by Stephen King
She doesn’t get it. The bitter gale, the one that’s making her cold even in her flannel nightgown with a sweater thrown on top for good measure, the one that’s making the furnace in the cellar run constantly as the house creaks and groans and sometimes even crrracks alarmingly, that big cold wind down from Canada, has torn a line down somewhere on the View and all she hears when she picks up the phone is an idiot mmmmm. She diddles the phone’s cutoff button a couple of times with the tip of her finger anyway, because that’s what you do, but she knows it will do no good, and it doesn’t. She’s alone in this big old converted Victorian house on Sugar Top Hill as the skies bloom with crazy-jane curtains of color and the temperatures drop to regions of cold best left unimagined. If she tries going next door to the Galloways, she knows the chances are good she’ll lose an earlobe or a finger—maybe a couple—to frostbite. She might actually freeze to death on their stoop before she can rouse them. This is the kind of cold you absolutely do not fool with.
She returns the useless phone to its cradle and hurries back down the hall to him, her slippers whispering. He is as she left him. The whining ’50s-vintage country-music soundtrack of The Last Picture Show in the middle of the night was bad but the silence is worse, worse, worst. And just before a giant gust of wind seizes the house and threatens to push it off its foundations (she can hardly believe they haven’t lost the electric, surely they will before much longer), she realizes why even the big wind is a relief: she can’t hear him breathing. He doesn’t look dead, there’s even some color in his cheeks, but how does she know he’s not?
“Honey?” she murmurs, going to him. “Hon, can you talk to me? Can you look at me?”
He says nothing, and he doesn’t look at her, but when she puts her chilly fingers against his neck, she finds that the skin there is warm and she feels the beat of his heart in the big vein or artery that lies just beneath the skin. And something else. She can feel him reaching out to her. In daylight, even cold daylight, windy daylight (like the kind that seems to pervade all the exteriors in The Last Picture Show, now that she thinks of it), she’s sure she would scoff at that, but not now. Now she knows what she knows. He needs help, just as much as he did on that day in Nashville, first when the madman shot him and then as he lay shivering on the hot pavement, begging for ice.
“How do I help you?” she murmurs. “How do I help you now?”
It’s Darla who answers, Darla as she was as a teenager—“Full of young tits n mean,” Good Ma had once said, an uncharacteristic vulgarity for her, so she must have been exasperated out of all measure.
You aren’t gonna help him, why are you talkin about helpin him? Darla asks, and that voice is so real Lisey can almost smell the Coty face-powder Darla was allowed to use (because of her blemishes) and hear the pop of her Dubble Bubble. And say! She’s been down to the pool, and cast her net, and brought back quite a catch! He’s off his rocker, Lisey, popped his cork, lost his marbles, he’s riding the rubber tricycle, and the only way you can help him is to call for the men in the white coats as soon as the phone’s working again. Lisey hears Darla’s laugh—that laugh of perfect teenage contempt—deep in the center of her head as she looks down at her wide-eyed husband sitting in the rocker. Help him! Darla snorts. HELP him? Cheezus pleezus.
And yet Lisey thinks she can. Lisey thinks there’s a way.
The trouble is that the way to help is possibly dangerous and not at all sure. She’s honest enough to recognize that she has made some of the problems herself. She has stowed away certain memories, such as their amazing exit from beneath the yum-yum tree, and hidden unbearable truths—the truth about Paul the Saintly Brother, for instance—behind a sort of curtain in her mind. There’s a certain sound
(the chuffing, dear God that low nasty grunting)
behind there, and certain sights
(the crosses the graveyard the crosses in the bloodlight)
as well. She wonders sometimes if everyone has a curtain like that in their minds, one with a don’t-think zone behind it. They should. It’s handy. Saves a lot of sleepless nights. There’s all sorts of dusty old crapola behind hers; stuff like-a dis, stuff like-a dat, stuff like-a d’other t’ing. All in all, it’s quite a maze. Oh leedle Leezy, how you amazenzee me, mein gott…and what do the kids say?
