Full Dark, No Stars

There was a quilt in the closet. I could not suppress a brief thought of what my mother would think if she could see what use I was making of that lovingly stitched wedding present. I laid it on the floor. We dropped Arlette onto it. Then we rolled her up.

"Quick," I said. "Before this starts to drip, too. No... wait... go for a lamp."

He was gone so long that I began to fear he'd run away. Then I saw the light come bobbing down the short hall past his bedroom and to the one Arlette and I shared. Had shared. I could see the tears gushing down his waxy-pale face.

"Put it on the dresser."

He set the lamp down by the book I had been reading: Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. I never finished it; I could never bear to finish it. By the light of the lamp, I pointed out the splashes of blood on the floor, and the pool of it right beside the bed.

"More is running out of the quilt," he said. "If I'd known how much blood she had in her..."

I shook the case free of my pillow and snugged it over the end of the quilt like a sock over a bleeding shin. "Take her feet," I said. "We need to do this part right now. And don't faint again, Henry, because I can't do it by myself."

"I wish it was a dream," he said, but he bent and got his arms around the bottom of the quilt. "Do you think it might be a dream, Poppa?"

"We'll think it is, a year from now when it's all behind us." Part of me actually believed this. "Quickly, now. Before the pillow-case starts to drip. Or the rest of the quilt."

We carried her down the hall, across the sitting room, and out through the front door like men carrying a piece of furniture wrapped in a mover's rug. Once we were down the porch steps, I breathed a little easier; blood in the dooryard could easily be covered over.

Henry was all right until we got around the corner of the cow barn and the old well came in view. It was ringed by wooden stakes so no one would by accident step on the wooden cap that covered it. Those sticks looked grim and horrible in the starlight, and at the sight of them, Henry uttered a strangled cry.

"That's no grave for a mum... muh..." He managed that much, and then fainted into the weedy scrub that grew behind the barn. Suddenly I was holding the dead weight of my murdered wife all by myself. I considered putting the grotesque bundle down--its wrappings now all askew and the slashed hand peeking out--long enough to revive him. I decided it would be more merciful to let him lie. I dragged her to the side of the well, put her down, and lifted up the wooden cap. As I leaned it against two of the stakes, the well exhaled into my face: a stench of stagnant water and rotting weeds. I fought with my gorge and lost. Holding onto two of the stakes to keep my balance, I bowed at the waist to vomit my supper and the little wine I had drunk. There was an echoing splash when it struck the murky water at the bottom. That splash, like thinking Ride 'em, Cowboy, has been within a hand's reach of my memory for the last eight years. I will wake up in the middle of the night with the echo in my mind and feel the splinters of the stakes dig into my palms as I clutch them, holding on for dear life.

I backed away from the well and tripped over the bundle that held Arlette. I fell down. The slashed hand was inches from my eyes. I tucked it back into the quilt and then patted it, as if comforting her. Henry was still lying in the weeds with his head pillowed on one arm. He looked like a child sleeping after a strenuous day during harvest-time. Overhead, the stars shone down in their thousands and tens of thousands. I could see the constellations--Orion, Cassiopeia, the Dippers--that my father had taught me. In the distance, the Cotteries' dog Rex barked once and then was still. I remember thinking, This night will never end. And that was right. In all the important ways, it never has.

I picked the bundle up in my arms, and it twitched.

I froze, my breath held in spite of my thundering heart. Surely I didn't feel that, I thought. I waited for it to come again. Or perhaps for her hand to creep out of the quilt and try to grip my wrist with the slashed fingers.

There was nothing. I had imagined it. Surely I had. And so I tupped her down the well. I saw the quilt unravel from the end not held by the pillow-case, and then came the splash. A much bigger one than my vomit had made, but there was also a squelchy thud. I'd known the water down there wasn't deep, but had hoped it would be deep enough to cover her. That thud told me it wasn't.

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 wa

s 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.

"Now she is." I lowered the old wooden cap back into place, knowing there was more work ahead: the well would have to be filled in. Ah, but that was long overdue, anyway. It was a danger, which was why I had planted the circle of stakes around it. "Let's go in the house and have breakfast."

"I couldn't eat a single bite!"

But he did. We both did. I fried eggs, bacon, and potatoes, and we ate every bite. Hard work makes a person hungry. Everyone knows that.

Henry slept until late afternoon. I stayed awake. Some of those hours I spent at the kitchen table, drinking cup after cup of black coffee. Some of them I spent walking in the corn, up one row and down another, listening to the swordlike leaves rattle in a light breeze. When it's June and corn's on the come, it seems almost to talk. This disquiets some people (and there are the foolish ones who say it's the sound of the corn actually growing), but I had always found that quiet rustling a comfort. It cleared my mind. Now, sitting in this city hotel room, I miss it. City life is no life for a country man; for such a man that life is a kind of damnation in itself.

