“I don’t know if I can agree to that.”
Crow spread his hands. “Have a nice trip back. Watch out for potholes.”
“No! No, I mean, how can I—”
“Newt, listen to me, I’m going to give you a hell of a story. I’m not joking here, and it’s as intense a story as you’re ever likely to write. If I want something kept out of it, then you have to trust that I have a good reason, but you also have to trust that what I will let you write about will be well worth any small concessions. So…?”
The reporter gave it some thought, but in the end his curiosity won out over any objections he might have otherwise raised. “Okay. I agree. What’s the second condition?”
Crow smiled faintly. “That if you don’t believe me, at least do me the courtesy of not laughing in my face.”
“Of course not—”
“Good, ’cause some of what I have to tell you is going to be pretty hard to swallow. I haven’t told this story to too many people—actually I’ve only told it to Val, and she was there for most of it—and I don’t feel like being ridiculed for it.”
From that Newton supposed that Crow had been too drunk to remember telling the story to Toby, but he decided not to mention it. “I can promise you that I won’t laugh or mock or anything. Just tell me, and I’ll listen.”
“Okay,” Crow said, nodding. “I’m taking you on faith, Newt. Don’t make me sorry about that. You can turn your recorder on.” He paused and closed his eyes, collecting scraps of old memories from a closet deep within his mind. He began speaking before he opened his eyes. “If you can believe it, except for Val’s dad being killed, the stuff that happened here these last few days were nothing compared to what happened thirty years ago. I mean, Karl Ruger and his cronies were bad enough, but back then we had someone as close to the devil as anyone I ever hope to meet. And like I told you yesterday it wasn’t the Bone Man…he wasn’t the one the papers nicknamed ‘the Reaper.’ I’d bet my life on that right now, and I can say that because I did stake my life on it back then.”
“Then, who…?”
Crow glanced left and right as if looking to see who was listening and then leaned close and in a hushed voice said, “Ubel Griswold.”
“I know that name…” Newton flipped through the pages of his notebook. “Griswold—yeah, he was the last of the victims, right? A local farmer?”
Crow shook his head. “I figured you’d have that wrong. I mean, yeah, Griswold was a farmer, but he wasn’t one of the victims.” He glanced at Val. “You know, baby, I don’t think I’ve even said that name out loud in…what? Twenty years? Whew!” He turned back to Newton. “It’s not a name one says lightly, no sirree. At least not me. Folks around here openly blame the Bone Man for what happened, but it was Ubel Griswold. He was an evil, evil man.”
“You’re confusing me here, Crow. Who was he?”
“What was he is a better way to put it.” Crow considered. “First let me put things into perspective for you, so let’s jump back thirty-six years ago to when Griswold first moved to Pine Deep, supposedly from Germany, and bought an old stone farmhouse in one of the more remote sections of town, way off of A-32 and nearly impossible to reach except by some obscure back road that’s no longer even there. This was before A-32 was expanded and paved, you understand. Back then it was called the Pinelands Highway, which was a joke because it was just dirt and gravel. When they built A-32 twenty-six years ago, a lot of the smaller roads became officially abandoned since many of them were cut into the state forest. That’s why they built the road in the first place, to keep traffic out of the forest. Anyway, Griswold settled himself down to raise cattle and generally kept to himself. His farm was small but he had a fair-sized herd for the available room. There are, however, no records of him ever selling a single one. Odd, don’t you think?”
Newton shrugged. Even after eight years in Black Marsh, what he knew about cattle farming would barely fill the back of an index card. Other than the fact that they were big, smelly, and went “Moo!” he didn’t know from cattle beyond medium rare at Outback Steakhouse. “Private sales?”
Crow shook his head and continued, “Griswold ran his farm more or less by himself. Sometimes he’d turn a couple of acres over to crops like pumpkins and corn and gourds, and then he’d hire day labor, always hiring drifters as his day labor. Not regular migrant workers, mind you, but hoboes, bums, guys like that. Never any local people.”
“So what? Cheap labor is cheap labor, and, who knows, maybe he felt sorry for them.”
Val said dryly, “I don’t think that was it.”
“No,” Crow agreed, “I think he just liked the fact that these were people no one would ever care about.”
“How do you mean?”
“If they went missing, I mean. No one would ever know if they went missing—no one would care.”
Newton laughed. “What are you saying? That he was doing…what? Feeding them to his cows?”
“I think he was killing them, is what I’m saying.”
“Killing them?” That knocked the smile from Newton’s face.
“It lays out like this. For four years Griswold ran his farm with the drifters acting as day labor, and no one ever noticed a damn thing. Then the fifth year was the Golden Harvest.”
“What’s that?”
“Local farmer’s legend,” Val said. “The Golden Harvest was the year we had the best crop that was ever reaped in these parts. Who knows why, but the crops went absolutely wild. Understand—when you plant, the birds get about half the seed and of the rest only a fraction actually produces a harvestable crop. That’s why farmers sow so many seeds, far in excess of expectations, so that the resulting crop will be enough. Well, that year it seemed like every seed that was sown took root and bore fruit.”
Crow nodded. “And what a crop! Jesus God! Ears of corn so big that they actually made it into textbooks as agricultural oddities. Tomatoes bigger than softballs and sweet as sugar, and apples that would make any teacher cry. Newt, this was like farmer’s heaven.”
“What does it have to do with Griswold?”
“Don’t rush me, son,” Crow said with a crooked grin. “It actually has more to do with the drifters than with Griswold per se. The crop yield was so big that farmers just couldn’t keep up, so they had to fish around for extra hands. A lot of them took on busloads of migrants from the ghettos in Philly and Trenton, and some of the others snagged up anybody who had two hands and needed a buck. A few farmers took on the drifters who usually worked for Griswold. As it chanced, that was one of the years that Griswold was not growing crops in his fields, he was just raising cattle.”
“The cattle he never sold,” said Newton.
Crow nodded. “The cattle he never sold, right. Henry Guthrie took on four or five of the drifters who had done field work before for Griswold and who were scouting around town for some shifts. Oren Morse was one of them. Now Morse—the Bone Man, as I prefer to call him—was a genuine cultural dropout. Young black guy, about twenty-five or-six. A blues-playing ex-hippie who quoted Santayana and Charles Bukowski and John Lennon. My brother Billy and I thought he was coolest thing going. We used to work side by side with him. We had lunch with him, listened to his stories about being on the dharma road like Kerouac. Even at eight I knew he was a good guy. Maybe not a pillar of any community, but he was a decent person—just a dropout from a world that he wasn’t suited for. He’d dodged the draft in 1969 and then just kept on running. This was long before the amnesty thing. He wasn’t running ’cause he was scared but because he actually thought the peace movement meant something and he didn’t want anyone to put a gun in his hand. Does that sound like a killer to you? Anyway, all through that season, through the Golden Harvest, we worked and talked and we learned a lot about dreaming and thinking from him. We all wanted to be just like him, to be that free. Then the year of the Golden Harvest came to an end and the year that followed changed everything.”