Murder in Little Egypt (15 page)

On another morning she asked him how he could stand living with a slob who never did the dishes, whose house was a pigsty, and whose four children survived on breakfast cereal and peanut butter.

“Oh, I’ve already told her,” Dale said matter-of-factly, “there isn’t going to be any of that lying around in bed all day and letting the garbage pile up.”

Still Marian did not lose faith. Dale was temporarily off his rocker, that was all. He had done something he already regretted and was being defensive about it. He will wake up one morning next to her and wish he were with me, Marian told herself; he’ll come back and we’ll be stronger than ever. Men were always saying that when you weld a piece of broken metal back together, it is sounder than it had been before. A marriage needs a break sometimes, a shock, a rough patch to shake everyone up. Surely when he realizes that his child is about to be born . . .

It was May. One afternoon Dale telephoned Marian from the hospital. He had to make a run near Harrisburg, he said. Would she care to come with him? He had to look in on a patient out near Rudement.

Marian fixed her hair and makeup. It was finally happening. She was ready to forgive him. She already had. It was just like the McLeansboro days, going with him on a house call. Why else would he be asking her to take a drive with him?

Dale picked her up. They talked of nothing on the way over, a distance of about twelve miles. It was a bright spring day. New grass brightened the fields. Beyond Harrisburg in the foothills dogwood and redbud trees bloomed—a day to exult and to banish miseries. Marian waited in the car as Dale went inside the small house to see his patient. She felt not quite happy, but hopeful.

On the way back Dale avoided Route 45. He is giving himself time, Marian thought, taking the side roads to make the trip longer. Or had he not decided what to say? Had he simply wished to see her, to try what it was like to be with her after these weeks? He might be unsure of himself. She felt sorry for him. She was so relieved to be with him and wanted the trip to last, whether he said anything to her now or not.

They were driving along the Billman Road when Dale broke the silence.

“I have to tell you something,” he began.

“Yes, tell me anything you want. Here I am.”

“I hate to tell you this when you’re six months pregnant. I don’t love you anymore, and I don’t need you, and I don’t want you.”

9

AUGUST ARRIVED. DALE REMAINED AWAY. HE WAS THERE IN Marian’s hospital room, however, when she started having her contractions, nattering on about cattle farming to an old man who was just being released and was soaking in the latest information on heifers. Marian told Dale that the baby was coming. He ignored her and kept on with his lecture. Finally he ordered her wheeled into the delivery room.

“It’s another boy” was all Dale said when Marian came out of the anesthetic.

Jewel and Noma helped her at home for the first few weeks. She named him Patrick after Pat Sullivan, who agreed to be the god-father, and as usual she added Dale as the middle name. She still believed Dale would come home. She had to.

Once Patrick was on a regular schedule, Marian had plenty of time to meditate on her marriage. Some of her wishful thinking evaporated. She could see how things had deteriorated gradually, right under her nose, without her noticing or wanting to notice. Behavior she had dismissed as eccentric had become regular. She had ignored or had disbelieved many of the stories Mark and Kevin had told her about Dale’s behavior when she was not around. She had minimized what she had seen with her own eyes, especially during the holidays.

Dale’s violence had increased along with his drinking. There was the incident Kevin had witnessed, when Dale had bent her arm back until she thought it would break and had socked her on the mouth and eye. On another occasion they had been lying in bed and she had said something Dale didn’t like: She had always spoken her mind to him, had prided herself on that, on not being like so many of the women she knew in southern Illinois, silent and obedient. But Dale had reacted like a typical down-home son of a bitch, grabbing her thumb and bending it back until she could hear the bones cracking.

“We better get that X-rayed” was all he had said the next morning, without an apology. At least when he had hit her on their first anniversary he had apologized.

One night they were home from a party, standing in the kitchen, when Dale opened the refrigerator to see what there was to eat. A bowl of gravy fell out and broke on the floor.

“Damn,” Marian said. “I’ll clean it up. Leave it alone.”

