Out Of The Deep I Cry (40 page)

Mrs. Marshall stiffened. After a moment she said, “How did he die?”

Russ looked to Dr. Dvorak.

“Did he drown? Was he shot?”

“If he was shot, there’s no surviving evidence of it,” Dvorak said. “I doubt, even if we had tissue to work with, that we’d find he’d been drowned.” He glanced at Russ.

“What is it?” Mrs. Marshall was pale, composed but on the edge.

“It appears that the proximate cause of death was a blow to the back of the skull. Several blows.” Dr. Dvorak paused for a moment, as if waiting for another question. When none was forthcoming, he went on. “From the extent of the damage, the cross-cranial impact zone, and the angle of declivity, I’ve concluded he was struck by a heavy, probably flat object with a surface area of at least eight to ten inches.”

Mrs. Marshall looked at the pathologist. She turned to Norm Madsen, then to Russ. “I don’t understand,” she said finally. “What sort of weapon could that be?”

There was a silence. Clare wracked her brain for some idea. Tire iron… baseball bat… none of those were flat. “A frying pan,” Russ said finally. “It has to be. Jonathon Ketchem was beaten to death with a frying pan.”

Is she asleep?”

Jane paused at the door to the kitchen. Jon hadn’t lifted his head from the paper to ask the question. “Yes,” she said. “She was all tired out from playing with the Reid boys today.”

He grunted. She crossed to the sink and pumped more water into the basin before lifting her apron off its nail and pulling it over her head. She knotted it behind her and attacked the dinner dishes. She was all tired out as well, after walking Solace to and from the Reids, and doing the marketing, and seeing to the chickens and the house and three meals and a triple batch of cookies intended for St. Alban’s bake sale tomorrow. As near as she could tell, Jon hadn’t moved from the davenport all day, except to go out back to the necessary. She scooped through the basin and dragged up a couple forks. All day. More like all week. He hadn’t been out of the house since Monday. She was the one who had brought him in the newspaper. The only reason he was in the kitchen right now was because the night was bidding cold, and the kitchen, with its woodstove, was the warmest spot in the house. He hadn’t gone down cellar to shovel more coal into the furnace, and she’d be deviled if she was going to do it for him. As it was, she was going to have to step out to the woodpile on the back porch and chop kindling for tomorrow morning.

“You lookin’ at the help-wanted notices?” She knew he wasn’t.

He grunted again.

“Lula Reid was saying that Will has openings for a strong man on his crew. He needs reliable workers. He’d love to have a farmer like you, she said. Used to rising early and putting in a full day. The pay’s real good.”

He dropped the paper on the oilcloth-covered table. “You some sort of job broker now?”

She wiped one of her grandmother’s blue willow plates dry and laid it on the counter. “Somebody’s got to be. You haven’t worked since February.” She turned toward him, leaning against the sink. “You’ve got to find something, Jon. Why not work for Will’s crew? At least it’d bring some money in.”

He looked up at her from his chair. “Ketchems are farmers. We don’t break rocks and pour asphalt so’s rich men can drive up to the mountains without bumping their asses along the way.”

“Jonathon Ketchem, I won’t have that kind of language in my house!”

“Don’t pester me and you won’t have to hear it.” He went back to his paper. She looked at him for a moment. He was still handsome, with his thick dark hair falling over his forehead and his dark eyes. Solace favored him. When they had made her, lying together in their marriage bed, had she loved him? One edge of his newspaper half fell over a painted iron trivet he had won for her, at a shooting gallery at the Sacandaga Amusement Park. He had been home on leave, full of stories about New York City and the South, looking like a million dollars in his uniform. Hadn’t she loved him then?

She turned back to her dishes. She rested her reddened hands on the curved white edge of the sink and looked at her wedding band. He had wrestled it onto her finger in Justice Kendrick’s parlor, with Mrs. Kendrick pumping out “Abide with Me” on their little organ and her best friend, Patsy, giggling with his brother David. She must have loved him then. She wished she could feel it now, feel something to go with the memories, instead of this blank incredulity that sent her searching for evidence that yes, once upon a time, she had loved the intimate stranger at her kitchen table.

