Harry saw the little gray animal, thought at first it was a rat, then realized it was a kitten with half its bowels out. He must have stepped on it, or the horse had. Or maybe he’d fallen on it. He’d have to kill it, that he saw right away. Annoyed and suddenly angry, Harry stepped hard on the kitten’s head with the heel of his cowboy boot. Harry’s teeth were bared. He was still getting his own breath back. His Gramma probably wouldn’t miss the kitten, he thought. She usually had too many of them. But Harry picked the kitten up by its oddly short tail, swung it once and hurled it as far as he could across the meadow, away from the house.
The mare followed the movement with her eyes, until the kitten—even before it landed on the ground—was lost to her vision. But she had seen the kitten smashed by the man falling on it. Fanny followed docilely as Harry led her towards the gate, towards the house. Fanny’s awareness of what had happened came slowly and ponderously, even more slowly than she plodded across the meadow. Involuntarily, Fanny turned her head and tried to look behind her, almost came to a stop, and the man jerked her bridle.
“Come on, come on, Engine!”
THE BROOK, SOMETIMES CALLED LATHAM’S BROOK, was about two miles from Bess’s farm. Harry knew it from his childhood visits with his grandmother. It crossed his mind that the wooden bridge might be different—wider, maybe with a rail now—and he was relieved to see that it was the same: a span of hardly twenty feet, and maybe eight or nine feet wide, not wide enough for two cars, but a car seldom came here, probably. The road was a single-lane, unpaved, and there were lots of better roads around for cars.
“There’s the old spot,” said Bess, looking across the brook at the green grass, pleasantly sheltered by a few trees, where the family had come for years to picnic. “Hasn’t changed, has it, Harry?” Bess was seated on a bench that let down from a side of the wagon, the right side.
Harry had the reins. “Nope. Sure hasn’t.”
This was where Marylou was to get down, and according to plan, she said, “Let me walk across, Harry! Is it shallow enough to wade?”
Harry tugged Fanny to a halt, sawing on her bit, and Fanny even backed a little, thinking that was what he wanted. “I dunno,” said Harry in a frozen tone.
Marylou jumped down. She was in blue jeans, espadrilles, and a red-checked shirt. She trotted across the bridge, as if feeling happy and full of pep.
Harry clucked up Fanny again. He’d go over the right side of the bridge. He tugged Fanny to the right.
“Careful, Harry!” said Bess. “Harry, you’re—”
The horse was on the bridge, the two right wheels of the wagon were not. There was a loud bump and scrape, a terrible jolt as the axles hit the edge of the bridge. Bess was thrown backward, balanced for a second with the wagon side in the small of her back, then she fell off into the water. Harry crouched, prepared to spring to safety, to jump towards the bank, but the falling wagon gave him nothing solid to leap from. Fanny, drawn backwards and sideways by the weight of the wagon, was suddenly over the edge of the bridge, trapped in her shafts. She fell on Harry’s shoulders, and Harry’s face was suddenly smashed against stones, underwater.
Fanny threshed about on her side, trying to regain her feet.
“Har-ry!” Marylou screamed. She had run onto the bridge. She saw a red stream coming from Harry’s head, and she ran to the bank and waded into the water. “Harry!”
The crazy horse was somehow sideways in the wagon shafts, trampling all over Harry’s legs now. Marylou raised her fists and shouted.
“Back, you idiot!”
Fanny, dazed with shock and fear, raised her front feet, not high, and when they came down, they struck Marylou’s knees.
Marylou screamed, gave a panic-stricken, brandishing movement of her right fist to drive the horse off, then sank into the water up to her waist, gasping. Blood, terrifying blood, poured from her knees, through her torn blue jeans. And the stupid horse was now pitching and stomping, trying to get out of the shafts. Again the hooves came down on Harry, on his body.
It all happened so slowly. Marylou felt paralyzed. She couldn’t even cry out. The horse looked like something in a slow-motion film, dragging now the broken wagon right across Harry. My God! And was it Bess yelling something now? Was it? Where? Marylou lost consciousness.
