101 Mystery Stories

71 Sweet, Sweet Murder H. A. DeRosso

I don’t know why everyone thinks we Smedleys are unusual. We’re like everybody else, with two arms and two legs and a head and a body. And our brains are always working. I remember my great-uncle Simeon, who was the intellect of the family and cleaned up after horses in the days before automobiles, well, he took up yoga or something and while in suspended animation thought up a whole book and wrote it down afterwards in Greek. Anyway, that’s what every publisher he sent it to said it was. And people think my cousin Albert is strange because he walks around at night with a lighted flashlight, looking for dew-worms. It isn’t his fault he’s allergic to night air and has to look for devices in his living room. And take me — I like peanuts salted in the shell. I throw the peanuts away and eat the salted shells because I like them, and how else are you going to get salted shells except with peanuts? Everybody has their little idiosyncrasies. But people just seem to make more fuss over those adopted by the Smedleys.

This brings me quite naturally to Uncle Phil. Everyone else in our family thinks of Uncle Phi as the black sheep, but to me he always was and still is a great man. Unfortunately, he was born ahead of his time, and what he did, I am sure, would have found favor in a later era. In a way, he was a pioneer, and pioneers always have tough going. Look at the Donner party that was caught in the Sierra Nevadas in the middle of winter, but that’s another story.

To get back to Uncle Phil, he was the only one who ever understood me. Maybe that’s why I can sympathize with him. When two people are just about outcasts, they tend to lean on each other for understanding and compassion. It was like that with me and Uncle Phil, though he was thirty years older than me. Still, there was a rapport between us, if you know what I mean, a feeling of muy simpático or lebensraum or something.

Anyway, this closeness, this mutual sympathy, developed when Grandmother Smedley died. The rest of the family — the brothers, the sisters, the aunts, the uncles, the cousins and second-cousins, the nieces, the nephews — were all somewhat scandalized by his attitude. I was the only one, young as I was, to realize that he was only being philosophical and practical about her death.

Neither Uncle Phil nor I had hated Grandmother Smedley. Oh, I’d had my differences with her, but I realized that she was old and crabby because she couldn’t help being either, and so I tried my best to be tolerant. Even when she killed my pet mosquito, Annabelle, a week before she died, I kept myself from hating her. I told myself that her eyesight wasn’t too good, I think she had cataracts or something, and so she hadn’t recognized Annabelle and squashed her with one well-aimed slap. Of course, she would never believe that I had trained poor Annabelle not to bite people. Afterwards, I tried to find another pet mosquito, but I never could find one quite like Annabelle.

Well, the relatives came from far and near for Grandmother Smedley’s funeral. With all that company it seemed like a holiday to me, but Mother and Father didn’t approve of my attitude. Only Uncle Phil agreed, because he felt the same way.

You could hardly blame Uncle Phil. He worked in the iron-ore mines, deep underground, ten hours a day and six days a week. This was before unions; so there was no such thing as holidays with pay or vacations with pay. There were no vacations, period. Not only that, but if a miner missed a shift, he’d get fired. So it came as a welcome relief, an answer to a prayer, when Uncle Phil was allowed to take three days off from work, without pay, for the mourning and the funeral, and without jeopardizing his job.

That was why he understood the way I felt and I understood the way he felt. He found me after Mother had given me a severe talking-to and I’d run off to sulk behind the woodshed, I was working off my spite, hanging a grasshopper, when Uncle Phil walked up.

He hunkered down on his heels and watched the grasshopper kicking for a while, then he reached over and adjusted the noose better. Then he watched a few moments more and nodded approval. After that, he turned his pale blue eyes on me. They always looked soft and wet, as though great sorrows were constantly tormenting him, even though he was usually smiling.

“I heard your mother, Paul,” he said to me, “but don’t mind her. She doesn’t understand people like you and me. You know how she picks on me just because she’s my sister. She. all of them, have the wrong attitude about death. Look at them up in the house, talking in hushed voices, sighing, twittering, crying. What did they expect, Grandmother to live forever?”

He prodded the grasshopper, which had stopped kicking, with a finger, and nodded, satisfied, when it didn’t move.

“This is really a break for me. Grandmother couldn’t have picked a better time to die — middle of summer with the sun shining and all that. You don’t know what it means to me to be able to walk around in the sun. Do you realize in the winter I go to work before daylight and come home after dark? What kind of a life is that? A man should be entitled to some time off from his job once in a while. Grandmother must have understood. That’s why she took it upon herself to pass away now, so on these days off I can enjoy the sun and the outdoors. She made me a gift. Should I cry over that? Am I an outlaw because I don’t feel like joining the others in their mourning and weeping?”

His eyes were wet, but, like I said, they always looked that way. He smiled brightly at me. “Let’s go for a walk, hey, Paul? We’re buddies, me and you...”

