“Absconded, Mr. Lester. Decamped. Took French leave. Did a midnight flit. As an avid reader and student of American slang, such terms occur naturally to me. Lars, however—and most other town folks—will just say ‘She run off and left him’ when the word gets around. Or him and the boy, in this case. I naturally thought she would have gone to her hog-fancying friends at the Farrington Company, and the next I heard from her would have been a notice that she was selling her father’s acreage.”
“As she means to do.”
“Has she signed it over yet? Because I guess I’d have to go to law, if she has.”
“As a matter of fact, she hasn’t. But when she does, I would advise you against the expense of a legal action you would surely lose.”
I stood up. One of my overall straps had fallen off my shoulder, and I hooked it back into place with a thumb. “Well, since she’s not here, it’s what the legal profession calls ‘a moot question,’ wouldn’t you say? I’d look in Omaha, if I were you.” I smiled. “Or Saint Louis. She was
always
talking about Sain’-Loo. It sounds to me as if she got as tired of you fellows as she did of me and the son she gave birth to. Said good riddance to bad rubbish. A plague on both your houses. That’s Shakespeare, by the way.
Romeo and Juliet
. A play about love.”
“You’ll pardon me for saying, but all this seems very strange to me, Mr. James.” He had produced a silk handkerchief from a pocket inside his suit—I bet traveling lawyers like him have lots of pockets—and began to mop his face with it. His cheeks were now not just flushed but bright red. It wasn’t the heat of the day that had turned his face that color. “Very strange indeed, considering the amount of money my client is willing to pay for that piece of property, which is contiguous with Hemingford Stream and close to the Great Western rail line.”
“It’s going to take some getting used to on my part as well, but I have the advantage of you.”
“Yes?”
“I know her. I’m sure you and your
clients
thought
you had a deal all made, but Arlette James . . . let’s just say that nailing her down to something is like trying to nail jelly to the floor. We need to remember what Pop Bradlee said, Mr. Lester. Why, the man was a countrified genius.”
“Could I look in the house?”
I laughed again, and this time it wasn’t forced. The man had gall, I’ll give him that, and not wanting to go back empty-handed was understandable. He’d ridden twenty miles in a dusty truck with no doors, he had twenty more to bounce across before he got back to Hemingford City (and a train ride after that, no doubt), he had a sore ass, and the people who’d sent him out here weren’t going to be happy with his report when he finally got to the end of all that hard traveling. Poor feller!
“I’ll ask you one back: could you drop your pants so I could look at your goolie-bits?”
“I find that offensive.”
“I don’t blame you. Think of it as a . . . not a simile, that’s not right, but a kind of
parable
.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Well, you’ve got an hour back to the city to think it over—two, if Lars’s Red Baby throws a tire. And I can assure you, Mr. Lester, that if I
did
let you poke around through my house—my private place, my castle, my goolie-bits—you wouldn’t find my wife’s body in the closet or . . .” There was a terrible moment when I almost said
or down the well
. I felt sweat spring out on my forehead. “Or under the bed.”
“I never said—”
“Henry!” I called. “Come over here a minute!”
Henry came with his head down and his feet dragging in the dust. He looked worried, maybe even guilty, but that was all right. “Yes, sir?”
“Tell this man where’s your mama.”
“I don’t know. When you called me to breakfast Friday morning, she was gone. Packed and gone.”
Lester was looking at him keenly. “Son, is that the truth?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The whole truth and nothing
but
the truth, so help you God?”
“Poppa, can I go back in the house? I’ve got schoolwork to make up from being sick.”
“Go on, then,” I said, “but don’t be slow. Remember, it’s your turn to milk.”
“Yes, sir.”
He trudged up the steps and inside. Lester watched him go, then turned back to me. “There’s more here than meets the eye.”
“I see you wear no wedding ring, Mr. Lester. If there comes a time when you’ve worn one as long as I have, you’ll know that in families, there always is. And you’ll know something else as well: you can never tell which way a bitch will run.”
He got up. “This isn’t finished.”
“It is,” I said. Knowing it wasn’t. But if things went all right, we were closer to the end than we had been.
If
.
