The Last Supper by Charles McCarry

him staring at them again. As the minister started to read the lesson, Aaron stood up and interrupted.
    “ ‘I’ve got something to say to you,’ he said. Aaron opened the box and displayed the dead crows. He explained where he’d found the crows. He didn’t see a
flicker of belief on any face in the congregation. Aaron realized that these people, many of them relations, all of them men and women he’d known all his life, could not possibly believe him.
To believe that these were the crows that Joe had shot was to believe that Joe was innocent of the murder of John Parker. And to believe in Joe’s innocence was to confess that the town had
hanged the Indian by mistake—or perhaps by something worse than a mistake. They ignored Aaron and went on with their service.
    “The next Sunday, Aaron was back, sitting in his straight chair at the front of the church, wearing his barn clothes and his dirty boots, silent and accusing, staring at the worshippers in
the pews. He came back the following Sunday, and every Sunday after that for twenty years. After a while, only visitors and children asked who Aaron was, sitting up there with his eyes glittering.
The older people would tell the story, and that served to keep alive the memory of the hanging of Joe. That seemed to be enough for Aaron, though he never really made another friend in Mahican.
    “A quarter of a century passed. Aaron took a wife, had children, grew gray. One January day, around dinner time, there came a knock at the door of the Harbor. Melody Stickles, Eleazer
Stickles’s wife, stood on the threshold. Aaron didn’t know her at first. He hadn’t seen her since she was a girl. She’d been the town beauty, and every boy in school,
including Aaron, had been in love with her when she was fourteen. But her family had been poor; her father had more or less sold her in marriage to Eleazer Stickles, a much older man. It was
remembered in the town that Melody had cried at her own wedding, walking down the aisle on the arm of her father—he’d worn a dirty shirt, buttoned at the neck, and wide galluses with a
red rose stuck in the buckle; no one ever left out that detail in telling the story, or how the tears flowed down Melody’s cheeks. She sobbed while speaking her marriage vows. After the
wedding, Melody’s father went right out and bought a pair of fast coach horses, and she went home with Eleazer.
    “On the day she called on Aaron at the Harbor, he hardly recognized her. He hadn’t seen her—no one had seen her, really—for twenty-five years. ‘Aaron,’ Melody
said, standing in the open door, ‘Eleazer wants you to come to the house. He’s on his deathbed.’
    “Eleazer Stickles’s ancestor had built a bigger house than was needful. Aaron had never been inside. What he saw when he did go through the door amazed him. Every room was stacked to
the ceiling with fifty years’ accumulation of junk. Boxes, newspapers, magazines, old horse collars, jars, bottles—Eleazer was a miser. In all his life, he’d never thrown a thing
away. He burned fallen twigs in the kitchen stove. Cats slept on the stove; it was lighted only to cook supper, and then not for very long.
    “Melody led Aaron along a footpath among these mountains of trash, and let him into a room where Eleazer lay in bed. He was covered with blankets, with a tanned horsehide thrown over the
top, hair side down. Still Eleazer shivered in his bed. It was below zero inside the house; the January wind howled in the eaves and bellowed down the cold chimneys. On the outside of the door of
this room, Aaron had noticed a heavy iron bolt, extending all the way across the panels. It was like a dungeon lock. There were iron bars on every window.
    “Eleazer, shuddering under his covers, peered at Aaron as he took in these details. ‘Curious, Aaron?’ he said.
    “ ‘About what, Eleazer?’
    “ ‘About them iron bars on the windows.’
    “Eleazer looked around for Melody, but she