Full Dark, No Stars

I named a price so low that Harl's mouth fell open and his eyebrows shot up. It was then that I noticed a smell wafting out of the neat and well-appointed Cotterie farmhouse that seemed entirely alien to that place: burnt fried food. Sallie Cotterie was apparently not doing the cooking. Once I might have been interested in such a thing, but that time had passed. All I cared about right then was getting shed of the 100 acres. It only seemed right to sell them cheap, since they had cost me so dear.

"That's pennies on the dollar," he said. Then, with evident satisfaction: "Arlette would roll in her grave."

She's done more than just roll in it, I thought.

"What are you smiling about, Wilf ?"

"Nothing. Except for one thing, I don't care about that land anymore. The one thing I do care about is keeping that god damned Farrington slaughter-mill off it."

"Even if you lose your own place?" He nodded as if I'd asked a question. "I know about the mortgage you took out. No secrets in a small town."

"Even if I do," I agreed. "Take the offer, Harl. You'd be crazy not to. That stream they'll be filling up with blood and hair and hog intestines--that's your stream, too."

"No," he said.

I stared at him, too surprised to say anything. But again he nodded as if I'd asked a question.

"You think you know what you've done to me, but you don't know all of it. Sallie's left me. She's gone to stay with her folks down McCook. She says she may be back, says she'll think things over, but I don't think she will be. So that puts you and me in the same old broke wagon, doesn't it? We're two men who started the year with wives and are ending it without them. We're two men who started the year with living children and are ending it with dead ones. The only difference I can see is that I didn't lose half my house and most of my barn in a storm." He thought about it. "And I've still got both hands. There's that, I suppose. When it comes to pulling my peter--should I ever feel the urge to--I'd have a choice of which one to use."

"What... why would she--"

"Oh, use your head. She blames me as well as you for Shannon's death. She said that if I hadn't gotten on my high horse and sent Shan away, she'd still be alive and living with Henry at your farm just down the road instead of lying frozen in a box underground. She says she'd have a grandchild. She called me a self-righteous fool, and she's right."

I reached for him with my remaining hand. He slapped it away.

"Don't touch me, Wilf. A single warning on that is all you get."

I put my hand back at my side.

"One thing I know for sure," he said. "If I took you up on that offer, tasty as it is, I'd regret it. Because that land is cursed. We may not agree on everything, but I bet we would on that. If you want to sell it, sell it to the bank. You'll get your mortgage paper back, and some cash besides."

"They'd just turn around and sell it to Farrington!"

"Tough titty said the kitty" was his final word on it as he closed the door in my face.

On the last day of the year, I drove to Hemingford Home and saw Mr. Stoppenhauser at the bank. I told him that I'd decided I could no longer live on the farm. I told him I would like to sell Arlette's acreage to the bank and use the balance of the proceeds to retire the mortgage. Like Harlan Cotterie, he said no. For a moment or two I just sat in the chair facing his desk, not able to believe what I had heard.

"Why not? That's good land!"

He told me that he worked for a bank, and a bank was not a real estate agency. He addressed me as Mr. James. My days of being Wilf in that office were over.

"That's just..." Ridiculous was the word that came to mind, but I didn't want to risk offending him if there was even a chance he might change his mind. Once I had made the decision to sell the land (and the cow, I would have to find a buyer for Achelois, too, possibly a stranger with a bag of magic beans to trade), the idea had taken hold of me with the force of an obsession. So I kept my voice low and spoke calmly.

"That's not exactly true, Mr. Stoppenhauser. The bank bought the Rideout place last summer when it came up for auction. The Triple M, as well."

"Those were different situations. We hold a mortgage on your original 80, and we're content with that. What you do with that hundred acres of pasturage is of no interest to us."

"Who's been in to see you?" I asked, then realized I didn't have to. "It was Lester, wasn't it? Cole Farrington's dogsbody."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Stoppenhauser said, but I saw the flicker in his eyes. "I think your grief and your... your injury... have temporarily damaged your ability to think clearly."

