1922 Read online

  “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.”

  “It’ll never be over,” he said, and turned facedown on the sofa. He put his hands over his ears, even though Elphis couldn’t be heard from in here. Except Henry still was hearing her, and so was I.

  I got my varmint gun from the high shelf in the pantry. It was only a .22, but it would do the job. And if Harlan heard shots rolling across the acres between his place and mine? That would fit our story, too. If Henry could keep his wits long enough to tell it, that was.

  * * *

  Here is something I learned in 1922: there are always worse things waiting. You think you have seen the most terrible thing, the one that coalesces all your nightmares into a freakish horror that actually exists, and the only consolation is that there can be nothing worse. Even if there is, your mind will snap at the sight of it, and you will know no more. But there is worse, your mind does not snap, and somehow you carry on. You might understand that all the joy has gone out of the world for you, that what you did has put all you hoped to gain out of your reach, you might wish you were the one who was dead—but you go on. You realize that you are in a hell of your own making, but you go on nevertheless. Because there is nothing else to do.

  Elphis had landed on top of my wife’s body, but Arlette’s grinning face was still perfectly visible, still tilted up to the sunlit world above, still seeming to look at me. And the rats had come back. The cow falling into their world had doubtless caused them to retreat into the pipe I would eventually come to think of as Rat Boulevard, but then they had smelled fresh meat, and had come hurrying out to investigate. They were already nibbling at poor old Elphis as she lowed and kicked (more feebly now), and one sat on top of my dead wife’s head like an eldritch crown. It had picked a hole in the burlap sack and pulled a tuft of her hair out with its clever claws. Arlette’s cheeks, once so round and pretty, hung in shreds.

  Nothing can be any worse than this, I thought. Surely I’ve reached the end of horror.

  But yes, there are always worse things waiting. As I peered down, frozen with shock and revulsion, Elphis kicked out again, and one of her hoofs connected with what remained of Arlette’s face. There was a snap as my wife’s jaw broke, and everything below her nose shifted to the left, as if on a hinge. Still the ear-to-ear grin remained. That it was no longer aligned with her eyes made it even worse. It was as if she now had two faces to haunt me with instead of just one. Her body shifted against the mattress, making it slide. The rat on her head scurried down behind it. Elphis lowed again. I thought that if Henry came back now, and looked into the well, he would kill me for making him a part of this. I probably deserved killing. But that would leave him alone, and alone he would be defenseless.

  Part of the cap had fallen into the well; part of it was still hanging down. I loaded my rifle, rested it on this slope, and aimed at Elphis, who lay with her neck broken and her head cocked against the rock wall. I waited for my hands to steady, then pulled the trigger.

  One shot was enough.

  * * *

  Back in the house, I found that Henry had gone to sleep on the couch. I was too shocked myself to consider this strange. At that moment, he seemed to me like the only truly hopeful thing in the world: soiled, but not so filthy he could never be clean again. I bent and kissed his cheek. He moaned and turned his head away. I left him there and went to the barn for my tools. When he joined me three hours later, I had pulled the broken and hanging piece of the well-cap out of the hole and had begun to fill it in.

  “I’ll help,” he said in a flat and dreary voice.

  “Good. Get the truck and drive it out to the dirtpile at West Fence—”

  “By myself?” The disbelief in his voice was only faint, but I was encouraged to hear any emotion at all.

  “You know all the forward gears, and you can find reverse, can’t you?”

  “Yes—”

  “Then you’ll be fine. I’ve got enough to be going on with in the meantime, and when you come back, the worst will be over.”

  I waited for him to tell me again that the worst would never be over, but he didn’t. I recommenced shoveling. I could still see the top of Arlette’s head and the burlap with that terrible picked-over tuft sticking out of it. There might already be a litter of newborn ratlings down there in the cradle of my dead wife’s thighs.

  I heard the truck cough once, then twice. I hoped the crank wouldn’t kick back and break Henry’s arm.

  The third time he turned the crank, our old truck bellowed into life. He retarded the spark, gunned the throttle a time or two, then drove away. He was gone for almost an hour, but when he came back, the truck’s bed was full of rocks and soil. He drove it to the edge of the well and killed the engine. He had taken off his shirt, and his sweat-shiny torso looked too thin; I could count his ribs. I tried to think when I’d last seen him eat a big meal, and at first I couldn’t. Then I realized it must have been breakfast on the morning after we’d done away with her.

