Page 51 of Stay Buried

Real polite. Kind, even.

Everyone in town felt bad for Willy, bad enough to buy him a drink when he asked, keep him supplied with tobacco, drop food off for him if he started looking thin.

Would they still if they knew the truth? If they knew what he’d done?

Willy walked by the table the two strangers were sitting at but was only able to catch one word:coincidence.

He took that as a sign.

“Coincidence,” he repeated to himself as he walked away from the pub, down to his camp by the river. “Coincidence.”

It bobbed around in his brain like a ping-pong ball going back and forth, back and forth.

Sometimes, like now, he talked to his wife. Back in his old life, he knew if something was troubling him, he just needed to bring it to Anna, to talk it over with her and she’d help him make sense of it.

“What do you think, Anna, is it a coincidence?”

Was it just a coincidence that these people had come to town now, when the mark had been left on the Fitzpatricks’ door?

The first mark that had been left in two years.

He thought back to that day, and he could still feel the heat of the fire on his skin, hear his wife screaming as she fell through the floor.

No such thing as coincidence, Anna whispered softly in his ear now, her breath chilling him.

And she was right.

Anna was always right.

There was no such thing as coincidence.

Not in Boone’s Ferry.

So it was also no coincidence that when he got back to his camp sometime later, he found a brand-new unopened bottle of Old Crow bourbon waiting for him, a crisp twenty-dollar bill beneath it.

He knew who it was from.

And he knew exactly what it meant.

What he should do, he told himself, was take that bottle and smash it. Take the twenty bucks and leave it on one of the picnic tables outside the factory for someone else to find. A symbolic gesture to say he was done with the whole thing.

But when he hefted the bottle of Old Crow by the neck, he felt that old, constant thirst, the thirst that could never be quenched, the thirst that made him ache to his very bones.

The crow on the label looked at him, turned its head a little.Just a sip. Just one sip, it said in its raspy bird tongue.

He cracked the top, put his lips to the neck, and drank.

The warmth flooded into him, and as he drank he promised himself, promised the crow, promised Anna, that he wouldn’t forget his plan, his big idea. He wouldn’t let them down.

TWENTY-FOURFRANKIE

March 13, 1919

The sun was coming up behind the mountains to the east, making the gunmetal-gray sky glow a watery orange. I followed Uncle Thomas, Benjamin Stoddard, and Luther St. James along the narrow road up Saw Meadow Hill leading to the knackerman’s place. Luther had been before and knew the way.

Though I’d lived in Boone’s Ferry all my life, I’d never ventured up Saw Meadow Hill. I knew the knackerman lived up there alone on the outskirts of town for a reason. There was talk that he had metal traps set out in the woods around his cabin, that he would greet visitors with a shotgun blast. Some said he’d trained the crows to watch from high up in the trees, to sound the alarm if anyone came up the hill. Few people, other than the determined Reverend Davies and his flock, ever dared to pay him a visit.

As I slogged uphill through the snow following the men, the thought occurred to me that perhaps the knackerman and I were not so different. Neither of us fit into the world we inhabited.