Dry Bones in the Valley: A Novel Read online

  DRY BONES

  IN THE VALLEY

  A NOVEL

  TOM BOUMAN

  W. W. Norton & Company NEW YORK LONDON

  For Ma

  An old ballad is often like an old silver dagger or an old brass pistol; it is rusty, or greenish; it is ominous with ancient fates still operating today.

  —CARL SANDBURG,

  The American Songbag

  CONTENTS

  Dry Bones in the Valley

  Acknowledgments

  DRY BONES IN THE VALLEY

  DRY BONES IN THE VALLEY

  THE NIGHT before we found the body, I couldn’t sleep. It was a mid-March thaw. The snow that covered everything, everywhere since January finally released its grip, filling ditches and creeks, dripping from my eaves, and streaming out of my gutters as meltwater. Over the horizon, three ridges to the southwest, a gas crew was flaring a well. I shivered barefoot on my porch with a cup of coffee, looking up at the clouds as they flickered bruise-purple from the fireball below. The old farmhouse I rented had been sinking untroubled into the hillside for years. Then came the procession of colossal machines to knock down trees and strip them of their tops and roots, to build access roads, to haul equipment, and to drill. Compared with the undertaking of clearing a well pad, the drilling and fracking was almost quiet. I could almost say it was a strong wind through the pines, if not for the stop-start and whine of machinery contending with the earth, the glow on the nighttime horizon, and the tanker trucks hirpling up and down our dirt roads newly widened to let them pass, so many headlights and taillights strung over the winter hills like Christmas decorations.

  At four a.m. I accepted that I wasn’t going to get back to sleep. And at dawn, when the sun rose magenta in the east, I was relieved.

  About seven I ate frozen waffles with peanut butter, tugged the snarls out of my beard, dressed in my uniform, and headed over to the office. The township stationed me in the garage with the plows and fire truck and other vehicles, near the pyramids of gravel and sand, across from the fairgrounds in a quiet valley among the dwindling quiet valleys in northeastern Pennsylvania. The garage is cinder block surrounded by a dirt lot, painted white with neat black letters that read WILD THYME TOWNSHIP VOL. FIRE CO.

  The police station is separated from the garage with drywall; you can hear the mechanics and roadmen working and everything they say. My office came equipped with an industrial-sized restaurant coffeemaker but my predecessor evidently lost the pot with the brown spout, leaving me only the orange one meant for decaf, which gave me the low feeling of always drinking decaf, so I replaced the whole thing with a new all-black coffeemaker on my own dime. That, and way back in history someone had put a drop ceiling in the office, but I disliked looking at all the little holes and brown stains in it. So I popped out the tiles and unscrewed the frame. It’s still somewhere in case someone wants to reinstall it. Till that day, I like seeing how everything works, the bones, everything plain from my steelcase desk right up to the pipes and HVAC near the ceiling. There’s a framed head shot of the governor on the wall, a map, a bulletin board, a vanilla-scented candle in the john that never gets lit.

  When I got to the office that morning, my deputy George Ellis had his head on his desk with his face tucked in his arms; he didn’t look up when I came in. A scanner was on with the volume low, and the air felt thick. I put my feet up and looked at a couple faxed wanted posters, the same sorry characters from the week before, and the outstanding warrants page, some of which dated all the way back to 1980.

  I fielded a call from Alexander Grace, owner of Grace Tractor Sales and Rental. One of his skid steers had been stolen from the lot several weeks earlier, and he’d called me every day, increasingly irate about my lack of progress. I didn’t tell him that for a theft like this, we had about a twenty percent chance of recovery. This past week, without consulting me, he’d placed an ad in the local coupon circular offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to the skid steer’s recovery, no questions asked. “I guess we’ll see what I can do on my own,” he said. I pleaded with him not to be stupid and to call me if he got any takers.

  As he often does, John Kozlowski stopped in to visit. The township mechanic was a drinking buddy of George’s, a good-time Charlie with a face full of broken capillaries. He declined to sit, citing oily coveralls, and filled us in on a variety of subjects, including the cottage he was building on Walker Lake, plus, he told us, the his-and-hers Jet Skis he had just bought. Walker Lake being pretty small, I asked him where he planned to go on such a contraption, and he said something unkind about my mother, and we went on like that for a bit.