  I’ll see that he gets a good dinner tonight, I thought. I’ll see that we both do. No beef, but there’s pork in the icebox—

  “Look yonder,” he said in his new flat voice, and pointed.

  I saw a rooster-tail of dust coming toward us. I looked down into the well. It wasn’t good enough, not yet. Half of Elphis was still sticking up. That was all right, of course, but the corner of the bloodstained mattress was also still poking out of the dirt.

  “Help me,” I said.

  “Do we have enough time, Poppa?” He sounded only mildly interested.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Don’t just stand there, help me.”

  The extra shovel was leaning against the side of the barn beside the splintered remains of the well-cap. Henry grabbed it, and we began shoveling dirt and rocks out of the back of the truck as fast as ever we could.

  * * *

  When the County Sheriff’s car with the gold star on the door and the spotlight on the roof pulled up by the chopping block (once more putting George and the chickens to flight), Henry and I were sitting on the porch steps with our shirts off and sharing the last thing Arlette James had ever made: a pitcher of lemonade. Sheriff Jones got out, hitched up his belt, took off his Stetson, brushed back his graying hair, and resettled his hat along the line where the white skin of his brow ended and coppery red took over. He was by his lonesome. I took that as a good sign.

  “Good day, gents.” He took in our bare chests, dirty hands, and sweaty faces. “Hard chorin’ this afternoon, is it?”

  I spat. “My own damn fault.”

  “Is that so?”

  “One of our cows fell in the old livestock well,” Henry said.

  Jones asked again, “Is that so?”

  “It is,” I said. “Would you want a glass of lemonade, Sheriff? It’s Arlette’s.”

  “Arlette’s, is it? She decided to come back, did she?”

  “No,” I said. “She took her favorite clothes but left the lemonade. Have some.”

  “I will. But first I need to use your privy. Since I turned fifty-five or so, seems like I have to wee on every bush. It’s a God damned inconvenience.”

  “It’s around the back of the house. Just follow the path and look for the crescent moon on the door.”

  He laughed as though this were the funniest joke he’d heard all year, and went around the house. Would he pause on his way to look in the windows? He would if he was any good at his job, and I’d heard he was. At least in his younger days.

  “Poppa,” Henry said. He spoke in a low voice.

  I looked at him.

  “If he finds out, we can’t do anything else. I can lie, but there can’t be anymore killing.”

  “All right,” I said. That was a short conversation, but one I have pondered often in the eight years since.

  Sheriff Jones came back, buttoning his fly.

  “Go in and get the Sheriff a glass,” I told Henry.

  Henry went.
Jones finished with his fly, took off his hat, brushed back his hair some more, and reset the hat. His badge glittered in the early-afternoon sun. The gun on his hip was a big one, and although Jones was too old to have been in the Great War, the holster looked like AEF property. Maybe it was his son’s. His son had died over there.

  “Sweet-smelling privy,” he said. “Always nice on a hot day.”

  “Arlette used to put the quicklime to it pretty constantly,” I said. “I’ll try to keep up the practice if she stays away. Come on up to the porch and we’ll sit in the shade.”

  “Shade sounds good, but I believe I’ll stand. Need to stretch out my spine.”

  I sat in my rocker with the PA cushion on it. He stood beside me, looking down. I didn’t like being in that position but tried to bear up patiently. Henry came out with a glass. Sheriff Jones poured his own lemonade, tasted, then gulped most of it down at a go and smacked his lips.

  “Good, isn’t it? Not too sour, not too sweet, just right.” He laughed. “I’m like Goldilocks, aren’t I?” He drank the rest, but shook his head when Henry offered to refill his glass. “You want me pissing on every fencepost on the way back to Hemingford Home? And then all the way to Hemingford City after that?”

  “Have you moved your office?” I asked. “I thought you were right there in the Home.”

  “I am, aren’t I? The day they make me move the Sheriff’s Office to the county seat is the day I resign and let Hap Birdwell take over, like he wants to. No, no, it’s just a court hearing up to the City. Amounts to no more than paperwork, but there it is. And you know how Judge Cripps is . . . or no, I guess you don’t, being a law-abiding sort. He’s bad-tempered, and if a fellow isn’t on time, his temper gets worse. So even though it comes down to just saying so help me God and then signing my name to a bunch of legal folderol, I have to hurry right along with my business out here, don’t I? And hope my God damned Maxie doesn’t break down on the way back.”