everything up looking for more bodies. Dug in the yard and out in the fields and so on.”
“But they didn’t find any more?”
“No, they didn’t. Not then,” Howie said. “Meantime, Jackson was in jail like I told you. He had kind of reddish hair, so the paper called him Redbeard. Because of Bluebeard, you know, and him not wanting his wife to look inside that cellar room. They called the house Redbeard’s Castle.
“They did things a whole lot quicker in those times, and it wasn’t much more than a month before he was tried. Naturally, his wife had to get up on the stand.”
I said, “A wife can’t be forced to testify against her husband.”
“She wasn’t testifying against him; she was testifying for him. What a good man he was, and all that. Who else would do it? Of course when she’d had her say, the district attorney got to go to work on her. You know how they do.
“He asked her about that room and she told him just about what I told you. Jackson, he said he wanted a place for himself and told her not to go in there. She said she hadn’t even known the door was locked till the sheriff tried to open it. Then the district attorney said, ‘Didn’t you know he was asking for your help, that your husband was asking for your help, that the whole room there was a cry for help, and he wanted you to go in there and find those bodies so he wouldn’t have to kill again?’ ”
Howie fell silent for a mile or two. I tossed the butt of my cigar out the window and sat wondering if I would hear any more about those old and only too commonplace murders.
When Howie began talking again, it was as though he had never stopped. “That was the first time anybody from around here had heard that kind of talk, I think. Up till then, I guess everybody thought if a man wanted to get caught he’d just go to the police and say he did it. I always felt sorry for her, because of that. She was—I don’t know—like an owl in daylight. You know what I mean?”
I didn’t, and I told him so.
“The way she’d been raised, a man meant what he said. Then too, the man was the boss. Today when they get married there isn’t hardly a woman that promises to obey, but back then they all did it. If they’d asked the minister to leave that out, most likely he’d have told them he wouldn’t perform the ceremony. Now the rules were all changed, only nobody’d told her that.
“I believe she took it pretty hard, and of course it didn’t do any good, her getting on the stand or the district attorney talking like that to her either. The jury came back in about as quick as they’d gone out, and they said he was guilty, and the judge said sentencing would be next day. He was going to hang him, and everybody knew it. They hanged them back then.”
“Sure,” I said.
“That next morning his wife came to see him in the jail. I guess he knew she would, because he asked the old man that swept out to lend him a razor and so forth. Said he wanted to look good. He shaved and then he waited till he heard her step.”
Howie paused to let me comment or ask a question. I thought I knew what was coming, and there didn’t seem to be much point in saying anything.
“When he heard her coming, he cut his throat with the razor blade. The old man was with her, and he told the paper about it afterward. He said they came up in front of the cell and Jackson was standing there with blood all running down his shirt. He really was Redbeard for true then. After a little bit, his knees gave out and he fell down in a heap.
“His wife tried to sell the farm, but nobody wanted that house. She moved back with her folks, quit calling herself Sarah Jackson. She was a good-looking woman, and the land brought her some money. After a year or so she got married again and had a baby. Everybody forgot, I suppose you could say, except maybe for the families of the girls that had died. And the house, it’s still standing back there. You just saw it yourself.”
Howie pronounced the final words as though the story were over and he wanted to talk of something else, but I said, “You said there were more bodies found later.”
“Just one. Some kids were playing in that old house. It’s funny, isn’t it, that kids would find it when the sheriff and all those deputies didn’t.”
“Where was it?”
“Upstairs. In her sewing room. You remember I told you how he’d said she could have a room to herself too? Of course, the sheriff had looked in there, but it hadn’t been there when he looked. It was her, and she’d hung herself from a hook in the wall. Who do you think killed her?”
I glanced at him to see if he were serious. “I thought you said she killed herself?”
“That’s what they would have said, back when she married Jackson. But who killed her now? Jackson— Redbeard—when he killed those other girls and cut his throat like that? Or was it when he loved her? Or that district attorney? Or the sheriff? Or the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters of the girls Jackson got? Or her other husband, maybe some things he said to her? Or maybe it was just having her baby that killed her—baby blues, they call it. I’ve heard that too.”
“Postnatal depression,” I said. I shook my head. “I don’t suppose it makes much difference now.”
“It does to me,” Howie said. “She was my mother.” He pushed the lighter into the dashboard and lit a cigarette. “I thought I ought to tell you before somebody else does.”
For a moment I supposed that we had left the highway and circled back along some secondary road. To our right was another ruined gate, another outdated house collapsing slowly among young trees.
Long, long ago, when Rosemary and I were still a young couple with small children, we moved to a tiny town out in the country. If I remember right, the population was under three hundred. Everyone in town—except for us— knew everyone else. Half the time, they’d gone to kindergarten together. More than half the time, they were at least distantly related. Rosemary and I were outsiders, and very much so. It was much lonelier than an isolated house would have been, and lonelier too than any city apartment.
Often I drove past a big white house in which no one lived. Most of its windows were broken; one shutter hung from a single hinge. The yard was full of weeds. I never found out why the house had been abandoned or who had
