Tales for a Stormy Night: Fifteen Crime Stories

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  I’ve often wondered what would’ve happened if I hadn’t spoken then. It gives me a cold chill thinking about it—words said with the best intentions in the world. I called out just as she got to the door: “Clara, I’ll be bringing up my fiddle.”

  I don’t suppose there ever was a party in Webbtown like Maudie put on that night. Word got around. Even the young folks came that mightn’t have if it was spooning weather. Maudie wore her best dress—the one she was saving, we used to say, for Clara’s wedding and her own funeral. It was black, but on happier occasions she’d liven it up with a piece of red silk at the collar. I remember Prouty saying once that patch of red turned Maudie from a Holstein into a Guernsey. Prouty, by the way, runs the undertaking parlor as well as the hardware store.

  I near split my fingers that night fiddling. Maudie tapped a special keg. Everybody paid for his first glass, but after that she put the cash box away and you might say she drew by heart.

  Matt was having a grand time just watching mostly. Matt was one of those creamy-looking fellows, with cheeks as pink as winter apples. He must’ve been fifty but there wasn’t a line or wrinkle in his face. And I never seen him without his collar and tie on. Like I said, a gentleman.

  Clara took to music like a bird to wing. I always got the feeling no matter who was taking her in or out she was actually dancing alone; she could do two steps to everybody else’s one. Matt never took his eyes off her, and once he danced with her when Maudie pushed him into it.

  That was trouble’s start—although we didn’t know it at the time. Prouty said afterwards he did, but Prouty’s a man who knows everything after the fact. That’s being an undertaker, I dare say. Anyway, Matt was hesitating after Clara—and it was like that, her sort of skipping ahead and leading him on, when all of a sudden, young Reuben White leaped in between them and danced with Clara the way she needed to be danced with.

  Now Reuben didn’t have much to recommend him, especially to Maudie. He did an odd job now and then—in fact, he hauled water for Maudie from the well she had up by the brewhouse back of Maple Tree Ridge. And this you ought to know about Maudie if you don’t by now—anybody she could boss around, she had no use for.

  Anyways, watching that boy dance with Clara that night should’ve set us all to thinking, him whirling her and tossing her up in the air, them spinning round together like an August twister. My fiddle’s got a devil in it at a time like that. Faster and faster I was bowing, till plunk I broke a string, but I went right on playing.

  Matt fell back with the other folks, clapping and cheering, but Maudie I could see going after her stick. I bowed even faster, seeing her. It was like a race we were all in together. Then all of a sudden, like something dying high up in the sky and falling mute, my E string broke and I wasn’t playing any more. In the center of the tavern floor Clara and Reuben just folded up together and slumped down into a heap.

  Everybody was real still for about a half a minute. Then Maudie came charging out, slashing the air with that switch of hers. She grabbed Clara by the hair—I swear she lifted the girl to her feet that way and flung her towards the bar. Then she turned on Reuben. That boy slithered clear across the barroom floor, every time just getting out of the way of a slash from Maudie’s stick. People by then were cheering in a kind of rhythm—for him or Maudie, you couldn’t just be sure, and maybe they weren’t for either. “Now!” they’d shout at every whistle of the switch. “Now! Now! Now!”

  Prouty opened the door just when Reuben got there, and when the boy was out Prouty closed it against Maudie. I thought for a minute she was going to turn on him. But she just stood looking and then burst out laughing. Everybody started clouting her on the back and having a hell of a time.

  I was at the bar by then and so was Matt. I heard him, leaning close to Clara, say, “Miss Clara, I never saw anything as beautiful as you in all my life.”

  Clara’s eyes snapped back at him but she didn’t say a word.

  Well, it was noon the next day before Matt pulled out of town, and sure enough, he forgot his umbrella and came back that night. I went up to The Red Lantern for my five o’clock usual, and him and Maudie were tête-à-tête, as they say, across the bar. Maudie was spouting the praises of her Clara—how she could sew and cook and bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy. The only attention she paid me was as a collaborating witness.

