Full Dark, No Stars(8)

I backed away from the well and tripped over the bundle that held Arlette. I fell down. The slashed hand was inches from my eyes. I tucked it back into the quilt and then patted it, as if comforting her. Henry was still lying in the weeds with his head pillowed on one arm. He looked like a child sleeping after a strenuous day during harvest-time. Overhead, the stars shone down in their thousands and tens of thousands. I could see the constellations—Orion, Cassiopeia, the Dippers—that my father had taught me. In the distance, the Cotteries’ dog Rex barked once and then was still. I remember thinking, This night will never end. And that was right. In all the important ways, it never has.

I picked the bundle up in my arms, and it twitched.

I froze, my breath held in spite of my thundering heart. Surely I didn’t feel that, I thought. I waited for it to come again. Or perhaps for her hand to creep out of the quilt and try to grip my wrist with the slashed fingers.

There was nothing. I had imagined it. Surely I had. And so I tupped her down the well. I saw the quilt unravel from the end not held by the pillow-case, and then came the splash. A much bigger one than my vomit had made, but there was also a squelchy thud. I’d known the water down there wasn’t deep, but had hoped it would be deep enough to cover her. That thud told me it wasn’t.

A high siren of laughter commenced behind me, a sound so close to insanity that it made gooseflesh prickle all the way from the crack of my backside to the nape of my neck. Henry had come to and gained his feet. No, much more than that. He was capering behind the cow barn, waving his arms at the star-shot sky, and laughing.

“Mama down the well and I don’t care!” he sing-songed. “Mama down the well and I don’t care, for my master’s gone aw-aaay!”

I reached him in three strides and slapped him as hard as I could, leaving bloody finger-marks on a downy cheek that hadn’t yet felt the stroke of a razor. “Shut up! Your voice will carry! Your—. There, fool boy, you’ve raised that god damned dog again.”

Rex barked once, twice, three times. Then silence. We stood, me grasping Henry’s shoulders, listening with my head cocked. Sweat ran down the back of my neck. Rex barked once more, then quit. If any of the Cotteries roused, they’d think it was a raccoon he’d been barking at. Or so I hoped.

“Go in the house,” I said. “The worst is over.”

“Is it, Poppa?” He looked at me solemnly. “Is it?”

“Yes. Are you all right? Are you going to faint again?”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

“I’m all right. I just… I don’t know why I laughed like that. I was confused. Because I’m relieved, I guess. It’s over!” A chuckle escaped him, and he clapped his hands over his mouth like a little boy who has inadvertently said a bad word in front of his grandma.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s over. We’ll stay here. Your mother ran away to St. Louis… or perhaps it was Chicago… but we’ll stay here.”

“She… ?” His eyes strayed to the well, and the cap leaning against three of those stakes that were somehow so grim in the starlight.

“Yes, Hank, she did.” His mother hated to hear me call him Hank, she said it was common, but there was nothing she could do about it now. “Up and left us cold. And of course we’re sorry, but in the meantime, chores won’t wait. Nor schooling.”

“And I can still be… friends with Shannon.”

“Of course,” I said, and in my mind’s eye I saw Arlette’s middle finger tapping its lascivious circle around her crotch. “Of course you can. But if you should ever feel the urge to confess to Shannon—”

An expression of horror dawned on his face. “Not ever!”

“That’s what you think now, and I’m glad. But if the urge should come on you someday, remember this: she’d run from you.”

“Acourse she would,” he muttered.

“Now go in the house and get both wash-buckets out of the pantry. Better get a couple of milk-buckets from the barn, as well. Fill them from the kitchen pump and suds ’em up with that stuff she keeps under the sink.”

“Should I heat the water?”

I heard my mother say, Cold water for blood, Wilf. Remember that.

“No need,” I said. “I’ll be in as soon as I’ve put the cap back on the well.”

He started to turn away, then seized my arm. His hands were dreadfully cold. “No one can ever know!” He whispered this hoarsely into my face. “No one can ever know what we did!”

“No one ever will,” I said, sounding far bolder than I felt. Things had already gone wrong, and I was starting to realize that a deed is never like the dream of a deed.

“She won’t come back, will she?”

“What?”

“She won’t haunt us, will she?” Only he said haint, the kind of country talk that had always made Arlette shake her head and roll her eyes. It is only now, eight years later, that I had come to realize how much haint sounds like hate.

“No,” I said.

But I was wrong.

I looked down the well, and although it was only 20 feet deep, there was no moon and all I could see was the pale blur of the quilt. Or perhaps it was the pillow-case. I lowered the cover into place, straightened it a little, then walked back to the house. I tried to follow the path we’d taken with our terrible bundle, purposely scuffing my feet, trying to obliterate any traces of blood. I’d do a better job in the morning.