Full Dark, No Stars

“Yes, Hank, she did.” His mother hated to hear me cal him Hank, she said it was common, but there was nothing she could do about it now. “Up and left us cold. And of course we’re sorry, but in the

meantime, chores won’t wait. Nor schooling.”

“And I can stil be… friends with Shannon.”

“Of course,” I said, and in my mind’s eye I saw Arlette’s middle finger tapping its lascivious circle around her crotch. “Of course you can. But if you should ever feel the urge to confess to Shannon—”

An expression of horror dawned on his face. “Not ever!”

“That’s what you think now, and I’m glad. But if the urge should come on you someday, remember this: she’d run from you.”

“Acourse she would,” he muttered.

“Now go in the house and get both wash-buckets out of the pantry. Better get a couple of milk-buckets from the barn, as wel . Fil them from the kitchen pump and suds ’em up with that stuff she keeps

under the sink.”

“Should I heat the water?”

I heard my mother say, Cold water for blood, Wilf. Remember that.

“No need,” I said. “I’l be in as soon as I’ve put the cap back on the wel .”

He started to turn away, then seized my arm. His hands were dreadful y cold. “No one can ever know!” He whispered this hoarsely into my face. “No one can ever know what we did!”

“No one ever wil ,” I said, sounding far bolder than I felt. Things had already gone wrong, and I was starting to realize that a deed is never like the dream of a deed.

“She won’t come back, wil she?”

“What?”

“She won’t haunt us, wil she?” Only he said haint, the kind of country talk that had always made Arlette shake her head and rol her eyes. It is only now, eight years later, that I had come to realize how much haint sounds like hate.

“No,” I said.

But I was wrong.

I looked down the wel , and although it was only 20 feet deep, there was no moon and al I could see was the pale blur of the quilt. Or perhaps it was the pil ow-case. I lowered the cover into place,

straightened it a little, then walked back to the house. I tried to fol ow the path we’d taken with our terrible bundle, purposely scuffing my feet, trying to obliterate any traces of blood. I’d do a better job in the morning.

I discovered something that night that most people never have to learn: murder is sin, murder is damnation (surely of one’s own mind and spirit, even if the atheists are right and there is no afterlife), but murder is also work. We scrubbed the bedroom until our backs were sore, then moved on to the hal , the sitting room, and final y the porch. Each time we thought we were done, one of us would find

another splotch. As dawn began to lighten the sky in the east, Henry was on his knees scrubbing the cracks between the boards of the bedroom floor, and I was down on mine in the sitting room, examining Arlette’s hooked rug square inch by square inch, looking for that one drop of blood that might betray us. There was none there—we had been fortunate in that respect—but a dime-sized drop

beside it. It looked like blood from a shaving cut. I cleaned it up, then went back into our bedroom to see how Henry was faring. He seemed better now, and I felt better myself. I think it was the coming of daylight, which always seems to dispel the worst of our horrors. But when George, our rooster, let out his first lusty crow of the day, Henry jumped. Then he laughed. It was a smal laugh, and there was stil something wrong with it, but it didn’t terrify me the way his laughter had done when he regained consciousness between the barn and the old livestock wel .

“I can’t go to school today, Poppa. I’m too tired. And… I think people might see it on my face. Shannon especial y.”

I hadn’t even considered school, which was another sign of half-planning. Half- assed planning. I should have put the deed off until County School was out for the summer. It would only have meant waiting a week. “You can stay home until Monday, then tel the teacher you had the grippe and didn’t want to spread it to the rest of the class.”

“It’s not the grippe, but I am sick.”

So was I.

We had spread a clean sheet from her linen closet (so many things in that house were hers … but no more) and piled the bloody bedclothes onto it. The mattress was also bloody, of course, and

would have to go. There was another, not so good, in the back shed. I bundled the bedclothes together, and Henry carried the mattress. We went back out to the wel just before the sun cleared the horizon.

The sky above was perfectly clear. It was going to be a good day for corn.

“I can’t look in there, Poppa.”

“You don’t have to,” I said, and once more lifted the wooden cover. I was thinking that I should have left it up to begin with— think ahead, save chores, my own Poppa used to say—and knowing that I never could have. Not after feeling (or thinking I felt) that last blind twitch.