  I’ll say this for Clara: when she did appear, she looked almost civilized, her hair in a ribbon, and her wearing a new striped skirt and a grandmother blouse clear up to her chin. That night, by glory, she went to the movie with Matt. We had movies every night except Sundays in those days. A year or so ago, they closed up the Bellevue altogether. Why did she go with him? My guess is she wanted to get away from Maudie, or maybe for Reuben to see her dressed up that way.

  The next time I saw all of them together was Decoration Day. Matt was back in town, arranging his route so’s he’d have to stop over the holiday in Webbtown. One of them carnival outfits had set up on the grounds back of the schoolhouse. Like I said before, we don’t have any population to speak of in Webbtown, but we’re central for the whole valley, and in the old days traveling entertainers could do all right if they didn’t come too often.

  There was all sorts of raffle booths—Indian blankets and kewpie dolls, a shooting gallery and one of those things where you throw baseballs at wooden bottles and get a cane if you knock ’em off. And there was an apparatus for testing a man’s muscle: you know, you hit the target on the stand with a sledgehammer and then a little ball runs up a track that looks like a big thermometer and registers your strength in pounds.

  I knew there was a trick to it no matter what the barker said about it being fair and square. Besides, nobody cares how strong a lawyer is as long as he can whisper in the judge’s ear. I could see old Maudie itching herself to have a swing at it, but she wasn’t taking any chance at giving Matt the wrong impression about either of the McCracken girls.

  Matt took off his coat, folded it, and gave it to Clara to hold. It was a warm day for that time of year and you could see where Matt had been sweating under the coat, but like I said, he was all gentleman. He even turned his back to the ladies before spitting on his hands. It took Matt three swings—twenty-five cents worth—but on the last one that little ball crawled the last few inches up the track and just sort of tinkled the bell at the top. The womenfolk clapped, and Matt put on his coat again, blushing and pleased with himself.

  I suppose you’ve guessed that Reuben showed up then. He did, wearing a cotton shirt open halfway down to his belly.

  “Now, my boy,” the barker says, “show the ladies, show the world that you’re a man! How many?”

  Reuben sniggled a coin out of his watch pocket, and mighty cocky for him, he said, “Keep the change.”

  Well, you’ve guessed the next part, too: Reuben took one swing and you could hear that gong ring out clear across the valley. It brought a lot of people running and the carnival man was so pleased he took out a big cigar and gave it to Reuben. “That, young fellow, wins you a fifty-cent Havana. But I’ll send you the bill if you broke the machine, ha! ha!”

  Reuben grinned and took the cigar, and strutting across to Clara, he made her a present of it. Now in Mart’s book, you didn’t give a lady a cigar, no, sir. Not saying a word, Matt brought his fist up with everything he had dead to center under Reuben’s chin. We were all of us plain stunned, but nobody more than Reuben. He lay on the ground with his eyes rolling round in his head like marbles.

  You’d say that was the blow struck for romance, wouldn’t you? Not if you knew our Clara. She plopped down beside Reuben like he was the dying gladiator, or maybe just something she’d come on helpless in the woods. It was Maudie who clucked and crowed over Matt. All of a sudden Clara leaped up—Reuben was coming round by then—and she gave a whisk of that fancy skirt and took off for the hills, Maudie bawling after her like a hogcaller. And at that point, Reuben scrambled to his feet and galloped after Clara. It wasn’t lon
g till all you could see of where they’d gone was a little whiff of dust at the edge of the dogwood grove. I picked up the cigar and tried to smoke it afterwards. I’d have been better off on a mixture of oak leaf and poison ivy.

  Everything changed for the worse at The Red Lantern after that. Clara found her tongue and sassed her sister, giving Maudie back word for word, like a common scold. One was getting mean and the other meaner. And short of chaining her, Maudie couldn’t keep Clara at home any more, not when Clara wanted to go.

  Matt kept calling at The Red Lantern regularly, and Maudie kept making excuses for Clara’s not being there. The only times I’d go to the inn those days was when I’d see Mart’s car outside. The place would brighten up then, Maudie putting on a show for him. Otherwise, I’d have as soon sat in Prouty’s cool room. It was about as cheerful. Even Maudie’s beer was turning sour.

