Full Dark, No Stars

  I begged her to kill me, to open my throat as I had opened hers, and she wouldn't.

  That was her revenge.

  It might have been two days later when my visitor arrived at the farm, or even three, but I don't think so. I think it was only one. I don't believe I could have lasted two or three more days without help. I had stopped eating and almost stopped drinking. Still, I managed to get out of bed and stagger to the door when the hammering on it commenced. Part of me thought it might be Henry, because part of me still dared hope that Arlette's visit had been a delusion hatched in delirium... and even if it had been real, that she had lied.

  It was Sheriff Jones. My knees loosened when I saw him, and I pitched forward. If he hadn't caught me, I would have gone tumbling out onto the porch. I tried to tell him about Henry and Shannon--that Shannon was going to be shot, that they were going to end up in a line shack on the outskirts of Elko, that he, Sheriff Jones, had to call somebody and stop it before it happened. All that came out was a garble, but he caught the names.

  "He's run off with her, all right," Jones said. "But if Harl came down and told you that, why'd he leave you like this? What bit you?"

  "Rat," I managed.

  He got an arm around me and half-carried me down the porch steps and toward his car. George the rooster was lying frozen to the ground beside the woodpile, and the cows were lowing. When had I last fed them? I couldn't remember.

  "Sheriff, you have to--"

  But he cut me off. He thought I was raving, and why not? He could feel the fever baking off me and see it glowing in my face. It must have been like carrying an oven. "You need to save your strength. And you need to be grateful to Arlette, because I never would have come out here if not for her."

  "Dead," I managed.

  "Yes. She's dead, all right."

  So then I told him I'd killed her, and oh, the relief. A plugged pipe inside my head had magically opened, and the infected ghost which had been trapped in there was finally gone.

  He slung me into his car like a bag of meal. "We'll talk about Arlette, but right now I'm taking you to Angels of Mercy, and I'll thank you not to upchuck in my car."

  As he drove out of the dooryard, leaving the dead rooster and lowing cows behind (and the rats! don't forget them! Ha!), I tried to tell him again that it might not be too late for Henry and Shannon, that it still might be possible to save them. I heard myself saying these are things that may be, as if I were the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come in the Dickens story. Then I passed out. When I woke up, it was the second of December, and the Western newspapers were reporting "SWEETHEART BANDITS" ELUDE ELKO POLICE, ESCAPE AGAIN. They hadn't, but no one knew that yet. Except Arlette, of course. And me.

  The doctor thought the gangrene hadn't advanced up my forearm, and gambled my life by amputating only my left hand. That was a gamble he won. Five days after being carried into Hemingford City's Angels of Mercy Hospital by Sheriff Jones, I lay wan and ghostly in a hospital bed, twenty-five pounds lighter and minus my left hand, but alive.

  Jones came to see me, his face grave. I waited for him to tell me he was arresting me for the murder of my wife, and then handcuff my remaining hand to the hospital bedpost. But that never happened. Instead, he told me how sorry he was for my loss. My loss! What did that idiot know about loss?

  Why am I sitting in this mean hotel room (but not alone!) instead of lying in a murderer's grave? I'll tell you in two words: my mother.

  Like Sheriff Jones, she had a habit of peppering her conversation with rhetorical questions. With him it was a conversational device he'd picked up during a lifetime in law enforcement--he asked his silly little questions, then observed the person he was talking to for any guilty reaction: a wince, a frown, a small shift of the eyes. With my mother, it was only a habit of speech she had picked up from her own mother, who was English, and passed on to me. I've lost any faint British accent I might once have had, but never lost my mother's way of turning statements into questions. You'd better come in now, hadn't you? she'd say. Or Your father forgot his lunch again; you'll have to take it to him, won't you? Even observations about the weather came couched as questions: Another rainy day, isn't it?

  Although I was feverish and very ill when Sheriff Jones came to the door on that late November day, I wasn't delirious. I remember our conversation clearly, the way a man or woman may remember images from a particularly vivid nightmare.

  You need to be grateful to Arlette, because I never would have come out here if not for her, he said.

