help, getting down the stairs and into the ATV. He smells terrible, and for an equally terrible moment she imagines giving him a bath, the way you bathe a dog, with a hose and a bucket. When he is settled in the seat next to her, the walker stowed behind them, he directs her across a field, down a path that cuts diagonally through a patch of woods, and out to the far edge of a field where a tall barn stands.
It’s a tobacco barn. Cecil used to grow tobacco, as did his father before him. The grass is high and thick in the field and has grown up around the barn, so Angelica has a hard time getting the flimsy double doors to swing open. He watches her but speaks no encouraging words.
Inside, overhead, she sees a row of smooth bare poles from which sheaves of tobacco were once hung to dry. The walls and the high ceiling are daubed with wasp nests constructed of mud. The wasps are not perturbed. On the dirt floor, the prehistoric remains of a fire. Montgomery startles her, coming noiselessly up behind her.
“In the old days we used to run a small fire, help dry the baccy. The drawback was, you had to stay up all night, make sure the fire didn’t catch. Woe betide you if you fell asleep, you could burn up the barn and yourself in it.”
He is on his walker and for the moment seems fairly steady.
“Farmer next door, he owned this whole property. Cecil Lightfoot, that was his name. Wife by the name of Caroline. Whatever he give her, it warn’t enough. She used to meet me out here in the barn at night, every so often, get what she wasn’t getting at home.”
Angelica hears the satisfaction in his voice, and a kind of pride.
“Are you looking for something out here?” she asks him.
He points to a wood pile in one corner. It’s covered with dust and grime and cobwebs.
“I blame Tommy’s father.”
“Your son.”
“Wilfred. Never done a lick a work in his life, never had the least amount of gumption. Set a bad example for the boy.”
She won’t ask where Wilfred is, what happened to him. Already the Lewises are crowding her imagination, and the place in her heart where the imagination does its work. Enough, she thinks, will be enough.
He asks her with notable politeness to remove a piece of plywood lying on the stack of wood. She picks it up, leans it against the wall. Underneath she discovers Tommy’s stash of stolen goods.
“Won’t be long before them county mounties are back. Now they got the boy, they’ll be curious what else he maybe lifted. They’ll make their way out here, no doubt about it. I heard they got dogs these days that sniff out stolen merchandise. I never did trust that Rex Armiger. He’d sell out his own momma for a sandwich bag of marijuana.”
Angelica makes a quick inventory. There is a cardboard box of stereo components, and some Bose speakers. There is a power drill, a new electric one with a battery and a charger, still in the box it came in. A socket set. She opens a faux-velvet bag and finds a tangle of women’s watches and bracelets and necklaces. More. She has no interest in itemizing every last thing Tommy Lewis has stolen and stashed.
“You see a fine quality wood box in there, it’s walnut? Got a brass clasp?”
“I see it.”
“Go ahead and lift it out, will you?”
She lifts it out. He asks her to carry the box outside. He follows slowly on the walker. One foot, she notices for the first time, drags as he makes his way to the ATV in the bed of which she has placed the walnut box.
With relish he opens the box. Inside, a long-barreled revolver.
“This here is a Colt forty-five,” he tells her. “Antique. A real collector’s item. There’s people would pay a lot of money to get their hands on this firearm. It’s in the high hundreds of dollars, you find the right buyer.”
There are bullets. She watches him load them into the cylinder. He does so methodically despite the slight tremor in his hands. He looks at her. Grins.
She feels no fear. He does not intend to shoot her. Her curiosity has a mud bottom.
A shadow on the grassy ground. They both feel it. It’s an eagle, crossing the field with indolent wingstrokes. Montgomery raises his arm, steadies his gun hand with the other. His finger is on the trigger. Angelica is horrified.
“Ever seen an eagle?” he wants to know.
“No. At least, I don’t think so.”
“We get ‘em all the time out this way. You can always tell ‘cuz they’re twice the size of a turkey vulture. It’s a huge goddamn bird.”
She waits for him to shoot, but it’s already too late, and he slowly lowers his arm.
“Ain’t nobody in the history of birds and mankind ever hit a eagle on the wing with a handgun.”
Again that grin, which does its evil best to bring her into Montgomery’s circle of knowledge.
He suddenly raises the pistol to the side of his head. Holds it there.
“Please,” she says. “Don’t do that.”
