Lisey's Story(94)

"No." He crushes his cigarette out in the ashtray sitting on top of the book.

She feels the oddest mixture of emotions at that simple negative: sweet relief and deep disappointment. It's like having a thunderhead in her chest. She doesn't know exactly what she was thinking, but that no means she doesn't have to think it any mo -

"He couldn't." Scott speaks in that same dry, flat tone of voice. With that same certainty. "Paul couldn't. He couldn't go." The emphasis on the last word is slight but unmistakable. "I had to take him."

Scott rolls toward her and takes her...but only into his arms. His face against her neck is hot with suppressed emotion.

"There's a place. We called it Boo'ya Moon, I forget why. It's mostly pretty." Purdy. "I took him when he was hurt and I took him when he was dead, but I couldn't take him when he was badgunky. After Daddy kilt him I took him there, to Boo'ya Moon, and burrit him away." The dam gives way and he begins sobbing.

He's able to muffle the sounds a little by closing his lips, but the force of those sobs shakes the bed, and for a little while all she can do is hold him. At some point he asks her to turn the lamp out and when she asks him why he tells her, "Because this is the rest of it, Lisey. I think I can tell it, as long as you're holding me. But not with the light on."

And although she is more frightened than ever - even more frightened than on the night when he came out of the dark with his hand in bloody ruins - she frees an arm long enough to turn out the bedside light, brushing his face with the breast that will later suffer Jim Dooley's madness. At first the room is dark and then the furniture reappears dimly as her eyes adjust; it even takes on a faint and hallucinatory glow that announces the moon's approach through the thinning clouds. "You think Daddy murdered Paul, don't you? You think that's how this part of the story ends."

"Scott, you said he did it with his rifle - "

Chapter 15

"But it wasn't murder. They would have called it that if he'd ever been tried for it in court, but I was there and I know it wasn't." He pauses. She thinks he'll light a fresh cigarette, but he doesn't. Outside the wind gusts and the old building groans. For a moment the furniture brightens, just a little, and then the gloom returns. "Daddy could have murdered him, sure. Lots of times. I know that. There were times he would have, if I hadn't been there to help, but in the end that isn't how it was. You know what euthanasia means, Lisey?"

"Mercy-killing."

"Yeah. That's what my Daddy did to Paul."

In the room beyond the bed, the furniture once more shivers toward visibility, then once more retreats into shadow. "It was the bad-gunky, don't you see? Paul got it just like Daddy. Only Paul got too much for Daddy to cut and let out." Lisey sort of understands. All those times the father cut the sons - and himself as well, she presumes - he was practicing a kind of wacky preventative medicine.

"Daddy said it mos'ly skip' two generations and then came down twice as hard. 'Come down on you like that tractor-chain on your foot, Scoot,' he said."

She shakes her head. She doesn't know what he's talking about. And part of her doesn't want to.

"It was December," Scott says, "and there come a cold snap.

First one of the winter. We lived on that farm way out in the country with open fields all around us and just the one road that went down to Mulie's Store and then to Martensburg. We were pretty much cut off from the world. Pretty much on our own hook, see?"

She does. She does see. She imagines the postman came up that road once in awhile, and of course "Sparky" Landon would drive down it in order to get to (U.S. Gyppum) work, but that would have been pretty much it. No school busses, because me'n Paul, we 'us home-schooled. The school busses went to the Donkey Corral.

"Snow made it worse, and cold made it worse still - the cold kept us inside. Still, that year wasn't so bad at first. We had a Christmas tree, at least. There were years when Daddy would get in the bad-gunky...or just plain broody...and there wouldn't be any tree or any presents." He gives out a short, humorless laugh. "One Christmas he must have kept us up until three in the morning, reading from the Book of Revelation, about jars being opened, and plagues, and riders on horses of various shades, and he finally threw the Bible into the kitchen and roared, 'Who writes this smogging bullshit? And who are the morons who believe it?' When he was in a roaring mood, Lisey, he could roar like Ahab during the last days of the Pequod. But this particular Christmas seemed nice enough. Know what we did? We all went up to Pittsburgh together for the shopping, and Daddy even took us to a movie - Clint Eastwood playing a cop and shooting up some city. It gave me a headache, and the popcorn gave me a bellyache, but I thought it was the most wonderful goddam thing I'd ever seen. I went home and started writing a story just like it and read it to Paul that night. It probably stank to high heaven, but he said it was good."

"He sounds like a great brother," Lisey says carefully. Her care is wasted. He hasn't even heard her. "What I'm telling you is that we were all getting along, had been for months, almost like a normal family. If there is such a thing, which I doubt. But...but."

He stops, thinking. At last, he begins again.

"Then one day not long before Christmas, I was upstairs in my room. It was cold - colder than a witch's tit - and getting ready to snow. I was on my bed, reading my history lesson, when I looked out my window and saw Daddy coming across the yard with an armload of wood. I went down the back stairs to help him stack it in the woodbox so the stovelengths wouldn't get bark all over the floor - that always made him mad. And Paul was 10