  In those early days of the boom, conversations about gas money were guarded. People would never say outright how much they’d signed for, but their cottages and new trucks did the talking for them. At first some landowners leased rights for as low as twenty-five dollars an acre. By the time Penn State made it clear how much gas might actually be under us, the going rate was more like four thousand dollars an acre. People were scooping up windfalls, but they were of different sizes, again depending on how early in the play they signed, and how much land they owned. Neighbors stayed neighborly, but kept an eye on their property lines.

  When John left, we passed time in silence until the phone rang. George raised his head and glared at it, but it kept ringing. He cursed it and answered. After a few short words on his end, he hung up and turned to me. “Dr. Brennan down at the clinic. She’s been pulling buckshot out of Danny Stiobhard’s side this morning, thought we should know.”

  “All right.” I looked at George as if to ask what he was waiting for. He scratched the white skin under his beard.

  “Look, Henry,” he said. “Danny and I had a run-in last week. At the bar.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’d love to take this one, but . . .” he said contritely.

  “It wouldn’t be politic, sending you,” I said.

  “That’s what it wouldn’t be.”

  “You know,” I said, looking into his bloodshot eyes, “this fighting won’t do, George.”

  “I know.”

  I didn’t fault him, not entirely. He and Danny Stiobhard had a long history, and his taking the deputy job didn’t help. For reasons I will explain, I didn’t want to make the visit either. I put on my hat and coat, took the .40 in its belt out of the locker, got in my truck, and headed to town.

  Geography and culture separates Wild Thyme Township and the town of Fitzmorris, which is the seat of Holebrook County, PA. Fitzmorris started as a summer colony for Philadelphia Scots Presbyterians back in the mid-1800s. It has some nice Greek Revivals, big white ones with columns, bigger than they have any right to be. Most have black trim but every ten houses a high-on-life home owner took a notion to paint theirs turquoise or heliotrope, or all colors of the rainbow. I like those, can’t help it.

  The township is a rural area north of Fitzmorris. After the Civil War, the state parceled off a bunch of hardpan in the surrounding hills to Fenian soldiers who fought for the Union, and those Fenians told a few more of their friends and families come on over; that’s how my people landed in Wild Thyme Township, the Fearghails, they fought for the 50th Pennsylvania. And the Fearghails we remained, until, in a moment of World War II Americanism, my grandfather changed the spelling to “Farrell,” and there you have it.

  Danny Stiobhard’s lineage is similar to mine. Our fathers used to hunt together. His last name goes “Steward,” if you care to know. However you say it, his clan has been here in Wild Thyme Township for several generations. While the particulars of their enterprise have changed over the years, the approach has remained the same: they sidestep law, object to government,
and profit off the land. Poachers of lumber and deer, burglars, rumored to be dipping toes in the drug trade, they believe they are fighting an eternal Whiskey Rebellion. As we don’t get too many high-ranking federal officials visiting, they cast me—a mere municipal officer, mind you—in the role of government tyrant.

  I pulled into the health clinic’s lot, behind Danny’s blue flatbed, noting some speckled perforations on the driver’s-side door. The clinic is run-down and small, occupying the top floor of a two-family house, with an elderly couple downstairs. We’ve all been there; Liz does her best.

  Nobody in the waiting room but Jo the receptionist. I laid a finger alongside my nose as I passed her; gravely she nodded and didn’t say a word.

  Down the hall and through an open door I saw Danny Stiobhard shirtless with his left arm raised above his shoulder, twenty-odd holes dotting his side and bleeding; Liz had a shiny clamp dug into a wound just below his rib cage, and when she pulled it out it stretched the surrounding flesh into a bleb. The shot emerged with the tiniest pop, or maybe I imagined that, but the stream of blood that followed was hard to miss. I caught Danny’s face just at the moment when his eyes welled over. The left half of his face looked like a movie alien’s, purple, blue, and swollen. Evidence of his fight with my deputy, I supposed. I waited for him to wipe his face with the back of his hand before I went in.

