“You think she’d keep her own last name?” asked Merle, and so the conversation continued throughout breakfast, and both Jack and Merle were immeasurably heartened by the exchange. They were perfectly serious about this project, and had every intention of offering a permanent home to little Mary Shirley. They had a fair idea of the trouble involved in raising a child—and the expense—but what did that matter, when the child was in need, and they were to some extent responsible for her predicament?
“I feel so foolish,” said Merle, “I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before.”
Jack nodded. “People in Pine Cone must think you and I are the meanest people in the world, abandoning that little girl the way we did.”
Jack and Merle Weaver walked out through a long path of dewy red clover—glaring, brilliant red in the early morning light—to their barn. Here it was necessary to unload the bags of grain that they had purchased in Pine Cone the day before, from off the back of the truck. The single farmhand that they employed, who normally would have assisted Jack in this work, was off on the far side of the property, mending a section of broken fence.
Working together, Jack and Merle pulled the bags off the back of the track and together carried them into the barn, where they stacked them near the rear door. After their third trip, on their way back to the truck, Merle’s eyes caught the glimmer of metal in the sand near one of the rear tires of the truck. She stooped and picked up a necklace, of simple, forthright design. She had never seen it before. She shook the sand off it, and held it close to her eyes.
“What you got, Merle?” said her husband.
She handed him the piece of jewelry.
“This yours?” he asked.
“No,” said Merle, “don’t know where it come from, Jack.”
“Where’d it come from though?” Jack asked.
“Right there in the dirt,” said Merle. “You saw me pick it up, right then, didn’t you?”
Jack shook his head. “It didn’t drop out of your pocket?” he asked.
“What’d I be doing with something like this? You know I don’t have nothing like this.”
“Maybe it fell off the truck,” said Merle’s husband. “Maybe that woman we ran down in the road was wearing it yesterday, and it came off her neck getting jostled around in the back when we was on the way back to Pine Cone.”
“Maybe,” said Merle, “maybe you’re right.”
There was a pause. Jack handed the amulet back to his wife. “You think it’s worth anything?” he asked.
“I can’t tell,” his wife replied.
“Is it gold, you think?” he asked.
“Gold’s gold, not black,” Merle pointed out.
Jack stepped forward and pointed to the gold band in between the wider bands of jet “There’s gold right round in there, between the black part. Maybe it’s all gold, and just part of it’s painted black . . .”
“Maybe you’re right, Jack.”
“Maybe it’s worth money.”
“If it’s gold, then it’s bound to be worth something,” said Merle.
Jack looked cannily at his wife. “Hold it up to your wedding ring, and compare ’em,” he said. This seemed a brilliant idea to him, a way to ascertain whether the necklace was really of gold or not.
Merle held up the amulet next to her wedding band, and examined them both in the light of the sun.
“Can’t tell, still can’t tell,” she judged, after a moment.
This was a thing not in their experience, the finding of an object that might be valuable, and something that very certainly did not belong to them. In any of its multitudinous forms, luck had rarely made an appearance on the Weaver farmstead.
“What you think we ought to do about it?” asked Jack quietly.
“You think we ought to tell the sheriff?” his wife replied.
“Can’t keep it, not ours,” Jack stated, simply.
Merle shook her head. “We ought to take it into Pine Cone, when we go over and see about that little girl.” Her husband nodded. “You think they’ll think we took it?” The idea occurred to Merle suddenly, and just thinking that she might be considered a thief appalled and frightened her.
“Nobody’s asked us where it was, or if we had seen it.”
“Maybe they don’t know about it. Maybe they don’t know it’s missing yet. Maybe we ought to take it in right now.” Merle was upset to hold on to something that so definitely belonged to someone else.
“We’ll go in this afternoon. That’ll be soon enough,” said Jack. He knew that his wife was nervous, and so tried to console her. “We’re not sure now, Merle, that the thing did belong to the woman that was killed on the bridge, and it might just not have, for all we know. But we’ll take it into the sheriff and leave it with him, and if somebody’s missing the thing, then he’ll step forward and claim it. And we’ll go back by the Baptist preacher’s, and see about that little girl. That poor little girl!”
