Ella Maud

by Nicholas Nicastro

  There was still the issue of money. On this score, his capacity for thought was scarcely impaired. He remembered hearing, during some round of barroom scuttlebutt, of a reporter in town who wasn’t afraid to open his wallet for a good story. His name was Saunders, and he ran a newspaper called The Independent over on Fearing Street.

  “He’s a regular shatterpate,” said Gene Betts. “I never agree with him, but—”

  “…his rag is good for spreading under leaky cranks,” injected Tuttle, who disliked the paper’s attacks on certain evangelists.

  Later, when they were alone, Jim made Betts a proposition: if he helped arrange a meeting between him and Saunders, he would pay Betts a commission of five dollars.

  “What do you want to see him for?” asked the other.

  “I think you know.”

  “Where’s the five dollars?”

  “The other guy has it.”

  Betts regarded him, appraising. Then he smiled.

  “All right. Gimme the particulars.”

  Jim told him that he would meet the journalist at 3 p.m. the day after next, at R.C. Abbot’s over on the waterfront. From there they would go by boat to some secluded spot on the river to talk. As he listened and nodded, Betts kept such a cheerfully dubious expression on his face that Jim wanted to punch it.

  The next day Gene stuck his head into Jim’s room: Saunders had agreed to Jim’s terms.

  “Did he give you the fiver?”

  Betts plucked the bill out of his breast pocket and waved it. With that, he proved he was the only person directly to profit from Jim’s misfortune.

  When the time came to meet, Jim was sitting in a bar on Front Street, drinking cheap beer because he didn’t have the money for anything stronger. The longer he sat, the more the skunkish swill sank him in a peevish kind of funk. For what did he have to sell the journalist, really? Everybody already knew Jim denied his guilt. As Aydlett had said, the photo proved nothing other than the Cropseys had lied about missing it.

  And he thought: there’s only one thing people will pay to hear. They want me to tell them I’m guilty. They want me to tell them I was against her going to New York, because I was afraid to lose her, and that I lost my temper on the porch that night, and knocked my sweet Nell in the head like I was slaughtering some animal, and dragged her body to the river and dumped it. And then that I was such a brute that I did all that, and had a pleasant confab with Len Owens, and then went home to kiss my mother’s face, and go upstairs for a pleasant sleep. Because it was not accidents they wanted to hear about, or the regular kinds of misunderstandings that happened between people. It was horror they wanted to hear, and the face of evil they found most comforting.

  In this way he managed to keep his seat until well after three, at which point he thought there was no use in going over and ordered another round.

  When he staggered back to the garage Gene Betts was there to greet him.

  “Why didn’t you show at Abbot’s? That reporter came here looking for you.”

  “He came here?”

  “He says he covered your trial, way back when.”

  “Did he,” said Jim, and steadied himself against a fender.

  “Let me know if you want to set him up again. Only this time the commission is ten bucks. And you gotta pay up front.”

  “Aye aye.”

  His windowless room made it hard for him to judge the time when he woke up in the morning. More often he could hazard a guess by the sound of the work going on in the shop. When he came to the next morning, deplorably sober, he remembered he had lost his nerve with Saunders, and felt lower than an insect. No matter what he tried, it seemed he was destined to fail. “Pointless,” he muttered, and got up to splash his face. He looked at himself in the little mirror Evelyn Tuttle had set up over the basin. “Pointless,” he said again.

  He shuffled over to take a pointless little piss in the garage’s bathroom. While he was in there, he heard Tuttle calling him.

  “Jim! You got a visitor!”

  It had to be Saunders coming for him. The prospect was suddenly so terrifying he closed his pants too soon, wetting himself.

  “Jim!” cried Tuttle as he rapped on his door.

  The bathroom had a window. The glass opened only partway, forcing him to squeeze through a space as wide as his forearm was long. When he finally came free, he tumbled and jammed his shoulder against the ground. Yet he was up in a flash, and running from the garage with the front of his pants soaked, cradling his left arm.