  Matt was a patient man if anything, and I guess being smitten for the first time at his age he got it worse than most of us would: he’d sit all evening just waiting a sight of that girl. When we saw he wasn’t going to get over it, Prouty and I undertook one day in late summer to give him some advice. What made us think we were authorities, I don’t know. I’ve been living with my fiddle for years and I’ve already told you what Prouty’d been living with. Anyways, we advised Matt to get himself some hunting clothes—the season was coming round—and to put away that doggone collar and tie of his and get out in the open country where the game was.

  Matt tried. Next time he came to Webbtown, as soon as he put in at The Red Lantern, he changed into a plaid wool shirt, brand-new khaki britches, and boots laced up to his knees, and with Prouty and me cheering him on, he headed for the hills. But like Cox’s army, or whoever it was, he marched up the hill and marched down again.

  But he kept at it. Every weekend he’d show up, change, and set out, going farther and farther every time. One day, when the wind was coming sharp from the northeast, I heard him calling out up there: “Clara…Clara…”

  I’ll tell you, that gave me a cold chill, and I wished to the Almighty that Prouty and I had minded our own business. Maudie would stand at the tavern door and watch him off, and I wondered how long it was going to take for her to go with him. By then, I’d lost whatever feeling I ever had for Maudie and I didn’t have much left for Clara either. But what made me plain sick one day was Maudie confiding in me that she was thinking of locking Clara in her room and giving Matt the key. I said something mighty close to obscene such as I’d never said to a woman before in my life and walked out of the tavern.

  It was one of those October days, you know, when the clouds keep building up like suds and then just seem to wash away. You could hear the school bell echo, and way off the hawking of the wild geese, and you’d know the only sound of birds till spring would be the lonesome cawing of the crows. I was working on a couple of things I had coming up in Quarter Sessions Court when Prouty pounded up my stairs. Prouty’s a pretty dignified man who seldom runs.

  “Hank,” he said, “I just seen Matt Sawyer going up the hill. He’s carrying old man McCracken’s shotgun.”

  I laughed kind of, seeing the picture in my mind. “What do you think he aims to do with it?”

  “If he was to fire it, Hank, he’d be likely to blow himself to eternity.”

  “Maybe the poor buzzard’d be as well off,” I said.

  “And something else, Hank—Maudie just closed up the tavern. She’s stalking him into the hills.”

  “That’s something else,” I said, and reached for my pipe.

  “What are we going to do?” Prouty fumbled through his pockets for some matches for me. He couldn’t keep his hands still.

  “Nothing,” I said. “The less people in them hills right now the better.”

  Prouty came to see it my way, but neither one of us could do much work that afternoon. I’d go to the window every few minutes and see Prouty standing in the doorway. He’d look down toward The Red Lantern and shake his head, and I’d know Maudie hadn’t come back yet.

  Funny, how things go on just the same in a town at a time like that. Tom Kincaid, the druggist, came out and swept the sidewalk clean, passed the time of day with Prouty, and went inside again. The kids were coming home from school. Pretty soon they were all indoors doing their homework before chore time. Doc Sissler stopped at Kincaid’s—he liked to supervise the making up of his prescriptions. It was Miss Dorman, the schoolteacher, who gave the first alarm. She always did her next day’s lessons before going home, so it was maybe an hour after school let out. I heard her scream and ran to the window.

  There was Matt coming down the street on Prouty’s side, trailing the gun behind him. You could see he was saying something to himself or just out loud. I opened my window and shouted down to him. He came on then across the street. His step on the stair was like the drum in a death march. When he got to my doorway he just stood there, saying, “I killed her, Hank. I killed her dead.”

  I got him into a chair and splashed some whiskey out for him. He dropped the gun on the floor beside him and I let it lie there, stepping over it. By then Prouty had come upstairs, and by the time we got the whiskey inside Matt, Luke Weber, the constable, was there.

  “He says he killed somebody,” I told Weber. “I don’t know who.”

