Amy stepped into the yard but I nodded her not to come closer.
‘I’m not some stud bull you can use then take back to another farm,’ Holland said to Amy. ‘That baby’s as much mine as yours. You’re saying it ain’t so won’t change ever a thing.’
Holland stepped toward me then, reached out and grabbed the barrel. If he’d of wanted he could have jerked the shotgun out of my hands.
‘Here,’ he said, pushing the barrel against his chest. ‘I’d have killed a man who done to me what I done to you.’
My hands jittered but Holland steadied the barrel against his chest.
‘Settle it now one way or another, Holcombe,’ Holland Winchester said, ‘because this here is the only way to keep me from claiming what’s mine.’
The cicadas sang overhead. It seemed like they got louder each second that passed, so loud it was like they’d crawled inside my head. Sweat stung my eyes and I had no free hand to wipe it away. I squinched my eyes but it did no good.
‘Please,’ Amy said, and I didn’t know if she was talking to me or Holland.
The .12 gauge’s butt slammed against my shoulder and Holland stumbled backwards. His hand slid off the foot of barrel he’d held like a drowning man letting go of a life rope. I raised my left hand and dabbed the sweat from my eyes and reloaded. Holland’s brown eyes stared right at me but he was seeing something else. Maybe it was himself as a child, or in a foxhole in Korea, or tangled in one flesh with Amy. Maybe he saw all those things, one after another flashing in front of him like he was looking at calendars filled with pictures instead of months and years.
Holland steadied himself. For a moment he stood his ground, the way he did in Korea. I watched the life fade from Holland’s eyes like a pail getting gloamy as it sinks into a well. You’ve just killed a man, I told myself.
Holland’s knees buckled, a puff of dust raising around him he hit the ground. Amy ran to where he laid. She looked down at him and then at me, her face scared for maybe she reckoned I’d put that other shell in the .12 gauge for her. Maybe if she’d kneeled down beside him and started crying I would have shot her. At that moment I was crazy as any slobbering dog or shedding snake. But Amy didn’t kneel down. Her eyes was dry as the dust she stood on.
All of a sudden my arms and legs got to twitching, as like parts of me wanted to shake free from my body and take off in all different directions, away from the awful sight of Holland laying there with a big hole in his chest. Get a hold on yourself, I kept saying, saying it right out loud.
Finally the twitching stopped. Amy stood close by, not saying nothing for a while, like she was afraid her words would set me off to twitching again, like words was to me like water to a mad dog. I took my breaths slow and easeful, trying to clear my thinking of anything but getting air in and out of me. After a couple of minutes my breath near leveled out.
‘What are you going to do?’ Amy finally said, the same question she’d asked yesterday.
‘I’ve got to study on it,’ I said, my voice calmer than I’d figured it to be. It was like the fit had shucked all the panic out of me, at least for a while. ‘I ain’t going to the jailhouse if I can help it, and I ain’t going to Texas or California. If I was going to tuck tail and run I’d of went yesterday.’
Amy didn’t say nothing to that. She looked at me like I was somebody she couldn’t quite place. I was feeling a stranger to myself as well. It would take some while to get used to being a murderer.
‘Get on in the house,’ I said, and I said it kind of bristly for bad thoughts came sudden to me, swirling around in my head like in a cave. Bad thoughts like maybe Amy had planned on Holland killing me instead of me killing him. Or even if I could have sired a child she’d of rathered Holland do it. I had a thought-picture of her and Holland in the back room, the bed shaking and squeaking underneath them, her hands on his back pushing him deeper into her.
‘Go on,’ I said.
Amy had enough smarts to do what I told her.
I sat down on a root that raised out from the white oak like a halfburied leg. I laid my head on my knees and closed my eyes, shedding my mind of all the bad thoughts that kept trying to roost in my head.
When I opened my eyes, it was like waking up from a bad dream because nothing that had happened since I’d aimed the shotgun at the sky seemed real. But Holland Winchester’s body was real and it was laying no more than a coffin-length from where I sat. The bluebottle flies and yellow jackets had already found him. The law would too by and by if I didn’t soon do something.
