Dolores Claiborne

One, my-pretty-pony… two, my-pretty-pony…three, my-pretty-pony. “Nope,” I says.

“Several of the fractured ribs had punctured his lungs. Such injuries always result in bleeding, but rarely bleeding this extensive. Bleeding of this sort was probably caused, I deduce, by the deceased crying repeatedly for riscue.” That was how he said it, Andy—riscue.

It wasn’t a question, but I counted three all the same before sayin, “You think he was down there callin for help. That’s what it all comes to, ain’t it?”

“No, madam,” he says. “I do na just think so; I have a moral sairtainty.”

This time I didn’t take no wait. “Dr. McAuliffe,” I says, “do you think I pushed my husband down into that well?”

That shook him up a little. Those lighthouse eyes of his not only blinked, for a few seconds there they dulled right over. He fiddled n diddled with his pipe some more, then stuck it back in his mouth n drew on it, all the time tryin to decide how he should handle that.

Before he could, Garrett spoke up. His face had gone as red as a radish. “Dolores,” he says, “I’m sure no one thinks… that is to say, that no one has even considered the idea that—”

“Aye,” McAuliffe breaks in. I’d put his train of thought off on a sidin for a few seconds, but I saw he’d got it back onto the main line without no real trouble. “I’ve considered it. Ye’ll understand, Mrs. St. George, that part of my job—”

“Oh, never mind no more Mrs. St. George,” I says. “If you’re gonna accuse me of first pushin my husband down the well n then standin over him while he screamed for help, you go right on ahead n call me Dolores.”

I wasn’t exactly tryin to plink him that time, Andy, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t do it, anyway—second time in as many minutes. I doubt if he’d been used that hard since medical school.

“Nobody is accusing you of anything, Mrs. St. George,” he says all stiff-like, and what I seen in his eyes was “Not yet, anyway.”

“Well, that’s good,” I says. “Because the idear of me pushin Joe down the well is just silly, you know. He outweighed me by at least fifty pounds —prob‘ly a fairish bit more. He larded up considerable the last few years. Also, he wa’ant afraid to use his fists if somebody crossed him or got in his way. I’m tellin you that as his wife of sixteen years, and you’ll find plenty of people who’ll tell you the same thing.”

Accourse Joe hadn’t hit me in a long while, but I’d never tried to correct the general impression on the island that he made a pretty steady business of it, and right then, with McAuliffe’s blue eyes tryin to bore in through my forehead, I was damned glad of it.

“Nobody is saying you pushed him into the well,” the Scotsman said. He was backin up fast now. I could see by his face that he knew he was, but didn’t have no idear how it had happened. His face said that I was the one who was supposed to be backin up. “But he must have been crying out, you know. He must have done it for some time—hours, perhaps—and quite loudly, too.”

One, my-pretty-pony… two, my-pretty-pony . . . three. “Maybe I’m gettin you now,” I says. “Maybe you think he fell into the well by accident, and I heard him yellin n just turned a deaf ear. Is that what you been gettin at?”

I seen by his face that that was exactly what he’d been gettin at. I also seen he was mad things weren’t goin the way he’d expected em to go, the way they’d always gone before when he had these little interviews. A tiny ball of bright red color had showed up in each of his cheeks. I was glad to see em, because I wanted him mad. A man like McAuliffe is easier to handle when he’s mad, because men like him are used to keepin their composure while other people lose theirs.

“Mrs. St. George, it will be verra difficult to accomplish anything of value here if you keep responding to my questions with questions of your own.”

“Why, you didn’t ask a question, Dr. McAuliffe,” I says, poppin my eyes wide n innocent. “You told me Joe must have been yellin—‘cryin out’ was what you actually said—so I just ast if—”

“All right, all right,” he says, and put his pipe down in Garrett’s brass ashtray hard enough to make it clang. Now his eyes were blazin, and he’d grown a red stripe acrost his forehead to go along with the balls of color in his cheeks. “Did you hear him calling for help, Mrs. St. George?”

