Full Dark, No Stars

I got her on the bed, took off her shoes, and left her there to snore with her legs spread and one hand dangling off the mattress. I went back into the sitting room and found Henry standing beside the

radio Arlette had hounded me into buying the year before.

“She can’t say those things about Shannon,” he whispered.

“But she wil ,” I said. “It’s how she is, how the Lord made her.”

“And she can’t take me away from Shannon.”

“She’l do that, too,” I said. “If we let her.”

“Couldn’t you… Poppa, couldn’t you get your own lawyer?”

“Do you think any lawyer whose services I could buy with the little bit of money I have in the bank could stand up to the lawyers Farrington would throw at us? They swing weight in Hemingford County; I swing nothing but a sickle when I want to cut hay. They want that 100 acres and she means for them to have it. This is the only way, but you have to help me. Wil you?”

For a long time he said nothing. He lowered his head, and I could see tears dropping from his eyes to the hooked rug. Then he whispered, “Yes. But if I have to watch it… I’m not sure I can…”

“There’s a way you can help and stil not have to watch. Go into the shed and fetch a burlap sack.”

He did as I asked. I went into the kitchen and got her sharpest butcher knife. When he came back with the sack and saw it, his face paled. “Does it have to be that? Can’t you… with a pil ow…”

“It would be too slow and too painful,” I said. “She’d struggle.” He accepted that as if I had kil ed a dozen women before my wife and thus knew. But I didn’t. Al I knew was that in al my half-plans—my daydreams of being rid of her, in other words—I had always seen the knife I now held in my hand. And so the knife it would be. The knife or nothing.

We stood there in the glow of the kerosene lamps—there’d be no electricity except for generators in Hemingford Home until 1928—looking at each other, the great night-silence that exists out there in

the middle of things broken only by the unlovely sound of her snores. Yet there was a third presence in that room: her ineluctable wil , which existed separate of the woman herself (I thought I sensed it then; these 8 years later I am sure). This is a ghost story, but the ghost was there even before the woman it belonged to died.

“Al right, Poppa. We’l … we’l send her to Heaven.” Henry’s face brightened at the thought. How hideous that seems to me now, especial y when I think of how he finished up.

“It wil be quick,” I said. Man and boy I’ve slit nine-score hogs’ throats, and I thought it would be. But I was wrong.

Let it be told quickly. On the nights when I can’t sleep—and there are many—it plays over and over again, every thrash and cough and drop of blood in exquisite slowness, so let it be told quickly.

We went into the bedroom, me in the lead with the butcher knife in my hand, my son with the burlap sack. We went on tiptoe, but we could have come in clashing cymbals without waking her up. I

motioned Henry to stand to my right, by her head. Now we could hear the Big Ben alarm clock ticking on her nightstand as wel as her snores, and a curious thought came to me: we were like physicians

attending the deathbed of an important patient. But I think physicians at deathbeds do not as a rule tremble with guilt and fear.

Please let there not be too much blood, I thought. Let the bag catch it. Even better, let him cry off now, at the last minute.

But he didn’t. Perhaps he thought I’d hate him if he did; perhaps he had resigned her to Heaven; perhaps he was remembering that obscene middle finger, poking a circle around her crotch. I don’t

know. I only know he whispered, “Good-bye, Mama,” and drew the bag down over her head.

She snorted and tried to twist away. I had meant to reach under the bag to do my business, but he had to push down tightly on it to hold her, and I couldn’t. I saw her nose making a shape like a shark’s fin in the burlap. I saw the look of panic dawning on his face, too, and knew he wouldn’t hold on for long.

I put one knee on the bed and one hand on her shoulder. Then I slashed through the burlap and the throat beneath. She screamed and began to thrash in earnest. Blood wel ed through the slit in the

burlap. Her hands came up and beat the air. Henry stumbled away from the bed with a screech. I tried to hold her. She pul ed at the gushing bag with her hands and I slashed at them, cutting three of her fingers to the bone. She shrieked again—a sound as thin and sharp as a sliver of ice—and the hand fel away to twitch on the counterpane. I slashed another bleeding slit in the burlap, and another, and another. Five cuts in al I made before she pushed me away with her unwounded hand and then tore the burlap sack up from her face. She couldn’t get it al the way off her head—it caught in her hair—and so she wore it like a snood.