Корнелл Вулрич: Murder at Mother’s Knee [= Something That Happened in Our House]

She retired and blew out the lamp finally.

How long she’d been asleep she could not tell, but it must have been well after midnight that something roused her. She didn’t know exactly what it was at first, then as she sat up and put her foot questioningly to the floor, she identified it as some sort of a strong vibration coming from someplace below. As though two heavy bodies were threshing about in a struggle down there. She quickly put something on and went out to listen in the hall. A chair went over with a vicious crack. A table jarred. She could hear an accompaniment of stentorian breathing, an occasional wordless grunt. But she was already on her way down by that time, all further thought of concealment thrown to the winds.

Mason and his son were locked in a grim, heaving struggle that floundered from one end of the kitchen to the other and back again, dislodging everything in its path. Mrs. Mason was a helpless onlooker, holding a lighted lamp back beyond danger of upsetting, and ineffectually whimpering: “Don’t! Dirk! Ed! Let each other be now!”

“Hold the door open, quick, Ma! I’ve got him!” Mason gasped just as Miss Prince arrived on the scene.

The woman edged over sidewise along the wall, flung it back. Mason catapulted his adversary bodily out into the night. Then he snatched up a chicken lying in a pool of blood over in a corner, sent that after him, streaking a line of red drops across the floor. “Thievin’ drunkard!” he shouted, shaking a fist at the sprawling figure outside. “Now you come back when you sober up, and I’ll let you in!” He slammed the door, shot the bolt home. “Clean up that mess, Ma,” he ordered gruffly. “That’s one think I won’t ’low, is no chicken-stealing drunkards in my house!” He strode past the open-mouthed teacher without seeming to see her, still heaving with righteous indignation, stamped up the stairs.

“He’s very strict about that,” Mrs. Mason whispered confidentially. “Ed don’t mean no harm, but he helps himself to things that don’t belong to him when he gets likkered up.” She sloshed water into a bucket, reached for a scrubbing-brush, sank wearily to her knees, and began to scour ruddy circles of chicken-blood on the floor. “I just got through doin’ this floor with lye after the last time,” she mumbled.

Miss Prince found her voice at last. It was still a very small, shaky one. “Has... has this happened before?”

“Every so often,” she admitted. “Last time he run off with the O’Brien’s Ford, drove it all the way out here just like it belonged to him. Mr. Mason had to sneak it back where he took it from, at that hour of the night.”

An odor of singeing felt assailed the teacher’s nostrils. She looked, discovered a felt hat, evidently the unmanageable Ed’s, fallen through the open scuttle-hole of the wood-burning stove onto the still-warm ashes below. She drew it up, beat it odorless against the back of a chair.

There was a slight rustle from the doorway and Johnny was standing there in his night-shirt, sleepily rubbing one eye. “I had another of those dreams, Ma,” he complained. “I dreamed the whole house was shaking and—”

“You go back to bed, hear?” his mother said sharply. “And don’t go writing no more compositions about it in school, neither!” She fanned out her skirt, trying to screen the crimson vestiges on the floor from him. “Another of them wood-varmints got into the house, and your Pa and your Uncle Ed had to kill it, that’s all!”

Miss Prince turned and slunk up the stairs presently, with a very peculiar look on her face. The look of someone who has made a complete, unmitigated fool out of herself. She slammed the door of her room behind her with — for her — unusual asperity. She went over to the window and stood looking out. Far down the highway she could make out the dwindling figure of Ed Mason in the moonlight, steering a lurching, drunken course back toward town and singing, or rather hooting, at the top of his voice as he went.

“Appearances!” she scowled bitterly. “Appearances!”

She always seemed to meet Kendall just when she didn’t want to. He appeared at her elbow next morning just as she alighted from the bus in town. “How’re things going? Get onto anything yet?”

She made a move to brush by him, first, without answering.

“I haven’t received anything definite yet on any of those inquiries I sent out,” he went on.

She turned and faced him. “You won’t, either. You can forget the whole thing! All right, laugh, you’re entitled to it! You were right and I was wrong. Now go ahead, make the most of it!”

“You mean you don’t think—”

“I mean I practically saw the same thing the boy did, with my own eyes, last night and it wasn’t anything of the sort. It was just a family row! I’ve made a fool out of myself and gone to a lot of trouble, for nothing!”

“What’re you going to do?”

“I’m going to pack my things and come away from there, right today, you can be sure of that!”

“Don’t take it too hard—” he tried to console her.

She stalked away. At least, she had to admit to herself, he’d been decent enough not to say, “I told you so,” and laugh right out in her face. Oh well, he was probably saving it up to enjoy it more fully back at the station-house with his cronies.

Mrs. Mason was alone in the kitchen again when she returned that afternoon to get her things together. There hadn’t been time before school in the morning. The woman looked at her questioningly, but the teacher didn’t say anything about her imminent departure. Time enough to announce it when she came down again.

In her room she picked up the dress she’d had on the afternoon before and started to fold it over. Something caught her eye. There was a viscous stain, a blotch, on the rear of it that she hadn’t noticed until now. She looked at it more closely, as though unable to account for it. Then she remembered sitting down on a half-submerged stump for a moment, just before hearing the boys’ cries of distress. “No more appearances!” she warned herself half under her breath, and tossed the garment into the open bag.

She picked up the batch of school papers lying on the table to follow suit with them. There was that composition of Johnny’s that had started all the trouble, staring her in the face again. She started to reread it. She was standing up at first. Before she had finished she was seated once more. She turned and looked over at the dress she had just put away. Then she got up and took it out again. That and the other things that had preceded it.

There was a timid knock on the door and Mrs. Mason looked in at her. “I thought maybe you’d like me to help you get your things together,” she faltered.

Miss Prince eyed her with cool imperturbability. “I didn’t say anything about leaving. What gave you that idea? I’m staying — at least for awhile longer.”

The woman’s hand started out toward her, in a palsied gesture of supplication and warning. She seemed about to say something. Then she quickly closed the door again with stealthy terror.

Her main worry was to get down the venerable stairs without causing them to creak and betray her. The house lay steeped in midnight silence. She had felt certain Mason and his son were inveterate snorers when asleep, she had heard them at other times, even downstairs when they dozed after meals. Tonight for some reason she couldn’t hear them.

She didn’t use the pocket-light she had provided herself with, for fear of attracting attention while still within the house. The real need for that would be later, over there in the woods. The stairs accomplished without mishap, it was a fairly easy matter to slip the bolt on the back door and get out without too much noise. There was a full moon up, but whether it would be much help where she was going, she doubted.