Charles Williams - Hell Hath No Fury

They had already taken him to the mortuary, and the funeral was to be on Wednesday. We expressed our sympathy and said what a fine man he’d been, and between sessions of sniffles she told us how it had happened. Apparently he had got up for something, because she had heard him out in the hall and just as she was about to call out to him and ask if anything was wrong she heard him fall. He rolled all the way down the stairs in the living room.

“Oh, it was horrible,” she said pitifully, and I’d have felt sorry for her if I hadn’t known better. “Going down the steps in the dark, trying to get to him, I fell myself before I got to the bottom.” She slipped the housecoat down a little and showed us the bruise on her shoulder. “Somehow I got to the phone and called the doctor, but when he got here it was too late.” She started crying again. She made me sick.

Well, she finally outlasted him, I thought. The whole works is hers now—probably a hundred thousand or more. I wondered if she’d sell out and leave. Probably, I thought. She could keep a whole stable of boy friends now, like a riding academy or a stud farm, and it’d work out better in a city.

Her sniffling got Gloria started. We left in a little while and I drove her home. I went back to the rooming house and tried to sleep in the afternoon, but it wasn’t any good. I kept having a nightmare about trying to run uphill out of a river bottom with a dead man shackled to my leg. I’d wake up covered with sweat and shaking.

When would they find him? That was beginning to get me now. I hadn’t thought about that part until now that I was getting a taste of it. What about the waiting? I thought everything was all right, and that they’d go for it, but how did I know? What if I’d forgotten something? I wouldn’t know until they found him and held the inquest. Every time I thought of that cold-eyed Sheriff I’d get scared. It was going to be great. I could see that. And if it went on very long I’d be crazy.

After it was dark I drove downtown and tried to eat. My mouth was dry and everything tasted like straw. I got in the car and drove out to the abandoned sawmill, stopping on the road for a while to be sure I wasn’t followed. The rain had stopped during the afternoon and now the stars were out. I parked beside the sawdust pile and got the bundle of clothes out of the trunk, went over all of it with the flashlight looking for laundry marks and cutting them out, and then carried the stuff down to the bottom of the ravine. Scooping out a hole in the bottom of the sawdust slide, I shoved them in, clothes, purse, shoes, everything, and covered them up. Then I went up a little way and started another slide. They were well buried, and as time went by more and more would fall down on them. Maybe, I thought if she stayed around here, she’d keep it sliding down. The place made me think of her, and remembering that night made me uncomfortable. Hating her didn’t make any difference. Maybe that was what she’d meant by saying I’d always come back. It was so easy to remember the last time.

The funeral was Wednesday afternoon, and they still hadn’t found Sutton. I couldn’t seem to sleep at all now. I’d doze off for a few minutes and then wake up sweating and scared. I wondered how much longer I could take it.

Gloria and Gulick and I ordered a big floral piece for the funeral, and we all went, of course. Everybody in the county seemed to be there. Gloria cried along at the end of it, and I had to blow my nose several times myself. He was a good man, a better man than I was, even if I’d been a long time in finding it out. Gloria and I drove around afterwards, not going anywhere, and that awkward silence was still there between us. When I took her home we sat in the car a few minutes in front of the house.

“What do you suppose she’ll do with the business?” she asked. “Do you think she’ll sell out?”

I got what she meant, and it was the first time I’d thought of it. There’d been so much I’d overlooked that possibility of grief. If she did sell there’d be an audit of the books, and it’d probably happen before we could get all that deficit cleaned up, even though I still had the five hundred dollars that was in Sutton’s wallet. God, I thought, how messed up can you get?

“I don’t know,” I said. “She hasn’t said a thing, and I didn’t want to bother her with business. But I’ll see what I can find out.”

But I didn’t find out anything. She didn’t call up or come around the place, and I didn’t call her because I was reaching the point I couldn’t think about anything except Sutton, and when they’d find him, and what the inquest would turn up when they did. It went on all day and all night because I never slept more than a few minutes at a time now. In another day or two I even quit seeing Gloria. I didn’t even call her up. I was so savage and on edge I didn’t know what I’d do or say next. By the Saturday after the funeral I wondered if I wasn’t reaching the breaking point. I began to have an idea they’d found him and weren’t saying anything, just waiting for me to crack under the strain. Maybe they were just playing with me, and any minute one of them would tap me on the shoulder. And then I’d get hold of myself and I’d know this wasn’t true. They just hadn’t found him yet. Nobody ever went out there. I’d just have to wait. Wait! God, how much longer could I stand it?

It broke on Sunday morning. Two farm boys hunting rabbits found him and came to town to report it to Tate. Everybody was talking about it around the drugstore and the restaurant. The Sheriff himself came over and they went out to the oil well and were gone for a little over two hours. When they returned, early in the afternoon, they brought the body out and went on back to the county seat. Nobody knew anything except what the boys had said. He was sitting at a table, kind of bent over it, and looked like he had been dead a long time, and they were afraid of him. They didn’t go inside the cabin.

I had to live through Sunday afternoon with nothing more than that. I couldn’t go around asking everybody I met what they’d heard about it. I went back to my room, but in a little while I knew I’d go crazy there. The old man next door was reading the Bible again. I got in the car and drove over to the county seat to a movie. It was a long picture, or maybe it was a double feature and I didn’t realize it, and when I came back it was dark. There was still the night to get through. When I got back to town I went to the restaurant and forced down a little food. Tate had come back, somebody said, but he hadn’t talked about it. The man died of a gunshot wound. And there’d be an inquest Monday morning. That was all.

I sat on the bed smoking cigarettes in the darkness until after three, and when fatigue caught up with me and I dozed off I began having dreams. When I shaved, I could see it on my face. I couldn’t take much more. I held on to it all through Monday morning and into the afternoon, burying myself in paper work and going out on the lot now and then to go through the motions of demonstrating a car to faceless and unreal people.

I went up to the restaurant for a cup of coffee at three-thirty, and the waitress told me. She was just making conversation. She was bored, and it was something to talk about. Tate had been in. They’d held an inquest on that man, what was his name, the one who lived out by the oil well that had been found dead, remember—yesterday morning, wasn’t it—sure it was yesterday morning because that was Sunday and she was just dead, that dance Saturday night, honestly—but about the man, they had held an inquest, she thought that was what Tate called it, and the man had been shot through the head with a gun, wasn’t it awful, and Tate had told her the way it was— Oh, the verdict?