  Dead, I replied.

  Sheriff Jones: She's dead, all right.

  And then, speaking as I had learned to speak at my mother's knee: I killed her, didn't I?

  Sheriff Jones took my mother's rhetorical device (and his own, don't forget) as a real question. Years later--it was in the factory where I found work after I lost the farm--I heard a foreman berating a clerk for sending an order to Des Moines instead of Davenport before the clerk had gotten the shipping form from the front office. But we always send the Wednesday orders to Des Moines, the soon-to-be-fired clerk protested. I simply assumed--

  Assume makes an ass out of you and me, the foreman replied. An old saying, I suppose, but that was the first time I heard it. And is it any wonder that I thought of Sheriff Frank Jones when I did? My mother's habit of turning statements into questions saved me from the electric chair. I was never tried by a jury for the murder of my wife.

  Until now, that is.

  They're here with me, a lot more than twelve, lined up along the baseboard all the way around the room, watching me with their oily eyes. If a maid came in with fresh sheets and saw those furry jurors, she would run, shrieking, but no maid will come; I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door two days ago, and it's been there ever since. I haven't been out. I could order food sent up from the restaurant down the street, I suppose, but I suspect food would set them off. I'm not hungry, anyway, so it's no great sacrifice. They have been patient so far, my jurors, but I suspect they won't be for much longer. Like any jury, they're anxious for the testimony to be done so they can render a verdict, receive their token fee (in this case to be paid in flesh), and go home to their families. So I must finish. It won't take long. The hard work is done.

  What Sheriff Jones said when he sat down beside my hospital bed was, "You saw it in my eyes, I guess. Isn't that right?"

  I was still a very sick man, but enough recovered to be cautious. "Saw what, Sheriff ?"

  "What I'd come to tell you. You don't remember, do you? Well, I'm not surprised. You were one sick American, Wilf. I was pretty sure you were going to die, and I thought you might do it before I got you back to town. I guess God's not done with you yet, is he?"

  Something wasn't done with me, but I doubted if it was God.

  "Was it Henry? Did you come out to tell me something about Henry?"

  "No," he said, "it was Arlette I came about. It's bad news, the worst, but you can't blame yourself. It's not like you beat her out of the house with a stick." He leaned forward. "You might have got the idea that I don't like you, Wilf, but that's not true. There's some in these parts who don't--and we know who they are, don't we?--but don't put me in with them just because I have to take their interests into account. You've irritated me a time or two, and I believe that you'd still be friends with Harl Cotterie if you'd kept your boy on a tighter rein, but I've always respected you."

  I doubted it, but kept my lip buttoned.

  "As for what happened to Arlette, I'll say it again, because it bears repeating: you can't blame yourself."

  I couldn't? I thought that was an odd conclusion to draw even for a lawman who would never be confused with Sherlock Holmes.

  "Henry's in trouble, if some of the reports I'm getting are true," he said heavily, "and he's dragged Shan Cotterie into the hot water with him. They'll likely boil in it. That's enough for you to handle without claiming responsibility for your wife's death, as well. You don't have to--"

  "Just tell m
e," I said.

  Two days previous to his visit--perhaps the day the rat bit me, perhaps not, but around that time--a farmer headed into Lyme Biska with the last of his produce had spied a trio of coydogs fighting over something about twenty yards north of the road. He might have gone on if he hadn't also spied a scuffed ladies' patent leather shoe and a pair of pink step-ins lying in the ditch. He stopped, fired his rifle to scare off the coys, and advanced into the field to inspect their prize. What he found was a woman's skeleton with the rags of a dress and a few bits of flesh still hanging from it. What remained of her hair was a listless brown, the color to which Arlette's rich auburn might have gone after months out in the elements.

  "Two of the back teeth were gone," Jones said. "Was Arlette missing a couple of back teeth?"

  "Yes," I lied. "Lost them from a gum infection."

  "When I came out that day just after she ran off, your boy said she took her good jewelry."

  "Yes." The jewelry that was now in the well.

  "When I asked if she could have laid her hands on any money, you mentioned 200 dollars. Isn't that right?"

