Tales for a Stormy Night (22 page)

Funny, how things go on just the same in a town at a time like that. Tom Kincaid, the druggist, came out and swept the sidewalk clean, passed the time of day with Prouty, and went inside again. The kids were coming home from school. Pretty soon they were all indoors doing their homework before chore time. Doc Sissler stopped at Kincaid’s—he liked to supervise the making up of his prescriptions. It was Miss Dorman, the schoolteacher, who gave the first alarm. She always did her next day’s lessons before going home, so it was maybe an hour after school let out. I heard her scream and ran to the window.

There was Matt coming down the street on Prouty’s side, trailing the gun behind him. You could see he was saying something to himself or just out loud. I opened my window and shouted down to him. He came on then across the street. His step on the stair was like the drum in a death march. When he got to my doorway he just stood there, saying, “I killed her, Hank. I killed her dead.”

I got him into a chair and splashed some whiskey out for him. He dropped the gun on the floor beside him and I let it lie there, stepping over it. By then Prouty had come upstairs, and by the time we got the whiskey inside Matt, Luke Weber, the constable, was there.

“He says he killed somebody,” I told Weber. “I don’t know who.”

Matt rolled his eyes towards me like I’d betrayed him just saying what he told me. His face was hanging limp and white as a strung goose. “I know Matt Sawyer,” I added then, “and if there was any killing, I’d swear before Jehovah it must’ve been an accident.”

That put a little life back in him. “It was,” he said, “it was truly.” And bit by piece we got the story out of him.

“I got to say in fairness to myself, taking the gun up there wasn’t my own idea,” he started. “Look at me, duded up like this—I had no business from the start pretending I was something I wasn’t.”

“That was me and Hank’s fault,” Prouty said, mostly to the constable, “advising him on how to court Miss Clara.”

He didn’t have to explain that to Weber. Everybody in town knew it.

“I’m not blaming either one of you,” Matt said. “It should’ve been enough for me, chasing an echo every time I thought I’d found her. And both of them once sitting up in a tree laughing at me fit to bust and pelting me with acorns…”

We knew he was talking about Reuben and Clara. It was pathetic listening to a man tell that kind of story on himself, and I couldn’t help but think what kind of an impression it was going to make on a jury. I had to be realistic about it: there’s some people up here would hang a man for making a fool of himself where they’d let him go for murder. I put the jury business straight out of my mind and kept hoping it was clear-cut accident. He hadn’t said yet who was dead, but I thought I knew by then.

“Well, I found them for myself today,” he made himself go on, “Clara and Reuben, that is. They were cosied in together in the sheepcote back of Maudie’s well. It made me feel ashamed just being there and I was set to sneak away and give the whole thing up for good. But Maudie came up on me and took me by surprise. She held me there—by the scruff of the soul, you might say—and made me listen with her to them giggling and carrying on. I was plain sick with jealousy, I’ll admit that.

“Then Maudie gave a shout: ‘Come out, you two! Or else we’ll blow you out!’ Something like that.

“It was a minute or two: nothing happened. Then we saw Reuben going full speed the other way, off towards the woods.

“‘Shoot, Matt, now!’ That’s what Maudie shouted at me. ‘You got him clear to sight.’ But just then Clara sauntered out of the shelter towards us—just as innocent and sweet, like the first time I ever laid eyes on her.”

I’m going to tell you, Prouty and me looked at each other when he said that.

The constable interrupted him and asked his question straight: “Did she have her clothes on?”

“All but her shoes. She was barefoot and I don’t consider that unbecoming in a country girl.”

“Go on,” Weber told him.

Matt took a long drag of air and then plunged ahead. “Maudie kept hollering at the boy—insults, I guess—I know I’d have been insulted. Then he stopped running and turned around and started coming back. I forget what it was she said to me then—something about my manhood. But she kept saying, ‘Shoot, Matt! Shoot, shoot!’ I was getting desperate, her hounding me that way. I slammed the gun down between us, buttend on the ground. The muzzle of it, I guess, was looking her way. And it went off.

