Great Short Stories by American Women (Dover Thrift Editions)

by Candace Ward

  Now, there he was! — saying things he didn’t need to say. Mrs. Hale tried to catch her husband’s eye, but fortunately the county attorney interrupted with:

  “Let’s talk about that a little later, Mr. Hale. I do want to talk about that, but I’m anxious now to get along to just exactly what happened when you got here.”

  When he began this time, it was very deliberately and carefully:

  “I didn’t see or hear anything. I knocked at the door. And still it was all quiet inside. I knew they must be up — it was past eight o‘clock. So I knocked again, louder, and I thought I heard somebody say, ‘Come in.’ I wasn’t sure — I’m not sure yet. But I opened the door — this door,” jerking a hand toward the door by which the two women stood, “and there, in that rocker” — pointing to it — “sat Mrs. Wright.”

  Everyone in the kitchen looked at the rocker. It came into Mrs. Hale’s mind that that rocker didn’t look in the least like Minnie Foster — the Minnie Foster of twenty years before. It was a dingy red, with wooden rungs up the back, and the middle rung was gone, and the chair sagged to one side.

  “How did she — look?” the county attorney was inquiring.

  “Well,” said Hale, “she looked — queer.”

  “How do you mean — queer?”

  As he asked it he took out a notebook and pencil. Mrs. Hale did not like the sight of that pencil. She kept her eye fixed on her husband, as if to keep him from saying unnecessary things that would go into that notebook and make trouble.

  Hale did speak guardedly, as if the pencil had affected him too.

  “Well, as if she didn’t know what she was going to do next. And kind of — done up.”

  “How did she seem to feel about your coming?”

  “Why, I don’t think she minded — one way or other. She didn’t pay much attention. I said, ‘Ho’ do, Mrs. Wright? It’s cold, ain’t it?’ And she said, ‘Is it?’ — and went on pleatin’ at her apron.

  “Well, I was surprised. She didn’t ask me to come up to the stove, or to sit down, but just set there, not even lookin’ at me. And so I said: ‘I want to see John.’ And then she laughed. I guess you would call it a laugh.

  “I thought of Harry and the team outside, so I said, a little sharp, ‘Can I see John?’ ‘No,’ says she — kind of dull like. ‘Ain’t he home?’ says I. Then she looked at me. ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘he’s home.’ ‘Then why can’t I see him?’ I asked her, out of patience with her now. ‘ ’Cause he’s dead,’ says she, just as quiet and dull — and fell to pleatin’ her apron. ‘Dead?’ says I, like you do when you can’t take in what you’ve heard.

  “She just nodded her head, not getting a bit excited, but rockin’ back and forth.

  “ ‘Why — where is he?’ says I, not knowing what to say.

  “She just pointed upstairs — like this” — pointing to the room above.

  “I got up, with the idea of going up there myself. By this time I — didn’t know what to do. I walked from there to here; then I says: ‘Why, what did he die of?’

  “ ‘He died of a rope round his neck,’ says she; and just went on pleatin’ at her apron.”

  Hale stopped speaking, and stood staring at the rocker, as if he were still seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before. Nobody spoke; it was as if everyone were seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before.

  “And what did you do then?” the county attorney at last broke the silence.

  “I went out and called Harry. I thought I might — need help. I got Harry in, and we went upstairs.” His voice fell almost to a whisper. “There he was — lying over the — ”

  “I think I’d rather have you go into that upstairs,” the attorney interrupted, “where you can point it all out. Just go on now with the rest of the story.”

  “Well, my first thought was to get that rope off. It looked — ”

  He stopped, his face twitching.

  “But Harry, he went up to him, and he said, ‘No, he’s dead all right, and we’d better not touch anything.’ So we went downstairs. She was still sitting that same way. ‘Has anybody been notified?’ I asked. ‘No,’ said she, unconcerned.

