I stood near her bed, folding clean linens. Though our washing machine hadn’t worked for years and all our laundry had to be done by hand with a washboard, I changed her bed sheets every day so as they’d always smell fresh. There was so little else I could do for her now.
“…Well, Joss died a few days later. A nurse from the hospital wrote to tell me. I figured he was out of his mind with fear or pain when he saw that thirty-foot yellow-haired man with the sword on horseback…”
“Of course, he was,” I agreed absently. I was used to her saying odd things. The morphine worked on her pain, but it also worked on her mind, and there were times when she thought she was a little girl again in Texas. I never had any trouble picturing her as a child. Rather, I’d always had trouble picturing her as an adult.
“But now I’m not so sure…”
“About what?”
“About the yellow-haired man.”
“Why?”
“Because the last couple of days, off and on, there’s been a Negro with feathers standing beside my door watching me.”
Reflexively I looked to the door.
“Do you see him?” she asked.
I didn’t, of course, and I’d just given her a whopping dose of morphine, but I didn’t see the point in arguing with her either. “Yes, I see him,” I said agreeably.
“Liar! He’s not there now. Funny it should be a Negro. The only Negro I ever really knew was the girl who kept house for us in Texas after Mama died. Her name was Josephina. The Reverend never allowed her to speak in his presence. And I don’t think I’ve seen one ever in Galen.”
“Why don’t you tell him to go away if you don’t like him watching you?”
“I do like it. He’s here for a reason. Like the song.” She began to hum, “…comin’ for to carry me home…”
“Stop it!”
“Remember that night, Darcy?”
“What night?” I said, but I knew.
“The night you came home from reform school.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She bunched up the pillows so that she could lean her elbows on them. “We’ve got to talk about it. And now. Because after I’m gone, there won’t be anybody left you can talk about it with. Unless you plan on telling Luca.”
“I’d never tell him.”
“Why? He’d never tell on us.”
“He wouldn’t understand. He’s like you. He thinks people are better than they are. And he’s so disappointed when he finds they’re just as rotten as everybody else.”
“You’re probably best off not telling, I guess. He’s too honest for his own good. A lie like that would eat at him. How well do you remember that night?”
“It’s not something a person’s likely to forget. I mean the body was two days old and getting gamy by the time I got home.” I didn’t like the turn the conversation had taken, so I took up a pile of socks and tried to match them.
“Where’d you put him, Darcy?”
“In the orchard,” I said. I couldn’t seem to find the mate to a navy blue one. “There’s a spot where the earth was soft. Too soft, maybe. Twice I caught Old Sam sniffing around the spot and once he started digging and I had to chase him away.”
“Do you know what happened that night, Darcy?”
She was looking at me sharply now with none of the morphine haze that sometimes dimmed her eyes. I wouldn’t look up. “No, and I don’t care.” It was some years now since Jesse had made his grand entrance into our lives and it felt like a hundred.
“Well, what do you think happened? In all these years, you must have formed some idea.”
“I figure you and Jesse had a fight and you killed him. He was such a little turd, it wouldn’t have taken much to do him in. Then you panicked and sent a message to me.”
She looked suddenly disappointed. “Don’t you remember what I told you that night, before you dragged him away?”
“You said, ‘I want you to know I didn’t do it.’”
“Well, didn’t you believe me?”
“No. I did not.”
“I’m telling you I didn’t do it.” She was getting herself all worked up now, and I wished there was a way to stop this talk, but it had been coming on too long.
“Then who did?” I asked flippantly. Maybe I was still holding a grudge. Even now, it galled me to think how I’d had to leave the Schuylkill County School for Wayward Girls in the middle of the night without even a chance to say goodbye to the librarian.
Jewel didn’t answer right away, still hurt that I had never believed her. Then she opened her mouth to speak, closed it, opened it again, and said, “Reverend Hamilton did it.”
Too shocked to react, I could only let my mouth hang open like an idiot.
“Reverend Hamilton killed Jesse,” she repeated.
“How?”
“He pushed him and—”
“I don’t mean how’d it happen. I mean why’d it happen?” I tried and failed not to be angry at a sick woman, but thinking how I’d gone to all that trouble to cover up for a man whose guts I’d always hated was more than I could swallow gracefully.
“It wasn’t really his fault,” Jewel was quick to say. “He didn’t mean to do it. It’s just one thing led to another.”
“What things?” I asked, tight-lipped.
After a deep sigh, she began. “Me and Jesse were fighting as usual. After
