I cleared my mind of such thoughts, telling myself it was enough for now that he was sleeping.
I had to make another visit to the well, and it would be best to do it alone. Our stripped bed seemed to shout murder. I went to the closet and studied her clothes. Women have so many, don’t they? Skirts and dresses and blouses and sweaters and underthings—some of the latter so complicated and strange a man can’t even tell which side is the front. To take them all would be a mistake, because the truck was still parked in the barn and the Model T under the elm. She had left on foot and taken only what she could carry. Why hadn’t she taken the T? Because I would have heard it start and stopped her going. That was believable enough. So . . . a single valise.
I packed it with what I thought a woman would need and what she could not bear to leave. I put in her few pieces of good jewelry and the gold-framed picture of her mama and poppa. I debated over the toiletries in the bathroom, and decided to leave everything except for her atomizer bottle of Florient perfume and her horn-backed brush. There was a Testament in her night table, given to her by Pastor Hawkins, but I had never seen her read it, and so left it where it was. But I took the bottle of iron pills, which she kept for her monthlies.
Henry was still sleeping, but now tossing from side to side as if in the grip of bad dreams. I hurried about my business as quickly as I could, wanting to be in the house when he woke up. I went around the barn to the well, put the valise down, and lifted the splintery old cap for the third time.
Thank God Henry wasn’t with me. Thank God he didn’t see what I saw. I think it would have driven him insane. It almost drove me insane.
The mattress had been shunted aside. My first thought was that she had pushed it away before trying to climb out. Because she was still alive. She was breathing. Or so it seemed to me at first. Then, just as ratiocinative ability began to resurface through my initial shock—when I began to ask myself what sort of breathing might cause a woman’s dress to rise and fall not just at the bosom but all the way from neckline to hem—her jaw began to move, as if she were struggling to talk. It was not words that emerged from her greatly enlarged mouth, however, but the rat which had been chewing on the delicacy of her tongue. Its tail appeared first. Then her lower jaw yawned wider as it backed out, the claws on its back feet digging into her chin for purchase.
The rat plopped into her lap, and when it did, a great flood of its brothers and sisters poured out from under her dress. One had something white caught in its whiskers—a fragment of her slip, or perhaps her skimmies. I chucked the valise at them. I didn’t think about it—my mind was roaring with revulsion and horror—but just did it. It landed on her legs. Most of the rodents—perhaps all—avoided it nimbly enough. Then they streamed into a round black hole that the mattress (which they must have pushed aside through sheer weight of numbers) had covered, and were gone in a trice. I knew well enough what that hole was; the
mouth of the pipe that had supplied water to the troughs in the barn until the water level sank too low and rendered it useless.
Her dress collapsed around her. The counterfeit breathing stopped. But she was
staring
at me, and what had seemed a clown’s grin now looked like a gorgon’s glare. I could see rat-bites on her cheeks, and one of her earlobes was gone.
“Dear God,” I whispered. “Arlette, I’m so sorry.”
Your apology is not accepted,
her glare seemed to say.
And when they find me like this, with rat-bites on my dead face and the underwear beneath my dress chewed away, you’ll ride the lightning over in Lincoln for sure. And mine will be the last face you see. You’ll see me when the electricity fries your liver and sets fire to your heart, and I’ll be grinning.
I lowered the cap and staggered to the barn. There my legs betrayed me, and if I’d been in the sun, I surely would have passed out the way Henry had the night before. But I was in the shade, and after I sat for five minutes with my head lowered almost to my knees, I began to feel myself again. The rats had gotten to her—so what? Don’t they get to all of us in the end? The rats and bugs? Sooner or later even the stoutest coffin must collapse and let in life to feed on death. It’s the way of the world, and what did it matter? When the heart stops and the brain asphyxiates, our spirits either go somewhere else, or simply wink out. Either way, we aren’t there to feel the gnawing as our flesh is eaten from our bones.
I started for the house and had reached the porch
steps before a thought stopped me: what about the twitch? What if she had been alive when I threw her into the well? What if she had
still
been alive, paralyzed, unable to move so much as one of her slashed fingers, when the rats came out of the pipe and began their depredations? What if she had felt the one that had squirmed into her conveniently enlarged mouth and began to—!
