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.
AFTERWORD
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 abandoned it, but it has come to haunt my fiction.
THE BOY WHO HOOKED THE SUN
O
n the eighth day a boy cast his line into the sea. The sun of the eighth day was just rising, making a road of gold that ran from its own broad, blank face all the way to the wild coastline of Atlantis, where the boy sat upon a jutting emerald; the sun was much younger then and not nearly so wise to the ways of men as it is now. It took the bait.
The boy jerked his pole to set the hook, and grinned, and spit into the sea while he let the line run out. He was not such a boy as you or I have ever seen, for there was a touch of emerald in his hair and there were flakes of sun-gold in his eyes. His skin was sun browned, and his fingernails were small and short and a little dirty, so he was just such a boy as lives down the street from us both. Years ago the boy’s father had sailed away to trade the shining stones of Atlantis for the wine and ram skins of the wild barbarians of Hellas, leaving the boy and his mother very poor.
All day the sun thrashed and rolled and leaped about. Sometimes it sounded, plunging all the Earth into night, and sometimes it leaped high into the sky, throwing up sprays of stars. Sometimes it feigned to be dead, and sometimes it tried to wrap his line around the moon to break it. And the boy let it tire itself, sometimes reeling in and sometimes letting out more line; but through it all he kept a tight grip on his pole.
The richest man in the village, the moneylender, who owned the house where the boy and his mother lived, came to him, saying, “You must cut your line, boy, and let the sun go. When it runs out, it brings winter and withers all the blossoms in my orchard. When you reel it in, it brings droughty August to dry all the canals that water my barley fields. Cut your line!”
But the boy only laughed at him and pelted him with the shining stones of Atlantis, and at last the richest man in the village went away.
Then the strongest man in the village, the smith, who could meet the charge of a wild ox and wrestle it to the ground, came to the boy, saying, “Cut your line, boy, or I’ll break your neck,” for the richest man had paid him to do it.
But the boy only laughed at him and pelted him with the shining stones of Atlantis, and when the strongest man in the village seized him by the neck, he seized the strongest man in return and threw him into the sea, for the power of the sun had run down the boy’s line and entered into him.
