Full Dark, No Stars

I sat for five minutes with my head lowered almost to my knees, I began to feel myself again. The rats had gotten to her—so what? Don’t they get to al of us in the end? The rats and bugs? Sooner or later even the stoutest coffin must col apse and let in life to feed on death. It’s the way of the world, and what did it matter? When the heart stops and the brain asphyxiates, our spirits either go somewhere else, or simply wink out. Either way, we aren’t there to feel the gnawing as our flesh is eaten from our bones.

I started for the house and had reached the porch steps before a thought stopped me: what about the twitch? What if she had been alive when I threw her into the wel ? What if she had still been alive, paralyzed, unable to move so much as one of her slashed fingers, when the rats came out of the pipe and began their depredations? What if she had felt the one that had squirmed into her conveniently

enlarged mouth and began to—!

“No,” I whispered. “She didn’t feel it because she didn’t twitch. Never did. She was dead when I threw her in.”

“Poppa?” Henry cal ed in a sleep-muzzy voice. “Pop, is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Who are you talking to?”

“No one. Myself.”

I went in. He was sitting at the kitchen table in his singlet and undershorts, looking dazed and unhappy. His hair, standing up in cowlicks, reminded me of the tyke he had once been, laughing and

chasing the chickens around the dooryard with his hound dog Boo (long dead by that summer) at his heels.

“I wish we hadn’t done it,” he said as I sat down opposite him.

“Done is done and can’t be undone,” I said. “How many times have I told you that, boy?”

“’Bout a mil ion.” He lowered his head for a few moments, then looked up at me. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. “Are we going to be caught? Are we going to jail? Or…”

“No. I’ve got a plan.”

“You had a plan that it wouldn’t hurt her! Look how that turned out!”

My hand itched to slap him for that, so I held it down with the other. This was not the time for recriminations. Besides, he was right. Everything that had gone wrong was my fault. Except for the rats, I thought. They are not my fault. But they were. Of course they were. If not for me, she would have been at the stove, putting on supper. Probably going on and on about those 100 acres, yes, but alive and wel instead of in the wel .

The rats are probably back already, a voice deep in my mind whispered. Eating her. They’ll finish the good parts, the tasty parts, the delicacies, and then…

Henry reached across the table to touch my knotted hands. I started.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re in it together.”

I loved him for that.

“We’re going to be al right, Hank; if we keep our heads, we’l be fine. Now listen to me.”

He listened. At some point he began to nod. When I finished, he asked me one question: when were we going to fil in the wel ?

“Not yet,” I said.

“Isn’t that risky?”

“Yes,” I said.

Two days later, while I was mending a piece of fence about a quarter-mile from the farm, I saw a large cloud of dust boiling down our road from the Omaha-Lincoln Highway. We were about to have a

visit from the world that Arlette had so badly wanted to be a part of. I walked back to the house with my hammer tucked into a belt loop and my carpenter’s apron around my waist, its long pouch ful of jingling nails. Henry was not in view. Perhaps he’d gone down to the spring to bathe; perhaps he was in his room, sleeping.

By the time I got to the dooryard and sat on the chopping block, I had recognized the vehicle pul ing the rooster-tail: Lars Olsen’s Red Baby delivery truck. Lars was the Hemingford Home blacksmith

and vil age milkman. He would also, for a price, serve as a kind of chauffeur, and it was that function he was fulfil ing on this June afternoon. The truck pul ed into the dooryard, putting George, our bad-tempered rooster, and his little harem of chickens to flight. Before the motor had even finished coughing itself to death, a portly man wrapped in a flapping gray duster got out on the passenger side. He pul ed off his goggles to reveal large (and comical) white circles around his eyes.

“Wilfred James?”

“At your service,” I said, getting up. I felt calm enough. I might have felt less so if he’d come out in the county Ford with the star on the side. “You are—?”

“Andrew Lester,” he said. “Attorney-at-law.”

He put his hand out. I considered it.

“Before I shake that, you’d better tel me whose lawyer you are, Mr. Lester.”

“I’m currently being retained by the Farrington Livestock Company of Chicago, Omaha, and Des Moines.”