Full Dark, No Stars

But no. I won’t say it that way. It’s too weak. This is my confession, my last word on everything, and if I can’t tel the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, what good is it? What good is anything?

It was him. It was Henry. I had seen by Sheriff Jones’s eyes that he only brought up that side-o’-the-road robbery because I wouldn’t kowtow to him the way he thought I should’ve, but I believed it.

Because I knew more than Sheriff Jones. After helping your father to murder your mother, what was stealing some new clothes and waving a crowbar in an old granny’s face? No such much. And if he tried

it once, he would try it again, once those 23 dol ars were gone. Probably in Omaha. Where they would catch him. And then the whole thing might come out. Almost certainly would come out.

I climbed to the porch, sat down, and put my face in my hands.

Days went by. I don’t know how many, only that they were rainy. When the rain comes in the fal , outside chores have to wait, and I didn’t have enough livestock or outbuildings to fil the hours with

inside chores. I tried to read, but the words wouldn’t seem to string together, although every now and then a single one would seem to leap off the page and scream. Murder. Guilt. Betrayal. Words like

those.

Days I sat on the porch with a book in my lap, bundled into my sheepskin coat against the damp and the cold, watching the rainwater drip off the overhang. Nights I lay awake until the smal hours of

the morning, listening to the rain on the roof overhead. It sounded like timid fingers tapping for entry. I spent too much time thinking about Arlette in the wel with Elphis. I began to fancy that she was stil …

not alive (I was under stress but not crazy), but somehow aware. Somehow watching developments from her makeshift grave, and with pleasure.

Do you like how things have turned out, Wilf? she’d ask if she could (and, in my imagination, did). Was it worth it? What do you say?

One night about a week after Sheriff Jones’s visit, as I sat trying to read The House of the Seven Gables, Arlette crept up behind me, reached around the side of my head, and tapped the bridge of my nose with one cold, wet finger.

I dropped the book on the braided sitting room rug, screamed, and leaped to my feet. When I did, the cold fingertip ran down to the corner of my mouth. Then it touched me again, on top of my head,

where the hair was getting thin. This time I laughed—a shaky, angry laugh—and bent to pick up my book. As I did, the finger tapped a third time, this one on the nape of the neck, as if my dead wife were saying, Have I got your attention yet, Wilf? I stepped away—so the fourth tap wouldn’t be in the eye—and looked up. The ceiling overhead was discolored and dripping. The plaster hadn’t started to bulge yet, but if the rain continued, it would. It might even dissolve and come down in chunks. The leak was above my special reading-place. Of course it was. The rest of the ceiling looked fine, at least so far.

I thought of Stoppenhauser saying, Do you want to tell me there aren’t improvements you could make? A roof to fix? And that sly look. As if he had known. As if he and Arlette were in on it together.

Don’t be getting such things in your head, I told myself. Bad enough that you keep thinking of her, down there. Have the worms gotten her eyes yet, I wonder? Have the bugs eaten away her sharp tongue, or at least blunted it?

I went to the table in the far corner of the room, got the bottle that stood there, and poured myself a good-sized hooker of brown whiskey. My hand trembled, but only a little. I downed it in two swal ows.

I knew it would be a bad business to turn such drinking into a habit, but it’s not every night that a man feels his dead wife tap him on the nose. And the hooch made me feel better. More in control of myself.

I didn’t need to take on a 750-dol ar mortgage to fix my roof, I could patch it with scrap lumber when the rain stopped. But it would be an ugly fix; would make the place look like what my mother would have cal ed trash-poor. Nor was that the point. Fixing a leak would take only a day or two. I needed work that would keep me through the winter. Hard labor would drive out thoughts of Arlette on her dirt throne, Arlette in her burlap snood. I needed home improvement projects that would send me to bed so tired that I’d sleep right through, and not lie there listening to the rain and wondering if Henry was out in it, maybe coughing from the grippe. Sometimes work is the only thing, the only answer.