Stephen King - A Good Marriage

“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?”

I blinked at him, surprised. “Still? No. I didn’t.”

“Yes. Even after she wouldn’t look at me unless I had my pants on, because she said I was too old and it wouldn’t be right. But I can’t pray now, or ever again. If I got down on my knees, I think God would strike me dead.”

“If there is one,” I said.

“I hope there isn’t. It’s lonely, but I hope there isn’t. I imagine all murderers hope there isn’t. Because if there’s no Heaven, there’s no Hell.”

“Son, I was the one who killed her.”

“No—we did it together.”

It wasn’t true—he was no more than a child, and I had cozened him—but it was true to him, and I thought it always would be.

“But you don’t have to worry about me, Poppa. I know you think I’ll slip—probably to Shannon. Or I might get feeling guilty enough to just go into Hemingford and confess to that Sheriff.”

Of course these thoughts had crossed my mind.

Henry shook his head, slowly and emphatically. “That Sheriff—did you see the way he looked at everything? Did you see his eyes ?”

“Yes.”

“He’d try to put us both in the ’lectric chair, that’s what I think, and never mind me not fifteen until August. He’d be there, too, lookin’ at us with those hard eyes of his when they strapped us in and—”

“Stop it, Hank. That’s enough.”

It wasn’t, though; not for him. “—and pulled the switch. I ain’t never letting that happen, if I can help it. Those eyes aren’t never going to be the last thing I see.” He thought over what he’d just said. “ Ever, I mean. Aren’t ever .”