by Gil Brewer
“We’ve got to smash it down.”
He slumped against the wall, looking at me. “I’m going to kill you,” he said calmly. “You have sinned. You’re a sinner. I’m going to kill you. And then I’m going to kill her, and—”
“Shut up!”
I stepped toward him and he cringed against the wall, holding his bad leg.
Noraine was still watching the cellar door. The smoke was a thin flat fanning, now—coming under the door like a sheet of filmy paper. The roaring upstairs was a subdued rushing sound, still very young and distant.
“We’ve got to smash that pipe,” I told Noraine.
She flung herself into my arms. “You do love me?” she said.
“Yes. I do.”
“Then nothing else matters.”
“The hell it doesn’t,” I said. “We’re getting out of here.” I grinned at her, and turned toward the bar across the room. I had just picked up one of the bar stools when the lights flickered on and off, became very weak, then bright white and then went out. It was dead black. I took the stool and moved in the direction of the air vent.
The fire in the furnace lighted the room dimly. I found the air vent and swung the stool. It bounced off the steel panels of the vent, wrenched from my grasp. I ran up along the wall and dragged one of the overstuffed chairs back, picked up the stool and climbed on the chair. I began smashing at the metal casing. It dented, then loosened a little. I swung the stool with all my might and the metal gave. I swung it again, slamming it with everything I had. It started to tear around the ceiling. I swung it again, then dropped it and reached up and grabbed the edge of the metal casing. It tore a little. I swung up on the casing, chinning myself.
It ripped loose and I sprawled on the floor with the casing on me.
“Get up by the door!” I told Noraine. “Hurry up!”
I got on the chair, grabbed the edge of the opening and pulled up, pushing with my feet against the wall. There was a grating across it. I reached with one hand and shoved the grating. Flames licked across up there and smoke palmed my face. I got one elbow hooked through the opening and walked up the wall, dragging myself. I got my head through and the house was really burning. It was flaming and I was in the midst of it. I pulled myself up through the opening and came out in the hall. The stair bannister was a long blazing ember.
I ran back down the hall through the smoke and fire, into the dining room. Some of the flames were only kerosene burning. I made it to the door and slung the bolt. My fingers blistered at the touch.
Noraine came through into the dining room.
“Weyman—hurry up!”
He came up the stairs jumping a step at a time.
The curtains in the dining room went with a single swoosh and fell curling in flaming shreds across the floor.
“Get out back!” I told her, pushing her toward the kitchen.
Weyman came through the door. I grabbed him and pushed Noraine, and we moved out of the dining room into the kitchen. It was burning, too. The smoke boiled like a sea of yellow fume.
We made a run for it through the kitchen, toward the door. The door was locked and I couldn’t get it open.
I grabbed a chair and flung it at a window. The flames leaped and danced in a crazy chimera, fanned by wind. The fire rose steadily.
“Out the window,” I said, guiding Noraine. I caught the scared look on her face and she choked and coughed as she went through. I went after her. We were on the rear porch, the air on one side brittle cold and snowing, on the other blistering hot. People were gathering outside.
I saw Weyman stepping through the window.
Noraine stepped off the porch into the snow and somebody yelled. It was Luckham, coming around the blazing corner of the house.
“Go tell him,” I said to Noraine.
She nodded and I started running for the barn, up through the same double-fenced alley past the paddock that I’d taken the other night when I was toting Sam Gunther’s body.
Moments later I was in deep snow, plowing up toward Cross Glen. I followed a path made by other feet before me—Lois’ feet. I stopped a moment and looked back at the blazing house, flames shooting high into the night.
Weyman Gunther was limping along in the snow behind me.
TWELVE
She had said she was going to the falls and watch. She had meant she would watch the house burn.
I looked back down the hillside. The fire brightened the whole valley. I saw the small black shadow of a man slowly working his way up the hillside, following the branch, as I was. He was no nearer than he had been before, but he moved steadily.
Lois’ tracks were hurried. It looked to me as if she had almost ran up the hill, and she was carrying something; now and then the snow showed where she had dragged it.
I heard Weyman shout far back there, his voice echoing against the hills.
I moved on.
