Although he sent his horse along at a smart pace, the car was soon out of sight. He had to keep an eye on the road to know from the tire marks at each turnoff that they had, in fact, stayed on the main road. And they did, moving farther from him at every moment. He moved, following them, wondering in useless desperation the location of Slow Johnny. On the chase?
No, not quite. The sheriff and the deputy, in trying to commandeer a car, met resistance not so much from the owner’s lack of agreement about the need for it, but because Slow Johnny was a notoriously poor driver. Beyond that, the two or three citizens whom he approached thought he would do more harm than good chasing down the Actor and probably get Miss DeWitt completely killed, if not himself, the deputy, and any bystander in a stone’s throw radius.
Berndt was far ahead, then, of any other form of help. As he traveled along behind the Actor’s car, he put his mind to the subject. By the process of recalling certain news items about local robberies, he had pretty well figured out what was happening. His equilibrium failed, and he experienced a wave of terror for Agnes so intense that he whipped the poor horse to a momentary froth. As soon as the Percheron rocked into a huge gallop, Berndt realized that he would kill his horse if he continued. Speed now was useless, and besides, with each mile covered he gained a distinct advantage. The car would eventually run out of gas. The horse, if Berndt was careful to conserve its energy, would last. And then, too, Berndt had the advantage of terrible road conditions. Since it was spring, it would be surprising if any car could get through the big washout Berndt knew of six miles up the road.
THE BLUE HORSE
The Actor’s car ripped through the silent country until, just as Berndt anticipated, they hit the washout. The car shimmied to a perplexed stall. The Actor pulled Agnes roughly into the back seat and the driver revved twice without result. With a fabulous jolt the powerful engine caught and they lurched free, only then to slip off the other side of the road into a more serious predicament. There was no moving, not at all, no matter how the men pushed, roared, swore, kicked. Turning in a circle of frustrated fury, the Actor spied at some distance the horse, the rider.
“Look sharp,” he spoke. The men and he changed suddenly to meeker, commoner sorts and began to work with assiduous uselessness on the car’s engaged tires. Pulling up beside them, Berndt casually offered his assistance. The words did not strangle his throat. He was calm. He tapped his farmer’s brim as he glanced into the back seat. The Actor had spread a blanket over Miss DeWitt’s legs, and she looked all right, though pale and dazzled.
Berndt did not know that the Actor, with an eye to concealing the stolen money, had taken wads of it from the canvas bag. During the ride he had thrust as many bills as he could into his shirt. He had shoved the bag itself under the blanket, next to Miss DeWitt, whom he instructed to not bother getting out of the car. He smiled a genial greeting to Berndt, who nodded at Miss DeWitt, and set to work.
As did she. Quickly, surreptitiously, with a busy intelligence, Agnes pulled sheaves of bills between her fingers and thrust these bills into the ripped lining of her jacket—and was able to feel, in spite of the swooning pain in her hip, that she was very glad to have been a careless seamstress. As for Berndt, by eagerly hooking the good beast to the car’s bumper and making an ostentatious show of straining its powers, Berndt made every appearance of helping the gang. Yet by degrees, through prods and signs, he actually caused the horse to mire them ever deeper. Soon they were in a more helpless state than before. The Actor didn’t see it at first, but then, trained to supersensory human clues, he caught a glance between the farmer and the hostage that betrayed their connection. Just as he moved to grab the reins and question this, there appeared at last Slow Johnny and the deputy, riding in the dead teller’s car.
The men of the law stopped close upon the robbers and gingerly stepped toward them, guns drawn.
“You’re done for,” shouted Slow Johnny.
“Halt, you jackass!”
Crouching so that his body was shielded by the car door and his gun level with the head of Miss DeWitt, the Actor warned off the sheriff.
“Back! Back!” Berndt signaled to Johnny.
“I’ll shoot her, yes by damn I will,” called the Actor.
