JOHN

 

In the beginning, it seemed so easy. She was not a beauty. She was no longer young. Low hanging fruit ready to drop from the bough, and all I had to do was hold out my hand. Her note read simply: “Tomorrow. Please Come.” No signature. None needed. Next day, I was knocking on her father’s front door on Second Street, no invitation, no luggage, not even a toothbrush. 

 

“Come in,” the old skinflint said, almost smiling. He liked me. Perhaps I reminded him of Sarah, and happier days. When he was married to my sister, he was young, just starting out, but now he was used up, shriveled, his frail body gave off a sour piss stink unmasked by the mothballs in his watch pocket. He hadn’t an idea of what I had planned with his daughter. 

“May I spend the night?” I asked. I told him I had come to town for a visit. And that was that. My brother-in-law and his second wife welcomed me, shared their meager dinner, we sat together around the table in the stifling dining room, sweltering in our stiff collars as we chatted amiably about nothing. I did not see her, the spinster, the daughter. When I asked, her step mother said crisply that she did not deign to join the family for meals, that she ate separately, the old lady’s mouth then shut tight like purse strings. Her bosom rose and fell, a battleship prow over the crockery, while out of the corner of her eye she fixed me in the way that women have been looking at me since I was first a lad in long pants. Oh you silly old fool, I thought to myself, you don’t know what I know about you. Maybe she sensed my gaze, her hand fluttered up to her neck in a nervous, bird like display that was ludicrously dainty in a woman of her size. 

The girl was avoiding me, and I began to wonder. Where was she?

That evening, the couple and I sat in the threadbare sitting room, listening to the mantle clock tick tock impatiently, incessantly. The Mrs darned his old wool sock by dim lamp light. 

“When are you going to have the electricity installed?” I asked Andrew, not for the first time.

He just chuffed, the closest he ever got to a laugh. “Unnecessary luxury,” he said, and went back to his Providence Journal. In the darkness I watched the paleness of his face, the shadows cast by the kerosine wick glow that showed the delicacy of his skull under paper white skin.

I heard her come in through the front door, a little after 9. She did not come into the room where we sat to say goodnight, she trod heavily up the stairs to her own room. Had she changed course? Would she not stick to our purpose?  Perhaps fear had entered into her, made her pause before the fatal step. I did not know. 

 

That night, while the house was asleep, while the whole town seemed to sleep, bare feet slapped along the floor boards, a candle flickered under the door, the hinges groaned, ever so quietly, as if I dreamt the scene. She stood there. An apparition. Her breath made the flame sputter, in its feeble glow her loose hair glinted copper against the fine whiteness of a wrap she wore, clutched closed in her trembling hand.  All was still, and silent. Through the open windows, I heard the faint whinny of a restless horse, the gentle thump of overripe pears that fell to the ground down in the orchard. Not a breath of air stirred. Moonlight streaming in through the lace curtains played patterns across her face as she remained at the threshold, looking at me. 

 

 And then the robe whispered open.

 

Afterwards, her heavy breasts pressed up against my chest as we lay there sweating, listening to the quiet. She traced my lips with her finger, touched my beard. “How will you do it?” she asked suddenly, cutting the silence with a rush of words.  

I told her, again, that the less she knew, the better, that she needed to remain perfectly innocent. 

“Innocent?” she repeated, laughing, a brief flash of something almost like happiness lightened her countenance from within, and then it was gone.

Innocent, I said. 

“You will take care of it? You’ll do it?” as though she had forsaken all trust in me. 

I assured her, again. I kissed her, though her lips were fleshy and she tasted of turned milk. 

Then her eyes flickered—people would say about her, during the trial and acquittal and in the long years after, that the intensity of her gaze made them uncomfortable, they would say that she seemed distant, haughty, aloof, sly--that night, I saw in those eyes an animal, with an animal’s fear and primitive passion, I felt the heat of her, banked up from within, she had been repressed, thwarted, corseted into twisted shapes, broken like a colt, made to take the bit. Still, she wanted. She burned with want. She suffered with it, a compelling need to be free, free from the old people, free of this house with its closeness and decay. 

 

She would do as she was told. I was sure of it, that she was in my power.  In truth, she would just be trading one master for another.

 

It pleased me to muse on this, as we fell into sleep, that it was I who held the reins. It would not be very long when I would come to understand just which of us all was being brought to slaughter.

 

And she would remain innocent. 

Or at least, not guilty.