He was refused again, and the exchange escalated, until the newspapermen observed Milo—with an unholy look in his eye—carrying the chaperone out of the dormitory, across a manicured yard, and down a gentle hill, to dump her with a noisy splash into a convenient willow-shrouded golf pond.
This proved controversial. Milo was fined by local authorities and excused from his law school for the space of one year. He took work as a grave digger at the Blue Creek Cemetery.
Suzie, visiting her beloved in the graveyard one summer lunchtime, only remarked, “I’d have thrown that old pea-wit in the pond myself back in September, if I wasn’t afraid of hurting the ducks.”
Then she gave him a kiss, there between two open graves. A good kiss, too. The kind it’s nice to give—deliciously, thrillingly so!—but not at all polite to talk about.
—
They came back as a couple who met in Paris between wars. Milo had a movie camera, and she had a brace of performing birds.
They made movies together. Little short films. Jerky black-and-white movies like tiny whirring storms. A girl with a flower cart, sped up until she seemed to dance on frenzied strings. A man getting beaten up by street children. A fat woman disrobing. They filmed her husband and his wife. Almost always, it was something a bit grotesque.
Her birds performing.
People reacting to a fake spider.
Opium addicts sleeping, with rats crawling and sniffing among them.
Two midgets sharing a wheelchair.
One time they filmed an entire rainstorm, beginning to end, with puddles and people hurrying and lightning reflected in shop windows.
They filmed themselves walking away, down the street, past a cat, past a man with a guitar, farther away, receding until someone—a fleet and criminal shadow—stole away with the camera.
BLUE CREEK, MICHIGAN, 1897
Suzie and Milo married. For a few years, they lived the life of a young, free couple with bright prospects. They hunted pheasant, quail, and wild turkeys, raising Irish setters to run and fetch. Suzie became the better shot, almost as if, when her finger found the trigger, something quiet and ancient moved in her.
The first two children—Charles and James—came as planned, with one year between, and then Edith, a surprise.
The same week Edith was born, Gerald Wedge, the Petoskey County prosecutor, handed Milo a capital case.
“Got to cut your milk teeth sometime,” Wedge told him.
A local businessman—Graydon Ornish—had found an intruder—Heinrick Mueller, a repeat offender—in his house and thrown him out. But he didn’t leave it at that. Ornish discovered where Mueller lived and burned his house down. Mueller and his wife both died.
The community—one part of it, anyway—wanted Ornish acquitted. They cried out that Ornish was a good man, defending himself against a recidivist who was no good to anybody.
“He would only have gone on robbing people,” insisted Ornish, “and maybe hurt someone.”
The community agreed, noisily. In Petoskey County, in those days, as in many other places, the local courts often bowed to public opinion.
Milo, however, knew his own mind and conscience.
“The law has to prevail here,” he declared to a belligerent courtroom, to an uncertain jury, “not the way we feel about it. We aren’t here to discuss what Mr. Mueller is but what Mr. Ornish has done.”
Young as he was, Milo stood there like an old tree, with thick glasses and hawkish nose, and in later years more than one of the spectators would say it was as if a grown-up had appeared out of thin air in a room full of foolish children.
Ornish went to the gallows.
Milo attended the hanging, which unfolded in its own dreamlike pocket of time, from the creak of the lever to the twitching and the dribbling of urine on the floor. It wounded him the way lightning will sometimes wound someone, on the inside.
Five years later, when Gerald Wedge died, the party men came to Milo and said that naturally he’d want to step in as acting prosecutor, and he surprised himself by saying, “No, fellows, thanks.”
He stopped being a prosecutor and became a defender.
“What happened?” Suzie wanted to know.
What had happened was that Milo had had a powerful dream. He had a lot of powerful dreams. They both did.
“I dreamed,” Milo explained, “that I lived in South Africa, in a village, and that I committed a terrible crime. I hurt someone and took his money. But I wasn’t punished.”
“You weren’t caught?” Suzie guessed.
“I was caught right away. But in this particular village, when someone did something destructive, they gathered around him or her in a circle and told stories of all the good things he had done in his life. Hardly anyone ever committed a second crime. We need something like that here. Something besides punishments that only make people worse.”
Suzie would always remember that evening, always remember him sitting sideways at his rolltop desk, one elbow at rest among papers, glasses perched on his forehead, hawkish nose dividing his face into light and shadow.
They were quiet together for a while.
“This may be a bad time to mention,” she said, kissing his forehead, “that I want to open a gun shop.”
—
Milo and Suzie were born again and again, and sometimes their life together didn’t go as they might have hoped. In one lifetime, they had planned to get married when they graduated from high school, but Suzie had a seizure while swimming in a pond and drowned before she turned seventeen.
Her headstone was one of the new kind: engraved polished marble. It would last. It would pass through time like an arrow.
For years after, Milo was like a piece of wood, splintering apart from inside. But he slowly got moving again and worked and grew gardens and owned cars and let the years pass. He kept her picture on his wall until it had been there for fifty years.
Suzie’s headstone lived up to the hype; fifty years later, it might as well have been new.
In the last summer of his own life, Milo planted a garden that grew to surround the house, nearly seventy yards of radishes, carrots, and beans, with marigolds to keep the rabbits out. Sad stories grew up around him like weeds.
BLUE CREEK, MICHIGAN, 1932
Thirty years went by.
Suzie and Milo built a new house above the country-club golf course and raised the children in it. Unbelievably soon, the house wasn’t new anymore. Empty spaces opened up: when Charles went off to Dartmouth, and when James went to U of M, and Edith went to Miami, down in Ohio.
And Milo stepped back from his project, his three-decade project, which was a diversion program for kids who broke the law, sending them to classes instead of vomiting them into the jails. He took stock of it all and, like a good wise man, knew when to step aside.
Suzie, by contrast, had bought the whole building above and around her gun shop. Hunters all over the world were proud to own Falkner rifles. She brought in way more money than Milo ever had.