“Me?”
“Yep. He said maybe he hadn’t been fair to you the way he’d acted about Aaron getting cut and all. He said, upon reflection, it was probably more Aaron’s doing than yours. Said he’d found out something that made him realize that. He thought maybe you were better off in reform school and away from the inn and Galen, that if you were given a decent upbringing, you’d grow into a fine young woman, and if I was any kind of mother, I’d use the time you were away to rid myself of all the evil influences around the inn, starting with bloodsuckers like Jesse. Well, Jesse took offence at that, naturally, and he said it was you, Darcy, who made all the trouble and that you were just no good, and the best thing for everybody would be if you never came home.”
She began coughing then and I went to get her water. After a few sips, she said, “I couldn’t let him say those things about you, my own child, and I turned on him like a snake. I said Reverend Hamilton made sense about getting rid of him, and I wanted him to leave that very night. That was when Jesse went crazy. He smashed every lamp in the room, and the girls came running up to the landing, but I told them to go back to their rooms and not come out again that night, no matter what they heard. Then Jesse grabbed me by the throat, and I thought he was going to break my neck. But the reverend came up and made him let me go. That’s when Jesse hit him, which wasn’t right because the reverend had twenty years on Jesse. I thought he’d never get up when Jesse knocked him down, but he did. Got up finally and hit Jesse right back. It wasn’t a very solid punch, no force to it and poorly aimed. Which is why the reverend and I just kept looking at each other when Jesse didn’t come back at him again. Then we saw the blood running out the side of his head, and we knew he’d hit something going down.”
She stopped talking then and bowed her head like she was in church, I guess in reverence for the deceased, but I felt no such reverence, and I wanted to hear the rest. “And then what happenened?”
“Everything got very confusing after that. The reverend was so shaken I had to get some liquor into him, and I was in no condition myself to be comforting him. He missed his mouth and spilled liquor all down his shirtfront. ‘My God, my God,’ he kept saying, ‘I’ve killed a man.’” I didn’t say a word because I was almost as scared as him. He said we should get a doctor, but we both knew it was too late for that. Then he came up with the worst idea of all. He wanted to go for the sheriff, and you know how nervous police and clergy make me, and to have both under my roof at the same time would have been more than I could stand. I had to think fast. I told him if it got out, he’d be ruined. And seeing as how he hadn’t meant to do it, there was no reason for him to tell anybody. Poor man. He just kept nodding his head up and down like a woodpecker and running his fingers through what hair he had left. ‘What shall I do?’ he kept repeating. I thought I’d go mad if he said it one more time. So I told him to go home and not say a word to anybody. I’d take care of everything. That’s when I sat down and wrote my message to you. I waited for the postman next morning, and I gave him twenty dollars to see to it that my letter got to you right away. I knew you’d know what to do, Darcy. You always know what to do.”
I laughed soundlessly. The spit in my mouth tasted of bile. To her death, Jewel would never know quite what to do about anything.
“I’m sorry I sent that letter, Darcy. I ought never to have drug you into it, except that I knew you’d take care of it better than any of us could.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said. “I can only imagine where we’d all be today if you hadn’t. What I can’t understand is why you’d risk everything you had for a man who lived to make trouble for us.”
She twisted her bed covers in her hand and said, “I can’t really explain that even to myself. It just seems like when you try to decide who’s bad and who’s good, it’s too tangled to figure out. I mean if the reverend hadn’t wanted to talk about your upbringing and then if he hadn’t unwound Jesse’s fingers from my throat, none of it would’ve happened. And Jesse wasn’t always a son of a bitch. Sometimes, he’d make me laugh and laugh. But once Jesse was dead, there was nothing I could do for him, but I could help the reverend and he needed help badly. I’ve done plenty of things I’m ashamed of, but I have never refused a human being my help. And it’s always come back to me, the help when I needed it, because the world