Merle stared a few moments at the amulet in her hand, absently feeling for the catch, wondering whether she ought not to put it around her neck. It was a heavy piece, and would feel good. She had had a heavy necklace once, when she was a little girl, but not since then.
But she shuddered; there was something about this necklace that she didn’t like at all. Besides, it didn’t belong to her. She glanced at her husband, stiffened her shoulders, and dropped the amulet into the waist pocket of her dress.
Chapter 40
Merle Weaver smiled to herself as she began work that morning, exulting that she had discovered a way to expiate her and Jack’s guilt over running down that poor woman, at the same time that she provided herself with a permanent cure against loneliness. That little girl—they couldn’t even remember her name, they had been so upset at the time—would come out to live with them, and they would raise her as if she were their own child. They had had a boy themselves, about ten years back, but he died in a rainstorm on the last day of August, hit in the head with a bolt of lightning when he was dragging in a croker sack of pecans out of the downpour. That little girl had grown up in town all her life, Merle thought, but she didn’t have anybody else, the sheriff said, and probably she would be wanting to stay in Pine Cone, with all her friends at school. Where did they send children who didn’t have anyplace to go? Merle supposed there were orphanages, but she didn’t know where any were located, and she couldn’t imagine that it could be a very happy existence there, with no one to love you especially. She had high hopes that the little girl would come to live with them, and Merle even decided that the little girl could keep her own name if she wanted to, whatever that name might happen to be.
“Oh,” said Merle to Jack, when the last of the sacks had been transferred from the back of the truck, “I’m just looking forward so much to having that child out here with us.”
“Well,” cautioned Jack, “we haven’t got her yet, and we may not get her, you know. I don’t know much about how these things work.”
“But she don’t have nowhere else to go. Used to be, somebody’s mama and daddy died, somebody in the church would take ’em on, but I don’t think that happens much anymore. They say there’s not enough money, and the other children don’t take to it or something.”
“Well, Merle, if she wants to come, and they’ll let us take her, then she’ll be here. And there’s nothing more to be said about it till we get into town. I don’t want you thinking about it, ’cause what if we don’t get her? Then you’ll be disappointed, and I don’t want that. I don’t want to see you unhappy . . .”
Merle nodded, and went to feed the pigs. She resolved to say nothing else, but the excitement would not go away. Merle stepped merrily up onto the lowest rail of the fences that encircled the pigpen, located next to a blank wall of the barn. She leaned forward against the upper rails to maintain her balance while she tossed ears of corn, from the crib by her side, into the pen. She delighted in hearing her sows and hogs squealing, and loved t
o watch them plow through the earth and mud after their morning’s food. Merle was sorry that this chore came so early in the morning, because it was her favorite task of the day. She knew every pig from every other, and to most of them she had given names; she had come to know them for intelligent, if not affectionate, creatures. And, it happened, they were the only thing on the farm that produced profit year after year after year.
Two ears of corn slipped over the edge of the crib, and fell just inside the pen. One of the larger sows rushed over to get at them, and in so doing, brushed against Merle’s foot. She stumbled on the rail, and barely managed not to fall; but in the process, the amulet slipped out of her pocket and disappeared into the mud on the inside of the pen. Merle was very annoyed by her own clumsiness, and set her lips in malediction against herself.
She turned to see where her husband was. In a moment he emerged from the barn, scratching his head, and approached her.
“I’ve done gone and dropped it in the pen, Jack.”
“What’d you drop? That thing we found?”
Merle nodded. “Dropped right out of my pocket, I don’t know how.”
“Where’d it go?” Jack moved over to the fence, and stared over into the mud. The animals were still squealing in pursuit of their breakfast.