He is aiming at the man he used to be, whom he blames for making him the man he is today. He sways a little and has to steady himself with his free hand, grabbing and gripping the edge of the ATV bed. His death hand shakes, and the pistol glints. Angelica’s eyes tear in the harsh sunlight. The word ‘forever’ comes into her mind.
She takes a step toward him.
“Stay where you are.”
She stops.
He lowers the revolver. Puts it back in the cushioned box, closes it, snaps the brass clasp. Stands there looking at the box while three crows jeer from the woods and grasshoppers leap across the high grass in a blind exhibition of insect joy.
“The next part,” he tells Angelica, raising his head to look at her straight on. “That’s the part I don’t get.”
Montgomery Lewis hates it when somebody comes to the door. Too much work to hoist his body from the chair that has him trapped; grip the handles of the walker; then shuffle across the floor and see who’s there. Sometimes the room spins, taking him with it. It’s either a salesman or somebody threatening consequences. Blast and damn their consequences. This morning he’s pretty sure it’s a deputy sheriff come to arrest Tommy. Montgomery told the boy to throw a tarp over that unexplained mower. Dollars to doughnuts he forgot.
Mongomery lives out in the country in a small clapboard house that used to belong to the Lightfoot farm. There’s a bad old story, best forgotten, about how he was taken advantage of by Cecil Lightfoot, brought to the poorhouse door by the tight-fisted farmer who sold out to the Amish, made a killing, wound up fat and happy in a Florida condominium where a heart attack finally put an end to his run of luck. Cecil never figured it out, but Montgomery had his sweet revenge. Did he ever.
The house and the acre it sits on have gone to seed. Wood surfaces cry out for paint, and everything that can break broke years back. The roof leaks, although last fall Tommy climbed a ladder and stretched a sheet of plastic over the trouble spot, tacked it down with roofing nails. Not a solution, but amazingly it held through the winter. It’s late May now, and the worry is hard rain. Any halfassed wind out of the south will take the plastic in a heartbeat, and then the ceiling gets a good soaking. Montgomery suspects the rot has already set in. Tommy is his grandson. He lives here, off and on. Tommy’s problem are always getting worse.
To the young woman at Montgomery’s door, the porch boards feel spongy, as though they might give way any second and she will go crashing down. Her name is Angelica Rossi, and this is the first day of her internship at Broadhope County Social Services. Mrs. Burrow, a thick-waisted African American woman wearing pearls, sent her out here to test her mettle. You think you are cut out for this work? Go try Montgomery Lewis on for size.
The mower sits in the side yard. It’s a new Cub Cadet. That telltale bright yellow can’t be mistaken. Zero turn, 60-inch cutting deck, electric starter. A handsome machine worth four grand easy. Tommy’s story does not stand up although Montgomery is not inclined to challenge the boy on it. An argument would only tire him out.
Angelica has never come this close to poverty. Her mother is a psychotherapist, her father a specialist in maritime law. They live in Philadelphia and write books. It was her mother who engineered the internship; she has a friend in the state health department in Richmond. Angelica wants to get an MSW, and two unpaid months in social services should help demonstrate her commitment.
The screen is torn at the bottom of the door. An orange tabby barrels through it, knocking into Angelica’s feet, and takes off flying down the porch steps with a contrary squawk. A sour smell wafts through the screen door. It might be the living room air, it might be the body odor of Mr. Lewis himself.
“Who are you, and what do you want?”
“Good morning, Mr. Lewis. My name is Angelica. May I come in?”
“What for?”
She is prepared for resistance. “I work for Social Services. I thought we could have a chat.”
‘Chat’ is absolutely the wrong word. Shit. She wishes she could take it back. Montgomery, hearing in her accent that she is not local, scents easy prey.
He is a slight man. His shoulders stoop. Not much hair left on his skull, just wisps like insignificant clouds that will never thicken to rain. His teeth are yellow with neglect. He needs a shave. He needs clean clothes, a thorough medical checkup, other things she cannot yet imagine.
Angelica feels the contrast intently. Her skirt and blouse combination is perfect for the first day on the job. Her chestnut hair has a kind of movement, in radiant cascades, all its own. She smells sweet but not too sweet. She has TANF in mind, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. From the looks of the place, Lewis qualifies.
