I thought I was gonna smother at the trial in that black dress and with people shoving all around me and the smell of bananas and peanuts rising up and choking me. Come out in the paper people was lining up on the courthouse steps as early as four o’clock in the morning so they’d be sure to get a seat. Nobody in the world never paid me no attention before and here was the greatest hubbub in the world, men with their cameras and their light bulbs and lawyers shouting at one another ain’t so ’tis so too, and me up there trying to talk and getting all balled up and starting to cry.
Still I didn’t have no regrets about Myrtle and Mr. Smith but I was just hoping and hoping they’d hang me, anything to get me out of my misery.
Nights I’d wake up and hear the jailers talking, yes sir, they’d say, it’s the cruelest, most cold-blooded thing ever happened. By God, she just sliced them up and made mincemeat out of both of them.
Well, finely the jury come out and the foreman was a little bald-headed man and he said yes sir when the judge ast him if a verdik had been reached, he said that I had been judged inn-sane.
Next day the matron said we’re sending you to the inn-sane asylum. I guess they’ll teach you a thing or two down there.
So I went on down there to the asylum in a police car and I’ll never forget the sight of driving in there and seeing all them people hanging outside them barred winders reaching out into the air and they was others walking up and down on the grounds like they wasn’t thinking of nothing in particular and the funny way they blinked their eyes and the peculiar things they was doing running and chasing and yelling and giggling like children.
Night time was the worst when dreams would come to tarmint them and they’d screech and run and fight and you could hear the struggle some of the attindints was having with somebody they couldn’t control.
With all that howling and yelling and nobody to say a word to I knowed I’d go crazy too. Oncet I went up to somebody that looked like she had right good sense and was smiling at me and I thanked God they was somebody around not a idiot and I said good morning to her and the things she said back at me I can’t repeat.
I couldn’t stand that place. I kep praying that I’d die.
But I stayed there eleven years right in the middle of all that and I was sure I was losing my mind. I’d try hard not to. In the morning I’d say to myself first thing when I got up, now Ruby you gotta do something to hold on to what little you know. Didn’t allow us to use no pencils, nothing sharp we might hurt somebody with, but when time come for us to take a little outing I’d pick up a twig on the grounds and find a smooth place in the yard and I’d draw some figures and do a little adding and I’d say the multiplication tables up to seven, never learned no more, and I’d spell a few words.
Finely the years was gone and my hair was gray as a rat’s and I jumped at the least noise and whimpered along with the others. Something happened then. They added what they called the new wing and some more doctors and nurses come in and they moved me to a new ward and they was one right nice doctor would call me every now and then to his office. Then finely one of the attindints come to me, didn’t talk nice, said look here you ain’t inn-sane, you can’t clutter up this place no more.
Looks like not many of us can face our dreams coming true. Year after year that was my one thought, to get out of there, and right then I wanted to cling to it. Mama and pap hadn’t paid me no attention, never had a word from them in all those years. I didn’t have no home to go to. Wasn’t a living soul cared whether I was dead or alive, and finely I broke down and begged them to let me stay, but they wouldn’t.
So I come back up here and somehow that woman from the newspaper found out and come out and they taken a pitcher and right back in the paper I was. They printed a pitcher of me at the trial in that right pretty dress the woman had bought me, then they taken one of me in the asylum uniform, only thing I had to wear, and they entitled the pitcher the wages of sin, said I had paid, just look at the pitchers if you didn’t believe it.
Wherever I turned people said that’s her that killed her own blood sister and brother-in-law. I went everywheres trying to get honest work and nobody would do a thing for me. So I had to call on you all up at the relief office. I had to beg for charity. And all I have is what you all up there have give me.
And all I do all night between the catnaps which is all the sleep I get, and all I do in the daytime is think about that night I killed them and the way I useta love Mr. Smith before he taken up with Myrtle. I ast God to let my cold heart relent, but so far He hasn’t seen fit to do it because I don’t regret what I done. I just can’t.
Nothing in this world is ever gonna make me regret what I done to Myrtle and Mr. Smith.
Detectiverse
Net Result
by Mark Grenier
© 1981 by Mark Grenier
The Adventure of the Pie-Eyed Piper
by Robert L. Fish
© 1981 by Robert L. Fish
In which we come upon Mr. Schlock Homes, the Great Detective, the Guzzler Puzzler, in a most deplorable condition, a condition we associate more often with some of the Great Private Eyes...
It was rare, indeed, for my friend, Mr. Schlock Homes, to indulge himself excessively in spirits; but the one time I recall when he might have been said to have had one over the eight, he still proved himself capable of resolving a situation that another might well have handled in an entirely different fashion, and almost certainly with completely different results.
I had come into the breakfast room of our quarters at 221-B Bagel Street one fine morning in June of the year ’79, to find Homes quite neatly fettered in a maze of rope. The chair to which he was bound had fallen to its side, carrying Homes with it, but still, in his indomitable manner, he was struggling to reach a book above him on the edge of the table.
“I should think that a most uncomfortable position in which to read, Homes,” I said, and then added, ever considerate, “However, I can see you are tied up. I can return for my repast at a later hour, if that should be more convenient.”
“No, no, Watney!” said he, a trifle impatiently. “It is simply that I suppose I should have read a bit further into Sir Baden-Powell’s book on scouting knots before I attempted to solve them. However, if you would kindly tug on this exposed portion of the cord—”
A moment later Homes was free and upon his feet, and after righting the chair and placing Sir Baden-Powell’s book in the dustbin, he seated himself across from me and reached for the parslied chutneys that Mrs. Essex had generously provided for our morning meal. As I drew my napkin into my lap, Homes began to eat while at the same time spreading the morning journal open upon the table and perusing the headlines. Suddenly he made a sound deep in his throat and looked up, considering me with a black frown upon his face.
“Tell me, Watney,” said he in dire tones, “what do you think of gifted children?”