A Good Marriage (20 page)

He didn’t, of course, but he came forward with alacrity when I invited him to. His sharp eyes—bright green, almost feline—went here, there, and everywhere. “Lot o’ duds,” he said.

“Yes,” I admitted, “Arlette liked clothes and she liked the mail-order catalogues. But since she only took the one valise—we have two, and the other one’s still there, see it in the back corner?—I’d have to say she only took the ones she liked the best. And the ones that were practical, I suppose. She had two pairs of slacks and a pair of blue denims, and those are gone, even though she didn’t care for pants.”

“Pants’re good for traveling in, though, aren’t they? Man or woman, pants are good for traveling. And a woman might choose them. If she was in a hurry, that is.”

“I suppose.”

“She took her good jewelry and her picture of Nana and Pop-Pop,” Henry said from behind us. I jumped a little; I’d almost forgotten he was there.

“Did she, now? Well, I suppose she would.”

He took another flick through the clothes, then closed the closet door. “Nice room,” he said, trudging back toward the hall with his Stetson in his hands. “Nice
house
. Woman’d have to be crazy to leave a nice room and a nice house like this.”

“Mama talked about the city a lot,” Henry said, and sighed. “She had the idea of opening some kind of shop.”

“Did she?” Sheriff Jones regarded him brightly with his green cat’s eyes. “Well! But a thing like that takes money, doesn’t it?”

“She’s got those acres from her father,” I said.

“Yes, yes.” Smiling bashfully, as if he’d forgotten those acres. “And maybe it’s for the best. ‘Better to be living in a wasteland than with a bitter-tongued, angry woman.’ Book of Proverbs. Are you glad she’s gone, Son?”

“No,” Henry said, and tears overspilled his eyes. I blessed each one.

Sheriff Jones said, “There-there.” And after offering that perfunctory comfort, he bent down with his hands braced on his pudgy knees, and looked under the bed. “Appears to be a pair of woman’s shoes under there. Broke in, too. The kind that would be good for walking. Don’t suppose she ran away barefooty, do you?”

“She wore her canvas shoes,” I said. “Those are the ones that are gone.”

They were, too. The faded green ones she used to call her gardening shoes. I’d remembered them just before starting to fill in the well.

“Ah!” he said. “Another mystery solved.” He pulled a silver-plated watch from his vest pocket and consulted it. “Well, I’d better get on the roll. Tempus is fugiting right along.”

We went back through the house, Henry bringing up the rear, perhaps so he could swipe his eyes dry in privacy. We walked with the Sheriff toward his Maxwell sedan with the star on the door. I was about to ask him if he wanted to see the well—I even knew what I was going to call it—when he stopped and gave my son a look of frightening kindness.

“I stopped at the Cotteries’,” he said.

“Oh?” Henry said. “Did you?”

“Told you these days I have to water just about every bush, but I’ll use a privy anytime there’s one handy, always assuming folks keep it clean and I don’t have to worry about wasps while I’m waiting for my dingus to drip a little water. And the Cotteries are clean folks. Pretty daughter, too. Just about your age, isn’t she?”

“Yes, sir,” Henry said, lifting his voice just a tiny bit on the
sir
.

“Kind of sweet on her, I guess? And her on you, from what her mama says.”

“Did she say that?” Henry asked. He sounded surprised, but pleased, too.

“Yes. Mrs. Cotterie said you were troubled about your own mama, and that Shannon had told her something you said on that subject. I asked her what it was, and she said it wasn’t her place to tell, but I could ask Shannon. So I did.”

Henry looked at his feet. “I told her to keep it to herself.”

“You aren’t going to hold it against her, are you?” Sheriff Jones asked. “I mean, when a big man like me with a star on his chest asks a little thing like her what she knows, it’s kind of hard for the little thing to keep mum, isn’t it? She just about has to tell, doesn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” Henry said, still looking down. “Probably.” He wasn’t just
acting
unhappiness; he
was
unhappy. Even though it was going just the way we had hoped it would.

“Shannon says your ma and your pop here had a big fight about selling those hundred acres, and when you came down on your poppa’s side, Missus James slapped you up pretty good.”

“Yes,” Henry said colorlessly. “She’d had too much to drink.”

Sheriff Jones turned to me. “Was she drunk or just tiddly?”

