Bag of Bones EPILOGUE

It snowed for Christmas a polite six inches of powder that made the carollers working the streets of Sanford look like they belonged in Its a Wonderful Life. By the eon I came tooshie from checking Kyra for the third time, it was quarter past single on the morning of the twenty-sixth, and the snow had stopped. A tardily moon, plump but blench, was peeking through the unravelling fluff of clouds.I was Christmasing with hound again, and we were the last both up. The kids, Ki included, were dead to the world, sleeping polish off the annual bacchanal of regimen and presents. Frank was on his third Scotch it had been a three-Scotch story if in that location ever was one, I guess but Id besides drunk the top off my first one. I recall I might take in gotten into the bottle quite heavily if non for Ki. On the days when I nurture her I normally dont drink so much as a glass of beer. And to have her three days in a row . . . but shit, kemo sabe, if you nookyt set have Ch ristmas with your kid, what the hell is Christmas for?Are you all pay? Frank asked when I sat down again and took some other inadequate token sip from my glass.I grinned at that. Not is she all near but are you all right. Well, nobody ever said Frank was stupid.You shouldve seen me when the Department of compassionate Services allow me have her for a weekend in October. I must have checked on her a dozen times before I went to bed . . . and then I kept checking. Getting up and peeking in on her, listening to her breathe. I didnt sleep a wink Friday night, caught maybe three hours on Saturday. So this is a big improvement. except if you ever blab any of what Ive t white-haired you, Frank -if they ever hear close to me filling up that bathtub before the beset knocked the gennie out I can kiss my chances of adopting her goodbye. Ill probably have to fill out a form in triplicate before they even let me attend her high-school graduation.I hadnt meant to specialize Frank the bathtub part, but once I started talking, al some anything spilled out. I suppose it had to spill to somebody if I was ever to get on with my life. Id assumed that potty Storrow would be the one on the other side of the confessional when the time came, but John didnt exigency to talk astir(predicate) any of those events except as they bore on our on air out legal business, which nowadays is all round Kyra Elizabeth Devore.Ill keep my mouth shut, dont worry. How goes the adoption battle?Slow. Ive coif to loathe the assign of Maine court system, and DHS as well. You take the slew who work in those bureaucracies one by one and theyre mostly fine, but when you put them unitedly . . . Bad, huh?I sometimes feel like a character in Bleak House. Thats the one where Dickens says that in court nobody wins but the lawyers. John tells me to be patient and count my blessings, that were making amazing progress considering that Im that most untrusdeucerthy of creatures, an unmarried whi te male of middle age, but Kis been in two foster-home situations since Mattie died, and Doesnt she have kin in one of those neighboring towns?Matties aunt. She didnt motivation anything to do with Ki when Mattie was alive and has even less interest now. Especially since since Kis not going to be rich.Yeah.The Whitmore woman was lying about Devores provide.Absolutely. He left wing everything to a foundation thats supposed to foster global computer literacy. With due respect to the numbercrunchers of the world, I cant imagine a colder charity.How is John?Pretty well mended, but hes never going to get the use of his right arm back entirely. He blasted near died of blood-loss.Frank had led me away from the entwined subjects of Ki and custody quite well for a man deep into his third Scotch, and I was willing comme il faut to go. I could hardly bear to theorise of her long days and thirster nights in those homes where the Department of Human Services stores away children like k nickknacks nobody motivations. Ki didnt live in those places but only existed in them, pale and listless, like a well-fed rabbit kept in a cage. Each time she saw my car turning in or pulling up she came alive, waving her arms and dancing like Snoopy on his doghouse. Our weekend in October had been wonderful (despite my obsessive need to check her every half hour or so after she was asleep), and the Christmas holiday had been even better. Her emphatic desire to be with me was helping in court more than anything else . . . yet the wheels still turned slowly.Maybe in the spring, Mike, John told me. He was a new John these days, pale and serious. The slightly arrogant eager beaver who had wanted nothing more than to go head to head with Mr. Maxwell Big Bucks Devore was no longer in evidence. John had learned something about mortality on the twenty-first of July, and something about the worlds idiot cruelty, as well. The man who had taught himself