by Stephen King
“Two of the back teeth were gone,” Jones said. “Was Arlette missing a couple of back teeth?”
“Yes,” I lied. “Lost them from a gum infection.”
“When I came out that day just after she ran off, your boy said she took her good jewelry.”
“Yes.” The jewelry that was now in the well.
“When I asked if she could have laid her hands on any money, you mentioned 200 dollars. Isn’t that right?”
Ah yes. The fictional money Arlette had supposedly taken from my dresser. “That’s right.”
He was nodding. “Well, there you go, there you go. Some jewelry and some money. That explains everything, wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t see—”
“Because you’re not looking at it from a lawman’s point of view. She was robbed on the road, that’s all. Some bad egg spied a woman hitchhiking between Hemingford and Lyme Biska, picked her up, killed her, robbed her of her money and her jewelry, then carried her body far enough into the nearest field so it couldn’t be seen from the road.” From his long face I could see he was thinking she had probably been raped as well as robbed, and that it was probably a good thing that there wasn’t enough of her left to tell for sure.
“That’s probably it, then,” I said, and somehow I was able to keep a straight face until he was gone. Then I turned over, and although I thumped my stump in doing so, I began to laugh. I buried my face in my pillow, but not even that would stifle the sound. When the nurse—an ugly old battleaxe—came in and saw the tears streaking my face, she assumed (which makes an ass out of you and me) that I had been crying. She softened, a thing I would have thought impossible, and gave me an extra morphine pill. I was, after all, the grieving husband and bereft father. I deserved comfort.
And do you know why I was laughing? Was it Jones’s well-meaning stupidity? The fortuitous appearance of a dead female hobo who might have been killed by her male traveling companion while they were drunk? It was both of those things, but mostly it was the shoe. The farmer had only stopped to investigate what the coydogs were fighting over because he’d seen a ladies’ patent leather shoe in the ditch. But when Sheriff Jones had asked about footwear that day at the house the previous summer, I’d told him Arlette’s canvas shoes were the ones that were gone. The idiot had forgotten.
And he never remembered.
*
When I got back to the farm, almost all my livestock was dead. The only survivor was Achelois, who looked at me with reproachful, starveling eyes and lowed plaintively. I fed her as lovingly as you might feed a pet, and really, that was all she was. What else would you call an animal that can no longer contribute to a family’s livelihood?
There was a time when Harlan, assisted by his wife, would have taken care of my place while I was in the hospital; it’s how we neighbored out in the middle. But even after the mournful blat of my dying cows started drifting across the fields to him while he sat down to his supper, he stayed away. If I’d been in his place, I might have done the same. In Harl Cotterie’s view (and the world’s), my son hadn’t been content just to ruin his daughter; he’d followed her to what should have been a place of refuge, stolen her away, and forced her into a life of crime. How that “Sweetheart Bandits” stuff must have eaten into her father! Like acid! Ha!
The following week—around the time the Christmas decorations were going up in farmhouses and along Main Street in Hemingford Home—Sheriff Jones came out to the farm again. One look at his face told me what his news was, and I began to shake my head. “No. No more. I won’t have it. I can’t have it. Go away.”
I went back in the house and tried to bar the door against him, but I was both weak and one-handed, and he forced his way in easily enough. “Take hold, Wilf,” he said. “You’ll get through this.” As if he knew what he was talking about.
He looked in the cabinet with the decorative ceramic beer stein on top of it, found my sadly depleted bottle of whiskey, poured the last finger into the stein, and handed it to me. “Doctor wouldn’t approve,” he said, “but he’s not here and you’re going to need it.”
The Sweetheart Bandits had been discovered in their final hideout, Shannon dead of the counterman’s bullet, Henry of one he had put into his own brain. The bodies had been taken to the Elko mortuary, pending instructions. Harlan Cotterie would see to his daughter, but would have nothing to do with my son. Of course not. I did that myself. Henry arrived in Hemingford by train on the eighteenth of December, and I was at the depot, along with a black funeral hack from Castings Brothers. My picture was taken repeatedly. I was asked questions which I didn’t even try to answer. The headlines in both the World-Herald and the much humbler Hemingford Weekly featured the phrase GRIEVING FATHER.
