Full Dark, No Stars(11)

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.”