Only when the butchery was done, along with all the associated cleaning, did the eeriness of the situation start to settle in. They’d sprung into action together, and done it well, and had left out of their minds that what started the process was the murder of a favored cow. A killing that served no purpose, that seemed too far afield even for random malice. Especially after what had happened to the dog. They all sat together around the well, still warm from their labor. Sunlight put a shine on the snowcaps to the west now, and a damp peach light was in the air. The diorama of cow’s blood was still frozen in the dirt, but the top was starting to shimmer and bead with droplets.
Who could have done such a thing? The first hypothesis was bored townie punks. Home-cooked meth had come to nearby Bishop recently, if in a small way, and unpredictable behavior had stopped being unfamiliar. But several of the students pointed out that it was a bit hard to imagine someone getting freaked out on meth, driving thirty miles on country roads in the dark, finding a cow—and not just any cow—in the barn, getting her out to center of campus, and slicing her throat, not to mention doing so without making enough noise to wake anyone up.
The quiet that followed was uncomfortable.
“Anybody got a crazy ex?” Neil asked with a stillborn chuckle.
It was Wesley Denniston who spoke up, a wiry second-year with the haircut of an orphan, which always made a surprise out of the clarity, the beauty, of his voice, even though he was never shy about using it. In every seminar, his voice was the first raised, and it was absent the upward lilt of a question mark. Everyone’s eyes went to him. Eli stared him into the dust, but Eli was behind the rest of the group where they couldn’t see him, and Wesley went on anyway.
“We all do,” he said. “Hugo.”
“That seems a pretty wild speculation,” Eli said.
“Just how wild?” Wesley said, staring right back.
WESLEY
I know Paul tells us our salvation is not by works but by faith. When James argues for the importance of works, however, he is not contradicting Paul. He says that a faith apart from works is dead, that a living faith will produce works. The point is that acts are not irrelevant. What draws most of us, and certainly me, to Battle Creek College is the idea not just that faith affects works, but that works affect faith. So when we are lugging sandbags or harvesting vegetables by hand or working all together to drive cattle through the corral to tag, horn, brand, and vaccinate them, that is its own kind of prayer. By adding it to traditional prayer, we enrich our faith. Many know the motto Simple Work, Complex Faith, but few understand it. Still, the school works well as a magnet: the ones who seek it are the ones who belong. Those who don’t believe in work don’t come.
Hugo was the exception. From the moment he arrived I sensed something off about him. He lacked a certain gravity. He was not serious enough. During work hours, students’ faces displayed the turning over and sorting out of the day’s lectures; you could see the smelting of ore into iron through the furnace of labor. But not with Hugo. He would look off at the mountains, or get lost in the sunset, and his pace would slow. If it was line work, he would throw off the rhythm of the whole crew. And his quiet in the seminar was unlike those who waited, listened, and processed thoughtfully before speaking, like Eli. Hugo’s silence was simply disengaged from the high life of the mind this place is designed to serve.
Eli, on the other hand, looked like a healthy thirty-year-old man even though he was only twenty-two. He was the type who had looked full-grown at thirteen. He looked like a cowboy, like a man who knew the land through a communion with the One who made it. He had finished his degree two years earlier and was in the second year of his ranch steward fellowship. He guided us not just in the upkeep of our crops and livestock, but in the classroom, where he was a sort of graduate assistant, and he let the students air their first thoughts and prejudices before diving in with a comment, or more often a question, that made clear the issue, or would rattle around in thirty skulls during our duty hours. Both the professors and Pastor Dale shifted their tone when talking to Eli, conversing with him as with an equal.
You can see why I could not have predicted or even believed that Hugo’s bad spirit could worm its way into this man. And yet the Book tells us that Adam and Eve fell, that the great David fell, that Saul fell, that even the Apostles denied and doubted their Lord. So it was some speck in my own eye, a naiveté or a boyish lack of confidence, that kept me from seeing the corruption of Eli sooner. How I wish that I had seen it sooner. But once I saw it I could not simply let it go. A living faith sometimes requires action.
ELI
I’d worried about Hugo from the start. Most kids came to the college with a drawer of secret anger, which the ranch work helped them burn off safely. You could see their fathers perched on their shoulders, doubting them. Others came with good-boy haircuts and a missionary good cheer. Hugo had a look I hadn’t seen before here. He was soft in the middle and had a mooning look in his eyes that the other students didn’t care for. I assigned him to my own work detail so I could look out for him and make sure he adjusted okay. Our main duty that fall was irrigation, and we’d ride out along the canals kicking the taps on and off, checking levels, and mucking out any debris we happened to find. September in Battle Creek meant sweltering afternoons with cold evenings, and as the sun got low one of those first days, Hugo, who was still an unsure rider, had to dismount to put on his coat. I rode up next to him and said:
“Don’t you know how to grip a horse with your legs?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“There’s no getting around learning.”
“People say I’m a slow learner. If that’s true, I never minded it.”
He seemed to realize that he was being standoffish, and that my attempt at ribbing him was simply my trying to be sensitive without giving the impression that he needed sensitivity. We were out by a field of leeks, and their green stalks were reaching up out of the soil like a thousand lizard paws, and looking out over them, he said, “They’re happy to have company tonight.” I didn’t know yet that this was one of his mannerisms, making these odd qualitative statements. Columbia was the most beautiful cow, he said, which agreed with the consensus, and Galahad was the most beautiful horse, which diverged from it. One day he pointed up at the Sierras, at a peak just separate from three others linked in a ridge, and told me it was the saddest mountain. I didn’t know if his strange pronouncements were sincere or an affectation, and I didn’t really want to know. I came to love them. But the first time I heard one, I didn’t know how to respond. I just told him what I knew: we’d be pulling up those leeks soon, and planting turnips.
WESLEY
I saw Hugo pulling up handfuls of early carrots on an afternoon at the end of September, when the ground was still tender and clumpy from the late summer rains and clung in dark walnuts to the pale orange icicles. He stacked them in the basket of his t-shirt, which distended into a lumpy mass. As he shuffled from the garden to the barn like that, a few carrots would sluice out the side of his bundle, and he’d have to stoop down and grope with his hand to retrieve them.
In the barn he walked back and forth between Columbia and Galahad, feeding them each a carrot at a time and rubbing their ears, their faces, so intent, almost in a trance, that he took no notice of me standing in the doorway until I confronted him about what he was doing.
“It’s from the vegetable garden,” he said, “not the crops.”