At a great distance from herself, Agnes felt her mouth open and words emerge. She spoke to the Actor, who cried out, warningly, again. Slow Johnny, though, was hard of hearing as well as slow and he kept walking forward. Berndt saw the thumb of the Actor lift off the hammer of the gun. He struck him just as the gun went off, so that the last Agnes DeWitt saw of the Actor was his unflinching look at her. The last thought she had about him was amazement that he did not regard her words or her life as important or even useful at all, or have a moment’s hesitation about ending all of the thousands of hours of tedious intensity of musical practice, ending the rippling music that her hands could bring into being, ending the episodes of greed and wonder in the arms of Berndt, and the several acts she’d learned to do that men paid whores great sums to perform and that she enjoyed, and further back, ending her time of devotion in the convent where her sisters had already unsewn, pressed, and restitched her habit for another hopeful. None of which was of any consequence. Not even the mountains of prayers for the souls so like his or the vivid attempts beseeching Mary to intercede. Nothing mattered. None of that. And beyond that, to her childhood and the tar roofs of the homestead and the alien bread of her mother’s cruel visions and her father’s terrifying gestures of love and all the precious jumble of her littleness, her thoughts, her creamy baby skin, her howls and burbles, all of this was as nothing to his casual wish to kill her.
This fact smote her as a marvel and a sorrow, and she knew it was because of what she saw, straight on, in the Actor that she so fervently loved Chopin. And God. Now, she had to give herself entirely to God’s will, whatever that might be. And it was just as she wondered, indeed, if for her to die was that will, that the gun went off at her temple and blackness stormed behind her eyes.
While Berndt jumped to her side, the Actor neatly grabbed the reins and somehow pulled himself onto the table-broad back of the horse. He dug in his heels, gave a desperate kick to the horse’s belly, and they were off, though the horse slowed at once just as soon as they entered the vast horizon-bound treeless wet field of thick gumbo. Berndt, kissing Agnes in a strange roar of grief, then followed the Actor, leaving the other two bank robbers and Slow Johnny and the deputy shouting back and forth and leveling their guns but not knowing whom to shoot. Berndt walked straight on. Just as he had when the car sped past, he understood his advantage lay in the increase of distance. He knew how exhausted his horse was, and he knew, too, that he, Berndt, could bend over from time to time to clean off his feet, but his horse could not. Either the Actor would have to dismount, or the horse would eventually slow to a stop, repossessed by the dirt.
And so it was—a low-speed chase.
There in that empty landscape they were a cipher of strained pursuit—one man plodding forward on the horse, the other plodding after. They seemed on that plain and under that spun sky eternal—bound to trudge on to hell no matter what. The clods on the hooves of the horse were soon great rich cakes. Still, on and on, slower, they pressed. Then slower yet so that the Actor kicked in savage indignation until the horse’s flanks bled. Slower yet. Berndt kept coming. The Actor screamed straight into the ear of the horse. With a frantic ripple of muscles it attempted to undo itself from the earth. Only sank itself farther, deeper. Raging, futile, the Actor saw the horse was stuck, leaped off, and put the pistol to its eye.
The shot echoed out, a crack. Another thinner crack echoed, against the mirage horizon. By the time the echo was lost, the horse was dead. Berndt saw his horse kneel in the wet cement dirt the way the animals worshiped the Christ. Then, to Berndt’s grief and rage, there was added a contemptuous bewilderment, which made him capable of what he did next.
The next bullet that the Actor fired struck Berndt in the c
hest but went through without touching a vital organ. Berndt merely felt a stunning rip of fire. He staggered one step back and then kept moving. When the bullet after that struck him mortally, he seemed to absorb it and strengthen. Rising to the next steps, he skipped from the mud. The Actor’s face stiffened in green shock and he fired point-blank. The empty chamber clicked over just as Berndt clasped the Actor by the shoulders and spoke into his face.
