Gypsies

He stood hitching up his denims in the light of the garage. “You come with me,” he said.

He took her up to the bedroom he shared with Mama.

It was a private place; Karen had not been in here even to help change the sheets. But she recognized the old oak dresser, the yellowing muslin curtains, the sailing-ship picture on the wall. They had owned these things forever. Daddy bent over the bottom drawer of the dresser, rummaged a moment, and then came up with a brown, ancient photograph, one that had not been included in Mama’s shoe box.

Karen took it from him with a dawning sense of wonder. It was a church picnic photo. Men in shirt sleeves and hats, women in billowing sundresses, all lined up stiffly for the camera.

“That’s him,” Willis said. “Second man in the back row. That’s Ben Williams.”

Karen inspected this faint, small image of her natural father.

Ben Williams was a tall man with wide, bewildered eyes. His skin was pale and his hair was long and tousled. He held a leather Bible absently in one hand.

“The woman next to him,” Willis said tonelessly, “is his wife. That blond one, there—you can’t see her too well. The babies were off in the grass.”

The babies, Karen thought. Me and Laura and Tim. We were there on this day—before everything changed.

Karen regarded the sad eyes of the man in the photograph. “Did he die?” “Yes. He died.” She thought about it. “Tell me,” she said.

Willis said, “Are you certain you want that?” She was not certain at all. But she nodded her head yes.

“All right, then,” Willis said.

Well, Willis said, we always knew they were strange.

They had a look about them. We took them for DPs because of their accent and all. Reverend Dahlquist told them there was a Greek Orthodox church downtown in Burleigh—he thought that must be more along their line. But they said no, the Assembly was what they wanted. They were friendly and they joined the church and they tried to fit in, and after a while nobody thought much about it.

Not until that night.

(Karen, open the window. Your mother hates it when I smoke in here. But right now I need to.)

You understand, I wasn’t there for the begi

It was late to be driving but Charlie Dagostino and Curt Bloedell came by in Charlie’s big Packard and picked me up. The three of us rode out there in the dark. Curt Bloedell had a little.22 caliber squirrel rifle with him, but I don’t think he ever expected to use it. In fact, he didn’t, not seriously—though maybe he should have.

We got to the Williams house at something past midnight. The house was dark.

Charlie argued that we should head back home.

Obviously nothing was wrong. I agreed with him, but Curt Bloedell wanted to knock and find out for certain —Curt always did love poking his nose in other people’s business. We argued and finally Charlie said okay, we’ll knock for Christ’s sake, I want to go home and get in bed. And so we three went up the slatboard front walk together.

It was not a big house and in fact it was mostly a shack, one of those shanties you might see out along the county road. Tar-paper roof and it had a coal stove for heat in the winter. But Ben had fixed it up as nice as he could, and his wife had filled some old truck tires with creek dirt and planted them with morning glories and lily of the valley, which had bloomed. We weren’t scared, except maybe of what Ben might say when we woke him up. None of us took this too seriously—Curt left his.22 lying in the car.

But before we could knock, the door opened.

A man stepped out.

He wore a gray trench coat and a gray hat. He looked foreign. He had a fu

Maybe you know who I mean.

And I suppose then we ought to have been scared or at least suspected something had happened. But the strange thing is we did not. He looked at each of us in turn, at me and Curt Bloedell and Charlie Dagostino —in that order—and he just smiled and said “Good night!” in a childish kind of way, and then he walked down to the road and was gone in the shadows while we watched. We didn’t ask who he was or what he was doing there. I swear I don’t know why. My guess would be that he put some kind of spell on us. I could not say this to Curt or Charlie and they never hinted at any such thing to me. But as soon as this man was out of sight we all shook our heads and began to have the feeling that something was terribly wrong. And we were scared then for the first time. Curt Bloedell kept muttering “Jesus, oh, Jesus,” and Charlie wanted to climb back in the Packard and run for home. But I said we had come to check on the Williamses and we should do that, and we were all thinking how strange it was that we could stand there talking out loud on the doorstep of the house and no one heard us, what was wrong? So I stepped inside and felt for a light switch because I knew the electric lines had been installed out here recently and so there would be light, at least. And I found the switch and I turned it on. Well, they were dead.

They were worse than dead, really, because parts of them were scattered around the shack and parts of them were just missing. There was some cheap luggage on the floor and some clothes, as if they might have been packing to leave when all this happened. And some of the baby toys were lying around. And so much blood.

I can’t describe it better than that. But it was terrible.

Remembering it is terrible.

I went outside and puked into one of the planters. Curt Bloedell ran to the Packard and got his.22 and started firing it into the air. I think he might have hurt himself if Charlie and I had not stopped him. He was sobbing like a child.

And I kept thinking, Those poor children!

We would have phoned for the police from that shack if there had been a phone, but Ben had never installed one. So we rode back to the parsonage (and it is a wonder no one was killed on that ride) and we told Reverend Dahlquist what had happened and he phoned the police for us.

We decided, in the time before the police came to talk to us, that we would not mention the children.

State custody would mean an orphanage or Christ knows what, and we thought it was better to deal with it inside the church—keep maybe a little closer eye on the kids that way. Plus Reverend Dahlquist and Charlie Dagostino’s wife had heard about Jea

I suppose she told you about that, too? I see.

The police talked to us and they were suspicious at first, but of course there was no way me and Curt and Charlie could have done anything like that even with the.22, and there was no blood on us or anything. We told them about the man we had seen and how the house had looked. Reverend Dahlquist told how he had sent us out there because he was worried about Ben getting drunk and beating his wife. And the police, I think because they couldn’t figure out how or why any of this had happened, didn’t seem to want to follow it up. As far as they were concerned it was two vagabonds that had died in suspicious circumstances— no more to be said. And none of the three of us talked about it after that.