Joe Hill - Heart-Shaped Box

“I have a cell phone—” Marybeth began.

“Me, too,” Arlene said. “But we don’t get no reception up in these parts. Let’s get Justin laid down, and I’ll see what I can do for his hand right now. Then I’ll drive down the road to the McGees and call from there.”

Without any forewarning she reached between them and snatched at Marybeth’s wrist, lifting her own bandaged hand for a moment. The wraps were stiff and brown with the dried bloodstains on them.

“What the hell have you two been doin’?” she asked.

“It’s my thumb,” Marybeth said.

“Did you try to trade it to him for his finger?”

“It’s just got an infection.”

Arlene set the bandaged hand down and looked at the unbandaged left hand, terribly white, the skin wrinkled. “I never seen any infection like this. It’s in both hands—is it anywhere else?”

“No.”

She felt Marybeth’s brow. “You’re burnin’ up. My God. The both of you. You can rest in my room, honey. I’ll put Justin in with his father. I shoved an extra bed in there two weeks ago, so I could nap in there and keep a closer eye on him. Come on, big boy. More walkin’ to do. Get yourself up.”

“If you want me to move, you better get the wheelbarrow and roll me,” Jude said.

“I got morphine in your daddy’s room.”

“Okay,” Jude said, and he put his left hand on the table and struggled to get to his feet.

Marybeth jumped up and took his elbow.

“You stay where you are,” Arlene said. She nodded in the direction of her rottweiler and the door beyond, which opened into what had once been a sewing room but was now a small bedroom. “Go on and rest in there. I can handle this one.”

“It’s all right,” Jude said to Marybeth. “Arlene’s got me.”

“What are we gonna do about Craddock?” Marybeth asked.

She was standing almost against him, and Jude leaned forward and put his face in her hair and kissed the crown of her head.

“I don’t know,” Jude said. “I wish like hell you weren’t in this with me. Why didn’t you get away from me when you still had the chance? Why you got to be such a stubborn ass about things?”

“I been hangin’ around you for nine months,” she said, and stood on tiptoe and put her arms around his neck, her mouth searching for his. “I guess it just rubbed off on me.”

And then for a while they stood rocking back and forth in each other’s arms.

42

When Jude stepped away from Marybeth,Arlene turned him around and started him walking. He expected her to march him back down the front hall, so they could go upstairs to the master bedroom, where he assumed his father lay. Instead, though, they continued along the length of the kitchen to the back hall, the one that led to Jude’s old bedroom.

Of course his father was there, on the first floor. Jude vaguely recalled that Arlene had told him, in one of their few phone conversations, that she was moving Martin downstairs and into Jude’s old bedroom, because it was easier than going up and down the stairs to tend to him.

Jude cast one last look back at Marybeth. She was watching him go, from where she stood in the doorway of Arlene’s bedroom, her eyes fever-bright and exhausted—and then Jude and Arlene were moving away, leaving her behind. He didn’t like the idea of being so far from Marybeth in the dark and decayed maze of his father’s house. It did not seem too unreasonable to think that they might never find their way back to each other.

The hall to his room was narrow and crooked, the walls visibly warped. They passed a screen door, the frame nailed shut, the screens rusty and bellied outward. It looked into a muddy hog pen, three medium-size pigs in it. The pigs peered at Jude and Arlene as they went by, their squashed-in faces benevolent and wise.

“There’s still pigs?” Jude said. “Who’s carin’ for them?”

“Who do you think?”

“Why didn’t you sell them?”

She shrugged, then said, “Your father took care of pigs all his life. He can hear them in where he’s layin’. I guess I thought it would help him know where he was. Who he was.” She looked up in Jude’s face. “You think I’m foolish?”

“No,” Jude said.

Arlene eased the door to Jude’s old bedroom inward, and they stepped into a suffocating warmth that smelled so strongly of menthol it made Jude’s eyes water.

“Hang on,” Arlene said. “Lemme move my sewin’.”

She left him leaning against the doorway and hastened to the little bed against the wall, to the left. Jude looked across the room to an identical cot. His father was in it.

Martin Cowzynski’s eyes were narrow slits, showing only glazed slivers of eyeball. His mouth yawned open. His hands were gaunt claws, curled against his chest, the nails crooked, yellow, sharp. He had always been lean and wiry. But he had lost, Jude guessed, maybe a third of his weight, and there was barely a hundred pounds of him left. He looked like he was already dead, although breath yet whined in his throat. There were streaks of white foam on his chin. Arlene had been shaving him. The bowl of hand-whipped foam was on the night table, a wood-handled brush sitting in it.

Jude had not seen his father in thirty-four years, and the sight of him—starved, hideous, lost in his own private dream of death—brought on a fresh wave of dizziness. Somehow it was more horrible that Martin was breathing. It would’ve been easier to look upon him, as he was now, if he were dead. Jude had hated him for so long that he was unprepared for any other emotion. For pity. For horror. Horror was rooted in sympathy, after all, in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst. Jude had not imagined he could feel either sympathy or understanding for the man in the bed across the room.

“Can he see me standing here?” Jude asked.

Arlene looked over her shoulder at Jude’s father.

“Doubt it. He hasn’t responded to the sight of anything in days. Course it’s been months since he could talk, but until just a little while ago he did sometimes make faces or give a sign when he wanted something. He enjoyed when I shaved him, so I still do that ever’ day. He liked the hot water on his face. Maybe some part of him still likes it. I don’t know.” She paused, considering the gaunt, rasping figure in the far bed. “It’s sorry to see him die this way, but it’s worse to keep a man going after a certain point. I believe that. There comes a time, the dead have a right to claim their own.”

Jude nodded. “The dead claim their own. They do.”

He looked at what Arlene held in her hands, the sewing kit she was moving off the other cot. It was his mother’s old kit, a collection of thimbles, needles, and thread, jumbled in one of the big yellow heart-shaped candy boxes his father used to get for her. Arlene squeezed the lid on it, closing it up, and set it on the floor between the cots. Jude eyed it warily, but it didn’t make any threatening moves.

Arlene returned and guided him by the elbow to the empty bed. There was a light on a mechanical arm, screwed to the side of the night table. She twisted the lamp around—it made a sproingy, creaking sound as the rusted coil stretched itself out—and clicked it on. He shut his eyes against the sudden brightness.

“Let’s look at that hand.”

She brought a low stool to the side of the bed and began to unwind the sopping gauze, using a pair of forceps. As she peeled the last layer away from his skin, a flush of icy tingling spread through his hand, and then the missing finger began, impossibly, to burn, as if it were crawling with biting fire ants.

She stuck a needle into the wound, injecting him here, and here, while he cursed. Then came a rush of intense and blessed cold, spreading through the hand and into his wrist, pumping along the veins, turning him into an iceman.