“If you hadn’t shot my horse, you wouldn’t have to die now,” said Berndt, abstractly stating a fact by which he perhaps meant that he would have preferred to deliver the Actor to the terrors of justice, or perhaps that Berndt would have preferred to die in the place of the horse, or yet, that the last bullet would have been his own coup de grâce. As there was life left in him, Berndt set his hands with a dogged weariness upon the Actor’s face, put his thumbs to the gangster’s eyeballs, and pressed, pressed with an inexorable parental dispassion, pressed until it was clear the gangster’s aim would be forever spoiled. Then Berndt toppled forward onto the ground, into the nearly liquid gumbo, pinning the Actor full length.
It was hours before anyone got to the scene and in that time Arnold “the Actor” Anderson could not budge the dead man. Inch by inch, with incremental slowness and tiny sucking noises the earth crept over the Actor and into him, first swallowing his heels, back, elbows, and then stopping up his ears, so his body slowly filled with soupy, rich topsoil. At the last, he could not hear his own scream. Dirt filled his nose and then his tipped up straining mouth. No matter how he spat, the earth kept coming and the mud trickled down his throat. Slowly, infinitely slowly, bronchia by bronchia the earth stopped up each passage of his lungs and packed them tight. The ground absorbed him. When at last the first member of the reluctantly formed posse arrived, he thought at first the robber had escaped, but then saw how only the hands of the Actor, clutching Berndt’s arms and back like a raft, still extended above the level of the horizon.
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
After she came to, nursed by her own former sisters in the hospital, a bullet crease shadowing her mind, did Agnes DeWitt sorrow in her bones that she had teasingly pushed Berndt away that morning? Did she dream all that month, while she hovered in and out of death, of his entering and her receiving him? Recall looking into his eyes pillowed close to hers? Long for the rough cup of his hand on her breast? No, not for a moment. Rather, she thought again of music. Chopin. The kind bullet that split and roped her scalp had remarkably fused her musical joys with all memories of Berndt.
She didn’t even recall, donning her jacket, how it came to be fitted behind the satin lining with an astonishing amount of money. Though she’d lost portions of her memory, she had not lost her wits, and she said nothing. Counted it in secret. Kept it safe in a Fargo bank. So she was well off. Berndt had written a will in which he declared her his common-law wife and left to her the farm and all upon it. There, she continued to raise rose-comb bantams, dominickers, reds. She played piano, too, for hours, and practiced more intensely than ever. She began to read. In the convent, she had not been permitted to read beyond her daily prayers and the lives of the saints. Now, with a town library full of volumes she’d never touched, she became a reader. A wolfish, selfish, maddened, hungry reader who let the chickens scream and peck one another to death, who ignored the intelligent loneliness of the pig and forgot to milk the groaning cow. She read or she played piano, did little else except that she did keep teaching. Only her toughest chickens survived.
Perhaps a season or so after Berndt’s death, her students noticed she would stop in the middle of a lesson and either pick up a book to gulp a page in with her eyes, or smile out the window as though welcoming a long expected visitor. One day the neighbor children went to pick up the usual order of eggs and were most struck to see the white-and-black-flecked dominickers flapping up in alarm around Miss DeWitt as she stood bare upon the green grass.
Tough, nonchalant, legs slightly bowed, breasts jutting a bit to either side and the dark flare of hair flicking up the center of her. Naked. She looked at the students with remote kindness. Asked, “How many dozen?” Walked off to gather the eggs.
That episode with the chickens made the gossip table rounds. People put it off to Berndt’s death and an unstringing of her nerves. Still, she lost only a Lutheran student or two. She continued playing the organ for Mass, the celestial Bach, and at home, in the black, black nights, Chopin. As she had formerly when a Christ-dedicated virgin, she played with unbearable simplicity. Her music was so finely told it hurt to listen to the notes that struck the high sweet breeze. If she was asked, once, by an innocent student too young to understand the meaning of discretion but having overheard some story about Miss Agnes DeWitt—some very alert student longing perhaps to see the dimple where the bullet was dug from her hip or push aside the lively darts and strands of her hair to find the curved clef of a scar—if that student were to ask Miss Agnes DeWitt why she did not wear her clothes, sometimes, Miss Agnes DeWitt would answer that she removed her clothing when she played the music of a particular composer, when she played at her finest, and when the mood would strike her. No other display of appreciation could express her pure intent. Miss DeWitt would meditatively nod and say in the firmest manner that when one enters into the presence of such music, one should be naked. And then she would touch the keys.
