Scene from Buddha’s Cross (last page of Chapter 2, The Moat)
As gently as he’d opened the cover, he closed it again. The book had to go. It was dangerous. He looked around and was about to drop it over the side and get on with his life, but he couldn’t bring himself to let go of it. Sweat broke out on his fingertips as he watched himself put the book in his pocket just the same as if he was watching himself lose his mind. What was he thinking putting it in his pocket? It would be his end. They’d torture him until he told them where he got it, even if he didn’t know. Then they’d hang him in the public square knowing mockery was the worst death Alfred Hatcher could die.
With the body slumped over the stern, he let the current carry him around to the south wall and the tool shed under the bridge where he tied the boat up. The worry and the haste brought back the prickly feeling and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead. He was overexcited, and fearing that he looked that way made it worse. Suddenly Elma Hennessy stepped out from behind the tool shed and a confession almost spilled out of him then and there.
The yardman’s eyes went wide with panic and he nearly blacked out. Pictures of men hanged in the public square flashed through his head. Did she see? Had she been hiding there the whole time? Why? Her arms were stretched out in front of her like she was in a trance or sleepwalking, and they offered him a red and white checkered handkerchief tied up in a pretty bow. Her mouth moved, but at first he couldn’t hear a single word. Sweat broke out all over him. It ran down his sides and out through his fingertips. Then her words reached him through the fog. The voice was small like a mouse’s.
“Your lunch, Alfred. Did you forget? I make your lunch every day, yet you forgot.” She hesitated, and he swore she was staring at the pocket in his pants where the book was hidden. He watched his arm stretch out and take the package from her.
“Is something wrong?”
His eyes narrowed. Was the devil of a woman playing with him? He almost blurted out that he was on his way to see the bailiff, to hand the book over as he was expected to do, but he knew the words would sound hollow even to himself. Of all the women in the village, Elma Hennessy was the most dangerous. Only her best friend Millie, a feeble old woman with a sharp tongue, could compare. News traveled faster than floodwaters from one of them to the other and from Millie to the rest of the village.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Alfred?”
What was she saying? He could barely hear.
“I’d better get back to Mary and the children.”
Fear finally turned to anger and he found his voice. “Snooping isn’t right. It’s just plain bad manners.”
Elma looked hurt. With the moral strength of a witness to a crime, she lashed back at him. “I’m not perfect, Alfred. Lots of people aren’t. You just have to be more reasonable. That’s what you are, Alfred—not reasonable.”
The woman turned her back on him and mounted the bank of the river without an effort. When she reached the road, she spun around and gazed at him long and hard—with spiteful eyes, he thought—before strutting off down the road.
The bile rose in his throat. Her sudden shift to the moral high ground enraged him. But what burned his guts more was that he was already wondering in the back of his mind if he was in the wrong. If this woman knew his secret, then he was done for. And she was not the kind to let it go wasted either. The yardman cursed her in the foulest way until he was obliged to ask God’s forgiveness.