If the reporters had seen me at the funeral home, however, when the cheap pine box was opened, they would have seen real grief; they could have featured the phrase SCREAMING FATHER. The bullet my son fired into his temple as he sat with Shannon’s head on his lap had mushroomed as it crossed his brain and taken out a large chunk of his skull on the left side. But that wasn’t the worst. His eyes were gone. His lower lip was chewed away so that his teeth jutted in a grim grin. All that remained of his nose was a red stub. Before some cop or sheriff’s deputy had discovered the bodies, the rats had made a merry meal of my son and his dear love.
“Fix him up,” I told Herbert Castings when I could talk rationally again.
“Mr. James … sir … the damage is …”
“I see what the damage is. Fix him up. And get him out of that shitting box. Put him in the finest coffin you have. I don’t care what it costs. I have money.” I bent and kissed his torn cheek. No father should have to kiss his son for the last time, but if any father ever deserved such a fate, it was I.
Shannon and Henry were both buried out of the Hemingford Glory of God Methodist Church, Shannon on the twenty-second and Henry on Christmas Eve. The church was full for Shannon, and the weeping was almost loud enough to raise the roof. I know, because I was there, at least for a little while. I stood in the back, unnoticed, then slunk out halfway through Reverend Thursby’s eulogy. Rev. Thursby also presided at Henry’s funeral, but I hardly need tell you that the attendance was much smaller. Thursby saw only one, but there was another. Arlette was there, too, sitting next to me, unseen and smiling. Whispering in my ear.
Do you like how things have turned out, Wilf? Was it worth it?
Adding in the funeral cost, the burial expenses, the mortuary expenses, and the cost of shipping the body home, the disposal of my son’s earthly remains cost just over $300. I paid out of the mortgage money. What else did I have? When the funeral was finished, I went home to an empty house. But first I bought a fresh bottle of whiskey.
*
1922 had one more trick left in its bag. The day after Christmas, a huge blizzard roared out of the Rockies, socking us with a foot of snow and gale-force winds. As dark came down, the snow turned first to sleet and then to driving rain. Around midnight, as I sat in the darkened parlor, doctoring my bellowing stump with little sips of whiskey, a grinding, rending sound came from the back of the house. It was the roof coming down on that side—the part I’d taken out the mortgage, at least in part, to fix. I toasted it with my glass, then had another sip. When the cold wind began to blow in around my shoulders, I took my coat from its hook in the mudroom, put it on, then sat back down and drank a little more whiskey. At some point I dozed. Another of those grinding crashes woke me around three o’clock. This time it was the front half of the barn that had collapsed. Achelois survived yet again, and the next night I took her into the house with me. Why? you might ask me, and my answer would be, Why not? Just why the hell not? We were the survivors. We were the survivors.
*
On Christmas morning (which I spent sipping whiskey in my cold sitting room, with my surviving cow for company), I counted what was left of the mortgage money, and realized it would not begin to cover the damage done by the storm. I did
n’t much care, because I had lost my taste for the farming life, but the thought of the Farrington Company putting up a hog butchery and polluting the stream still made me grind my teeth in rage. Especially after the high cost I had paid for keeping those triple-goddamned 100 acres out of the company’s hands.
It suddenly struck home to me that, with Arlette officially dead instead of missing, those acres were mine. So two days later I swallowed my pride and went to see Harlan Cotterie.
The man who answered my knock had fared better than I, but that year’s shocks had taken their toll, just the same. He had lost weight, he had lost hair, and his shirt was wrinkled—although not as wrinkled as his face, and the shirt, at least, would iron out. He looked sixty-five instead of forty-five.
“Don’t hit me,” I said when I saw him ball his fists. “Hear me out.”
“I wouldn’t hit a man with only one hand,” he said, “but I’ll thank you to keep it short. And we’ll have to talk out here on the stoop, because you are never going to set foot inside my house again.”
