“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 me,” 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?”