Merle pointed directly downward over the rail. “Right down there,” she said. “It was right there, Jack. Because when I knew it had fallen I looked over and saw it sliding under the mud, and then Louise must have stepped on it, because I can’t see it no more.” Louise was the great sow that had knocked against Merle’s foot.
“You want me to go after it?” said Jack, and without waiting for a reply, he began to scale the fence. “You show me where it went and I’ll find it.”
But his wife held him back, grabbing the straps of his overalls. “No,” she said, “it was my fault so I’ll look for it. Got to do what’s right.”
“You gone ruin that dress,” her husband said, with kind concern, “and I really don’t mind doing it.”
“It’s my fault,” his wife repeated. “If I hadn’t found the thing, we wouldn’t be having this trouble now. Now you just stand here and help me down over into the pen.”
Merle climbed over the fence, and her husband held her hand so that she would not fall headlong into the mud. The wet earth was ankle deep, and Merle bent over gingerly, toeing the mud with her shoe trying to locate the amulet. All the while, she and Jack talked reassuringly to the pigs, who were a little alarmed to find a human in their pen. But Merle was unsuccessful, and could not turn up the amulet.
“Fell right here,” she murmured again, with annoyance. “Jack, you go get me a broom or something, something with a long handle, maybe that’ll help.”
Jack stepped down backward off the rail and went into the barn. There he looked around a bit, but saw nothing that would be of use. The broom that usually stood on the inside of the front door was missing. He thought a moment and then went through the barn and out to the truck. From the back he pulled a pitchfork, and then plunged it idly into the ground, thinking that this, with its long prongs, would be just right for retrieving a necklace out of the mud of a pigsty.
Jack Weaver had started back toward the barn, when he heard a terrified scream from the direction of the pigpen. The voice was so strained, so filled with horror that he could not even recognize it as his wife’s, though he knew it must be hers. A tall picket fence separated him from the pen, and he was forced to run back through the barn again. He stumbled in the relative darkness of the structure, tripping on a length of hose, and fell against the packed-earth floor. He picked himself quickly up, and ran, leaving the pitchfork behind. The scream had not been repeated, and he called out his wife’s name. “Merle! Merle! Merle!”
As soon as Jack had disappeared into the barn after something to help her locate the amulet, the sow Louise had knocked against Merle, and the farm woman tumbled into the mud. She fell forward and sprawled helpless there a moment, upset by the combined misfortune. Her feet slid in the mud, and it was difficult, in her distress of mind, to raise herself out of the mire. She had made a half turn on her hands and knees, intending to take hold of the rails and lift herself out by that expedient; she had even reached out to grasp one, when suddenly Louise scurried forward, right up to Merle, and bared her teeth menacingly in Merle’s face.
Merle was alarmed. She had never seen her own pigs attack before, though she had heard stories, and she wanted to know no more about it than she did. She supposed she had fallen onto one of Louise’s piglets, or that Louise was just angry at the intrusion, but in any case, Merle made a great effort to scramble away. Other pigs gathered round her, curiously, and began to nudge her. Louise advanced slowly on the crawling woman. Merle backed away from Louise, looking like a crab in a flowered dress, until she came up against another great hog, the largest in the pen, who impeded her path. The bristles in its coat scratched the flesh from her arms. It was at this point that Merle screamed in terror.
Merle tried to raise herself against the back of this great animal, but she kept slipping in the mud. All the pigs in the pen began to scream together, and the sound made Merle very, very cold. “Jack! Jack! You come here!” she cried, wanting to shout, but her voice was only a whisper.
Merle was opening her mouth, prepared to scream again, scream in terror, when Louise suddenly lunged forward, and in one swift motion tore out the poor woman’s throat.
Jack emerged from the barn only in time to see his wife’s body falling back, stiffened with horror, into the mud.
“Merle! Merle!” he screamed and ran back through the barn, and out to the truck. He pulled open the cab door, and took down the rifle that was set on a rack in the back window. He scrambled for shells in the glove compartment and then loaded the piece as he ran back through the barn.