“It was like the ground exploding underneath us. Hell smoke and brimstone—that’s what went through my mind. I don’t know whether it was in my imagination—my ears weren’t hearing proper after all that noise—but like ringing in my head I could hear Clara laughing, just laughing like hysterics…And then when I could see, there was Maudie lying on the ground. I couldn’t even find her face for all that was left of her head.”

We stood all of us for a while after that. Listening to the tick of my alarm clock on the shelf over the wash-stand, I was. Weber picked up the gun then and took it over to the window where he examined the breech.

Then he said, “What did you think you were going to do with this when you took it from the tavern?”

Matt shook his head. “I don’t know. When Maudie gave it to me, I thought it looked pretty good on me in the mirror.”

I couldn’t wait to hear the prosecutor try that one on the jury.

Weber said, “We better get on up there before dark and you show us how it happened.”

We stopped by at Prouty’s on the way and picked up his wicker basket. There wasn’t any way of driving beyond the dogwood grove. People were following us by then. Weber sent them back to town and deputized two or three among them to be sure they kept the peace.

We hadn’t got very far beyond the grove, the four of us, just walking, climbing up, and saying nothing. Hearing the crows a-screaming not far ahead gave me a crawling stomach. They’re scavengers, you know.

Well, sir, down the hill fair-to-flying, her hair streaming out in the wind, came Clara to meet us. She never hesitated, throwing herself straight at Matt. It was instinct made him put his arms out to catch her and she dove into them and flung her own arms around his neck, hugging him and holding him, and saying things like, “Darling Matt…wonderful Matt. I love Matt.” I heard her say that.

You’d have thought to see Matt, he’d turned to stone. Weber was staring at them, a mighty puzzled look on his face.

“Miss Clara,” I said, “behave yourself.”

She looked at me—I swear she was smiling—and said, “You hush, old Hank, or we won’t let you play the fiddle at our wedding.”

It was Prouty said, hoisting his basket up on his shoulder, “Let’s take one thing at a time.”

That got us started on our way again. Clara skipping along at Matt’s side, trying to catch his hand. Luke Weber didn’t say a word.

I’m not going into the details now of what we saw. It was just about like Matt had told it in my office. I was sick a couple of times. I don’t think Matt had anything left in him to be sick with. When it came to telling what had happened first, Clara was called on to corroborate. And Weber asked her, “Where’s Reuben now, Miss Clara?”

“Gone,” she said, “and I don’t care.”

“Didn’t care much about your sister either, did you?” Weber drawled, and I began to see how really bad a spot old Matt was in. There was no accounting Clara’s change of heart about him—except he’d killed her sister. The corroborating witness we needed right then was Reuben White.

Prouty got Weber’s go-ahead on the job he had to do. I couldn’t help him though I tried. What I did when he asked it, was go up to Maudie’s well to draw him a pail of water so’s he could wash his hands when he was done. Well, sir, I’d have been better off helping him direct. I couldn’t get the bucket down to where it would draw the water.

After trying a couple of times, I called out to Weber asking if he had a flashlight. He brought it and threw the beam of light down into the well. Just about the water level a pair of size-twelve shoes were staring up at us—the soles of them like Orphan Annie’s eyes.

There wasn’t any doubt in our minds that what was holding them up like that was Reuben White, headfirst in the well.

The constable called Clara to him and took a short-cut in his questioning.

“How’d it happen, girl?”

“I guess I pushed him,” Clara said, almost casual.

“It took a heap of pushing,” Weber said.

“No, it didn’t. I just got him to look down and then I tumbled him in.”

“Why?”

“Matt,” she said, and smiled like a Christmas cherub.

Matt groaned, and I did too inside.

“Leastways, it come to that,” Clara explained. Then in that quick-changing way of hers, she turned deep serious. “Mr. Weber, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you what Reuben White wanted me to do with him—in the sheepcote this afternoon.”

“I might,” Luke Weber said.

I looked at Prouty and drew my first half-easy breath. I could see he felt the same. We’re both old-fashioned enough to take warmly to a girl’s defending her virtue.

But Weber didn’t bat an eye. “And where does Matt here come in on it?” he said.

“I figure he won’t ever want me to do a thing like that,” Clara said, and gazed up at old stoneface with a look of pure adoration.

