Psychosis takes oddball forms in the big woods—and this story is based on a series of actual newspaper stories that aren’t that far in the past.
Even after ten years, I still kill him again every night. There’s no satisfaction in it, of course, because I know I’m dreaming. You’d think, having gotten away with it as slick as a whistle, that I’d let the thing drop, let him be, let him lie there in the cemetery in the woods and rest in peace.
I can’t seem to do that. He died too fast. It wasn’t slow and painful enough to fulfill the need that made me kill him to begin with. I wish I hadn’t taken the gun with me at all. My bare hands would have had the pleasure of wringing his miserable life out of him, cutting off his breath, feeling him struggle and heave, watching him go black in the face.... I get excited when I think about that. Have to go out and walk around the block very quickly, while I cool down again.
I never had the urge to kill anyone else. Not ever. But after he married Linda—my Linda—I never wanted anything so much in my life as to kill Arthur, slowly, painfully, lingeringly...there! My blood pressure is going up again. Have to watch that.
I go about my business just about the way anyone else does; take my wife and children to church and to picnics and ballgames. I’m no monster. I don’t let that fixation get in the way of earning a living and helping out my neighbors. I even ran for the City Council last year, though I was pretty relieved when I was beaten in the runoff.
It’s just about this time of year, late summer, with the grass drying in the fields and pears getting ripe on the trees, the heat wavering in a haze over everything, that I think of that last day of Arthur’s life. It all came to a head that day, though he didn’t have the foggiest notion that I had ever been upset with him at all, anymore than anyone else had.
I walked up to him in the back woods behind his farmhouse. He thought I’d been out hunting rabbits, I suppose, because he didn’t more than glance at the shotgun I carried.
I blew him away before he could finish saying hello.
Everyone, including the deputies and the sheriff, thought somebody had been hunting in the woods, and had killed him by accident and been afraid to own up to it. There was a big funeral, and I took Carrie and the baby and we all looked mighty sad.
I thought I had done with him.
The dreams started a while later. I’d wake up out of a sound sleep, covered with sweat, seeing him dying. Not by the shotgun blast, but in a lot of different ways, all of them slow. Carrie began to believe I was coming down with something and kept giving me vitamins. There would be months and months when everything went along fine as silk. Then I’d get to thinking about Arthur. I’d go out there to Rosebud Cemetery, whenever Carrie took the kids to see her mother for a few days, and do nothing but drink, lying there on Arthur’s grave, cursing him better and better the drunker I got.
The cemetery is so far out in the woods that nobody goes there except for a funeral or, from time to time, to put a plot in order. There’s plenty of warning—you can hear a car rattling over the washboard road for a mile or more before it gets there, so I never got caught. But after a while it got so that that wasn’t enough.
I went all over the area, when I could steal the time from my job, and tore down his advertising stickers for his real estate business that he ran along with his farm. Got every one in the county and most of those in the adjoining counties. That helped for a good long time, because it wasn’t a thing you can get done in a year or even in two.
I quit having the dreams as long as that lasted, but there came a time when I couldn’t find a sign or a sticker or even a business card left anyplace. That’s when the dreams started again.
I knew something had to be done when I woke up in the middle of the night choking Carrie. She was grunting and struggling and flopping, and that must be what woke me. Good thing. I’d have killed her if I’d gone on sleeping.
That really put the fat into the fire. Nothing would do but I had to go to Dallas and see a psychiatrist. She harped on that day and night until I wished I’d finished the job—or at least broken her voice box. I had good reason not to take off from work, but finally she got at Ralph, my boss, and the two of the fixed it up so I had to go.
That was one screwed-up dude I talked to. When I told him I was having bad dreams, he got started on why I hated my folks and when I’d been toilet trained. Soon as I saw what he wanted, I gave him just that, and he sent me home with a clean bill of health. Well, not quite that, but he said I was as normal as anybody. Which, looking around me, doesn’t say a lot at that.
This thing had been rocking along for a decade by now, and I’d handled it as well as I could all the way. The cemetery quit being used for new burials, so I could visit there without having to fear anything but a visit from Arthur’s old mother, who had a habit of going out there and weeding or planting flowers at the damndest times.
I don’t know if it was choking Carrie or the talk with the psychiatrist that got things off their even keel. I started having worse dreams than ever. I made so much noise at night that Carrie moved into the guest room, just to be able to sleep.
I’d wake up in a cold sweat, with my hands remembering the throbbing of Arthur’s throat or feeling the sticky heat of his blood, and I’d lie there shaking for a long time. I soon knew that something had to be done. I hadn’t done it right in the beginning, that was the problem. What I had to do now was to do it all over again, and this time do a bang-up job. It would take time. Uninterrupted time. In the daylight. I wasn’t about to try something like that in the dark.
My chance came when Carrie’s Ma got sick. It was late summer again, with the kids out of school, so they all went to stay for a couple of weeks and get the old lady back on her feet. If she’d known what a favor she was doing me, she’d have got well right off, instead of going around so puny for so long. But she didn’t know, and that’s what counts.
I watched Arthur’s Ma for a few days, to make sure she’d already done her stint of graveyard tending for the week. Sure enough, she got done on a Tuesday. I went home from work Wednesday with a virus, I told Ralph. Wouldn’t be in the next day at all. Maybe by Friday....
He was all sympathy.
* * * * * * *
Bright and early Thursday morning I took off for Rosebud Cemetery in the old pickup that belonged to my Dad. I keep it out in the back shed, and it only gets cranked once a month. It had enough tools in the back to dig up the whole graveyard.
They’d put in a fancy kind of grave marker. Out at Rosebud, the graves are all so old, most of them, that they just go anywhichaways. The plots lie at angles to each other, and there’s no telling, except by the individual markers, which way any grave is headed. I checked out Arthur’s pretty carefully, but I have to admit that I’d brought a bottle to keep me company.
I decided which end was which, and that wasn’t easy, and started in digging. I didn’t intend to uncover the whole coffin, you see, but just a hole big enough to let me get down and choke him again through the hole I’d chop in the lid. Saved a heck of a lot of work.
Well, I worked and sweated, and the sun got hotter and hotter above the big pines that shaded the place, and I kept drinking to help cool off. But it was near noon by the time I hit something that went thunk! It was the coffin, and no mistake.
I climbed out of the hole and got my hatchet, which I’d brought just for that purpose. Once back down there, I began hacking away at the coffin-lid. They don’t make those things with chopping in mind. They’re slick and hard, and that had been an expensive box.
Finally I broke through, and that gave me the energy to get busy and make that hole big enough so I could see his ugly face while I did the job right and choked him.
By damn, when I looked through with my flashlight, there was nothing there but a pair of skinny ankles in black silk socks! I’d gone and dug up the wrong end!
I tried choking the ankles, but it just isn’t the same thing. Besides, there was a smell. I could have stood it, if I’d been really caught up in what I was doing, but it just wasn’t going to work. I could see that pretty soon.
There was no way I could take the time to dig up the other end and chop through more of that confounded coffin. I didn’t have the time, I didn’t have the energy, and I was hot as a six-shooter anyway. Having a stroke or heart attack out there at Rosebud wasn’t going to help things a bit.
That’s why I came back home without doing what I’d set out to do. That’s not my way, not as a general rule, but things just turned out so.
I’m lying here in my E-Z-Rest with a cold beer in my hand and the TV on. I’ll get all good and rested. Tomorrow morning, I’ll call in and tell Ralph I’m still sick.
Then, by God, I’ll go back out there and dig up the right end of Arthur!