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Go in the house, I said. The worst is over.

Is it, Poppa? He looked at me solemnly. Is it?

Yes. Are you all right? Are you going to faint again?

Did I?

Yes.

Im all right. I just I dont know why I laughed like that. I was confused. Because Im relieved, I guess. Its over! A chuckle escaped him, and he clapped his hands over his mouth like a little boy who has inadvertently said a bad word in front of his grandma.

Yes, I said. Its over. Well stay here. Your mother ran away to St. Louis or perhaps it was Chicago but well stay here.

She? His eyes strayed to the well, and the cap leaning against three of those stakes that were somehow so grim in the starlight.

Yes, Hank, she did. His mother hated to hear me call him Hank, she said it was common, but there was nothing she could do about it now. Up and left us cold. And of course were sorry, but in the meantime, chores wont wait. Nor schooling.

And I can still be friends with Shannon.

Of course, I said, and in my minds eye I saw Arlettes middle finger tapping its lascivious circle around her crotch. Of course you can. But if you should ever feel the urge to confess to Shannon-

An expression of horror dawned on his face. Not ever!

Thats what you think now, and Im glad. But if the urge should come on you someday, remember this: shed run from you.

Acourse she would, he muttered.

Now go in the house and get both wash-buckets out of the pantry. Better get a couple of milk-buckets from the barn, as well. Fill them from the kitchen pump and suds em up with that stuff she keeps under the sink.

Should I heat the water?

I heard my mother say, Cold water for blood, Wilf. Remember that.

No need, I said. Ill be in as soon as Ive put the cap back on the well.

He started to turn away, then seized my arm. His hands were dreadfully cold. No one can ever know! He whispered this hoarsely into my face. No one can ever know what we did!

No one ever will, I said, sounding far bolder than I felt. Things had already gone wrong, and I was starting to realize that a deed is never like the dream of a deed.

She wont come back, will she?

What?

She wont haunt us, will she? Only he said haint, the kind of country talk that had always made Arlette shake her head and roll her eyes. It is only now, eight years later, that I had come to realize how much haint sounds like hate.

No, I said.

But I was wrong.

I looked down the well, and although it was only 20 feet deep, there was no moon and all I could see was the pale blur of the quilt. Or perhaps it was the pillow-case. I lowered the cover into place, straightened it a little, then walked back to the house. I tried to follow the path wed taken with our terrible bundle, purposely scuffing my feet, trying to obliterate any traces of blood. Id do a better job in the morning.

I discovered something that night that most people never have to learn: murder is sin, murder is damnation (surely of ones own mind and spirit, even if the atheists are right and there is no afterlife), but murder is also work. We scrubbed the bedroom until our backs were sore, then moved on to the hall, the sitting room, and finally the porch. Each time we thought we were done, one of us would find another splotch. As dawn began to lighten the sky in the east, Henry was on his knees scrubbing the cracks between the boards of the bedroom floor, and I was down on mine in the sitting room, examining Arlettes hooked rug square inch by square inch, looking for that one drop of blood that might betray us. There was none there-we had been fortunate in that respect-but a dime-sized drop beside it. It looked like blood from a shaving cut. I cleaned it up, then went back into our bedroom to see how Henry was faring. He seemed better now, and I felt better myself. I think it was the coming of daylight, which always seems to dispel the worst of our horrors. But when George, our rooster, let out his first lusty crow of the day, Henry jumped. Then he laughed. It was a small laugh, and there was still something wrong with it, but it didnt terrify me the way his laughter had done when he regained consciousness between the barn and the old livestock well.

I cant go to school today, Poppa. Im too tired. And I think people might see it on my face. Shannon especially.

I hadnt even considered school, which was another sign of half-planning. Half- assed planning. I should have put the deed off until County School was out for the summer. It would only have meant waiting a week. You can stay home until Monday, then tell the teacher you had the grippe and didnt want to spread it to the rest of the class.

Its not the grippe, but I am sick.

So was I.

