Full Dark, No Stars

then I was holding tight to what little cash money we had. Henry even turned his pig-bank over to me when I asked, so she couldn’t steal from that source, paltry as it was. She went, of course, to the

Farrington Company offices in Deland, feeling quite sure (as was I) that they who had so much to gain would stand good her legal fees.

“They wil , and she’l win,” I told Henry from what had become our usual place of conversation in the hay-mow. I was not entirely sure of this, but I had already taken my decision, which I wil not go so far as to cal “a plan.”

“But Poppa, that’s not fair!” he cried. Sitting there in the hay, he looked very young, more like 10 than 14.

“Life never is,” I said. “Sometimes the only thing to do is to take the thing that you must have. Even if someone gets hurt.” I paused, gauging his face. “Even if someone dies.”

He went white. “Poppa!”

“If she was gone,” I said, “everything would be the way it was. Al the arguments would cease. We could live here peaceful y. I’ve offered her everything I can to make her go, and she won’t. There’s only one other thing I can do. That we can do.”

“But I love her!”

“I love her, too,” I said. Which, however little you might believe it, was true. The hate I felt toward her in that year of 1922 was greater than a man can feel for any woman unless love is a part of it. And, bitter and wil ful though she was, Arlette was a warm-natured woman. Our “marital relations” had never ceased, although since the arguments about the 100 acres had begun, our grapplings in the dark

had become more and more like animals rutting.

“It needn’t be painful,” I said. “And when it’s over… wel …”

I took him out back of the barn and showed him the wel , where he burst into bitter tears. “No, Poppa. Not that. No matter what.”

But when she came back from Deland (Harlan Cotterie, our nearest neighbor, carried her most of the way in his Ford, leaving her to walk the last two miles) and Henry begged her to “leave off so we

can just be a family again,” she lost her temper, struck him across the mouth, and told him to stop begging like a dog.

“Your father’s infected you with his timidity. Worse, he’s infected you with his greed.”

As though she were innocent of that sin!

“The lawyer assures me the land is mine to do with as I wish, and I’m going to sel it. As for the two of you, you can sit here and smel roasting hogs together and cook your own meals and make your

own beds. You, my son, can plow al the day and read his everlasting books al night. They’ve done him little good, but you may get on better. Who knows?”

“Mama, that’s not fair!”

She looked at her son as a woman might look at a strange man who had presumed to touch her arm. And how my heart rejoiced when I saw him looking back just as coldly. “You can go to the devil,

both of you. As for me, I’m going to Omaha and opening a dress shop. That’s my idea of fair.”

This conversation took place in the dusty dooryard between the house and the barn, and her idea of fair was the last word. She marched across the yard, raising dust with her dainty town shoes, went

into the house, and slammed the door. Henry turned to look at me. There was blood at the corner of his mouth and his lower lip was swel ing. The rage in his eyes was of the raw, pure sort that only

adolescents can feel. It is rage that doesn’t count the cost. He nodded his head. I nodded back, just as gravely, but inside the Conniving Man was grinning.

That slap was her death-warrant.

Two days later, when Henry came to me in the new corn, I saw he had weakened again. I wasn’t dismayed or surprised; the years between childhood and adulthood are gusty years, and those living

through them spin like the weathercocks some farmers in the Midwest used to put atop their grain silos.

“We can’t,” he said. “Poppa, she’s in Error. And Shannon says those who die in Error go to Hel .”

God damn the Methodist church and Methodist Youth Fellowship, I thought… but the Conniving Man only smiled. For the next ten minutes we talked theology in the green corn while early summer

clouds—the best clouds, the ones that float like schooners—sailed slowly above us, trailing their shadows like wakes. I explained to him that, quite the opposite of sending Arlette to Hel , we would be sending her to Heaven. “For,” I said, “a murdered man or woman dies not in God’s time but in Man’s. He… or she… is cut short before he… or she… can atone for sin, and so al errors must be forgiven.

When you think of it that way, every murderer is a Gate of Heaven.”

“But what about us, Poppa? Wouldn’t we go to Hel ?”

I gestured to the fields, brave with new growth. “How can you say so, when you see Heaven al around us? Yet she means to drive us away from it as surely as the angel with the flaming sword drove

Adam and Eve from the Garden.”