“Don’t goinzee there,” Lisey mutters, but she thinks she will; she thinks if she is to have any chance of saving Scott, of bringing him back, she must goinzee there…wherever there is.
Oh, but it’s right next door.
That’s the horror of it.
“You know, don’t you?” she says, beginning to weep, but it isn’t Scott she’s asking, Scott has gone to where the gomers go. Once upon a time, under the yum-yum tree where they sat protected from the world by the strange October snow, he had referred to his job of writing stories as a kind of madness. She had protested—she, practical Lisey, to whom everything was the same—and he had said, You don’t understand the gone part. I hope you stay lucky that way, little Lisey.
But tonight while the wind booms down from Yellowknife and the sky blooms with wild colors, her luck has run out.
7
Lying on her back in her dead husband’s study, holding the bloody delight against her breast, Lisey said: “I sat down beside him and worked his hand out from under the african so I could hold it.” She swallowed. There was a click in her throat. She wanted more water but didn’t trust herself to get up, not just yet. “His hand was warm but the floor
8
The floor is cold even through the flannel of her nightgown and the flannel of her longjohns and the silk panties beneath the longies. This room, like all of them upstairs, has baseboard heat that she can feel if she stretches out the hand that isn’t holding Scott’s, but it’s small comfort. The endlessly laboring furnace sends it up, the baseboard heaters send it out, it creeps about six inches across the floorboards…and then, poof! Gone. Like the stripes on the barber’s pole. Like cigarette smoke when it rises. Like husbands, sometimes.
Never mind the cold floor. Never mind if your ass turns blue. If you can do something for him, do it.
But what is that something? How is she supposed to start?
The answer seems to come on the next gust of wind. Start with the tea-cure.
“Henever-told-me-about-that-because-I-never—
asked.” This comes out of her so rapidly it could almost be one long exotic word.
If so, it’s an exotic one-word lie. He answered her question about the tea-cure that night at The Antlers. In bed, after love. She asked him two or three questions, but the one that mattered, the key question, turned out to be that first one. Simple, too. He could have answered with a plain old yes or no, but when had Scott Landon ever answered anything with a plain old yes or no? And it turned out to be the cork in the neck of the bottle. Why? Because it returned them to Paul. And the story of Paul was, essentially, the story of his death. And the death of Paul led to—
“No, please,” she whispers, and realizes she’s squeezing his hand far too tight. Scott, of course, makes no protest. In the parlance of the Landon family, he has gone gomer. Sounded funny when you put it that way, almost like a joke on Hee-Haw.
Say, Buck, where’s Roy?
Well, I tell yew, Minnie—Roy’s gone gomer!
[Audience howls with laughter.]
But Lisey isn’t laughing, and she doesn’t need any of her interior voices to tell her Scott has gone to gomerland. If she wants to fetch him back, first she must follow him.
“Oh God no,” she moans, because what that means is already looming in the back of her mind, a large shape wrapped in many sheets. “Oh God, oh God, do I have to?”
God doesn’t answer. Nor does she need Him to. She knows what she needs to do, or at least how she needs to start: she must remember their second night at The Antlers, after love. They had been drowsing toward sleep, and she had thought What’s the harm, it’s Saintly Big Brother you want to know about, not Old Devi
l Daddy. Go ahead and ask him. So she did. Sitting on the floor with his hand (it’s cooling now) folded into hers and the wind booming outside and the sky filled with crazy color, she peers around the curtain she’s put up to hide her worst, most perplexing memories and sees herself asking him about the tea-cure. Asking him
9
“After that thing on the bench, did Paul soak his cuts in tea, the way you soaked your hand that night in my apartment?”
He’s lying in bed next to her, the sheet pulled up to his hips, so she can see the beginning curl of his pubic hair. He’s smoking what he calls the always fabulous post-coital cigarette, and the only light in the room is cast down on them by the lamp on his side of the bed. In the rose-dusty glow of that lamp the smoke rises and disappears into the dark, making her wonder briefly
(was there a sound, a clap of collapsing air under the yum-yum tree when we went, when we left)
about something she’s already working to put out of her mind.