“The dam’s finished up,” he said.

She was surprised he spoke. “I’d heard.”

“Two days now, it’s been filling up. Soon, it’ll all be gone.” The tone in his voice made her turn around. “The hayfield. The beanfield. Lord, I used to love that field in the spring, all the flowers peeping out. I wonder if the water rushes in fast or rises slow.” He looked into some middle distance that only he could see. “I wonder if people’s stuff comes floating by. You know, stuff that got left behind, not worth taking.”

She turned back to the sink and grabbed another blue willow plate. “Anything in people’s houses or barns got burnt down. You know that.”

“Our barn could be knee deep in water right now.”

“There’s no barn left.”

“Remember how the boys used to swing from that rope I hung on the cross-beam? Imagine ’em swinging back and forth and then letting go into the water.”

She whirled, water splattering from the plate in her hand. “Don’t talk about that! There isn’t any barn there anymore!”

His eyes were spooky-empty, looking at things he had no business looking at. “A ghost barn,” he said. “For ghost children.” His voice broke on the last word.

She slammed the plate down so hard it rang. “Stop it! It’s no good talking about it!”

“Why not?” He raised his head to her. “Why not?” He cracked the paper against the edge of the table. “Why can’t we talk about it?” He stood up, racking his chair back. “It’s all gone. Everything I ever worked for and wanted. Dead and gone, and all you can talk about is me joining up with some goddamned road crew.”

“Because we’ve got to move on,” she said. She turned back to the sink so he wouldn’t see the hot blur in her eyes. She slid the skillet into the soapy water and scrubbed at it unseeing. “It doesn’t do any good to talk about what was. It just makes us feel bad.”

“I feel bad all the time, anyway,” he said. “I used to be a father. I used to be a farmer. Maybe you don’t want to remember. But I do. Remembering about it is all I’ve got.”

She scrubbed the dish towel against her eyes and dashed it to the counter. “You’re still a father, you jackass, unless you’ve forgotten that little girl upstairs.” She turned to face him. “And you could be a farmer again. There’s land around here going begging from the bank. Use some of the money and buy it!”

“No!” His voice felt like a blow to her stomach. “Not a penny of it. I’m not touching that money, and neither are you.”

“Why not?” She jutted her chin forward, refusing to let him scare her. “You certainly earned it.”

His hand jerked up and she flinched. They both looked at it, at the knotted bulges where his first two fingers had been broken and never set right. He lowered it to his side. “You blame me, don’t you.”

She shook her head.

“You do. I see you sometimes, looking at me. Thinking it’s my fault.”

“Then you’re a fool. It’s as much my fault as yours. Don’t you think I don’t lie awake nights, blaming myself? Going over and over everything? What I should have done, what I would have done?”

“You hate me.”

“No.”

“You hate me. Admit it.”

“No.”

He lunged forward and dug his fingers into her arms. “Say it! You hate me! Say it!”

“All right then!” she screamed. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate me!” She tore out of his grasp and clapped her hand over her mouth, her heart thudding, the echo of her words ringing through the kitchen.

He nodded, as if he had proved something to his satisfaction. “That night, when they were so sick. We should have been willing to die for them. If I had known, I would have given my life to save them. But we didn’t know. That it was the end. Of all our lives.”

“It wasn’t the end.” She was gasping now, her breath coming in high, hard pants. She thought she ought to bend over and put her head between her knees, but she was afraid. Afraid of what he’d do.

“It’s like a curse.” His eyes were gone again, his gaze somewhere over her head. “First the children, then the farm. There’s nothing left of my life.”

She sucked in another breath. “Well there’s plenty left of my life. Solace.”

“Solace,” he said. “My poor baby girl. Having to take the place of all her brothers and sisters. What kind of life is that for a kid?”

She thought she had been afraid before. Now she felt frozen with fear, every nerve in her body strung tight and screaming, as if she had dropped without warning into an icy lake.

“You leave her out of this,” she managed to say.

