Full Dark, No Stars

The other two fled. Back to their secret way underground, I have no doubt. Back to their rotting queen. What they left behind on my dead wife’s sideboard were little piles of rat-shit and three or four bits of the burlap sack Henry fetched from the barn on that early summer night in 1922. The rats had come to kil my last cow and bring me little pieces of Arlette’s snood.

I went outside and patted Achelois on the head. She stretched her neck up and lowed plaintively. Make it stop. You’re the master, you’re the god of my world, so make it stop.

I did.

Happy New Year.

That was the end of 1922, and that is the end of my story; al the rest is epilogue. The emissaries crowded around this room—how the manager of this fine old hotel would scream if he saw them!—wil

not have to wait much longer to render their verdict. She is the judge, they are the jury, but I’l be my own executioner.

I lost the farm, of course. Nobody, including the Farrington Company, would buy those 100 acres until the home place was gone, and when the hog-butchers final y swooped in, I was forced to sel at

an insanely low price. Lester’s plan worked perfectly. I’m sure it was his, and I’m sure he got a bonus.

Oh, wel ; I would have lost my little toehold in Hemingford County even if I’d had financial resources to fal back on, and there is a perverse sort of comfort in that. They say this depression we are in started on Black Friday of last year, but people in states like Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska know it started in 1923, when the crops that survived the terrible storms that spring were kil ed in the drought that fol owed, a drought that lasted for 2 years. The few crops that did find their way to the big city markets and the smal city agricultural exchanges brought a beggar’s price. Harlan Cotterie hung on until 1925

or so, and then the bank took his farm. I happened on that news while perusing the Bank Sales items in the World-Herald. By 1925, such items sometimes took up whole pages in the newspaper. The

smal farms had begun to go, and I believe that in a hundred years—maybe only 75—they’l al be gone. Come 2030 (if there is such a year), al Nebraska west of Omaha wil be one big farm. Probably it

wil be owned by the Farrington Company, and those unfortunate enough to live on that land wil pass their existence under dirty yel ow skies and wear gas masks to keep from choking on the stench of

dead hogs. And every stream wil run red with the blood of slaughter.

Come 2030, only the rats wil be happy.

That’s pennies on the dollar, Harlan said on the day I offered to sel him Arlette’s land, and eventual y I was forced to sel to Cole Farrington for even fewer on the dol ar. Andrew Lester, attorney-at-law, brought the papers to the Hemingford City rooming house where I was then living, and he smiled as I signed them. Of course he did. The big boys always win. I was a fool to think it could ever be any different. I was a fool, and everyone I ever loved paid the price. I sometimes wonder if Sal ie Cotterie ever came back to Harlan, or if he went to her in McCook after he lost the farm. I don’t know, but I think Shannon’s death probably ended that previously happy marriage. Poison spreads like ink in water.

Meanwhile, the rats have begun to move in from the baseboards of this room. What was a square has become a closing circle. They know that this is just the after, and nothing that comes after an irrevocable act matters much. Yet I wil finish. And they won’t have me while I’m alive; the final smal victory wil be mine. My old brown jacket is hung on the back of the chair I’m sitting in. The pistol is in the pocket. When I’ve finished the last few pages of this confession, I’l use it. They say suicides and murderers go to Hel . If so, I wil know my way around, because I’ve been there for the last eight years.

I went to Omaha, and if it is indeed a city of fools, as I used to claim, then I was at first a model citizen. I set to work drinking up Arlette’s 100 acres, and even at pennies on the dol ar, it took 2 years.

When I wasn’t drinking, I visited the places Henry had been during the last months of his life: the grocery and gasoline station in Lyme Biska with the Blue Bonnet Girl on the roof (by then closed with a sign on the boarded-up door reading FOR SALE BY BANK), the pawnshop on Dodge Street (where I emulated my son and bought the pistol now in my jacket pocket), the Omaha branch of the First Agricultural. The pretty young tel er stil worked there, although her last name was no longer Penmark.

“When I passed him the money, he said thank you,” she told me. “Maybe he went wrong, but somebody raised him right. Did you know him?”

“No,” I said, “but I knew his family.”