A divorce petition? Eviction notice? Car crash summons and complaint or notice of foreclosure? Harvard didn’t know. He was a civil process server and the content of the papers wasn’t any of his business. It was his job to hand the envelope to someone, politely state: “You have been served,” and, then, exit the scene. Sometimes, people were angry but mostly they just seemed stunned, as if their heart had skipped a beat or as if some strange, and, even, beautiful, landscape had just revealed itself before their eyes. On occasion, people asked questions. It wasn’t his job to answer questions.
Most of his work was within the seven-county Metro area. Travel beyond the Cities and their suburbs was rare. But this afternoon, Harvard found himself a hundred miles from the office, out in God’s Country, riding a rural highway to a village far from the Interstate. The fields hadn’t been planted yet and they were either harrowed to black furrows or still yellow and brown with stalks leftover from last Fall’s harvest. Signs along the right-of-way pointed to lonely churches concealed deep in the country, hidden by shelter belts and the brown islands of wood lots floating on the horizon. Towers equipped to auger grain into bins stood sentinel over farms. A metal roof over a hog house far away glinted in the sunlight like a strange, still lake.
Harvard was from the suburbs, neither city nor country, and the straight, flat roads and the distant horizons hung with mournful clouds were foreign to him. The air was bitter with the smell of pesticides and, then, sometimes sickly sweet with the stench of manure that trucks were spraying onto the fields. The slant of light was different from city and suburb. The space was open and intimidating and Harvard didn’t think that anything good could happen out here.
He found the village, built not along the highway, but next to the railroad tracks a half mile away. There was a Casey’s gas station advertising slices of pizza at the intersection leading into town. A couple of parallel streets lined with old brick storefronts comprised the business district. There was a bank carved with a facade like a miniature Greek temple, some pillars crowned with chiseled leaves embedded in the pale, limestone wall. Harvard parked his car apart from other vehicles, backing into the spot so that he could make a quick getaway. He entered the bank and asked a teller to direct him to the person that he had been instructed to serve. The man was sitting in a small office, fiddling with his computer. A framed print of pheasants in flight was on the wall. The man had weak eyes and wore slightly tinted glasses. Harvard knocked at the open door and, when the man answered, stepped into the room and handed him the envelope. When he was told that he had been served, the man asked: “What is this?” Harvard replied that he didn’t know. He didn’t want to turn his back to the man and so he edged out of the office and, then, glancing over his shoulder, hurried out onto the street to his car.
As he pulled onto Main Street, the man who had been served emerged from the bank, standing in the entrance between the pillars carved with wreaths at their tops. The man looked at Harvard, squinting in the sunlight behind the tinted lenses of his glasses. Harvard drove to the traffic light hanging over the intersection a block away. No one was following him. He stopped at the Casey’s on the county highway, bought some chips and a bottle of Mountain Dew and, then, started the trip back to the Cities. Reimbursable miles ticked away under his tires. The afternoon was bright and vast.
About eight miles from the freeway, Harvard saw a sign next to the road: Old Fort Gordon. The sign pointed down a gravel road. Harvard drove a quarter mile past the sign, but then made a u-turn and returned to the intersection that it marked. He wondered what Old Fort Gordon might be, considering that it wasn’t likely that he would be in this neck of the woods again and, so, he thought: “What do I have to lose?” He had no other appointments that afternoon and it was a Friday so he wasn’t in any particular hurry to get back to the office.
The gravel road thumped and rattled a little under his car. The road was on a low dike between swamps. The marshland was empty, little round pools of water fenced by cattails strewn across the bog. The prairie grass between the ponds was all flattened, crushed-down as if some great beast had rested on it. After a mile, Harvard came to a line of trees, bent and twisted around a meandering creek full of stagnant motionless water. No farmhouses were visible – apparently, the land was too wet to be productive. Beyond the stream, the road bent in a wide arc toward a two-story structure alone in a copse of trees. The field beyond the trees had been plowed and, at its black edge, there were several squat grain bins standing in the tall grass.
The structure was solidly built, irregular yellow fieldstone in limestone mortar. Wind-ruffled shingles covered the roof and there were several small square windows piercing the upper part of the building. A broad wooden door, painted green, was closed on one side of the building. Opposite to that opening, there was a man-sized door, held shut with a complicated-looking metal latch. A sign posted next to the door was engraved with letters explaining that this block-house-shaped structure was old Fort Gordon. The writing on the sign said that the fort had been built to shelter local families during the Indian wars, that the small square windows were rifle-ports, and that the broad door on the other side of the building was made to accommodate a Gatling gun.