I still sigh when I think of that walk. A feeling of peace and contentment came over me as we walked through the fields. The sun shone in a deep blue sky; a couple of fluffy white clouds drifted by. The air was rich with the smell of ripening timothy and clover, and sweet with the singing of birds. It was the most comforting feeling I’d ever know.

I caught a frog, and me and Uncle Phil hanged it. Then we did some other interesting things. I really had a wonderful time on that walk, and I know Uncle Phil did, too.

“Am I going to hate going back to work day after tomorrow,” he said on our way home, and sighed deeply. “What the miners ought to have is a five-and-half-day week.” Tomorrow was Grandmother’s funeral. “It’s so nice having a vacation.”

“Maybe Aunt Selma will die,” I said, trying to comfort him, because for once he wasn’t smiling, and really looked like he was ready to cry. “She looks pretty old, and I heard her coughing something terrible.”

“It’s that corncob,” Uncle Phil said, almost absently, and I could tell his mind was on something else. “She should switch to another kind of pipe.”

“Maybe shell die anyway,” I said, trying to cheer him up, “and you’ll have another vacation.”

He looked at me for the first and only time with disapproval. “Hush now, Paul,” he said. “You mustn’t say things like that.”

That hurt and made me mad. “You sound just like Mother,” I said, and ran off, crying.

Well, we buried Grandmother, and that brings up Cousin Newfry. He was Uncle Phil’s nephew, like me, but he was grown up. I never liked him because he was all-fired bossy. I remember that in church I couldn’t help myself, and got a giggling jag. Mother tried to shush me, and though I got a belly-ache for my efforts, I couldn’t quit giggling. So Cousin Newfry, who was in the pew behind me, rapped me one on the skull real hard, and that made me bust out crying, right out loud. That was when they took me out of the church and really gave me something to cry about.

The only one to understand and show me sympathy was Uncle Phil. “I hate Cousin Newfry,” I told Uncle Phil between sobs, “I’d like to hang him right from the belfry.”

He didn’t swat me one like the others would have done. He just tousled my hair and nodded thoughtfully. I took care to stay next to Uncle Phil throughout the rest of the doings. He was the only protection I had.

Uncle Newfry lived in the southern part of the state, and I could hardly wait for him to go home. I thought he’d leave right after the funeral or the next day, but he hung around. There was something about a will, I think, and the way I got it from Uncle Phil, it was Cousin Newfry causing all the trouble — which didn’t surprise me any.

What did surprise me was how Uncle Phil suddenly started playing up to Cousin Newfry. It also disgusted me very much. Here I thought I was Uncle Phil’s favorite nephew, and all at once he starts preferring Cousin Newfry to everyone else.

He invited Cousin Newfry to stay at his house. And two weeks later, on a Sunday, the only day off he had from the mine, he took Cousin Newfry fishing with him. I ran off and hid in the woods and just bawled when Uncle Phil didn’t ask me to go along. I looked around for something to hang, and when I couldn’t find anything, I cried harder than ever.

Well, it happened that Uncle Phil and Cousin Newfry went out on the lake in a boat, and somehow the plug in the bottom came out, and the boat sank. Uncle Phil said he just barely made it to shore, but Cousin Newfry, who couldn’t swim, drowned.

I tell you, I didn’t shed any tears for Cousin Newfry. I went around with a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud, and that got me plenty of dirty looks from all the Smedleys, who had gathered again, and a good whipping from Father. I was behind the woodshed hanging a chipmunk when Uncle Phil found me this time, but he cut the chipmunk down before it was dead, and I stared at him. For once he didn’t make any sense to me.

“Paul,” he said gently, “you’ve got to realize that people can’t understand why you act the way you do. Just like the big boss at the mine not understanding me when I spoke up for all the miners not getting enough time off. I understand you, yes, but no one else does, and so you’ve got to act the way they expect you to.”

“But I’m glad Cousin Newfry is dead,” I said. “Aren’t you glad, too?”

His eyes watered more than ever. “Newfry was a guest in my house. He was my sister’s son. How can I be glad?”

“You got another vacation and—”

He clapped a hand over my mouth and looked around. “Leave us not say what our hearts feel,” he said solemnly, sounding just like the minister. “It is possible to rejoice within and mourn without. Do you follow me, Paul?”

“Sure, Uncle Phil,” I whispered when he took his hand away, awed by all his wisdom. “I follow you...”

By being kind and reasonable he taught me a lesson I never forgot. Uncle Phil had a way about him with children, and it’s too bad he never had any of his own, although I heard Mother often say thank God for that. I have to disagree with her, however. All she and Father thought was necessary to teach me something was with the back of a hand or the front of a stick. Uncle Phil was different. He used psychology, which is why I’ve never forgotten the things he taught me. That is why I say my Uncle Phil was a great man, with some shortcomings.

Anyway, I learned how to behave when people were dead, and that came in handy the following summer, when, in a period of perfect weather in July, Aunt Donora died.

