Full Dark, No Stars

He stood up. I did, too. “And if I can’t find a way? What then, Harl? You send the Sheriff ?”

His lips curled in an expression of contempt that turned my dislike of him to hate. It happened in an instant, and I stil feel that hate today, when so many other feelings have been burned out of my

heart. “I’d never go to law on a thing like this. But if you don’t take your share of the responsibility, you and me’s done.” He squinted into the declining daylight. “I’m going. Got to, if I want to get back before dark. I won’t need the 75 for a couple of weeks, so you got that long. And I won’t come dunning you for it. If you don’t, you don’t. Just don’t say you can’t, because I know better. You should have let her sel that acreage to Farrington, Wilf. If you’d done that, she’d stil be here and you’d have some money in hand. And my daughter might not be in the fam’ly way.”

In my mind, I pushed him off the porch and jumped on his hard round bel y with both feet when he tried to get up. Then I got my hand-scythe out of the barn and put it through one of his eyes. In reality, I stood with one hand on the railing and watched him trudge down the steps.

“Do you want to talk to Henry?” I asked. “I can cal him. He feels as bad about this as I do.”

Harlan didn’t break stride. “She was clean and your boy filthied her up. If you hauled him out here, I might knock him down. I might not be able to help myself.”

I wondered about that. Henry was getting his growth, he was strong, and perhaps most important of al , he knew about murder. Harl Cotterie didn’t.

He didn’t need to crank the Nash but only push a button. Being prosperous was nice in al sorts of ways. “75 is what I need to close this business,” he cal ed over the punch and blat of the engine. Then he whirled around the chopping block, sending George and his retinue flying, and headed back to his farm with its big generator and indoor plumbing.

When I turned around, Henry was standing beside me, looking sal ow and furious. “They can’t send her away like that.”

So he had been listening. I can’t say I was surprised.

“Can and wil ,” I said. “And if you try something stupid and headstrong, you’l only make a bad situation worse.”

“We could run away. We wouldn’t get caught. If we could get away with… with what we did… then I guess I could get away with eloping off to Colorado with my gal.”

“You couldn’t,” I said, “because you’d have no money. Money fixes everything, he says. Wel , this is what I say: no money spoils everything. I know it, and Shannon wil , too. She’s got her baby to watch out for now—”

“Not if they make her give it away!”

“That doesn’t change how a woman feels when she’s got the chap in her bel y. A chap makes them wise in ways men don’t understand. I haven’t lost any respect for you or her just because she’s

going to have a baby—you two aren’t the first, and you won’t be the last, even if Mr. High and Mighty had the idea she was only going to use what’s between her legs in the water-closet. But if you asked a five-months-pregnant girl to run off with you… and she agreed… I’d lose respect for both of you.”

“What do you know?” he asked with infinite contempt. “You couldn’t even cut a throat without making a mess of it.”

I was speechless. He saw it, and left me that way.

He went off to school the next day without any argument even though his sweetie was no longer there. Probably because I let him take the truck. A boy wil take any excuse to drive a truck when

driving’s new. But of course the new wears off. The new wears off everything, and it usual y doesn’t take long. What’s beneath is gray and shabby, more often than not. Like a rat’s hide.

Once he was gone, I went into the kitchen. I poured the sugar, flour, and salt out of their tin canisters and stirred through them. There was nothing. I went into the bedroom and searched her clothes.

There was nothing. I looked in her shoes and there was nothing. But each time I found nothing, I became more sure there was something.

I had chores in the garden, but instead of doing them, I went out back of the barn to where the old wel had been. Weeds were growing on it now: witchgrass and scraggly fal goldenrod. Elphis was

down there, and Arlette was, too. Arlette with her face cocked to the side. Arlette with her clown’s grin. Arlette in her snood.

“Where is it, you contrary bitch?” I asked her. “Where did you hide it?”

I tried to empty my mind, which was what my father advised me to do when I’d misplaced a tool or one of my few precious books. After a little while I went back into the house, back into the bedroom,