Chapter 18 The Nowhere Apple Farm #2
‘Why would he do it?’ asked Angela, pressing her handkerchief to her mouth.
The men were inside now and she could hear the sound of retching.
‘Who would do that to children?’ Angela was almost grateful for the stench – it made it easier to believe that this thing had truly happened.
‘She never said a word about her little ones – to me or any of us.’ She turned to her husband.
‘Did he ever mention them?’ she asked, imploring. ‘The children? Did you know?’
Ben shook his head. ‘Dunning never said a word.’
‘Five children kept up here in secret.’ Angela’s mouth set hard then trembled. Her eyes stared at something he could not see. ‘And the little baby, Ben. She had the baby.’
‘Sometimes,’ Ben said, taking her hand, ‘you only know what you know. We cannot always know the reason why.’
‘I know,’ Angela said. ‘The reason why.’ He looked at her uncomprehending, and she saw it then – the distance, the great expanse between his past and hers. ‘Your parents were kind to you,’ Angela said. ‘They always protected you from harm.’
‘They were,’ Ben’s expression was sweet and puzzled. ‘They did.’
Angela smiled and hung her head and tried to breathe.
The search party filed out of the farmhouse. Their faces were white, brows laced with beads of sweat. One man went to the trees to vomit and another quickly stumbled after him.
‘The sheriff must be informed,’ Abel Manton said, wiping his brow. ‘We ride for Boulder.’
Angela drew a deep breath. ‘No.’
‘He must,’ Ben said, gentle.
‘You know what they think of mountain people. They have been waiting for something like this to happen, all this while.’ She turned to Abel Manton. ‘And do you wish to be asked to explain some of the goods you keep up here in their cellar from time to time?’
He looked at her, mouth gaping.
‘Oh, yes, of course I know. Everyone knows.’ Angela’s mouth tightened, but she held her tears at bay.
‘She was my friend. I mourn her deeply. But her murderer is dead, and there is nothing to be gained from outsiders coming in and poking into things. Whatever happened here, she was an innocent and I want her memory preserved as such.’
‘But, Angie—’
Angela crouched down and put her hands over her ears. Her scream rolled all down the valley, high and ragged. Storytime threw up his head, wild-eyed. ‘Questions just unsettle everything,’ Angela said, breathing fast.
It seemed after some discussion that most of the rescue party had at one time or another stored goods which to the law did not exist, in the apple cellar at Nowhere.
It was well known in the town that things that did not exist travelled through Nowhere.
Did they all want to be associated with these deaths?
People make all kinds of assumptions. Someone might suggest that there was a disagreement about the stored goods.
Someone might suggest the disagreement became violent.
And now Angela had put it like that, they decided, what was the good in sullying the family’s name?
They didn’t know what had truly happened here, after all.
‘Better that it was bandits or convicts,’ said Angela. ‘Who is to say it was not? These things happen every day.’
After a moment, everyone nodded. It was agreed.
Angela went through the house, taking away the childish things. There were not many. There were no toys and the children seemed to have all slept together on one straw mattress in a small room. There was one set of clothes for each of them in a dresser. The drawers were labelled with their names.
Angela scrubbed the labels off each drawer.
She helped swaddle Jane’s and Thomas’s bodies in linen and bind them over the back of the sturdiest horse, to be taken down to Ault.
The men buried the children in the earth floor of the apple cellar, along with the knife that took their lives.
Angela could not be inside the house for this so she stood in the orchard in the light mizzle and turned her face up to the rain.
Storytime bowed his head at the hitching post, blinking at the cold drops.
He was angry with her, she knew, and would blow out his stomach in revenge when she put the saddle back on.
Abel came out of the house, dusting earth from his hands.
‘It was Indians,’ he said, confident. ‘No doubt about it. They never rounded up all the Ute. Some still live wild up here. No one will do anything about it, despite my letters …’ Angela saw that he had already begun to believe this, and for a moment she was so envious of his conviction that it took the breath right out of her chest.
Angela knows that if she works hard enough, if she trains her mind to the thought, she can cleanse the memory of that day at Nowhere from her mind – the sight of the red and white pile of flesh and small faces, the crisp linen of the nightgowns, the purple-white skin, the small, outflung leg, the tiny foot, all that old, dark blood.
Sometimes on long nights when the wind comes hard down over the mountain, and sleep eludes her, memory breaks the surface and Angela wonders, for the length of a gasp or a heartbeat, whether she did the right thing.
Her friend Jane’s kind eyes and those five small lives are gone and the truth is hidden forever.
There will be no reckoning and no justice.
They must have all been born at Nowhere, those children. It seems they never left in all their short lives. They had never known anything but Nowhere and never would.
Angela puts these thoughts away and closes the door on them with the firmness of long practice.
She knows all too well that some recollections are best left behind in the dark.
Angela hardly retains any memories at all of her daddy or [those things] that happened back then and she lives a truly happy life, so she knows that this is the best way.
Angela thinks, with another of those surges of envy which are so familiar to her, that at least those children never had to grow up to carry [those things] with them.
They will not spend years with [those things] sitting on their shoulders like a demon, weighing them down until they are bent double with the pain and the questions, growing older and wrestling with the fact that no one seemed to see, at the time, or perhaps no one cared.
The Nowhere children are beyond such questions; they do not carry the pain of [those things]. They are free.