Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests (30 page)

I tried to stay out of his way like always, but that room was small and he took up the whole place.

He went banging into the other room, and my mama followed him. She’d hid her revolver in the patch basket that was hanging
off the end of the bed. I knew she was scared he’d get his hands on it.

She’d bought the revolver to keep us safe after a man followed us from Foster’s store into the woods. Mr. Foster had just
paid my mama for her eggs, so we knew what the man meant to do. We ran like the devil up to the road, even though that was
the longer way home. Later my mama was sorry she bought the revolver. She always had to change the hiding place so Mr. Davis
wouldn’t find it and shoot her.

Mama and Mr. Davis were yelling in the bedroom, and I went out of the kitchen onto the porch. I found those two loaves where
he’d thrown them in the snow. I brought them in and got a knife and cleaned them off as best I could. I hadn’t had my dinner
with him tearing up the house. All this time I didn’t pay too much mind to his carrying on because that’s how it always was
when he was drunk.

Then all of a sudden I heard a crash and he yelled, “Now I’ve got it and I’m going to kill you and put you in a box.”

I dropped the bread and ran into the bedroom. Mr. Davis had torn that room up, knocked over the stand, pulled the quilt off
the bed. He was calling my mama names and waving the revolver around. He could hardly stand up, he was so drunk. My mama had
her back to the wall. She yelled to me, “Run up to the Ernhouts’.”

I was too scared to do that. The Ernhouts were almost a mile up the road. If Mr. Davis shot my mama, he’d come after me, not
to shoot me, but to do the things I knew he’d been thinking about for months, ever since I became a woman. I ran to her and
hung on to her because I didn’t know what else to do.

The truth was, I hated my mama, though not as much as I hated him. He told her to give him money, and she gave it. He beat
her, dragged her around the house by her hair, and she stayed on, knowing that tomorrow would mean another beating. If I was
a grown woman, I’d live like an animal in the woods before I’d stay with him. But that night I hung on to her. She was all
there was between me and him.

He just looked at me and laughed and said, “Okay with me if I kill you both.” He was coming toward us, still swinging the
revolver around, when he stumbled forward and dropped it. Tripped on his own bootlace is what I think happened. Then there
was a struggle for the gun. He was stronger, but he was drunk, and when the revolver went off he got it right in the throat.
He fell to the floor with blood spurting from his neck.

Mama grabbed my arm and pulled me into the kitchen. We shut the door and leaned against it, listening to hear if he was dead
or alive. Then we heard a thump and my mama said, “He’s a red dog.” That’s the way old-time Catskill Mountain people say it
when someone is killed.

He was on the floor when we went into the room. Mama got some rags and wiped down the gun and put it away. There was a place
where the mattress came open, and that’s where she put it. After she cleaned up some of the blood, the two of us wrapped Mr.
Davis in the summer quilt. Then we dragged him out to the shed. My mama was a big woman, almost as big as Mr. Davis, but it
was hard going, dragging him out of the house and all the way around back.

When I asked where we were going to bury him, my mama said, “Use your head, Lucy Ann. How can we bury him when the ground
is froze up solid?” Then she sent me running to the house for the lantern.

I brought it back and watched her take the ax from the wall. Her hair had come undone and it tumbled down her back, black
as night in the light from the lantern. As soon as she started to sharpen the ax with the whetstone, I knew what she was going
to do. I’d seen her butcher hogs. She looked up and saw me shivering. She told me to go fire up the stove, get it as hot as
I could, and then fill the bucket and start scrubbing the floor, get all the blood up from the floor.

That’s how we spent the night, me scrubbing up the blood, my mama going back and forth from the shed to the house with the
big tub she used for washing clothes. I wouldn’t look to see what she was throwing into the stove, but you couldn’t get away
from the smell of it.

When dawn came up, our work was pretty much done. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired. My arms hurt like they were going
to fall off and my knees felt like needles were sticking into them. All that was left of Mr. Davis were his bones. Some of
the bones my mama pounded up fine and put in a box. She said she’d give those to the chickens. The rest she threw into the
dirt cellar that was under the barn. The ground wasn’t frozen there and my mama said that’s where she’d bury them. But that
was going to wait for another day because she was too tired to move.

