Full Dark, No Stars

Al these things Arlette told me on a day when those two doomed children were stil alive. Al these things she told me while the rats crawled around me and her stink fil ed my nose and my infected,

swol en hand ached like fire.

I begged her to kil me, to open my throat as I had opened hers, and she wouldn’t.

That was her revenge.

It might have been two days later when my visitor arrived at the farm, or even three, but I don’t think so. I think it was only one. I don’t believe I could have lasted two or three more days without help. I had stopped eating and almost stopped drinking. Stil , I managed to get out of bed and stagger to the door when the hammering on it commenced. Part of me thought it might be Henry, because part of

me stil dared hope that Arlette’s visit had been a delusion hatched in delirium… and even if it had been real, that she had lied.

It was Sheriff Jones. My knees loosened when I saw him, and I pitched forward. If he hadn’t caught me, I would have gone tumbling out onto the porch. I tried to tel him about Henry and Shannon—that

Shannon was going to be shot, that they were going to end up in a line shack on the outskirts of Elko, that he, Sheriff Jones, had to cal somebody and stop it before it happened. Al that came out was a garble, but he caught the names.

“He’s run off with her, al right,” Jones said. “But if Harl came down and told you that, why’d he leave you like this? What bit you?”

“Rat,” I managed.

He got an arm around me and half-carried me down the porch steps and toward his car. George the rooster was lying frozen to the ground beside the woodpile, and the cows were lowing. When had I

last fed them? I couldn’t remember.

“Sheriff, you have to—”

But he cut me off. He thought I was raving, and why not? He could feel the fever baking off me and see it glowing in my face. It must have been like carrying an oven. “You need to save your strength.

And you need to be grateful to Arlette, because I never would have come out here if not for her.”

“Dead,” I managed.

“Yes. She’s dead, al right.”

So then I told him I’d kil ed her, and oh, the relief. A plugged pipe inside my head had magical y opened, and the infected ghost which had been trapped in there was final y gone.

He slung me into his car like a bag of meal. “We’l talk about Arlette, but right now I’m taking you to Angels of Mercy, and I’l thank you not to upchuck in my car.”

As he drove out of the dooryard, leaving the dead rooster and lowing cows behind (and the rats! don’t forget them! Ha!), I tried to tel him again that it might not be too late for Henry and Shannon, that it stil might be possible to save them. I heard myself saying these are things that may be, as if I were the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come in the Dickens story. Then I passed out. When I woke up, it was the second of December, and the Western newspapers were reporting “SWEETHEART BANDITS” ELUDE ELKO POLICE, ESCAPE AGAIN. They hadn’t, but no one knew that yet. Except Arlette, of

course. And me.

The doctor thought the gangrene hadn’t advanced up my forearm, and gambled my life by amputating only my left hand. That was a gamble he won. Five days after being carried into Hemingford

City’s Angels of Mercy Hospital by Sheriff Jones, I lay wan and ghostly in a hospital bed, twenty-five pounds lighter and minus my left hand, but alive.

Jones came to see me, his face grave. I waited for him to tel me he was arresting me for the murder of my wife, and then handcuff my remaining hand to the hospital bedpost. But that never happened. Instead, he told me how sorry he was for my loss. My loss! What did that idiot know about loss?

Why am I sitting in this mean hotel room (but not alone!) instead of lying in a murderer’s grave? I’l tel you in two words: my mother.

Like Sheriff Jones, she had a habit of peppering her conversation with rhetorical questions. With him it was a conversational device he’d picked up during a lifetime in law enforcement—he asked his

sil y little questions, then observed the person he was talking to for any guilty reaction: a wince, a frown, a smal shift of the eyes. With my mother, it was only a habit of speech she had picked up from her own mother, who was English, and passed on to me. I’ve lost any faint British accent I might once have had, but never lost my mother’s way of turning statements into questions. You’d better come in now, hadn’t you? she’d say. Or Your father forgot his lunch again; you’ll have to take it to him, won’t you? Even observations about the weather came couched as questions: Another rainy day, isn’t it?

Although I was feverish and very il when Sheriff Jones came to the door on that late November day, I wasn’t delirious. I remember our conversation clearly, the way a man or woman may remember