to shake with his left hand instead of his right was no longer interested in partying til he puked. He was seeing a misfire in Philly, the daughter of one of his mothers friends. I had no caprice if it was serious or not, Kis Unca John is closemouthed about that part of his life, but when a preteen man is of his own accord seeing the daughter of one of his mothers friends, it ordinarily is.Maybe in the spring it was his mantra that late fall and early winter. What am I doing wrong? I asked him once this was fairish after Thanksgiving and another setback.Nothing, he replied. Single-parent adoptions are always slow, and when the putative adopter is a man, its worse. At that point in the conversation John made an ugly little gesture, scoke the index finger of his left hand in and out of his loosely cupped right fist.Thats blatant sex discrimination, John.Yeah, but usually its justified. Blame it on every twisted asshole who ever decided he had a right to take off some little kids pants, if you want, blame it on the bureaucracy, if you want, hell, blame it on cosmic rays if you want. Its a slow process, but youre going to win in the end. Youve got a clean record, youve got Kyra saying I want to be with Mike to every render and DHS worker she sees, youve got enough money to keep after them no matter how much they squirm and no matter how many forms they throw at you . . . and most of all, buddy, youve got me.I had something else, too what Ki had whispered in my ear as I paused to catch my breath on the steps. Id never told John about that, and it was one of the few things I didnt tell Frank, either.Mattie says Im your little guy now, she had whispered. Mattie says youll take care of me.I was trying to as much as the fucking slowpokes at Human Services would let me but the waiting was hard.Frank picked up the Scotch and tilted it in my direction. I shook my head. Ki had her heart set on snowman-making, and I wanted to be able to face the glare of early sun on fresh snow without a headache.Fra nk, how much of this do you really believe?He poured for himself, then just sat for a time, looking down at the table and thinking. When he raised his head again there was a smile on his face. It was so much like Jos that it broke my heart. And when he spoke, he juiced his ordinarily faint Boston brogue.Sure and Im a half-drunk Irishman who just finished listenin to the granddaddy of all ghost stories on Christmas night, he said. I believe all of it, you silly git.I laughed and so did he. We did it mostly through the nose, as men are apt to do when up late, maybe in their cups a little, and dont want to wake the house.Come on how much really? all told of it, he repeated, dropping the brogue. Because Jo believed it. And because of her. He nodded his head in the direction of the stairs so Id know which her he meant. Shes like no other little girl Ive ever seen. Shes pleasurable enough, but theres something in her eyes. At first I thought it was losing her mother the way she did, bu t thats not it. Theres more, isnt there?Yes, I said.Its in you, too. Its touched you both.I thought of the baying thing which Jo had managed to hold back while I poured the lye into that rotted roll of canvas. An Outsider, she had called it. I hadnt gotten a clear look at it, and probably that was good. Probably that was very good.Mike? Frank looked concerned. Youre shivering.Im okay, I said. Really.Whats it like in the house now? he asked. I was still living in Sara Laughs. I procrastinated until early November, then put the Derry house up for sale.Quiet.Totally quiet?I nodded, but that wasnt completely true. On a couple of do I had awakened with a sensation Mattie had once mentioned that there was someone in bed with me. But not a dangerous presence. On a couple of occasions I have smelled (or thought I have) Red perfume. And sometimes, even when the air is perfectly still, Bunters bell will shiver out a few notes. Its as if something lonely wants to say hello.Frank glanced at t he clock, then back at me, almost apologetically. Ive got a few more questions okay?If you cant continue up until the wee hours on Boxing Day morning, I said, I guess you never can. Fire away.What did you tell the police?I didnt have to tell them much of anything. Footman talked enough to suit them too much to suit Norris rooftreewick. Footman said that he and Osgood it was Osgood driving the car, Devores pet broker did the drive-by because Devore had made threats about what would happen to them if they didnt. The State cops also found a retroflex of a wire-transfer among Devores effects at Warringtons. Two million dollars to an account in the Grand Caymans. The name scribbled on the copy is Randolph Footman. Randolph is Georges middle name. Mr. Footman is now residing in Shawshank State Prison.What about Rogette?Well, Whitmore was her mothers maiden name, but I think its safe to say that