“That’s fine,” I said. I had lost weight myself—plenty—and I was shivering, but the cold air felt good on my stump, and on the invisible hand that still seemed to exist below it. “I want to sell you 100 acres of good land, Harl. The hundred Arlette was so determined to sell to the Farrington Company.”
He smiled at that, and his eyes sparkled in their new deep hollows. “Fallen on hard times, haven’t you? Half your house and half your barn caved in. Hermie Gordon says you’ve got a cow living in there with you.” Hermie Gordon was the rural route mailman, and a notorious gossip.
I named a price so low that Harl’s mouth fell open and his eyebrows shot up. It was then that I noticed a smell wafting out of the neat and well-appointed Cotterie farmhouse that seemed entirely alien to that place: burnt fried food. Sallie Cotterie was apparently not doing the cooking. Once I might have been interested in such a thing, but that time had passed. All I cared about right then was getting shed of the 100 acres. It only seemed right to sell them cheap, since they had cost me so dear.
“That’s pennies on the dollar,” he said. Then, with evident satisfaction: “Arlette would roll in her grave.”
She’s done more than just roll in it, I thought.
“What are you smiling about, Wilf?”
“Nothing. Except for one thing, I don’t care about that land anymore. The one thing I do care about is keeping that god damned Farrington slaughter-mill off it.”
“Even if you lose your own place?” He nodded as if I’d asked a question. “I know about the mortgage you took out. No secrets in a small town.”
“Even if I do,” I agreed. “Take the offer, Harl. You’d be crazy not to. That stream they’ll be filling up with blood and hair and hog intestines—that’s your stream, too.”
“No,” he said.
I stared at him, too surprised to say anything. But again he nodded as if I’d asked a question.
“You think you know what you’ve done to me, but you don’t know all of it. Sallie’s left me. She’s gone to stay with her folks down McCook. She says she may be back, says she’ll think things over, but I don’t think she will be. So that puts you and me in the same old broke wagon, doesn’t it? We’re two men who started the year with wives and are ending it without them. We’re two men who started the year with living children and are ending it with dead ones. The only difference I can see is that I didn’t lose half my house and most of my barn in a storm.” He thought about it. “And I’ve still got both hands. There’s that, I suppose. When it comes to pulling my peter—should I ever feel the urge to—I’d have a choice of which one to use.”
“What … why would she—”
“Oh, use your head. She blames me as well as you for Shannon’s death. She said that if I hadn’t gotten on my high horse and sent Shan away, she’d still be alive and living with Henry at your farm just down the road instead of lying frozen in a box underground. She says she’d have a grandchild. She called me a self-righteous fool, and she’s right.”
I reached for him with my remaining hand. He slapped it away.
“Don’t touch me, Wilf. A single warning on that is all you get.”
I put my hand back at my side.
“One thing I know for sure,” he said. “If I took you up on that offer, tasty as it is, I’d regret it. Because that land is cursed. We may not agree on everything, but I bet we would on that. If you want to sell it, sell it to the bank. You’ll get your mortgage paper back, and some cash besides.”
“They’d just turn around and sell it to Farrington!”
“Tough titty said the kitty” was his final word on it as he closed the door in my face.
*
On the last day of the year, I drove to Hemingford Home and saw Mr. Stoppenhauser at the bank. I told him that I’d decided I could no longer live on the farm. I told him I would like to sell Arlette’s acreage to the bank and use the balance of the proceeds to retire the mortgage. Like Harlan Cotterie, he said no. For a moment or two I just sat in the chair facing his desk, not able to believe what I had heard.
“Why not? That’s good land!”
He told me that he worked for a bank, and a bank was not a real estate agency. He addressed me as Mr. James. My days of being Wilf in that office were over.
“That’s just …” Ridiculous was the word that came to mind, but I didn’t want to risk offending him if there was even a chance he might change his mind. Once I had made the decision to sell the land (and the cow, I would have to find a buyer for Achelois, too, possibly a stranger with a bag of magic beans to trade), the idea had taken hold of me with the force of an obsession. So I kept my voice low and spoke calmly.