“No,” I whispered. “She didn’t feel it because she didn’t twitch. Never did. She was dead when I threw her in.”
“Poppa?” Henry called in a sleep-muzzy voice. “Pop, is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Who are you talking to?”
“No one. Myself.”
I went in. He was sitting at the kitchen table in his singlet and undershorts, looking dazed and unhappy. His hair, standing up in cowlicks, reminded me of the tyke he had once been, laughing and chasing the chickens around the dooryard with his hound dog Boo (long dead by that summer) at his heels.
“I wish we hadn’t done it,” he said as I sat down opposite him.
“Done is done and can’t be undone,” I said. “How many times have I told you that, boy?”
“’Bout a million.” He lowered his head for a few moments, then looked up at me. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. “Are we going to be caught? Are we going to jail? Or . . .”
“No. I’ve got a plan.”
“You had a plan that it wouldn’t hurt her! Look how
that
turned out!”
My hand itched to slap him for that, so I held it down with the other. This was not the time for recriminations. Besides, he was right. Everything that had gone wrong was my fault.
Except for the rats,
I thought.
They are not my fault
. But they were. Of course they were. If not for me, she would have been at the stove, putting on supper. Probably going on and on about those 100 acres, yes, but alive and well instead of
in
the well.
The rats are probably back already,
a voice deep in my mind whispered.
Eating her. They’ll finish the good parts, the tasty parts, the
delicacies,
and then . . .
Henry reached across the table to touch my knotted hands. I started.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re in it together.”
I loved him for that.
“We’re going to be all right, Hank; if we keep our heads, we’ll be fine. Now listen to me.”
He listened. At some point he began to nod. When I finished, he asked me one question: when were we going to fill in the well?
“Not yet,” I said.
“Isn’t that risky?”
“Yes,” I said.
* * *
Two days later, while I was mending a piece of fence about a quarter-mile from the farm, I saw a large cloud of dust boiling down our road from the Omaha-Lincoln Highway. We were about to have a visit from the world that Arlette had so badly
wanted to be a part of. I walked back to the house with my hammer tucked into a belt loop and my carpenter’s apron around my waist, its long pouch full of jingling nails. Henry was not in view. Perhaps he’d gone down to the spring to bathe; perhaps he was in his room, sleeping.
By the time I got to the dooryard and sat on the chopping block, I had recognized the vehicle pulling the rooster-tail: Lars Olsen’s Red Baby delivery truck. Lars was the Hemingford Home blacksmith and village milkman. He would also, for a price, serve as a kind of chauffeur, and it was that function he was fulfilling on this June afternoon. The truck pulled into the dooryard, putting George, our bad-tempered rooster, and his little harem of chickens to flight. Before the motor had even finished coughing itself to death, a portly man wrapped in a flapping gray duster got out on the passenger side. He pulled off his goggles to reveal large (and comical) white circles around his eyes.
“Wilfred James?”
“At your service,” I said, getting up. I felt calm enough. I might have felt less so if he’d come out in the county Ford with the star on the side. “You are—?”
“Andrew Lester,” he said. “Attorney-at-law.”
He put his hand out. I considered it.
“Before I shake that, you’d better tell me whose lawyer you are, Mr. Lester.”
“I’m currently being retained by the Farrington Livestock Company of Chicago, Omaha, and Des Moines.”
Yes,
I thought,
I’ve no doubt. But I’ll bet your name isn’t even on the door. The big boys back in Omaha don’t have to eat country dust to pay for their daily bread, do they? The big boys have got their feet up on their desks, drinking coffee and admiring the pretty ankles of their secretaries.
I said, “In that case, sir, why don’t you just go on and put that hand away? No offense.”
He did just that, and with a lawyer’s smile. Sweat was cutting clean lines down his chubby cheeks, and his hair was all matted and tangled from the ride. I walked past him to Lars, who had thrown up the wing over his engine and was fiddling with something inside. He was whistling and sounded just as happy as a bird on a wire. I envied him that. I thought Henry and I might have another happy day—in a world as varied as this one, anything is possible—but it would not be in the summer of 1922. Or the fall.