Harvard was puzzled by the sign. He was a student of history and didn’t recall any Indian wars. In fact, the local tribes had been friendly to the White pioneers – at least, that’s what he recalled from his High School history book. Gatling guns weren’t used to fight Indians in any event. Harvard couldn’t recall any movie or TV show in which weapons of that kind had been deployed.
A complicated, spring-loaded latch held closed the man-door into the block-house. Harvard had never seen a latch of this sort, a hasp with double hooks. To his surprise, he was able to press open the latch and, with slight pressure, the heavy wooden door swung open on its hinges.
The inside of the stone building was cold and smelled of straw. Underfoot, the floor was hard, trampled dirt. Beams of wan light slanted into the shadow, rays entering through the gap between windows and window-frames. The place empty, heavy bare walls that seemed to lean inward. It was silent, like the chapel of some austere iconoclastic cult that eschewed all trappings of religion, even the most bare altar, celibate with respect to not only its priests but its adherents. Harvard touched the wall and felt the rocks embedded in the matrix of sandy, lime mortar. Above, a third of the blockhouse’s floor space was under a frail-looking wooden platform, ten feet above the floor, made from some tree-limbs whittled into posts supporting a lattice of old lathe. By design, it appeared that there was no ladder to reach the platform. Probably, the structure was incapable of supporting the weight of even one person. The sign outside said that as many as twenty families had sheltered in the fort’s second story. This seemed questionable to Harvard.
When he turned to leave the fort, Harvard found the door had swung shut and, apparently, latched. He pounded on the door but it didn’t budge. Then, he put his shoulder to the door, pushing as hard as he could. But the door didn’t open. He took a few steps back from the door and, then, hurled himself against it. The door was solid and he bounced off, falling to the floor.
For awhile, he surveyed his surroundings. The windows fourteen feet above the floor looked as if they could be forced open, but there was no way to reach them. From the inside the broader aperture for the hypothesized Gatling gun was barred with a steel brace. The little slits at chest level were shuttered with wood.
Harvard went to the door and pounded his fist against it. After a while, pain in his hand made pounding on the heavy door impossible. He leaned against the wall and felt the ancient chill from the walls spreading into his shoulders and back. He returned to the door and kicked at it until the one of his toes cracked and went sideways. Harvard buried his face in his wounded hands. He couldn’t see out of the stone structure and so had no way of knowing whether traffic was passing on the gravel road. It seemed unlikely, however, since the country lane didn’t seem to go anywhere in particular and most of the land for a mile around the structure was swamp. It didn’t seem prudent to scream for help. No one was around and crying out in that way would just sap his strength.
After awhile, the rays of sunlight entering around the windows were gone. The stone cell was dark and its walls were cold as the rock in a cave. Outside, Harvard heard the wind soughing in the bare oak trees. An animal shrieked as if in pain. Harvard thought of the settlers cowering in the barn. He fell asleep and dreamed that the cavalry had arrived to save the pioneers. When he awoke, he was very cold and shivering. He was wearing a light suit and dress shoes and his feet felt like they were frozen. Harvard found that he couldn’t get warm and he shivered so that his teeth clattered together.
Of course, one might think that the disappearance of a civil process server, a single man recently divorced, entrusted with important legal documents, might be a cause of concern and that search parties would be dispatched to find him. But no one noticed Harvard’s absence until almost a week had passed and, by then, it was far too late for him. Authorities interviewed the man with tinted sunglasses from the small-town bank, but he knew nothing about Harvard’s disappearance.
Two weeks later, when it was quite warm, a cub scout pack from the county seat came to old Fort Gordon. The den leader had volunteered the boys for some maintenance work at the fort. They picked up winter deadfall under the oak trees and stacked it to make a bonfire. Two of the kids pushed lawnmowers to cut the grass. It smelled bad around the stone building. The cub scout leader thought that this was because older kids came to the place sometimes to smoke dope – he had done that himself when he was younger – and sometimes they used the stone structure for a restroom. He fiddled with the latch and opened the door. Some of the boys ran up to the entrance curious to see what was inside.
“Don’t go in there,” the cub scout leader said with a catch in his voice.
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