I began to plan murders. I planned them cold-bloodedly and deliberately, without a qualm of conscience in me, only black merciless hate, because he had it coming to him. I had the power and the right to do it. Without guilt, I planned murder upon murder, and then discarded each plan because there was a flaw, a catch, a weak link that couldn't be trusted. And then I planned again.
I had plenty of time, you see. One thing had gone wrong. Three days after Lucy's death, the surgeon had amputated my left arm just below the shoulder, had left this ugly, reminding stump, this dangling, freakish monument to all I owed to Dick Stewart.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was amazing how simply a whole life could be ended.
I don't mean just the mortality that had been Lucy's, but the whole of a life together that had been built between us. For her part, she had had no family, except a distant aunt and uncle who kept discreetly silent about the whole thing, after I had Brax Jordan notify them.
As simply as that, with only the additional complication of a funeral I could not attend, and which few others cared to attend, and the meaningless purchase of a tombstone, she went to dust and memory.
As for the rest of it, as soon as I was on the road to recovery from my arm operation I called in Jordan again. His quick lawyer's eyes narrowed when I told him what I wanted.
"Don't be a fool, Harry!"
"And then," I said, "you take what you get for it and settle up my debts and buy me the old Caldwell place."
He shook his head.
"They must have you doped up."
"Look, Brax. You just do what I say. Let the bright remarks go."
He chewed furiously at his cigar. It was nearly as big as he was. Brax Jordan was a little fellow, not much over five-four. His head, set solidly on amazingly wide shoulders, seemed far too big for his body.
Maybe that head was just bulging with brain. A lot of people thought so, anyway. He had smashed all records at law school, and when he finished he could have had his pick of jobs with any number of big-city law firms. Yet he had come back to St. Johns to open his own practice.
Oddly enough, it had made him rich, because he combined his law work with some of the shrewdest farm real-estate deals the county had ever seen. His holdings were far bigger than mine, although he owned no single piece of land as big as the London place.
His father and my father had been friends, and in the same way, Brax and I were friends too. It was more than an acquaintance growing out of business relations. He and I had hunted together and fished together and grown up together. When the other kids had ragged him about his size, I had used my own big body to shut them up.
He had paid that debt back, years later, by doing his best to make the county accept Lucy, although he had never been able to force her down their throats.
He took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at me. the big head shaking slightly from side to side.
"Harry, you and I have been friends a mighty long time. Now I'm a lawyer and I take that seriously. Mighty seriously. And you own the best and biggest farm in this part of the state. As a lawyer and even more as your friend, I can't let you sell that farm for the peanuts it'll bring compared to what it's worth. And even if I could, I'll be damned if I'd turn around and buy that damn desert with the money."
"All right. I'll get Murdoch Smith to handle it."
He snorted. "He'd skin your eyebrows. Harry, you have to snap out of this."
"Out of what?"
"Whatever it is. There's no sense in any of it. So Lucy got crazy ideas in her head. So you're all cut up. That's understandable. But for the Lord's sake, man, you can't chuck everything for the rest of your life!"
"I don't aim to."
"Then what the hell do you want with the Caldwell place? There's not a building on it. It won't even grow sandspurs."
"The hell with it, Brax. You want to handle it?"
He got up and went over to the window and flipped the cigar out.
"No. Get yourself another boy."
"All right. You mind calling Smith lo come over?"
He looked at me steadily.
"Goddamn your eyes," he said. "Goddamn Smith, too. I'll get to work on it."
"Good. Anything you get over what it costs for the Caldwell place and maybe a thousand dollars, fix it up for…" I thought a minute. "For the polio foundation."
Brax shook his head from side to side, slowly. His mouth was slightly open.
"Close your mouth," I said. "I'll tell you once and that's all. That farm is what did this to me and Lucy. That and-something else. I don't want to see the place again, or hear about it, or have money from it, or any goddamn thing at all. I don't want to even think about it. Now-you see?"
"Maybe. But now about the something else?"
"I'll fix the something else, too. Sometime."
He looked at me shrewdly.
"I never would have thought it," he said. "Old Puritan Harry London. The guy who could preach whole sermons about the sanctity of the home. Harry, just how and when were you, of all people, unfaithful to Lucy?"
That was too close, I thought. Way too close. I changed the subject, wincing as if he had touched upon a tender nerve.
"One other tiling, Brax. There's an old trunk out there in the attic. Get it down and put some of my clothes in it, whatever you think I might need, and that picture of my folks and some blankets and stuff like that."
"How about Lucy's things?"
"That goes with the sale. All of it."
"Do you think that will do any good? Do you think that will get her out of your mind?"
"I don't know. I just don't want any of her stuff around."
"By the way," he said. "The sheriff sent the pistol over to my office. Said to give it back to you when you were up again. You don't want it, do you?"
"Yes," I said. "Put that in the trunk too."
Brax sold the place for me and then bought the Caldwell place. He put the thousand I had decided to hold out in the bank for me, plus enough to cover my hospital bills, and fixed up the rest for the polio foundation.