I shook Lars’s hand and asked how he was.
“Tolerable fair,” he said, “but dry. I could use a drink.”
I nodded toward the east side of the house. “You know where it is.”
“I do,” he said, slamming down the wing with a metallic clatter that sent the chickens, who’d been creeping back, into flight once more. “Sweet and cold as ever, I guess?”
“I’d say so,” I agreed, thinking:
But if you could still pump from that other well, Lars, I don’t think you’d care for the taste at all.
“Try it and see.”
He started around to the shady side of the house
where the outside pump stood in its little shelter. Mr. Lester watched him go, then turned back to me. He had unbuttoned his duster. The suit beneath would need dry-cleaning when he got back to Lincoln, Omaha, Deland, or wherever he hung his hat when he wasn’t doing Cole Farrington’s business.
“I could use a drink myself, Mr. James.”
“Me, too. Nailing fence is hot work.” I looked him up and down. “Not as hot as riding twenty miles in Lars’s truck, though, I’ll bet.”
He rubbed his butt and smiled his lawyer’s smile. This time it had a touch of rue in it. I could see his eyes already flicking here, there, and everywhere. It would not do to sell this man short just because he’d been ordered to rattle twenty miles out into the country on a hot summer’s day. “My sit-upon may never be the same.”
There was a dipper chained to the side of the little shelter. Lars pumped it full, drank it down with his Adam’s apple rising and falling in his scrawny, sunburned neck, then filled it again and offered it to Lester, who looked at it as doubtfully as I’d looked at his outstretched hand. “Perhaps we could drink it inside, Mr. James. It would be a little cooler.”
“It would,” I agreed, “but I’d no more invite you inside than I’d shake your hand.”
Lars Olsen saw how the wind was blowing and wasted no time going back to his truck. But he handed the dipper to Lester first. My visitor didn’t drink in gulps, as Lars had, but in fastidious sips. Like a lawyer, in other words—but he didn’t stop until the dipper was empty, and that
was also like a lawyer. The screen door slammed and Henry came out of the house in his overalls and bare feet. He gave us a glance that seemed utterly disinterested—good boy!—and then went where any red-blooded country lad would have gone: to watch Lars work on his truck, and, if he were lucky, to learn something.
I sat down on the woodpile we kept under a swatch of canvas on this side of the house. “I imagine you’re out here on business. My wife’s.”
“I am.”
“Well, you’ve had your drink, so we better get down to it. I’ve still got a full day’s work ahead of me, and it’s three in the afternoon.”
“Sunrise to sunset. Farming’s a hard life.” He sighed as if he knew.
“It is, and a difficult wife can make it even harder. She sent you, I suppose, but I don’t know why—if it was just some legal paperwork, I reckon a sheriff’s deputy would have come out and served it on me.”
He looked at me in surprise. “Your wife didn’t send me, Mr. James. In point of fact, I came out here to look for
her
.”
It was like a play, and this was my cue to look puzzled. Then to chuckle, because chuckling came next in the stage directions. “That just proves it.”
“Proves what?”
“When I was a boy in Fordyce, we had a neighbor—a nasty old rip name of Bradlee. Everyone called him Pop Bradlee.”
“Mr. James—”
“My father had to do business with him from
time to time, and sometimes he took me with him. Back in the buckboard days, this was. Seed corn was what their trading was mostly about, at least in the spring, but sometimes they also swapped tools. There was no mail-order back then, and a good tool might circle the whole county before it got back home.”
“Mr. James, I hardly see the rel—”
“And every time we went to see that old fellow, my mama told me to plug my ears, because every other word that came out of Pop Bradlee’s mouth was a cuss or something filthy.” In a sour sort of way, I was starting to enjoy this. “So naturally I listened all the harder. I remember that one of Pop’s favorite sayings was ‘Never mount a mare without a bridle, because you can never tell which way a bitch will run.’”
“Am I supposed to understand that?”
“Which way do you suppose
my
bitch ran, Mr. Lester?”
“Are you telling me your wife has . . . ?”