We had spread a clean sheet from her linen closet (so many things in that house were hers but no more) and piled the bloody bedclothes onto it. The mattress was also bloody, of course, and would have to go. There was another, not so good, in the back shed. I bundled the bedclothes together, and Henry carried the mattress. We went back out to the well just before the sun cleared the horizon. The sky above was perfectly clear. It was going to be a good day for corn.

I cant look in there, Poppa.

You dont have to, I said, and once more lifted the wooden cover. I was thinking that I should have left it up to begin with-think ahead, save chores, my own Poppa used to say-and knowing that I never could have. Not after feeling (or thinking I felt) that last blind twitch.

Now I could see to the bottom, and what I saw was horrible. She had landed sitting up with her legs crushed beneath her. The pillow-case was split open and lay in her lap. The quilt and counterpane had come loose and were spread around her shoulders like a complicated ladies stole. The burlap bag, caught around her head and holding her hair back like a snood, completed the picture: she almost looked as if she were dressed for a night on the town.

Yes! A night on the town! Thats why Im so happy! Thats why Im grinning from ear to ear! And do you notice how red my lipstick is, Wilf? Id never wear this shade to church, would I? No, this is the kind of lipstick a woman puts on when she wants to do that nasty thing to her man. Come on down, Wilf, why dont you? Dont bother with the ladder, just jump! Show me how bad you want me! You did a nasty thing to me, now let me do one to you!

Poppa? Henry was standing with his face toward the barn and his shoulders hunched, like a boy expecting to be beaten. Is everything all right?

Yes. I flung down the bundle of linen, hoping it would land on top of her and cover that awful upturned grin, but a whim of draft floated it into her lap, instead. Now she appeared to be sitting in some strange and bloodstained cloud.

Is she covered? Is she covered up, Poppa?

I grabbed the mattress and tupped it in. It landed on end in the mucky water and then fell against the circular stone-cobbled wall, making a little lean-to shelter over her, at last hiding her cocked-back head and bloody grin.

Now she is. I lowered the old wooden cap back into place, knowing there was more work ahead: the well would have to be filled in. Ah, but that was long overdue, anyway. It was a danger, which was why I had planted the circle of stakes around it. Lets go in the house and have breakfast.

I couldnt eat a single bite!

But he did. We both did. I fried eggs, bacon, and potatoes, and we ate every bite. Hard work makes a person hungry. Everyone knows that.

Henry slept until late afternoon. I stayed awake. Some of those hours I spent at the kitchen table, drinking cup after cup of black coffee. Some of them I spent walking in the corn, up one row and down another, listening to the swordlike leaves rattle in a light breeze. When its June and corns on the come, it seems almost to talk. This disquiets some people (and there are the foolish ones who say its the sound of the corn actually growing), but I had always found that quiet rustling a comfort. It cleared my mind. Now, sitting in this city hotel room, I miss it. City life is no life for a country man; for such a man that life is a kind of damnation in itself.

Confessing, I find, is also hard work.

I walked, I listened to the corn, I tried to plan, and at last I did plan. I had to, and not just for myself.

There had been a time not 20 years before, when a man in my position neednt have worried; in those days, a mans business was his own, especially if he happened to be a respected farmer: a fellow who paid his taxes, went to church on Sundays, supported the Hemingford Stars baseball team, and voted the straight Republican ticket. I think that in those days, all sorts of things happened on farms out in what we called the middle. Things that went unremarked, let alone reported. In those days, a mans wife was considered a mans business, and if she disappeared, there was an end to it.

But those days were gone, and even if they hadnt been there was the land. The 100 acres. The Farrington Company wanted those acres for their God damned hog butchery, and Arlette had led them to believe they were going to get them. That meant danger, and danger meant that daydreams and half-plans would no longer suffice.