“Is this all there is to eat?” Dale asked, and he bent down, scooped up a handful of gravy and threw it in her face.

When she shouted and cursed him he punched her in the eye, knocking her to the floor. There were no apologies.

Marian rationalized all of these outbursts by attributing them to drink. Some people get mean when they drink, she told herself, deciding that there was such a thing as a drunk Dale and a sober Dale and that the two had little to do with one another. She isolated the incidents, separated them from one another as well as from the sober Dale, to avoid seeing patterns and connections. Since they occurred over a period of three or four years, she had time to recover from each and file it away. None seemed serious enough to weaken her faith in the future or to threaten her happiness with her home and her boys. As for his harshness with the boys, a lot of southern Illinois fathers were rough on their kids. It was the old-fashioned way. Marian did not approve, but she did not consider such behavior abnormal, and she never hesitated to criticize Dale for his sarcasm or to tell him when she thought he had punished the boys enough or too much.

Since childhood Marian had learned to make the best of things. Compared to the difficulties her mother had faced and surmounted, hers seemed trivial, the ups and downs that any woman lucky enough to have a husband and a home could expect. She had long ago acquiesced to living in southern Illinois; her city dreams had faded. She believed in Dale, loved him as ever, and was not a quitter. The violence was not something she wished to discuss with a friend or an outsider; her brother lived in California now, happy and successful with his own family, and it did not occur to her to telephone him or write him about what were surely passing troubles. The violence was humiliating but better forgotten. Dale had not meant to break her thumb: He had been drinking and had forgotten how strong he was. She had been drinking some herself: Maybe she had said something truly awful, that was possible. It was more of an accident than an assault.

But now, with the new baby and with her husband off with another woman, Marian had plenty of time to think, and she began to wonder how well she knew Dale. He had his life thoroughly compartmentalized; there was so much of it about which she knew nothing. The children had been her realm; everything else besides their social life was his. She had her own checking account, into which Dale deposited money when it was needed. He paid her charge accounts at the grocery and liquor stores; even the utility bills at the house went to his office. She had no idea how much money he was making or what he was doing with it. Occasionally he would bring her papers to sign, but she never examined them. She knew nothing about business or property; it never occurred to her to question a successful man who she believed was far brighter than she and who, after all, was the one making the money.

She did worry from time to time about the vast amount he must have been sinking into the farms for cattle and equipment, eventually for the elaborate catfish-breeding operation he installed: terraced, aerated pools; hatcheries; a processing plant. When she did dare ask him whether he was confident that the farms would turn a profit, or were they more of a hobby of his, Dale responded curtly that since their sons were probably not going to amount to anything anyway, they had better have something to fall back on when they were grown-up and broke. She knew the boys well enough to see that they had no interest whatever in agriculture. They had many years ahead of them still to find themselves. Wasn’t Dale being rather premature in dismissing their prospects? Not everyone could be a genius like him! He could spend more time with them, if he wanted to inspire them. But if Dale had in mind becoming some sort of gentleman farmer as well as a doctor, she could hardly object.

Marian now saw that just as Dale had excluded her from his business and professional life, he excluded himself from family life. Every Christmas Eldorado offered a prize for the prettiest decorations. When Marian won it with her wreaths and colored lights and spotlit photos of the children on the lawn, Dale reacted as if she were celebrating someone else’s children. The boys kidded her about the photos, which made perfect snowball targets and provoked razzing at school, but Marian knew that her children appreciated her efforts to show family pride. She continued with the decorations in 1966, even with Dale gone, adding Patrick’s photograph. There was no use in trying to get Dale to pose for the Christmas card, so she designed a five-pointed star of individual photos, with Patrick’s in the center and a shot of Dale from another year at the lower left point.

She tried to figure out how and why Dale had changed: His personality had not fundamentally altered, but it had grown extreme, like his drinking. He had always been the life of the party; now he got drunk quickly, launched into nonstop monologues, challenged people. Theirs was a drinking crowd; no one seemed to mind; but Dale made Marian nervous with the vehemence of his arguments about the state of the world or the genetics of cattle or whatever. He would grow red in the face, grab people by the lapels, raise that piercing voice.

