Chapter 24 #2
“When I learned of it. When I had it for certain. I went to Mateo Flores. I told him I wanted the man gone out of my life and out of this county for good. And Mateo’s men took him, off the road, that night, before ever he reached this house to sit at my table—so that I could say, after, in perfect truth, that he never arrived—and they did the thing I paid them well to do.
They brought him back here to me after it was done.
And I had him put in the ground out behind this house. Where I could—”
He stopped.
“Where you could know he was there,” Marielle said, very quiet.
“Every day for two years. Out your own back window. The man my mother grieved and I hunted, lying in your yard the whole time, and you knowing it, and her…” she moved her eyes to Charlotte Nash for a bare instant and back, “and her knowing it, too. The both of you sitting down to your suppers in this house with him in the ground out the window.”
Nash said nothing to that, and the saying of nothing was the whole of the answer and she had it.
She looked then, for a long moment, at Charlotte Nash.
And Charlotte Nash looked back at her, and her face was a thing Marielle hadn’t expected and wasn’t prepared for, full of a grief and a guilt so old and so deep and so long worn that Marielle understood, even in the cold and terrible place from which she was working tonight, that whatever had passed between this woman and her father had been a true thing to her.
It had been a real and a costly thing, and she had paid for it already in a coin past Marielle’s reckoning—two years of sitting in this house at this man’s side, eating at his table, sharing his bed, with her husband knowing the whole of it and the body of the man she’d loved in the ground out the back window where the husband could be sure she saw it too.
There was a punishment already long at work on Charlotte Nash that no rope and no rifle of Marielle’s could improve upon or hasten, and Marielle, in the cold, knew it when she saw it.
She made her decision the way she made all her decisions, all at once and entire, and once it was made she didn’t go back and turn it over again.
She found cord, the heavy silk sash that tied back the study’s curtains, and she pulled it down.
She tied Charlotte Nash to the heavy chair by the desk, wrist and ankle, not gently and not cruelly, only securely, and the woman let herself be tied and didn’t fight it and didn’t plead, only sat and let it be done to her with the tears running silent down her face.
Then Marielle got Nash up off the couch at the point of the rifle, and marched him down through his own dark house and the dark kitchen and out the back door into the full unbroken roar of the storm.
“Your shovel,” she said into the rain. “Wherever you keep it. Get it. Now.”
He got it, from a lean-to built off the back wall of the house, his soft hands shaking so on the handle that he near dropped it twice in the dark.
And she marched him out across the streaming sodden ground behind the house at the rifle’s point, the rain coming down now in solid gray sheets and the lightning walking close and bright overhead, out to the dead tree, the burned black trunk standing alone at the wood’s edge, killed by lightning years gone and left to stand, and she set the rifle on him and she told him to dig.
He dug. In the storm, in the rising mud, the rain filling the hole near as fast as he could empty it of earth, the careful man who had run a whole county from a fine study brought down in the end to a man on his knees in a flooding hole in the dark, clawing wet earth up out of it with a shovel under the muzzle of a dead man’s daughter’s rifle.
He dug and he wept openly and he begged of her some, between the spadefuls, his voice breaking up under the rain, and she stood over him in the storm with David’s rifle and answered none of it, not one word of it, only watched him go down through the two years of packed earth toward her father.
When the shovel struck at last what it struck, the dull soft different sound of it, and he stopped, and went still, and turned his streaming gray face up out of the hole toward her with everything gone out of it, she had him climb up out of the grave he had dug.
And then she shot him.
It wasn’t a thing she decided there in the storm at the lip of the grave.
It was a thing she had decided somewhere back along the dark walk up to the dark house, or perhaps somewhere back across the long two years, and the moment at the grave’s edge had only at last arrived at the decision and made it real.
The rifle bucked hard against her shoulder and the report rolled out flat across the sodden ground under the rain.
Nash went down beside the open grave he had dug, down into the mud, and lay there still in the pouring rain, and that was the whole of it and it was a smaller thing in the doing than she had ever imagined it would be across two years of imagining.
Marielle stood a moment with the rain hammering down on her bare head and the powder smoke torn off the muzzle and gone.
Then she let the rifle down to hang at her side, and she turned from the man in the mud and looked instead into the hole he had opened.
Into the flooding grave at the foot of the dead black tree, where the rain was pouring down now onto the wrapped and ruined and rain-darkened thing that was her father, come up at last out of two years of the dark into a storm.
Water rose in the bottom of the hole around him, and she stood over the open grave in the storm she had spent two years and a whole town to reach the bottom of, and she hadn’t the first idea in all the world how she was going to get him up out of it alone.
And the thing she hadn’t let herself go to, back in the lit study with the rifle steady and the work not yet done, came up on her now with the work done and nothing left to hold it off.
The grief came first and plainest, the low animal grief of the shape down in the rising water that had been her father and was her father yet.
But it didn’t come alone. For two years she had carried a particular man, the one her mother grieved and the county grieved, Emmett Vaughn who rode out one night and did not come home, taken by hard country and worse men, and she had built two years of her life and the whole of the hunt on the back of that man.
The man in the hole was not that man.
The man in the hole had died for a thing he had done in secret under another man’s roof, had gotten himself killed for it, and had left her and her mother behind to grieve a clean story that hadn’t once been true.
She couldn’t make the two of them the one man, the father she had hunted and the father she had dug up out of the dark, and that was a harder thing to stand in than the grave itself had been.
She had wanted the truth for two years. She had it now, the whole cold weight of it. There was no one in all the storm to hand the smallest part of it to, and nothing in it that would close, and she stood over the open grave of him in the rain and didn’t move, alone, for a long time.