Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (70 page)

“I said: I’m going to bed. I stood up and she must have thought I was going to hit her because she shrank back in the chair. And I felt sorry for her. I never doubted that what she said had happened those years ago was true. She was literally eaten up with guilt. I felt sorry for her; she looked so little and demented. I thought she was harmless. That was where I made my mistake, John. Oh, how I wish I could go back and redo it, change it. She was like a cornered ferret, and ferrets bite, don’t they, when their backs are against the wall? 

“I got to the door and she whispered: Unto the third and fourth generations. I never looked back at her. 

“The next afternoon I asked Don to take me out riding. We went into town and got hot fudge sundaes, and I told him the whole story. He took it very well. I can remember that he repeated the word over two or three times, tasting it, rolling it in his mouth: Bastard. Bastard. Then he asked: Did she say what his name was? I said: No. He took my hand and held it between his. He said: Does it feel any different? I said: Not a bit. He said: I love you. 

“On the way back we talked about his father--his foster-father, Cass’s husband. Don said: I don’t think she could ever actually tell him. It’s been hidden too long. I don’t think she could even bring herself to tell me. I said: I hope you are right. 

“He was. After supper that night Don stood up and announced that he had asked me to marry him and that the lady had said yes. Julia clapped her hands and said:
Yayyyyy
! She ran around the table and kissed me. For a moment John just looked at us, and then he dropped his napkin into his plate, smiled, and said: I could not be more pleased.  

“Cass made an odd hissing noise. Her face had gone dead white. It began to twist. She knocked over her water glass getting up, seemed on the verge of saying something, and then ran out of the room. Julia had pressed herself against me. Outside it had begun to snow again. 

“John said: You mustn’t mind. You know how she has been, Don. 

“Don nodded and his father said: Now perhaps you had better tell me your plans and how I can help. 

“I said: Except for my father, you’re the finest man I’ve ever known, Mr. Knowles. 

“He got out his pipe and said: Then perhaps you ought to marry me. 

“Then we all laughed, and things were a little easier. When Don told him that we planned to move here, he nodded and said that would probably be best. He said: I suppose this does not sound just right, but I think perhaps it will do your mother some good, Donald. 

“Don said: I think that might be. We both looked at him, but his face was as unreadable as the back of a playing card. I still wonder how much he did know about Cass. Perhaps she talked in her sleep. 

“I went to bed early. I was walking in a rose mist. April seemed an eternity away. I didn’t even like to think what Cass would be like to live with for the next four months. As it turned out, I didn’t have to live with her that long. Nowhere near. 

“The next two weeks were heaven. I bought things. Two dresses, a set of dishes. I bought a nightie. A silk one. I felt very sinful, buying a silk nightie. I felt downright Babylonian. John went around smiling. He tried to make Cass smile too, but Cass didn’t want to smile. She was beyond smiling. She cooked and she fetched the wood when Don wasn’t there to do it (I offered; she only glared at me), and she read the Bible. For a while she went on reading it at the table, but John must have told her to stop. The last night she did it she read from one of the Books of Moses, something about wholesome and kingdoms of wholesome and fire and judgments. 

“On the last day of January, Don came back from Brunswick with an engagement ring. It was very small--you could have put it in your eye and it wouldn’t have hurt your eyesight any--but it was beautiful. Beautiful. I wept and he kissed me, and we lay down on the divan in the living room. He touched me all over and I touched him. I wanted to. He could have had me, right then. But he did not want it just then. He said: In the spring. In the spring. And we will have the windows open and we will be able to smell the earth starting to make.  

“He got up and said: Good night, Edie. I love you. He was wearing his brown banker’s suit, and how he
bulged
! I said: I love you too, Don. Goodnight. He said: Will you remember to take the milk out of the ice-box before you go up? I said: Yes, dear. Goodnight.  

“Those were the last words he ever said to me. I loved him more than the world. He was mine and I was his and it seemed like it was us together that made the whole universe. And the last words he ever said to me were: Will you remember to take the milk out of the ice-box before you go up? How can there be a God? How can there, unless He’s on an eternal LSD trip?” 

John Edgars shifted his legs in the darkness. A fresh cigarette glowed. “Maybe He’s just a lousy playwright. How’s that for pseudo-philosophy?” 

She put her hands on his. They were cold and he held them tightly, enfolding them. 

“When I came home from school the next day I was really euphoric. Peter van Nook had gotten into a fight with one of his classmates, a boy named Arthur Hapgood who had been calling him a bookworm pansy. Peter thrashed him and made him take it back. Arthur finally did, after Peter almost broke his arm. Then he let Arthur go and said: I learned that hold out of a book, you stupid bastard. And Arthur said: Show me. Peter said: I’ll bring the book tomorrow. And they went away with their arms around each other’s shoulders. There was that, and there was Don. Don would be home when I got there--for the whole blessed and wonderful week. 

