place on the endtable and that gallon jug is on the floor beside it. I look at the jug and can't hardly believe what I'm seeing: there's not but an inch or so left. It's almost impossible for me to believe he's drunk so much—he who isn't used to drinking at all—but the stink hanging around him, so thick I can almost see it, is very persuasive.
The pickaxe leans against the head of the sofa, and there's a piece of paper stuck on the end that came down through my bed. I know it's a note he's left for me, and I don't want to read it, but I have to. He's written on three lines, but there are only eight words. Too few to ever forget.
KILL ME
THEN PUT ME WITH PAUL
PLEASE
19
Lisey, crying harder than ever, turned this page into her lap along with the others. Now there were only two left. The printing had grown loose, a little wandering, not always sticking to the lines, quite clearly tired. She knew what came next—I put a pickaxe in his head while he was a-sleepun, he had told her under the yum-yum tree—and did she have to read the details here? Was there anything in the marriage vows about having to subject yourself to your dead husband's confession of patricide?
And yet those pages called to her, cried to her like some lonely thing that has lost everything but its voice. She dropped her eyes to the final pages, determined that if she must finish, she would do so as quickly as she could.
20
I don't want to, but I take up the pickaxe anyway and stand there with it in my hands, looking at him, the lord of my life, the tyrant of all my days. I have hated him often and he has never given me cause to love him enough, I know that now, but he has given me some, especially during those nightmare weeks after Paul went bad. And in that five o'clock living room with the day's first gray light creeping in and the sleet ticking like a clock and the sound of his wheezing snores below me and an ad on the radio for some discount furniture store in Wheeling, West Virginia, I will never visit, I know it comes down to a bald choice between those two, love and hate. Now I'll find out which one rules my child's heart. I can let him live and run down the road to Mulie's, run into some unknown new life, and that will condemn him to the hell he fears and in many ways deserves. Richly deserves. First hell on earth, the hell of a cell in some looneybin, and then maybe hell forever after, which is what he really fears. Or I can kill him and set him free. This choice is mine to make, and there is no God to help me make it, for I believe in none.
Instead I pray to my brother, who loved me until the bad-gunky stole his heart and mind. I ask him to tell me what to do, if he's there. And I get an answer—although whether it is really from Paul or just from my own imagination masquerading as Paul I suppose I'll never know. In the end, I don't see that it matters; I need an answer and I get one. In my ear, just as clearly as he ever spoke when he was alive, Paul says: 'Daddy's prize is a kiss.'
I take hold on the pickaxe then. The ad on the radio finishes and Hank Williams comes on, singing 'Why don't you love me like you used to do, How come you treat me like a worn-out shoe?' And
21
Here three lines were blank before the words took up again, this time in the past tense and addressing her directly. The rest was crammed together with almost no regard for the blueruled notebook lines, and Lisey was sure he had written the final passage in a single rush. She read it the same way. Turning over to the last page as she did and continuing on, continually wiping away her tears so she could see clearly enough to get the sense of what he was saying. The mental seeing part, she found, was hellishly easy. The little boy, barefooted, wearing perhaps his only pair of untorn jeans, raising the pickaxe over his sleeping father in the gray predawn light while the radio plays, and for a moment it only hangs there in the air that reeks of blackberry wine and everything is the same. Then
22
I brought it down. Lisey, I brought it down in love—I swear— and I killed my father. I thought I might have to hit him with it again but that single blow was enough and all my life it's been on my mind, all my life it's been the thought inside every thought, I get up thinking I killed my father and go to bed thinking it. It has moved like a ghost behind every line I ever wrote in every novel, any story: I killed my father. I told you that day under the yum-yum tree, and I think that gave me just enough relief to keep me from exploding completely five years or ten or fifteen down the line. But a statement isn't the same as telling.
Lisey, if you're reading this, I've gone on. I think my time is short, but such time as I had (and it was very good time) is all down to you. You have given me so much. Just give me this much more—your eye on these last few words, the hardest I've ever written.
No tale can tell how ugly such dying is, even if it's instantaneous. Thank God I didn't hit him a glancing blow and have to do it again; thank God there was no squealing or crawling. I hit him dead center, right where I meant to, but even mercy is ugly in the living memory; that's a lesson I learned well when I was just ten. His skull exploded. Hair and blood and brains showered up, all over that blanket he'd spread on the back of the couch. Snot flew out of his nose and his tongue fell out of his mouth. His head went over to the side and I heard soft puttering noises as the blood and brains leaked out of his head. Some of it splashed on my feet and it was warm. Hank Williams was still on the radio. One of Daddy's hands made a fist, then opened again. I smelled shit and knew he'd left a load in his pants. And I knew that was the last of him.
The pickax was still stick out his head.
I crep away into the corn of the room and curl up and I cried. I cried and cried. I guess maybe I slep some too, I don't kno, but there came a time when it was brighter and the sun was almost out and I think it might have been noonish. If so, I guess 7 hours or so wen by. That was when I first tried to take my Daddy to Boo'ya Moon and couldn't. I thought if I got something to eat, so I did but still I couldn't. Then I thought if I took a bath and got the blut off me, his blood, and clean up some of the mess around wehre he was but still I coulnt. I tried and tried. Off and on quite a bit. Two days, I guess. Sometime I'd look at his wrap in the blanket and make believe he was say You keep on pluggin Scoot you old sumbitch, you'll make it like in a story. I'd try, then I'd clean, try and clean, eet somethig and try summore. I cleen that hole house! Top to bottom! Once I went to Boo'ya by myself prove I still had the nack and I dit but I coulnt take my daddy. I trite so hard Lisey.
23
Several blank lines here. At the bottom of the last page he had written: Some things are like an ANCHOR Lisey do you remember?
'I do, Scott,' she murmured. 'I do. And your father was one of them, wasn't he?' Wondering how many days and nights in all. How many days and nights alone with the corpse of Andrew 'Sparky' Landon before Scott finally gave up plugging and invited the world in. Wondering how in God's name he had stood up to it without going completely insane.
There was a little more on the other side of the sheet. She flipped it over and saw that he had answered one of her questions.
Five days I tride. Finaly gave up and warped him in that blanket and put him down the dry well. The next time the sleet stoped I went to Mulie's and said 'My Daddy's took my big brother and I guess they up and left me.' They took me to the County Sheriff, a fat old man named Gosling and he took me to the Child Welfare and I was 'on the County' as they say. So far as I know Gosling was the only cop who ever went up there to the home place, and big deal. My own Daddy once said 'Sheriff Gosling couldn't find his own ass after he took a shit.'
Below this was another space of three lines, and when the printing resumed—the last four lines of communication from her husband—she could see the effort he had made to get hold of himself, to find his adult self. He had made the effort for her, she thought. No, knew.
Babyluv: If you need an anchor to hold your place in the world—not Boo'ya Moon but the one we shared, use the african. You know how to get it back. Kisses—at least a thousand,
Scott
P.S. Everything the same. I love you.
24
Lisey could have sat there with his letter for a long time, but the afternoon was fleeting. The sun was still yellow, but it was now approaching the horizon and would soon begin to take on that thundering orange cast she
