999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [205]
The state trooper whom Romero had asked for backup was part of the team. When Romero’s police chief and sergeant heard what had happened, they drove up from Santa Fe. By then the excavations had started, and the bodies were showing up. What was left of them, anyway, after their blood had been drained into the fields and they’d been cut into pieces.
“Good God, how many?” the state trooper exclaimed as more and more body parts, most in extreme stages of decay, were found under the fields.
“As long as Matthew can remember, it’s been happening,” Romero said. “His mother died giving him birth. She’s under one of the fields. The father died from a heart attack three years ago. They never told anybody. They just buried him out there someplace. Every year on the last average frost date, May fifteenth, they’ve sacrificed someone. Most of the time it was a homeless person, no one to be missed. But last year it was Susan Crowell and her fiancé. They had the bad luck of getting a flat tire right outside the farm. They walked down here and asked to use a phone. When John saw the out-of-state license plate …”
“But why?” the police chief asked in dismay as more body parts were discovered.
“To give life to the earth. That’s what the D. H. Lawrence story was about. The fertility of the earth and the passage of the seasons. I guess that’s as close as John was able to come to explaining to his victims why they had to die.”
“What about the shoes?” the police chief asked. “I don’t understand about the shoes.”
“Luke dropped them.”
“The fourth brother?”
“That’s right. He’s out there somewhere. He committed suicide.”
The police chief looked sick.
“Throughout the spring, until the vegetables were ready for sale, Luke drove back and forth from the farm to Santa Fe to sell moss rocks. Each day, he drove along Old Pecos Trail. Twice a day, he passed the Baptist church. He was as psychologically tortured as Matthew, but John never suspected how close he was to cracking. That church became Luke’s attempt for absolution. One day, he saw old shoes on the road next to the church.”
“You mean he didn’t drop the first ones?”
“No, they were somebody’s idea of a prank. But they gave him an idea. He saw them as a sign from God. Two years ago, he started dropping the shoes of the victims. They’d always been a problem. Clothes will decay readily enough. But shoes take a lot longer. John told him to throw them in the trash somewhere in Santa Fe. Luke couldn’t bring himself to do that any more than he could bring himself to go into the church and pray for his soul. But he could drop the shoes outside the church in the hopes that he’d be forgiven and that the family’s victims would be granted salvation.”
“And the next year, he dropped shoes with feet in them,” the sergeant said.
“John had no idea that he’d taken them. When he heard what had happened, he kept him a prisoner here. One morning, Luke broke out, went into one of the fields, knelt down, and slit his throat from ear to ear.”
The group became silent. In the background, amid a pile of upturned rich black soil, someone shouted that they’d found more body parts.
* * *
Romero was given paid sick leave. He saw a psychiatrist once a week for four years. On those occasions when people announced that they were vegetarians, he answered, “Yeah, I used to be one, but now I’m a carnivore.” Of course, he couldn’t subsist on meat alone. The human body required the vitamins and minerals that vegetables provided, and although Romero tried vitamin pills as a substitution, he found that he couldn’t do without the bulk that vegetables provided. So he grudgingly ate them, but never without thinking of those delicious, incredibly large, shiny, healthy-looking tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash, cabbage, beans, peas, carrots, and chard that the Parsons brothers had sold. Remembering what had fertilized