Meanwhile, the silence is stretching out. She has just about decided he won’t answer when he does. And his tone makes her believe it was careful thought and not reluctance that made him pause. “I’m pretty sure the tea-cure came later, Lisey.” He thinks a little more, nods. “Yeah, I know it did, because by then I was doing fractions. One-third plus one-fourth equals seven-twelfths, stuff like-a dat.” He grins…but Lisey, who is coming to know his repertoire of expressions well, thinks it is a nervous grin.
“In school?” she asks.
“No, Lisey.” His tone says she should know better than this, and when he speaks again, she can hear that somehow chilling childishness
(I trite and I trite)
creeping into his voice. “Me n Paul, we ’us home-schooled. Daddy called public school the Donkey Corral.” On the night-table beside the lamp is an ashtray sitting on top of his copy of Slaughterhouse-Five (Scott takes a book with him everywhere he goes, there are absolutely no exceptions), and he flicks his cigarette into it. Outside, the wind gusts and the old inn creaks.
It suddenly seems to Lisey that perhaps this isn’t such a good idea after all, that the good idea would be to just roll over and go to sleep, but she is two-hearted and her curiosity drives her on. “And Paul’s cuts that day—the day you jumped from the bench—were bad? Not just nicks? I mean, you know the way kids see things…any busted pipe looks like a flood…”
She trails off. There’s a very long pause while he watches the smoke from his cigarette rise out of the lamp’s beam and disappear. When he speaks again, his voice is dry and flat and certain. “Daddy cut deep.”
She opens her mouth to say something conventional that will put an end to this discussion (all kinds of warning bells are going off in her head, now; whole banks of red lights are flashing), but before she can, he goes on.
“Anyway, that’s not what you want to ask. Ask what you want, Lisey. Go ahead. I’ll tell you. I’m not going to keep secrets from you—not after what happened this afternoon—but you have to ask.”
What did happen this afternoon? That would seem to be the logical question, but Lisey understands this cannot be a logical discussion because it’s madness they’re circling, madness, and now she’s a part of it, too. Because Scott took her somewhere, she knows it, that was not her imagination. If she asks what happened, he’ll tell her, he’s as much as said so…but it’s not the right way in. Her post-coital drowse has departed and she’s never felt more awake in her life.
“After you jumped off the bench, Scott…”
“Daddy gave me a kiss, a kiss ’us Daddy’s prize. To show the blood-bool was over.”
“Yes, I know, you told me. After you jumped off the bench and the cutting was done, did Paul…did he go away somewhere to heal? Is that how come he could go to the store for bottles of dope and then run around the house making a bool hunt so soon after?”
“No.” He crushes his cigarette out in the ashtray sitting on top of the book.
She feels the oddest mixture of emotions at that simple negative: sweet relief and deep disappointment. It’s like having a thunderhead in her chest. She doesn’t know exactly what she was thinking, but that no means she doesn’t have to think it any mo—
“He couldn’t.” Scott speaks in that same dry, flat tone of voice. With that same certainty. “Paul couldn’t. He couldn’t go.” The emphasis on the last word is slight but unmistakable. “I had to take him.”
Scott rolls toward her and takes her…but only into his arms. His face against her neck is hot with suppressed emotion.
“There’s a place. We called it Boo’ya Moon, I forget why. It’s mostly pretty.” Purdy. “I took him when he was hurt and I took him when he was dead, but I couldn’t take him when he was bad-gunky. After Daddy kilt him I took him there, to Boo’ya Moon, and burrit him away.” The dam gives way and he begins sobbing. He’s able to muffle the sounds a little by closing his lips, but the force of those sobs shakes the bed, and for a little while all she can do is hold him. At some point he asks her to turn the lamp out and when she asks him why he tells her, “Because this is the rest of it, Lisey. I think I can tell it, as long as you’re holding me. But not with the light on.”