  “Morning, Danny. Liz.” The room smelled of rubbing alcohol and damp clothes that had not been washed in some time.

  Danny raised his good eye to the ceiling. “Oh, goddamn it, Liz, you fuckin called him. Sorry, excuse me.”

  “Sit still,” Liz told him. Blood speckled her green scrubs, and her copper hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She prodded another wound with her finger.

  “You said you wouldn’t,” Danny said.

  “Sit still.”

  I said, “What the hell is this, Danny?”

  He had been wearing a hat until recently, from the look of his hair. His beard showed gray. His chest hair was matted, and he had several tattoos. The elastic band of his underwear was soaked red. “Accident,” he said.

  “Oh, all right,” I said. “My work here is done, then.”

  Danny snorted and lowered his arm. “Liz, stop. Wait until he goes.”

  “Sit. Still.” She plucked another ball out. He hissed through gritted teeth and exhaled when the shot was free. His face looked mighty pale.

  “Stiobhard, you might as well tell me who the other party is.”

  As Liz dug in with the clamp again, Stiobhard yelped and started to hyperventilate. Liz made him lower his head between his knees and slow his breathing. When he regained control, he said, “I’ll tell you who to talk to. You know Aub Dunigan out on Fieldsparrow Road?”

  I nodded. Aub lived on a disused dairy farm that most passersby would assume was abandoned. There were younger Dunigans in the area, yet Aub was alone in the world as far as I knew. A recluse.

  “Like I said, it was an accident, no doubt. He’ll tell you himself if he remembers back as far as half an hour ago.”

  “You provoke him?” My guess was Danny had his eye on a nice cherry tree; they have grown big in Aub’s woods.

  “Why would I? Over what? He’s old. His cousin Kevin hired me to clear his trails. Evidently nobody told him. You have what you need, would you just? Just go check on the old man. Tell him no hard feelings.”

  Liz pushed her glasses into place with her wrist. She had bright blue eyes. “Let’s talk out in the hall.” After she’d closed the door to her makeshift operating room she said, “Henry, I’ve given you all the time I can right now.”

  “Got it.”

  “Let me patch him up, then you can do whatever you’re going to do.”

  “All right. Save the shot, okay?”

  She nodded. “Hey, we on tonight? Uncle Dave Macon got the ax this morning,” she said. “I made coq au vin.”

  Uncle Dave Macon is—was—a troublesome rooster. Liz is my best friend Ed’s wife. We get together Tuesday nights to have dinner and run through old fiddle tunes. I play the fiddle. All you really need to make dance music is a fiddle and a banjo. Liz comes from a traditional family and plays very good clawhammer banjo and passable three-finger. Ed started out as a rock-and-roll guitar player, but he’s been learning. Despite his frequent suggestions that we arrange some heavy metal song in a bluegrass style, and drinking to excess when we play, he rounds Liz and me out pretty well. It’s nice to have someone to play with.

  Liz saved my life when I first returned to Wild Thyme a few years back, which I’ll tell about later.

  I told her we were on, left the clinic, then called the office on my cell and asked George to go out and park at the foot of Aub Dunigan’s driveway and not let anyone up. I decided to call on Kevin Dunigan, Aub’s second cousin and nearest relative that I knew of. If the old man needed to be put in a home, best that process started with family.

  It was early enough that I could catch Kevin before work. I put on the lights, but not the siren, and stepped on it, easing through one red light and racing into the outskirts. Kevin lived with his wife in a brick ranch house just east of town, and owned an oil-change shop in Fitzmorris. The house is at some remove from the road in the middle of a field, but you can pick it out at a distance by the flagpole in his yard; he flies Old Glory and, just beneath it, a big blue flag with the oil-change corporate logo on. As a result of that flag he’s had to turn away some would-be customers who concluded that his house was the shop.

  When I got to his driveway I turned off the flashers and pulled in. One of the garage doors was open and at least one car was still there. Kevin, gray and compact and near fifty, stepped out of the door that communicated between house and garage, and onto the driveway. There was a look of mild concern on his face and a mug in his hand.