“Where was Matt when you…tumbled Reuben in?” Weber asked, and I could tell he was well on his way to believing her.

“He’d gone down the hill to tell you what’d happened to Sister Maudie.”

“And when was it Reuben made this—this proposal to you?” Weber said. I could see he was getting at the question of premeditation. Luke Weber’s a pretty fair policeman.

“It was Matt proposed to me,” Clara said. “That’s why I’m going to marry him. Reuben just wanted…”

Weber interrupted. “Why, if he wasn’t molesting you just then, and if you’d decided to marry Matt Sawyer, why did you have to kill him? You must’ve known a well’s no place for diving.”

Clara shrugged her pretty shoulders. “By then I was feeling kind of sorry for him. He’d have been mighty lonesome after I went to live with Matt.”

Well, there isn’t much more to tell. We sort of disengaged Matt, you might say. His story of how Maudie died stood up with the coroner, Prouty and I vouching for the kind of man he was. I haven’t seen him since.

Clara—she’ll be getting out soon, coming home to the hills, and maybe opening up The Red Lantern again. I defended her at the trial, pleading temporary insanity. Nobody was willing to say she was insane exactly. We don’t like saying such things about one another up here. But the jury agreed she was a temporary sort of woman. Twenty years to life, she got, with time off for good behavior.

You come around some time next spring. I’ll introduce you.

1963

Y
OU ARE LIKELY TO
say, reading about Mary Gardner, that you knew her, or that you once knew someone like her. And well you may have, for while her kind is not legion it endures and sometimes against great popular odds.

You will see Mary Gardner—or someone like her—at the symphony, in the art galleries, at the theater, always well-dressed if not quite fashionable, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of other women all of whom have an aura, not of sameness, but of mutuality. Each of them has made—well, if not a good life for herself, at least the best possible life it was in her power to make.

Mary Gardner was living at the time in a large East Coast city. In her late thirties, she was a tall lean woman, unmarried, quietly feminine, gentle, even a little hesitant in manner but definite in her tastes. Mary was a designer in a well-known wallpaper house. Her salary allowed her to buy good clothes, to live alone in a pleasant apartment within walking distance of her work, and to go regularly to the theater and the Philharmonic. As often as she went to the successful plays, she attended little theater and the experimental stage. She was not among those who believed that a play had to say something. She was interested in “the submerged values.” This taste prevailed also in her approach to the visual arts—a boon surely in the wallpaper business whose customers for the most part prefer their walls to be seen but not heard.

In those days Mary was in the habit of going during her lunch hour—or sometimes when she needed to get away from the drawing board—to the Institute of Modern Art which was less than a city block from her office. She had fallen in love with a small, early Monet titled “Trees Near Le Havre,” and when in love Mary was a person of searching devotion. Almost daily she discovered new voices in the woodland scene, trees and sky reflected in a shimmering pool—with more depths in the sky, she felt, than in the water.

The more she thought about this observation the more convinced she became that the gallery had hung the picture upside down. She evolved a theory about the signature: it was hastily done by the artist, she decided, long after he had finished the painting and perhaps at a time when the light of day was fading. She would have spoken to a museum authority about it—if she had known a museum authority.

Mary received permission from the Institute to sketch within its halls and often stood before the Monet for an hour, sketchbook in hand. By putting a few strokes on paper she felt herself conspicuously inconspicuous among the transient viewers and the guards. She would not for anything have presumed to copy the painting and she was fiercely resentful of the occasional art student who did.

So deep was Mary in her contemplation of Claude Monet’s wooded scene that on the morning of the famous museum fire, when she first smelled the smoke, she thought it came from inside the picture itself. She was instantly furious, and by an old association she indicted a whole genre of people—the careless American tourist in a foreign land. She was not so far away from reality, however, that she did not realize almost at once there was actually a fire in the building.

Voices cried out alarms in the corridors and men suddenly were running. Guards dragged limp hoses along the floor and dropped them—where they lay like great withered snakes over which people leaped as in some tribal rite. Blue smoke layered the ceiling and then began to fall in angled swatches—like theatrical scrims gone awry. In the far distance fire sirens wailed.