The door opened directly into the front room. The room was small and neat, warmed by rag rugs on the floor, an afghan on the couch. Embroidered mottoes on the plasterboard walls went with the character lines in the old woman’s face. A piece of wool with knitting needles in it lay on the arm of a chair. She picked it up and hid it in a drawer, as if it was evidence of criminal negligence in her housekeeping.
“Sit down, if you can find a place to sit. Did you say you were from the State Hospital? They offered me a job there once, but I always liked private work better.”
Rose Parish sat beside me on the couch. “Are you a nurse, Mrs. Hutchinson?”
“A special nurse. I started to train for an R. N. but I never got my cap. Hutchinson wouldn’t wait. Would you be an R. N., Miss?”
“I’m a psychiatric social worker. I suppose that makes me a sort of nurse. Carl Hallman was one of my patients.”
“You wanted to ask me about him? Is that it? I say it’s a crying shame what happened to that boy. He used to be as nice as you could want. There in that house, I watched him change right in front of my eyes. I could see his mother’s trouble coming out in him like a family curse, and not one of them made a move to help him until it was too late.”
“Did you know his mother?” I said.
“Know her? I nursed her for over a year. Waited on her hand and foot, day and night. I should say I did know her. She was the saddest woman you ever want to see, specially toward the end there. She got the idea in her head that nobody loved her, nobody ever did love her. Her husband didn’t love her, her family didn’t love her, even her poor dead parents didn’t love her when they were alive. It became worse when Carl went away to school. He was always her special darling, and she depended on him. After he left home, she acted like there was nothing for her in life except those pills she took.”
“What kind of pills?” Rose Parish said. “Barbiturates?”
“Them, or anything else she could get her hands on. She was addicted for many years. I guess she ran through every doctor in town, the old ones and then the new ones, ending up with Dr. Grantland. It isn’t for me to second-guess a doctor, but I used to think those pills he let her have were her main trouble. I got up my nerve and told him so, one day toward the end. He said that he was trying to limit her, but Mrs. Hallman would be worse off without them.”
“I doubt that,” Rose Parish said. “He should have committed her; he might have saved her life.”
“Did the question ever come up, Mrs. Hutchinson?”
“Between me and her it did, when the doctor first sent me out there to look after her. I had to use some kind of leverage on her. She was a sad, spoiled woman, spoiled rotten all her life. She was always hiding her pills on me, and taking more than her dosage. When I bawled her out for it, she pulled out that little gun she kept under her pillow. I told her she’d have to give up those shenanigans, or the doctor would have to commit her. She said he better not. She said if he tried it on her, she’d kill herself and ruin him. As for me, I’d never get another job in this town. Oh, she could be a black devil when she was on the rampage.”
Breathing heavily with remembered anger, Mrs. Hutchinson looked up at the wall above her armchair. An embroidered motto there exhorted Christian charity. It calmed her visibly. She said: “I don’t mean she was like that all the time, just when she had a spell. Most of the time she wasn’t a bad sort of lady to have to deal with. I’ve dealt with worse. It’s a pity what had to happen to her. And not only her. You young people don’t read the Bible any more. I know that. There’s a line from the Word keeps running in my head since all this trouble today. The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”
“Right out of Freud,” Rose Parish said in a knowing undertone.
I thought she was putting the cart in front of the horse, but I didn’t bother arguing. The Old Testament words reverberated in my mind. I cut their echo short, and brought Mrs. Hutchinson back to the line of questioning I’d stumbled upon: “It’s funny they’d let Mrs. Hallman have a gun.”
“All the ranch women have them, or used to have. It was a hangover from the old days when there were a lot of hoboes and outlaws wandering around in the west. Mrs. Hallman told me once her father sent her that gun, all the way from the old country – he was a great traveler. She took a pride in it, the way another kind of woman would take pride in a piece of jewelry. It was something like a gewgaw at that – a short-barreled little thing with a pearl handle set in filigree work. She used to spend a lot of time cleaning and polishing it. I remember the fuss she made when the Senator wanted to take it away from her.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t,” Rose Parish said. “We don’t even permit nail files or bottles on our closed wards.”
“I know that, and I told the Senator it was a danger to her. He was a hard man to understand in some ways. He couldn’t really admit to himself that there was anything the matter with her mind. It was the same with his son later. He believed that their troubles were just notions, that all they wanted was to attract some attention to themselves. He let her keep that gun in her room, and the box of shells that went with it, right up to the day of her death. You’d almost think,” she added with the casual insight of the old, “you’d almost think he wanted her to do herself a harm. Or somebody else.”
“Somebody else?” I said.
Mrs. Hutchinson reddened and veiled her eyes. “I didn’t mean anything, I was only talking.”
“You said Mrs. Hallman had that gun right up to the day of her death. Do you know that for a fact?”
“Did I say that? I didn’t mean it that way.”
There was a breathing silence.
“How did you mean it?”
“I wasn’t trying to pin down any exact time. What I said was in a general manner of speaking.”
“Did she have it on the day of her death?”
“I can’t remember. It was a long time ago – more than three years. It doesn’t matter, anyway.” Her statement had the force of a question. Her gray head turned toward me, the skin of her neck stretched in diagonal folds like recalcitrant material being twisted under great pressure.
“Do you know what happened to Mrs. Hallman’s gun?”
“I never was told, no. For all I know it’s safe at the bottom of the ocean.”
“Mrs. Hallman had it the night she drowned herself?”
“I didn’t say that. I don’t know.”
“Did she drown herself?”
“Sure she did. But I couldn’t swear to it. I didn’t see her jump in.” Her pale gaze was still on me, cold and watchful under slack folded lids. “What is it that’s so important about her gun? Do you know where it is?”
“Don’t you?”
The strain was making her irritable. “I wouldn’t be asking you if I knew all about it, would I?”
“The gun is in an evidence case in the sheriff’s office. It was used to shoot Jerry Hallman today. It’s strange you don’t know that, Mrs. Hutchinson.”
“How would I know what they shot him with?” But the color of confusion had deepened in her face. Its vessels were purplish and congested with the hot shame of an unpracticed barefaced liar. “I didn’t even hear the shot, let alone see it happen.”
“There were two shots.”
“That’s news to me. I didn’t hear either one of them. I was in the front room with Martha, and she was playing with that silver bell of her mother’s. It drowned out everything.”
The old woman sat in a listening attitude, screwing up her face as if she was hearing the shots now, after a long delay. I was certain that she was lying. Apart from the evidence of her face, there was at least one discrepancy in her story. I scanned back across the rush and welter of the day, trying to pin it down, but without success. Too many words had been spilled. The sense of discrepancy persisted in my mind, a gap in the known through which the darkness threatened, like sea behind a dike.