Ghostly Tales by Russell Kirk

Author:Russell Kirk [Kirk, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pyrate Press

Fate's Purse

(1979)

"Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money."

—Acts VIII, 20, c. 75

Hour miles west of Bear City, Cubby Hasper splashed up the gravelly bed of Brownlee's Creek, casting for trout. Although swift, the creek was very shallow this dry summer. It was a re

mote spot, the woods of the Brownlee farmstead extending densely on either side of the stream. Cubby, thirteen years old, trusted that he wouldn't encounter old Fate Brownlee, who had a short way with trespassers. Fate! It was a funny name to have given a Brownlee baby — if one could imagine old Fate as a baby — but as the man had turned out, the name was suitable enough.

Rounding a bend, Cubby saw something curious. A small tractor somehow had nosed down the low bank into the

creek and stood there silent and un- moving, the clear water eddying round the fore part of it, as if the machine had given up the ghost. Cubby reeled in his line and made his way to the tractor. Then he perceived what turned him white and shaking all over.

Just under the surface of the fast- flowing water, shadowed by the branches of an ancient willow, a few feet beyond the tractor's nose, lay a man's face. Cubby almost had stepped upon the dead thing. It was old Fate Brownlee's face. Cubby screamed and turned and ran for home, falling into two or three creek-bed potholes on the way.

In the considered judgment of the coroner, Fate Brownlee's death, as an act of God, was a case for the judge of probate, not for the county prosecutor. Apparently the old miser had intended to cut yet more cords of firewood in preparation for winter — even though already there must have been a hundred cords stacked close beside his damp farmhouse, the earlier cut cords among them already fungi- covered and rotting to punk. As best the circumstances might be reconstructed, it seemed that Fate must have driven his rusty tractor along the woods trail to the creek, intending to cross the stream at his ford and fell dead elms on the far side; his chain saw had been hanging upon the tractor when his body was taken from the water.

At the creek, something must have happened to the tractor, the coroner speculated — one of its treads snagged on a dead water-logged branch, perhaps. Old Fate, presumably, had waded into the creek to clear the way. Then his tractor, its engine left running, must have begun to move again when Fate had freed the tread; or else the tractor may have slid down the bank, unexpectedly, so pinning Fate Brownlee to the creek bed, cruelly imprisoned under great weight nearly to his waist, but his head and arms and chest free to flounder in the stream.

It had been a hard way to go. For it appeared that Fate may have lain alive and conscious in the creek for some time — possibly for hours.

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