He started across the dooryard, then turned back. He used his silk handkerchief to mop off his face again, then said, “If you think those 100
acres are yours just because you’ve scared your wife away . . . sent her packing to her aunt in Des Moines or a sister in Minnesota—”
“Check Omaha,” I said, smiling. “Or Sain’-Loo. She had no use for her relations, but she was crazy about the idea of living in Sain’-Loo. God knows why.”
“If you think you’ll plant and harvest out there, you’d better think again. That land’s not yours. If you so much as drop a seed there, you will be seeing me in court.”
I said, “I’m sure you’ll hear from her as soon as she gets a bad case of broke-itis.”
What I wanted to say was,
No, it’s not mine . . . but it’s not yours, either. It’s just going to sit there. And that’s all right, because it
will
be mine in seven years, when I go to court to have her declared legally dead. I can wait. Seven years without smelling pigshit when the wind’s out of the west? Seven years without hearing the screams of dying hogs (so much like the screams of a dying woman) or seeing their intestines float down a creek that’s red with blood? That sounds like an excellent seven years to me.
“Have yourself a fine day, Mr. Lester, and mind the sun going back. It gets pretty fierce in the late afternoon, and it’ll be right in your face.”
He got into the truck without replying. Lars waved to me and Lester snapped at him. Lars gave him a look that might have meant
Snap and yap all you want, it’s still twenty miles back to Hemingford City
.
When they were gone except for the rooster-tail of dust Henry came back out on the porch. “Did I do it right, Poppa?”
I took his wrist, gave it a squeeze, and pretended not to feel the flesh tighten momentarily under my hand, as if he had to override an impulse to pull away. “Just right. Perfect.”
“Are we going to fill in the well tomorrow?”
I thought about this carefully, because our lives might depend on what I decided. Sheriff Jones was getting on in years and up in pounds. He wasn’t lazy, but it was hard to get him moving without a good reason. Lester would eventually convince Jones to come out here, but probably not until Lester got one of Cole Farrington’s two hell-for-leather sons to call and remind the sheriff what company was the biggest taxpayer in Hemingford County (not to mention the neighboring counties of Clay, Fillmore, York, and Seward). Still, I thought we had at least two days.
“Not tomorrow,” I said. “The day after.”
“Poppa,
why
?”
“Because the High Sheriff will be out here, and Sheriff Jones is old but not stupid. A filled-in well might make him suspicious about
why
it got filled in, so recent and all. But one that’s still
being
filled in . . . and for a good reason . . .”
“What reason? Tell me!”
“Soon,” I said. “Soon.”
* * *
All the next day we waited to see dust boiling toward us down our road, not being pulled by Lars Olsen’s truck but by the County Sheriff’s car. It didn’t come. What came was Shannon Cotterie, looking pretty in a cotton blouse and gingham
skirt, to ask if Henry was all right, and could he take supper with her and her mama and her poppa if he was?
Henry said he was fine, and I watched them go up the road, hand-in-hand, with deep misgivings. He was keeping a terrible secret, and terrible secrets are heavy. Wanting to share them is the most natural thing in the world. And he loved the girl (or thought he did, which comes to the same when you’re just going on 15). To make things worse, he had a lie to tell, and she might know it was a lie. They say that loving eyes can never see, but that’s a fool’s axiom. Sometimes they see too much.
I hoed in the garden (pulling up more peas than weeds), then sat on the porch, smoking a pipe and waiting for him to come back. Just before moon-rise, he did. His head was down, his shoulders were slumped, and he was trudging rather than walking. I hated to see him that way, but I was still relieved. If he had shared his secret—or even part of it—he wouldn’t have been walking like that. If he’d shared his secret, he might not have come back at all.
“You told it the way we decided?” I asked him when he sat down.
“The way
you
decided. Yes.”
“And she promised not to tell her folks?”
“Yes.”
“But will she?”
He sighed. “Probably, yes. She loves them and they love her. They’ll see something in her face, I reckon, and get it out of her. And even if they
don’t, she’ll probably tell the Sheriff. If he bothers to talk to the Cotteries at all, that is.”