Rogettes heart belonged to Daddy. She had leukemia, was diagnosed in 1996. In people her age she was only fifty-seven when she died, by the way its fatal in two cases out of every three, but she was doing the chemo. Hence the wig.Why did she try to stamp out Kyra? I dont understand that. If you broke Sara Tidwells hold on this earthly plane of ours when you dissolved her bones, the curse should have . . . why are you looking at me that way?Youd understand if youd ever met Devore, I said. This is the man who lit the whole fucking TR on fire as a way of saying goodbye when he headed west to sunny California. I thought of him the second I pulled the wig off, thought theyd swapped identities somehow. Then I thought Oh no, its her all right, its Rogette, shes just lost her sensory hair somehow.And you were right. The chemo.I was also wrong. I know more about ghosts than I did, Frank. Maybe the most important thing is that what you see first, what you think first . . . thats whats usually true. It was him that day. Devore. He came back at the end. Im sure of it. At the e nd it wasnt about Sara, not for him. At the end it wasnt even about Kyra. At the end it was about Scooter Larribees sled.Silence between us. For a few moments it was so deep that I could actually hear the house breathing. You can hear that, you know. If you really listen. Thats something else I know now.Christ, he said at last. I dont think Devore came east from California to kill her, I said. That wasnt the original plan.Then what was? Get to know his granddaughter? repair his fences?God, no. You still dont understand what he was.Tell me, then.A human monster. He came back to buy her, but Mattie wouldnt sell. Then, when Sara got hold of him, he began to plan Kis death. I suspect that Sara never found a more willing tool.How many did she kill in all? Frank asked.I dont know for sure. I dont think I want to. Based on Jos notes and clippings, Id say that there were perhaps four other . . . directed murders, shall we call them? . . . in the years between 1901 and 1998. whole children , all K-names, all closely related to the men who killed her.My God.I dont think God had much to do with it . . . but she made them pay, all right.Youre sorry for her, arent you?Yes. I would have torn her apart before I let her put so much as a finger on Ki, but of lead I am. She was raped and murdered. Her child was drowned while she herself place down dying. My God, arent you sorry for her?I suppose I am. Mike, do you know who the other son was? The crying boy? Was he the one who died of blood-poisoning?Most of Jos notes concerned that part of it its where she got started. Royce Merrill knew the story well. The crying boy was Reg Tidwell, Junior. You have to understand that by September of 1901, when the Red-Tops played their last pose in Castle County, almost everyone on the TR knew that Sara and her boy had been murdered, and almost everyone had a good inclination of whod done it.Reg Tidwell spent a lot of that August hounding the County Sheriff, Nehemiah Bannerman. At firs t it was to find them alive Tidwell wanted a search mounted and then it was to find their bodies, and then it was to find their killers . . . because once he accepted that they were dead, he never doubted that theyd been murdered.Bannerman was sympathetic at first. Everyone seemed sympathetic at first. The Red-Top crowd had been treated wonderfully during their time on the TR that was what infuriated Jared the most and I think you can forgive tidings Tidwell for making a crucial mistake.What mistake was that?Why, he got the idea that Mars was heaven, I thought. The TR must have seemed like heaven to them, right up until Sara and Kito went for a stroll, the boy carrying his berry-bucket, and never came back. It must have seemed that theyd finally found a place where they could be black people and still be allowed to breathe.Thinking theyd be treated like regular folk music when things went wrong, just because theyd been treated that way when things were right. Instead, the TR c lubbed together against them. No one who had an idea of what Jared and his prot?g?s had done condoned it, exactly, but when the chips were down . . . You protect your own, you wash your dirty laundry with the door unlikable, Frank murmured, and finished his drink.Yeah. By the time the Red-Tops played the Castle County Fair, their little community down by the lake had begun to break up this is all according to Jos notes, you understand theres not a whisper of it in any of the town histories.By Labor Day the active harassment had started so Royce told Jo. It got a little uglier every day a little scarier but Son Tidwell flat didnt want to go, not until he found out what had happened to his sister and nephew. He apparently kept the blood family there in the meadow even after the others had taken off for friendlier locations.Then someone laid