“She sent it,” Henry said. He was grinning. “The rats are hers, now.”
“No such thing. You’re just upset.”
He dropped his shovel and went to the pile of rocks with which we meant to finish the job once the well was mostly filled in. There he sat down and stared at me raptly. “Are you sure? Are you positive she ain’t haunting us? People say someone who’s murdered will come back to haunt whoever—”
“People say lots of things. Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, a broken mirror brings seven years’ bad luck, a whippoorwill calling at midnight means someone in the family’s going to die.” I sounded reasonable, but I kept looking at the dead rat. And that shred of bloodstained burlap. From her snood. She was still wearing it down there in the dark, only now there was a hole in it with her hair sticking up. That look is all the rage among dead women this summer, I thought.
“When I was a kid, I really believed that if I stepped on a crack, I’d break my mother’s back,” Henry said musingly.
“There—you see?”
He brushed rock-dust from the seat of his pants, and stood beside me. “I got him, though—I got that fucker, didn’t I?”
“You did!” And because I didn’t like how he sounded—no, not at all—I clapped him on the back.
Henry was still grinning. “If the Sheriff had come back here to look, like you invited him, and seen that rat come tunneling to the top, he might have had a few more questions, don’t you think?”
Something about this idea set Henry to laughing hysterically. It took him four or five minutes to laugh himself out, and he scared a murder of crows up from the fence that kept the cows out of the corn, but eventually he got past it. By the time we finished our work it was past sundown, and we could hear owls comparing notes as they launched their pre-moonrise hunts from the barn loft. The rocks on top of the vanished well were tight together, and I didn’t think any more rats would be squirming to the surface. We didn’t bother replacing the broken cap; there was no need. Henry seemed almost like his normal self again, and I thought we both might get a decent night’s sleep.
“What do you say to sausage, beans, and cornbread?” I asked him.
“Can I start the generator and play Hayride Party on the radio?”
“Yessir, you can.”
He smiled at that, his old good smile. “Thanks, Poppa.”
I cooked enough for four farmhands, and we ate it all.
Two hours later, while I was deep in my sitting room chair and nodding over a copy of Silas Marner, Henry came in from his room, dressed in just his summer underdrawers. He regarded me soberly. “Mama always insisted on me saying my prayers, did you know that?”
I blinked at him, surprised. “Still? No. I didn’t.”
“Yes. Even after she wouldn’t look at me unless I had my pants on, because she said I was too old and it wouldn’t be right. But I can’t pray now, or ever again. If I got down on my knees, I think God would strike me dead.”
“If there is one,” I said.
“I hope there isn’t. It’s lonely, but I hope there isn’t. I imagine all murderers hope there isn’t. Because if there’s no Heaven, there’s no Hell.”
“Son, I was the one who killed her.”
“No—we did it together.”
It wasn’t true—he was no more than a child, and I had cozened him—but it was true to him, and I thought it always would be.
“But you don’t have to worry about me, Poppa. I know you think I’ll slip—probably to Shannon. Or I might get feeling guilty enough to just go into Hemingford and confess to that Sheriff.”
Of course these thoughts had crossed my mind.
Henry shook his head, slowly and emphatically. “That Sheriff—did you see the way he looked at everything? Did you see his eyes?”
“Yes.”
“He’d try to put us both in the ’lectric chair, that’s what I think, and never mind me not fifteen until August. He’d be there, too, lookin’ at us with those hard eyes of his when they strapped us in and—”
“Stop it, Hank. That’s enough.”
It wasn’t, though; not for him. “—and pulled the switch. I ain’t never letting that happen, if I can help it. Those eyes aren’t never going to be the last thing I see.” He thought over what he’d just said. “Ever, I mean. Aren’t ever.”
“Go to bed, Henry.”
“Hank.”
“Hank. Go to bed. I love you.”
He smiled. “I know, but I don’t much deserve it.” He shuffled off before I could reply.
And so to bed, as Mr. Pepys says. We slept while the owls hunted and Arlette sat in her deeper darkness with the lower part of her hoof-kicked face swung off to one side. The next day the sun came up, it was a good day for corn, and we did chores.
When I came in hot and tired to fix us a noon meal, there was a covered casserole dish sitting on the porch. There was a note fluttering beneath one edge. It said: Wilf—We are so sorry for your trouble and will help any way we can. Harlan says dont worry about paying for the harvister this summer. Please if you hear from your wife let us know. Love, Sallie Cotterie. PS: If Henry comes calling on Shan, I will send back a blueberry cake.
I stuck the note in the front pocket of my overalls with a smile. Our life after Arlette had begun.
If God rewards us on earth for good deeds—the Old Testament suggests it’s so, and the Puritans certainly believed it—then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones. I can’t say for sure, but I can say that was a good summer, with plenty of heat and sun for the corn and just enough rain to keep our acre of vegetable garden refreshed. There was thunder and lightning some afternoons, but never one of those crop-crippling winds Midwestern farmers fear. Harlan Cotterie came with his Harris Giant and it never broke down a single time. I had worried that the Farrington Company might meddle in my business, but it didn’t. I got my loan from the bank with no trouble, and paid back the note in full by October, because that year corn prices were sky-high and the Great Western’s freight fees were at rock bottom. If you know your history, you know that those two things—the price of produce and the price of shippage—had changed places by ’23, and have stayed changed ever since. For farmers out in the middle, the Great Depression started when the Chicago Agricultural Exchange crashed the following summer. But the summer of 1922 was as perfect as any farmer could hope for. Only one incident marred it, having to do with another of our bovine goddesses, and that I will tell you about soon.
Mr. Lester came out twice. He tried to badger us, but he had nothing to badger with, and he must have known it, because he was looking pretty harried that July. I imagine his bosses were badgering him, and he was only passing it along. Or trying to. The first time, he asked a lot of questions that really weren’t questions at all, but insinuations. Did I think my wife had had an accident? She must have, didn’t I think, or she would either have contacted him in order to make a cash settlement on those 100 acres or just crept back to the farm with her (metaphorical) tail between her legs. Or did I think she had fallen afoul of some bad actor while on the road? Such things did happen, didn’t they, from time to time? And it would certainly be convenient for me, wouldn’t it?
The second time he showed up, he looked desperate as well as harried, and came right out with it: had my wife had an accident right there on the farm? Was that what had happened? Was it why she hadn’t turned up either alive or dead?
“Mr. Lester, if you’re asking me if I murdered my wife, the answer is no.”
“Well of course you’d say so, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s your last question to me, sir. Get in yonder truck, drive away, and don’t come back here. If you do, I’ll take an axe-handle to you.”
“You’d go to jail for assault!” He was wearing a celluloid collar that day, and it had come all askew. It was almost possible to feel sorry for him as he stood there with that collar poking into the underside of his chin and sweat cutting lines through the dust on his chubby face, his lips twitching and his eyes bulging.
“No such thing. I have warned you off my property, as is my right, and I intend to send a registered letter to your firm stating that very thing. Come back again and that’s trespassing and I will beat you. Take warning, sir.” Lars Olsen, who had brought Lester out again in his Red Baby, had all but cupped his hands around his ears to hear better.