At the mouth of the glen, I worked in close to the waters. Shelves of snow humped out over the frozen part of the stream, but the stream itself was shallow along the outer edges, trickling across the shale. The water was icy, but it was easier walking than in the snow. Lois had gone up the outer ledge of the glen among the trees.
I could hear the falls roaring, and it seemed impossible that only moments before I had been sweating and blistering in heat. I came around the first big bend in the glen and the stream was deeper now. The water was frothing over boulders and rocks, rushing downward. I grabbed the root of an oak and hauled myself onto a ledge, then worked my way up into the trees that grew along the steep sides of the glen.
A man called from the mouth of the glen. It was Weyman. I pushed through the snow among the trees, reached a trail among pines and started to run. Suddenly the sound of the falls was very close, tons of water smashing down onto the rocks. I ran among the pines along the ledge at the start of the falls, just under the flying water. I circled around through the pines and came to the rocks, and began mounting them one at a time, working my way up.
Lois had not come this way. She couldn’t have made it, not carrying something with her. She’d come over from the top and I wished I had done the same now.
There was a narrow rock trail that led on a steep slope to the very top of the falls, and I kept to that. It was wet, icy, jammed with drifted snow.
I reached the top. It was like bursting out into the clear white air of night again, with the sky tented and blowing full of fine snow.
I was in a copse of young pine, waist-high, moving toward the top of the falls. I came out on a shelf of rock that stretched across the broad stream at the head of the falls.
Lois stood out there, a suitcase beside her, looking down into the valley. She did not hear my approach.
“Al!”
“Yes.”
She stood on the very edge of the flat surface of black slate, just above the swift water. We were not ten feet from the brink of the falls. Way down in the valley you could see the house burning. It was not snowing hard enough to shield the sight. Lois wore a dark jacket, the collar turned up about her face, her hair streaming off to one side.
“Why are you up here?” I said.
“Why do you think?” she shouted. She stared at me as if I had struck her. She didn’t want to believe that I was here.
“You’ll have to come back with me, Lois.”
“No!” She shouted it. “No!”
“Be sensible.”
“I am sensible.”
I moved another step toward her.
“Don’t move,” somebody said. “Just don’t move, either one of you.”
Weyman came out of the trees and limped toward us, holding a rifle.
Lois began to laugh. She shouted laughter.
“Hush up, Sis!”
“You won’t stop me,” she shouted. “Not you!”
“We’re going to split that money, Sis,” Weyman said. “You and me.”
She was holding the suitcase, looking at Weyman. Suddenly, she
turned along the shale and started to run. She ran away from the falls along the ledge of rock just above the water, and he shot her. The crash of the rifle ripped through the naked trees. She stumbled and fell on the shale. She got to her hands and knees and began crawling toward us along the shale, dragging the suitcase. He fired again. She sprawled out and lay still, but her head moved and she still was not dead.
He whirled on me with the rifle. He moved toward me and I stood still, waiting. He came up to me slowly, limping, his face haggard. He held the gun quite steady.
We looked at each other. The snow came down steadily and you could hear the noise of the falls.
The light from the snow shone in his eyes and his hair wisped about his head. I glanced toward Lois and saw her head move again.
“Weyman,” I said, “don’t be a fool”
“She’s still down there, alive,” he said. “Your girl—Noraine—and you’re not going to have her. You’re not going to have anything. Everybody has something but me—well, this time I’m going to have something. Nobody can stop me. She’s going to wait and wait, only you’re not going to come back to her. I am. You think they’ll believe her stories? No. They’ll believe me. Because I’m Sam Gunther’s son.”
“Your father’s dead, Weyman.”
“I should know. I killed him—I killed my father.”
“And Herb Spash?”
“No. My father killed that drunk. I saw him do it—saw him running after Spash with the knife. Because Spash was going to tell you he knew my father took the money from the bank vault—and he did know. My father shouldn’t have killed him. He sinned—he planned it. He changed into overalls to kill Spash and he was covered with blood. I saw him. And then he dressed in his car and went back to her—to Noraine—and I couldn’t stand it!” He shouted the last words in a kind of agony. “An old man, with her—with that beautiful, wonderful—”
I stepped in and slammed the barrel aside. I caught the barrel and ripped it from his hands, flung it out at the water. He came at me, crying and cursing.
His hands were like claws. I dodged and he went sliding and slipping off across the wet black slate. He turned and limped back at me. And then I swung at him. He caught the blow in the face and reeled backwards.