He turned to her, slowly, like he was working things out in his head. “What kind of life is this for any of us? You and me hating and aching and scared. And Solace. Even her name tells her she’s just a makeup for the others. The third-place ribbon.” He focused on her, really focused on her, for the first time since she had screamed at him. “Wouldn’t you like a little peace, Janie? Just to lay down and not feel any pain anymore?”

“No.” She was shaking. “Solace needs me.”

He waved her answer off. “All of us.”

She braced her hands against the sink and pushed herself forward. “I won’t let you hurt her.” She had failed before, in the call to lay down her life for her children, but she wouldn’t fail this time. “I swear to God, I’ll die before I’ll let you hurt her.”

He looked appalled. “I wouldn’t hurt her.” She felt a shock of relief rush through her, warm and liquid, until he said, “I don’t want to hurt any of us. I want the hurting to stop.”

“No!” She launched herself at him, punching and hitting, but he wrapped her in his big arms, strong from years of yoking and plowing and haying and baling, and for a moment, her body remembered what it had felt like, him holding her at the end of a long day.

“Think, Janie!” His voice was hot and hissing in her ears. “Who’s to say it couldn’t happen again? Do you want Solace to suffer like they suffered?”

“Get out,” she said, her voice squeezed from where he was crushing her ribs. “Get out of this house.”

“And if not by disease, how then? Run over by a car like the McGonnegal boy? Burnt alive like that little girl up Cossayuharie way? Or maybe she’ll grow up to die having children, or eaten up inside by a cancer. Don’t you see, Janie?” His voice grewvery small, a tiny snake slithering into a dark hole. “We’re all dead already.”

Oh God, she thought. Oh God oh God oh God.

“I don’t want to hurt you. Will you promise to be still?”

She nodded.

“Are you scared?”

She nodded.

“Don’t be. I’ll hold you. And we can stop hating each other. I’m so sick of it. Sick to death of it.”

He released her slowly, keeping his hands up so he could grab her or knock her down. Her eyes darted to the kitchen doorway as she counted off everything that stood between her and Solace escaping out the front door. Through the front room. Up the stairs. Into Solace’s room. Pick her up. Carry her downstairs. Out the door. The door. Had he already locked it for the night?

“Don’t try it, Janie.” He stepped close to her. She could feel the heat of his body. “If you run, I’ll have to stop you. I’ve never laid a hand on you. Don’t make me do it tonight.”

“I don’t want to die,” she whispered.

“I do.” He turned, then, away from the door to the front room, away from the stairs, and for a moment she watched without understanding as he laid his hand on the door to the back porch. Where the woodpile was.

The hatchet.

Then her hand closed around the skillet handle, wet and hot and slithering with soap, and she raised it and she swung it and she smashed it against the back of his beautiful dark hair with all the strength of her days of lifting feed and lugging wash and toting children. She smashed it, and smashed it, and smashed it, as he toppled to his knees and fell unstrung to the floor. Blood and soap froth and water splattered across the floor and over her apron and still she smashed the skillet down, over and over, pounding out her fear until she stopped suddenly and staggered back.

Everything was quiet.

She looked at him, sprawled on the linoleum tiles, and wondered if he was dead. She was afraid to move close enough to tell. The only things she had ever killed in her life-
except your children
-were chickens, and they liked to jump around after their heads were cut off.

She looked at the skillet in her hand and saw the blood and hairs sticking to it. It almost fell from her nerveless fingers. She plunged it in the sink.

Then she sat down and flopped over and put her head between her knees and breathed. She sat that way for a long time, until she registered the blood splatters on her apron, and then she sat bolt upright. She was going to go to jail. No. Jail was for thieving or running whiskey. She was going to go to the chair. She had murdered her husband. She was going to be taken away from her home and her daughter and strapped in the electric chair and fried. And Solace, her comfort, her joy, her only child, would grow up knowing that her father had been killed and her mother had done it.

“No,” she said, and was surprised she had spoken out loud.

She had told Jon she wasn’t ready to die. She had told him she wouldn’t leave Solace. Her little girl needed her.

So. She looked at her hands. They were shaking. She grabbed them and squeezed them tight. Her little girl needed her. What she did in the next few hours would mean the difference between growing up with a mother who loved her or growing up under a stain of guilt and shame.