“Don’t want no welfare,” Montgomery snaps. He makes a half-turn with the walker, stops, turns his head back to face her. “You want to know when this country started going downhill? It’s when they started handing out welfare checks to every Tom, Dick and Harry that stuck their hand out.”
The interview is over. Angelica visualizes Mrs. Burrow behind her desk at the office. You think you can do this job? She is not hostile, necessarily, but she is definitely curious.
Walking back to her car, which she left at the head of Mr. Lewis’s drive, Angelica worries again that the Solterra will stand out in the wrong way. It was a graduation gift from her parents. Her father chose it when she insisted on an electric vehicle. Sure enough, the hulking man stepping out from an old Dodge Charger can’t take his eyes off it. The Charger screams off, the driver going through the gears with enthusiasm, and the man says, “Cool wheels.”
Does she say thank you? That seems silly.
Finally he tears his attention away from the car to size her up.
“Who are you?”
“I work for Social Services. My name is Angelica Rossi.”
He grins. It’s a leer. “Bet the old man told you where to stick it.”
“I think he might qualify for assistance.”
She stops, realizing she has just breached her would-be client’s confidentiality, and she does not even know who this large, pale-skinned, shambling man with a moony face is. She asks. He tells her. This is Montgomery Lewis’s grandson. His T-shirt reads Whistlin’ Dixie.
There is a file on Tommy Lewis at Social Services. It’s not as thick as the file on him they keep at the sheriff’s office. Angelica does not know of the existence of either but is a good guesser.
“How much that car set you back?”
“It was a gift.”
This strikes him as improbable, but he nods as though he believes her. “Maybe you can help me out with something.”
“How?”
“I’m trying to locate my momma.”
Angelica reaches for her phone, hands it over. Tommy shakes his head.
“She ain’t got no phone. I mean, she’s got one, but it ain’t working just now.”
“Where is she?”
He makes a vague gesture she does not know how to interpret.
“Momma’s got a blood problem. I don’t understand the ins and outs of it, but I picked up some medicine in Briery, just like she asked. Now I can’t locate her. There’s just two, maybe three places she could be. Would you drive me around ‘til I find her?”
Angelica thinks she might be able to get to Montgomery through the grandson so agrees. Before they leave in her new car, he walks out to a broken-down shed with half a door, finds a tarpaulin, and throws it over the yellow lawn mower. She texts Mrs. Burrow that she will be a little later than she anticipated. In return she gets an emoji with a skeptical expression. She will explain what happened later. She needs to stay on Mrs. Burrow’s good side.
Inside the house, Montgomery listens intently but can’t make out what is being said, only that Tommy is talking to the Social Services girl, who smelled like flowers. He does not have the oomph to get up from his chair again, go out to the porch, see what’s going on. Death is thinking about him, thinking hard. He should make a list of things to be sorry for. The Lewises have been Baptist since time immemorial, but he always got restless in the service and was visited by evil thoughts. In his black heart they found a cozy nest.
Tommy offers to drive – he knows the area like the back of his hand – but Angelica understands that’s a bad idea. She spends the next hour and a half piecing together the fragments of thoughts that come out of Tommy’s mouth. He wants his grandfather to get what’s coming to him, and that includes every last penny the county owes him. He speaks with counterfeit animation meant to convince her he means what he says, he’s on her side. Both men have been shafted, she is informed. Time and again they have been shabbily treated by people and circumstances, by the law and its authorized representatives. People like Montgomery and Tommy, the deck is stacked against them.
No sign of Tommy’s mother – she’s a Gillispie, and no mention is made of his father – at the first house where they stop, or the second.
“What kind of medicine did you say it was?” Angelica asks as he directs her to a place called Scuffletown, still farther out in the country.
“It’s somethin’ for the blood. Her sickness, it’s what they call chronic, which I guess means serious. You know anything about it?”
The third place they stop is a double-wide trailer at the back end of a field so green it shouts. A Confederate flag hangs listlessly from a pole affixed to the side of the trailer. Two pit bulls locked in a run go into a frenzy as they get out of the car, and a spasm of fear goes through Angelica. It’s hot now, differently hotter than Philadelphia. The thick wet heat is a blanket that clings to her shoulders.
Tommy tells her, “You best wait here. I don’t know about them dogs. I can’t guarantee they won’t let ‘em out just to mess with us.”
