Keeping Silence  By Claudia Mundell

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood…Henry David Thoreau

Darcy dashed in from the garage and set a bag of groceries on the counter. “Skip, I’m so glad you are home.” Ignoring the milk and eggs she rushed into a monologue while her husband peeled potatoes for a cast iron skillet heating on the stove. “You know I have been working on this special issue for the paper…digging up old stories about Kansas City gangsters of the twenties…I thought it old hat at first, but you will never guess, what I ran into today. Have you ever heard of Butch and Patty Candela, bank robbers? They started…”

“Whoa, there Cubby.  Take a breath, come up for air,” Skip said. “No kiss, no hello, no ‘gee, thanks for starting supper, lover boy’ for this hardworking cop?”

She winced at the goofy term Skip had been calling her since she had started writing articles for the paper a few months ago. She wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think anyone was referred to as a cub reporter anymore. She pulled the leather purse strap off her shoulder and hung it next to the holstered revolver hanging on the coat tree in the hall, the temporary resting place for the gun and Skip’s blue officer’s cap. He must have arrived home only shortly before she did.

Returning to empty the canvas shopping bag, Darcy retrieved eggs and then leaned in to give Skip a quick kiss before stealing a sip from his wine glass near the sink. “Sorry. But you are not going to believe what I learned today and what I am on to.”

Skip poured the sliced Russets into hot grease and the salted and peppered the skillet. Reaching for another skillet, he pointed to the eggs. Darcy shook her head meaning she would handle them. Cracking the shells one-handed, she stepped when grease popped as if excited to see the yellow yolks.

Shortly the couple sat down to freshened wine glasses and a simple supper of potato and eggs, their favorite at the end of long work day. “Now, start from the beginning and tell me your story,” said Skip.

“My editor has me digging in the archives for something we can do on gangsters of Kansas City. Readers are always interested in Mafia type stories, but they can be old hat. Smitty wants something really different and intriguing if I can find it. So I am digging around and find a small clipping on the Candela’s, bank robbers that were like a Bonnie and Clyde team. But not many have heard of them. They started in Nebraska but robbed banks all the way to Oklahoma, choosing smaller banks that were ignored by the more infamous names at the time.”

“Okay,” Skipped offered slowly. “I have never heard of them but what makes them different or newsy worthy now?”

“They robbed a small Midwest Heritage Bank in Kansas City in 1936, and your brothers in blue gave them chase close on their heels. I guess crime was quiet that season, and the police were determined to get their man—and woman—this time. They followed them over to Topeka where they headed south. Going to the mine fields in the corner of Kansas is my guess, but the law lost them… but not before shooting up the car pretty badly, maybe even hitting Patty.”

“Cubby, you are losing me. If they escaped, where is the story?”

“My grandparents lived in that corner of Kansas. Could have been in the path of Butch and his babe, ya think?” Darcy sipped her wine and continued quickly. “Remember that old car carcass out in the north forty, near the long forgotten pond? What if it was a gangster’s car?”

“That is way too much of a stretch, Darcy. Lots of old junk cars around and you have no leads to draw that connection.”

“But..,” she cooed and rubbed her now shoeless toes up and down Skip’s calf, “…you always say a good cop leaves no stone unturned. What if? Huh? Maybe that is the Candela car itself. I have already called Mom to quiz her, but she knows nothing as it is dad’s family farm. Since Dad is dead, I’ll have to bring it up with my relatives. Want to take a trip?”

“Ah, I do have some time off next week and I’d agree to most anything if you would take a trip upstairs with me now.” Skip stood and offered Darcy his hand that she eagerly took while setting aside thoughts of a bank robber’s car for awhile.

The next Tuesday, Skip wove the compact in and out of traffic like a threaded darning needle. The city traffic faded as they hit the hills and vales on the Kansas side. Huge red combines threshed amber wheat and funneled the golden grains into waiting farm trucks. The July heat climbed steadily as the miles passed.

“So, Cubby, tell me what we have to go on that eliminates this from being a wild goose chase.”