One, my-pretty-pony… two, my-pretty-pony…

“John, I hardly think there’s any call to badger the woman,” Garrett broke in, soundin more uncomfortable than ever, and damn if it didn’t break that little bandbox Scotsman’s concentration again. .I almost laughed right out loud. It woulda been bad for me if I had, I don’t doubt it, but it was a near thing, all the same.

McAuliffe whipped around and says to Garrett, “You agreed to let me handle this.”

Poor old Garrett jerked back in his chair s’fast he almost tipped it over, and I’m sure he gave himself a whiplash. “Okay, okay, no need to get hot under the collar,” he mumbles.

McAuliffe turned back to me, ready to repeat the question, but I didn’t bother lettin him. By then I’d had time to count to ten, pretty near.

“No,” I says. “I didn’t hear nothing but people out on the reach, tootin their boat-horns and yellin their fool heads off once they could see the eclipse had started to happen.”

He waited for me to say some more—his old trick of bein quiet and lettin people rush ahead into the puckerbrush—and the silence spun out between us. I just kep my hands folded on top of my handbag and let her spin. He looked at me and I looked back at him.

“You’re gonna talk to me, woman,” his eyes said.

“You’re going to tell me everything I want to hear… twice, if that’s the way I want it.”

And my own eyes were sayin back, “No I ain’t, chummy. You can sit there drillin on me with those diamond-bit baby-blues of yours until hell’s a skatin rink and you won’t get another word outta me unless you open your mouth n ask for it.”

We went on that way for damned near a full minute, duellin with our eyes, y’might say, and toward the end of it I could feel myself weakenin, wantin to say somethin to him, even if it was only “Didn’t your Ma ever teach you it ain’t polite to stare?” Then Garrett spoke up—or rather his stomach did. It let out a long goiiiinnnnggg sound.

McAuliffe looked at him, disgusted as hell, and Garrett got out his pocket-knife and started to clean under his fingernails. McAuliffe pulled a notebook from the inside pocket of his wool coat (wool! in July!), looked at somethin in it, then put it back.

“He tried to climb out,” he says at last, as casual as a man might say “I’ve got a lunch appointment.”

It felt like somebody’d jabbed a meatfork into my lower back, where Joe hit me with the stovelength that time, but I tried not to show it. “Oh, ayuh?” I says.

“Yes,” McAuliffe says. “The shaft of the well is lined with large stones (only he said ”stanes,” Andy, like they do), and we found bluidy hand-prints on several of them. It appears that he gained his feet, then slowly began to make his way up, hand over hand. It must have been a Herculean effort, made despite a pain more excruciating than I can imagine.”

“I’m sorry to hear he suffered,” I said. My voice was as calm as ever—at least I think it was—but I could feel the sweat startin to break in my arm-pits, and I remember bein scairt it’d spring out on my brow or in the little hollows of my temples where he could see it. “Poor old Joe.”

“Yes indaid,” McAuliffe says, his lighthouse eyes borin n flashin away. “Poor… auld… Joe. I think he might have actually gotten out on his own. He probably would have died soon after even if he had, but yes; I think he might have gotten out. Something prevented him from doing so, however.”

“What was it?” I ast.

“He suffered a fractured skull,” McAuliffe said. His eyes were as bright as ever, but his voice’d become as soft as a purrin cat. “We found a large rock between his legs. It was covered wi’your husband’s bluid, Mrs. St. George. And in that bluid we found a small number of porcelain fragments. Do you know what I deduce from them?”

One… two… three.

“Sounds like that rock must have busted his false teeth as well’s his head,” I says. “Too bad—Joe was partial to em, and I don’t know how Lucien Mercier’s gonna make him look just right for the viewin without em.”

McAuliffe’s lips drew back when I said that n I got a good look at his teeth. No dentures there. I s’pose he meant it to look like a smile, but it didn’t. Not a bit.

