The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (63 page)

“To save you? That's no defense!” Thyrza cut in savage-like. “Why should he kill a man for you? He's got no call to protect you—you're nothing to him! There's no law says he's got a right to kill anyone for you.” She turned slowly to Jasper, and you could see the plan a-borning in her eyes. “But if it was for me—if you'd done it for your wife, Jasper. If it was my bedroom Amos had come to...”

For an hour we rehearsed the story we would tell—they wrote it down for me, word for word.

Then we acted it out, for Miss Thyrza said she didn't want any perjury on her soul; whatever she said on the witness stand must be the truth. Even carrying Amos to their room, with Thyrza alone, and Jasper coming up the stairs and finding him there, even the second shot to call Effie and rouse me from my book. And at midnight Jasper rode into town and gave himself up for shooting and killing Amos McGill, with a plea of the unwritten law. But Miss Thyrza needn't have worried about the perjury, for as wife she couldn't testify, and the only one who lied was Mr. Nichols, the lawyer, and that doesn't count. It may in heaven but not in law, for he's not sworn to tell the truth like witnesses. Why is that? Why doesn't it count when a lawyer lies? Why don't they make them swear to tell the truth like other people?

The Birches earnestly swore how they'd brought Miss Thyrza home at half after nine that night, as Jasper had gone on to Hebron to see a man about some hogs. Then Mr. Nichols insinuated how when Jasper reached the crik he'd found the spring freshets had washed out the bridge and so had come home sooner than his wife expected. And what was to show his mare had lost a shoe and he'd never been near the crik but had reached home a good half-hour before Miss Thyrza?

And Effie, standing out from everyone else in the courtroom—do you remember how she looked, Mr. Hedges, as if there was a light shining over her, and through her, and from her!—described the scene she saw when the shot was fired.

Then I wrote down my answers, and also told how, back when she took me to raise, Miss Thyrza had told the matron it was to keep tongues quiet about her and Amos; and that when she was in the garden, he was in the garden, when she was in the barn, he was in the barn, and when he was in the orchard, she went traipsing after. And it was true—she was trying to egg him on with his work, but they never asked me why. Why do they make you swear to tell the whole truth, Mr. Hedges, then snap you off the minute the lawyer's got the answer he wants and never ask you why?

Jasper didn't take the stand at all, just sat with his head in his hands, meeting no one's eyes.

But Miss Thyrza held hers high, for though she couldn't testify, there was nothing to keep her from nodding yes to all the lawyer said so the jury could see her do it and think that's what she'd like to say. With her eyes all bright and shiny, her hair curled and cheeks painted (the lawyer had said she must look kind of fast to bear out his story while he told what a dangerous woman she was, how irresistible and appealing), she looked real handsome, just like all the papers said.

Altogether it was a great week for her, for it's not every woman that's left on the carpet for forty years who lives to hear herself called a Cleopatra with all the neighbors standing around to hear—women she'd gone to school with, men who'd called her an old maid, all standing around now, gawking and wondering.

“Well, what any man can see in her!” That was the womenfolk's verdict.

But the men all kind of snickered and looked wise and said they couldn't exactly explain but there was “something,” they'd always felt it, a certain “something.”

Then the newspapermen from the city tried to analyze the strange lure that had set Amos and Jasper to battling for her charms. Some said it was her hawk-black eyes that held them spellbound, others said her throaty voice, others the line of her jaw and the Mona Lisa smile, cold and enigmatic; and they called her the Iron Woman Who Lures Men to Destruction, and ran her picture alongside of Circe, Madame de Pompadour, and Ninon de Lenclos, who had lovers at the age of ninety, which was very encouraging as Miss Thyrza was still well under fifty.

But once the verdict was in, it was like a pin in a balloon or a Fourth of July tableau when you take away the red and blue lights.

