One Monday We Killed Them All (5 page)

Had Meg not been such a bright handsome industrious child that the teachers in the Central School took a special interest in her, her history could have been quite different.
When she was ten and Dwight was eight, an ancient borrowed tractor rolled on her great-uncle and killed him. Her great-aunt was institutionalized. The farm was sold for taxes. Meg and Dwight would have become wards of the county had not one of her teachers taken them in.

After Meg began to win every award and scholarship in sight, Dwight began to come into his own as an athlete. She selected an all-expense scholarship for two years of State Normal School that would lead to her teaching certificate so that she could quickly begin earning a living and be able to help Dwight with his college education.

The most vivid picture I got during my off-duty investigation was from an old man who remembered how it had been for them. “I seen ’em go by lots of times, them two raggedy kids with that same bright-color hair, her the bigger one, holding his hand fierce and proud and strong. They was two against the world and she was the one knew it best, making sure his belly got filled before her’n, staring holes right through any sorry person tried to trouble them. When he pulled loose of her, and was playing rough games, and jawing at her, it was like a hen hatched a duck egg and can’t stand for to see the little thing paddling out acrosst the pond. Later on, in the high school, when he was night roamin’ with a hard crowd, with people older than she was, roamin’ and fast drivin’, turnin’ theyselves ugly on ’shine, it was her fought to keep him out of worse trouble than he got in, and trouble is easy back there in the hills, with any old country dance turning quick into a stomping or a knifing or a shooting. He was thrice before the circuit judge up there, once warned and two times probation, and even with her fighting for him I’d say they’d chained him to work the roads a spell if it wasn’t he was giving them the best football years back up there ever seen before or since. But what I remember is her hauling him along, those two heads shining in the sun, her chin up like a queen, coming barefooted down the dusty road with a nickel for stale bread.”

She wanted no part of a flatland cop. Several times I humiliated myself by waiting for her at the school and walking the six blocks to Crown Street with her. She would answer a direct question, but that was all. By then I knew more about her, and I did too much talking, trying to tell her how the world had treated us a little bit alike. My own
family had gone, but in quieter ways and when I was older than she had been. At headquarters they gave me a hard ride about it. Except for Alfie Peters, I kept my head down. But he said filthy things about her, so I had to wait until we were both off, and took him out behind the maintenance shed where such things were settled. They told me later he spent the first ten minutes of it laughing, clowning, dancing and knocking me down, and some of them were getting ready to stop it. I’m lanky and rawboned and clumsier than I would like to be, and I don’t look half as powerful and durable as I’ve always been. Then they say there was a time when he stopped clowning and took his work seriously, trying to knock me down in such a way I’d stay down. But little by little he got arm-weary and he slowed down to the point where he couldn’t duck enough of my slow, heavy, roundhouse punches, floating at him like sacks of stones on the ends of two ropes. After he started to go down I had longer and longer times in which to catch my breath, and finally he went down and stayed down. They told me I was kneeling beside him and shaking him and telling him to promise not to say anything more about Margaret McAran while his eyes were still rolled up out of sight. But after they treated us at the emergency room of City Hospital, he apologized in a way that satisfied me, and looked as if it hurt his mouth more than I had.

“Another time, pal, I’ll know enough not to horse around at the beginning,” he said.

“Name the time.” I stared at him until his eyes shifted.

“I’ll name it when I’m ready,” he said. But he’s never been ready, I guess.

On a May evening I stopped to check a badly parked car. As I straightened up after looking inside to see if anyone was in there asleep, sick or drunk, I heard a slight movement behind me, started to turn—and woke up sixty hours later with twenty-one stitches in my head. Severe concussion and coma. It had been a stolen car. The drunk who had stolen it had parked it fast to go into a vacant lot and throw up. He had taken the tire iron with him because he was scared of cats, he said. He could not remember hitting me. The paper gave it a big play, because had I died, which one of the doctors thought entirely possible, it would have been murder first committed during the commission of a felony. He made five fast miles before nipping a power pole
off at the base. The lab matched my blood and hair to the tire iron.