“Yes,” he says, showin me both rows of his neat little teeth all the way to the gumline. “Yes, that’s my conclusion, as well—those porcelain shards are from his lower plate. Now, Mrs. St. George—do you have any idea of how that rock might have come to strike your husband just as he was on the verge of escaping the well?”

One… two… three.

“Nope,” I says. “Do you?”

“Yes,” he says. “I rather suspect someone pulled it out of the earth and smashed it cruelly and wi’ malice aforethought into his upturned, pleading face.”

Wasn’t nobody said anything after that. I wanted to, God knows; I wanted to jump in as quick as ever I could n say, “It wasn’t me. Maybe somebody did it, but it wasn’t me.” I couldn’t, though, because I was back in the blackberry tangles and this time there was friggin wells everyplace.

Instead of talkin I just sat there lookin at him, but I could feel the sweat tryin to break out on me again and I could feel my clasped hands wantin to lock down on each other. The fingernails’d turn white if they did that… and he’d notice. McAuliffe was a man built to notice such things; it’d be another chink to shine his version of the Battiscan Light into. I tried to think of Vera, and how she woulda looked at him—as if he was only a little dab of dogshit on one of her shoes—but with his eyes borin into me like they was just then, it didn’t seem to do any good. Before, it’d been like she was almost there in the room with me, but it wasn’t like that anymore. Now there was no one there but me n that neat little Scots doctor, who probably fancied himself just like the amateur detectives in the magazine stories (and whose testimony had already sent over a dozen people up n down the coast to jail, I found out later), and I could feel myself gettin closer n closer to openin my mouth n blurtin somethin out. And the hell of it was, Andy, I didn’t have the slightest idear what it’d be when it finally came. I could hear the clock on Garrett’s desk tickin—it had a big hollow sound.

And I was gonna say somethin when the one person I’d forgot—Garrett Thibodeau—spoke up instead. He spoke in a worried, fast voice, and I realized he couldn’t stand no more of that silence, either—he musta thought it was gonna go on until somebody had to scream just to relieve the tension.

“Now John,” he says, “I thought we agreed that, if Joe pulled on that stone just right, it could have come out on its own and—”

“Mon, will ye not shut op!” McAuliffe yelled at him in a high, frustrated sort of voice, and I relaxed. It was all over. I knew it, and I believe that little Scotsman knew it, too. It was like the two us had been in a black room together, and him ticklin my face with what might have been a razor-blade… n then clumsy old Constable Thibodeau stubbed his toe, fell against the window, and the shade went up with a bang n a rattle, lettin in the daylight, and I seen it was only a feather he’d been touchin me with, after all.

Garrett muttered somethin about how there was no call for McAuliffe to talk to him that way, but the doc didn’t pay him no mind. He turned back to me and said “Well, Mrs. St. George?” in a hard way, like he had me in a corner, but by then we both knew better. All he could do was hope I’d make a mistake… but I had three kids to think about, and havin kids makes you careful.

“I’ve told you what I know,” I says. “He got drunk while we were waitin for the eclipse. I made him a sandwich, thinkin it might sober him up a little, but it didn’t. He got yellin, then he choked me n batted me around a little, so I went up to Russian Meadow. When I come back, he was gone. I thought he’d gone off with one of his friends, but he was down the well all the time. I s’pose he was tryin to take a short-cut out to the road. He might even have been lookin for me, wantin to apologize. That’s somethin I won’t never know… n maybe it’s just as well.” I give him a good hard look. “You might try a little of that medicine yourself, Dr. McAuliffe.”

“Never mind yer advice, madam,” McAuliffe says, and those spots of color in his cheeks was burnin higher n hotter’n ever. “Are ye glad he’s dead? Tell me that!”

“What in holy tarnal hell has that got to do with what happened to him?” I ast. “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you?”