When he had reached the pen again, he was weeping, moaning his wife’s name. He shuddered to see her body again, floating on top of the mud, with a number of piglets burrowing in the earth at her side, as if she were a nursing sow, and all squealing that they could find no teats to suck.
Louise had blood all around her snout and was tearing viciously at Merle Weaver’s feet. It was a horrible, vindictive action that was wholly out of keeping with what Jack Weaver—if he had had the presence of mind to think about such things—knew about the habits of pigs, and especially of Louise, who had been something of a pet to his dead wife. Jack Weaver stared at the bloody tendons of his wife’s foot as it was scraped between Louise’s jaws. The sow began to drag the resisting corpse through the mud.
Jack took aim and shot the sow through the spine; the animal collapsed suddenly. Wailing piteously, Jack Weaver climbed into the corncrib, and began to hurl ears of corn at all the pigs, hitting them as hard as he could with the cobs. The pigs squealed, and ran about, and trampled the body of the dead woman beneath their hooves.
Chapter 41
When the house was quiet and dark, and Sarah Howell lay turning, sleeplessly, on the couch in the living room, she thought about Jo and Dean and the amulet. She would contrive all manner of stories that explained where Jo had got hold of such a thing, would think of ways in which it would cause somebody to die, would imagine herself snatching it out of someone’s grasp to grind it beneath the heel of her shoe. In those long, hot minutes Jo and Dean became powerfully evil in her imagination, and in the blackness she could not tell when her directed thoughts left off and when her nightmares began.
In the morning, when she first awoke, things seemed better. There was light in the room, for when she went to bed, Sarah pulled the drapes and opened the windows for air. She dismissed all her thoughts about the amulet, about murder and revenge and intended evil, as she would disregard any discomforting dream. For a while she would be overcome with pity for Dean, lying in the next room, in exactly the position in which she had last viewed him six hours before. Jo woke, and from her bed began telling Sarah to do this and bring her
that but the woman was simply lazy and cantankerous, and Sarah was relieved to imagine that she was no more than that. And the amulet was a hunk of cheap jewelry brought to the house through the mail, from Sears or Montgomery Ward. And Dorothy Sims had had one just like the one that got burned up in the Coppage house.
Sarah rose at five-thirty and left for work at a quarter of eight and in that two hours, she got enough of her husband and her mother-in-law to last the whole day. She had to prepare breakfast for them, after she had attended to Dean’s sanitary needs in the bedroom—or what was worse—had to clean up after him. Some days Sarah put a load of laundry in the washing machine first thing, so that she could hang it out before she went off to the plant, and on other days Jo liked to see her take a broom and dustcloth to the rooms, “just so she could earn her keep.”
And invariably, just before Sarah was about to go out the door, with Becca honking the horn in the driveway, Jo would think of one more thing that absolutely had to be accomplished before Sarah went off. This was usually to move Dean somewhere else; to guide him to the sofa, help him struggle into the backyard, to set him down on the living room floor in front of the television set that he could not see. Dean’s legs shuffled along—almost comically—and Sarah wondered that if he could do this much, if he actually remembered how to walk, even in this limited, depressing fashion, why could he not respond to anything else? Why did he never move again once he had been put into his bed? Why didn’t he even try to talk; why wouldn’t he chew his food?
It was horrible for Dean; Sarah knew that. If he could think at all, then he must be thinking about nothing but the difference between what he had been and what he was now. But there was such great disparity between what the doctors said his progress should be and what she had to put up with every day; even such disparity between his complete motionlessness and insensitivity for just hours on end, and this staggering gait which got him from the bed to wherever his mother wanted him—that Sarah occasionally entertained the thought that Dean was deceiving her, that he was better than he let on, that he was only pretending that he had no speech, no mind, no control over his limbs and digestive tract. But these thoughts only came to her late at night, when she did not have before her the utterly debilitating spectacle of the man himself, head and neck swathed in reeking bandages. That sight demanded that she do for him what was asked of her by Jo, by the doctors, by her own conscience.
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