Lisey’s Story (75 page)

A little further in and I see there's a cut running up one cheek, and his closed eyes have a purplish, exhausted look. His lips have slid back from his teeth, making him look like an old dog that fell asleep trying to snarl. He covers the couch with an old Navajo blanket to keep off grease and spilled food, and he's wrapped part of it over him. He must have been tired of busting things up by the time he got in here, because he's poked out the eye of the television and smashed the glass over his dead wife's studio portrait and called it good. The radio's in its usual place on the end-table and that gallon jug is on the floor beside it. I look at the jug and can't hardly believe what I'm seeing: there's not but an inch or so left. It's almost impossible for me to believe he's drunk so much—he who isn't used to drinking at all—but the stink hanging around him, so thick I can almost see it, is very persuasive.

The pickaxe leans against the head of the sofa, and there's a piece of paper stuck on the end that came down through my bed. I know it's a note he's left for me, and I don't want to read it, but I have to. He's written on three lines, but there are only eight words. Too few to ever forget.

KILL ME

THEN PUT ME WITH PAUL

PLEASE

Lisey, crying harder than ever, turned this page into her lap along with the others. Now there were only two left. The printing had grown loose, a little wandering, not always sticking to the lines, quite clearly tired. She knew what came next—
I put a pickaxe in his head while he was a-sleepun
, he had told her under the yum-yum tree—and did she have to read the details here? Was there anything in the marriage vows about having to subject yourself to your dead husband's confession of patricide?

And yet those pages called to her,
cried
to her like some lonely thing that has lost everything but its voice. She dropped her eyes to the final pages, determined that if she must finish, she would do so as quickly as she could.

I don't want to, but I take up the pickaxe anyway and stand there with it in my hands, looking at him, the lord of my life, the tyrant of all my days. I have hated him often and he has never given me cause to love him enough, I know that now, but he has given me some, especially during those nightmare weeks after Paul went bad. And in that five o'clock living room with the day's first gray light creeping in and the sleet ticking like a clock and the sound of his wheezing snores below me and an ad on the radio for some discount furniture store in Wheeling, West Virginia, I will never visit, I know it comes down to a bald choice between those two, love and hate. Now I'll find out which one rules my child's heart. I can let him live and run down the road to Mulie's, run into some unknown new life, and that will condemn him to the hell he fears and in many ways deserves.
Richly
deserves. First hell on earth, the hell of a cell in some looneybin, and then maybe hell forever after, which is what he really fears. Or I can kill him and set him free. This choice is mine to make, and there is no God to help me make it, for I believe in none.

Instead I pray to my brother, who loved me until the bad-gunky stole his heart and mind. I ask him to tell me what to do, if he's there. And I get an answer—although whether it is really from Paul or just from my own imagination masquerading as Paul I suppose I'll never know. In the end, I don't see that it matters; I need an answer and I get one. In my ear, just as clearly as he ever spoke when he was alive, Paul says: “Daddy's prize is a kiss.”

I take hold on the pickaxe then. The ad on the radio finishes and Hank Williams comes on, singing “Why don't you love me like you used to do, How come you treat me like a worn-out shoe?” And

Here three lines were blank before the words took up again, this time in the past tense and addressing her directly. The rest was crammed together with almost no regard for the blue-ruled notebook lines, and Lisey was sure he had written the final passage in a single rush. She read it the same way. Turning over to the last page as she did and continuing on, continually wiping away her tears so she could see clearly enough to get the sense of what he was saying. The
mental seeing
part, she found, was hellishly easy. The little boy, barefooted, wearing perhaps his only pair of untorn jeans, raising the pickaxe over his sleeping father in the gray pre-dawn light while the radio plays, and for a moment it only hangs there in the air that reeks of blackberry wine and everything is the same. Then

I brought it down. Lisey, I brought it down in love—I swear—and I killed my father. I thought I might have to hit him with it again but that single blow was enough and all my life it's been on my mind, all my life it's been the thought inside every thought, I get up thinking
I killed my father
and go to bed thinking it. It has moved like a ghost behind every line I ever wrote in every novel, any story:
I killed my father
. I told you that day under the yum-yum tree, and I think that gave me just enough relief to keep me from exploding completely five years or ten or fifteen down the line. But a statement isn't the same as
telling
.

Lisey, if you're reading this, I've gone on. I think my time is short, but such time as I had (and it was very good time) is all down to you. You have given me so much. Just give me this much more—your eye on these last few words, the hardest I've ever written.

No tale can tell how ugly such dying is, even if it's instantaneous. Thank God I didn't hit him a glancing blow and have to do it again; thank God there was no squealing or crawling. I hit him dead center, right where I meant to, but even mercy is ugly in the living memory; that's a lesson I learned well when I was just ten. His
skull exploded. Hair and blood and brains showered up, all over that blanket he'd spread on the back of the couch. Snot flew out of his nose and his tongue fell out of his mouth. His head went over to the side and I heard soft puttering noises as the blood and brains leaked out of his head. Some of it splashed on my feet and it was warm. Hank Williams was still on the radio. One of Daddy's hands made a fist, then opened again. I smelled shit and knew he'd left a load in his pants. And I knew that was the last of him.

The pickax was still stick out his head.