  “ ‘Who did this, Mrs. Wright?’ said Harry. He said it business-like, and she stopped pleatin’ at her apron. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You don’t know?’ says Harry. ‘Weren’t you sleepin’ in the bed with him?’ ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘but I was on the inside.’ ‘Somebody slipped a rope round his neck and strangled him, and you didn’t wake up?’ says Harry. ‘I didn’t wake up,’ she said after him.

  “We may have looked as if we didn’t see how that could be, for after a minute she said, ‘I sleep sound.’

  “Harry was going to ask her more questions, but I said maybe that weren’t our business; maybe we ought to let her tell her story first to the coroner or the sheriff. So Harry went fast as he could over to High Road — the Rivers’ place, where there’s a telephone.”

  “And what did she do when she knew you had gone for the coroner?” The attorney got his pencil in his hand all ready for writing.

  “She moved from that chair to this one over here” — Hale pointed to a small chair in the corner — “and just sat there with her hands held together and looking down. I got a feeling that I ought to make some conversation, so I said I had come in to see if John wanted to put in a telephone; and at that she started to laugh, and then she stopped and looked at me — scared.”

  At the sound of a moving pencil the man who was telling the story looked up.

  “I dunno — maybe it wasn’t scared,” he hastened; “I wouldn’t like to say it was. Soon Harry got back, and then Dr. Lloyd came, and you, Mr. Peters, and so I guess that’s all I know that you don’t.”

  He said that last with relief, and moved a little, as if relaxing. Everyone moved a little. The county attorney walked toward the stair door.

  “I guess we’ll go upstairs first — then out to the barn and around.”

  He paused and looked around the kitchen.

  “You’re convinced there was nothing important here?” he asked the sheriff. “Nothing that would — point to any motive?”

  The sheriff too looked all around, as if to re-convince himself.

  “Nothing here but kitchen things,” he said, with a little laugh for the insignificance of kitchen things.

  The county attorney was looking at the cupboard — a peculiar, ungainly structure, half closet and half cupboard, the upper part of it being built in the wall, and the lower part just the old-fashioned kitchen cupboard. As if its queerness attracted him, he got a chair and opened the upper part and looked in. After a moment he drew his hand away sticky.

  “Here’s a nice mess,” he said resentfully.

  The two women had drawn nearer, and now the sheriff’s wife spoke.

  “Oh — her fruit,” she said, looking to Mrs. Hale for sympathetic understanding. She turned back to the county attorney and explained: “She worried about that when it turned so cold last night. She said the fire would go out and her jars burst.”

  Mrs. Peters’ husband broke into a laugh.

  “Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder, and worrying about her preserves!”

  The young attorney set his lips.

  “I guess before we’re through she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about.”

  “Oh, well,” said Mrs. Hale’s husband, with good-natured superiority, “women are used to worrying over trifles.”

  The two women moved a little closer together. Neither of them spoke. The county attorney seemed suddenly to remember his manners — and think of his future.

  “And yet,” said he, with the gallantry of a young politician, “for all their worries, what would we do without the ladies?”

  The women did not speak, did not unbend. He went to the sink and began washing his hands. He turned to wipe them on the roller towel — whirled it for a cleaner place.

  “Dirty towels! Not much of
a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?”

  He kicked his foot against some dirty pans under the sink.

  “There’s a great deal of work to be done on a farm,” said Mrs. Hale stiffly.

  “To be sure. And yet” — with a little bow to her — “I know there are some Dickson County farm-houses that do not have such roller towels.”

  “Those towels get dirty awful quick. Men’s hands aren’t always as clean as they might be.”

  “Ah, loyal to your sex, I see,” he laughed. He stopped and gave her a keen look. “But you and Mrs. Wright were neighbors. I suppose you were friends, too.”

  Martha Hale shook her head.

  “I’ve seen little enough of her of late years. I’ve not been in this house — it’s more than a year.”

  “And why was that? You didn’t like her?”