Holland’s truck would still be at his house. His momma would know he hadn’t gone far. I wondered if she knew he was coming over here and the what-for of his visit. I reckoned Mrs. Winchester had her suspicions, especially since he was dressed more for sparking than farm work. I pondered if she’d heard the shot and already knew, the way a momma will sometimes know, that trouble had found her boy. For all I knew, she could have already telephoned the law.
I sure knew I couldn’t bury him. A fresh-dug grave would be so easy a thing to find. Besides, hard as the ground was I’d still be digging when the law showed. I couldn’t hide him neither for anything dead in the dog days gets rank in the worst sort of way.
The river was the natural place. I could take a big flat river rock and tie it to Holland’s chest and sink him in a blue hole. But be a trick to that since I could swim no better than a rock my self. Even if I was slick enough to get it done, that would be the place anybody would look. Low as the river was, they’d surely find him too.
I took out my tin and papers and rolled a cigarette for to calm me more. A checkerbacker flew up from the river and lit in the white oak, its beak tapping like a hammer as it grubbed a branch. The cicadas soon started again. I looked up but the white oak leaves was so thick I couldn’t see a one of them. It was like the tree itself was singing. Think hard, I told myself, remember everything you ever knew. Don’t get stirred up. Stay calm and you’ll figure a way. And that’s what I did, flushing thoughts out in my mind like you’d flush doves from a September corn field. All the while that checkerbacker and the cicadas made their racket above me I figured what I would do, or at least try to do. I thought out the how’s for a while and walked into the house.
Amy sat in the ladder-back chair, her hand laid on her stomach. Maybe she was trying to soothe the baby, maybe just herself.
‘If anybody comes and asks about Holland, you say you ain’t seen him,’ I said. ‘I’m going to go do what’s got to be done.’
‘You going to bury him?’
‘It’s better you not know,’ I said. ‘All you need to say is what I just told you, that you ain’t seen Holland Winchester today. Understand ?’
Amy looked up at me and nodded, her blue eyes sorrowful.
‘I didn’t never think a thing this bad could happen,’ Amy said.
‘You’re near twenty years old,’ I said. ‘You’ve lived long enough to know once trouble comes it don’t wander off on its own.’
Amy teared up, not much but enough to have to dab her eyes.
‘You can’t cry,’ I said. ‘We’re going to act like this never happened. Never a word to no one about it, not even to each other, so if you got anything to say, say it now.’
‘Could we just tell the truth?’ Amy asked. ‘Tell that he wasn’t going to leave us be?’
‘The truth is I shot a unarmed man, a war hero,’ I said‘That’s the only truth a jury would care about.’
‘I could say I did it,’ Amy said. ‘I could say he raped me.’
‘And then he let you press a shotgun against his chest and pull the trigger,’ I said, my voice tough as barbed wire. ‘The biggest chucklehead in this county wouldn’t believe that. All that would do is get us both sent to the jailhouse, maybe get me a sit-down in the electric chair.’
My back was to the window. I turned and searched till I caught sight of Sam out by the barn chewing what little grass the dog days hadn’t killed.
‘There’s but one way,’ I said. ‘And that’s to put him where nobody can ever find him. The law needs a body to claim a murder.’
I turned from the window.
‘I got to get to it.’
The late morning light beveled through the panes and brightened Amy’s face, made her yellow hair and blue eyes shine. She looked down to shirk the glare.
‘We never speak again about any of this without it’s to get our story straight to tell the law,’ I said. ‘Not about you and him, not any of what happened today.’
Amy didn’t look up.
‘Yes,’ she said.
I went out to the shed. The first thing I did was tie three lengths of rope together with square knots. Then I got me a roll of barbed wire and a hoe. I took the collar and trace chains off Sam and led him into the shade of the white oak. I walked around Holland’s body and leaned over. I swatted at the bluebottle flies and yellow jackets and then reached under Holland’s arms and heisted him up.
He was heavy, heavy enough that I pondered I might have to call Amy to help me. The stubble on Holland’s face prickled my cheek while I hugged him against my chest. A yellow jacket stung me on the neck and I felt the poison riffle through my skin like scalding water.
Then I steadied Sam and grabbed Holland at his middle and shoved him onto Sam’s back. I looped the rope around Holland’s neck and ankles and tied him to Sam like a saddle. There was a lot more rope than I needed, at least right then, so I wrapped it around Sam a few times and knotted it under his belly.