“Somewhere in between,” I said. “If she’d been all the way to drunk, she would have slept all night instead of getting up and packing a grip and creeping away like a thief.”

“Thought she’d come back once she sobered up, did you?”

“I did. It’s over four miles out to the tarvy. I thought for sure she’d come back. Someone must have come along and given her a ride before her head cleared. A trucker on the Lincoln-Omaha run would be my guess.”

“Yep, yep, that’d be mine, too. You’ll hear from
her when she contacts Mr. Lester, I’m sure. If she means to stay out on her own, if she’s got that in her head, she’ll need money to do it.”

So he knew that, too.

His eyes sharpened. “Did she have any money at all, Mr. James?”

“Well . . .”

“Don’t be shy. Confession’s good for the soul. The Catholics have got hold of something there, don’t they?”

“I kept a box in my dresser. There was 200 dollars put by in it, to help pay the pickers when they start next month.”

“And Mr. Cotterie,” Henry reminded. To Sheriff Jones, he said: “Mr. Cotterie has a corn harvester. A Harris Giant. Almost new. It’s a pip.”

“Yep, yep, saw it in his dooryard. Big bastid, isn’t it? Pardon my Polish. Money all gone out’n that box, was it?”

I smiled sourly—only it wasn’t really me making that smile; the Conniving Man had been in charge ever since Sheriff Jones pulled up by the chopping block. “She left twenty. Very generous of her. But twenty’s all Harlan Cotterie will ever take for the use of his harvester, so
that’s
all right. And when it comes to the pickers, I guess Stoppenhauser at the bank’ll advance me a shortie loan. Unless he owes favors to the Farrington Company, that is. Either way, I’ve got my best farmhand right here.”

I tried to ruffle Henry’s hair. He ducked away, embarrassed.

“Well, I’ve got a good budget of news to tell
Mr. Lester, don’t I? He won’t like any of it, but if he’s as smart as he thinks he is, I guess he’ll know enough to expect her in his office, and sooner rather than later. People have a way of turning up when they’re short on folding green, don’t they?”

“That’s been my experience,” I said. “If we’re done here, Sheriff, my boy and I better get back to work. That useless well should have been filled in three years ago. An old cow of mine—”

“Elphis.” Henry spoke like a boy in a dream. “Her name was Elphis.”

“Elphis,” I agreed. “She got out of the barn and decided to take a stroll on the cap, and it gave way. Didn’t have the good grace to die on her own, either. I had to shoot her. Come around the back of the barn I’ll show you the wages of laziness with its damn feet sticking up. We’re going to bury her right where she lies, and from now on I’m going to call that old well Wilfred’s Folly.”

“Well, I would, wouldn’t I? It’d be somethin’ to see. But I’ve got that bad-tempered old judge to contend with. Another time.” He hoisted himself into the car, grunting as he did so. “Thank you for the lemonade, and for bein’ so gracious. You could have been a lot less so, considering who sent me out here.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “We all have our jobs.”

“And our crosses to bear.” His sharp eyes fastened on Henry again. “Son, Mr. Lester told me you were hidin’ something. He was sure of it. And you were, weren’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Henry said in his colorless and somehow
awful voice. As if all his emotions had flown away, like those things in Pandora’s jar when she opened it. But there was no Elphis for Henry and me; our Elphis was dead in the well.

“If he asks me, I’ll tell him he was wrong,” Sheriff Jones said. “A company lawyer don’t need to know that a boy’s mother put her hand to him while she was in drink.” He groped under his seat, came up with a long S-shaped tool I knew well, and held it out to Henry. “Would you save an old man’s back and shoulder, son?”

“Yes, sir, happy to.” Henry took the crank and went around to the front of the Maxwell.

“Mind your wrist!” Jones hollered. “She kicks like a bull!” Then he turned to me. The inquisitive glitter had gone out of his eyes. So had the green. They looked dull and gray and hard, like lake water on a cloudy day. It was the face of a man who could beat a railroad bum within an inch of his life and never lose a minute’s sleep over it. “Mr. James,” he said. “I need to ask you something. Man to man.”

“All right,” I said. I tried to brace myself for what I felt sure was coming next:
Is there another cow in yonder well? One named Arlette?
But I was wrong.