  “Why, Henry.”

  “Kevin, how you been?”

  “Fine. What, ah, what brings you around?”

  “You hear from Danny Stiobhard this morning?”

  Kevin’s eyes widened. “Why would I?”

  “Your cousin Aub winged him with a shotgun. He says.”

  “Come again?”

  Kevin’s wife Carly joined us outside, wearing a yellow baseball hat and baggy jeans tucked into galoshes. I didn’t know her very well; she worked in the little bookstore in town, and had steered it in a Christian direction.

  Kevin relayed what I’d just told him. She said, “Now look.”

  “Don’t worry about Danny,” I said. “He’ll live. Just so I have everything straight: You hired him to clear the trails?”

  “I certainly did not,” Kevin said. “What on earth.”

  “He said you did.”

  “What about Aub? Can we see him? What do we do?”

  “Well, I have yet to get his side of things. It would be good if you came with me to check on him. I may have to bring him in.”

  Carly boggled at that. “You ‘may’? You haven’t got him now?”

  Kevin took a couple steps back, saying, “Oh, no. No, you don’t.”

  I held up my hands. “Hey. Please.”

  Kevin pointed a finger at me. “Do your own job.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  He handed his coffee mug to Carly and rubbed his face with both hands. “Sorry, Henry. Since I was a kid, he’s . . . it’s been difficult, him in the family. Just don’t let him shoot me and I’ll get my coat.” He went inside.

  Carly raised an eyebrow at me.

  “He won’t get shot,” I said.

  Kevin followed me in his car, a silver sedan. We drove up and down the hills on 37, the sun getting higher in the morning and the roadside ditches rushing with meltwater. Every now and then a beer can flashed blue. Holebrook County is on the western edge of the Endless Mountains region. The term is a poetic one; what people mean is that it’s hilly. We’re part of the Appalachian Range, which formed almost five hundred million years ago, along with a vast inland sea to the west. Creatures in the s
ea died and sank, and the mountains eroded, and over a hundred million years this mix of sediment and organic matter was buried and turned into shale, the Marcellus Shale. Because of the once-living things in it, the Marcellus contains a lot of natural gas, all wrapped up in layers of rock like a present to America.

  After maybe seven miles we turned onto a narrower route, passing dirt roads where they coughed out onto the pavement. Many were marked with blue and white ribbons put there by the gas operators, showing the way to sites they were probably going to drill. And not only at roads: if you knew where to look in the tree line, you saw the ribbons marking trailheads. I dislike seeing them but I’m out of luck, because they’re everywhere.

  Fieldsparrow Road led up and to the north. I waited to see that I hadn’t left Kevin in the dust and then made the turn, slowing the truck to about half speed. The township paid for new shocks last year and they won’t be doing it again soon. We bumped along for a mile or two, past derelict trailers and at the edge of a clearing, a blue swing set grown over with black grapevine. After a long stretch of woods the road emerged into wide gray fields. On the left stood a couple lopsided sheds, and up a long, steep driveway a farmhouse was half hidden by a grove of maples. I parked behind Deputy Ellis’s radio car, where he sat tapping ash over the top of his window, hidden from the house by a barn.

  We each got out of our vehicles and stood in the road and George said, “Nobody stirring up there. Far as I can tell.” He tossed a butt into the ditch, where the water carried it away. “How’s Danny?”

  “He’ll live.”

  Kevin Dunigan pulled up. George tried to wave him along with some impatience, not realizing who he was. Extending a hand out his window, Kevin introduced himself. George told him to park out of sight of the house, then turned to squint one eye at me as if to ask what the hell.

  The barn we were hiding behind was built into a slope, so that half the foundation disappeared underground. A heap of blue shale fieldstones surrounded the barn, along with a set of rusted rotary blades, several empty jugs of wine, and much more broken glass, all covered with briars and deadly nightshade. The structure itself was standing, I’ll say that for it; the siding had weathered silver and was full of holes toward the bottom. I peered around the corner to the base of the dirt driveway and was surprised to find a new hatchback. It was blue, on blocks, and its wheels were gone.