  Jim figured that in case the journalist waited for him, he should make himself scarce. He kept away all day and the whole of the following night. He woke up in a gutter on the west side of town, his cheek in a puddle of vomit. Jerking himself up, he was convulsed by a pain, intense enough to bring tears to his eyes, that shot from his left shoulder,. He had not just jammed that shoulder, but dislocated it.

  Tuttle and Betts were next door when he got back to the shop. The door to the office was left ajar. Jim knew Tuttle sometimes kept a little bottle of brandy or schnapps in his top desk drawer, so he went in for a little fortification against the pain.

  The infernal Tuttle, alas, had removed the stuff. But then Jim noticed the 12-gauge double-barreled duck gun on the rack behind the desk. He took it down and checked if it was loaded. It was not—but a box of shells, labeled ‘No. 6’, were sitting pretty-as-you-please in the top right drawer.

  Tuttle and Betts were back when Jim came out with the shotgun.

  “Whoa there, fella,” said Betts.

  “Watch me! I’m going to kill myself!” cried Jim.

  Tuttle, with no hesitation, approached Jim with his hand out.

  “Give me that.”

  Jim reversed the gun and held it under his chin. Then he jerked the barrel away from his head and fired. The shot—just one barrel—made a tight scatter of holes in the ceiling.

  Tuttle wrested the gun out of Jim’s hands lest he pull the other trigger. Jim shrank in agony as his dislocated shoulder was shoved in the struggle.

  “Looks like he’s hurt,” said Betts.

  They got Jim to lie down on his bed while the doctor was summoned. As he lay there he said nothing. Instead, he stared with animal hostility at everyone who came near him. If someone had asked him, and he had the inclination to answer, Jim would have said that he had passed the point of no return sometime that day. That point had come without him realizing it, but the conviction was no weaker for sneaking up on him.

  Tuttle and Betts got back to work as the doctor tended to Jim.

  “He wasn’t serious,” said the former. “He just needed help.”

  There was a muffled cry as Jim’s arm was popped back into its socket. The mechanics ignored it.

  When the doctor came out, Tuttle had four greasy dollar bills for him.

  “Not necessary,” the doctor held up his hand. “That didn’t take long.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Your friend is in a bad way. He belongs in a sanitarium just for that cough.”

  Tuttle winced, and could only repeat, “Thank you.”

  “He’s got a head for drama,” he told Betts when the doctor was gone.

  Despite his certainty that Jim lacked the courage for successful suicide, Tuttle shared the news of his attempt with his wife. Evelyn shook her head, “That poor dear. He was just in pain from that shoulder.”

  “I’ll have to lock my office from now on,” said Tuttle, in a tone that hinted nothing could be worse.

  “We should take up a collection to get that poor soul to a sanitarium.”

  “Some time in the mountains might help.”

  Evelyn Tuttle did not make idle declarations. The next day, she sent notes to all her friends, asking them to suggest a good institution for Jim. She also phoned her minister to add his name to the list of unfortunates for whom extra prayers would be said that Sunday. She considered giving Jim the news about this coming bounty, but decided she better raise the money befor
e getting his hopes up. For the moment, she would put on her hat and go to the market, with a mind to consoling him with a fresh-baked blackberry pie.

  The next day, Jim’s shoulder was still too sore for him to take any work. Instead, he drifted over to Annie Mae’s house. He didn’t knock on the door, but just stood outside on the street, wondering what was going on inside. Once he saw the parlor curtains sway, but only slightly, as if stirred by a puff of wind.

  He opened the mailbox. Taking out his pen-knife, he wrapped it in his best remaining kerchief, and put them in there. Neither gift amounted to much. It just pleased him to believe his nephews would find them, and give them some use in the future.

  As he made his way back to the shop, he passed two bars that were open at 11AM. Oddly, he felt no inclination to go in. It wouldn’t have mattered if he did: he had no money, and no credit left in either place.

  Back at the garage, he retreated to his bed and slept an indeterminate number of hours. When he woke, something about the quality of the shadows told him it was late afternoon. A feeble voice inside him told him to get up and make some use of what was left of the day. He wondered, simply for the sake of argument with himself, whether there was any purpose in him getting up. He could not think of a single one.