  Ah yes. The fictional money Arlette had supposedly taken from my dresser. "That's right."

  He was nodding. "Well, there you go, there you go. Some jewelry and some money. That explains everything, wouldn't you say?"

  "I don't see--"

  "Because you're not looking at it from a lawman's point of view. She was robbed on the road, that's all. Some bad egg spied a woman hitch-hiking between Hemingford and Lyme Biska, picked her up, killed her, robbed her of her money and her jewelry, then carried her body far enough into the nearest field so it couldn't be seen from the road." From his long face I could see he was thinking she had probably been raped as well as robbed, and that it was probably a good thing that there wasn't enough of her left to tell for sure.

  "That's probably it, then," I said, and somehow I was able to keep a straight face until he was gone. Then I turned over, and although I thumped my stump in doing so, I began to laugh. I buried my face in my pillow, but not even that would stifle the sound. When the nurse--an ugly old battle-axe--came in and saw the tears streaking my face, she assumed (which makes an ass out of you and me) that I had been crying. She softened, a thing I would have thought impossible, and gave me an extra morphine pill. I was, after all, the grieving husband and bereft father. I deserved comfort.

  And do you know why I was laughing? Was it Jones's well-meaning stupidity? The fortuitous appearance of a dead female hobo who might have been killed by her male traveling companion while they were drunk? It was both of those things, but mostly it was the shoe. The farmer had only stopped to investigate what the coydogs were fighting over because he'd seen a ladies' patent leather shoe in the ditch. But when Sheriff Jones had asked about footwear that day at the house the previous summer, I'd told him Arlette's canvas shoes were the ones that were gone. The idiot had forgotten.

  And he never remembered.

  When I got back to the farm, almost all my livestock was dead. The only survivor was Achelois, who looked at me with reproachful, starveling eyes and lowed plaintively. I fed her as lovingly as you might feed a pet, and really, that was all she was. What else would you call an animal that can no longer contribute to a family's livelihood?

  There was a time when Harlan, assisted by his wife, would have taken care of my place while I was in the hospital; it's how we neighbored out in the middle. But even after the mournful blat of my dying cows started drifting across the fields to him while he sat down to his supper, he stayed away. If I'd been in his place, I might have done the same. In Harl Cotterie's view (and the world's), my son hadn't been content just to ruin his daughter; he'd followed her to what should have been a place of refuge, stolen her away, and forced her into a life of crime. How that "Sweetheart Bandits" stuff must have eaten into her father! Like acid! Ha!

  The following week--around the time the Christmas decorations were going up in farmhouses and along Main Street in Hemingford Home--Sheriff Jones came out to the farm again. One look at his face told me what his news was, and I began to shake my head. "No. No more. I won't have it. I can't have it. Go away."

  I went back in the house and tried to bar the door against him, but I was both weak and one-handed, and he forced his way in easily enough. "Take hold, Wilf," he said. "You'll get through this." As if he knew what he was talking about.

  He looked in the cabinet with the decorative ceramic beer stein on top of it, found my sadly depleted bottle of whiskey, poured the last finger into the stein, and handed it to me. "Doctor wouldn't approve," he said, "but he's not here and you're going to need it."

  The Sweetheart Bandits had been discovered in their final hideout, Shannon dead of the counterman's bullet, Henry of one he had put into his own brain. The bodies had been taken to the Elko mortuary, pending instructions. Harlan Cotterie would see to his daughter, but would have nothing to do with my son. Of course not. I did that myself. Henry arrived in Hemingford by train on the eighteenth of December, and I was at the depot, along with a black funeral hack from Castings Brothers. My picture was taken repeatedly. I was asked questions which I didn't even try to answer. The headlines in both the World-Herald and the much humbler Hemingford Weekly featured the phrase GRIEVING FATHER.

  If the reporters had seen me at the funeral home, however, when the cheap pine box was opened, they would have seen real grief; they could have featured the phrase SCREAMING FATHER. The bullet my son fired into his temple as he sat with Shannon's head on his lap had mushroomed as it crossed his brain and taken out a large chunk of his skull on the left side. But that wasn't the worst. His eyes were gone. His lower lip was chewed away so that his teeth jutted in a grim grin. All that remained of his nose was a red stub. Before some cop or sheriff's deputy had discovered the bodies, the rats had made a merry meal of my son and his dear love.

