The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell Page B

Several voices said He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s got to be dead laying that way. A center fielder in his middle teens named Jack Gutermuth stepped to the brink, squinted downward and announced, “That’s that preacher.”
    “Which preacher?”
    “The one that said my uncle deserved to be roasted alive ’cause he could dance.”
    “That’s him?”
    “Yup.”
    “Well, I reckon he’s in a red handcart to hell by now, about to get fried up good in his own grease—he’ll keep—it’s only the seventh inning.”
    When Sheriff Adderly and Deputy Bob Jennings arrived postgame they shooed everybody back from the creek bank so they could study the situation closely. They wandered around on all sides of the body, squatted to their heels and turned the face up. One large whitish rock had left its outline impressed in mud short of the water’s edge and come to rest bloodstained and brain-spattered in a trickle near the body. The skull had been crushed and made almost triangular.
    Deputy Jennings said, “There’s a word for what happened to that rock, there.”
    “Lifted?”
    “No, a better word.”
    “Heaved?”
    “Not that one, either.”
    “Dislodged?”
    “That’s it. That’s the one I like for this—dislodged.”
    “So, the way you suss this scene—Preacher Willard stumbled over a root or something else up there, tumbled all accidental down to here and dislodged this big ol’ rock with his head?”
    (Fifteen years later, Vance Bullington, who’d lost a boy and a girl at the Arbor, did on what he thought was his deathbed but wasn’t quite say to his surviving daughter, Billie, “That preacher with the big mouth? In nineteen and thirty-one? I’m who done for him.”
    “I always have heard you most likely were who did that, Daddy.”
    “You have?”
    “So has everybody.”
    “He was hunkered in the crick, there, catchin’ crawdads with ham fat on a string, and … I’ll take full credit for that killing now, I guess.”
    “You already have the credit, Daddy, everywhere but in the newspapers.”
    Billie added, “Daddy was a purty big gol-danged liar sometimes, told me he could fly airplanes backwards using hand mirrors and had once set up light housekeeping with Mata Hari over by Poplar Bluff ’til she got to boring him silly with her nosy questions, and a bunch of horsefeathers along those lines, so take his confession or leave it. I personally think this once Daddy spoke true. I kind of hope he did.”) “That’s how I read it, Sheriff. That there’s way too big of a rock to dislodge with your head, you know, and walk away after.”
    “So it’s just that simple—Preacher tripped up there on somethin’ I don’t see and dislodged too big of a rock down here with his head.”
    “And died.”
    “Do I hear an amen?”
    And there were the anniversary confessions. In the first decade after the conflagration perhaps a dozen complete or merely suggestive confessions were taken, all easily refuted, and the confessed would be returned to homes where relatives dealing with the Great Depression promised to watch over their lonesome addled kin and spend more time with them on Sundays if they could manage it, though it seemed nearly to blaspheme basic heavenly intentions to feed crazy folks when sane ones went about starving. Two of the more eager confessors were next-door neighbors who became perennials and their testimonies expanded in competition over the years into picaresque recitations of unforgivable guilt and delicious subplots of scurrilous intrigue everybody heard in detail one way or another, and plenty came to look forward to hearing yearly the advances delivered as both men tried anew to talk themselves into being hanged before the other. When one neighbor in 1937 drank raw milk too late and died, the other did sadly resign himself to not ever being hanged by others and gave up all confessing.
    And there were the accusations and denunciations also delivered in clusters surrounding the