“Now, Mrs. Sledge, be strong. When was the last time you saw Mary?”
“Sunday afternoon. She was out here in the yard. I wasn’t paying too close attention to her — but watching her just the same. She was playing some kind of game, chasing those little yellow butterflies, trying to get near enough to blow on them.... I hate this wretched place.” When she had said this last thing she was not crying.
“Now where might she have gone, Mrs. Sledge? To a friend’s house maybe. Have you checked with her playmates?”
“I’ve been a good mother, Mrs. Candlewine.”
“I know, Mrs. Sledge, but . . .”
“No you don’t. You don’t think that at all. You think it’s my fault that my baby’s gone into the City — that I didn’t whip her, or make her help with the washing, or do her Sunday School lessons. But she was always good . . . never unhappy.” Her eyes were dry now and she pointed down into the fog. “It’s That . . . that.”
Mrs. Candlewine went inside the house and told John Charles to stay with his mother while she went away, and to stop playing with his pocketknife. She drove to the police station, the highway patrol, the homes of the other children in Mary’s class, to the amusement park, and to the zoo. Late in the evening she returned to the Sledges’, where she found Luke and Andrea sitting on the back porch. The afterdark had come.
“Mrs. Candlewine, this is my husband,” said Andrea.
“Hello,” said Mrs. Candlewine.
“Mrs. Candlewine was Mary’s teacher,” Andrea told her husband, who acknowledged the fact by lowering his eyes.
“I’ve checked with Mary’s friends and none of them have seen her. I’m sure that if we have patience and pray, she will turn up. Children have been known to wander off into the woods and be gone for weeks.”
“Mary’s in the City, Mrs. Candlewine. Somehow she walked down there and a monument opened and she went in. It is an insult to tell ourselves lies.”
“No,” said Mrs. Candlewine, her whole body quivering but her voice steady and flat. “She is not in the City. She is not. God protects the innocent. He would never let such a thing happen. Were I to believe that I’d walk in there myself and find her.”
“No you wouldn’t, Mrs. Candlewine — just like you won’t now. Just like I won’t.”
“She’s not in the City,” said Luke, being careful to talk to neither woman in particular. “Even she wasn’t that stupid. But she’ll never come back either — someone has killed her — perhaps by accident, in an automobile, was afraid and sank her in the river . . . or perhaps intentionally; there are such people.”
“I’m sorry for you,” said Mrs. Candlewine, “the way you think,” and went home and waited. She waited for a week, then two, and then three. Once she stopped John Charles in the hall and asked if his sister had returned home yet. “No,” he answered and she never asked again. She waited, and continued to wait. She read the names Nellie Sledge, Walter Sledge, waiting — Will Sledge, Paul Sledge. Then she quit waiting and told me once while I fumbled with sticks of colored paraffin to fill up the hollow spaces between the outline of distant characters in my coloring book: “I knew your sister, Mary, before she got on the train that took her away.” I wanted Mrs. Candlewine to help me with the crayons because the colors kept running over the lines and leaving blotches inside the hollow spaces but she said I was doing fine and walked on down the row of desks to watch another colorer, of whose style I was envious.
When John Charles was twenty he was in love with a girl whose name I did not know for a long time because Nellie and Walt and Father had forgotten it. The idea of being in love excited him. That would have been in 1933 when the railroad was only running one train a week through to Chicago and that one didn’t stop. The farmers had weathered the depression well and we had made out by what John C. and Father could steal and what was given to us out of conscience. He was in love with a girl who lived on the western side of Des Moines. They went to Missouri because he had been indirectly offered a job with a stone quarry by Tommy Robinson, a man from St. Louis he had met playing horseshoes. She was excited and a little afraid because John C. had told her St. Louis was a tough town.
He wrote home once, two years later, and Nellie had kept the letter and showed it to me. The paper had turned yellow and was dissolving the ink: “Doing fine. Read in the paper the other day that the railroad is starting up again. Life is hard out here and you have to be tough to stay alive, but I’m doing fine. Hope to be home for a visit soon.” On December 22, 1939, Father met him at the station. Two railroad hands lifted the box out of the freight car and set it on the platform. Tickie unfastened the letter held by three achromatic thumbtacks from the lid and gave it to Father.
L. Sledge, Mang.
Des Moines Depot
Des Moines, Iowa
Dear Sir:
We regret to inform you that on November 19, 1939, John Charles Sledge was found guilty of Section 31 of Chapter 18 of the Missouri Penal Code, Judge Garnold presiding. Executed at 5:10 A.M., December 21, 1939, Missouri State Penitentiary and pronounced dead by State Coronor Bill Mallory.
(Casket and shipping charges paid by the State of Missouri)
Elliot Winfield
Public Relations Dir.
St. Louis, Missouri.
Father and Tickie carried John Charles inside the depot and Father took him home in the pickup after work. He showed Andrea the letter and she read it. Nellie cried while she held me against her in the rocking chair. From her bed Mother looked at Luke and then he went into the living room. Walt and Will were not at home yet and Paul played his guitar until Father told him that if he wanted to play it to go out on the porch. Then Paul began to cry.
Many years later Nellie told me all she could remember about John Charles; the rest I have learned from the people who knew and remembered him from Des Moines and from St. Louis, back issues of the St. Louis Daily, and finally what I was led to believe must have happened — those magicless, empty (re)constructions of real people, real things, and real movement — thin lines that can never even hope to approximate the color they are to represent.
John Charles and Hermie Huber drove to Missouri in a blue Plymouth. It took John C. two months to steal enough gasoline for the trip, which he stored in five-gallon milk cans and put in the trunk. Hermie had fourteen dollars and John had six. Just into Missouri they broke down because of the fan blade cutting into the radiator. John C. purchased the parts from a junkyard and repaired the car. This made them nervous because they hadn’t counted on it and also because it was bad.
In St. Louis John Charles located Tommy Robinson, who oddly enough was there and helped him obtain a job at the quarry. This was a sign, a good omen. John C. and Hermie rented a trailer house in Eastown Court. Things had worked out. John C. sold the Plymouth to a “fish” living next to him. They bought a new car. They had done the things that they had planned in Des Moines to do — reached the goal they had imagined for themselves in the several months before and sat now, in their imagined blue trailer house, looking at each other and trying to be gentle. Perhaps that was it, limited expectations, that caused what later happened; but things are never that simple, and you must see for yourself.
John Charles worked for a little under three years as a dynamiter at the Rocky Edge Quarry. There was satisfaction in this. He learned quickly and an offhand manner soon characterized his work, which some of the men there called “dangerous.” But the beginning novelty of his work drained away and he found himself left with the remains of a noisy boredom — his job. The safety regulations were obscure and as he had long ago discovered, no one really even cared about those. No, he was too much to be confined in such a way. He had expected more than this. After thirty months he quit his job at the quarry and