Confessing, I find, is also hard work.

I walked, I listened to the corn, I tried to plan, and at last I did plan. I had to, and not just for myself.

There had been a time not 20 years before, when a man in my position needn't have worried; in those days, a man's business was his own, especially if he happened to be a respected farmer: a fellow who paid his taxes, went to church on Sundays, supported the Hemingford Stars baseball team, and voted the straight Republican ticket. I think that in those days, all sorts of things happened on farms out in what we called "the middle." Things that went unremarked, let alone reported. In those days, a man's wife was considered a man's business, and if she disappeared, there was an end to it.

But those days were gone, and even if they hadn't been... there was the land. The 100 acres. The Farrington Company wanted those acres for their God damned hog butchery, and Arlette had led them to believe they were going to get them. That meant danger, and danger meant that daydreams and half-plans would no longer suffice.

When I went back to the house at midafternoon, I was tired but clear-headed and calm at last. Our few cows were bellowing, their morning milking hours overdue. I did that chore, then put them to pasture where I'd let them stay until sunset, instead of herding them back in for their second milking just after supper. They didn't care; cows accept what is. If Arlette had been more like one of our bossies, I reflected, she would still be alive and nagging me for a new washing machine out of the Monkey Ward catalogue. I probably would have bought it for her, too. She could always talk me around. Except when it came to the land. About that she should have known better. Land is a man's business.

Henry was still sleeping. In the weeks that followed, he slept a great deal, and I let him, although in an ordinary summer I would have filled his days with chores once school let out. And he would have filled his evenings either visiting over at Cotteries' or walking up and down our dirt road with Shannon, the two of them holding hands and watching the moon rise. When they weren't kissing, that was. I hoped what we'd done had not spoiled such sweet pastimes for him, but believed it had. That I had. And of course I was right.

I cleared my mind of such thoughts, telling myself it was enough for now that he was sleeping. I had to make another visit to the well, and it would be best to do it alone. Our stripped bed seemed to shout murder. I went to the closet and studied her clothes. Women have so many, don't they? Skirts and dresses and blouses and sweaters and underthings--some of the latter so complicated and strange a man can't even tell which side is the front. To take them all would be a mistake, because the truck was still parked in the barn and the Model T under the elm. She had left on foot and taken only what she

could carry. Why hadn't she taken the T? Because I would have heard it start and stopped her going. That was believable enough. So... a single valise.

I packed it with what I thought a woman would need and what she could not bear to leave. I put in her few pieces of good jewelry and the gold-framed picture of her mama and poppa. I debated over the toiletries in the bathroom, and decided to leave everything except for her atomizer bottle of Florient perfume and her hornbacked brush. There was a Testament in her night table, given to her by Pastor Hawkins, but I had never seen her read it, and so left it where it was. But I took the bottle of iron pills, which she kept for her monthlies.

Henry was still sleeping, but now tossing from side to side as if in the grip of bad dreams. I hurried about my business as quickly as I could, wanting to be in the house when he woke up. I went around the barn to the well, put the valise down, and lifted the splintery old cap for the third time. Thank God Henry wasn't with me. Thank God he didn't see what I saw. I think it would have driven him insane. It almost drove me insane.

The mattress had been shunted aside. My first thought was that she had pushed it away before trying to climb out. Because she was still alive. She was breathing. Or so it seemed to me at first. Then, just as ratiocinative ability began to resurface through my initial shock--when I began to ask myself what sort of breathing might cause a woman's dress to rise and fall not just at the bosom but all the way from neckline to hem--her jaw began to move, as if she were struggling to talk. It was not words that emerged from her greatly enlarged mouth, however, but the rat which had been chewing on the delicacy of her tongue. Its tail appeared first. Then her lower jaw yawned wider as it backed out, the claws on its back feet digging into her chin for purchase.

The rat plopped into her lap, and when it did, a great flood of its brothers and sisters poured out from under her dress. One had something white caught in its whiskers--a fragment of her slip, or perhaps her skimmies. I chucked the valise at them. I didn't think about it--my mind was roaring with revulsion and horror--but just did it. It landed on her legs. Most of the rodents--perhaps all--avoided it nimbly enough. Then they streamed into a round black hole that the mattress (which they must have pushed aside through sheer weight of numbers) had covered, and were gone in a trice. I knew well enough what that hole was; the mouth of the pipe that had supplied water to the troughs in the barn until the water level sank too low and rendered it useless.