Full Dark, No Stars

Henry was stil sleeping. In the weeks that fol owed, he slept a great deal, and I let him, although in an ordinary summer I would have fil ed his days with chores once school let out. And he would have fil ed his evenings either visiting over at Cotteries’ or walking up and down our dirt road with Shannon, the two of them holding hands and watching the moon rise. When they weren’t kissing, that was. I hoped what we’d done had not spoiled such sweet pastimes for him, but believed it had. That I had. And of course I was right.

I cleared my mind of such thoughts, tel ing myself it was enough for now that he was sleeping. I had to make another visit to the wel , and it would be best to do it alone. Our stripped bed seemed to

shout murder. I went to the closet and studied her clothes. Women have so many, don’t they? Skirts and dresses and blouses and sweaters and underthings—some of the latter so complicated and

strange a man can’t even tel which side is the front. To take them al would be a mistake, because the truck was stil parked in the barn and the Model T under the elm. She had left on foot and taken only what she could carry. Why hadn’t she taken the T? Because I would have heard it start and stopped her going. That was believable enough. So… a single valise.

I packed it with what I thought a woman would need and what she could not bear to leave. I put in her few pieces of good jewelry and the gold-framed picture of her mama and poppa. I debated over

the toiletries in the bathroom, and decided to leave everything except for her atomizer bottle of Florient perfume and her hornbacked brush. There was a Testament in her night table, given to her by Pastor Hawkins, but I had never seen her read it, and so left it where it was. But I took the bottle of iron pil s, which she kept for her monthlies.

Henry was stil sleeping, but now tossing from side to side as if in the grip of bad dreams. I hurried about my business as quickly as I could, wanting to be in the house when he woke up. I went around the barn to the wel , put the valise down, and lifted the splintery old cap for the third time. Thank God Henry wasn’t with me. Thank God he didn’t see what I saw. I think it would have driven him insane. It almost drove me insane.

The mattress had been shunted aside. My first thought was that she had pushed it away before trying to climb out. Because she was stil alive. She was breathing. Or so it seemed to me at first. Then,

just as ratiocinative ability began to resurface through my initial shock—when I began to ask myself what sort of breathing might cause a woman’s dress to rise and fal not just at the bosom but al the way from neckline to hem—her jaw began to move, as if she were struggling to talk. It was not words that emerged from her greatly enlarged mouth, however, but the rat which had been chewing on the

delicacy of her tongue. Its tail appeared first. Then her lower jaw yawned wider as it backed out, the claws on its back feet digging into her chin for purchase.

The rat plopped into her lap, and when it did, a great flood of its brothers and sisters poured out from under her dress. One had something white caught in its whiskers—a fragment of her slip, or

perhaps her skimmies. I chucked the valise at them. I didn’t think about it—my mind was roaring with revulsion and horror—but just did it. It landed on her legs. Most of the rodents—perhaps al —avoided it nimbly enough. Then they streamed into a round black hole that the mattress (which they must have pushed aside through sheer weight of numbers) had covered, and were gone in a trice. I knew wel

enough what that hole was; the mouth of the pipe that had supplied water to the troughs in the barn until the water level sank too low and rendered it useless.

Her dress col apsed around her. The counterfeit breathing stopped. But she was staring at me, and what had seemed a clown’s grin now looked like a gorgon’s glare. I could see rat-bites on her

cheeks, and one of her earlobes was gone.

“Dear God,” I whispered. “Arlette, I’m so sorry.”

Your apology is not accepted, her glare seemed to say. And when they find me like this, with rat-bites on my dead face and the underwear beneath my dress chewed away, you’ll ride the lightning over in Lincoln for sure. And mine will be the last face you see. You’ll see me when the electricity fries your liver and sets fire to your heart, and I’ll be grinning.

I lowered the cap and staggered to the barn. There my legs betrayed me, and if I’d been in the sun, I surely would have passed out the way Henry had the night before. But I was in the shade, and after