“Lester will see that he does. He’ll bark at Sheriff Jones because his bosses in Omaha are barking at him. Round and round it goes, and where it stops, nobody knows.”
“We never should have done it.” He considered, then said it again in a fierce whisper.
I said nothing. For awhile, neither did he. We watched the moon rise out of the corn, red and pregnant.
“Poppa? Can I have a glass of beer?”
I looked at him, surprised and not surprised. Then I went inside and poured us each a glass of beer. I gave one to him and said, “None of this tomorrow or the day after, mind.”
“No.” He sipped, grimaced, then sipped again. “I hated lying to Shan, Poppa. Everything about this is dirty.”
“Dirt washes off.”
“Not this kind,” he said, and took another sip. This time he didn’t grimace.
A little while later, after the moon had gone to silver, I stepped around to use the privy, and to listen to the corn and the night breeze tell each other the old secrets of the earth. When I got back to the porch, Henry was gone. His glass of beer stood half-finished on the railing by the steps. Then I heard him in the barn, saying “Soo, Boss. Soo.”
I went out to see. He had his arms around Elphis’s neck and was stroking her. I believe he was crying. I watched for awhile, but in the end said
nothing. I went back to the house, undressed, and lay down in the bed where I’d cut my wife’s throat. It was a long time before I went to sleep. And if you don’t understand why—
all
the reasons why—then reading this is of no use to you.
* * *
I had named all our cows after minor Greek goddesses, but Elphis turned out to be either a bad choice or an ironic joke. In case you don’t remember the story of how evil came to our sad old world, let me refresh you: all the bad things flew out when Pandora gave in to her curiosity and opened the jar that had been left in her keeping. The only thing that remained when she regained enough wits to put the lid back on was Elphis, the goddess of hope. But in that summer of 1922, there was no hope left for our Elphis. She was old and cranky, no longer gave much milk, and we’d all but given up trying to get what little she had; as soon as you sat down on the stool, she’d try to kick you. We should have converted her into comestibles a year before, but I balked at the cost of having Harlan Cotterie butcher her, and I was no good at slaughtering much beyond hogs . . . a self-assessment with which you, Reader, must now surely agree.
“And she’d be tough,” Arlette (who had shown a sneaking affection for Elphis, perhaps because she was never the one to milk her) said. “Better leave well enough alone.” But now we had a use for Elphis—
in
the well, as it so happened—and her death might serve an end far more useful than a few stringy cuts of meat.
Two days after Lester’s visit, my son and I put a nose-halter on her and led her around the side of the barn. Halfway to the well, Henry stopped. His eyes shone with dismay. “Poppa! I
smell
her!”
“Go into the house then, and get some cotton balls for your nose. They’re on her dresser.”
Although his head was lowered, I saw the sidelong glance he shot me as he went.
This is all your fault,
that look said.
All your fault because you couldn’t let go.
Yet I had no doubt that he would help me do the work that lay ahead. Whatever he now thought of me, there was a girl in the picture as well, and he didn’t want her to know what he had done. I had forced him to it, but she would never understand that.
We led Elphis to the well-cap, where she quite reasonably balked. We went around to the far side, holding the halter-strings like ribbons in a Maypole dance, and hauled her out onto the rotted wood by main force. The cap cracked beneath her weight . . . bowed down . . . but held. The old cow stood on it, head lowered, looking as stupid and as stubborn as ever, showing the greenish-yellow rudiments of her teeth.
“What now?” Henry asked.
I started to say I didn’t know, and that was when the well-cap broke in two with a loud and brittle snap. We held onto the halter-strings, although I thought for a moment I was going to be dragged into that damned well with two dislocated arms. Then the nose-rig ripped free and flew back up. It
was split down both the sides. Below, Elphis began to low in agony and drum her hoofs against the well’s rock sides.
“Poppa!”
Henry screamed. His hands were fists against his mouth, the knuckles digging into his upper lip.
“Make her stop!”
Elphis uttered a long, echoing groan. Her hoofs continued to beat against the stone.
I took Henry’s arm and hauled him, stumbling, back to the house. I pushed him down on Arlette’s mail-order sofa and ordered him to stay there until I came back to get him. “And remember, this is almost over.”