He didn’t answer—just picked up his pipe in a hand that was shakin the tiniest little bit and went to work lightin it again. He never ast another question; the last question that was ast of me that day was ast by Garrett Thibodeau. McAuliffe didn’t ask it because it didn’t matter, at least not to him. It meant somethin to Garrett, though, and it meant even more to me, because nothing was going to end when I walked out of the Town Office Building that day; in some ways, me walkin out was gonna be just the beginning. That last question and the way I answered it mattered plenty, because it’s usually the things that wouldn’t mean squat in a courtroom that get whispered about the most over back fences while women hang out their warsh or out on the lobster-boats while men are sittin with their backs against the pilothouse n eatin their lunches. Those things may not send you to prison, but they can hang you in the eyes of the town.

“Why in God’s name did you buy him a bottle of liquor in the first place?” Garrett kinda bleated. “What got into you, Dolores?”

“I thought he’d leave me alone if he had somethin to drink,” I said. “I thought we could sit together in peace n watch the eclipse n he’d leave me alone.”

I didn’t cry, not really, but I felt one tear go rollin down my cheek. I sometimes think that’s the reason I was able to go on livin on Little Tall for the next thirty years—that one single tear. If not for that, they mighta driven me out with their whisperin and carpin and pointin at me from behind their hands—ayuh, in the end they mighta. I’m tough, but I don’t know if anyone’s tough enough to stand up to thirty years of gossip n little anonymous notes sayin things like “You got away with murder.” I did get a few of those—and I got a pretty good idear of who sent em, too, although that ain’t neither here nor there at this late date —but they stopped by the time school let back in that fall. And so I guess you could say that I owe all the rest of my life, includin this part here, to that single tear… and to Garrett puttin the word out that in the end I hadn’t been too stony-hearted to cry for Joe. There wasn’t nothing calculated about it, either, and don’t you go thinkin there was. I was thinkin about how sorry I was that Joe’d suffered the way the little bandbox Scotsman said he had. In spite of everything he’d done and how I’d come to hate him since I’d first found out what he was tryin to do to Selena, I’d never intended for him to suffer. I thought the fall’d kill him, Andy —I swear on the name of God I thought the fall’d kill him outright.

Poor old Garrett Thibodeau went as red’s a stop-sign. He fumbled a wad of Kleenex out of the box of em on his desk and kinda groped it out at me without lookin—I imagine he thought that first tear meant I was gonna go a gusher—and apologized for puttin me through “such a stressful interrogation.” I bet those were just about the biggest words he knew.

McAuliffe gave out a humph! sound at that, said somethin about how he’d be at the inquest to hear my statement taken, and then he left—stalked out, actually, n slammed the door behind him hard enough to rattle the glass. Garrett gave him time to clear out n then walked me to the door, holdin my arm but still not lookin at me (it was actually sorta comical) and mutterin all the time. I ain’t sure what he was mutterin about, but I s’pose that, whatever it was, it was really Garrett’s way of sayin he was sorry. That man had a tender heart and couldn’t stand to see someone unhappy, I’ll say that for him… and I’ll say somethin else for Little Tall: where else could a man like that not only be constable for almost twenty years but get a dinner in his honor complete with a standin ovation at the end of it when he finally retired? I’ll tell you what I think—a place where a tender-hearted man can succeed as an officer of the law ain’t such a bad place to spend your life. Not at all. Even so, I was never gladder to hear a door close behind me than I was when Garrett’s clicked shut that day.

So that was the bugger, and the inquest the next day wasn’t nothing compared to it. McAuliffe ast me many of the same questions, and they were hard questions, but they didn’t have no power over me anymore, and we both knew it. My one tear was all very well, but McAuliffe’s questions—plus the fact that everyone could see he was pissed like a bear at me—went a long way toward startin the talk which has run on the island ever since. Oh well; there would have been some talk no matter what, ain’t that right?