Then we cleaned ourselves up as best we could and fell into the bed. When we got up, the sun was low in the sky. It’s the
only time in my life I ever slept from sunup to sundown instead of the other way around.

____

T
HE DAYS THAT
followed were peaceful with him gone. But every time I heard a noise outside, I was afraid it was the sheriff come to ask
about Mr. Davis. If people asked where he had gone, my mama and I were going to tell them he was over to Denville buying a
cow. After a while, when he didn’t come back, my mama would say that he’d gone off with another woman. That had happened before,
that he had another woman, so it could have been true.

After about a week, Mr. Ernhout rode over to our place looking for Mr. Davis. He said Mr. Davis owed him money for the horse
he’d gotten off him, that he was paying for a little each month. When I heard my mama tell Mr. Ernhout the story we had agreed
upon, I didn’t think he believed her. My mama was a truthful woman and a lie coming out of her mouth sounded like what it
was. After he left I said to her, “Mama, I think he knows you were lying.”

The next morning we were just finishing the milking when Karl Myerhoff found us in the barn. He was Mr. Davis’s uncle. My
heart jumped when I saw him in that dim light, thinking Mr. Davis had come back to life. There was a resemblance between the
two, although Mr. Myerhoff was older and his clothes were clean and neat and he wasn’t a drunk.

He followed us back to the house. My mama asked him to come in and sit down, but he wouldn’t do that. He would never set foot
in our place even when he came to see Mr. Davis. It was plain from the time my mama married his nephew that Mr. Myerhoff didn’t
have any use for her. He would speak his business on the front porch and then leave.

This time he asked my mama straight out where his nephew was. When she said he’d gone to Denville, he said, “You’re telling
me he walked twelve miles to Denville?”

I knew why he said that. He’d seen the horse in the barn.

My mama was just his size, so she could look him straight in the eye. She wrapped her shawl tight around her and said, “He
told me he was going to Denville, and when I came back from carrying the eggs to Foster’s, he was gone. Maybe someone came
for him with a wagon. I don’t know and I don’t care how he got there. I’m just glad to have the peace and quiet.”

That last part sounded like she was speaking the truth, so I was glad she said it. For the rest, I was afraid that Mr. Myerhoff
knew she was lying.

When he left, my mama and I went inside and she started frying meat for our breakfast. I was surprised. I thought the meat
was for our dinner. My mama said that if Mr. Myerhoff went straight to the sheriff, we might not be having dinner at our place.
Then she said we’d better have our story straight.

I know the story, I said to her, the story about him going off with another woman.

Not that story, my mama said. If the sheriff and his men came and searched the place, she worried that they’d find the bones
she’d buried in the barn cellar. If that happened, she was going to have to tell them that she’d shot Mr. Davis by accident.

“But, Mama…,” I said, and she stopped me from saying more.

“That’s how we’re going to tell it, Lucy Ann.” She fixed me with her eyes, so I would know there was no arguing.

Then I started trembling and crying and couldn’t get myself to stop.

“There’s nothing to go on about,” my mama said. “It was nobody’s fault but his that the revolver went off. That’s what I’ll
tell them, the sheriff and all, and they’ll believe me because everyone around here knows what that man was like, the temper
on him and the things he did to me.”

Then why did we tell the story about him going off to Denville? I wanted to ask. And why did you chop him up and burn him?
I didn’t ask those questions, because I knew the answer. In her heart she was afraid that no one would care what he had done
to her and no one would believe that he got shot by accident.

Later that day, when we came back from Foster’s, the sheriff and his men were waiting.

“Are you Mrs. Margaret Davis?” the sheriff asked my mama. He was a sour-looking man with a pockmarked face.

She answered that she was and that this was her house and she would like to go inside. But they wouldn’t let us in, only kept
us out on the porch. I could see through the window that they’d turned the place upside down. Then two men came out of the
barn. One of them had something in his hand. I knew before he got close enough for me to see that they’d found Mr. Davis’s
bones.

