Mohawk

sure the whole world knew the kind of unnatural mother she was. One day her sister broke down completely and told her she must in God’s judgment be corrupt for such a terrible thing to have happened, and to be pursued so far. And the younger girl thought her sister must’ve been right, because she was never the same afterwards, not even when the man and the boy were gone. “I am unholy in God’s sight,” her older sister told her again and again during that last year.
    For months after he left, the swollen boy who made crazy sounds when he talked haunted her imagination, and she frequently expected him to reappear on the porch. Then came her sister’s death, which meant that he wouldn’t be coming back, thank God, but still she couldn’t forget him. Then, for a long time, things didn’t work out, first one thing and then another. Her mother was placed in a nursing home in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and waiting for her to die took years. And one day a letter came for her sister, who’d been dead for well over a decade, from the man who had brought the boy, and it said the boy had gotten into a mess and to come back if she wanted to. She tore the letter up anddidn’t bother answering, but it got her thinking about the swollen boy again, and wondering if he was still looking at God. She didn’t believe in God herself any more. Not since her mother and sister died, and she discovered that not believing didn’t make such a hell of a difference. So, a month after the letter came, she went to Mohawk to find out about the boy, who by then had been taken to Utica. People said a man named Harry Saunders had been his only friend, and since Harry was a decent enough man she got him to marry her. She saw the man Gaffney once or twice—he’d changed surprisingly little, and she would’ve recognized him anywhere—but she never let on who she was, or that she remembered him, or that over the years she had pieced it all together. Every Christmas she sent him a card with a message inside. “Unholy in the sight of God,” she scribbled every year, signing her dead sister’s name—the only retribution she allowed herself.
    Her story so confused people that some began to credit the protestations the girl who lived in the trailer had been making from the start, an awesomely ugly tale that no one save Randall’s lawyer had wanted to believe.
    From a reporter’s standpoint, the best ticket in town was Dallas Younger, father of the accused, who, it turned out, had a disarming presence on television. Without coaching, he would look right into the camera and talk as if to another human being. Before long a string of reporters were following him around as best they could, this despite the fact that he clearly knew nothing. He not only knew nothing about what hadhappened the night the Gaffneys died, but also knew next to nothing about his son. Either he never knew or had forgotten, among other things, the boy’s middle name, his birthday, his favorite subjects in school, how long he and Anne had been married when Randall came along. But if Dallas wasn’t a rich source of information, his ignorance on key points was thoroughly engaging, and one reporter, famous for his human-angle method, pronounced that what Dallas knew was the story. And what Dallas knew all about was Mohawk. He
was
Mohawk, “a backcountry prophet too unself-conscious to guess that his words and attitudes were a ringing indictment of his world.” In time this last assessment became received truth, but only after Dallas was interviewed on all the local stations, quoted in the major regional newspapers and offered a lucrative contract with an Albany advertising firm to promote a new line of hunting-wear. He hadn’t hunted once in his life, but according to the agency his carriage and rugged face “reeked” of the woods they’d never been in either.
    That Dallas could be counted on for copy was good, because during the month preceding the scheduled commencement of the trial, no reporter got a word out of the boy’s mother, an attractive woman who unfortunately didn’t photograph at all well. On camera her face looked harshly angular, and she made the photogs doubt their skill, briefly, before writing her off. And since she gave the reporters nothing to write, they had to make up what they didn’t know, and most of them suggested vaguely that she was a piece of the tragic puzzle of her son’s ruined life. One columnist suggested that “ice water