She is happy to wait. She watches as he knocks on the door, a skinny guy festooned with tattoos steps out, and something is exchanged between the two men. Angelica gets it now; late and slow, but she gets it. Tommy Lewis may or may not have a mother who may or may not have a chronic blood condition. But he definitely needs to score. He has been jonesing all morning, which might explain his incoherence. She does not wait to hear the excuse he concocts. She backs out of the gravel drive and heads for the office in Briery.
🁐
Angelica gets busy at work, and Montgomery listens with increasing attentiveness for footsteps.
At Social Services, orientation and training eat up Angelica’s hours and days. One day Mrs. Burrow sends her next door to Prince Edward County for a workshop on interviewing techniques, where she feels her outsider status acutely. She rents a small apartment but chooses not to furnish or decorate it. She will get by with the basics. Simple seems good. She is not seeking virtue, only clarity.
Aaron wants to visit, her first weekend in Briery. He is going to the Wharton School in the fall and pressured her relentlessly to take the summer off, go with him to a stone cottage outside of Dijon that his family owns. When she tells him not to come for the weekend, he takes it as a permanent dismissal. Such it may prove to be.
It’s on the weekend, too – Saturday morning before the heat is unbearable, and the patient ticking of insects foretells no doom – when Montgomery hears a commotion outside. He forces himself to get up and go investigate. Blast and damn. It’s not the undertaker come to collect the body, it’s two Broadhope deputies. One of them pulls the tarp from the Cub Cadet. The other snaps a picture of the machine, then one of the serial number. Evidence. They make their way to the porch. Montgomery Lewis is a known quantity.
“Mornin’, Mr. Lewis. We’re looking for your grandson.”
“I ain’t got no goddamn grandson.”
Spitting out the words, he has a vague memory of somebody in the Bible denying kinship, but he can’t bring back the story.
Both deputies are beef-bodied, with slab faces and blue eyes that have seen their fair share of crime and criminals. Can’t help but affect a person.
“Tommy Lewis ain’t your grandson?”
“He ain’t here.”
“Any idea where he’s at?”
“None whatsoever. I can’t be expected to look after a grown man, not in my condition.”
That’s another echo from the Bible, dim as the first and with the same prickle. It strengthens his conviction that he is due to meet his Unmaker.
Montgomery does not ask why they want him. It will open up a discussion of the stolen mower that he would just as soon steer clear of. When the deputies drive off he wishes he had paid the phone bill. He’d like to give Tommy a heads up. The boy carries a cell phone. Where he gets the money to keep it turned on, God knows. But Verizon killed Montgomery’s landline months ago.
Years. Maybe it has been a couple of years without the phone. His sense of time is doughy.
Tommy claims Rex Armiger bought the mower cheap off a guy who lost his job, Tommy is only keeping it for him until he can sell it for a quick profit. You can’t say no to your best friend.
Tommy is an idiot. If you’re going to be a thief, at least take the trouble to hide your haul.
It’s the drugs, has to be. They make the boy stupid. This is another conversation he would just as soon not have.
Montgomery goes back to his chair. He naps.
The following Tuesday his name comes up when Mrs. Burrow and Angelica go to lunch. The supervisor takes her intern to a place in Briery called The Newsroom, located in an old brick building that used to house the local paper. The sandwiches are named for famous journalists. Angelica chooses the Judy Woodruff because it contains no meat.
The two women have decided they like each other well enough. Angelica admires the way Mrs. Burrow – Agatha – runs the office. She is both firm and flexible, brooking no challenge to her authority. Agatha, for her part, sees in the composed young person of obvious privilege an intelligence that has something to do with how she listens.
“I’d like to try again with Mr. Lewis,” Angelica tells her boss.
Agatha chose the Bob Woodward. Pulled pork on a brioche, with sweet potato fries. She studies her intern between bites.
“You know I sent you out there in the first place to make a point.”
“The point being, not everybody is reachable.”
“Something like that. Montgomery Lewis…” She puts down her sandwich. She wants to get this right. “You remember Humpty Dumpty?”
“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put him together again.”
“Seems to me, if a person wants to do this work, make a career of it, they had better recognize that first, there are a bunch of Montgomery Lewises out there, and second, how they feel about that.”
“Does that mean you think I shouldn’t try again?”
Agatha slowly shakes her head, meaning go ahead, give it your best shot.
