Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012

“You’re worse than a flake,” Sawyer kept on, “you’re a damn thief!”

Though Bartleby was bolted together as solid as a hot-water boiler, he was as easygoing as a carousel. But far as I knew, no one had ever called him a flake to his face before, and certainly not a thief. As I stood there feeling helpless, an amazing change came over the Village Collector: His neck thickened and his jaw extended and his chest puffed up like a grouse getting ready to mate. Catching his breath, he raised his hands slowly in front of his face and stared at them as if he hadn’t seen them in a long time. That was the first time I’d noticed how big and muscular they were, the blue veins popping out like rivers on a map.

The collector and the farmer stood two feet apart for half a minute, neither one of them blinking or budging or burping, the air so thick you could’ve bitten into it like a Granny Smith. At long last Bartleby lowered his hands to his sides and muttered, “I’m jess trying to tell you, Mr. Sawyer, that after your boy left I found the missing money on the floor — must’ve slipped off the table when I wudn’t looking.”

Sawyer’s chest seemed to deflate like a punctured inner tube. “Why the hell didn’t you say so ’fore?” But he couldn’t hide the relief in his voice. And why not? The farmer had stuck his head into the fiery furnace of Bartleby’s anger, and had quickly learned to respect the flake. Besides, fifteen dollars was a lot of money to him: All these farmers around here worked the soil not because they could scrape a decent living out of it, but because they were determined to spend all their days and nights with earth under their fingernails until they were buried in the stuff. Young Sawyer, who had dirt under his nails too, had his back pressed against the screen door.

To this day I can’t say if the farmer was bluffing because he was short on cash, or if his boy had been hard up for a few dollars to take his girlfriend to the movies over in the county seat. (A lad that age’ll do just about anything to impress a girl, one of the few things that hasn’t changed in the world they’ve twisted out of shape.) And it’s just as hard to say if Bartleby was backing down, or if he was just being kind to Sawyer. The lines between such matters, like the markings between properties in this part of the state, are always hard to stake out. All I know is I still haven’t managed to rid myself of that mental picture of Bartleby, intense on the edge of violence, puffy red hands dangling at his sides.

When the Village Collector didn’t show up at his job on Monday morning, Zack Cowley sent the Wesley boy over to Bartleby’s cottage. The boy went up and knocked and, when he got no answer, walked right in: The drawers of the wooden bureau were left open, and his shirts, pants, and socks were gone. Along with everything else he owned, which wasn’t much. It didn’t take long for folks to start repeating what had jumped out of Sawyer’s mouth — that Bartleby was a thief; a few of them seemed pleased with the notion he’d run off with the Village Dues. Nor did it change people’s minds after the dues were found, all counted out and recorded on a sheet of paper, in a cigar box in his refrigerator. More than once I found myself trying to straighten out the facts for my neighbors. But it didn’t do much good. Once a story gets told in a certain way, it keeps on going in that direction until folks get hold of another story they like better.