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.
I discovered something that night that most people never have to learn: murder is sin, murder is damnation (surely of one’s own mind and spirit, even if the atheists are right and there is no afterlife), but murder is also work. We scrubbed the bedroom until our backs were sore, then moved on to the hall, the sitting room, and finally the porch. Each time we thought we were done, one of us would find another splotch. As dawn began to lighten the sky in the east, Henry was on his knees scrubbing the cracks between the boards of the bedroom floor, and I was down on mine in the sitting room, examining Arlette’s hooked rug square inch by square inch, looking for that one drop of blood that might betray us. There was none there—we had been fortunate in that respect—but a dime-sized drop beside it. It looked like blood from a shaving cut. I cleaned it up, then went back into our bedroom to see how Henry was faring. He seemed better now, and I felt better myself. I think it was the coming of daylight, which always seems to dispel the worst of our horrors. But when George, our rooster, let out his first lusty crow of the day, Henry jumped. Then he laughed. It was a small laugh, and there was still something wrong with it, but it didn’t terrify me the way his laughter had done when he regained consciousness between the barn and the old livestock well.
“I can’t go to school today, Poppa. I’m too tired. And… I think people might see it on my face. Shannon especially.”
I hadn’t even considered school, which was another sign of half-planning. Half-assed planning. I should have put the deed off until County School was out for the summer. It would only have meant waiting a week. “You can stay home until Monday, then tell the teacher you had the grippe and didn’t want to spread it to the rest of the class.”
“It’s not the grippe, but I am sick.”
So was I.
We had spread a clean sheet from her linen closet (so many things in that house were hers… but no more) and piled the bloody bedclothes onto it. The mattress was also bloody, of course, and would have to go. There was another, not so good, in the back shed. I bundled the bedclothes together, and Henry carried the mattress. We went back out to the well just before the sun cleared the horizon. The sky above was perfectly clear. It was going to be a good day for corn.
“I can’t look in there, Poppa.”
“You don’t have to,” I said, and once more lifted the wooden cover. I was thinking that I should have left it up to begin with—think ahead, save chores, my own Poppa used to say—and knowing that I never could have. Not after feeling (or thinking I felt) that last blind twitch.
Now I could see to the bottom, and what I saw was horrible. She had landed sitting up with her legs crushed beneath her. The pillow-case was split open and lay in her lap. The quilt and counterpane had come loose and were spread around her shoulders like a complicated ladies’ stole. The burlap bag, caught around her head and holding her hair back like a snood, completed the picture: she almost looked as if she were dressed for a night on the town.
Yes! A night on the town! That’s why I’m so happy! That’s why I’m grinning from ear to ear! And do you notice how red my lipstick is, Wilf? I’d never wear this shade to church, would I? No, this is the kind of lipstick a woman puts on when she wants to do that nasty thing to her man. Come on down, Wilf, why don’t you? Don’t bother with the ladder, just jump! Show me how bad you want me! You did a nasty thing to me, now let me do one to you!
“Poppa?” Henry was standing with his face toward the barn and his shoulders hunched, like a boy expecting to be beaten. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes.” I flung down the bundle of linen, hoping it would land on top of her and cover that awful upturned grin, but a whim of draft floated it into her lap, instead. Now she appeared to be sitting in some strange and bloodstained cloud.
“Is she covered? Is she covered up, Poppa?”
I grabbed the mattress and tupped it in. It landed on end in the mucky water and then fell against the circular stone-cobbled wall, making a little lean—to shelter over her, at last hiding her cocked-back head and bloody grin.