That’s why Angelica is out at the Lewis house the next morning when a police car pulls in, followed by a pickup truck with a trailer. Two burly deputies get out of the cruiser. An equally burly bald man in overalls with a curly black beard gets out of the truck. He leans against the hood with his arms crossed, waiting to be told to do what he has been contracted to do.
The deputies approach the porch alertly, hands near their holstered guns but not touching the grips. Montgomery has come outside on his walker, the better to tell the social worker to piss off. It’s another hot morning in Southside, Virginia. Corn plants are leaping up in their fields, straining for sunlight. Birds carry nourishment in their beaks to babies in cleverly concealed nests. In a field adjacent to Montgomery Lewis’s useless acre, a young Amish boy guides a team of draught horses hauling a wagon down a path. He wears his father’s straw hat, and sober dark clothes. His family’s disciplined hard work has made the old Lightfoot farm produce as it never did back when Montgomery worked there, managing the hands.
A deputy says calmly, “Morning, Montgomery.”
“I don’t guess me telling you to get the hell off my land is gonna accomplish anything.”
“We need to talk to Tommy.”
“He ain’t here.”
“We know he’s here. We just had us an interesting conversation with Rex Armiger. Him and Tommy, they’re best buds, right?”
In fact Tommy got trashed the night before with Rex and lies asleep on his grandfather’s sofa. No reasonable conversation in a reasonable tone of voice will wake him regardless of subject.
“Ma’am,” one of the deputies says to Angelica. “I need you to come down off the porch. That your car out there? The safest thing is for you to go have a seat there while we do what we got to do.”
Stupidly, she tells him she works for Social Services. He repeats the command. She steps down into the yard but does not go to her car. In that moment she gets a text from Aaron but does not look at it. A stone cottage in rural France. Climb the hill behind, and you see a restored seventeenth-century chateau. Why is the world like this?
There is something quivery in the human constitution that causes Tommy to wake the instant the first deputy’s foot touches the porch boards. There is a leaden heaviness in the way events arrange themselves. There is no perfect sunlight that answers longing. Tommy gets up off the couch, walks over and stares through the screen door. He has no pants on. His dick shrivels in recognition of the inescapable fact of his impending arrest. No need, really, for either deputy to go for a gun.
Angelica watches Montgomery who watches his grandson handcuffed and escorted to the back door of the cruiser, where he gets in talking a mile a minute, not a single word of the spew worth the breath he spends on it. The bald man pulls down a ramp on his trailer and drives the Cub Cadet up onto the bed. He lashes it down with straps that tighten by pulley. Five minutes later, she is alone with the old man.
Montgomery lowers his body onto the porch floor, legs on the second-to-top step.
“What are you lookin’ at?”
Grandmother Rossi’s expression comes to her. “You look a little green around the gills. Can I get you something? A glass of water?”
He shakes his head. She approaches the steps. His eyes are wet. She feels sorry for him. He feels sorry for himself.
“I won’t see Tommy again. He’s been incarcerated one too many times. Last time they give him a warning. They are not about to let him out on bail, not any more.”
“Do you have someone who can come by and help you out? Some family, a friend?”
The look he gives her indicates how dumb he finds the question.
“It ain’t like he done all that much around here. Cuts firewood in the winter, I’ll give him that. And he shaves me now and then. Boy’s got a nice light touch with the razor. Never nicked me once, all these years.”
He rubs the palm of his hand thoughtfully across his chin.
“You can do me a favor, if you are wanting to do something.”
“Of course.”
“See that ATV off yonder? You ever drove one of them?”
“No.”
“It’s easy.”
He gives her instructions. She listens carefully. The main thing is not to flood the engine. She has no idea what he is up to, but she walks out to the all-terrain vehicle by the shed. It has knobby tires, no roof, a simple clutch. She gets it started.
He wants a little help, getting down the stairs and into the ATV. He smells terrible, and for an equally terrible moment she imagines giving him a bath, the way you bathe a dog, with a hose and a bucket. When he is settled in the seat next to her, the walker stowed behind them, he directs her across a field, down a path that cuts diagonally through a patch of woods, and out to the far edge of a field where a tall barn stands.
It’s a tobacco barn. Cecil used to grow tobacco, as did his father before him. The grass is high and thick in the field and has grown up around the barn, so Angelica has a hard time getting the flimsy double doors to swing open. He watches her but speaks no encouraging words.