And although she is more frightened than ever—even more frightened than on the night when he came out of the dark with his hand in bloody ruins—she frees an arm long enough to turn out the bedside light, brushing his face with the breast that will later suffer Jim Dooley’s madness. At first the room is dark and then the furniture reappears dimly as her eyes adjust; it even takes on a faint and hallucinatory glow that announces the moon’s approach through the thinning clouds.
“You think Daddy murdered Paul, don’t you? You think that’s how this part of the story ends.”
“Scott, you said he did it with his rifle—”
“But it wasn’t murder. They would have called it that if he’d ever been tried for it in court, but I was there and I know it wasn’t.” He pauses. She thinks he’ll light a fresh cigarette, but he doesn’t. Outside the wind gusts and the old building groans. For a moment the furniture brightens, just a little, and then the gloom returns. “Daddy could have murdered him, sure. Lots of times. I know that. There were times he would have, if I hadn’t been there to help, but in the end that isn’t how it was. You know what euthanasia means, Lisey?”
“Mercy-killing.”
“Yeah. That’s what my Daddy did to Paul.”
In the room beyond the bed, the furniture once more shivers toward visibility, then once more retreats into shadow.
“It was the bad-gunky, don’t you see? Paul got it just like Daddy. Only Paul got too much for Daddy to cut and let out.”
Lisey sort of understands. All those times the father cut the sons—and himself as well, she presumes—he was practicing a kind of wacky preventative medicine.
“Daddy said it mos’ly skip’ two generations and then came down twice as hard. ‘Come down on you like that tractor-chain on your foot, Scoot,’ he said.”
She shakes her head. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And part of her doesn’t want to.
“It was December,” Scott says, “and there come a cold snap. First one of the winter. We lived on that farm way out in the country with open fields all around us and just the one road that went down to Mulie’s Store and then to Martensburg. We were pretty much cut off from the world. Pretty much on our own hook, see?”
She does. She does see. She imagines the postman came up that road once in awhile, and of course “Sparky” Landon would drive down it in order to get to
(U.S. Gyppum)
work, but that would have been pretty much it. No school busses, because me’n Paul, we ’us home-schooled. The school busses went to the Donkey Corral.
“Snow made it worse, and cold made it worse still—the cold kept us inside. Still, that year wasn’t so bad at first. We had a Christmas tree, at least. There were years when Daddy would get in the bad-gunky…or just plain broody…and there wouldn’t be a
ny tree or any presents.” He gives out a short, humorless laugh. “One Christmas he must have kept us up until three in the morning, reading from the Book of Revelation, about jars being opened, and plagues, and riders on horses of various shades, and he finally threw the Bible into the kitchen and roared, ‘Who writes this smogging bullshit? And who are the morons who believe it?’ When he was in a roaring mood, Lisey, he could roar like Ahab during the last days of the Pequod. But this particular Christmas seemed nice enough. Know what we did? We all went up to Pittsburgh together for the shopping, and Daddy even took us to a movie—Clint Eastwood playing a cop and shooting up some city. It gave me a headache, and the popcorn gave me a bellyache, but I thought it was the most wonderful goddam thing I’d ever seen. I went home and started writing a story just like it and read it to Paul that night. It probably stank to high heaven, but he said it was good.”
“He sounds like a great brother,” Lisey says carefully.
Her care is wasted. He hasn’t even heard her. “What I’m telling you is that we were all getting along, had been for months, almost like a normal family. If there is such a thing, which I doubt. But…but.”
He stops, thinking. At last, he begins again.
“Then one day not long before Christmas, I was upstairs in my room. It was cold—colder than a witch’s tit—and getting ready to snow. I was on my bed, reading my history lesson, when I looked out my window and saw Daddy coming across the yard with an armload of wood. I went down the back stairs to help him stack it in the woodbox so the stovelengths wouldn’t get bark all over the floor—that always made him mad. And Paul was
10
Paul is sitting at the kitchen table when his kid brother, just ten years old and needing a haircut, comes down the back stairs with the laces of his sneakers flapping. Scott thinks he’ll ask if Paul wants to go out sledding on the hill behind the barn once the wood’s in. If Daddy doesn’t have any more chores, that is.
