She set the lamp on the packing case that saved as a table beside the bed. She leaned over him and with both hands and all her strength she drove the knife into his chest clear to the handle.
He made a hoarse sound and struggled to sit up. His fingers fumbled with the knife. He stared at her with horrified unbelief. He coughed and blood gushed down his heaving body. Then he fell back on the bed.
Marcy turned down the lamp wick and blew out the flame. The small room flooded with the black and silver of the moonlight. The woman leaned against the bed frame. Now that it was done she was trembling and sick, but she was glad. The children were hers — she had borne them, she had raised them...
Slowly her strength came back to her and her hands were steady as she changed to her work clothes. She went out to the toolshed in the back yard and got a shovel. She dug a grave for Joe beneath a young Black Twig apple tree in the orchard. The ground was hard and the grave deep so that the night was almost over when she had finished.
She wrapped the body in the stained bedclothing and dragged it out through the house, across the back porch, and across the yard to the grave. When she had tumbled it in, she stood gasping for breath. Joe was a big man and heavy. The moon, low in the west, gave an eerie unearthly look to the dark bulk of the familiar mountain ridges, and its pale light made weblike shadows of the tree branches in the lifeless grass. Only the brightest of the stars blazed with chill, diamond brilliance in the black velvet sky. It seemed a time set aside for death.
Marcy shivered. She hurried back into the house and brought out the clothes Joe had worn. Sitting on the mound of fresh earth, she searched his pockets — some of her $20 might be left. She found the keys to his red Ford truck and a roll of bills. She counted the money — nearly $200! No wonder he had come home in such a good humor — the card game had been lucky for him.
Marcy dropped Joe’s clothes into the grave and then quickly filled it in. She smoothed the ground and spread the extra dirt into the freshly disked orchard rows. She cleaned the shovel and put it away and washed her face and hands in the spring’s icy overflow.
The eastern sky was growing light with the coming of the sun when Marcy Bayliss finally sat on her front-porch step. A rooster crowed in the hen house and a coyote sang in the dark canyon below the house.
Marcy smiled. The eastern sky faded into gold and palest blue. It was a new day — a fine new day to go to the County Fair.
II: Cross My Heart...
Louise lay flat on her stomach on the lumpy bed under the poplar tree in the back yard of her home. She lay with her knees bent and her calloused bare feet twined and twisted with a snaky life of their own as she looked at the bright-colored pictures in an old Montgomery Ward catalogue. She removed one grimy hand from her chin as she turned a page. Behind her thick-lensed, black-rimmed glasses her dark eyes were glassy with longing. She leaned on her elbow and stabbed at the pages with a grimy forefinger.
“I wish I had that,” she said. “And that... and that... and that—”
Above her head the heart-shaped poplar leaves hung limp and dark, unstirring in the morning’s oppressively humid heat. Her mother’s White Leghorns car-r-rked lazily as they dusted themselves in the powdery dirt of the chicken pen. Bees hummed sluggishly in the alfalfa patch beyond the unkempt yard. Over the flat fields the sun flung a pale, wavering haze of moisture drawn from the irrigation ditches and the soaked earth. The hot air smelled of steaming plant growth and stagnant water.
Louise turned on her back. Her eyes stared sightlessly up into the inert dark leaves. She felt herself sinking delightfully into her own inner world where she seemed to hang suspended in space, cushioned in the softest down, caressed tenderly by unseen hands.
She closed her eyes and waited breathlessly. Silken billows lifted her and she saw herself standing on a stage in front of a huge audience. The people in the audience were indistinct mouths smiling at her and shining eyes looking at her with love. She stood apart and saw herself and she was beautiful with a skin like ivory satin and a little red mouth and great dark eyes. And her dress felt light as a moonbeam and was of palest rose chiffon.
There were jewels in her ears and around her throat. She stretched out her arms to the people, a hush fell on the audience, a crescendo of violins played — and she sang. Her voice was clear and true and incredibly sweet She sang and sang and when she had finished the audience stood as one and shouted and cried and rained flowers on her — all but two who crouched, black as vultures, in the wings of the vast stage.
Louise tried to hold onto the wonderful dream but the two evil figures tore her away from all the beauty and warm delight. Their faces grew and swelled until they were close, staring at her, pointing their long clawlike fingers... The faces belonged to Miss Miles and Miss Henderson.
Louise had been in the cloakroom that last week of school in June. The children were supposed to play outside during recess, so she had stepped back into a corner behind an old coat when she heard the thump of sensible heels on the board floor. Then they had come into the room, Miss Miles and Miss Henderson, who taught Louise’s sixth-grade classes.
Miss Miles said to Miss Henderson, “What do you think of that Carter girl?” Her voice sounded funny as if she were speaking about something unclean.
Miss Henderson said, “I never saw such a thoroughly unattractive child.” Her voice had the same sound as Miss Miles’s voice.
“I know it,” said Miss Miles. “I can’t bear to have her close to me. I know I shouldn’t feel that way, but she makes my skin absolutely crawl!”
“I wonder,” began Miss Henderson thoughtfully. “It’s an odd thing—”
She and Miss Miles talked some more, but they began to use big words.
The rest of the week Louise had kept as far away from her teachers as she could. But in her mind, with dreadful relish, she had destroyed them a hundred times.
Now, as she lay quietly on her back under the old poplar tree, she ran them down with her powerful red sports car. It wasn’t as gruesome as some of her other methods of destruction, but it had its juicy points. The two teachers were walking down a steep banked road in a dark forest — Miss Miles, round and fat, Miss Henderson, thin and flat. They heard her coming — the deadly whirr of the powerful engine, the vengeful scream of the racing tires on the rough pavement. They looked back over their shoulders. Their eyes grew wide. They looked funny — Miss Miles, her round face like a pale sugar cookie with raisin eyes, and Miss Henderson, her long face like a slab of colorless cheese with a carrot nose. They ran. They screamed. They clawed at the steep bank, but it didn’t do them one bit of good. Louise ran over them and over them and over them until they looked like printed linoleum rugs, one round and one long and narrow.
“Louise! Louise!”
The girl heard the voice faintly.
“Louise, you lazy good-for-nothin’! If I have to yell once more, I’ll come over there an’ swat you good!”
The dream burst into a thousand crimson bubbles that floated into the dark forest and vanished.
The girl opened her eyes and saw the leaves of the poplar tree and the shattered glass sparkles of the sun. She moved her head. “What d’ya want?”
Her mother stood on the back porch of the old frame house. She was a tall graying woman in a faded housedress. She was all angles and flat unyielding planes. A sour and bitter defeat shone in her tired eyes and in the bitter harshness of her mouth.