“The sky was overcast, but we were having a thaw and the snow was melting. The roads were slushy but clear. All the icicles on the house were dripping, and the smell of the sea was as sharp as a slap. I took off my boots in the entry and came into the living room. I could smell apple pies. They smelled cinnamony and fresh. They smelled lovely. 

“And right then, feeling as wonderful as I did, I decided to make friends with Cass. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that I could do it. I could have done anything. That’s how I felt. 

“I pushed through the door into the kitchen--” 

She was taken with a fit of shuddering and tried to draw her hands away from him. He held them and pulled her against him. He wrapped an arm around her and she pressed against his shirt, smelling the warm smell of him. 

“I saw him right away. His head was in the wood box and at first I thought he had been sick. Then I saw the blood. There was blood underneath him and blood on the walls. I could smell it underneath the smell of the pies. A sharp smell, like heated metal. It smelled like a hog had been slaughtered. 

“I screamed. I ran to him and tried to turn him over. I couldn’t. He was too heavy. He was all…loose. God knows how many times she had hit him with that hatchet. I got blood all over the front of my dress. It was warm and gooey, like fudge-sauce. I rocked back on my heels and looked at the ceiling. I thought I was going to faint. 

“That was when I heard her. I looked around and she was crouched in the corner between the stove and the wall. She was rocking back and forth and keening. There was blood on her ankles. Her eyes were closed. She didn’t even know I was there. She was just rocking back and forth and clutching her apron. There was something in her apron. The hatchet was between her feet. I took two steps toward her, and I saw what was in her apron. 

“She looked at me and I began wailing. I couldn’t move. All I could do was stand there and wail, smelling the pies as they started to burn and hearing the icicles drip. 

“She held it out to me. She said: Unto the third and fourth generations. Then I ran out. I ran straight down to the docks. It must have been a mile. I fell in the slush and screamed going down and getting up. I screamed all the time I ran. People came out and looked at me. I could smell the salt and the water but there was still the smell of apple pies. I found John and then I fainted.” 

There was a long, long silence in the car. She could feel something in her belly loosening, freeing itself. She began to breathe in long, shuddering sighs. He held her against him, fingers tangled carelessly in her hair. 

“I went home. I had to go to the inquest, but not to the committal hearing. They put her in a place in Augusta very quietly. John Knowles wrote me a long and incoherent letter in late April. They had told him she was in something called a catatonic state and probably would be for the rest of her life. Completely withdrawn. There was, I understand, some kind of brain damage in addition to her mental obsession and feelings of guilt.” 

“And you?” John asked. 

“I went home for a year. I didn’t talk much. I did a lot of knitting and learned how to do crewl work. I went for walks. I slept a great deal. And over some space of time I decided to come here. 

“My mother was fiercely against it. I was nothing but a sack of skin and bones, and she was convinced that I had consumption. She wouldn’t lose me for good, that was what she said. Not after my father. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair and she wouldn’t have it and that was an end to it. 

“Except it wasn’t the end. I applied for and got a job at the Canal Street Grammar School. I taught fourth grade. At first that meant nothing, either--my days were nothing but blurs--but I began to take an interest, little by little. There was another Peter van Nook, then another. The principal, a nice fat man named Grayson Henry, got me interested in more schooling. I began to take language courses at the University. After the war I went back full time and got my second degree. I started to teach French at Harding High School in September of 1949.” 

She was quiet for a long time. Finally, in a small voice, she said: “I think I’m through, John. Thank you.” 

“Feel better?” 

“Much.” 

“I’m glad.” 

“You’re not him,” she said. “I started off thinking you were, and that has been part of the trouble. Do you think I’ve made an awful botch of my life?” 

“No,” he said, holding her hand. “Do you? Really?” 

She smiled. “No. It’s a temptation, but it’s too easy. My life hasn’t been a gothic novel, no matter how impossibly insane the introduction was. It’s been sunny and for the most part, happy. I put romance out of it, but that seemed to be a decision above right and wrong--it seemed practical. I never realized the hole until you came along, maybe not until the afternoon that you left my bed. Then I realized the hole. I missed a whole dimension of love. Just let it slip away.” 

He started to speak, but she raised her head and stopped him. “No, don’t say it, John. It isn’t true. There may be another man--I think there could be at least that much now--but there isn’t going to be another moon-June. No afternoon sleigh-rides. I’m not a late-bloomer and I don’t want to be. I don’t want to marry the postman and move to St. Petersburg. It’s enough to know I’ve grown a little more.” 

“You’re a lovely lady,” he said simply. He kissed her. 

She sat up and moved away from him a little, feeling a strange new lightness in her body. Her muscles felt stretchy, elastic. Her mind felt hosed down. She looked at her wristwatch. 

“My Lord, John. It’s almost ten o’clock. We ought to--” 

A police siren started up, startling both of them. She suddenly realized that a tattered stream of people were hurrying out of the restaurant and going around the back of the building. The car-park boy walked by, going the other way, and John unrolled the window. “Excitement?” 

“Aw, some boy got himself sliced.” 

“Bad?” 

The car-park boy’s face was a bland and savage mask. “Not for him no more. He daid.”