  Matt rolled his eyes towards me like I’d betrayed him just saying what he told me. His face was hanging limp and white as a strung goose. “I know Matt Sawyer,” I added then, “and if there was any killing, I’d swear before Jehovah it must’ve been an accident.”

  That put a little life back in him. “It was,” he said, “it was truly.” And bit by piece we got the story out of him.

  “I got to say in fairness to myself, taking the gun up there wasn’t my own idea,” he started. “Look at me, duded up like this—I had no business from the start pretending I was something I wasn’t.”

  “That was me and Hank’s fault,” Prouty said, mostly to the constable, “advising him on how to court Miss Clara.”

  He didn’t have to explain that to Weber. Everybody in town knew it.

  “I’m not blaming either one of you,” Matt said. “It should’ve been enough for me, chasing an echo every time I thought I’d found her. And both of them once sitting up in a tree laughing at me fit to bust and pelting me with acorns…”

  We knew he was talking about Reuben and Clara. It was pathetic listening to a man tell that kind of story on himself, and I couldn’t help but think what kind of an impression it was going to make on a jury. I had to be realistic about it: there’s some people up here would hang a man for making a fool of himself where they’d let him go for murder. I put the jury business straight out of my mind and kept hoping it was clear-cut accident. He hadn’t said yet who was dead, but I thought I knew by then.

  “Well, I found them for myself today,” he made himself go on, “Clara and Reuben, that is. They were cosied in together in the sheepcote back of Maudie’s well. It made me feel ashamed just being there and I was set to sneak away and give the whole thing up for good. But Maudie came up on me and took me by surprise. She held me there—by the scruff of the soul, you might say—and made me listen with her to them giggling and carrying on. I was plain sick with jealousy, I’ll admit that.

  “Then Maudie gave a shout: ‘Come out, you two! Or else we’ll blow you out!’ Something like that.

  “It was a minute or two: nothing happened. Then we saw Reuben going full speed the other way, off towards the woods.

  “‘Shoot, Matt, now!’ That’s what Maudie shouted at me. ‘You got him clear to sight.’ But just then Clara sauntered out of the shelter towards us—just as innocent and sweet, like the first time I ever laid eyes on her.”

  I’m going to tell you, Prouty and me looked at each other when he said that.

  The constable interrupted him and asked his question straight: “Did she have her clothes on?”

  “All but her shoes. She was barefoot and I don’t consider that unbecoming
in a country girl.”

  “Go on,” Weber told him.

  Matt took a long drag of air and then plunged ahead. “Maudie kept hollering at the boy—insults, I guess—I know I’d have been insulted. Then he stopped running and turned around and started coming back. I forget what it was she said to me then—something about my manhood. But she kept saying, ‘Shoot, Matt! Shoot, shoot!’ I was getting desperate, her hounding me that way. I slammed the gun down between us, buttend on the ground. The muzzle of it, I guess, was looking her way. And it went off.

  “It was like the ground exploding underneath us. Hell smoke and brimstone—that’s what went through my mind. I don’t know whether it was in my imagination—my ears weren’t hearing proper after all that noise—but like ringing in my head I could hear Clara laughing, just laughing like hysterics…And then when I could see, there was Maudie lying on the ground. I couldn’t even find her face for all that was left of her head.”

  We stood all of us for a while after that. Listening to the tick of my alarm clock on the shelf over the wash-stand, I was. Weber picked up the gun then and took it over to the window where he examined the breech.

  Then he said, “What did you think you were going to do with this when you took it from the tavern?”

  Matt shook his head. “I don’t know. When Maudie gave it to me, I thought it looked pretty good on me in the mirror.”

  I couldn’t wait to hear the prosecutor try that one on the jury.

  Weber said, “We better get on up there before dark and you show us how it happened.”

  We stopped by at Prouty’s on the way and picked up his wicker basket. There wasn’t any way of driving beyond the dogwood grove. People were following us by then. Weber sent them back to town and deputized two or three among them to be sure they kept the peace.

  We hadn’t got very far beyond the grove, the four of us, just walking, climbing up, and saying nothing. Hearing the crows a-screaming not far ahead gave me a crawling stomach. They’re scavengers, you know.