The verdict was death by misadventure. McAuliffe didn’t like it, and at the end he read his findins in a dead-level voice, without ever lookin up once, but what he said was official enough: Joe fell down the well while drunk, had prob’ly called for help for quite awhile without gettin an answer, then tried to climb out on his own hook. He got most of the way to the top, then put his weight on the wrong stone. It pulled free, bashed him in the head hard enough to fracture his skull (not to mention his dentures), and knocked him back down to the bottom again, where he died.

Maybe the biggest thing—and I never realized this until later—was they couldn’t find no motive to hang on me. Of course, the people in town (and Dr. McAuliffe too, I have no doubt) thought that if I had done it, I did it to get shut of him beatin me, but all by itself that didn’t carry enough weight. Only Selena and Mr. Pease knew how much motive I’d really had, and no one, not even smart old Dr. McAuliffe, thought of questionin Mr. Pease. He didn’t come forward on his own hook, either. If he had’ve, our little talk in The Chatty Buoy would’ve come out, and he’d most likely have been in trouble with the bank. I’d talked him into breakin the rules, after all.

As for Selena… well, I think Selena tried me in her own court. Every now n then I’d see her eyes on me, dark n squally, and in my mind I’d hear her askin, “Did you do anything to him? Did you, Mamma? Is it my fault? Am I the one who has to pay?”

I think she did pay—that’s the worst part. The little island girl who was never out of the state of Maine until she went to Boston for a swim-meet when she was eighteen has become a smart, successful career-woman in New York City—there was an article about her in the New York Times two years ago, did you know that? She writes for all those magazines and still finds time to write me once a week… but they feel like duty-letters, just like the phone-calls twice a month feel like duty-calls. I think the calls n the chatty little notes are the way she pays her heart to be quiet about how she don’t ever come back here, about how she’s cut her ties with me. Yes, I think she paid, all right; I think the one who was the most blameless of all paid the most, and that she’s payin still.

She’s forty-four years old, she’s never married, she’s too thin (I can see that in the pitchers she sometimes sends), and I think she drinks—I’ve heard it in her voice more’n once when she calls. I got an idear that might be one of the reasons she don’t come home anymore; she doesn’t want me to see her drinkin like her father drank. Or maybe because she’s afraid of what she might say if she had one too many while I was right handy. What she might ask.

But never mind; it’s all water over the dam now. I got away with it, that’s the important thing. If there’d been insurance, or if Pease hadn’t kep his mouth shut, I’m not sure I woulda. Of the two, a fat insurance policy prob’ly woulda been worse. The last thing in God’s round world I needed was some smart insurance investigator hookin up with that smart little Scots doctor who was already mad as hell at the idear of bein beaten by an ignorant island woman. Nope, if there’d been two of em, I think they might’ve got me.

So what happened? Why, what I imagine always happens in cases like that, when a murder’s been done and not found out. Life went on, that’s all. Nobody popped up with last-minute information, like in a movie, I didn’t try to kill nobody else, n God didn’t strike me dead with a lightnin-bolt. Maybe He felt hittin me with lightnin over the likes of Joe St. George woulda been a waste of electricity.

Life just went on. I went back to Pinewood n to Vera. Selena took up her old friendships when she went back to school that fall, and sometimes I heard her laughin on the phone. When the news finally sunk in, Little Pete took it hard… and so did Joe Junior. Joey took it harder’n I expected, actually. He lost some weight n had some nightmares, but by the next summer he seemed mostly all right again. The only thing that really changed durin the rest of 1963 was that I had Seth Reed come over n put a cement cap on the old well.

Six months after he died, Joe’s estate was settled in County Probate. I wa‘ant even there. A week or so later I got a paper tellin me that everythin was mine—I could sell it or swap it or drop it in the deep blue sea. When I’d finished goin through what he’d left, I thought the last of those choices looked like the best one. One kinda surprisin thing I discovered, though: if your husband dies sudden, it can come in handy if all his friends were idiots, like Joe’s were. I sold the old shortwave radio he’d been tinkerin on for ten years to Norris Pinette for twenty-five dollars, and the three junk trucks settin in the back yard to Tommy Anderson. That fool was more’n glad to have em, and I used the money to buy a ’59 Chevy that had wheezy valves but ran good otherwise. I also had Joe’s savins passbook made over to me, and re-opened the kids’ college accounts.