  "Fix him up," I told Herbert Castings when I could talk rationally again.

  "Mr. James... sir... the damage is..."

  "I see what the damage is. Fix him up. And get him out of that shitting box. Put him in the finest coffin you have. I don't care what it costs. I have money." I bent and kissed his torn cheek. No father should have to kiss his son for the last time, but if any father ever deserved such a fate, it was I.

  Shannon and Henry were both buried out of the Hemingford Glory of God Methodist Church, Shannon on the twenty-second and Henry on Christmas Eve. The church was full for Shannon, and the weeping was almost loud enough to raise the roof. I know, because I was there, at least for a little while. I stood in the back, unnoticed, then slunk out halfway through Reverend Thursby's eulogy. Rev. Thursby also presided at Henry's funeral, but I hardly need tell you that the attendance was much smaller. Thursby saw only one, but there was another. Arlette was there, too, sitting next to me, unseen and smiling. Whispering in my ear.

  Do you like how things have turned out, Wilf? Was it worth it?

  Adding in the funeral cost, the burial expenses, the mortuary expenses, and the cost of shipping the body home, the disposal of my son's earthly remains cost just over $300. I paid out of the mortgage money. What else did I have? When the funeral was finished, I went home to an empty house. But first I bought a fresh bottle of whiskey.

  1922 had one more trick left in its bag. The day after Christmas, a huge blizzard roared out of the Rockies, socking us with a foot of snow and gale-force winds. As dark came down, the snow turned first to sleet and then to driving rain. Around midnight, as I sat in the darkened parlor, doctoring my bellowing stump with little sips of whiskey, a grinding, rending sound came from the back of the house. It was the roof coming down on that side--the part I'd taken out the mortgage, at least in part, to fix. I toasted it with my glass, then had another sip. When the cold wind began to blow in around my shoulders, I took my coat from its hook in the mudroom, put it on, then sat back down and drank a little more whiskey. At some point I dozed. Another of those grinding crashes woke me around three o'clo
ck. This time it was the front half of the barn that had collapsed. Achelois survived yet again, and the next night I took her into the house with me. Why? you might ask me, and my answer would be, Why not? Just why the hell not? We were the survivors. We were the survivors.

  On Christmas morning (which I spent sipping whiskey in my cold sitting room, with my surviving cow for company), I counted what was left of the mortgage money, and realized it would not begin to cover the damage done by the storm. I didn't much care, because I had lost my taste for the farming life, but the thought of the Farrington Company putting up a hog butchery and polluting the stream still made me grind my teeth in rage. Especially after the high cost I had paid for keeping those triple-goddamned 100 acres out of the company's hands.

  It suddenly struck home to me that, with Arlette officially dead instead of missing, those acres were mine. So two days later I swallowed my pride and went to see Harlan Cotterie.

  The man who answered my knock had fared better than I, but that year's shocks had taken their toll, just the same. He had lost weight, he had lost hair, and his shirt was wrinkled--although not as wrinkled as his face, and the shirt, at least, would iron out. He looked sixty-five instead of forty-five.

  "Don't hit me," I said when I saw him ball his fists. "Hear me out."

  "I wouldn't hit a man with only one hand," he said, "but I'll thank you to keep it short. And we'll have to talk out here on the stoop, because you are never going to set foot inside my house again."

  "That's fine," I said. I had lost weight myself--plenty--and I was shivering, but the cold air felt good on my stump, and on the invisible hand that still seemed to exist below it. "I want to sell you 100 acres of good land, Harl. The hundred Arlette was so determined to sell to the Farrington Company."

  He smiled at that, and his eyes sparkled in their new deep hollows. "Fallen on hard times, haven't you? Half your house and half your barn caved in. Hermie Gordon says you've got a cow living in there with you." Hermie Gordon was the rural route mailman, and a notorious gossip.