The reporters and picturemen vanished back to the city; the lawyers, who'd got their pay in advance, melted away. Only the townsfolk were left, and Jezebel was the one she made them think of. Even the jury that had said “not guilty” because of the unwritten law skulked off as if they thought he'd protected a home, all right, like any real man should, but it wasn't the kind they'd care to set foot in. So it was that no one grabbed his hand to wish him luck when at last he walked out of the courthouse, free; and alone he followed Miss Thyrza down the narrow, dark stairs, through the empty hall, and across the square to the hitching rings, where the surrey stood waiting.

They were in back, I climbed in front with Effie, and we started the long drive back to the farm to pick up life again.

I'll never forget that cold winter sunshine and the sundogs that came up just as we turned in the lane.

The house, on the hilltop, looked dark and lonely and evil—like a house where a murder had been, like a house where love could not live, where decency would be strangled. The tree branches twisted and writhed in the wind like black snakes over the roof; and the windows, shot with the last yellow light from over the hill, gleamed like a nest of copperheads I'd found in the woods one day.

And it's here my statement really starts.

Yes, thank you. I would relish a little coffee if it don't put you out too much, for being up all night this way and walking to town on an empty stomach has left me kind of weak—besides what happened, and I'm getting to that pretty soon
.

Fear of being the butt of the town's jokes had started Miss Thyrza on what looked like a noble sacrifice, and vanity had buoyed her up during the giddy, gaudy whirl of the trial. But now it was over, a darker, uglier feeling raised its head.

“Effie, get supper on. And Jasper, you can help Ernie with the chores when you've laid a fire. For we've got no hand now, and there won't be none.” Jasper stood white and silent as she went on. “And Effie here can take her turn when she's through with the work in the kitchen—there'll be fewer to do for now and she'll have more time. You've cost me enough, you two, in shame and money; I've bought you both ways and now you can start paying me. Get to work!”

Over and over in the days that followed she'd remind them how it was her money that had paid the lawyers, even bringing out bills to prove all it had cost her, how it was her stock and crops had suffered from neglect at harvest time.

And when folks passing by would stop and stare at the house, she'd say bitterly, “See, I'm a scarlet woman. That's what I've made of myself to save you from the gallows.”

Again and again she'd fling at them what they owed her: “If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't have any life, or her any reputation. They're mine, both of them—I've bought them.”

And every night at prayers she'd remind them of their sins, which only the blood of the Lamb could cleanse, while she begged God to save their souls from eternal fire. Through it all Effie was scared and ashamed, like a child that knows it's done wrong and is being rightly punished. But Jasper was steady and serene—untouched.

And that nearly drove Miss Thyrza wild: to think she'd bought him and he still belonged to himself, that he had the power to lift himself up and beyond anything she could say or do. He was never defiant, always gentle with her as if humoring a sick person, but quiet and smiling as if his mind was on other things. I don't think he even realized how she was reaching out, like something with feelers and claws to suck its prey down into the mud.

But her chance came that spring.

The work wasn't so hard that winter, but when spring came, with all the plowing and planting and farrows besides the regular work, there were days when the three of us worked, with our tongues hanging out, from four in the morning till nine at night and still weren't through. And on top of it all she decided to clear out the timber along the crik and dredge out the gravel pit (the road commissioners had made her an offer)—Effie and Jasper shoveling and me to haul.

I had just started off with a load of the gravel and was halfway up the hill when the singletree broke, and I went back to get Jasper's help. I'll always remember them like that, standing there on the bank of the crik, half hidden by the new green of the willows that dipped here and there in the water, a turtle peeping up through the mud, and the sunshine everywhere warm and lazy—and she looking up at him with that winging, soaring look in her eyes that were blind to everything in the world but him. And he was saying only her name over and over and over. And you knew from that look, whether ever a word was said, that come what may, the bond between them was for all the days of their life.

I stole away, thinking how she, Miss Thyrza, I mean, had really brought it about. The way she had hurled at them always, “You two—you two—you two.” Seeking all the time to make them hers, she had only bound them together in a suffering that had turned to love.