When I went back to the house at midafternoon, I was tired but clear-headed and calm at last. Our few cows were bellowing, their morning milking hours overdue. I did that chore, then put them to pasture where Id let them stay until sunset, instead of herding them back in for their second milking just after supper. They didnt care; cows accept what is. If Arlette had been more like one of our bossies, I reflected, she would still be alive and nagging me for a new washing machine out of the Monkey Ward catalogue. I probably would have bought it for her, too. She could always talk me around. Except when it came to the land. About that she should have known better. Land is a mans business.

Henry was still sleeping. In the weeks that followed, he slept a great deal, and I let him, although in an ordinary summer I would have filled his days with chores once school let out. And he would have filled his evenings either visiting over at Cotteries or walking up and down our dirt road with Shannon, the two of them holding hands and watching the moon rise. When they werent kissing, that was. I hoped what wed done had not spoiled such sweet pastimes for him, but believed it had. That I had. And of course I was right.

I cleared my mind of such thoughts, telling myself it was enough for now that he was sleeping. I had to make another visit to the well, and it would be best to do it alone. Our stripped bed seemed to shout murder. I went to the closet and studied her clothes. Women have so many, dont they? Skirts and dresses and blouses and sweaters and underthings-some of the latter so complicated and strange a man cant even tell which side is the front. To take them all would be a mistake, because the truck was still parked in the barn and the Model T under the elm. She had left on foot and taken only what she could carry. Why hadnt she taken the T? Because I would have heard it start and stopped her going. That was believable enough. So a single valise.

I packed it with what I thought a woman would need and what she could not bear to leave. I put in her few pieces of good jewelry and the gold-framed picture of her mama and poppa. I debated over the toiletries in the bathroom, and decided to leave everything except for her atomizer bottle of Florient perfume and her hornbacked brush. There was a Testament in her night table, given to her by Pastor Hawkins, but I had never seen her read it, and so left it where it was. But I took the bottle of iron pills, which she kept for her monthlies.

Henry was still sleeping, but now tossing from side to side as if in the grip of bad dreams. I hurried about my business as quickly as I could, wanting to be in the house when he woke up. I went around the barn to the well, put the valise down, and lifted the splintery old cap for the third time. Thank God Henry wasnt with me. Thank God he didnt see what I saw. I think it would have driven him insane. It almost drove me insane.

The mattress had been shunted aside. My first thought was that she had pushed it away before trying to climb out. Because she was still alive. She was breathing. Or so it seemed to me at first. Then, just as ratiocinative ability began to resurface through my initial shock-when I began to ask myself what sort of breathing might cause a womans dress to rise and fall not just at the bosom but all the way from neckline to hem-her jaw began to move, as if she were struggling to talk. It was not words that emerged from her greatly enlarged mouth, however, but the rat which had been chewing on the delicacy of her tongue. Its tail appeared first. Then her lower jaw yawned wider as it backed out, the claws on its back feet digging into her chin for purchase.

The rat plopped into her lap, and when it did, a great flood of its brothers and sisters poured out from under her dress. One had something white caught in its whiskers-a fragment of her slip, or perhaps her skimmies. I chucked the valise at them. I didnt think about it-my mind was roaring with revulsion and horror-but just did it. It landed on her legs. Most of the rodents-perhaps all-avoided it nimbly enough. Then they streamed into a round black hole that the mattress (which they must have pushed aside through sheer weight of numbers) had covered, and were gone in a trice. I knew well enough what that hole was; the mouth of the pipe that had supplied water to the troughs in the barn until the water level sank too low and rendered it useless.

Her dress collapsed around her. The counterfeit breathing stopped. But she was staring at me, and what had seemed a clowns grin now looked like a gorgons glare. I could see rat-bites on her cheeks, and one of her earlobes was gone.

Dear God, I whispered. Arlette, Im so sorry.

Your apology is not accepted, her glare seemed to say. And when they find me like this, with rat-bites on my dead face and the underwear beneath my dress chewed away, youll ride the lightning over in Lincoln for sure. And mine will be the last face you see. Youll see me when the electricity fries your liver and sets fire to your heart, and Ill be grinning.