  Next he opened his eyes, it was dark. He got up and looked out the door. The garage was shut for the night, Tuttle’s tools put back in their places. He went to the bench and found a flat-head screwdriver. Testing the door to the office, it was, as he expected, locked. He stuck the head of the screwdriver into the jamb. The wood was soft, chunks of it coming out easily. The strike plate came loose, and the door clicked open.

  The duck gun was in the same place, but the shells were no longer in the right-hand drawer. He searched for them, eliminating each possible place until he found them, hidden in the back of the bottom file drawer. He loaded the shotgun by the feeble light of the waning moon.

  He went back to his room. Shutting the door, he climbed into bed with the gun. He lay there for some time, feeling the cool metal against his arm, suddenly in no particular hurry. Just having the means, so close at hand, was comforting. The sensation reminded him of the last time he hunted in the Dismal: it was a Saturday morning in October, ’00. He remembered thinking it was unusually cold. Tassels of mist twisted off the water as the sun lingered behind the trees, and no matter how much he blew his call, the ducks would not be roused. He sat in his blind, contented, and thought that he would see Nell that evening and gift the family with a brace of birds, to which they would express delight and remark upon his prowess and ask him to dinner the next evening. Nell—as was her wont—would not overplay her satisfaction, but would look on him with smiling, half-lidded eyes. He would seem indifferent, as if his skill was a matter of course, but that look would warm him, and made him want to please her every day of her life. And in the sweet penumbra of that memory, he drifted off to sleep.

  Gene Betts arrived at 8:30 the next morning. He had just gotten the garage door open when he heard Jim calling for him to “Come and see”. Betts did not rush to respond. Jim called again, saying “Gene, you’re gonna want to see this!”

  Betts came. Opening the door, he saw Jim sitting on his bed with the shotgun propped under his chin.

  “So, you still think I’m kidding?” he asked, a sneer on his face.

  “If you’re gonna use that,” Betts replied, “then use it. I got work to do.”

  The bell sounded as a customer pulled into the garage. Betts went over to greet Mr. A.R. Luton, who rolled in with his head stuck out the window of his Plymouth.

  “Hey there, Archie.”

  “Morning Gene. Got a few minutes to look after a leak?”

  “Right now, got nothin’ but time.”

  The two men stood looking at the front driver’s side tire.

  “May be a nail. Or a piece of glass.”

  “The roads around here really are in a state.”

  “Our tax dollars at work…” said Betts, setting the jack.

  Both men jumped at the sound of a shotgun going off.

  Luton mopped his forehead with his kerchief. “Somebody in your back yard?” he asked.

  “It’s just Jim Wilcox shooting up the roof again,” said Betts as he commenced to raise the car.

  As there was no obvious puncture in the tire, Betts dunked it in a pickle barrel full of water. Sure enough, a train of bubbles issued from a tight slit within one of the treads.

  “Not a nail. Maybe glass or a sliver of metal…”

  John Tuttle came in as the town clock struck nine. It had been fifteen minutes since they heard the shotgun blast. He joined Luton, bent over to watch Betts patch the tube.

  “Nail?” asked Tuttle.

  “I don’t think so,” replied Betts.

  Tuttle nodded and went off to unlock his office. He passed Jim’s room on the way, but didn’t look inside.

  He found his office door half-open. The screwdriver still on the floor, and there was a crunching sound as he stepped on fragments of wood.

  “Oh for the love of Pete,” Tuttle exclaimed. And then, calling out: “Gene, did you see this?”

  “See what?”

  Checking within, there at first seemed to be nothing missing. Then he remembered the shotgun. Suddenly, he was filled with a deep, inexplicable dread.

  Tuttle went to Jim’s room. The door was ajar, as Betts had left it. He pushed it open, and was stunned by what he saw.

  Jim’s body was on the bed, the gun lying by his side. Half of his head was disassembled and decorating the wall, tracing lines of blood downward as they slid.