the trap. There was a clearing in the woods about a mile east of whats now called Tidwells hayfield it had a big birch cross in the middle o f it. Jo had a picture of it in her studio. That was where the black community had their services after the doors of the local churches were closed to them. The boy Junior used to go up there a lot to pray or just to sit and meditate. There were plenty of folks in the township who knew his routine. Someone put a leghold trap on the little path through the woods that the boy used. C overed it with leaves and needles.Jesus, Frank said. He voiceed ill.Probably it wasnt Jared Devore or his logger-boys who set it, either they didnt want any more to do with Sara and Sons people after the murders, they kept right clear of them. It might not even have been a friend of those boys. By then they didnt have that many friends. But that didnt change the fact that those folks down by the lake were acquire out of their place, scratching at things better left alone, refusing to take no for an answer. So someone set the trap. I dont think there was any goal to actually kill the boy, but to maim him? Maybe see him with his foot off, condemned to a lifetime crutch? I think they may have gotten that far in their imagining.In any case it worked. The boy stepped in the trap . . . and for quite awhile they didnt find him. The pain must have been excruciating. Then the blood-poisoning. He died. Son gave up. He had other kids to think about, not to mention the people whod stuck with him. They packed up their clothes and their guitars and left. Jo traced some of them to North Carolina, where many of the descendants still live. And during the fires of 1933, the ones young Max Devore set, the cabins burned flatI dont understand why the bodies of Sara and her son werent found, Frank said. I understand that what you smelled the putrescence wasnt there in any physical sense. But surely at the time . . . if this path you call The Street was so popular . . . Devore and the others didnt bury them where I found them, not to begin with. They would have started by dragging the bodies deepe r into the woods maybe up to where the north wing of Sara Laughs stands now. They covered them with brush and came back that night. Must have been that night to leave them any longer would have drawn every carnivore in the woods. They took them someplace else and buried them in that roll of canvas. Jo didnt know where, but my guess is Bowie Ridge, where theyd spent most of the summer cutting. Hell, Bowie Ridge is still pretty isolated. They put the bodies somewhere we might as well say there.Then how . . . why . . . Draper Finney wasnt the only one haunted by what they did, Frank they all were. Literally haunted. With the possible exception of Jared Devore, I suppose. He lived another ten years and apparently never missed a meal. But the boys had mentally ill dreams, they drank too much, they fought too much, they argued . . . bristled if anyone so much as mentioned the Red-Tops . . . Might as well have gone virtually wearing signs reading cunt US, WERE GUILTY, Frank commented. Yes. It probably didnt help that most of the TR was giving them the silent treatment. Then Finney died in the quarry committed suicide in the quarry, I think and Jareds logger-boys got an idea. Came down with it like a cold. Only it was more like a compulsion. Their idea was that if they dug up the bodies and reburied them where it happened, thingsd go back to normal for them.Did Jared go along with the idea?According to Jos notes, by then they never went near him. They reburied the bag of bones without Jared Devores help where I eventually dug it up. In the late fall or early winter of 1902, I think.She wanted to be back, didnt she? Sara. Back where she could really work on them.And on the whole township. Yes. Jo thought so, too. Enough so she didnt want to go back to Sara Laughs once she found some of this stuff out. Especially when she guessed she was pregnant. When we started trying to have a baby and I suggested the name Kia, how that must have scared her And I never saw.Sa ra thought she could use you to kill Kyra if Devore played out before he could get the job done he was old and in bad health, after all. Jo gambled that youd save her instead. Thats what you think, isnt it?Yes.And she was right.I couldnt have done it alone. From the night I dreamed about Sara singing, Jo was with me every step of the way. Sara couldnt make her quit.No, she wasnt a quitter, Frank agreed, and wiped at one eye. What do you know about your twice-great-aunt? The one that married Auster?Bridget Noonan Auster, I said. Bridey, to her friends. I asked my mother and she swears up and down she knows nothing, that Jo never asked her about Bridey, but I think she might be lying. The young woman was definitely the black sheep of the family I can tell just by the sound of Moms voice when