We stood there for a time, watching each other. There was the sound of the roaring falls and rushing water.
“You didn’t kill me, Weyman,” Lois said. “You missed that last time.”
She was crawling toward him along the black shining slate. Then he turned to me, and something went awry inside him. He opened his mouth and yelled, I could not tell what. Then he turned and ran blindly toward Lois. He grabbed the suitcase and turned, running in a fast, staggering limp off across the slate.
“Stop him,” Lois said.
He saw that he was near the top of the falls on the wet slate and it scared him. The slate was black and gleaming, water curling in a bright foam along the smooth edging.
“Weyman.”
“No!”
I lunged for him, caught the suitcase and yanked. He pulled and twisted frantically and his grip came loose. I flung down the suitcase and dived for him, but it was much too late. I saw him strike free air over the foaming lip of the falls, hang for a moment, suspended. He fell. He was gone, the sudden short sound of his scream drowned in the roar of the water.
I walked carefully to the edge beside the rushing water and looked down. There was no sign of him.
I turned and picked up the suitcase and walked slowly back to where Lois lay. She was on her side, watching me. I knelt down and opened the suitcase and looked in at the money, stacked in neat bundles.
“There’s something in there you should see,” she said.
“What?”
“A sheet of paper,” she said.
I pawed through the packets of bills and at the bottom of the suitcase I found the paper she referred to. As soon as I saw it, I recognized the long legal-sized foolscap my father always used to write his personal notes on. Kneeling there, I found matches and, using my body as a shield, lit one after the other as I read what it said:
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
This is to notify all persons concerned with me in a business way, that, being of sound mind—at least—I am taking my own life. There does not appear to be any other way for me. But it is also to notify these same persons that this is no conscience-wracked suicide writing here, as might easily be supposed due to over-sentimentality. My life is done. It has been the kind of life I made it and the kind I wanted it to be. I am hated thoroughly and this does not displease me. I did not aim to be loved.
But since I am dead as you read this, I am going to do something I would not otherwise do, and for a reason—at least to me. I can no longer direct the legalities of my business, so I hereby declare as my last will and testament null and void all papers having to do with any person or persons in this county that are signed in my name. All deeds, mortgages and payments are from this date on to revert to their owners. All monies are to be refunded. The money in the vault will cover everything satisfactorily, and without dipping into deposits. The books have been carefully kept to date, and transactions can be worked out with a bit of care. This means that all payments of notes, mortgages, etc., are to be refunded in their entirety to their owners. All interest payments are to be included. I wish it this way not because of soft-heartedness, but because I believe in death.
In a few moments I shall be dead, and in a few more moments found that way. It is unpleasant, but not entirely so. I have directed Mr. Herbert Spash to ask Sam Gunther to come down here to the bank. Sam will find me.
I have just come from the vault, and with all these payments, this bank will still be able to pay off its depositors to the last penny. I do not consider this so bad, after all.
For your curiosity, I am taking my life for good reason. I cannot longer endure pain. Yesterday I consulted a doctor in Westfield and learned that I have an incurable cancer.
It was signed “Cyrus Wyngate Harper,” and the date was fixed beneath his name.
Sam Gunther had seen this, looked in the vault, and understood his perfect chance. It had worked for some time.
I knelt there for another moment, then placed the “confession and will” back in the suitcase with the money and locked it. Lois did not speak.
I rose and moved to her side. She was unconscious, but still breathing. I could understand her motives. I wished there were some way to tell her without hurting her still more. There wasn’t.
I took the suitcase close to her side and it was then I heard them coming through the field. Voices rose through the snow above the sound of the falls. After a time, Sheriff Luckham hollered from among the trees and I saw the bright gleam of a flashlight.
“Harper?”
“Yes. It’s all right.”
They came out of the trees, several of them, and started slowly across the black slate. Then I saw Noraine leave Luckham’s side and move toward me.
I held her in my arms and it was enough. There was nothing more to want, nothing more to need. Just her. It was very good this way.
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Copyright © 1957 by Gil Brewer
Registration Renewed in 1985 by Verlaine Brewer
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual per
sons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4252-X
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4252-7
Cover art © 123RF/Andrey Kiselev
