She opened the door, stepped outside. The night was properly dark and silent. She filled her lungs gratefully with fresh air.
Ray said, “Pull his car into the driveway alongside the house. Wait a sec, I think he’s got the keys on him.” He bent over Farr, dug a set of car keys out of his pocket. “Go ahead,” he said.
She brought the car to the side door. Ray appeared in the doorway with Bruce’s inert form over one shoulder. He dumped him onto the backseat and walked around the car to get behind the wheel.
“Take our buggy,” he told Marcia. “Follow me, but not too close. I’m taking Route Thirty-two north of town. There’s a good drop about a mile and a half past the county line.”
“Not too good a drop, I hope,” she said. “He could be burned beyond recognition.”
“No such thing. Dental x-rays — they can’t miss. It’s a good thing he didn’t have the brains to think of that.”
“He wasn’t very long on brains,” she said.
“Isn’t,” he corrected. “He’s not dead yet.”
She followed Ray, lagging about a block and a half behind him. At the site he had chosen, she stood by while he took the money from the trunk and checked Farr’s pockets to make sure he wasn’t carrying anything that might tip anybody off. Ray propped him behind the wheel, put the car in neutral, braced Farr’s foot on the gas pedal. Farr was just beginning to stir.
“Good-bye, Brucie,” Marcia said. “You don’t know what a bore you were.”
Ray reached inside and popped the car into gear, then jumped aside. The heavy car hurtled through an ineffective guard rail, hung momentarily in the air, then began the long fast fall. First, there was the noise of the impact. Then there was another loud noise, an explosion, and the vehicle burst into flames.
They drove slowly away, the suitcase full of money between them on the seat of their car. “Scratch one fool,” Ray said pleasantly. “We’ve got two hours to catch our flight to New York, then on to Paris.”
“Paris,” she sighed. “Not on a shoestring, the way we did it last time. This time we’ll do it in style.”
She looked down at her hands, her steady hands. How surprisingly calm she was, she thought, and a slow smile spread over her face.
Someday I’ll Plant More Walnut Trees
There is a silence that is just stillness, just the absence of sound, and there is a deeper silence that is more than that. It is the antithesis, the aggressive opposite, of sound. It is to sound as antimatter is to matter, an auditory black hole that reaches out to swallow up and nullify the sounds of others.
My mother can give off such a silence. She is a master at it. That morning at breakfast she was thus silent, silent as she cooked eggs and made coffee, silent while I spooned baby oatmeal into Livia’s little mouth, silent while Dan fed himself and while he smoked the day’s first cigarette along with his coffee. He had his own silence, sitting there behind his newspaper, but all it did was insulate him. It couldn’t reach out beyond that paper shield to snatch other sounds out of the air.
He finished and put out his cigarette, folded his paper. He said it was supposed to be hot today, with rain forecast for late afternoon. He patted Livia’s head, and with his forefinger drew aside a strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead.
I can see that now, his hand so gentle, and her beaming up at him, wide-eyed, gurgling.
Then he turned to me, and with the same finger and the same softness he reached to touch the side of my face. I did not draw away. His finger touched me, ever so lightly, and then he reached to draw me into the circle of his arms. I smelled his shirt, freshly washed and sun-dried, and under it the clean male scent of him.
We looked at each other, both of us silent, the whole room silent. And then Livia cooed and he smiled quickly and chucked me under the chin and left. I heard the screen door slam, and then the sounds of the car as he drove to town. When I could not hear it anymore I went over to the radio and switched it on. They were playing a Tammy Wynette song. “Stand by your man,” Tammy urged, and my mother’s silence swallowed up the words.
While the radio played unheard I changed Livia and put her in for her nap. I came back to the kitchen and cleared the table. My mother waved a hand at the air in front of her face.
“He smokes,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything,” she said.
We did the dishes together. There is a dishwasher but we never use it for the breakfast dishes. She prefers to run it only once a day, after the evening meal. It could hold all the day’s dishes, they would not amount to more than one load in the machine, but she does not like to let the breakfast and lunch dishes stand. It seems wasteful to me, of time and effort, and even of water, although our well furnishes more than we ever need. But it is her house, after all, and her dishwasher, and hers the decision as to when it is to be used.
Silently she washed the dishes, silently I wiped them. As I reached to stack plates in a cupboard I caught her looking at me. Her eyes were on my cheek, and I could feel her gaze right where I had felt Dan’s finger. His touch had been light. Hers was firmer.
I said, “It’s nothing.”
“All right.”
“Dammit, Mama!”
“I didn’t say anything, Tildie.”
I was named Matilda for my father’s mother. I never knew her, she died before I was born, before my parents met. I was never called Matilda. It was the name on my college diploma, on my driver’s license, on Livia’s birth certificate, but no one ever used it.
“He can’t help it,” I said. “It’s not his fault.”
Her silence devoured my words. On the radio Tammy Wynette sang a song about divorce, spelling out the word. Why were they playing all her records this morning? Was it her birthday? Or an anniversary of some failed romance?
“It’s not,” I said. I moved to her right so that I could talk to her good ear. “It’s a pattern. His father was abusive to his mother. Dan grew up around that. His father drank and was free with his hands. Dan swore he would never be like that, but patterns like that are almost impossible to throw off. It’s what he knows, can you understand that? On a deep level, deeper than intellect, bone deep, that’s how he knows to behave as a man, as a husband.”
“He marked your face. He hasn’t done that before, Tildie.”
My hand flew to the spot. “You knew that—”
“Sounds travel. Even with my door closed, even with my good ear on the pillow. I’ve heard things.”
“You never said anything.”
“I didn’t say anything today,” she reminded me.
“He can’t help it,” I said. “You have to understand that. Didn’t you see him this morning?”
“I saw him.”
“It hurts him more than it hurts me. And it’s my fault as much as it’s his.”
“For allowing it?”
“For provoking him.”
She looked at me. Her eyes are a pale blue, like mine, and at times there is accusation in them. My gaze must have the same quality. I have been told that it is penetrating. “Don’t look at me like that,” my husband has said, raising a hand as much to ward off my gaze as to threaten me. “Damn you, don’t you look at me like that!”
Like what? I’d wondered. How was I looking at him? What was I doing wrong?
“I do provoke him,” I told her. “I make him hit me.”
“How?”
“By saying the wrong thing.”
“What sort of thing?”
“Things that upset him.”
“And then he has to hit you, Tildie? Because of what you say?”
“It’s a pattern,” I said. “It’s the way he grew up. Men who drink have sons who drink. Men who beat their wives have sons who beat their wives. It’s passed on over the generations like a genetic illness. Mama, Dan’s a good man. You see how he is with Livia, how he loves her, how she loves him.”