Bess was struggling to get to her feet. She’d been knocked out for a few minutes, she realized. What on earth had happened? Fanny was trying to climb the bank opposite, and the wagon was wedged between two trees. When Bess’s eyes focused a bit better, she saw Harry almost covered by water, and then Marylou, who was nearer. Clumsily Bess waded into the deeper water of the brook, seized Marylou by one arm, and dragged her slowly, slowly over the stones, until her head was on the bank, clear of the water.
But Harry was face down and underwater! Bess had a horrible moment, had a desire to scream as loudly as she could for help. But all she did was wade towards Harry, hands outstretched, and when she reached him, she took as hard a grip as she could on his shirt, under his arm, and tugged with all her strength. She could not move him, but she turned him over, held his head in the air. His face was a pink and red blur, no longer a face. There was something wrong with his chest. It was crushed.
“Help!” Bess yelled. “Please!—Help!”
She waited a minute, and shouted again. She sat down finally on the grass of the bank. She was in shock, she realized. She shivered, then she began to tremble violently. A chill. She was soaking wet. Even her hair was wet. See about Marylou, she told herself, and she got up again and went to Marylou who was on her back, her legs twisted in an awful way, as if they were broken. But Marylou was breathing.
Bess made herself move. She unhitched Fanny. Bess had no purpose. She felt she was in some kind of nightmare, yet she knew she was awake, that it had all happened. She held on to a brass ring of Fanny’s collar, and Fanny pulled her up the slope, on to the bridge. They walked slowly, the woman and the horse, back the way they had come. It was easily nearly a mile to any house, Bess thought. The Poindexter place, wasn’t that the next?
When the Poindexter house was in sight, Bess saw a car approaching. She raised her arm, but found she hadn’t strength to yell out loudly enough. Still, the car was coming, slowing down.
“Go to the bridge. The brook,” Bess told the bewildered looking man who was getting out of his car. “Two people—”
“You’re hurt? You’re bleeding,” said the man, pointing to Bess’s shoulder. “Get in the car. We’ll go to the Poindexters’ house. I know the Poindexters.” He helped Bess into the car, then he took Fanny’s dangling reins and pulled her into the long driveway of the Poindexters’ property, so the horse would be off the road. He went back and drove the car into the driveway, past the horse, on to the house.
Bess knew the Poindexters too. They were not close friends, but good neighbors. Bess had enough of her wits about her to refuse to lie down on the sofa, as Eleanor Poindexter wished her to do, until they’d put newspapers down on it. Her clothes were still damp. Eleanor made her some tea. The man was already on the telephone. He came back and said he’d asked for an ambulance to go at once to the ford.
Eleanor, a gentle, rather pretty woman of fifty, saw to Bess’s shoulder. It was a cut, not serious. “Whatever made your grandson go over the edge?” he said for the second time, as if in wonderment. “That bridge isn’t all that narrow.”
It was two or three days before Bess felt anything like her usual self. She hadn’t needed to go into a hospital, but the doctor had advised her to rest a lot at home, which she had done. And Eleanor Poindexter had been an angel, and driven Bess twice to visit Marylou in the Danville hospital. Marylou’s legs had been broken, and she’d need an operation on both knees. She might always walk with a limp, one doctor told Bess. And Marylou was strangely bitter about Harry—that shocked Bess the most, considering they were newlyweds, a
nd Bess assumed much in love.
“Stupid—selfish—so-and-so,” Marylou said. Her voice was bitter.
Bess felt Marylou might have said more, but didn’t want to or didn’t dare. Harry’s body had been sent to California, to Harry’s mother. After the brook, Bess had never seen Harry.
One day that same week, Bess took Fanny into the meadow for grazing. Bess was feeling a little happier. She’d had a letter from Sam, and he was willing to come back, providing Harry’s visit was over (Sam didn’t mince words), and Bess had just replied to him in a letter which the mailman would take away tomorrow morning.