His practical jokes had gotten out of hand. One night they were driving home with Pat and Betty Ray Sullivan along the Marion-Harrisburg Road. Marian always liked being with the Sullivans. She was close to Betty Ray; Pat, perhaps because he was such a successful businessman, perhaps because he was big and burly and conveyed with nonchalance an air of authority, was able to hold Dale in check, more or less, with a word or a gesture. Near Shady Rest that night, Dale hit a deer, knocking it into a ditch and killing it. After surveying the damage to his fender, Dale drove on, and they dropped the Sullivans at home.

On the road to Eldorado, Dale suddenly stopped, burst out laughing, turned around, and headed back toward Marion on Route 13.

“What are you doing?” Marian asked.

“You’ll see,” Dale said. “We’re going back and get that deer. We’re going to make Pat a present of it.”

Marian knew better than to argue.

She went along with the gag. She helped Dale hoist the big buck into the trunk of the car.

“It’s all bloody,” Marian complained.

“Never mind. This’ll be worth it.”

At the Sullivans’, Marian was sorry to see that the lights were out. Dale dragged the deer out of the trunk, through the front yard and onto the porch, propping it up on a wrought-iron bench against the white brick.

“I don’t think they’re going to appreciate this,” Marian said as Dale sped off. The Sullivans’ house was immaculate, freshly painted, a Harrisburg showplace. Marian could not imagine that Pat and Betty Ray would be amused. Dale asked her whether she had lost her sense of humor.

The next morning, as he told them later with some vehemence, Pat went out in his robe and pajamas to fetch the Sunday paper and noticed the blood that had seeped over the porch. The sight of that deer sitting on the bench was grotesque; nor did he and Betty Ray relish the idea of the neighbors’ gawking at it as they walked to church. They dragged it several blocks away into an alley and spent hours cleaning up the porch. Pat was incensed, but a headline in the Harrisburg
Register
three days later broke the ice between the Sullivans and the Cavanesses:

DEER FOUND WITHIN CITY LIMITS

Another of Dale’s pranks turned out to be less easily resolved. The Cavanesses were spending the Fourth of July with three other couples at the Sullivans’ Holiday Inn at Kentucky Lake, a resort and recreation area south of Paducah across the Ohio River. It had been an uneventful holiday, with the kids enjoying speeding around on the Sullivans’ boat. The Sullivans had gone home a day early; on the night of the Fourth, Dale was up late drinking with the other men after the women and children had gone to bed.

Duke Culley was not as drunk as Dale but was well-enough oiled to come up with a silly idea.

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” Duke said, pointing to a cabin cruiser parked on a trailer near the swimming pool, “to wake up in the morning and find that boat in the pool?”

That was all Dale needed. Duke protested that he had only been kidding, but Dale hurried over to the boat. He was unable to roll the trailer by himself at first and called for help, but everyone refused, telling him to stop before he did something he’d regret. This spurred Dale on and he found the strength to back the boat up to the edge of the pool. A good-sized Chris-Craft, it was about twenty-five feet long.

The boat was not locked onto the trailer. Dale was able to launch it into the pool, which it nearly filled, gallons of water slopping over the sides.

The men could not help sending up a cheer, but a subdued one: They did not want to wake the other guests. Their appreciation of Dale’s bold move turned quickly to alarm. The boat’s owner had opened its seacocks. It started sinking. Dale wanted to jump aboard to save it, but the others held him back. It was too late.

Within a couple of minutes the boat had sunk to the bottom of the pool, sending oil and gasoline to the surface. The men hurried to their rooms, woke up their families, and headed home in the middle of the night.

Pat Sullivan’s mother was the manager of the inn. She telephoned her son early the next morning to report the disaster. It would take a special crew to raise the boat from the pool. The owner was livid and demanding compensation. The pool’s filtration system was ruined. With no swimming pool for the rest of their holiday, most of the rest of the guests had checked out.