Saturday, March 29, 1930
“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.
She looked at—her mind slid around the name “Jonathon”—the body on the floor. She would have to get rid of it. And any signs of violence in the kitchen. She thought. And thought. And thought some more.
She went upstairs to the linen closet and pulled out one of the old, stained sheets she used on the bed during her monthlies. She opened Solace’s door and listened for a moment to her daughter’s slow, even breathing. Then she carried the sheet downstairs and spread it next to Jo—the body. She squatted next to him and rolled him over. When she saw his open eyes, she almost lost her supper, but she closed her eyes, swallowed, and kept on. She rolled him again until he was smack-dab in the middle of the sheet, and then she twisted it around him, tying a thick knot at each end.
She stepped out onto the back porch. At its far side, it led to the privy, which led to the old tack room, which led to the stables, where they garaged the car. She went through the rooms, opening each door, and into the garage, where she swung the back door of the Ford wide. Jon had left the stable door open, and she considered closing it before she began, but figured that would look strange to any neighbors who might notice the car going out later. She would just have to brazen it out.
Back in the kitchen, she grabbed the sheet behind the fat knot at its head, and pulled. The homemade shroud bumped over the doorsill, out onto the porch. She hauled the body across the floor, through the narrow walkway in the privy, down three steps to the old tack room, and, taking a quick look around, into the shadows next to the car.
This, she guessed, would be the hardest part. She pulled on the knot until it—he—was in a sitting position. She squatted down and wrapped her arms around the waist. Like seeing his open eyes, the familiar feeling of embracing his middle came close to undoing her, and she had to clamp her teeth against a bubble of sound, half moan, half sob. She heaved him over her shoulder and staggered into a crouch, the best she could do against his weight. His dead weight, she thought, and then had to shut her mouth against a hysterical laugh. She slid and shoved him through the back door onto the floor.
She sponged up the splatters on the kitchen floor and door, scrubbing them until they were spotless. Then she finished the washing up: the plates, the pots, the glasses, and the skillet. She dried everything and put it away, just like always. She gathered several pieces of wood from the back porch and stoked the fire before untying her apron and tossing it into the stove. She almost dumped the dishwater down the drain, but thought better of it. Instead, she picked up the basin and lurched to the privy, where she dumped the water into the pit below. She pumped more water into the basin to make sure it was well rinsed, and sloshed that into the two-seater as well.
She went upstairs. Solace was still sleeping soundly. She was a good sleeper, never fussing after her story time, never rousing to demand a cuddle or a drink of water, unlike Lu—she stopped herself.
In her vanity mirror, she checked her appearance. She was looking for anything telltale: a bruise or a smudge of blood. There was nothing. It startled her, how normal she looked. No telltale lines of guilt. She wasn’t even pale and washed out, as she might have expected. Well, not after all that hauling and cleaning.
She pulled a pair of Jon’s pants right over her dress, tucking the skirt in around the too-large waist. Then she shrugged into one of his coats, clapped his hat on her head, and, at the last moment, took his wallet from the dresser top and slipped it into the coat pocket.
She paused at the bottom of the stairs. Took a deep breath. Pictured Solace in her bed, her round cheeks still babylike in sleep. Then she turned on the outside light and left the house.
She slammed the door. She jingled her keys and slammed the car door, too, doing everything she could to attract attention to her make-believe Jonathon. She started the car and backed it out of the garage, shifting it into first and rolling down Ferry Street, toward the river. She turned right, then right again, up Wharf Street. At the head of Wharf was the new cemetery. Its gates were closed and locked, as they were every night at sundown, but to her left, outside the cemetery proper, a stub of a driveway led up to and alongside the caretaker’s one-room utility shed. She pulled the car in next to the shed and turned off the ignition.
This was the most dangerous part of her plan, the part she was leaving in the hands of God, who hadn’t been noticeably kind to her.
She shucked off the hat, coat, and pants and dropped them in the back, atop the still, sheet-shrouded form. She slipped out of the car, closing the door just far enough to hear the snick of the latch. Prying off her shoes, she ran in stocking feet as fast as she could until she reached the head of Ferry Street. She flew down the cold, grainy sidewalk, and when she was within shouting distance of her own house, she shoved her feet back into the shoes and walked, panting for breath, to her next-door neighbor’s.
Mrs. Creighton greeted the bell. “Why Mrs. Ketchem. Whatever are you doing here? Is everything all right?”
Jane pressed her hand against her chest. “I’m afraid Jonathon and I had a fight,” she said. “He drove off in a pet and I ran out to try to persuade him to come back, but I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him. You didn’t by chance notice our car leave, did you?”
Since Mrs. Creighton was an elderly lady whose joy of an evening was sitting close to her radio, Jane wasn’t surprised when she said, “No, dear, I didn’t. Do you want to come in and sit for a moment? You look all out.”
Jane heaved a sigh that might have been catching her breath. “What time is it?”
Mrs. Creighton stepped back from the door and peered at a large cuckoo clock looming on the wall. “It’s just about nine o’clock.”
“I’d better be getting back. My girl’s at home alone. Maybe I’ll bake some cookies for when he comes back.”
“A peace offering.” Mrs. Creighton smiled, wrinkling up her whole face. “That’s a nice idea.”
“Good night, Mrs. Creighton. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“You’re never a bother, dear. Send your little girl over tomorrow. I’ve made cross buns, and she can eat her fill.”
Jane thanked her, went down the walk, along the sidewalk, and up her own walk to her front door, where the light still shone from “Jonathon” ’s departure. She didn’t have any time to waste.
She dashed upstairs and pulled one of her warm wool dresses right over her housedress. She rolled an extra pair of woolen stockings on and pulled her winter boots from the closet. Downstairs, she retrieved her hat and gloves from the box bench beside the front door and stuffed her hair under her beret. She paused at the kitchen stove, stirred up the fire, and laid three more logs in before turning down the damper. There should still be living embers there if she made it home before daybreak.
She went out onto the back porch, but instead of exiting through the privy, she went down the stairs into the yard. It was black and hushed. She gave her eyes a moment to adjust before trekking to the bottom of their yard, scrambling over the low fence, and making her way between two small stables almost identical to their own.
She stepped out onto Wharf Street with her heart choking off her throat. Her legs and back and arms shook with the urge to run pell-mell to the head of the street, but she forced herself to a pace resembling a woman, say, strolling home after an evening of cards with friends. Lights were on. People were home. At any moment, she expected to be accosted, expected to see a blaze of lights from around the corner as the police arrived to see what Jonathon’s car was doing parked by the cemetery. There was nothing. She had, all without planning, hit the magic hour, after families had withdrawn into their houses, before dogs had been walked for the night.
The car was where she had left it. It took her two tries to open the door, her hand was shaking so. She started the ignition, backed into the street, and drove up Burgoyne, headed for Route 100, the road out of town. She was taking Jonathon home.