Then Bess saw the dry and half-eaten body of the little gray cat, and a shock of pain went through her. She’d supposed the kitten had wandered on somewhere. What had happened to it? Crushed somehow. By what? A car or tractor never came into this meadow. Bess turned and looked at Fanny, whose thick neck was bent towards the ground. Fanny’s lips and teeth moved in the grass. Fanny couldn’t have stepped on the little thing, the kitten was much too quick, had been. Fanny had liked the kitten, Bess had seen that the morning she’d given the kitten the rib bone. And there, just a few feet away, was the long bone, stripped clean now by birds. Bess bent and picked it up. How the little kitten had loved this bone! Bess, after bracing herself, lifted the kitten’s body up too. Hadn’t Harry harnessed Fanny in the meadow that day? What had happened? What had happened to make Fanny so angry that day at the brook? It was Harry’s hands that had driven the wagon over the edge. Bess had seen it. Fanny would never have gone so near the edge, if she hadn’t been tugged that way.
In the afternoon, Bess buried the kitten in an old, clean dishtowel in a grave she dug in the far meadow, beyond the chickens’ and the ducks’ yard. It hadn’t seemed right to dispose of the kitten in the garbage, even if she’d wrapped the body well. The kitten had been so full of life! Harry had somehow killed the kitten, Bess felt sure. And Fanny had seen it. Bess knew too that Harry had meant to kill her. It was horrid, too horrid to think about.
The Day
of Reckoning
John took a taxi from the station, as his uncle had told him to do in case they weren’t there to meet him. It was less than two miles to Hanshaw Chickens, Inc., as his Uncle Ernie Hanshaw now called his farm. John knew the white two-story house well, but the long gray barn was new to him. It was huge, covering the whole area where the cow barn and the pigpens had been.
“Plenty of wishbones in that place!” the taxi driver said cheerfully as John paid him.
John smiled. “Yes, and I was just thinking—not a chicken in sight!”
John carried his suitcase towards the house. “Anybody home?” he called, thinking Helen would probably be in the kitchen now, getting lunch.
Then he saw the flattened cat. No, it was a kitten. Was it real or made of paper? John set his suitcase down and bent closer. It was real. It lay on its side, flat and level with the damp reddish earth, in the wide track of a tire. Its skull had been crushed and there was blood there, but not on the rest of the body which had been enlarged by pressure, so that the tail looked absurdly short. The kitten was white with patches of orange, brindle and black.
John heard a hum of machinery from the barn. He put his suitcase on the front porch, and hearing nothing from the house, set off at a trot for the new barn. He found the big front doors locked, and went round to the back, again at a trot, because the barn seemed to be a quarter of a mile long. Besides the machine hum, John heard a high-pitched sound, a din of cries and peeps from inside.
“Ernie?” John yelled. Then he saw Helen. “Hello, Helen!”
“John! Welcome! You took a taxi? We didn’t hear any car!” She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “You’ve grown another three inches!”
His uncle climbed down from a ladder and shook John’s hand. “How’re you, boy?”
“Okay, Ernie. What’s going on here?” John looked up at moving belts which disappeared somewhere inside the barn. A rectangular metal container, nearly as big as a boxcar, rested on the ground.
Ernie pulled John closer and shouted that the grain, a special mixture, had just been delivered and was being stored in the factory, as he called the barn. This afternoon a man would come to collect the container.
“Lights shouldn’t go on now, according to schedule, but we’ll make an exception so you can see. Look!” Ernie pulled a switch inside the barn door, and the semi-darkness changed to glaring light, bright as full sun.
The cackles and screams of the chickens augmented like a siren, like a thousand sirens, and John instinctively covered his ears. Ernie’s lips moved, but John could not hear him. John swung around to see Helen. She was standing farther back, and waved a hand, shook her head and smiled, as if to say she couldn’t bear the racket. Ernie drew John farther into the barn, but he had given up talking and merely pointed.
