Stephen King - A Good Marriage

He had pushed a button on his desk, and now the door opened. It was just a little bank, too small to employ a security guard, but the teller who leaned in was a beefy lad. One of the Rohrbacher family, from the look of him; I’d gone to school with his father, and Henry would have gone with his younger sister, Mandy.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Stoppenhauser?” he asked.

“Not if Mr. James leaves now,” he said. “Won’t you see him out, Kevin?”

Kevin came in, and when I was slow to rise, he clamped a hand just above my left elbow. He was dressed like a banker, right down to the suspenders and the bow tie, but it was a farmer’s hand, hard and callused. My still-healing stump gave a warning throb.

“Come along, sir,” he said.

“Don’t pull me,” I said. “It hurts where my hand used to be.”

“Then come along.”

“I went to school with your father. He sat beside me and used to cheat off my paper during Spring Testing Week.”

He pulled me out of the chair where I had once been addressed as Wilf. Good old Wilf, who would be a fool not to take out a mortgage. The chair almost fell over.

“Happy New Year, Mr. James,” Stoppenhauser said.

“And to you, you cozening fuck,” I replied. Seeing the shocked expression on his face may have been the last good thing to happen to me in my life. I have sat here for five minutes, chewing on the end of my pen and trying to think of one since—a good book, a good meal, a pleasant afternoon in the park—and I can’t.

Kevin Rohrbacher accompanied me across the lobby. I suppose that is the correct verb; it wasn’t quite dragging. The floor was marble, and our footfalls echoed. The walls were dark oak. At the high tellers’ windows, two women served a little group of year-end customers. One of the tellers was young and one was old, but their big-eyed expressions were identical. Yet it wasn’t their horrified, almost prurient interest that took my own eye; it was captivated by something else entirely. A burled oak rail three inches wide ran above the tellers’ windows, and scurrying busily along it—

“Ware that rat!” I cried, and pointed.

The young teller voiced a little scream, looked up, then exchanged a glance with her older counterpart. There was no rat, only the passing shadow of the ceiling fan. And now everyone was looking at me.

“Stare all you want!” I told them. “Look your fill! Look until your God damned eyes fall out!”

Then I was in the street, and puffing out cold winter air that looked like cigarette smoke. “Don’t come back unless you have business to do,” Kevin said. “And unless you can keep a civil tongue.”

“Your father was the biggest God damned cheater I ever went to school with,” I told him. I wanted him to hit me, but he only went back inside and left me alone on the sidewalk, standing in front of my saggy old truck. And that was how Wilfred Leland James spent his visit to town on the last day of 1922.

When I got home, Achelois was no longer in the house. She was in the yard, lying on her side and puffing her own clouds of white vapor. I could see the snow-scuffs where she’d gone galloping off the porch, and the bigger one where she had landed badly and broken both front legs. Not even a blameless cow could survive around me, it seemed.

I went into the mudroom to get my gun, then into the house, wanting to see—if I could—what had frightened her so badly that she’d left her new shelter at a full gallop. It was rats, of course. Three of them sitting on Arlette’s treasured sideboard, looking at me with their black and solemn eyes.

“Go back and tell her to leave me alone,” I told them. “Tell her she’s done damage enough. For God’s sake tell her to let me be.”

They only sat looking at me with their tails curled around their plump black-gray bodies. So I lifted my varmint rifle and shot the one in the middle. The bullet tore it apart and splattered its leavings all over the wallpaper Arlette had picked out with such care 9 or 10 years before. When Henry was still just a little ’un and things among the three of us were fine.

The other two fled. Back to their secret way underground, I have no doubt. Back to their rotting queen. What they left behind on my dead wife’s sideboard were little piles of rat-shit and three or four bits of the burlap sack Henry fetched from the barn on that early summer night in 1922. The rats had come to kill my last cow and bring me little pieces of Arlette’s snood .

I went outside and patted Achelois on the head. She stretched her neck up and lowed plaintively. Make it stop. You’re the master, you’re the god of my world, so make it stop.

I did.

Happy New Year.

That was the end of 1922, and that is the end of my story; all the rest is epilogue. The emissaries crowded around this room—how the manager of this fine old hotel would scream if he saw them!—will not have to wait much longer to render their verdict. She is the judge, they are the jury, but I’ll be my own executioner.

I lost the farm, of course. Nobody, including the Farrington Company, would buy those 100 acres until the home place was gone, and when the hog-butchers finally swooped in, I was forced to sell at an insanely low price. Lester’s plan worked perfectly. I’m sure it was his, and I’m sure he got a bonus.

Oh, well; I would have lost my little toehold in Hemingford County even if I’d had financial resources to fall back on, and there is a perverse sort of comfort in that. They say this depression we are in started on Black Friday of last year, but people in states like Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska know it started in 1923, when the crops that survived the terrible storms that spring were killed in the drought that followed, a drought that lasted for 2 years. The few crops that did find their way to the big city markets and the small city agricultural exchanges brought a beggar’s price. Harlan Cotterie hung on until 1925 or so, and then the bank took his farm. I happened on that news while perusing the Bank Sales items in the World-Herald . By 1925, such items sometimes took up whole pages in the newspaper. The small farms had begun to go, and I believe that in a hundred years—maybe only 75—they’ll all be gone. Come 2030 (if there is such a year), all Nebraska west of Omaha will be one big farm. Probably it will be owned by the Farrington Company, and those unfortunate enough to live on that land will pass their existence under dirty yellow skies and wear gas masks to keep from choking on the stench of dead hogs. And every stream will run red with the blood of slaughter.

Come 2030, only the rats will be happy.

That’s pennies on the dollar, Harlan said on the day I offered to sell him Arlette’s land, and eventually I was forced to sell to Cole Farrington for even fewer on the dollar. Andrew Lester, attorney-at-law, brought the papers to the Hemingford City rooming house where I was then living, and he smiled as I signed them. Of course he did. The big boys always win. I was a fool to think it could ever be any different. I was a fool, and everyone I ever loved paid the price. I sometimes wonder if Sallie Cotterie ever came back to Harlan, or if he went to her in McCook after he lost the farm. I don’t know, but I think Shannon’s death probably ended that previously happy marriage. Poison spreads like ink in water.

Meanwhile, the rats have begun to move in from the baseboards of this room. What was a square has become a closing circle. They know that this is just the after, and nothing that comes after an irrevocable act matters much. Yet I will finish. And they won’t have me while I’m alive; the final small victory will be mine. My old brown jacket is hung on the back of the chair I’m sitting in. The pistol is in the pocket. When I’ve finished the last few pages of this confession, I’ll use it. They say suicides and murderers go to Hell. If so, I will know my way around, because I’ve been there for the last eight years.