“I can put her name and description out on the telegraph wire, if you want. She won’t have gone no further than Omaha, will she? Not on just a hundred and eighty smackers. And a woman who’s spent most of her life keepin’ house has no idea of how to hide out. She’ll like as not be in a rooming
house over on the east side, where they run cheap. I could have her brought back.
Dragged
back by the hair of the head, if you want.”

“That’s a generous offer, but—”

The dull gray eyes surveyed me. “Think it over before you say yea or nay. Sometimes a fee-male needs talking to by hand, if you take my meaning, and after that they’re all right. A good whacking has a way of sweetening some gals up. Think it over.”

“I will.”

The Maxwell’s engine exploded into life. I stuck out my hand—the one that had cut her throat—but Sheriff Jones didn’t notice. He was busy retarding the Maxwell’s spark and adjusting her throttle.

Two minutes later he was no more than a diminishing boil of dust on the farm road.

“He never even wanted to look,” Henry marveled.

“No.”

And that turned out to be a very good thing.

*  *  *

We had shoveled hard and fast when we saw him coming, and nothing stuck up now but one of Elphis’s lower legs. The hoof was about four feet below the lip of the well. Flies circled it in a cloud. The Sheriff would have marveled, all right, and he would have marveled even more when the dirt in front of that protruding hoof began to pulse up and down.

Henry dropped his shovel and grabbed my arm. The afternoon was hot, but his hand was ice-cold.
“It’s her!” he whispered. His face seemed to be nothing but eyes.
“She’s trying to get out!”

“Stop being such a God damned ninny,” I said, but I couldn’t take my eyes off that circle of heaving dirt. It was as if the well were alive, and we were seeing the beating of its hidden heart.

Then dirt and pebbles sprayed to either side and a rat surfaced. The eyes, black as beads of oil, blinked in the sunshine. It was almost as big as a full-grown cat. Caught in its whiskers was a shred of bloodstained brown burlap.

“Oh you fuck!”
Henry screamed.

Something whistled inches past my ear and then the edge of Henry’s shovel split the rat’s head in two as it looked up into the dazzle.

“She sent it,” Henry said. He was grinning. “The rats are hers, now.”

“No such thing. You’re just upset.”

He dropped his shovel and went to the pile of rocks with which we meant to finish the job once the well was mostly filled in. There he sat down and stared at me raptly. “Are you sure? Are you positive she ain’t haunting us? People say someone who’s murdered will come back to haunt whoever—”

“People say lots of things. Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, a broken mirror brings seven years’ bad luck, a whippoorwill calling at midnight means someone in the family’s going to die.” I sounded reasonable, but I kept looking at the dead rat. And that shred of bloodstained burlap. From her
snood
. She was still wearing it down
there in the dark, only now there was a hole in it with her hair sticking up.
That look is all the rage among dead women this summer,
I thought.

“When I was a kid, I really believed that if I stepped on a crack, I’d break my mother’s back,” Henry said musingly.

“There—you see?”

He brushed rock-dust from the seat of his pants, and stood beside me. “I got him, though—I got that fucker, didn’t I?”

“You did!” And because I didn’t like how he sounded—no, not at all—I clapped him on the back.

Henry was still grinning. “If the Sheriff had come back here to look, like you invited him, and seen that rat come tunneling to the top, he might have had a few more questions, don’t you think?”

Something about this idea set Henry to laughing hysterically. It took him four or five minutes to laugh himself out, and he scared a murder of crows up from the fence that kept the cows out of the corn, but eventually he got past it. By the time we finished our work it was past sundown, and we could hear owls comparing notes as they launched their pre-moonrise hunts from the barn loft. The rocks on top of the vanished well were tight together, and I didn’t think any more rats would be squirming to the surface. We didn’t bother replacing the broken cap; there was no need. Henry seemed almost like his normal self again, and I thought we both might get a decent night’s sleep.

“What do you say to sausage, beans, and corn-bread?” I asked him.

“Can I start the generator and play
Hayride Party
on the radio?”

“Yessir, you can.”

He smiled at that, his old good smile. “Thanks, Poppa.”

I cooked enough for four farmhands, and we ate it all.

*  *  *

Two hours later, while I was deep in my sitting room chair and nodding over a copy of
Silas Marner,
Henry came in from his room, dressed in just his summer underdrawers. He regarded me soberly. “Mama always insisted on me saying my prayers, did you know that?”