A Congregation of Jackals

Chapter 6

The beefy man sat in the adjacent rocking chair and adjusted his denims. “Should we inquire what he meant by the phrase ‘all old acquaintances’?”

Oswell looked at the window behind him. Elinore cleaned a rabbit in the kitchen and then quartered it. The sound of the knife impacting the wood was silenced by the glass.

“She can’t hear us,” Godfrey said as he struck a match and lit his cigarette, rocking his chair forward as if the flame might escape him.

“You know what Lingham meant,” stated Oswell. “You know who he meant. He wouldn’t have invited us otherwise. I didn’t invite him to my wedding, and you didn’t invite him to yours.”

Godfrey scratched his red and silver beard and drew thoughtfully upon his cigarette as if it might contain wisdom. “Do you suppose that he could have been coerced into contacting us?”

“I hadn’t considered that.” Oswell brooded upon his older brother’s suspicion and shook his head. “Nah. Lingham wouldn’t.”

“The Lingham we knew wouldn’t, but we don’t know this one—it’s been decades. We’re all different than we were.”

“You’re fatter, that’s for certain.”

“You always call me fat when I’ve outsmarted you, which results in a lot of insults.”

“Lingham was solid. I don’t think he’d be part of a trap, no matter what. I can’t reconcile that suspicion with him.” Oswell turned and through the window watched his wife quarter an onion. To his brother’s reflection in the glass, he said, “You’re like Ma that way, always suspicious. The way she made the butcher weigh the meat before he charged her and then again after, to make sure he didn’t sneak any for himself.”

“You think we should go? Travel across the whole damn country and get tangled up in this old mess?”

Oswell turned from the window and looked at his brother directly. “I don’t think we’ve got a choice.”

Two small figures strode up the dirt road, excitedly discussing some subject, but the distance dissolved their words into unintelligible squawks by the time they reached the ears of Oswell and Godfrey.

The rancher continued, “It’s our mess as much as Lingham’s—or maybe more. And even if you’re right, even if he was coerced into contacting us, the man who coerced him is alive and likely knows where we live. Better to meet him out there.” Oswell glanced pointedly at his two children, who were coming up the road.

Godfrey looked at his approaching niece and nephew and nodded.

In a quiet voice, the plump man said, “All these years, I prayed that he was dead.”

“So did I. Lingham and Dicky said the same prayer, I bet.”

“Do you think Dicky will go?”

“I don’t know. He wasn’t one for responsibility, but he’s no coward.”

The children walked closer to the house, and the words “not” and “hogs” and “licorice” and “penny” became dimly audible to Oswell. Even from this distance, they were recognizable as his children.

Godfrey asked, “You’ve still got our gear?”

“Buried beneath the porch.” The skinny brown-haired boy of eleven and the chubby redheaded girl of nine who had freckles and a cherubic smile reached the edge of the Danford property. “I put it down there when I built this place.” The brothers watched the children approach the house.

In a quiet voice that begat a coiled serpent of smoke, Godfrey said, “You better dig it up.”

CHAPTER THREE

He Knows How to Talk to Ladies: He Read the Dictionary Thrice

As a child, Richard Sterling had hated the nickname Dicky. When he was only three years old, his father had died of tuberculosis, leaving him in a New York City apartment bursting with women: three sisters (Peggy, Sam and Girdy), a mother and her mother. The absence of a male figure and the ubiquity of women had not made young Richard Sterling an especially masculine boy, nor did his delicate, pretty features, which his mother and her mother had regularly referred to as “girl-handsome.” The nickname Dicky emasculated him further.

With only eleven years behind him, the lone male Sterling had taken his first job working for a fishmonger on the east side near Park Row. When he came home, fetid with fish oil, pinched by blue crabs, iridescent scales in his black hair from when he had scratched himself while handling carp, he looked at his mother and said, “Please call me Richard.”

Despite his request, no member of his family (excepting the deceased father) called him Richard. His grandmother died without ever once uttering the name. He resented being infantilized in a family where he and his dead father’s bank account provided almost all of the income (two sisters would hem dresses on occasion, but this amounted to very little), and his ire at being saddled with the name Dicky only grew with its longevity.

Contrarily, as a strikingly handsome man of forty-four years, there was no other name he would have preferred over Dicky. No matter what he said to a woman, no matter what promises he made to her, no matter what fantastical shared future he promised her, he could not be wholly accountable: he was a guy named Dicky. Ladies should not take an adult man named Dicky too seriously, and if they did, who should they blame but themselves?

Several women on several different rainy days in several different bars said roughly, “He told me that he had never before been so truly in love with a woman as he was with me, that my voice was the sound he hoped to hear call him to dinner each night and read to him by the fireside. He asked me the size of my ring finger and also which type of caviar I most enjoyed.