Her hands were frozen still. Her eyes were wide in the moonlight. They spoke in whispers.
“I don’t know what you’re saying, what you’re talking about.”
“When it gets worse, if that’s what you want, make it go quickly. I’ve waited so long to see what would happen, and now I know, and it’s fine, it’s fine with me, but I want it to go quickly. I don’t want to suffer.”
“You’re tired. Sleep now. I don’t know what you’re saying. I would never want you to suffer.”
He could feel the blood pulsing through the vein of her leg. He could see her eyes dart away from him, dart toward the moonlight. She put out her hand and closed his eyes. She kept her cold hand over his lids, her breath shushed him in his ear, as one might calm a child to sleep, a child who had waked from a nightmare.
“I’ll never talk about it again. You are free.”
“This doesn’t make sense. I don’t know what you’re saying. I love you.”
She had never said it before. No one had said it to him for more than twenty years, yet he believed her. She loved him, and she was the thing that was bringing his death, an end to his torment. She was the angel of his death. And he loved her with all his heart.
She didn’t want to do it. She didn’t want to watch him die. She truly loathed the idea of him suffering or sickening or any of the things that were about to happen. But she knew that, any day, a letter might come, a letter that would end it all. Love and money-she had promised herself these two things, but she realized more and more that maybe one person got only one thing, and she would not, could not be ruined. She would live in the gutter, Antonio had said. She would grow sad and disheveled, and eventually she would die. But whatever happened, she could only save herself.
A man ate an entire dictionary and died. Larsen cut off his own burned hand with an axe, believing the burn which would not heal was the kiss of the devil, the ineradicable mark of sin, while Mrs. Larsen watched and screamed. As a boy of fifteen, he had fought in the Civil War and come home without a scratch. Now he lay, a drooling idiot with one hand, in an expensive Catholic hospital in Chicago, paid for by Truitt, while Mrs. Larsen never mentioned him again. Such things happened.
Catherine Land, a young wife of Truitt, Wisconsin, set out to poison-slowly, with arsenic-the husband who loved her, whom she herself loved, to her surprise, the man who had saved her from a life of destitution and despair.
Such things happened.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I’m cold. I’m cold all the time.” Ralph Truitt said, as he sat and shivered in the evenings.
Catherine hesitated in her purpose. With the medicine dropper in her hand, her courage wavered. She put away the poison. She stopped for a week. He was a good man, honest, decent, good in his bones, and he didn’t deserve this. She knew that, and she felt in some way, for the first time, that these things mattered. The idea of goodness had never crossed her mind, and now it seemed very real. There was a reason people did things; there was a reason some lives turned out well, others badly. It had never occurred to her. As though goodness itself were some perfect heaven, and she might have constantly judged her distance from it, had she ever stopped to think. Now it haunted her.
She could change her mind, she supposed, would have to, but the thought of Antonio hung on her like a noose. It was not an idle threat. He would write, and it would all be over. Antonio was love to her, or all of it she had known until Ralph. What Antonio wanted, what she had promised him, would have to be done, somehow. And so she started again.
Love, even bad love, was a glittering lure that could draw her attention, if only for a time. The idea of Antonio dangled in front of her mesmerized eyes. It was just a drop, after all, a drop in his water, in his soup, a drop on his hairbrush. It was clear and icy and almost without odor. She knew how awful it would be. She knew how he would die. She couldn’t stop now.
True to his word, he never spoke of it again. He never asked her to stop, never complained of the changes beginning to affect his body, his life. He became anxious. The dreams that had enchanted his sleep turned terrifying, and still he never complained.
He would wake at two or three in the morning, covered in the sweat of terror, and he would turn to her and she would dry him and place him beneath the covers where he would lie until dawn, shivering with the cold. She felt his forehead with her hand. He was burning up. She felt a tenderness she had never felt for any man, a tenderness that went beyond love.
He looked haggard. His clothes began to burn his skin. Any sound, any noise, began to scrape at his ear until he couldn’t stand it.
After dinner one night he spoke in a soft voice, reciting a poem:
I wander all night in my vision,
Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,
Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers,
Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill- assorted, contradictory,
Pausing, gazing, bending, and stopping.
She didn’t know what he meant. She didn’t know where the words came from. There was no reproach in his voice. She assumed it was the beginning of a dementia that would at least make him oblivious to much of what would happen to him.
Depression, morbidity, followed by death. These were the words she had read in the library. She knew everything that was to happen, the sores, the spots in his vision that would turn the world yellow and green, the bilious pustules, the haggard eyes, the dark hollows. She knew and she had thought she was ready.
“It’s wrong,” said Mrs. Larsen. “I’ve seen sickness, plenty of it, in Truitt, in… in the world, and this ain’t no sickness I’ve ever seen.”
Mrs. Larsen began to watch her. Catherine sat and talked to her.
“I don’t know what it is. We’ll call the doctor. He’ll tell us what to do.”
A doctor would find nothing, would suspect nothing. A man Truitt’s age might develop eczema and rashes. His hair might fall out. He might develop a visionary mind, an acute hearing, a ringing in the ears, an irrationality. Anybody might. Such things happened. Truitt, while he wasn’t old, wasn’t young either. But Truitt wouldn’t have the doctor. The poison was his fuel. He was not unhappy. And he loved his wife. She was the beautiful, lethal, insinuating spider he had waited for all his life. She was the final knife in his heart. He opened his shirt to her with gladness.
Mrs. Larsen watched Catherine every minute of the day. Truitt was her life, and she felt her life slipping cruelly away, as so much else had gone. Gone into madness, into incurable awfulness. And she knew, as she had known before, that it wasn’t natural.
Ralph could not bear to be touched. His skin was so raw he couldn’t stand the feel of the softest nightshirt next to him. He slept naked, under smooth sheets that Mrs. Larsen now changed every day.
He could not bear to have Catherine’s skin on his skin, and yet his desire for her was undiminished. He shivered with the constant cold. His skin felt raw, the sheets felt like icy nettles in the night. The anxiety he felt before going to sleep could be lessened only by sex. Gently he led her, taught her to give him pleasure without touching.
When he had come, he could sleep for a while, but he woke from terrible dreams. He would sit on the edge of the bed, shivering and burning up with itching. She would undo her hair and let it fall on his shoulders and slide down his back, to ease the itching. She would do it for an hour, back and forth as light as breath, her silken hair, while he closed his eyes and dreamed. He was like her child. She was gentle past belief.
He didn’t understand her sorrow. This awful thing was not happening to her. She was causing his death, and he wanted death, so he forgave her. He felt his life slipping away without regret, along with his houses, his businesses, the people he had known and the memories he had harbored for fifty years. Everything had been a burden to him. Losing it now made him feel light. He let it go without regret. Only the bitter image of Antonio, the face he might have known, refused to leave him. But he felt no sorrow, not anymore, while she seemed to grieve deeply. It was deep and private and she had no way to tell him, and he would never have asked, but he wondered and she nursed and dried him and led him like a blind man to the dark bed where she pulled the soft sheets up to his chin and sat in the moonlight as he slept. She was his assassin and his nurse.