the name comes up. I have no idea how she met Benton Auster. Lets say he was down in the Prouts Neck part of the world visiting friends and started butterfly with her at a clambake. Thats as li kely as anything else. This was in 1884. She was eighteen, he was twenty-three. They got married, one of those hurry-up jobs. Harry, the one who actually drowned Kito Tidwell, came along six months afterward.So he was barely seventeen when it happened, Frank said. Great God.And by then his mother had gotten religion. His terror over what shed think if she ever found out was part of the reason he did what he did. Any other questions, Frank? Because Im really starting to fade.For several moments he said nothing I had begun to think he was done when he said, Two others. Do you mind?I guess its too late to back out now. What are they?The Shape you spoke of. The Outsider. That troubles me.I said nothing. It degraded me, too.Do you think theres a chance it might come back?It always does, I said. At the risk of sounding pompous, the Outsider eventually comes back for all of us, doesnt it? Because were all bags of bones. And the Outsider . . . Frank, the Outsider wants whats in the bag.H e mulled this over, then swallowed the rest of his Scotch at a gulp.You had one other question?Yes, he said. Have you started committal to writing again?I went upstairs a few minutes later, checked Ki, brushed my teeth, checked Ki again, then climbed into bed. From where I lay I was able to look out the window at the pale moon shining on the snow.Have you started writing again?No. opposite than a rather lengthy essay on how I spent my summer vacation which I may show to Kyra in some later year, theres been nothing. I know that Harold is nervous, and sooner or later I suppose Ill have to call him and tell him what he already guesses the machine which ran so sweet for so long has stopped. It isnt broken this memoir came out with nary a accelerator pedalp or missed heartbeat but the machine has stopped, just the same. Theres gas in the tank, the sparkplugs spark and the battery bats, but the wordygurdy stands there quiet in the middle of my head. Ive put a tarp over it. Its served me well, you see, and I dont like to think of it getting dusty.Some of it has to do with the way Mattie died. It occurred to me at some point this fall that I had written similar deaths in at least two of my books, and popular fiction is heaped with other examples of the same thing. Have you set up a moral dilemma you dont know how to solve? Is the protagonist sexually attracted to a woman who is much too young for him, shall we say? Need a quick fix? Easiest thing in the world. When the story starts going sour, bring on the man with the gun. Raymond Chandler said that, or something like it close enough for government work, kemo sabe.Murder is the worst kind of pornography, murder is let me do what I want taken to its final extreme. I believe that even make-believe murders should be taken seriously maybe thats another idea I got last summer. mayhap I got it while Mattie was struggling in my arms, gushing blood from her smashed head and dying blind, still crying out for her daughte r as she left this earth. To think I might have written such a hellishly convenient death in a book, ever, sickens me.Or maybe I just wish thered been a little more time.I remember telling Ki its best not to leave love letters around what I thought but didnt say was that they can come back to haunt you. I am haunted anyway . . . but I will not willingly haunt myself, and when I closed my book of dreams I did so of my own free will. I think I could have poured lye over those dreams as well, but from that I stayed my hand.Ive seen things I never expected to see and felt things I never expected to feel not the least of them what I felt and still feel for the child sleeping down the hall from me. Shes my little guy now, Im her big guy, and thats the important thing. Nothing else seems to matter half so much.Thomas Hardy, who supposedly said that the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones, stopped writing novels himself after finishing Jude the Obscure and whi le he was at the height of his narrative genius. He went on writing poetry for another twenty years, and when someone asked him why hed quit fiction he said he couldnt understand why he had trucked with it so long in the first place. In brush up it seemed silly to him, he said. Pointless. I know exactly what he meant. In the time between now and whenever the Outsider remembers me and decides to come back, there must be other things to do, things that mean more than those shadows. I think I could go back to clanking chains behind the Ghost House wall, but I have no interest in doing so. Ive lost my taste for spooks. I like to imagine Mattie would think of Bartleby in Melvilles story.Ive put down my scriveners pen. These days I prefer not to.