  Head swimming, Tuttle fell back, only narrowly catching his balance as he brushed against a stack of motor oil cans. These crashed to the floor. Gene Betts noticed one of the cans roll across the concrete, into the shop.

  “For God’s sake, Jim…” he heard Tuttle moan.

  Betts joined Tuttle at the door. Looking within, he felt his innards recoil. He was sickened, but also couldn’t look away: Jim Wilcox’s finger was still on the shotgun’s second trigger, which had not been pulled. Pieces of his shattered skull littered a whole side of the room, but everything below his neck was free of blood. And on the half of his face that remained, he still wore the sneer that had challenged Betts in his last moments:

  “So, do you still think I’m kidding?”

  Word of Jim’s fate spread quickly. By the time the Sheriff arrived, he had to cope with a throng of onlookers, each pushing to get a glimpse. Among them was W.O. Saunders, who grabbed his camera and rushed over the instant he got the news. Upon gaining entry to the scene, though, he took no photographs. Witnesses recalled seeing a thin, suited man in wire glasses behind the garage that morning, vomiting.

  In his account that week in The Independent, Saunders described Jim as “the most tragic figure in Elizabeth City, destitute, sick, despondent and growing old [who took] leave of a wretched life in spectacular manner, protesting innocence of his sweetheart’s murder to the end.”

  They found pieces of Jim’s shattered cranium all over that room, gathering them in a milk box for the burial. These went into the ground on December 5, in Jim’s solitary plot in Hollywood Cemetery. One unaccountably large piece, however, was found by Evelyn Tuttle weeks later, gathering dust in a corner. She refused to touch the thing. Instead, Gene Betts fetched it, tied it with twine, and hung it from the rafters of Tuttle’s Garage.

  There it remained for years, like some saintly relic suspended in the nave of a cathedral. It twisted there long after Tuttle sold the business, and memories of the Cropsey case faded. When he was asked about the strange bone twenty years later, the garage’s owner shrugged, and said it was a piece of ‘some murderer.’

  Jim’s last mortal remains found their final rest when the garage was demolished. The bone fell in among the rafters and roof slats and assorted debris, collected by backhoe and dumped. The pile was soon covered with weeds, indistinguishable from all the other mounds of de
tritus on the edge of town.

  VIII.

  The last time Ollie’s father got sick, none of the rest of the family was able to see him. Almost the entire Cropsey clan had moved away from Elizabeth City—some farther west in North Carolina, most back north. William Cropsey was eighty-five by then, and frequently fatigued or in pain. The doctor used words like “interstitial nephilitis” and “arterioschlerosis”, the gist of which seemed to mean “chronically indisposed”. When the end came, only Ollie was at home, and her mother.

  By this time Ollie had accepted her role as family helpmeet. For her, the status of wife and mother would remain forever unrealized. She had abjured them, pushed them away with both hands, as she had any of the less conventional roles outside the home. Her main occupations now were simply to make the house function—to see the bills paid and the groceries delivered—and to ruminate over the past. She became practiced at reliving her yesterdays in ever more precise detail. She was sometimes heard arguing with people who had been dead for years, demanding they explain what they had meant by some remark, or addressing questions whose answers had long since ceased to matter. Her brothers and sisters ignored these eccentricities. Ollie suffered from nerves, they said; different folks dealt with loss in their own ways. Inwardly they were merely thankful she cared for their parents, and left them free to live their own lives.

  Ollie brought up a bowl of clear broth to her father, who sat up in bed because it made the pain endurable. He watched her eyes as she spooned the broth between his lips, not swallowing but passively letting the liquid process down his throat. She tended to him silently, as a matter of obligation; no words interrupted the rhythmic scrape, tap, scrape of the spoon against the bowl, and the ponderous tick of the grandfather on the landing.

  She discharged this duty until he twisted his face to refuse the spoon, and with trembling resolve lifted his right hand to take her’s. Ollie was surprised. She allowed him to hold her, shaking the broth onto the bedsheets, until she gently removed his hand and laid it at his side.

  “Look here, we’ve made a mess.”