I woke up on Thursday and was permitted visitors on Saturday. I opened my eyes after a cat nap Saturday afternoon and saw Meg sitting beside my bed looking at me with all her sweet gravity.

“How do you feel, Fenn?” she asked solemnly, using my name for the first time.

“I guess I feel pretty good. I guess I feel real good, Margaret.”

“It’s Meg, usually.”

“I’m glad you came to see me, Meg, but it’s—a real surprise.”

“To me too. I guess I should tell you why I had to come.”

“I—I’d like to know.”

We stared at each other for a little while. Meg can lie readily about small things, those lies that make the life of every day an easier thing. But in the importances of life she requires of herself a truly terrible honesty which does not count the cost.

“They have kidded me about you, Fenn. The other teachers. I said you would soon give up and stop bothering me. I hoped you would. The paper on Tuesday said you might die without regaining consciousness. A friend said to me my problem was solved, trying to make a joke I guess, but it had an ugly sound. When she went away I found myself crying and I didn’t know why. I took a bus to the end of the line and walked in the country. I could have sworn with all my heart, Fenn, I thought you were a pest. I thought of you often, and I believed it was because you were annoying me. But suddenly I knew that if you died, it would be—changed.”

“You’re crying again. There’s no reason.”

“It’s been happening this way. The tears just—start.”

“I think we better get married, Meg.”

Her broad and heated smile nearly stopped my heart, but did not stop her slow tears. “After you court me, Fenn. Court me and ask me.”

“I’ve been courting you.”

“But it will be different, much different, now.”

She touched my hand lightly and was gone from the room, and did not answer my call. She left the memory of the coolness and softness of her touch on the back of my
hand. I kissed the place she had touched. They had to release me on Sunday or I would have torn the walls down.

It was as different as she had promised it would be. She was a girl to stand tall and proud against you, filling your arms and your heart.

“You have to understand about me,” I told her. “There’s a lot about me I can change if it’s needed, but not being a cop. You’ll have better opportunities, and you should wait for them, maybe, and select a—a more important kind of life in a prettier place in the world.”

“You have to understand about me, Fenn Hillyer,” she told me. “I belong where love is, because that’s what I’m for. That’s the meaning of me. I am for the man who is now my whole life, and I am lucky we are to cherish each other because you have—a goodness. I’d love you anyway because that is the way these things are. But, because of that goodness, Fenn, there doesn’t have to be any end or limit or reservation to my giving, and I will make you so happy, so happy. So there just isn’t any more important kind of life, and wherever we have to be, we will be in the prettiest part of the world.”

Court is an old-time word, and she gave it all the old-time meanings, so that I could only guess at her passionate intensities, at what her kissings promised, until our honeymoon when, as though to refute all the sniggering ideas we flatlanders have about hill country girls, there was confirmed her hinted virginity. We had two weeks in late August, a borrowed station wagon and very little money. We spent the first two nights in a hotel in a city fifty miles away, and then went up into the hills, her hills, with food and camping gear, some new and some borrowed. She knew remote places and how to get to them. We camped twelve days and nights by a pond after lugging the gear two miles beyond the place where the logging track ended. It was wild country, with a wide misty view and no trace of man. We talked a lot, walked a lot, divided the chores, ate like wolves, and—in the best sense of the word—made each other’s acquaintance.

We had no way of knowing we had not yet cured ourselves of a honeymoon awkwardness because we had no basis for comparison. An idiotic modesty still inhibited both of us. Our lovemaking had that dead protocol and inhibition which is the result of two people attempting to perform in
all the ways they have read. We were each so determinedly anxious to inflict pleasure, it was all slightly forced, but we had no knowledge of what it could become for us.

I had used the entrenching tool we brought to enlarge a spring hole, and we would take turns bathing there. It took great will to clamber down into that icy water. On our fourth afternoon, I was collecting firewood and I thought I heard her call me. I assumed she had finished her bath. I went to the spring. The noise of the spring kept her from hearing me. I stopped, half-screened by brush, and watched her like a thief. White body, leaf shadows, yellow coins of summer sunlight, shining hair, black water. She stood up. The water level came just above mid-thigh. She plucked at the crown of her head and the piled hair came spilling down. She clambered cautiously up the bank. She was wearing a secret, private smile.

Suddenly, magically, I had the stupendous realization that the woman I watched was my woman, not just a honeymoon object to be anxious about. I felt as if weights had been taken off my shoulders. I went grinning toward her and laughed at her startled look, and pulled her down into the woodsy grass and took her joyfully, without protocol or borrowed knowledge or any worry about style or pace. I turned off my worried mind and did whatever my heart and body told me to do, and right there, with a great rumbling of her pale strong limbs, delighted gaspings and terminal frenzy we became man and wife at last in the only way that lasts. We grinned at each other, and we made bad and bawdy jokes. She felt that whatever it was which had so suddenly happened to us, there should be quite a different name for it.

In the days and nights left to us we learned of that curious paradox which seems to distort the lives of most couples. When two bodies are well-used in love, in forthright, honest, inter-selfish pleasure, sex becomes a familiar joy which can be approached in any mood, and thus becomes not only more important—in that it is an affirmation—but also less important because it becomes such a part of life it is not any more or any less serious than any other part. When bodies are not used in this honest way, there is an accumulated pressure of anxiety which elevates sex to a position of false importance, like a starving man obsessed with visions of food. Such trivia as the careful timing of mutual orgasm becomes a ponderously serious thing, whereas all
true lovers know that the times of love are like an endless shelf of books. Some endings are happier than others, but all the pleasure is mostly in the reading, in how each story starts, and how it moves, and how the chapters fit together, and what little adventures the people have before the book finally ends. Each is a journey, and each is a story, and if one ending is a little less apt than usual, the next one will very probably be better, and every so often you will find a masterpiece. The anxious ones seem to feel they have in their hands the very last book on the shelf. They chant the words in a dead monotone, lose the thread of the story, plow joylessly through all the pages thinking only of how it will end.

I could put my hand on my schoolteacher and have her say, “Why sure!” or, “More beans or more franks?” or, “Go get your own can of beer.” She could bend down and kiss the nape of my neck and I would either get up and go with her on a walk, or go get more wood for the fire, or turn and pull her down. The anxious never understand what is wanted. The lovers always do.

By the time we packed and started driving back down through the hills, I knew I had a prize more rare than I could have ever guessed, and marveled at my luck. The last bachelor suspicion had been leached out of my mind. I knew I had a woman who would last me all my life. We sang as we went down the winding roads. Neither of us can carry a tune. There is no sadness in the ending of a good honeymoon, but I understand there aren’t too many good ones. We knew ours had been good. There should be two classifications of couples. Married and really married.

The only cloud on my horizon was so small I had to look close to see it. Her half-brother had taken time off from his summer job with a road builder in a neighboring state to come and give the bride away. It was the first time I had met him. I hadn’t liked the look of him, or his manner.

But for Meg’s sake, I had to say I thought he was fine.

Any professional lawman will tell you there is no such thing as a criminal countenance. There are murderers who look like earnest, dedicated young priests. There are simian professors, rodent-like bankers and Neanderthal ministers.

But if you keep pressing the professional police officer he will often admit being conscious of a kind of almost imperceptible strangeness about a man with the innate capacity
for lawless violence. It is idiotic to use a word like psychopath. That is a wastebasket word, a receptacle for all those people in whom we detect a kind of strangeness with which we can make no valid contact.

The police officer sees no specific clue. He suddenly has a hunch. The hunch is the result of an amalgam of many small impressions, any one of which would be meaningless taken by itself. For example, when a man is husky and has a lot of vitality, and dresses with great care and expense, and seems to have no strong opinions about any abstract thing, such as politics, and avoids anything that will require persistent effort, and is always enthusiastic about the next moment, but ignores next week, and hates to be alone, and has considerable surface charm and attractiveness, and is impulsive and unreliable, and likes to lead an active, eventful life, likes to exaggerate and dramatize, and lie about money, and make promises he forgets to keep, and has no specific goal in life, and tends to overindulge in anything he tries, and uses the people who love him and charms them into forgiveness, and forms no lasting emotional relationships, then small bells start to ring.