BEYOND BETHLEHEM
eatured a lot of clover. Honeybees were attracted to those little white blossoms and occasionally I stepped on one—which stung me on the bottom of the foot, of course.
SYPNOSIS
Chance Wilder is a visual artist battling advancing age, loneliness, and his own criminal tendencies. He rips off the Devil’s Deacons motorcycle club for big bucks as a way of honoring the memory of an old friend. Now his house is burning down, his career as an artist is history and he’s on the run.
Wilder lays low in the small North Country town of Madstone, where he develops a fascination for the women who are Amazing Grace LaRue, who lives with dissociative (multiple) personality disorder.
In Madstone, Wilder strives to change his life even as he becomes a suspect in the death of Grace’s abusive lover and a series of sniper-style slayings of outdoorsmen. Meanwhile the Devil’s Deacons kill yet another of his friends. Wilder vows revenge. He uses his sudden notoriety to lure the bikers to the North Country of New Hampshire where he will let them pursue him into the wilderness, thinking they are the hunters.
Excerpt from chapter 20
“It must have irked him something wicked to have to do firewood when he could have been hunting deer. Worthy likes his venison the way he likes his eggs—poached. He generally has a couple deer cut and packaged and frozen before opening day comes around. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, so he set up the tractor behind the barn, hooked the cordwood saw to the power take off and commenced to cutting, lifting the tray to feed those four footers to the big spinning saw disc to make sixteen-inch pieces which he intended to split with his new used hydraulic splitter. He’d reached the age where it hurt his shoulders to swing the ten-pound splitting maul, don’t you know.
“To make the chore go easier Worthy tapped the forty-gallon white oak whiskey barrel of apple jack stored in the northwest corner of his barn. He and Charlie Miller had put up the jack the previous fall. According to Charlie this batch was a bit cloudy and had a tang of vinegar in the aftertaste. So Worthy had a six pack of Molson Ale sitting in the shade to stay cold. He was sipping beer to wash away that aftertaste.
“It was mid-afternoon when the pile of cordwood rolled forward, gave Worthy a surprise push behind the knees, bent him backwards as he was lifting the tray to feed another piece of wood to the big blade. He caught himself, but like a driver sliding on the first snow of the season, he overcorrected some while straightening out, felt a pinch at his right hand. When he looked at the hand, it wasn’t the same hand he’d had only moments before. As if looking was the cue, blood began to spurt from the stumps of his index and middle fingers. He looked for the fingers and saw they’d fallen into the accumulating pile of coarse sawdust layered with curled and wrinkled scraps of bark.
“So Worthy wrapped his hand in that dirty old blue bandana snot rag he keeps in the back pocket of his bib overalls and shut down the tractor and saw rig. He picked up the ale he’d just opened and trudged on up to the farmhouse.
“Temperance was on the radio at the county dispatch, and she took Worthy’s call. She says he started off by apologizing for bothering her, but he’d been into the jack hard enough he didn’t feel right driving himself to the emergency room. Then he told her what he’d done to himself. Right off she asked him where the fingers were. Right where they fell, he told her. She told him to get a plastic bag and some ice cubes, collect those fingers and give them to the EMTs she was dispatching to his place up on Drizzle Hill.”
“Sometimes they can reattach them,” she told him.
“Wouldn’t that be something,” he said. “I’ll go get ‘em.”
“So Worthy wandered on back down to the barn with a Wonder Bread bag half full of ice cubes and the half empty Molson. By this time, the snow was turning to slush. Worthy was wearing his leather boots that had cracked when they dried out after the spring sugaring. So instead of walking through the slushy tall grass beside the barn he went on through the barn,
“It was a chore getting the back door to slide on its tracks, him being one-handed. When it finally slid open, there was Luke the hobo hound. Luke just looked at Worthy and swallowed the finger he’d chewed to size. Then he picked up the other finger in his mouth and trotted off.
“Clayton was one of the EMTs who responded. He says when they arrived Worthy was firing away with his lever action, taking long shots at Luke, who was up on the hardwood ridge. The EMTs held up until the rifle was out of ammunition. Worthy turned to them with his empty Winchester, and he had tears streaming down through the stubble on his cheeks. But it wasn’t on account of the pain.”
“’Goddamn, but I can’t shoot for shit without my trigger finger,’” was what Worthy said.
***