The Unquiet

Phil’s shoulders slumped. It was time to admit defeat. “Let’s go,” he said to Steve.

Angel tossed him the wallets. He and Louis watched as the two men loaded up their bags and the pieces of the rifles, minus the firing pins, which Angel had thrown into the forest. When they were done, Steve took the driver’s seat, and Phil stood at the passenger door. Angel and Louis leaned casually on the rail of the cabin, only the guns suggesting that this wasn’t merely a quartet of acquaintances exchanging final farewells.

“All of this because we were having a little fun with you at the bar,” said Phil.

“No,” said Angel. “All of this because you’re assholes.”

Phil got in the car, and they drove away. Louis waited until their lights had faded, then tapped Angel gently on the back of the hand.

“Hey,” he said, “we never get calls from Jersey.”

“I know,” said Angel. “Why would we want to talk to anyone in Jersey?”

And, their work done, they retired to bed.

Chapter XXXI

The next morning, we headed north into Jackman. We got stuck waiting for a truck to reverse at the Jackman Trading Post, even in November its display of T-shirts hanging outside like laundry drying. To one side of it was an old black-and-white with a ma

“They ever have cops up here?” asked Louis.

“I think there used to be a policeman in the sixties or seventies.”

“What happened to him? He die of boredom?”

“I guess it is kinda quiet. There’s a constable now, far as I know.”

“Bet the long winter nights just fly by for him.”

“Hey, they had a killing once.”

“Once?” He didn’t sound impressed.

“It was a pretty famous story at the time. A guy named Nelson Bart-ley, used to own the Moose River House, got shot in the head. They found his body jammed under an uprooted tree.”

“Yeah, and when was this?”

“Nineteen nineteen. There was rum-ru

“You telling me there’s been nothing since then?”

“Most people in this part of the world take their time about dying, if they can,” I said. “You may find that startling.”

“I guess I move in different circles.”

“I guess so. You don’t like rural life much, do you?”

“I had my fill of rural life when I was a boy. I didn’t care much for it then. Don’t figure it’s improved much since.”

There were also twin outhouses beside the trading post, one on top of the other. On the door of the upper outhouse was written the word “Conservative.” On the door of the lower one was the word “Liberal.”

“Your people,” I said to Louis.

“Not my people. I’m a liberal Republican.”

“I’ve never really understood what that means.”

“Means I believe people can do whatever they want, as long as they don’t do it anywhere near me.”

“I thought it would be more complex than that.”

“Nope, that’s about it. You think I should go in and tell them I’m gay?”

“If I was you, I wouldn’t even tell them you’re black,” said Angel, from the backseat.

“Don’t judge this place by that outhouse back there,” I said. “That’s just to give the tourists something to laugh at. A small town like this doesn’t survive, even prosper some, if the people who live here are bigots and idiots. Don’t make that mistake about them.”

Incredibly, this silenced both of them.

Beyond the trading post, and to the left, the impressive twin steeples of St. Anthony’s Church, built from local granite in 1930, loomed against the pale gray sky. The church wouldn’t have looked out of place in a big city, but it seemed incongruous here in a town of a thousand souls. Still, it had given Be

Jackman, or Holden as it was originally known, was founded by the English and the Irish, and the French came down to join them later. Back where the Trading Post lay used to be part of an area called Little Canada, and from there to the bridge was the Catholic part of town, which was why St. Anthony’s was on the eastern side of the river. Once you crossed the bridge, that was Protestant territory. There was the Congregational church, and the Episcopalians, too, who were the Protestants it was okay to like if you were a Catholic, or so my grandfather used to say. I didn’t know how much the place had changed since then, but I was pretty certain that the old divide still remained, give or take a couple of houses.

The red Jackman station house stood by the railway line that cut through the town, but it was now privately owned. The main bridge in town was being repaired, so a detour took us over a temporary structure and into the township of Moose River. On the right was the modest Moose River Congregational Church, which bore the same relationship to St. Anthony’s as the local Little League team bore to the Red Sox.

Eventually, we came to the sign for Holden Cemetery, across from the Windfall Outdoor Center, its blue school buses, now empty, lined up sleepily outside. A dirt-and-stone road led down to the cemetery, but it looked steep and slick with ice, so we left the car at the top of the road and walked the rest of the way. The road led past a frozen pond on one side and a patch of beaver bog on the other, before the gravestones of the cemetery appeared on a hill to the left. It was small, and bordered by a wire fence, with an unlocked gate wide enough for one person to pass through at a time. The graves dated as far back as the nineteenth century, probably to the days when this was still just a settlement.

I looked at the five stones nearest the gate, three large stones, two small. The first read “Hattie E., wife of John F. Childs” and gave the dates of her birth and death: April 11, 1865, and November 26, 1891. Beside her stood the two smaller stones: Clara M. and Vinal F. According to the stone, Clara M. was born on August 16, 1895, and died just over a month later on September 30, 1895. Vinal F.’s time on this earth was even briefer: born on September 5, 1903, he was dead by September 28. The fourth stone was that of Lillian L., John’s second wife and presumably the mother of Clara and Vinal. She was born on July 11, 1873, and died less than a year after her son, on May 16, 1904. The last stone was that of John F. Childs himself, born September 8, 1860, and died, having outlived two wives and two children, March 18, 1935. There were no other stones nearby. I wondered if John F. had been the last of his line. Here, in this tiny cemetery, the story of his life was laid bare in the space of five carved pieces of rock.

But the stone we were looking for stood in the farthest southern corner of the cemetery. There were no names upon it, and no dates of birth or death. It read only the children of gilead, followed by the same word carved three times:

INFANT

INFANT

INFANT

and a plea to God to have mercy on their souls. As unbaptized children, they would originally have been laid to rest outside the cemetery, but it was clear that at some point in the past the position of the cemetery fence had been discreetly altered in this corner, and the Children of Gilead now lay within its boundaries. It said a lot about the people of the town that quietly, and without fuss, they had embraced these lost infants and allowed them to rest within the precincts of the graveyard.

“What happened to the men who did this?” asked Angel. I looked at him and saw the grief etched on his face.

“Men and women,” I corrected him. “The women must have known and colluded in what happened, for whatever reason. Two of those children died of unknown causes, but one was stabbed with a knitting needle shortly after birth. You ever hear of a man stabbing a child with a knitting needle? No, the women covered it up, whether out of fear or shame, or something else. I don’t think Dubus was lying about that much. Nobody was ever charged. The authorities examined three girls and confirmed that they’d given birth at some point in the recent past, but there was no evidence to co