“That’s not exactly true, Mr. Stoppenhauser. The bank bought the Rideout place last summer when it came up for auction. The Triple M, as well.”
“Those were different situations. We hold a mortgage on your original 80, and we’re content with that. What you do with that hundred acres of pasturage is of no interest to us.”
“Who’s been in to see you?” I asked, then realized I didn’t have to. “It was Lester, wasn’t it? Cole Farrington’s dogsbody.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Stoppenhauser said, but I saw the flicker in his eyes. “I think your grief and your … your injury … have temporarily damaged your ability to think clearly.”
“Oh no,” I said, and began to laugh. It was a dangerously unbalanced sound, even to my own ears. “I’ve never thought more clearly in my life, sir. He came to see you—him or another, I’m sure Cole Farrington can afford to retain all the shysters he wants—and you made a deal. You c-c-colluded!” I was laughing harder than ever.
“Mr. James, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“Maybe you had it all planned out beforehand,” I said. “Maybe that’s why you were so anxious to talk me into the god damned mortgage in the first place. Or maybe when Lester heard about my son, he saw a golden opportunity to take advantage of my misfortune and came running to you. Maybe he sat right in this chair and said, ‘This is going to work out for both of us, Stoppie—you get the farm, my client gets the land by the crick, and Wilf James can go to Hell.’ Isn’t that pretty much how it went?”
He had pushed a button on his desk, and now the door opened. It was just a little bank, too small to employ a security guard, but the teller who leaned in was a beefy lad. One of the Rohrbacher family, from the look of him; I’d gone to school with his father, and Henry would have gone with his younger sister, Mandy.
“Is there a problem, Mr. Stoppenhauser?” he asked.
“Not if Mr. James leaves now,” he said. “Won’t you see him out, Kevin?”
Kevin came in, and when I was slow to rise, he clamped a hand just above my left elbow. He was dressed like a banker, right down to the suspenders and the bow tie, but it was a farmer’s hand, hard and callused. My still-healing stump gave a warning throb.
“Come alo
ng, sir,” he said.
“Don’t pull me,” I said. “It hurts where my hand used to be.”
“Then come along.”
“I went to school with your father. He sat beside me and used to cheat off my paper during Spring Testing Week.”
He pulled me out of the chair where I had once been addressed as Wilf. Good old Wilf, who would be a fool not to take out a mortgage. The chair almost fell over.
“Happy New Year, Mr. James,” Stoppenhauser said.
“And to you, you cozening fuck,” I replied. Seeing the shocked expression on his face may have been the last good thing to happen to me in my life. I have sat here for five minutes, chewing on the end of my pen and trying to think of one since—a good book, a good meal, a pleasant afternoon in the park—and I can’t.
*
Kevin Rohrbacher accompanied me across the lobby. I suppose that is the correct verb; it wasn’t quite dragging. The floor was marble, and our footfalls echoed. The walls were dark oak. At the high tellers’ windows, two women served a little group of year-end customers. One of the tellers was young and one was old, but their big-eyed expressions were identical. Yet it wasn’t their horrified, almost prurient interest that took my own eye; it was captivated by something else entirely. A burled oak rail three inches wide ran above the tellers’ windows, and scurrying busily along it—
“Ware that rat!” I cried, and pointed.
The young teller voiced a little scream, looked up, then exchanged a glance with her older counterpart. There was no rat, only the passing shadow of the ceiling fan. And now everyone was looking at me.
“Stare all you want!” I told them. “Look your fill! Look until your God damned eyes fall out!”
Then I was in the street, and puffing out cold winter air that looked like cigarette smoke. “Don’t come back unless you have business to do,” Kevin said. “And unless you can keep a civil tongue.”
“Your father was the biggest God damned cheater I ever went to school with,” I told him. I wanted him to hit me, but he only went back inside and left me alone on the sidewalk, standing in front of my saggy old truck. And that was how Wilfred Leland James spent his visit to town on the last day of 1922.