"Oh no," I said, and began to laugh. It was a dangerously unbalanced sound, even to my own ears. "I've never thought more clearly in my life, sir. He came to see you--him or another, I'm sure Cole Farrington can afford to retain all the shysters he wants--and you made a deal. You c-c-colluded!" I was laughing harder than ever.

"Mr. James, I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave."

"Maybe you had it all planned out beforehand," I said. "Maybe that's why you were so anxious to talk me into the god damned mortgage in the first place. Or maybe when Lester heard about my son, he saw a golden opportunity to take advantage of my misfortune and came running to you. Maybe he sat right in this chair and said, 'This is going to work out for both of us, Stoppie--you get the farm, my client gets the land by the crick, and Wilf James can go to Hell.' Isn't that pretty much how it went?"

He had pushed a button on his desk, and now the door opened. It was just a little bank, too small to employ a security guard, but the teller who leaned in was a beefy lad. One of the Rohrbacher family, from the look of him; I'd gone to school with his father, and Henry would have gone with his younger sister, Mandy.

"Is there a problem, Mr. Stoppenhauser?" he asked.

"Not if Mr. James leaves now," he said. "Won't you see him out, Kevin?"

Kevin came in, and when I was slow to rise, he clamped a hand just above my left elbow. He was dressed like a banker, right down to the suspenders and the bow tie, but it was a farmer's hand, hard and callused. My still-healing stump gave a warning throb.

"Come along, sir," he said.

"Don't pull me," I said. "It hurts where my hand used to be."

"Then come along."

"I went to school with your father. He sat beside me and used to cheat off my paper during Spring Testing Week."

He pulled me out of the chair where I had once been addressed as Wilf. Good old Wilf, who would be a fool not to take out a mortgage. The chair almost fell over.

"Happy New Year, Mr. James," Stoppenhauser said.

"And to you, you cozening fuck," I replied. Seeing the shocked expression on his face may have been the last good thing to happen to me in my life. I have sat here for five minutes, chewing on the end of my pen and trying to think of one since--a good book, a good meal, a pleasant afternoon in the park--and I can't.

Kevin Rohrbacher accompanied me across the lobby. I suppose that is the correct verb; it wasn't quite dragging. The floor was marble, and our footfalls echoed. The walls were dark oak. At the high tellers' windows, two women served a little group of year-end customers. One of the tellers was young and one was old, but their big-eyed expressions were identical. Yet it wasn't their horrified, almost prurient interest that took my own eye; it was captivated by something else entirely. A burled oak rail three inches wide ran above the tellers' windows, and scurrying busily along it--

"Ware that rat!" I cried, and pointed.

The young teller voiced a little scream, looked up, then exchanged a glance with her older counterpart. There was no rat, only the passing shadow of the ceiling fan. And now everyone was looking at me.

"Stare all you want!" I told them. "Look your fill! Look until your God damned eyes fall out!"

Then I was in the street, and puffing out cold winter air that looked like cigarette smoke. "Don't come back unless you have business to do," Kevin said. "And unless you can keep a civil tongue."

"Your father was the biggest God damned cheater I ever went to school with," I told him. I wanted him to hit me, but he only went back inside and left me alone on the sidewalk, standing in front of my saggy old truck. And that was how Wilfred Leland James spent his visit to town on the last day of 1922.

When I got home, Achelois was no longer in the house. She was in the yard, lying on her side and puffing her own clouds of white vapor. I could see the snow-scuffs where she'd gone galloping off the porch, and the bigger one where she had landed badly and broken both front legs. Not even a blameless cow could survive around me, it seemed.

I went into the mudroom to get my gun, then into the house, wanting to see--if I could--what had frightened her so badly that she'd left her new shelter at a full gallop. It was rats, of course. Three of them sitting on Arlette's treasured sideboard, looking at me with their black and solemn eyes.

"Go back and tell her to leave me alone," I told them. "Tell her she's done damage enough. For God's sake tell her to let me be."

They only sat looking at me with their tails curled around their plump black-gray bodies. So I lifted my varmint rifle and shot the one in the middle. The bullet tore it apart and splattered its leavings all over the wallpaper Arlette had picked out with such care 9 or 10 years before. When Henry was still just a little 'un and things among the three of us were fine.

The other two fled. Back to their secret way underground, I have no doubt. Back to their rotting queen. What they left behind on my dead wife's sideboard were little piles of rat-shit and three or four bits of the burlap sack Henry fetched from the barn on that early summer night in 1922. The rats had come to kill my last cow and bring me little pieces of Arlette's snood.

I went outside and patted Achelois on the head. She stretched her neck up and lowed plaintively. Make it stop. You're the master, you're the god of my world, so make it stop.

I did.

Happy New Year.

That was the end of 1922, and that is the end of my story; all the rest is epilogue. The emissaries crowded around this room--how the manager of this fine old hotel would scream if he saw them!--will not have to wait much longer to render their verdict. She is the judge, they are the jury, but I'll be my own executioner.

I lost the farm, of course. Nobody, including the Farrington Company, would buy those 100 acres until the home place was gone, and when the hog-butchers finally swooped in, I was forced to sell at an insanely low price. Lester's plan worked perfectly. I'm sure it was his, and I'm sure he got a bonus.

Oh, well; I would have lost my little toehold in Hemingford County even if I'd had financial resources to fall back on, and there is a perverse sort of comfort in that. They say this depression we are in started on Black Friday of last year, but people in states like Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska know it started in 1923, when the crops that survived the terrible storms that spring were killed in the drought that followed, a drought that lasted for 2 years. The few crops that did find their way to the big city markets and the small city agricultural exchanges brought a beggar's price. Harlan Cotterie hung on until 1925 or so, and then the bank took his farm. I happened on that news while perusing the Bank Sales items in the World-Herald. By 1925, such items sometimes took up whole pages in the newspaper. The small farms had begun to go, and I believe that in a hundred years--maybe only 75--they'll all be gone. Come 2030 (if there is such a year), all Nebraska west of Omaha will be one big farm. Probably it will be owned by the Farrington Company, and those unfortunate enough to live on that land will pass their existence under dirty yellow skies and wear gas masks to keep from choking on the stench of dead hogs. And every stream will run red with the blood of slaughter.

Come 2030, only the rats will be happy.

That's pennies on the dollar, Harlan said on the day I offered to sell him Arlette's land, and eventually I was forced to sell to Cole Farrington for even fewer on the dollar. Andrew Lester, attorney-at-law, brought the papers to the Hemingford City rooming house where I was then living, and he smiled as I signed them. Of course he did. The big boys always win. I was a fool to think it could ever be any different. I was a fool, and everyone I ever loved paid the price. I sometimes wonder if Sallie Cotterie ever came back to Harlan, or if he went to her in McCook after he lost the farm. I don't know, but I think Shannon's death probably ended that previously happy marriage. Poison spreads like ink in water.

Meanwhile, the rats have begun to move in from the baseboards of this room. What was a square has become a closing circle. They know that this is just the after, and nothing that comes after an irrevocable act matters much. Yet I will finish. And they won't have me while I'm alive; the final small victory will be mine. My old brown jacket is hung on the back of the chair I'm sitting in. The pistol is in the pocket. When I've finished the last few pages of this confession, I'll use it. They say suicides and murderers go to Hell. If so, I will know my way around, because I've been there for the last eight years.

I went to Omaha, and if it is indeed a city of fools, as I used to claim, then I was at first a model citizen. I set to work drinking up Arlette's 100 acres, and even at pennies on the dollar, it took 2 years. When I wasn't drinking, I visited the places Henry had been during the last months of his life: the grocery and gasoline station in Lyme Biska with the Blue Bonnet Girl on the roof (by then closed with a sign on the boarded-up door reading FOR SALE BY BANK), the pawnshop on Dodge Street (where I emulated my son and bought the pistol now in my jacket pocket), the Omaha branch of the First Agricultural. The pretty young teller still worked there, although her last name was no longer Penmark.

"When I passed him the money, he said thank you," she told me. "Maybe he went wrong, but somebody raised him right. Did you know him?"

