Stephen King - A Good Marriage

“What’s my part in this? I assume I must have one.”

“Are you smarting on me, Wilf? I know you’ve had a tough year, but I still won’t bear you smarting on me.”

“I’m not smarting on you, but you need to know you’re not the only one who’s mad and ashamed. Just tell me what you want, and maybe we can stay friends.”

The singularly cold little smile with which he greeted this—just a twitch of the lips and a momentary appearance of dimples at the corners of his mouth—said a great deal about how little hope he held out for that .

“I know you’re not rich, but you still need to step up and take your share of the responsibility. Her time at the home—the sisters call it prenatal care—is going to cost me 300 dollars. Sister Camilla called it a donation when I talked to her on the phone, but I know a fee when I hear one.”

“If you’re going to ask me to split it with you—”

“I know you can’t lay your hands on 150 dollars, but you better be able to lay them on 75, because that’s what the tutor’s going to cost. The one who’s going to help her keep up with her lessons.”

“I can’t do that. Arlette cleaned me out when she left.” But for the first time I found myself wondering if she might’ve socked a little something away. That business about the 200 she was supposed to have taken when she ran off had been a pure lie, but even pin-and-ribbon money would help in this situation. I made a mental note to check the cupboards and the canisters in the kitchen.

“Take another shortie loan from the bank,” he said. “You paid the last one back, I hear.”

Of course he heard. Such things are supposed to be private, but men like Harlan Cotterie have long ears. I felt a fresh wave of dislike for him. He had loaned me the use of his corn harvester and only taken 20 dollars for the use of it? So what? He was asking for that and more, as though his precious daughter had never spread her legs and said come on in and paint the walls .

“I had crop money to pay it back with,” I said. “Now I don’t. I’ve got my land and my house and that’s pretty much it.”

“You find a way,” he said. “Mortgage the house, if that’s what it takes. 75 dollars is your share, and compared to having your boy changing didies at the age of 15, I think you’re getting off cheap.”

He stood up. I did, too. “And if I can’t find a way? What then, Harl? You send the Sheriff?”

His lips curled in an expression of contempt that turned my dislike of him to hate. It happened in an instant, and I still feel that hate today, when so many other feelings have been burned out of my heart. “I’d never go to law on a thing like this. But if you don’t take your share of the responsibility, you and me’s done.” He squinted into the declining daylight. “I’m going. Got to, if I want to get back before dark. I won’t need the 75 for a couple of weeks, so you got that long. And I won’t come dunning you for it. If you don’t, you don’t. Just don’t say you can’t, because I know better. You should have let her sell that acreage to Farrington, Wilf. If you’d done that, she’d still be here and you’d have some money in hand. And my daughter might not be in the fam’ly way.”

In my mind, I pushed him off the porch and jumped on his hard round belly with both feet when he tried to get up. Then I got my hand-scythe out of the barn and put it through one of his eyes. In reality, I stood with one hand on the railing and watched him trudge down the steps.

“Do you want to talk to Henry?” I asked. “I can call him. He feels as bad about this as I do.”

Harlan didn’t break stride. “She was clean and your boy filthied her up. If you hauled him out here, I might knock him down. I might not be able to help myself.”

I wondered about that. Henry was getting his growth, he was strong, and perhaps most important of all, he knew about murder. Harl Cotterie didn’t.

He didn’t need to crank the Nash but only push a button. Being prosperous was nice in all sorts of ways. “75 is what I need to close this business,” he called over the punch and blat of the engine. Then he whirled around the chopping block, sending George and his retinue flying, and headed back to his farm with its big generator and indoor plumbing.

When I turned around, Henry was standing beside me, looking sallow and furious. “They can’t send her away like that.”

So he had been listening. I can’t say I was surprised.

“Can and will,” I said. “And if you try something stupid and headstrong, you’ll only make a bad situation worse.”

“We could run away. We wouldn’t get caught. If we could get away with… with what we did… then I guess I could get away with eloping off to Colorado with my gal.”

“You couldn’t,” I said, “because you’d have no money. Money fixes everything, he says. Well, this is what I say: no money spoils everything. I know it, and Shannon will, too. She’s got her baby to watch out for now—”

“Not if they make her give it away!”

“That doesn’t change how a woman feels when she’s got the chap in her belly. A chap makes them wise in ways men don’t understand. I haven’t lost any respect for you or her just because she’s going to have a baby—you two aren’t the first, and you won’t be the last, even if Mr. High and Mighty had the idea she was only going to use what’s between her legs in the water-closet. But if you asked a five-months-pregnant girl to run off with you… and she agreed… I’d lose respect for both of you.”

“What do you know?” he asked with infinite contempt. “You couldn’t even cut a throat without making a mess of it.”

I was speechless. He saw it, and left me that way.

He went off to school the next day without any argument even though his sweetie was no longer there. Probably because I let him take the truck. A boy will take any excuse to drive a truck when driving’s new. But of course the new wears off. The new wears off everything, and it usually doesn’t take long. What’s beneath is gray and shabby, more often than not. Like a rat’s hide.

Once he was gone, I went into the kitchen. I poured the sugar, flour, and salt out of their tin canisters and stirred through them. There was nothing. I went into the bedroom and searched her clothes. There was nothing. I looked in her shoes and there was nothing. But each time I found nothing, I became more sure there was something .

I had chores in the garden, but instead of doing them, I went out back of the barn to where the old well had been. Weeds were growing on it now: witchgrass and scraggly fall goldenrod. Elphis was down there, and Arlette was, too. Arlette with her face cocked to the side. Arlette with her clown’s grin. Arlette in her snood .

“Where is it, you contrary bitch?” I asked her. “Where did you hide it?”

I tried to empty my mind, which was what my father advised me to do when I’d misplaced a tool or one of my few precious books. After a little while I went back into the house, back into the bedroom, back into the closet. There were two hatboxes on the top shelf. In the first one I found nothing but a hat—the white one she wore to church (when she could trouble herself to go, which was about once a month). The hat in the other box was red, and I’d never seen her wear it. It looked like a whore’s hat to me. Tucked into the satin inner band, folded into tiny squares no bigger than pills, were two 20-dollar bills. I tell you now, sitting here in this cheap hotel room and listening to the rats scuttering and scampering in the walls (yes, my old friends are here), that those two 20-dollar bills were the seal on my damnation.