Страница 29 из 91
All these things Arlette told me on a day when those two doomed children were still alive. All these things she told me while the rats crawled around me and her stink filled my nose and my infected, swollen hand ached like fire.
I begged her to kill me, to open my throat as I had opened hers, and she wouldn’t.
That was her revenge.
It might have been two days later when my visitor arrived at the farm, or even three, but I don’t think so. I think it was only one. I don’t believe I could have lasted two or three more days without help. I had stopped eating and almost stopped drinking. Still, I managed to get out of bed and stagger to the door when the hammering on it commenced. Part of me thought it might be Henry, because part of me still dared hope that Arlette’s visit had been a delusion hatched in delirium… and even if it had been real, that she had lied.
It was Sheriff Jones. My knees loosened when I saw him, and I pitched forward. If he hadn’t caught me, I would have gone tumbling out onto the porch. I tried to tell him about Henry and Sha
“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 Sha
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.”