The search party drove down every dirt trail and poked into bushes; they peered into the shimmering dam and contemplated dredging it. They combed through the waving fields of wheat and ransacked barns…until the sheriff called off the search. The rainmaker was missing, but not before he’d done his job, and, besides, it wasn’t as if he was a local, Jeremiah rationalized. One week was a respectable time to spend looking for a stranger, especially one who had gone out of his way to seduce all the womenfolk in town.
The sheriff had his deputy pin up notices declaring that Jacob Kidderminister had left voluntarily due to family circumstances and in the rush had left behind his trailer and his possessions. No one questioned the law enforcer’s assessment.
The water receded; Rebecca adopted the coyote; the Kaufmann brothers towed away the silver trailer to sell for recycled aluminum; and life went on.
The preacher resumed his sermons and gradually his congregation trickled back. But Bill Williams appeared a destroyed man. The stoop was more pronounced, the thin lips were curled in a permanent sneer of disapproval. But what was most noticeable was that the old fire and passion had completely disappeared from his preaching. During one sermon, delivered in a barely audible whisper, he fell into loud sobbing. Embarrassed, the organist petered into discordance and the congregation began to snigger.
The subject was raised at the knitting circle. The postmistress (who had flown into Dallas for a face-lift since the incident of the rainmaker) put down her needles. “I say he is losing his wind,” she declared defiantly.
The other women rattled their knitting needles in agreement.
The mayor’s mother spoke up. “Why don’t we swap him for a young sexy one? You know, one of them that talks in tongues. You never know, he could turn out to be a useful contributor to the mental health of the women of this town, just like the rainmaker!”
The room dissolved into giggles.
The rivers became streams again, frogs returned to the wetlands, and the wheat rippled fatly under the hot sun. Life was bursting with fecundity. Bill Williams recovered and slowly the fervor began to creep back into the Sunday sessions at the small church—with one difference: he never mentioned race again.
All returned to normalcy. Except the townsfolk seemed to take more joy in their everyday tasks, as if the drought and the floods had given them a greater understanding of the vulnerability of life.
And so it was that the mayor and his mistress again found themselves in Abigail’s back paddock, with Abigail’s face buried between Chad’s legs. The mayor, having just reached orgasm, pulled her up and gazed into her eyes. He had never felt more emotional. Divorce proceedings were under way and Cheri had already begun her campaign trail to run against him in the next council elections. All of which Chad was treating with supreme equanimity. He was in love and had reached a momentous decision. He was going to ask Abigail to marry him.
He’d barely got the words out when she emitted a loud scream.
“Hey, I didn’t expect that kind of reaction,” he muttered, crestfallen, but then noticed that Abigail was pointing to something in the field. He turned and gagged on a wave of nausea.
Beneath a tree in which a flock of starlings were roosting, sticking up out of the mud, were two human hands entwined. One, fragile and dark, was obviously female. The other was large and white. Twinkling on its index finger was a large sapphire ring, which Chad instantly recognized.
They lay tied to a rusting brass bed, his muscular body curled around her darkly luminous flesh. It was a posture of infinite tenderness, a petrification of the moment when two people collapse into each other in love. The dead couple, miraculously preserved, were raised out of the earth like a glorious classical statue suspended in its own time bubble. The stunned onlookers removed their hats in respect, lowered their eyes in hushed shame. The silence was broken by a lone nightingale that perched itself on the bed frame and burst into song.
Jeremiah, in an attempt to hide his clenching heart, adopted an air of professional detachment. He pointed to a single bullet wound visible in Jacob’s back. “I would say that one bullet was responsible for both the deaths, having passed through the male’s body and into the female.”
He paused, visibly shaken by the clouded gaze of the dead girl who, despite her black skin, looked vaguely familiar.
“Who is she, by the way? Anyone here know?” He turned to the small group of farmhands and officials who had helped drag the bed from beneath the mud.
The youngest Kaufmann brother, the shyest, spoke up. “I don’t know who she is, but she’s got the very same birthmark as the preacher on her hand. Why, I’ve seen that mark a thousand times!”
The men all leaned forward to look. There it was, as clear as day, a star-shaped wine-colored mark.
By the time the sheriff and the mayor reached the church, word of the double murder had spread across town like a virus. The officials pushed open the iron gate with some dread. Jeremiah hated homicide cases. Luckily he hadn’t had to deal with many, but they were enough to scar a man’s soul for life.
By the time they reached the door of the church the two men sensed something was amiss. The door was wide open, the altar smashed, the plaster hands of the Lord Jesus had been hacked off.
As Jeremiah bent down to pick up one of the miniature hands, a creak came from the belfry above them.
The preacher’s body hung from a rafter beside the huge brass bell, suspended by a metal chain. The body slowly swung around and the darkened, swollen face came into view. It was ravaged, pecked to pieces. On the floor below lay a single owl’s feather.
Echo
The tramp stank of piss and some unmentionable human filth Gavin couldn’t even bear to imagine. His leathery face loomed out at the property developer from under the canopy of snaking vines that still clung to the decaying wooden verandah.
“Forest come un twisty up your soul, you have nothing, boyo, seep into yer DNA then zap! Dead meat scum.”
He spat what looked like the last of his teeth at the property developer’s feet. Gavin, a big-boned man, who moved with the lolling grace of an individual who knew his own strength, was not a sentimentalist. He was also convinced that everyone was responsible for their own destiny and that poverty was quite likely contagious. He stepped back and regarded the squat, ragged figure with open disgust.
“Get the fuck off my site before I arrange for the Salvos to come and pick up a corpse, comprende, you psycho schizo? I’ll give you the grace of ten minutes to fuck off, starting from…” Gavin pulled up the sleeve of his Zegnitti suit, chosen especially because it was woven entirely out of synthetic fibers, and studied his Gucci watch, “now.”
The old man clutched a battered leather medicine bag to his chest. His matted locks crawled with lice; his eyes, kaleidoscopes of crazed delirium, fixed unerringly on Gavin. He lunged forward and tugged at his suit, his stench washing over the developer in a nauseating miasma.