Darcy began to read from her notes. “The outlaws were driving a 1936 light colored Chevy, maybe grayish, and after a serious shoot out six blocks from the bank, they escaped to the highway. One office thought he hit Patty on the passenger side when she went down and never was seen again while the car was in sight. Random thoughts were that the couple was heading south where known Italian family connections might live and also where they might catch Route 66 for a faster get away west.”

Darcy stopped reading and speculated, “The farm is west of this path, but they could have changed directions a bit. I know the stretch of 66 they were heading to. There is a rainbow bridge there, near Riverton or Baxter Springs. I can’t remember exactly which.”

“But look, Cubby, even if all this is true, what do you know about the car on the farm? It could be some relative’s junked jalopy they parked there in 1957. I don’t hear anything that connects the two. Didn’t you ever ask about it before now?”

“Sure, but we were always told to just leave it alone, that it was a family junk yard. And true there was a refrigerator and an old John Deer tractor tossed in the same low spot. Crops were planted giving the area wide berth. No one ever there and we kids were warned to never play there. Just accepted that I guess. If there is any family tradition associated with the car body, it is one of silence.”

Signs for the old frontier fort at Fort Scott began to appear on the roadsides. Darcy got quiet as she soaked up the familiar roads and markers like ponds and farms she once knew well. The miles clicked over on the odometer and Skip adjusted his sunglasses on his nose. “Next exit, right?”

The late afternoon sun had hours left to shine when the car pulled into the lane leading to a red brick farm house. A large collie joined the car at the gate keeping up the pace of the wheel all the way to the front door. Darcy’s Uncle Jim was already out on the porch. “Guess who?” he shouted back to Emma, his wife.

After a glass of lemonade and a brief catching up, Darcy asked, “We would like to see the old car carcass on the back forty if you don’t care.”

“Whatever for?”asked her aunt.

“I was always forbidden to play there, to investigate the car….”

Before she could say more, Skip interrupted, “Now that she is a newspaper gal, she investigates everything. Our trash, the neighbor’s doings, my wallet.” They all laughed, including Darcy at herself.

“Seriously, Uncle Jim, is there a story to that old car?”

“Not one I know of. Like you, I was warned to never get in the car, to leave it alone. Of course, it has set there and rusted and looks worse than when I was a kid. Never understood why Dad never sold it for junk or fixed it or whatever. Guess I never asked after I was hushed about it a few times.” Then he added, “We always just plowed around it and the rest of the junk pile. Now the renter does the same.”

The weeds were high but not so thick Darcy and Skip couldn’t navigate around the old car body. All the windows were gone, headlights out, fenders hanging loosely like ill fitting false teeth in an aged mouth. Skip managed to pull open the driver side door and whistled as he examined what appeared to be ancient blood stains under mounds of shattered glass. His professional eye went to work.

“Look at those bullet holes in the passenger door, could be old blood splats on the seat. I’d say someone took a hit sitting there. There are bullet holes in the back seat as well. Hum, you might be on to something here, Cubby.”

Darcy beamed. Her story had promise. There was enough her to concoct at least a suggestion of a story. She already had her camera out snapping pictures inside and out of the car. No tags were on the car and nothing in the glove box except an ancient lipstick tube, now empty. It read SAVAGE on the end. Darcy stuck the tube in her jeans pocket.

“Never figured to find an Italian bank robber associated with you Irish O’Briens. Maybe I should check the rest of the skeletons in your closet, Cubby. But how about doing in a cool motel room?” Skip asked while wiping summer sweat off his brow.

The next morning Darcy and Skip drove to the assisted living center where Colleen O’Brien lived. At 93, the O’Brien matriarch had outlived two sons, passed the farm to a third, and was still sharp as a tack mentally on most days. Memory was beginning to fail her some, and her legs dumped her like a tire swing pushed too high if she wasn’t careful.

Darcy arranged the Egg McMuffins, her Gran’s favorite, on the three placemats at the small oak table. Her Gran had made some Irish Breakfast tea that she was pouring into white ironstone mugs. They did small talk and then Gran wanted to know about their jobs. Once Darcy had explained her new job at the Kansas City Star, she jumped into questions about the car.

“Gran, I am doing a story on Butch and Patty Candela from the 30’s. Have you ever heard of them?”

