Empire Falls

astonishing, and at first C. B. Whiting concluded that somebody, or a great many somebodies, had had the effrontery to use the property as an unofficial landfill. How many years had this outrage been going on? It made him mad enough to shoot somebody until one of the men he’d hired to clear the land pointed out that for somebody, or a great many somebodies, to use Whiting land for a dump, they would have required an access road, and there wasn’t one, or at least there hadn’t been until C. B. Whiting himself cut one a month earlier. While it seemed unlikely that so much junk—spent inner tubes, hubcaps, milk cartons, rusty cans, pieces of broken furniture and the like—could wash up on one spot naturally, the result of currents and eddies, there it was, so it must have. There was little alternative but to cart the trash off, which was done the same May the foundation of the house was being poured .
    Spring rains, a rising river and a bumper crop of voracious black flies delayed construction, but by late June the low frame of the sprawling hacienda was visible from across the river where C. B. Whiting kept tabs on its progress from his office on the top floor of the Whiting shirt factory. By the Fourth of July the weather had turned dry and hot, killing off the last of the black flies, and the shirtless, sunburned carpenters straddling the hacienda roof beams began to wrinkle their noses and regard one another suspiciously. What in the world was that smell?
    It was C. B. Whiting himself who discovered the bloated body of a large moose decomposing in the shallows, tangled among the roots of a stand of trees that had been spared by the bulldozer that they might provide shade and privacy from anyone on the Empire Falls side of the river who might be too curious about goings-on at the hacienda. Even more amazing than this carcass was another mound of trash, which, though smaller than its carted-off predecessor, was deposited in the same exact area where a spit of land jutted out into the river and created in its lee a stagnant, mosquito- and now moose-infested pool .
    The sight and smell of all this soggy, decomposing trash caused C. B. Whiting to consider the possibility that he had an enemy, and kneeling there on the bank of the river he scrolled back through his memory concerning the various men he, his father and his grandfather had managed to ruin in the natural course of business. The list was not short, but unless he’d forgotten someone, no one on it seemed the right sort. They were mostly small men of smaller means, men who might’ve shot him if the opportunity had presented itself—if, for instance, he’d wandered into their neighborhood tavern when they had a snoot full and happened to be armed. But this was a different quality of maliciousness. Somebody apparently believed that all the trash generated in Dexter County belonged on C. B. Whiting’s doorstep, and felt sufficient conviction to collect all that garbage (no pleasant task) and transport it there .
    Was the dead moose a coincidence? C.B. couldn’t decide. The animal had a bullet hole in its neck, which could mean any number of things. Perhaps whoever was dumping the trash had also shot the moose and left it there on purpose. Then again, the animal could conceivably have been shot elsewhere by a poacher; in fact, an entire family of poachers, the Mintys, lived in Empire Falls. Maybe the wounded animal had attempted to cross the river, tired in the attempt, and drowned, coming to rest below the hacienda .
    C. B. Whiting spent the rest of the afternoon on one knee only a few feet from the blasted moose, trying to deduce his enemy’s identity. Almost immediately a paper cup floated by and lodged between the hind legs of the moose. The next hour brought a supermarket bag, an empty, bobbing Coke bottle, a rusted-out oil can, a huge tangle of monofilament fishing line and, unless he was mistaken, a human placenta. All of it got tangled up with the reeking moose. From where C. B. Whiting knelt, he could just barely see one small section of the Iron Bridge, and in the next half hour he witnessed half a dozen people, in automobiles and afoot, toss things into the river as they crossed. In his mind he counted the number of bridges spanning the Knox upstream (eight), and the number of mills and factories and sundry small businesses that backed onto the water (dozens). He knew firsthand the temptation of dumping into the river after the sun went