One Foot in Eden Read Online Free PDF Page B

job outside a mill, a job where I’d get to use my brain some, use it even more when Sheriff McLeod retired two years later.

    As I walked down the field edge to where Billy worked, I started a conversation with myself, because there had been times doing such had helped me solve crimes. O.K., Billy, where would you hide a body? Maybe in the barn loft? Maybe the bottom of the well? It doesn’t seem likely. You had to know those were the kinds of places we’d look first. Maybe in the woods, but a fresh-dug grave would stick out like a No-Heller in a church full of Hardshell Baptists. Besides, the ground is hard as cement. No, Billy, I said to myself. You didn’t bury that body.
    The season was against him. It was the time of year when the Dog Star rose with the sun, and while that meant hot weather and little rain, there was more to it than that. The old Romans had considered it an unwholesome season, and it was hard not to agree with them. Ponds and rivers got scummy and stagnant this time of year, the air still and heavy, like a weight pressing down. The cattle got pinkeye and blackleg, and a dog or cat could go mad. Polio got worse too, or so people believed. Children weren’t allowed to go swimming or to picture shows.
    For Billy it also meant a dead man would bloat and rot twice as fast.
    If he didn’t bury Holland’s body, anybody within a half mile would soon enough smell it.
    Unless he put it in the river, and that was where I figured the body to be. Low as the river was it could still hide a body, especially if you weighted it down with a creek rock or waterlogged tree.
    Billy saw me coming and raised up from topping his tobacco.
    He stood in the middle of a row. The first stick of dynamite went off and then another, but Billy didn’t take his eyes off me. I thought for a moment he might raise his hands over his head and make it easy for all of us, but he didn’t.
    Then I saw them, drifting down slow as black ashes over the trees across the river. To tell the truth I was disappointed in Billy. He hadn’t kept his head about him after all. It was almost funny the way he stood in the field facing me, doing his best to look innocent while right behind him the buzzards in the sky marked a giant X where Holland’s body was. Billy’s shotgun lay at the end of his row, and I stood between him and it.
    ‘Looks to be something dead over yonder,’ I said.
    I waited for Billy’s face to go pale as he looked over his shoulder and saw he’d forgotten about buzzards when he’d hidden Holland’s body. I’d seen men piss on themselves at such moments. Others would cry, or fall down, or run though they knew there was nowhere to run to, run like chickens that had just had their heads cut off and their bodies didn’t yet know they were doomed.
    ‘It’s my plow horse,’ Billy said, hardly giving the buzzards a glance. ‘He broke his leg yesterday.’
    And that set me back, set me back hard as if he’d suckerpunched me in the stomach. He couldn’t have come up with a lie that quick and delivered it that matter-of-fact, at least I didn’t believe he could.
    ‘That’s some hard luck,’ I told him.
    We talked a couple more minutes, but before I could bring up what Mrs. Winchester had told me and Bobby, Tom and Leonard sloshed out of the river, Stonewall loping behind them.
    ‘Bring up anything?’ I asked.
    Tom opened his pack to show a big trout the dynamite had blown out of the water. I pointed out the buzzards to them.
    ‘Damn,’ Bobby said. ‘I guess we been looking down when we should of been looking up.’
    ‘You want us to go look?’ Tom asked, but I told them I’d take care of that, for them to go on to town for lunch, round up some more men if they could and get back by two o’clock. They started to leave, but I nodded at Bobby to stay a few moments longer.
    ‘What you got the .12 gauge for?’ I asked Billy.
    ‘Groundhog been troubling my cabbage,’ he said, and that was a reasonable enough