Oh, and one other thing—in January of 1964, I started goin by my maiden name again. I didn’t make no particular fanfare about it, but I was damned if I was gonna drag St. George around behind me the rest of my life, like a can tied to a dog’s tail. I guess you could say I cut the string holdin the can… but I didn’t get rid of him as easy as I got rid of his name, I can tell you that.

Not that I expected to; I’m sixty-five, and I’ve known for at least fifty of those years that most of what bein human’s about is makin choices and payin the bills when they come due. Some of the choices are pretty goddam nasty, but that don’t give a person leave to just walk away from em—especially not if that person’s got others dependin on her to do for em what they can’t do for themselves. In a case like that, you just have to make the best choice you can n then pay the price. For me, the price was a lot of nights when I woke up in a cold sweat from bad dreams n even more when I never got to sleep at all; that and the sound the rock made when it hit him in the face, bustin his skull and his dentures—that sound like a china plate on a brick hearth. I’ve heard it for thirty years. Sometimes it’s what wakes me up, and sometimes it’s what keeps me outta sleep and sometimes it surprises me in broad daylight. I might be sweepin the porch at home or polishin the silver at Vera’s or sittin down to my lunch with the TV turned to the Oprah show and all at once I’ll hear it. That sound. Or the thud when he hit bottom. Or his voice, comin up outta the well: “Duh-lorrrr-issss…”

I don’t s‘pose those sounds I sometimes hear are so different from whatever it was that Vera really saw when she screamed about the wires in the corners or the dust bunnies under the bed. There were times, especially after she really began to fail, when I’d crawl in bed with her n hold her n think of the sound the rock made, n then close my eyes n see a china plate strikin a brick hearth and shatterin all to bits. When I saw that I’d hug her like she was my sister, or like she was myself. We’d lie in that bed, each with her own fright, and finally we’d drowse off together—her with me to keep the dust bunnies away, and me with her to keep away the sound of the china plate—and sometimes before I went to sleep I’d think, “This is how. This is how you pay off bein a bitch. And it ain’t no use sayin if you hadn’t been a bitch you wouldn’t’ve had to pay, because sometimes the world makes you be a bitch. When it’s all doom n dark outside and only you inside to first make a light n then tend it, you have to be a bitch. But oh, the price. The terrible price. ”

Andy, do you s’pose I could have one more tiny little nip from that bottle of yours? I’ll never tell a soul.

Thank you. And thank you, Nancy Bannister, for puttin up with such a long-winded old broad as me. How your fingers holdin out?

Are they? Good. Don’t lose your courage now; I’ve gone at it widdershins, I know, but I guess I’ve finally gotten around to the part you really want to hear about, just the same. That’s good, because it’s late and I’m tired. I’ve been workin my whole life, but I can’t remember ever bein as tired as I am right now.

I was out hangin laundry yest‘y mornin—it seems like six years ago, but it was only yest’y—and Vera was havin one of her bright days. That’s why it was all so unexpected, and partly why I got so flustered. When she had her bright days she sometimes got bitchy, but that was the first n last time she got crazy.

So I was down below in the side yard and she was up above in her wheelchair, supervisin the operation the way she liked to do. Every now n then she’d holler down, “Six pins, Dolores! Six pins on every last one of those sheets! Don’t you try to get away with just four, because I’m watching!”

“Yeah,” I says, “I know, and I bet you only wish it was forty degrees colder and a twenty-knot gale blowin.”

“What?” she caws down at me. “What did you say, Dolores Claiborne?”

“I said someone must be spreadin manure in their garden,” I says, “because I smell a lot more bullshit around here than usual.”

