“What was she so afraid of?”
“It started with her father, I think, and then it spread to other things, including me. And herself.” He breathed deeply. “Sometimes it was like a wild animal inside of her looking out through her eyes – an animal I had to keep fed and tamed. So long as I could give her love, the security she needed, she was safe. For nine years I kept her living along like a fairly normal person. Then I failed her. I was the one who failed. I’d overestimated my strength, and taken on too much. And I gave in.”
He struck his long thigh with the edge of his hand. He seemed to be chopping his life into segments.
“I suppose I was attracted to Anne the first time I saw her. I didn’t let myself know it when she was living with us, or for a long time after. She was so young, and I wasn’t going to repeat what her father had done. She was like a daughter to me – a prodigal daughter when she grew up. I was too much of a Puritan to approve of Anne. But she stood for the things I’d been missing: fun and laughter and love without tears. She was so much like Hilda, yet so different – heads and tails of the same coin.
“I started dreaming about her last year, last spring when the hills were turning green. The rutting season.” He was ironizing himself like an old man recalling his hot extinguished youth. But there was a lift in his voice. “I would make elaborate plans to meet her on the street, or think of reasons for Hilda to have her over. Then when she came I was afraid to go near her. She was so lovely.
“I could have stopped it. I could have stopped myself. But I was carried away by – whatever you want to call it, love, or rut, or self-indulgence. I thought I deserved more than I was getting. Well, I got more. We all did.
“In June the three of us went to the ocean for the weekend. I didn’t want to take Anne along – I was fighting it at the time, and I knew I was losing, but Hilda insisted. She had some idea of getting Anne away from Kerrigan, I think. The first night we were there, Hilda had a migraine. Anne and I left her in the motel and went for a walk on the beach. We hadn’t been alone together for years, not since she’d grown up, not in a private place. It happened to us.”
I heard a tearing noise in the patio. I got up and went to the door. Hilda was down on her knees, ripping at the crabgrass that grew in long strands around the edge of the brick planter.
“That was my crime,” Church said to my back, insistently. “I took away my love from Hilda and gave it to her sister. Anne fell in love with me, too. It got so that we had to be together, any way we could, anywhere. I’d go away for a night with Anne, and Hilda would be waiting for me when I came home with that wounded-animal look in her eyes. She never said a word about Anne, never asked me a question. She was withdrawing herself again, the way she was when I married her. And I let it happen. I think I must have wanted it to happen. There were times when I willed her to lose her mind completely, so that I’d be free to live with Anne, to marry her and have children.” His voice broke. “I got my wish, in a way.”
“Has she ever been hospitalized?”
“Once, in the first year of our marriage. She tried to commit suicide. They held her for observation at the county hospital for ten days. She was going to have a baby, and the doctors blamed it on her pregnancy. She told me she didn’t want to bring a child into this world. The same night she took an overdose of sleeping-pills. I got her to a stomach pump in time.
“I could have had her committed then. The doctors left it up to me. I decided to keep her at home. I believed I could give her a better life at home. And she was carrying my child.”
“What happened to the child?”
“She lost it anyway. Her mental condition improved after that.”
“Has she been having psychiatric treatment?”
“Some, off and on. Supportive treatment.”
“Well, it’s a fair background for a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity plea. Did she plan to kill Anne ahead of time, do you know?”
“I know it wasn’t premeditated. It was done on the spur of the moment. I can prove it, if they’ll take my word for it. She didn’t have the gun when she went up there.”
“So she told me. I didn’t know if she was telling the truth.”
“She was. She must have taken it from Anne, or found it in the cabin. I saw it on the bureau Saturday night, and I warned Anne about leaving a loaded gun lying around. But she wouldn’t let me unload it. She wanted it for protection.”
“Against Hilda?”
“That I doubt. She was never afraid of Hilda.”
“She should have been. According to Hilda, Anne gave her the gun. Does that make any sense to you?”
“She told me that, too. But Anne wouldn’t do that.”
“I wonder. She knew that Hilda had attempted suicide.” I moved to the door. Hilda was on her knees among the flowers, but she was no longer weeding. She was tearing up the trailing lobelia in great colored handfuls and flinging them behind her. The planter looked half-scalped.
Church brushed past me and stepped down into the patio. “Hilda! What are you doing?”
She rose on her knees and glanced up at us over her shoulder. Her face was flushed and wet. “I don’t like these. They’re not pretty any more.” She saw the shocked look on his face and cringed away from it. “Is it all right, Father, I mean Brandon?”
He answered after a breathing pause: “It’s all right, Hilda. Do what you want to with the flowers. They’re yours.”
“I’d like to ask you a question,” I said. “About Anne.”
She got to her feet, pushing her hair back with a soiled hand. “But I told you about Anne. It was an accident. I had the gun in my hand and it went off and she looked at me. She looked at me and fell over on the floor.”
“How did the gun get into your hand?”
“Anne gave it to me,” she said. “I told you that”
“Why did she give it to you? Did she say anything? Do you remember?”
“I remember something. It doesn’t seem right.”
“What was said, Mrs. Church? Try hard to remember.”
“She laughed at me. I said if she didn’t leave Father alone that I would kill myself.”
“Leave your father alone?”
“No.” Her eyes were puzzled. “Brandon. Leave Brandon alone. She laughed and went into the bedroom and got the revolver and handed it to me. ‘Go ahead and kill yourself,’ she said. ‘Here’s your chance, the gun is loaded. Kill yourself,’ she said.” She paused, in a listening attitude. “But I didn’t. I killed her.”
Church groaned behind me. I turned. He looked like a man who had barely survived a long illness. A hummingbird whizzed over his head like an iridescent bullet. He watched it out of sight, peering into the blue depths of the sky.
His wife was back among the flowers, ripping the last of them out of the moist earth. When the police car arrived, the planter was denuded and she had begun to strip the thorny lemon tree. Church washed and bandaged her bleeding hands before they took her away.
The End