"No," I said, "but I knew his family."

Of course I went to St. Eusebia's, but made no attempt to go in and inquire about Shannon Cotterie to the governess or matron or whatever her title may have been. It was a cold and forbidding hulk of a building, its thick stone and slit windows expressing perfectly how the papist hierarchy seems to feel in their hearts about women. Watching the few pregnant girls who slunk out with downcast eyes and hunched shoulders told me everything I needed to know about why Shan had been so willing to leave it.

Oddly enough, I felt closest to my son in an alley. It was the one next to the Gallatin Street Drug Store & Soda Fountain (Schrafft's Candy & Best Homemade Fudge Our Specialty), two blocks from St. Eusebia's. There was a crate there, probably too new to be the one Henry sat on while waiting for a girl adventurous enough to trade information for cigarettes, but I could pretend, and I did. Such pretense was easier when I was drunk, and most days when I turned up on Gallatin Street, I was very drunk indeed. Sometimes I pretended it was 1922 again and it was I who was waiting for Victoria Stevenson. If she came, I would trade her a whole carton of cigarettes to take one message: When a young man who calls himself Hank turns up here, asking about Shan Cotterie, tell him to get lost. To take his jazz elsewhere. Tell him his father needs him back on the farm, that maybe with two of them working together, they can save it.

But that girl was beyond my reach. The only Victoria I met was the later version, the one with the three comely children and the respectable title of Mrs. Hallett. I had stopped drinking by then, I had a job at the Bilt-Rite Clothing factory, and had reacquainted myself with razor blade and shaving soap. Given this veneer of respectability, she received me willingly enough. I told her who I was only because--if I am to be honest to the end--lying was not an option. I could see in the slight widening of her eyes that she had noted the resemblance.

"Gee, but he was sweet," she said. "And so crazy in love. I'm sorry for Shan, too. She was a great gal. It's like a tragedy out of Shakespeare, isn't it?"

Only she said it trad-a-gee, and after that I didn't go back to the Gallatin Street alley anymore, because for me Arlette's murder had poisoned even this blameless young Omaha matron's attempt at kindness. She thought Henry and Shannon's deaths were like a

trad-a-gee out of Shakespeare. She thought it was romantic. Would she still have thought so, I wonder, if she had heard my wife screaming her last from inside a blood-sodden burlap sack? Or glimpsed my son's eyeless, lipless face?

I held two jobs during my years in the Gateway City, also known as the City of Fools. You will say of course I held jobs; I would have been living on the street otherwise. But men more honest than I have continued drinking even when they want to stop, and men more decent than I have ended up sleeping in doorways. I suppose I could say that after my lost years, I made one more effort to live an actual life. There were times when I actually believed that, but lying in bed at night (and listening to the rats scampering in the walls--they have been my constant companions), I always knew the truth: I was still trying to win. Even after Henry's and Shannon's deaths, even after losing the farm, I was trying to beat the corpse in the well. She and her minions.

John Hanrahan was the storage foreman at the Bilt-Rite factory. He didn't want to hire a man with only one hand, but I begged for a trial, and when I proved to him that I could pull a pallet fully loaded with shirts or overalls as well as any man on his payroll, he took me on. I hauled those pallets for 14 months, and often limped back to the boardinghouse where I was staying with my back and stump on fire. But I never complained, and I even found time to learn sewing. This I did on my lunch hour (which was actually 15 minutes long), and during my afternoon break. While the other men were out back on the loading dock, smoking and telling dirty jokes, I was teaching myself to sew seams, first in the burlap shipping bags we used, and then in the overalls that were the company's main stock-in-trade. I turned out to have a knack for it; I could even lay in a zipper, which is no mean skill on a garment assembly line. I'd press my stump on the garment to hold it in place as my foot ran the electric treadle.

Sewing paid better than hauling, and it was easier on my back, but the Sewing Floor was dark and cavernous, and after four months or so I began to see rats on the mountains of freshly blued denim and hunkering in the shadows beneath the hand-trucks that first brought in the piecework and then rolled it out again.