Inside, overhead, she sees a row of smooth bare poles from which sheaves of tobacco were once hung to dry. The walls and the high ceiling are daubed with wasp nests constructed of mud. The wasps are not perturbed. On the dirt floor, the prehistoric remains of a fire. Montgomery startles her, coming noiselessly up behind her.
“In the old days we used to run a small fire, help dry the baccy. The drawback was, you had to stay up all night, make sure the fire didn’t catch. Woe betide you if you fell asleep, you could burn up the barn and yourself in it.”
He is on his walker and for the moment seems fairly steady.
“Farmer next door, he owned this whole property. Cecil Lightfoot, that was his name. Wife by the name of Caroline. Whatever he give her, it warn’t enough. She used to meet me out here in the barn at night, every so often, get what she wasn’t getting at home.”
Angelica hears the satisfaction in his voice, and a kind of pride.
“Are you looking for something out here?” she asks him.
He points to a wood pile in one corner. It’s covered with dust and grime and cobwebs.
“I blame Tommy’s father.”
“Your son.”
“Wilfred. Never done a lick a work in his life, never had the least amount of gumption. Set a bad example for the boy.”
She won’t ask where Wilfred is, what happened to him. Already the Lewises are crowding her imagination, and the place in her heart where the imagination does its work. Enough, she thinks, will be enough.
He asks her with notable politeness to remove a piece of plywood lying on the stack of wood. She picks it up, leans it against the wall. Underneath she discovers Tommy’s stash of stolen goods.
“Won’t be long before them county mounties are back. Now they got the boy, they’ll be curious what else he maybe lifted. They’ll make their way out here, no doubt about it. I heard they got dogs these days that sniff out stolen merchandise. I never did trust that Rex Armiger. He’d sell out his own momma for a sandwich bag of marijuana.”
Angelica makes a quick inventory. There is a cardboard box of stereo components, and some Bose speakers. There is a power drill, a new electric one with a battery and a charger, still in the box it came in. A socket set. She opens a faux-velvet bag and finds a tangle of women’s watches and bracelets and necklaces. More. She has no interest in itemizing every last thing Tommy Lewis has stolen and stashed.
“You see a fine quality wood box in there, it’s walnut? Got a brass clasp?”
“I see it.”
“Go ahead and lift it out, will you?”
She lifts it out. He asks her to carry the box outside. He follows slowly on the walker. One foot, she notices for the first time, drags as he makes his way to the ATV in the bed of which she has placed the walnut box.
With relish he opens the box. Inside, a long-barreled revolver.
“This here is a Colt forty-five,” he tells her. “Antique. A real collector’s item. There’s people would pay a lot of money to get their hands on this firearm. It’s in the high hundreds of dollars, you find the right buyer.”
There are bullets. She watches him load them into the cylinder. He does so methodically despite the slight tremor in his hands. He looks at her. Grins.
She feels no fear. He does not intend to shoot her. Her curiosity has a mud bottom.
A shadow on the grassy ground. They both feel it. It’s an eagle, crossing the field with indolent wingstrokes. Montgomery raises his arm, steadies his gun hand with the other. His finger is on the trigger. Angelica is horrified.
“Ever seen an eagle?” he wants to know.
“No. At least, I don’t think so.”
“We get ‘em all the time out this way. You can always tell ‘cuz they’re twice the size of a turkey vulture. It’s a huge goddamn bird.”
She waits for him to shoot, but it’s already too late, and he slowly lowers his arm.
“Ain’t nobody in the history of birds and mankind ever hit a eagle on the wing with a handgun.”
Again that grin, which does its evil best to bring her into Montgomery’s circle of knowledge.
He suddenly raises the pistol to the side of his head. Holds it there.
“Please,” she says. “Don’t do that.”
He is aiming at the man he used to be, whom he blames for making him the man he is today. He sways a little and has to steady himself with his free hand, grabbing and gripping the edge of the ATV bed. His death hand shakes, and the pistol glints. Angelica’s eyes tear in the harsh sunlight. The word ‘forever’ comes into her mind.
She takes a step toward him.
“Stay where you are.”
She stops.
He lowers the revolver. Puts it back in the cushioned box, closes it, snaps the brass clasp. Stands there looking at the box while three crows jeer from the woods and grasshoppers leap across the high grass in a blind exhibition of insect joy.
“The next part,” he tells Angelica, raising his head to look at her straight on. “That’s the part I don’t get.”