When I got out of the hospital, I went to the bank and got the money in small bills. I went to Brax and got the trunk from him and asked him if he'd drive me out to the Caldwell place.
He got out his car and we drove uptown and I went into the hardware store and bought a rifle, some cartridges, and a tool kit. They sold building supplies, too, and I ordered some lumber and a Cadet heater and a length of stovepipe. Then I went to the dime store and bought two or three cheap dishes, some ten-cent silverware, a frying pan, and a coffeepot.
I went back to the car and asked Brax to drive down Hertford Street, and sure enough, there were plenty of them there. I motioned Brax to stop and stuck my head out the window.
"You, boy," I said. "You want to work a day or two?"
The colored man shuffled closer to the car. Huge muscles rippled in his arms.
"Doin' what, Cap'n?"
"Building a shack."
He considered this.
"Fifty cents an hour?"
"I'll give you five dollars a day till we finish."
The broad face squeezed into thought, ponderously balancing off fifty cents an hour against five dollars a day.
"I reck'n so, Cap'n."
He got in the back seat and we drove out of town. About a mile out, I told Brax to slop again and I went into a filling station and bought bacon and coffee, a dozen cans of beans, some corn meal and canned milk. Then we went on again.
We turned off the paved highway and followed a bumpy clay road about five miles. A rutted road led off to the left through scraggly brush. Brax slowed for the turn.
"We'll get out here," I said.
He stopped the car and the Negro and I got out and took the stuff out of the car. The hardware-store truck wouldn't be more than a mile or two behind, I figured.
Brax sat there staring at me.
"Thanks for everything," I said. "See you sometime."
He
pulled out a cigar, in his lawyer's way of taking plenty of time about what he had to say.
"All this"-he held a match to the cigar-"doesn't impress me very much."
"It's not meant to."
"But it is. You want us-the county-to know you're hurt. You want us to feel sorry for you. You want us to say, 'Poor old Harry, living out there all alone because of what that Yankee girl did to him'."
I laughed. The Negro moved uneasily.
"Well, I'm not sorry for you. You're a damn fool, Harry. Why don't you use your head?"
"Why don't you go back to town?"
He shrugged and let in the clutch. He turned the car around in the narrow road and the Negro and I watched him head back the way we had come.
I sat down under a tree and the Negro squatted nearby, his eyes nervous and his face carefully expressionless.
"Got to wait for a truck," I said.
Pretty soon it came along, rattly and slow, dust clouding behind it. It slowed down and made the turn and then the colored driver saw us and stopped. The Negro and I climbed into the back with the lumber and the stove.
"Just a little way now," I told the driver.
The truck shackled on through the scrub, and in a minute or two the bushes and small trees fell behind us. It's seventy miles from the sea, but the sea may have covered it once, for all I know. Those dunes, they shift sometimes in the wind. This sand won't grow anything at all. A man named Caldwell once thought oil lay under this geological freak of sand and hard white clay and scattered bunches of bladelike grass. So he bought it all and built a shack and a rickety derrick and went to drilling.
He never struck anything, but after he died geologists came to make sure the old man wasn't just crazy, thinking there was oil under here. He may not have been crazy, but all the geologists found were old sea shells and the shifting, biding sand.
And now it's mine. That day, we went on along the almost disappearing road and then we saw green again, the few sparse trees around that inexplicable spring of cool, sweet water. The four canted posts of the old derrick, it's superstructure gone with the years, were stark against the sky. Old Man Caldwell's cabin had long ago disappeared.
"All right," I said to the driver. "Stop here."
The driver and the Negro unloaded the truck and I paid the driver. He got in the truck, turned it around, and went back the way he had come, the truck moving more swiftly now.
I went over by the spring and I looked around a minute and then I took a stick and drew a ten-foot square in the soft earth.
"We'll build here, boy."
"O.K., Cap'n."
The rest of that day we worked and then we rolled into blankets from the trunk and slept till the sun called us and all the next day we worked and then slept again and finished it the third day. I was of little use as yet, with only my one arm, but the Negro was a hard worker.
Then we had it finished, one room, square and un-painted, a small hole for a window, another larger one for a door, and one just large enough for the stovepipe, with a slanting shed roof and no porch. The floor was plain lumber, and we had built a bunk into one corner and some shelves along the opposite wall and a larger one against the blank rear wall for eating.
I gave him the fifteen dollars, and his thanks, except for questions asked and instructions given, were very nearly the first words between us since the car had stopped on Hertford Street. He took a few steps along the road away from me and then he stopped and looked back.
"You aim to live here, Cap'n?"
"Yes."
He shook his head. "Don't laugh at me, now, Cap'n, but there's sperrits here."
"What spirits?"
"Just sperrits. I heard 'em last night. Bad, Cap'n. This ain't no place to live."
Anger flared in me as if a sudden storm had crashed in my stomach.
"Get your black carcass off my land," I said.
He turned around and walked off up the road, not hurrying, just plodding steadily away from there. I went back and sat down in the door of the cabin and looked at where my arm had been and swore out loud.