FATHER DAMIEN MODESTE
(THE FIRST)
When she didn’t show up for several days on end to play the organ, it was known that Miss DeWitt was suffering from nerves again. Incrementally, tortuously, unnecessarily, she was unblessed by tiny fragments of memory. Berndt materialized, cruelly, touch by touch, until he was all there but not there. A word and a look, a moment they had spent together, had apparently entered the heart of Agnes to be kept sealed and safe until, for no particular reason, she was to be tormented by an elusive recovery. She shut herself away. Some people grieve by holding fast to the love of others, some by rejecting all companionship. Some grieve with tears and some with dry howls. Some grieve like water, some burn. Some are fuel for the fire of sorrow and some are stone. Agnes was pure slate, dark and impenetrable.
Even books didn’t help—she began and discarded them until they threatened her couch in tottering stacks.
A priest en route to his Indian mission and taking wayfarer’s advantage of the local rectory’s hospitality was dispatched to the suffering widow with communion—of which she now partook as she lived no longer in a state of mortal sin. She heard his knock, but did not rise to meet him, only called out from her place on the couch that he should enter, and so he did. Father Damien Modeste was a small, prunish, inquisitive man of middle age who had been called by his God, from a comfortable parish near Chicago, to missionize Indians. Momentarily intrigued, she sat up, but then almost immediately she lost interest. He gave her communion. Took what food she’d set out. And then, as she was silent in her blanket, brooding, he remained a bit longer and attempted to raise her spirits by telling her of his zeal.
“I am going north,” he insisted, and went into detail regarding the harrowing details of his trip to the reservation. “Letters addressed to me by my fellow priest, Father Hugo, confirm the deep need for my service. Oh, there had been inroads. We are not the first generation of priests, but the devil . . .”
Here Father Damien paused, gauging Miss DeWitt’s despairing reserve, licked his thin lips, and went on, “The devil works with a shrewd persistence, Miss DeWitt, and is never known to give up a soul merely because it is a thing willed in heaven. Our labor is required here on earth, in the ordinary world. Evil, oh yes, evil—”
“What do you know of evil?” Miss DeWitt’s attention shifted suddenly from the acorn pattern of the wallpaper to the prematurely withered face of the missionary. He opened his mouth to go eagerly forward. But before he could speak, Miss DeWitt did.
“I’ve seen evil,” she told her confessor, firmly. “It has blue eyes and brown shoes. About size ten. The feet are narrow. The
hands are square. The build is slight and I’d say the face, though not handsome, has an intriguing changeability about it. Though I am only now repossessing my memory of all the specifics, Father Modeste, I’ve seen the devil himself and he was disguised in a rumpled cassock.”
Father Modeste, already in possession of the story, nodded with barely hidden avidity.
“God dispensed great justice that day.”
“Selectively.”
Now Miss DeWitt glared tiredly at her piano.
“I couldn’t play this afternoon. Something haunts me, as though another terrible memory is ready to pour into my mind and only a sheer finger’s breadth of earth is holding it in place.”
“I suppose you are referring”—here Father Damien coughed delicately—“to your . . . ah . . . companion.”
“Yes,” Agnes admitted, unwillingly. She hated being pegged and didn’t much like this priest with the avid eyes. She touched the frail mend of the bullet’s crease. “Only a short time ago, I was a sister in the local convent, having taken my temporary vows at a very young age. I remember every word, every Mass, every confession I made, every note I played. But only at times do I remember Berndt’s features. And yet I recall with unwished clarity the face of the man who killed him! Fortunately, I often see another man, one I’ve never met, hair parted far over to the left, a deep-eyed brow, a broad, beaky nose, a small and rather full mouth and low cheekbones, lumpy and sad.”