Sometime after two o’clock, Frank gets out of bed. Elma is sleeping, so he rises gently from the mattress, gathers up his clothing, and goes quietly into the other room. He gets dressed in the kitchen, his mind buzzing with the knowledge that Willie is alive. Willie is alive. Willie is alive. He accepts this in the same way he has accepted all of the day’s improbable events, questioning nothing. He figures everything happens for a reason. Still, as he ties the laces of his shoes, his hands shake, shake with the same astonishment and wonder that earlier, when the priest came with the news, sent Elma to her knees.
Elma. He looks toward the bedroom door, where he can make out the corner of the bed where Elma is sleeping. He hesitates for a moment, then walks softly to the door. He stands on the threshold, his shadow long across Elma’s still body, finally, after so many wakeful nights, asleep. Frank blinks at her, thinking how much younger she looks in sleep, her worry lines smoothed, her frown softened into a gentle arc. Things will be different now, he thinks. Willie is alive, and if so by the grace of God, he can’t see that grace falling away. Eighteen years ago, against all odds, Willie was born, and tonight, against all odds, he was saved. He had to have been saved for a reason. This is what Frank believes.
He takes a breath and goes out the back kitchen door to the small outbuilding where he keeps his tools and the mule. Kept the mule. He looks into Bess’s empty stall, the trampled hay on the dirt floor, where he knows Grace and Willie sometimes lay. Tomorrow he will have to go back to the field where he left the mule and do something with her body. What, he doesn’t know.
For now, he finds the sledgehammer among his tools, resting up against the wall. It hasn’t been used in some time, and it is heavier than he remembers. Cobwebs have gathered in the L where the head meets the lever. Frank wipes the fine filaments away with his hand, remembering how Willie had trailed him all those years ago as he drove fence posts into the ground around the Harkness place, post after post under a white-hot sun. It’s funny; Frank remembers distinctly the sound of the metal head against the wood against the ground, a deeply satisfying combination of thunk and thud.
Tonight, he hoists the sledgehammer over his shoulder and goes out into the night, passing around the house and out to the street. It is quiet. In the middle of the night, it should be, but the stillness is striking given the earlier crowd; he’d half expected to find angry folks out in the street, but he doesn’t see a soul. The only sign of life is the occasional lit window, and a single mangy dog who follows him for a quarter mile down the street.
It doesn’t take long for Frank to reach the cemetery where just hours ago he readied Willie’s stone. It stands, smooth and unengraved, in the moonlight among the other stones. The walnut tree stands quietly above, the green balls of its ready nuts hanging or fallen on the ground; one, since Frank was here earlier, has come to rest along the base of Willie’s stone. Frank gazes down at the nut, and at the stone. The stone. He could save it, he thinks, use it for Elma or himself when their time comes. Or maybe he could sell it; though he doubts that he could return it for his borrowed funds. But the stone is the marker of an unrealized and undeserved death. That is why he is here. So he lifts the sledgehammer over his head, and with all the strength he has he drives it crashing down.