I crep away into the corn of the room and curl up and I cried. I cried and cried. I guess maybe I slep some too, I don't kno, but there came a time when it was brighter and the sun was almost out and I think it might have been noonish. If so, I guess 7 hours or so wen by. That was when I first tried to take my Daddy to Boo'ya Moon and couldn't. I thought if I got something to eat, so I did but still I couldn't. Then I thought if I took a bath and got the blut off me, his blood, and clean up some of the mess around wehre he was but still I coulnt. I tried and tried. Off and on quite a bit. Two days, I guess. Sometime I'd look at his wrap in the blanket and make believe he was say
You keep on pluggin Scoot you old sumbitch, you'll make it
like in a story. I'd try, then I'd clean, try and clean, eet somethig and try summore. I cleen that hole house! Top to bottom! Once I went to Boo'ya by myself prove I still had the nack and I dit but I coulnt take my daddy. I trite so hard Lisey.

Several blank lines here. At the bottom of the last page he had written:
Some things are like an ANCHOR Lisey do you remember?

“I do, Scott,” she murmured. “I do. And your father was one of them, wasn't he?” Wondering how many days and nights in all. How many days and nights alone with the corpse of Andrew “Sparky” Landon before Scott finally gave up plugging and invited the world in. Wondering how in God's name he had stood up to it without going completely insane.

There was a little more on the other side of the sheet. She flipped it over and saw that he had answered one of her questions.

Five days I tride. Finaly gave up and warped him in that blanket and put him down
the dry well. The next time the sleet stoped I went to Mulie's and said “My Daddy's took my big brother and I guess they up and left me.” They took me to the County Sheriff, a fat old man named Gosling and he took me to the Child Welfare and I was “on the County” as they say. So far as I know Gosling was the only cop who ever went up there to the home place, and big deal. My own Daddy once said “Sheriff Gosling couldn't find his own ass after he took a shit.”

Below this was another space of three lines, and when the printing resumed—the last four lines of communication from her husband—she could see the effort he had made to get hold of himself, to find his adult self. He had made the effort for her, she thought. No,
knew
.

Babyluv: If
you
need an anchor to hold your place in the world—not Boo'ya Moon but the one we shared,
use the african
. You know how to get it back. Kisses—at least a thousand,

Scott

P.S. Everything the same. I love you.

Lisey could have sat there with his letter for a long time, but the afternoon was fleeting. The sun was still yellow, but it was now approaching the horizon and would soon begin to take on that thundering orange cast she remembered so well. She didn't want to be on the path even close to sunset, and that meant she had better get moving now. She decided to leave Scott's final manuscript here, but not under the Story Tree. She would leave it at the head of the faint hollow that marked Paul Landon's final resting-place, instead.

She walked back to the sweetheart tree with the moss-shaggy trunk, the one that looked weirdly like a palm tree, carrying the remains of the yellow afghan and the damp and mushy manuscript box. She put them down, then picked up the marker with
PAUL
printed on the horizontal arm. It was splintered and bloody and all askew, but not really broken. Lisey was able to straighten the horizontal arm and slip the marker back into its former place. When she did, she spied something lying nearby, something almost hidden in the high grass. She knew what
it was even before she picked it up: the hypodermic that had never been used, now rustier than ever, its cap still on.

Playin with fire there, Scoot
, his father had said when Scott had suggested that maybe they could drug Paul . . . and his father had been right.

Damn if I didn't think I pricked myself on it!
Scott had said to Lisey when he had taken her to Boo'ya Moon from their bedroom at The Antlers.
That'd be a joke on me, all right—after all those years!—but the cap's still on!

It was still on now. And the nighty-night stuff was still inside, as if all the years between hadn't existed.

Lisey kissed the dull glass of the hypodermic's barrel—why she could not have said—and put it into the box with Scott's last story. Then, bundling the wasted remains of Good Ma's wedding afghan in her arms, Lisey went to the path. She glanced briefly at the board lying in the high grass to one side of it, the words on it more faded and ghost-like than ever but still discernible, still reading
, and then passed under the trees. At first she stalked rather than walked, her gait made awkward by her fear that a certain something might be lurking nearby, that its strange and terrible mind would sense her. Then, little by little, she relaxed. The long boy was somewhere else. It crossed her mind that it might not even be in Boo'ya Moon at all. If it was, it had gone deep into the forest. Lisey Landon was only a small part of its business in any case, and if what she was about to do worked, she would become a smaller part of it still, because her latest intrusions in this exotic but frightening world had been involuntary, and were about to cease. With Dooley out of her life, she couldn't think why she would ever need to come back on purpose.

Some things are like an anchor Lisey do you remember?

Lisey walked faster, and when she came to where the silver spade lay on the path, its bowl still dark with Jim Dooley's blood, she stepped over it with no more than a single absent look.

By then she was nearly running.

When she came back to the empty study, the top of the barn was hotter than ever but Lisey was cool enough, because for the second time she had come back soaked to the skin. This time wrapped around her middle like some strange wide belt was the remains of the yellow afghan, also sopping wet.

Use the african
, Scott had written, and had told her she knew how to get it back—not to Boo'ya Moon but to
this
world. And of course she did. She'd waded into the pool with it wrapped around her, then waded out again. And then, standing on the firm white sand of that beach for what was almost certainly the last time, facing not toward the sad and silent spectators on the benches but away from them, looking at the waters above which the eternally full moon would eventually rise, she had closed her eyes and had simply—what? Wished herself back? No, it was more active than that, less wistful . . . but not without sadness, for all that.