Now, Aunt Donora was Uncle Phil’s wife. They seemed to get along real good, though Uncle Phil let his hair down with me a few times, but to everyone else he pretended everything was just fine between him and Aunt Donora. He would say, “Yes, dear” and “Right away, dear” and “Certainly, dear” and “You’re ever so right, dear.” But that was for public consumption. To me, his only confident, he related the miserable life he was living.

“It isn’t that I don’t love Donora. Paul,” he said, “but if she’d only quit nagging. She’s always finding fault. I don’t know why, because I never do anything wrong. Yet she nags me for putting ketchup in my soup and gravy on my salad. She nags me for picking between my toes. All I’m trying to do is have perfectly clean feet. I sleep better then.” He sighed deeply, and my heart went out to him. “I have a cross to bear, Paul, I really have.”

Well, anyway, that July he had just bought a car, one of those Model T’s with the shift pedals in the floor. I could never figure out which pedal was which. I only knew they made the car go. They sure were confusing. You had to have the emergency on, I think, to get it in low, and then leave the pedal out for it to go into high, or something like that. It really was confusing, and that was how Aunt Donora was killed.

Uncle Phil really wasn’t used to the shift pedals yet, having just bought the car. I know he was having trouble with the pedals, mixing up the low-and-high one with the reverse, and that’s how it happened. He took Aunt Donora for a ride out in the country, and the car got stuck or something, and Aunt Donora got out to push, with Uncle Phil driving, and he accidentally stepped on the wrong pedal, putting the car in reverse and running over poor Aunt Donora.

Of course, Uncle Phil got to have another vacation, no argument at all from the big boss down at the mine, since Aunt Donora was Uncle Phil’s wife. Uncle Phil even cried real tears, he was so broken up. I remembered what he had taught me, about how to act when people are dead, and I tell you, I didn’t do any smiling or laughing, and I behaved very well all through the services and afterwards at the cemetery. When it was all over, Uncle Phil patted me on the head and said I had learned real well.

“I sure hate to think of going back to work in the morning,” he told me when we were alone. “But I suppose, under the circumstances, it will be good for me to get out of the house for a few hours. Too many memories here. Poor Donora.” And he sniffled for real again.

By now I was starting to catch on, and so I began to play a little game, trying to figure out who it would be the next time Uncle Phil got the urge to have a vacation from the mine. The summer wore on, and autumn came. I figured that Uncle Phil would wait until next spring, at the earliest, because he liked his vacations when the weather was nice. But he fooled me. He picked the fall, bird season.

Uncle Jarvis — he was my uncle because he was Aunt Donora’s brother and Uncle Phil’s brother-in-law — anyway, Uncle Jarvis brought up something about some insurance Aunt Donora had that peeved Uncle Phil a little. But Uncle Phil wasn’t one to quarrel with anybody. I don’t think he spoke a single word in anger in all his life. He was gentle that way. He sure believed in live and let live. Anyway, he listened to what Uncle Jarvis had to say, and then they had a long discussion, and everything got patched up so that Uncle Phil and Uncle Jarvis were the best of friends that day late in October when they went hunting partridge.

The way this one happened was that somehow the barrel of Uncle Jarvis’s twelve-gauge got plugged up with mud, and when the went to shoot a partridge, the twelve-gauge exploded in Uncle Jarvis’ face. That didn’t surprise me at all. The surprise came when the sheriff interrupted Uncle Phil’s vacation and arrested him.

I don’t care what they say, but I’ll bet they gave poor Uncle Phil the third degree to make him talk. They say they found the same kind of mud that had exploded the twelve-gauge on Uncle Phil’s clothes and under his fingernails. Maybe, but how come Uncle Phil confessed to killing Cousin Newfry and Aunt Donora, too, just so he could have vacations from the mine? Don’t tell me they didn’t give Uncle Phil the third degree.

Anyway, just because Uncle Phil said he killed those people to get time off from his job, they sent him away to the state hospital at Winnebago. All the Smedleys thought this was something terrible, and none of them ever spoke Uncle Phil’s name again. I did a few times, at first, and promptly got licked each time.

I’ll never forget Uncle Phil. Like I said, he was a pioneer. He was the first in these parts to feel that a working man is entitled to some time off from his job and to do something about it. I’ll admit he was a little selfish, thinking mainly about a vacation for himself, but none of us are perfect.

Anyway, the unions finally came to the mines, and now that the miners are organized, they have their vacations every year, and with pay besides. But there are still some stubborn people who don’t think that it’s right for anyone to get time off from a job and be paid for it. Mr. Self, who owned the hardware and appliance store where I work, was one of these.

Mr. Self never did give in to our demands for a union. He fought it all along, because he wanted us to work six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. We had to like it or lose our jobs. Well, we finally got a few days off, because when me and Mr. Self were delivering a refrigerator to a second-floor apartment, the dolly to which the refrigerator was strapped slipped from my grip, and the refrigerator fell smack on top of Mr. Self and killed him.