The chickens were smallish and mostly white, and they all shuffled constantly. John saw that this was because the platforms on which they stood slanted forward, inclining them towards the slowly moving feed troughs. But not all of them were eating. Some were trying to peck the chickens next to them. Each chicken had its own little wire coop. There must have been forty rows of chickens on the ground floor, and eight or ten tiers of chickens went up to the ceiling. Between the double rows of back-to-back chickens were aisles wide enough for a man to pass and sweep the floor, John supposed, and just as he thought this, Ernie turned a wheel, and water began to shoot over the floor. The floor slanted towards various drain holes.
“All automatic! Somethin’, eh?”
John recognized the words from Ernie’s lips, and nodded appreciatively. “Terrific!” But he was ready to get away from the noise.
Ernie shut off the water.
John noticed that the chickens had worn their beaks down to blunt stubs, and their white breasts dripped blood where the horizontal bar supported their weight. What else could they do but eat? John had read a little about battery chicken farming. These hens of Ernie’s, like the hens he had read about, couldn’t turn around in their coops. Much of the general flurry in the barn was caused by chickens trying to fly upward. Ernie cut the lights. The doors closed after them, apparently also automatically.
“Machine farming has really got me over the hump,” Ernie said, still talking loudly. “I’m making good money now. And just imagine, one man—me—can run the whole show!”
John grinned. “You mean you won’t have anything for me to do?”
“Oh, there’s plenty to do. You’ll see. How about some lunch first? Tell Helen I’ll be in in about fifteen minutes.”
John walked towards Helen. “Fabulous.”
“Yes. Ernie’s in love with it.”
They went on towards the house, Helen looking down at her feet, because the ground was muddy in spots. She wore old tennis shoes, black corduroy pants, and a rust-colored sweater. John purposely walked between her and where the kitten lay, not wanting to mention it now.
He carried his suitcase up to the square, sunny corner room which he had slept in since he was a boy of ten, when Helen and Ernie had bought the farm. He changed into blue jeans, and went down to join Helen in the kitchen.
“Would you like an old-fashioned? We’ve got to celebrate your arrival,” Helen said. She was making two drinks at the wooden table.
“Fine.—Where’s Susan?” Susan was their eight-year-old daughter.
“She’s at a—Well, sort of summer school. They’ll bring her back around four-thirty. Helps fill in the summer holidays. They make awful clay ashtrays and fringed money-purses—you know. Then you’ve got to praise them.”
John laughed. He gazed at his aunt-by-marriage, thinking she was still very attractive at—what was it? Thirty-one, he thought. She was about five feet four, slender, with reddish blonde curly hair and eyes that sometimes looked green, sometimes blue. And she had a very ple
asant voice. “Oh, thank you.” John accepted his drink. There were pineapple chunks in it, topped with a cherry.
“Awfully good to see you, John. How’s college? And how’re your folks?”
Both those items were all right. John would graduate from Ohio State next year when he would be twenty, then he was going to take a post-graduate course in government. He was an only child, and his parents lived in Dayton, a hundred and twenty miles away.
Then John mentioned the kitten. “I hope it’s not yours,” he said, and realized at once that it must be, because Helen put her glass down and stood up. Who else could the kitten have belonged to, John thought, since there was no other house around?
“Oh, Lord! Susan’s going to be—” Helen rushed out of the back door.
John ran after her, straight for the kitten which Helen had seen from a distance.
“It was that big truck this morning,” Helen said. “The driver sits so high up he can’t see what’s—”
“I’ll help you,” John said, looking around for a spade or a trowel. He found a shovel and returned, and prized the flattened body up gently, as if it were still alive. He held it in both his hands. “We ought to bury it.”
“Of course. Susan mustn’t see it, but I’ve got to tell her.—There’s a fork in back of the house.”
John dug where Helen suggested, a spot near an apple tree behind the house. He covered the grave over, and put some tufts of grass back so it would not catch the eye.
“The times I’ve brought that kitten in the house when the damned trucks came!” Helen said. “She was barely four months, wasn’t afraid of anything, just went trotting up to cars as if they were something to play with, you know?” She gave a nervous laugh. “And this morning the truck came at eleven, and I was watching a pie in the oven, just about to take it out.”
John didn’t know what to say. “Maybe you should get another kitten for Susan as soon as you can.”
The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder Page 11
