1922 Read online

  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 . . . ?”

  “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 thi
s 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.