I picked up the hoe and shotgun and laid the roll of barbed wire across my shoulder like a haversack. The barbs jabbed my shoulder like thorns on a devil’s walking stick. There was nothing to be done about that. The ground stained dark where Holland had laid but the dust had already drank up his blood. Another few minutes and you wouldn’t be able to tell a man’s life had spilled out there. Amy came out on the porch but she didn’t say anything. We was past words now.
I led Sam down the field edge past corn stalks and beans near dead as Holland. For better or worse, I thought as I rubbed my neck and almost laughed because it was hard to reckon knowing worse than this. But I knew that wasn’t certain so. Things can always get worse. If what I had in mind didn’t work they’d soon get a whole lot worse.
I left the hoe on the cabbage row closest to the river. I led Sam a few yards downstream to a pool that held a big brown trout I’d been trying to catch for two years. l’d used everything from hellgrammites to spring lizards and hadn’t got much as a nibble. I couldn’t outsmart a fish with a brain the size of a butter bean but here I was trying to outslick a sheriff who’d passed most of his life catching people like me.
I shucked off my shoes and left them on the bank. Then I wrapped the rein around my hand between my thumb and fingers and made a fist. I grabbed up the shotgun and stepped into the shallows the tail end of the pool. Sam followed me off the bank, the water raising to my kneecaps. The water ran slow, the stones under our green and slick. I took my time, tucking my feet in white pockets sand amongst the rocks. Sam stepped his way careful too, careful calm, not shying the way many a horse would when the water got deeper. I watched Sam take another step away from a field he’d never work again. It made me sick to the heart knowing what I was going to do to him.
I tried to think of other things, letting my mind jump in all directions like grasshoppers flaring out of high weeds. My mind lit down on nothing good, just thought-pictures of my daddy laid out dead in his coffin, Holland and Amy tangled together, me in bed as a boy with my legs froze up with polio. Don’t think, Billy, I said to myself, just do.
Halfway across Sam’s legs splayed out in front of him. He near went tumbling and kicking into the whitewater downstream, taking me and Holland with him, but he found his balance. We got the rest of the way without slipping and sloshed out of the river onto Carolina Power land. The power company didn’t allow hunting or logging so there wouldn’t be many folks poking around these woods. I thought that might be important in the later on.
I’d turned to help Sam up the bank when I saw her. She was so far upriver you could just make out it was a woman, a woman coming my way. It had to be Sarah Winchester, looking for her boy. That thought paled me. I tethered Sam in the trees deep enough not to be spotted. I carried the shotgun with me as I walked back to the river.
She was closer now, an old woman dressed in black, some kind of tote-sack in her hand. It wasn’t Sarah Winchester though. It was Widow Glendower. She stopped every so often, stooping that creaky old body of hers to pick something off the riverbank. I’d watched her in past times do much the same, mainly in the spring, passing by without never a word or nod as I’d worked in my field.
I’d as lief it be the same now but I couldn’t chance that. I walked upriver, not exact sure what to say or do, wondering if maybe she saw me before I saw her. A woman that old won’t have good eyesight I told myself. Don’t fret yourself more than you need to.
‘I take it you’re Billy,’ she said when I stepped close. ‘Your woman told me ever much about you when she came calling.’
She gave me a little smile I didn’t much cotton to.
‘Amy ain’t been to see me lately. She ain’t feeling poorly, is she? Ain’t got the morning throw-ups?’
Widow Glendower nodded at the tote-sack she’d laid on the ground.
‘I got some mint in there if she’s needful. Got some boneset too.’
‘She’s doing fine,’ I said.
‘What of you? You look to be some peaked.’
‘I got no complainings.’
‘You certain of that?’ Widow Glendower asked. ‘I don’t mind the sharing.’
‘I’ve no need for your tonics.’
Maybe it was all of what I’d been through this morning or maybe just rememberings of following that old woman’s notions last spring but my words came out quarrelsome. But there was something else. I was sudden afraid of her.
Widow Glendower picked up her tote-sack.
‘Well, I’ll be on my way,’ she said. ‘I need to find me some yellowroot.’
I stepped in front of her.
‘You best not go downriver,’ I said.
‘And why might that be?’‘There’s a big satinback, twelve rattles on him at the least. I saw him sunning on a rock yesterday.’