Darcy noticed her grandmother’s skin, thin as parchment, turned a pallid shade of burned ashes. Her wrinkled hand, still wearing her wedding ring, went to her throat, but she did not speak until finally she said, “What do you know of the Candela’s, Darcy?”

“Well, I had never heard of them until I was digging in the archives. Then I read that they were bank robbers and that they headed this way escaping from Kansas City after a heist in 1936. My curiosity began to churn because they were driving a 1936 Chevy, the same model as sits in Grandpa’s north field.”

“You always were too smart for your own good, Darcy. Your daddy always suspected but he was smart enough not to ask. Now after all these years, you want to open this can of worms?”

“Gran, do you want to tell me?”

Colleen O’Brien looked out the tiny apartment’s window on a small man made lake built for residents at Shady Rest. Her eyes glazed and she slipped back to the years when a small natural pond surrounded by cottonwoods and cattails corner the north forty acres of their land. The pond had been shrinking while crops refused to grow in the dry fields. The drought, strangling farms and farmers,  hung on season after season like laundry on a line someone forgot to unpeg. If rain didn’t come soon, if a crop didn’t make, the land would be lost.

            She began to talk out loud. “The car was a light color, Quail Gray they called it. A new color. I saw it coming down the lane in the dusk and knew it meant trouble as no one we knew had such a nice car. Your grandpa met the man on the porch and recognized the lump of a gun under his left arm shoulder.

“My wife is hurt, and I need some help,” Butch had said that day.

“Your grandpa never missed a beat, told him I was a nurse, to bring the woman inside. He helped bring Patty in, and then looking at bullet holes all over the door, he said, “You’ll need to hide that car. Pull it down to that stand of cottonwoods, park it tight up on the west bank and no one will see it if’n they come around.”

“Butch and I put Patty on the kitchen table, and I became to dig out a bullet in her shoulder. She was tough, took it well. I packed the wound, found her some good Irish whiskey, and made a supper for all of us. Couldn’t have asked for more polite guests, but I wanted them gone, that is for sure.”

“Lou, your grandpa, suggested we all get some rest for a few hours, but Butch was nervous about that before agreeing. About three in the morning, Lou got our farm truck out and pulled it to the front yard. I helped Patty with a fresh dressing and one of my nicer dresses that didn’t have a bullet hole in it. Patty thanked me and left me a jar of Lily Pons and a tube of Savage lipstick on my dresser.”

“Butch wouldn’t take our truck, insisted Lou drive him aways and then bring the truck back or we might be implicated as accomplices. I didn’t want to see Lou drive out with those bank robbers, but he assured me if he didn’t, they could kill us both. So I waited. I waited until afternoon before I heard that beat up truck rumble into the barn.

I met Lou between the barn and garden. He put his arms around me and said, ‘We don’t mention this ever again. We don’t know how the car got there and we don’t even know that car is there!’” Colleen took a deep breath and continued.

“We went back in the house and no one ever showed up for any reason about the car. We heard that the Candela’s had stolen a school teacher’s car in Weir, and then doubled back to Nebraska somehow.  It was probably six months later that a package with no return address arrived in the mail. Lou took off the brown paper and inside was a cigar box was $500 in small bills. No note or explanation, but in between the bills was a tube of Savage lipstick, Jungle Red was the color. Two years later, the newspapers reported both were shot dead while robbing a bank north of Kansas City, near Kearny.”

Darcy saw that her Gran’s gaze was still focused on the pond out the window, but her eyes were filling with tears. Her Gran added, “The story here is not about bank robbers, Darcy, but about your grandpa’s keeping us alive in those Thirties.

Your grandpa never did anything wrong, illegal, or hurtful in his life other than keep his silence. That night he kept us alive, kept those folks alive, and when that money came in a box, it helped us not loose the farm.”

            “Don’t worry Gran. I think I can keep Grandpa’s silence too.” Darcy looked up at her police officer husband.

“Me too, Cubby. Some things are best left unsaid, and I don’t see any crime here.”

Darcy took the lipstick tube she had found yesterday in the rusted car and slipped it into her grandmother’s palm. She continued to grasp the old woman’s hand long after was necessary.