But after a while the fury went out of me and I began to make plans again. An idea came to me and I thought about it, examining it carefully until dark, and then I found the flaw in it and discarded the idea and went on into the shack and got a can of beans off the shelf and hacked it open with the ax.
CHAPTER NINE
But the Negro was right. Maybe there aren't any spirits. Maybe he just felt something in the air, the atmosphere. But whatever it was. he was right about it.
Because something happened to my brain out there. Maybe I was a little crazy with it, the hate and the longing and the sorrow and the dark, nameless voice in me ceaselessly asking, Why? Maybe it was the loneliness and the eternal sand, or the never ending beans and bacon, or the silence at night. Maybe it was all of that.
But whatever it was, whether it was crazy or not, some giant grip took hold of my brain and steadily squeezed on it until it slopped. I could no longer, literally, think. My body moved and functioned. Some instinct supplied what it had to have, the motions, the food, the rest, or rather the stretching of bones and flesh upon the unyielding bunk.
But beyond that, cells and lobes refused to go. The careful calculation of the hospital days was impossible now. I could not even remember what those exhaustive, always flawed plans had been, much less conceive new ones. The ability to think, to reason, to apply logic was squeezed out of me, and in its place an image rose: a lace, swart, handsome, always smiling, with not only mockery but defiance in the deep blue of the eyes, with tumbling curly hair, the lips moist and wet, Stewart's face, bodiless, bloodless, fleshless, always before me, always mocking, always haunting even the tortured fever of sleep.
The image persisted until it was no longer image but reality, like the spring or the four ghostly posts, the skeletons against sand and sky. It persisted until one day I took a stick six feet long and drove it into the earth about twenty yards from my door and placed an empty bean can over the end of it and went back and sat in the door until the face came, leering from what had once been a can of beans, and then I took the rifle and methodically began to put bullets through the can.
When that one was full of holes, I put up another can, and then another, and thereafter the image appeared always sieved with dark, evil holes, none of them different from the hole in Lucy's head about which the stain of exploding powder was seared.
But the plan did not come, the plan to which my days were to have been devoted, the plan to which I would someday apply my hand like an implacable god. It devolved into an ethereal face and a can of beans and a rifle, a dream that inevitably faded before the final moment of knowledge.
The hand still squeezed on me, cells and lobes still stagnated, and I remained a god without lightning.
Yes, the Negro was right. And one night, when I had been here three months, the loneliness and the hurt and the hate, the face in the can, and the impotence told me he had been right. And I walked out of the little shack and out of the road and down it to a small unpainted farmhouse set back among overbearing trees.
When I returned, I put the two fruit jars on the floor by the door, got a can of beans off the shelf, emptied them in the unwashed frying pan, and then took the can out and hung it on the stick. I went back to the shack, got the rifle from the corner, sat down in the door, and took a drink from one of the jars.
Pretty soon, in the moonlight, I could see the face in the can and I lifted the rifle and put a bullet over its right eye, a little in toward the nose. Then I put the rifle down and took another drink and waited for the face to come again.
***
I was drunk.
I had to lean for a moment against the candy counter, my eyes furry and my mouth a little slack, and then I had my feet firmly on the floor under me again and I walked on over to the potbellied stove, glowing red against the raw winter chill.
There was a vacant chair in the circle around it and I lurched
down on it, Feeling the sharp edge of the pistol in my hip pocket.
"Well, Harry," the man sitting next to me said. My eyes focused slowly on him and I saw that it was George Aitken, who owned a small farm beyond my own. Or what had been my own.
I looked at him and there couldn't have been any greeting in my eyes, because I didn't feel any inside of me. After a moment he turned his head and sent a blob of tobacco juice sizzling against the side of the stove.
I concentrated slowly on the three other men around the stove. None of them looked at me, although I had known them all most of my life. The hell with them. I thought, the hell with all of them. They didn't know. They don't know anything.
I reached into the pocket of the heavily lined hunting jacket that had been one of the things Brax Jordan had kept out for me when he sold off the farm. My hand clutched the fruit jar and brought it out. It slipped from my hand, but the heavy glass did not break on the floor.
I lunged down on one knee to pick it up and then I lost my balance and threw out my arm to catch myself, and knelt like that on the floor, my head hanging and my mouth open and my breathing heavy. I laughed, loudly and harshly, and I picked up the jar and hauled myself back into the chair.
I offered the jar vaguely around the circle.
"Have a drink," I said, my tongue leaden in my mouth. "Bes' ol' white y'ever tas'ed."
They did not look at me and nobody spoke. I was not even capable of anger any more, and I laughed again.
" 'S your fun'ral," I said, and turned the jar up and drank.
And then I saw him, standing just outside the circle of silent men, his hands on his hips, looking very steadily at me. Something like a shiver ran down my spine and I was conscious again of the bulk of the pistol in my pocket. I took the jar down from my lips and leaned forward, my forearm on my knee, and looked back at him.
"Th' Grea' Lov'r," I said. "If's 'not th' Grea' Lov'r."
His lips twitched.
"If you have to drink that stuff in here, I wish you'd go back to the storeroom," he said, his voice very flat.
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