Four Past Midnight

be Tansy Power. A lot of the kids who used to come to Ardelia's Story Hours are in AA around these parts, Sarah - make of it what you will. In the summer of 1960, I came very close to killin Tansy Power ... and that's not the worst of it. I only wish it were.'

8

Naomi excused herself, and after several minutes had dragged by, Sam got up to go after her.

'Let her be,' Dave said. 'She's a wonderful woman, Sam, but she needs a little time to put herself back in order. You would, too, if you found out that one of the members of the most important group in your life once came close to murderin your closest friend. Let her abide. She'll be back - Sarah's strong.'

A few minutes later, she did come back. She had washed her face - the hair at her temples was still wet and slick - and she was carrying a tray with three glasses of iced tea on it.

'Ah, we're getting down to the hard stuff at last, ain't we, dear?' Dave said.

Naomi did her best to return his smile. 'You bet. I just couldn't hold out any longer.'

Sam thought her effort was better than good; he thought it was noble. All the same, the ice was talking to the glasses in brittle, chattery phrases. Sam rose again and took the tray from her unsteady hands. She looked at him gratefully.

'Now,' she said, sitting down. 'Finish, Dave. Tell it to the end.'

9

'A lot of what's left is stuff she told me,' Dave resumed, 'because by then I wasn't in a position to see anything that went on first hand. Ardelia told me sometime late in '59 that I wasn't to come around the Public Library anymore. If she saw me in there, she said she'd turn me out, and if I hung around outside, she'd sic the cops on me. She said I was gettin too seedy, and talk would start if I was seen goin in there anymore.

''Talk about you and me?' I asked. 'Ardelia, who'd believe it?'

' 'Nobody,' she said. 'It's not talk about you and me that concerns me, you idiot.'

'Well then, what does?'

'Talk about you and the children,' she said. I guess that was the first time I really understood how low I'd fallen. You've seen me low in the years since we started goin to the AA meetins together, Sarah, but you've never seen me that low. I'm glad, too.

'That left her house. It was the only place I was allowed to see her, and the only time I was allowed to come was long after dark. She told me not to come by the road any closer than the Orday farm. After that I was to cut through the fields. She told me she'd know if I tried to cheat an that, and I believed her - when those silver eyes of hers turned red, Ardelia saw everything. I'd usually show up sometime between eleven o'clock and one in the morning, dependin on how much I'd had to drink, and I was usually frozen almost to the bone. I can't tell you much about those months, but I can tell you that in 1959 and 1960 the state of Iowa had a damned cold winter. There were lots of nights when I believe a sober man would have frozen to death out there in those cornfields.

'There wasn't no problem on the night I want to tell you about next, though - it must have been July of 1960 by then, and it was hotter than the hinges of hell. I remember how the moon looked that night, bloated and red, hangin over the fields. It seemed like every dog in Homestead County was yarkin up at that moon.

'Walkin into Ardelia's house that night was like walkin under the skirt of a cyclone. That week - that whole month, I guess - she'd been slow and sleepy, but not that night. That night she was wide awake, and she was in a fury. I hadn't seen her that way since the night after Mr Lavin told her to take the Little Red Ridin Hood poster down because it was scarin the children. At first she didn't even know I was there. She went back and forth through the downstairs, naked as the day she was born - if she ever was born - with her head down and her hands rolled into fists. She was madder'n a bear with a sore ass. She usually wore her hair up in an old-maidy bun when she was at home, but it was down when I let myself in through the kitchen door and she was walkin so fast it went flyin out behind her. I could hear it makin little crackly sounds, like it was full of static electricity. Her eyes were red as blood and glowin like those railroad lamps they used to put out in the old days when the tracks were blocked someplace up the line, and they seemed to be poppin right out of her face. Her body was oiled with sweat, and bad as I was myself, I could smell her; she stank like a bobcat in heat. I remember I could see big oily drops rollin down her bosom and her belly. Her hips and thighs shone with it. It was one of those still, muggy nights we get out here in the summer sometimes, when the air smells green and sits on your chest like a pile of junk iron, and it seems like there's cornsilk in every breath you pull in. You wish it would thunder and lightnin and pour down a gusher on nights like that, but it never does. You wish the wind would blow, at least, and not just because it would cool you off if it did, but because it would make the sound of the corn a little easier to bear ... the sound of it pushin itself up out of the ground all around you, soundin like an old man with arthritis tryin to get out of bed in the mornin without wakin his wife.

'Then I noticed she was scared as well as mad this time - someone had really looped the fear of God into her. And the change in her was speedin up. Whatever it was that happened to her, it had knocked her into a higher gear. She didn't look older, exactly; she looked less there. Her hair had started to look finer, like a baby's hair. You could see her scalp through it. And her skin looked like it was startin to grow its own skin - this fine, misty webbing over her cheeks, around her nostrils, at the corners of her eyes, between her fingers. Wherever there was a fold in the skin, that was where you could see it best. It fluttered a little as she walked. You want to hear something crazy? When the County Fair comes to town these days, I can't bear to go near the cotton-candy stands on the midway. You know the machine they make it with? Looks like a doughnut and goes round and round, and the man sticks in a paper cone and winds the pink sugar up on it? That's what Ardelia's skin was starting to look like -those fine strands of spun sugar. I think I know now what I was seein. She was doin what caterpillars do when they go to sleep. She was spinnin a cocoon around herself.

'I stood in the doorway for some time, watchin her go back and forth. She didn't notice me for a long while. She was too busy rollin around in whatever bed of nettles it was she'd stumbled into. Twice she hammered her fist against a wall and smashed all the way through it - paper, plaster, and lath. It sounded like breakin bones, but it didn't seem to do her no hurt at all, and there was no blood. She screamed each time, too, but not with pain. What I heard was the sound of a pissed-off she-cat ... but, like I said, there was fear underneath her anger. And what she screamed was that deputy's name.

''John Power!' she'd scream, and whack! Right through the wall her fist would go. 'God damn you, John Power! I'll teach you to stay out of my business! You want to look at me? Fine! But I'll teach you how to do it! I'll teach you, little baby of mine!' Then she'd walk on, so fast she was almost runnin, and her bare feet'd come down so hard they shook the whole damn house, it seemed like. She'd be mutterin to herself while she walked. Then her lip would curl, her eyes would glare redder'n ever, and whack! would go her fist, right through the wall and a little puff of plaster comin out through the hole. 'John Power, you don't dare!' she'd snarl. 'You don't dare cross me!'

'But you only had to look into her face to know she was afraid he did dare. And if you'd known Deputy Power, you'd have known she was right to be worried. He was smart, and he wasn't afraid of nothing. He was a good deputy and a bad man to cross.

'She got into the kitchen doorway on her fourth or fifth trip through the house, and all at once she saw me. Her eyes glared into mine, and her mouth began to stretch out into that horn shape - only now it was all coated with those spidery, smoky threads - and I thought I was dead. If she couldn't lay hands on John Power, she'd have me in his place.

'She started toward me and I slid down the kitchen door in a kind of puddle. She saw that and she stopped. The red light went out of her eyes. She changed in the wink of an eye. She looked and spoke as if I'd come into a fancy