  “I liked her well enough,” she replied with spirit. “Farmers’ wives have their hands full, Mr. Henderson. And then — She looked around the kitchen.

  “Yes?” he encouraged.

  “It never seemed a very cheerful place,” said she, more to herself than to him.

  “No,” he agreed; “I don’t think anyone would call it cheerful. I shouldn’t say she had the home-making instinct.”

  “Well, I don’t know as Wright had, either,” she muttered.

  “You mean they didn’t get on very well?” he was quick to ask.

  “No; I don’t mean anything,” she answered, with decision. As she turned a little away from him, she added: “But I don’t think a place would be any the cheerfuller for John Wright’s bein’ in it.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about that a little later, Mrs. Hale,” he said. “I’m anxious to get the lay of things upstairs now.”

  He moved toward the stair door, followed by the two men.

  “I suppose anything Mrs. Peters does’ll be all right?” the sheriff inquired. “She was to take in some clothes for her, you know — and a few little things. We left in such a hurry yesterday.”

  The county attorney looked at the two women whom they were leaving alone there among the kitchen things.

  “Yes — Mrs. Peters,” he said, his glance resting on the woman who was not Mrs. Peters, the big farmer woman who stood behind the sheriff’s wife. “Of course Mrs. Peters is one of us,” he said, in a manner of entrusting responsibility. “And keep your eye out, Mrs. Peters, for anything that might be of use. No telling; you women might come upon a clue to the motive — and that’s the thing we need.”

  Mr. Hale rubbed his face after the fashion of a showman getting ready for a pleasantry.

  “But would the women know a clue if they did come upon it?” he said; and, having delivered himself of this, he followed the others through the stair door.

  The women stood motionless and silent, listening to the footsteps, first upon the stairs, then in the room above.

  Then, as if releasing herself from something strange, Mrs. Hale began to arrange the dirty pans under the sink, which the county attorney’s disdainful push of the foot had deranged.

  “I’d hate to have men comin’ into my kitchen,” she said testily — “snoopin’ round and criticizin’.”

  “Of course it’s no more than their duty,” said the sheriff’s wife, in her manner of timid acquiescence.

  “Duty’s all right,” replied Mrs. Hale bluffly; “but I guess that deputy sheriff that come out to make the fire might have got a little of this on.” She gave the roller towel a pull. “Wish I’d thought of that sooner! Seems mean to talk about her for not having things slicked up, when she had to come away in such a hurry.”

  She looked around the kitchen. Certainly it was not “slicked up.” Her eye was held by a bucket of sugar on a low shelf. The cover was off the wooden bucket, and beside it was a paper bag — half full.

  Mrs. Hale moved toward it.

  “She was putting this in there,” she said to herself — slowly.

  She thought of the flour in her kitchen at home — half sifted. She had been interrupted, and had left things half done. What had interrupted Minnie Foster? Why had that work been left half done? She made a move as if to finish it — unfinished things always bothered her — and then she glanced around and saw that Mrs. Peters was watching her — and she didn’t want Mrs. Peters to get that feeling she had got of work begun and then — for some reason — not finished.

  “It’s a shame about her fruit,” she said, and walked toward the cupboard that the county attorney had opened, and got on the chair, murmuring: “I wonder if it’s all gone.”

  It was a sorry enough looking sight, but “Here’s one that’s all right,” she said at last. She held it toward the light. “This is cherries, too.” She looked again. “I declare I believe that’s the only one.”

  With a sigh, she got down from the chair, went to the sink, and wiped off the bottle.

  “She’ll feel awful bad, after all her hard work in the hot weather. I remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last summer.”

  She set the bottle on the table, and, with another sigh, started to sit down in the rocker. But she did not sit down. Something kept her from sitting down in that chair. She straightened — stepped back, and, half turned away, stood looking at it, seeing the woman who had sat there “pleatin’ at her apron.”