____

W
E RODE INTO
town with the sheriff, the cold wind whipping against us so it was hard to catch a breath. As soon as we got there, they
took my mama away. For a long time I’d been thinking that as soon as I had my own money, I’d get as far from her as I could.
But that day, when they took my mama down off the wagon, I cried like a baby. My mama had no family, and my father’s people
were out in Pennsylvania. They didn’t want to know us after my mama married Mr. Davis. If the sheriff put my mama in jail,
I had no home, no place to go to at all.

They put me up for a few days at Tyler’s Hotel, with a woman called Miss Carter in charge of me. Then Mr. Myerhoff came to
see me and said I was to go home with him. Before we rode out of town in his wagon, we stopped at Kaufman’s Dry Goods. Mr.
Myerhoff gave me five dollars and sent me inside to buy some things. I got a thick wool shawl and a blue skirt and some other
things. I never before had so many new things at the same time.

Mr. Myerhoff had the feed-and-grain store in town. When I saw his big white house, clean and warm inside, with carpet on the
floor, I thought he must be a rich man. His wife took me to a small room in back of the kitchen and said that’s where I would
sleep. I never before had a room all to myself.

I knew by Mrs. Myerhoff’s face that if it was up to her, I wouldn’t be there. She told me I would have to make myself useful
in the house. I said I wasn’t afraid to work. I was used to it.

Working for Mrs. Myerhoff was nowhere near as hard as what I had to do at home. And when she saw I knew how to do the washing
and keep the place clean, she didn’t seem to mind that I was there. In that house, I got to see how things could be when no
one was drunk or swearing or breaking up the chairs. I made up my mind that someday I would live like that with my own family.
If someone had said to me, Lucy Ann, you’re going home with your mama today, I would have begged to stay on with the Myerhoffs.
Every day I worried that I’d do something wrong and they’d send me away, so I tried to do just like they said.

In those months before the trial, Mr. Myerhoff would take me to see Mr. Sullivan, the district attorney. The two of them asked
me questions, the same ones over and over. I figured that they were going to keep asking until they got the answers they wanted.

How did Mr. Davis come to get shot? It was an accident, I said. What had my mama done with Mr. Davis’s body? I don’t know,
I said. That was partly true. I’d only seen her sharpen the ax and carry the tub back and forth from the shed to the stove.

Then they twisted the questions around, and it got harder for me to answer.

“Wasn’t it true there was a lot of yelling and shouting?” Mr. Sullivan asked me. “Weren’t you scared and confused? Can you
say for certain that you didn’t see your mama pull the trigger?” Then: “You saw Mr. Davis dead and you saw the ax and you
saw your mama covered with blood. How do you suppose that blood got on her?”

When I didn’t answer the way he wanted, Mr. Sullivan talked to me about the oath. He said when the trial came I was going
to have to swear on a Bible that I would speak the truth. He said, “Lucy Ann, if you see someone shoot and kill another person
and lie about it, you can go to prison just the same as if you pulled the trigger yourself.”

In the end I was afraid that if I didn’t answer the way they wanted me to, Mr. Myerhoff would send me out of his house and
Mr. Sullivan would make sure I went to prison.

One time, before the trial, I was taken to see my mama’s lawyer. I answered his questions the way Mr. Sullivan had taught
me. I could see Mama’s lawyer wasn’t pleased with me. I told myself that I hadn’t put my mama in jail. From the time I was
ten, I’d begged for us to run away. If she’d listened to me, Mr. Davis would never have got shot. And I told myself that when
the trial started, the judge would hear about the beatings and the black eyes. Then he’d know that Mr. Davis got what he deserved.

____

I
T WAS SPRING
when the trial started. People were lined up on the grass outside the courthouse waiting to get in. Mr. Myerhoff and I didn’t
have to wait. We went right in and found our seats in the courtroom. That place looked to me like a church for rich people,
with its marble walls and dark wooden benches and tall windows.

Every person stopped talking when my mama walked into the courtroom that first day. The sheriff was right beside her, like
they were afraid she’d bolt and run. The people all stretched their necks to see her, some standing up until they were told
to sit back down.