That night after supper they told her and asked that she let Effie go; fifty dollars would take her back to her mother's people, or else to the city, where she could find work. But she couldn't stay on there with Jasper, her loving him and knowing that he loved her—it wouldn't be right.

Miss Thyrza refused. Effie had caused her the loss of Amos McGill, the best hand she ever had, and she had no mind to go out hunting another. If she was so particular about doing right, that was it: to stay and, so far as she could, fill his place.

Of the love between Effie and Jasper, she said not a word. But from then on she tortured him through the girl. Effie was afraid of the dark, so Miss Thyrza'd make excuses to send her with only a candle that threw ghastly shadows into the dry cellar, where we kept the potatoes and turnips, apples and squash. She was afraid of rats, so Miss Thyrza would make her set the bit-steel trap in the corn crib (Priscilla had died with her last batch of kittens) and hold it, full of slick, fat rats, in the watering trough till they were drowned, or else pick up the bodies when they'd eaten the poison she scattered around. She couldn't stand the sun, so all summer long Miss Thyrza kept her working in the fields and Jasper inside at easy jobs; then she could watch him suffer when Effie came in sick and dizzy from overheat. And once, when she gave way and fainted, Miss Thyrza wouldn't even let him go near her, but she brought her around, all the time smiling, a smile that was meaner somehow than her harshest words had ever been. Jasper broke under this. At last she had found a way to reach him! And the more haggard he grew, the happier and brighter she was—like she was feeding, really eating and feeding, on his suffering. It was horrible to watch, for she seemed to be circling and circling about them, like a buzzard, waiting, waiting.

Yes, I know I'm going slow, but I'm tired. I'm terrible tired. It's two nights now
.

For they came to her again night before last and all night they pleaded and begged: that she should let them go away together, that Jasper would send what money he could earn and she could divorce him.

“No,” she said. “You can't drive me to a thing like that. I've been a good woman all my life—you have sinned, but you can't force me to.”

Then let Effie go—Effie would have to go, they said.

And she flung in his teeth all the words he had said that night of the murder: “‘A young girl we've taken in our home and our duty to protect her!' Fine way you've got of protecting! I took her sin on me once, but this time she shall know disgrace.”

“Then we'll both go away,” Jasper said slowly. “We've put it up to you fair.”

“I'll have the law on you first! I'll tell them the truth about the trial. Effie perjured herself and they'll send her to prison, and as for you—”

“I wish they had hanged me,” he said. “I wish to God that they had!” And all Effie asked was that Jasper be forgiven; she wouldn't mind prison herself, only—

“You needn't worry about that,” Miss Thyrza said, still smiling, “for I'll bring the child up like mine.”

Morning came and she sent them about their work, Jasper to town with a load of hogs and Effie to clean out the henhouse and rid it of rats, while she went upstairs to sleep. Effie gave me a snack for noon (I was husking in the bottom field), and all day I figured and wondered. Had Miss Thyrza known from the very first, had she planned it all, had she meant this should happen—the final link for her chain?

I came to supper and found her there at the table alone, and I took the rope I had brought from the barn and wound it round her, with a cloth tied around her throat and head—and you'll find her like that, bound and dead.

I waited all night, but Jasper and Effie didn't come. They have gone as they told her they would, and I am glad. There's no need to bring them back—they know nothing about it all. This is my statement, voluntary and of my own free will.

I don't know what Miss Thyrza ate that night, Mr. Hedges. Why do you ask me that? What she ate had nothing to do with it! I don't care what the doctor and coroner say—tell Mr. Morgan not to believe them! She died, like I told you, from being bound! Poisoned? The autopsy shows poison? With the stuff they give rats! And Effie and Jasper have confessed—oh no! Why didn't they wait! Give me back my statement! You said it would be used against me, not them. I'm as guilty as they are: I wanted her dead but didn't know how. And they did
.

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