  The thin voice of the sheriff’s wife broke in upon her: “I must be getting those things from the front room closet.” She opened the door into the other room, started in, stepped back. “You coming with me, Mrs. Hale?” she asked nervously. “You — you could help me get them.”

  They were soon back — the stark coldness of that shut-up room was not a thing to linger in.

  “My!” said Mrs. Peters, dropping the things on the table and hurrying to the stove.

  Mrs. Hale stood examining the clothes the woman who was being detained in town had said she wanted.

  “Wright was close!” she exclaimed, holding up a shabby black skirt that bore the marks of much making over. “I think maybe that’s why she kept so much to herself. I s’pose she felt she couldn’t do her part; and then, you don’t enjoy things when you feel shabby. She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively — when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls, singing in the choir. But that — oh, that was twenty years ago.”

  With a carefulness in which there was something tender, she folded the shabby clothes and piled them at one corner of the table. She looked up at Mrs. Peters, and there was something in the other woman’s look that irritated her.

  “She don’t care,” she said to herself. “Much difference it makes to her whether Minnie Foster had pretty clothes when she was a girl.”

  Then she looked again, and she wasn’t so sure; in fact, she hadn’t at any time been perfectly sure about Mrs. Peters. She had that shrinking manner, and yet her eyes looked as if they could see a long way into things.

  “This all you was to take in?” asked Mrs. Hale.

  “No,” said the sheriff’s wife; “she said she wanted an apron. Funny thing to want,” she ventured in her nervous little way, “for there’s not much to get you dirty in jail, goodness knows. But I suppose just to make her feel more natural. If you’re used to wearing an apron — . She said they were in the bottom drawer of this cupboard. Yes — here they are. And then her little shawl that always hung on the stair door.”

  She took the small gray shawl from behind the door leading upstairs.

  Suddenly Mrs. Hale took a quick step toward the other woman.

  “Mrs. Peters!”

  “Yes, Mrs. Hale?”

  “Do you think she — did it?”

  A frightened look blurred the other thing in Mrs. Peters’ eyes.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, in a voice that seemed to shrink away from the subject.

  “Well, I don’t think she did,” affirmed Mrs. Hale stoutly. “Asking for an apron, and her little shawl. Worryin’ about her fruit.”

  “Mr. Peters says — .” Footsteps were heard in the ro
om above; she stopped, looked up, then went on in a lowered voice: “Mr. Peters says — it looks bad for her. Mr. Henderson is awful sarcastic in a speech, and he’s going to make fun of her saying she didn’t — wake up.”

  For a moment Mrs. Hale had no answer. Then, “Well, I guess John Wright didn’t wake up — when they was slippin’ that rope under his neck,” she muttered.

  “No, it’s strange,” breathed Mrs. Peters. “They think it was sucha — funny way to kill a man.”

  “That’s just what Mr. Hale said,” said Mrs. Hale, in a resolutely natural voice. “There was a gun in the house. He says that’s what he can’t understand.”

  “Mr. Henderson said, coming out, that what was needed for the case was a motive. Something to show anger — or sudden feeling.”

  “Well, I don’t see any signs of anger around here,” said Mrs. Hale. “I don’t — ”

  She stopped. It was as if her mind tripped on something. Her eye was caught by a dish-towel in the middle of the kitchen table. Slowly she moved toward the table. One half of it was wiped clean, the other half messy. Her eyes made a slow, almost unwilling turn to the bucket of sugar and the half empty bag beside it. Things begun — and not finished.

  After a moment she stepped back, and said, in that manner of releasing herself: “Wonder how they’re finding things upstairs? I hope she had it a little more red up there. You know” — she paused, and feeling gathered — “it seems kind of sneaking: locking her up in town and coming out here to get her own house to turn against her!”

  “But, Mrs. Hale,” said the sheriff’s wife, “the law is the law.”

  “I s‘pose ’tis,” answered Mrs. Hale shortly.

  She turned to the stove, worked with it a minute, and when she straightened up she said aggressively: