When Gussie walked home in the middle of the morning, she was stopped and asked by half a dozen people whether she had finally got fed up with Miz Thelma, or whether Miz Thelma had finally got fed up with her. She replied, “I been fed up since the day that Miz Thelma married Mr. James, and I wasn’t fired ’cause there’s nobody else in town would work for that woman, and she knew it—but you are right. I ain’t got no job no more . . .” And she went on to explain why; the news spread on the black side of Burnt Corn Creek as well.
A number of people arrived at the munitions factory not having heard of the deaths, but they were informed quickly enough. Those who had learned of it, at most, fifteen minutes before, invariably cried, “Ohhhhh! You mean you hadn’t heard? It’s all over town! Nobody’s talking about anything else! The seven dead Coppages is old hat!”
Becca and Sarah were a little late for work, and got into their places no more than ten seconds before the conveyer belt started up, and because it was impossible to hear over the noise of it, they discovered nothing until coffee break at ten o’clock. Even before the belt had stopped vibrating the woman on the line next to Becca stood up, leaned over the partition and cried, “Wasn’t it just awful!”
“What?” cried Becca, for she knew by the tone of the woman’s voice that something spectacular had occurred.
“James and Thelma Shirley is dead!” the woman cried, and already the assembly line workers were gathering in little groups to talk about it, though there had been no new information available since the time that they had come to work.
“Oh!” cried Sarah. “How’d they die? Car wreck?”
“No,” said another woman sternly—an older woman who had lately taken up Christian Science. “She carved out his heart with a paring knife, and then turned it on herself. She buried that paring knife up to the hilt in her very own neck.” The others nodded in vigorous agreement.
“Ohhhh!” exclaimed a young girl, just out of high school. “They was just buckets of blood on the floor, buckets, enough to fill your bathtub!”
“And little Mary Shirley,” stated another, “tripped over the bodies when she got up to go the bathroom, fell down in the blood, and hasn’t stopped quivering yet. They got her strapped down at the Presbyterian manse, feeding her chocolate milk through a straw, ’cause she cain’t keep anything else down . . .”
And so the talk went, with details of the horror pulled out of God knew where, and much of it contradictory, with nothing really agreed upon but that James and Thelma Shirley both were dead.
Some details were clarified at noontime when people went home to eat or went over to the diner or telephoned their spouses. It became known that the instrument of murder had been an ice pick and nothing else; that it had been found in the policeman’s ear; that Thelma had not committed suicide, but had died accidentally, slipping in spilled water and cutting her throat on broken glass. This made the whole thing seem even stranger. Had she thought that she would be able to get away with it?
“Ohhh!” cried Becca to Sarah, “there we were this morning, just sitting on the line, putting in screws like nothing was wrong! And James and Thelma Shirley lying there, wallowing in their own blood the whole time! When we come to work on Wednesday morning they was nine people alive in this town that just don’t even exist anymore. D’you think of that, Sarah?”
“I did. That’s just what I was thinking,” said Sarah sadly. “We were out there in front of the Coppages yesterday morning, talking to James Shirley. And he was talking about Rachel. He brought up her name.”
“And I bet,” said Becca slyly, “she was at home that very minute, sharpening up the ice pick, just getting it ready for him. You know,” she continued, “I thought Jo Howell was mean—don’t worry, I’m not gone get on that subject right now—but a woman that would use a ice pick on her husband’s brain, that’s just terrible. A woman ought to use poison or something like that. James Shirley had lots of guns, I bet, being a policeman. She could of shot him without a bit of trouble in the world—put a gun to his ear and pulled the trigger and he wouldn’t feel a thing. Wouldn’t ever know it. But a ice pick? What you think she was thinking about when she did something like that?”
Sarah shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t even begin to guess.”
Chapter 25
When Sarah got home that rainy afternoon, she went directly into the bedroom, intending to find out what Jo had heard about James and Thelma Shirley’s deaths. Though Jo Howell didn’t have any friends—none, in fact, that Sarah knew of—she seemed to find out things. Small facts, curious circumstances that nobody else knew about. And Sarah, like everyone else in Pine Cone, was curious about the Shirleys.
But there were two voices inside the room, and Sarah’s heart beat violently to think that Dean was talking again. Had his speech come back to him so suddenly? Or had he been capable of it all the while, and only refused to speak in her presence? She thought the latter the more likely case, and careered into the bedroom, hoping to catch Dean in mid-sentence. She knew she must actually see him talking, watch that slit move in the bandages, because otherwise she knew that Jo would deny it, would claim that Sarah was only hearing noises.
Dean lay silent and unmoving upon the bed. She looked up, about to protest to Jo that she had heard Dean’s voice, when she saw that a man, in army uniform, sat uncomfortably on the forward edge of the little straight chair at the foot of the bed. Sarah did not know him.
“You gone crazy, Sarah?” asked Jo, calmly. “You gone scare the living daylights out of Dean, coming running in here like that.”
Sarah caught her breath. “I’m sorry . . .” she faltered. “I thought I heard Dean saying something . . .”
“That was Si talking here, talking to me, talking to me about Dean. Si and Dean was at Rucca together. Si was lying next to Dean in the firing range when the Pine Cone rifle blew up in Dean’s face, lying right next to him, and he saw the whole thing.”
Si looked extremely embarrassed, but he nodded to Sarah, and said briefly, “Yes, I was. It was a terrible accident.”
“Wasn’t no accident!” cried Jo. “Somebody made that rifle wrong! Somebody didn’t put that rifle together right!”
“It was just terrible,” Si repeated helplessly.
“You came to see Dean?” said Sarah.
The man nodded, and said, “I had leave and I’m from Pennsylvania, so I didn’t have anyone that I wanted to see in this part of the country. I borrowed the sergeant’s car. I parked it down the street, had a hard time finding this place. I thought I would come and see how Dean was getting along.” He glanced nervously toward the bed.
“Well,” snapped Jo, “he’s in pretty bad shape.”
Si didn’t respond to this.
“That was real good of you,” said Sarah, “real good, and I know that Dean appreciates it.”
“Si was telling me about Dean being in the army and all,” said Jo. “Real interesting. All the stuff they had to do together and so on. I tell you, though,” she said to Si, “I hate to think of all you boys going over to Saigon and Asia and all, getting killed like they are over there, but I’d rather have Dean in Saigon than in that bed like he is.”
Si looked down at the floor, but said nothing.
“Si,” said Sarah, “you were real good to come down here and see Dean. Why don’t you let me fix you a cup of coffee?” Sarah could see that the poor man was being made very uncomfortable by Jo, and that he was probably desperate to get out of that room.
Si nodded gratefully, and quickly stood up. He glanced down at Dean’s mother, who didn’t seem pleased with his defection to the enemy.
“Mrs. Howell, you were very kind to let me see Dean.”
She nodded curtly.
“Come in the kitchen with me,” said Sarah, and walked out of the room. Si followed her.
As soon as Sarah had closed the kitchen door behind them, and motioned Si over to the table to seat himself, she said, “It was
good of you to come to see Dean, ’cause he don’t get many visitors. I know it means a lot to him. And you ought not pay any attention to what Jo Howell says or how she says it . . .”
“I . . .” started Si, but didn’t know how to finish his consolation.
“We’re used to it, and we don’t pay no attention, so don’t let it bother you . . .”
“I thought she might be upsetting Dean, some of the things that she said. I think I’d be upset,” he said in a low voice.
“Well, so would I. But Dean’s not, or if he is, he don’t show it, and I don’t know how to tell. You know,” Sarah shook her head sadly, “I’m not ever sure he knows what’s going on in the room. I don’t know if he hears anything that’s said to him . . .”
“It’s terrible,” said Si hesitantly, “and I’m very sorry that any of this happened.”
“Well,” said Sarah curtly, “so am I. So am I.” In all of her troubles, Sarah had never tried to make anyone feel sorry for her.
Sarah took her time about preparing coffee so that Si might regain what composure he had lost in the formidable presence of Jo Howell.
“Mrs. Howell was telling me,” he began in a much more conversational tone, “about all the horrible things that happened here in Pine Cone, just this week.”
Sarah turned to face Si. “What did she say?”
“She talked about the family that got burned up, and then the policeman whose wife killed him with an ice pick, just this morning. She said the maid looked through the window and saw the bodies on the floor and had to lift the little girl out of the other window so that she wouldn’t see anything. Sounds terrible to me.”
“It was real bad,” Sarah agreed thoughtfully, “because what nobody can figure out is why she did it. They weren’t the happiest people in the world, but they weren’t talking about divorce either. They had gotten used to each other, they say, and that’s why it seemed so strange that Thelma should just up and want to kill James Shirley. Just real strange. I wonder how Jo heard about the maid and the windows and all.”
“Mrs. Howell talked about it like she was right there,” said Si, with a little wonder. “I mean, she told me all about it. She’s got a lot of imagination, because she sure does know how to tell a story. And most of the time, she seemed to be telling it to Dean more than to me.”
“Is that right?” asked Sarah curiously. She was desperate to know what happened between Jo and Dean when she was out of the house. “I wonder how she found out about it all?”
“Pine Cone’s a small place. I guess news travels fast around here.” Si smiled at Sarah.
“I guess it does,” she said, and poured out his coffee.
Then Sarah sat at the table beside him and asked him to tell her all the things about Dean that he had already related to Jo—what Dean was like in the army, what his duties had been, and so forth. But she didn’t ask him to tell her what had happened on the firing range that afternoon the rifle blew up in Dean’s face. Still it was impossible not to speak of the accident, when the bandaged figure lying motionless at the other end of the house was very much on the mind of the man and woman sitting in the kitchen.
“Well,” she sighed, “you know I work in the plant that made that rifle.”
“Yes,” said Si, “I do know. Dean told me that. He sort of thought that the pinecone on the rifle would bring him good luck. I guess it didn’t.”
Sarah shook her head. “His mama says I made the rifle that blew up in Dean’s face . . .”
Si was shocked, and could not reply.
“Oh,” said Sarah, “but she doesn’t think I did it on purpose or anything like that. But she’s got this idea that it’s my fault, what happened, and it’s the fault of everybody who works at the plant, that it’s the fault of the whole town and so forth.”
“Well,” said Si cautiously, “it was an accident. Who knows what made that rifle blow up?”
Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know anything about ’em. I just put three screws in. I don’t think about ’em. I wouldn’t even know how to shoot one of ’em. I certainly wouldn’t know how to make one blow up in somebody’s face.”
“No,” said Si quickly, “of course not. Of course you wouldn’t.”
“I don’t know what Dean thinks, whether he blames me or not. He doesn’t talk, he doesn’t even move, so how can I know what he’s thinking about? Whether he’s mad at me or anything?”
“You can’t. You really can’t.”
Sarah smiled bleakly. “You were real good to come. I keep saying that,” she smiled, shyly this time, “but I really mean it. And I’m just sitting here, depressing all the spirit out of you, talking about my troubles.”
“It’s all right,” said Si kindly, and he meant it.
He left twenty minutes later after saying good-bye to Jo Howell and nodding very uncomfortably at the bandages. After Sarah saw him to the front door she returned to the bedroom, and sat down for a moment at Dean’s bedside.
“Dinner’s late,” said Jo.
“Well, Jo, I couldn’t start fixing dinner when Si was here. It was right to keep him company, and wrong to do anything else.”
“Dean’s hungry.”
“I’m about to get up. In a minute,” said Sarah. She looked steadily at Jo, and said, “Si said you were telling him all about what happened over at the Shirleys’ this morning.”
Jo did not reply for a moment, then said huskily, “Thought he might want to know what kind of things go on in a small town.”
“He said you knew a good deal about it all, like you had been there yourself, he said.”
“That’s all anybody is talking about today. There was even a report on the radio at dinnertime. Me and Dean listened to it. Didn’t you hear it?”
“No,” said Sarah, “I didn’t. They give all the details? That where you heard it all?”
“They told ever’thing you’d ever want to know about how Thelma Shirley killed James with a ice pick, and then died herself accidental on a piece of broke glass.”
Sarah rose from the chair with a sigh, and returned to the kitchen. She stood at the kitchen sink for a few moments, and stared out into the wet yard, and wondered if it was ever going to stop raining.
Chapter 26
Sarah Howell thought that there was something horribly unnatural in the way that her husband was acting, or rather, the way in which he did nothing at all. He was supposed to be recuperating, but he didn’t move, didn’t speak, and didn’t react to anything. At least he did nothing when she was with him. If the spoon hadn’t come out clean, Sarah would have thought that Dean was dead. Jo always assured her that Dean heard everything, that despite his sightlessness, despite his immobility, he knew everything that was going on in the whole of Pine Cone.
Sarah had begun to wonder desperately what went on in that house when she was away at work. It was true that Dean’s legs could be made to shuffle along like those of a rickety pull toy when it was absolutely necessary to get him from this place to that, but it was an enormous chore, and the man, despite great loss of weight, was very heavy. Jo would never help her.
But often, when she came home from work, Sarah would find Dean in different clothing, lying or sitting up motionless, in another part of the house. When Sarah asked Jo how she managed him Jo would only reply, with an annoyed, impatient shrug of her shoulders, “It’s not so hard as you make it out to be.” But Sarah knew that it was.
The rain continued throughout Saturday. In the afternoon, the sky was dark, and the ground was sodden. Great pools of water had formed in the flat lawns, drowning the grass and beating the first summer blossoms back into the earth. In the bedroom, Sarah had insisted on raising the blinds and pulling back the curtains so that what little daylight there was might come into the room.
“Dean don’t like the light,” said Jo, again ensconced in the chair at the foot of the bed. Jo was always in the way when Sarah wanted to get anything done.
“Dean’s got his e
yes covered up,” said Sarah shortly, “and it don’t matter to him whether there’s light or not.”
“The light shrinks his bandages. Makes ’em tight,” argued Jo, but Sarah thought that she had made this reason up and therefore ignored it.
Sarah pulled the sheets off her husband, and then pulled him to the right side of the bed. Then she went round to the other side, and took the sheets out. Then she had to drag him onto the bare mattress so that she could remove the sheets altogether. It was a great, difficult, infuriating ritual to change Dean’s bed, but she hated the way slow healing smelled.
It occurred to Sarah suddenly that she led a hard life—a tiring boring job all week long, every day, and then come home in the evening, and nurse her husband, without comfort, without thanks. The weekend was spent in cleaning the house. It was this train of thought that prompted Sarah to say to her mother-in-law then, “You’re here the whole damn day, Jo, why can’t you help with Dean? Why can’t you do something around the house?”
“You’re his wife, it’s you that ought to take care of him,” Jo replied unhesitatingly.
“What about the house? The house belongs to you. You ought to help with things,” Sarah continued.
“I don’t charge you nothing to live here, so there’s no reason that I ought to help. What you do is for your rent and from what I see, dust in the corners, and things not picked up like they should be, you’re getting the place cheap, Sarah. I think real cheap.”
Sarah shook her head, and continued to tuck the sheets in all around the bed. The subject was dropped and when the two women began to talk again, the subject was of course the deaths of the policeman and his wife. Becca Blair had come over just after breakfast that morning with the latest news, got from Mrs. Nelson by way of Mary-Louise and Margaret.
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