“Are you being smart, Dolores?” she calls back in her cracked, wavery voice.

She sounded about like she did on any day when a few more sunbeams than usual was findin their way into her attic. I knew she might get up to mischief later on, but I didn’t much care—right then I was just glad to hear her makin as much sense as she was. To tell you the truth, it seemed like old times. She’d been number’n a pounded thumb for the last three or four months, and it was sorta nice to have her back… or as much of the old Vera as was ever gonna come back, if you see what I mean.

“No, Vera,” I called up to her. “If I’d been smart, I’d’ve gotten done workin for you a long time ago.”

I expected her to yell somethin else down at me then, but she never. So I went on hangin up her sheets n her diapers n her warshcloths n all the rest. Then, with half the basket still to do, I stopped. I had a bad feeling. I can’t say why, or even where it started. All at once it was just there. And for just a moment the strangest thought came to me: “That girl’s in trouble… the one I saw on the day of the eclipse, the one who saw me. She’s all grown up now, almost Selena’s age, but she’s in terrible trouble.”

I turned around n looked up, almost expectin to see the grownup version of that little girl in her bright striped dress n pink lipstick, but I didn’t see nobody, and that was wrong. It was wrong because Vera should have been there, just about hangin out onto the roof to make sure I used the right number of clothespins. But she was gone, and I didn’t understand how that could be, because I’d put her in her chair myself, and then set the brake once I had it by the window the way she liked.

Then I heard her scream.

“Duh-lorrrrr-isss!”

Such a chill ran up my back when I heard that, Andy! It was like Joe had come back. For a moment I was just frozen to the spot. Then she screamed again, and that second time I recognized it was her.

“Duh-lorrr-isss! It’s dust bunnies! They’re everywhere! Oh-dear-God! Oh-dear-God! Duh-lorrr-iss, help! Help me!”

I turned to run for the house, tripped over the damned laundry-basket, and went sprawlin over it n into the sheets I’d just hung. I got tangled up in em somehow n had to fight my way out. For just a minute it was like the sheets had grown hands and were tryin to strangle me, or just hold me back. And all the while that was goin on, Vera kep screamin, and I thought of the dream I’d had that one time, the dream of the dust-head with all the long snaggly dust-teeth. Only what I saw in my mind’s eye was Joe’s face on that head, and the eyes were all dark n blank, like someone had pushed two lumps of coal into a cloud of dust, and there they hung n floated.

“Dolores, oh please come quick! Oh please come quick! The dust bunnies! THE DUST BUNNIES ARE EVERYWHERE!”

Then she just screamed. It was horrible. You’d never in your wildest dreams have thought a fat old bitch like Vera Donovan could scream that loud. It was like fire n flood n the end of the world all rolled up into one.

I fought my way clear of the sheets somehow, and as I got up I felt one of my slip-straps pop, just like on the day of the eclipse, when Joe almost killed me before I managed to get shut of him. And you know that feelin you get when it seems like you’ve been someplace before, and know all the things people are gonna say before they say em? That feelin came over me so strong it was like there were ghosts all around me, ticklin me with fingers I couldn’t quite see.

And you know somethin else? They felt like dusty ghosts.

I ran in the kitchen door n pelted up the back stairs as fast as my legs’d carry me, and all the time she was screamin, screamin, screamin. My slip started to slide down, and when I got to the back landin I looked around, sure I was gonna see Joe stumblin up right behind me n snatchin at the hem.

Then I looked back the other way, and I seen Vera. She was three-quarters of the way down the hall toward the front staircase, waddlin along with her back to me n screamin as she went. There was a big brown stain on the seat of her nightgown where she’d soiled herself—not out of meanness or bitchiness that last time, but out of plain cold fear.

Her wheelchair was stuck crosswise in her bedroom door. She must’ve released the brake when she saw whatever it was that had scared her so.

Always before when she come down with a case of the horrors, the only thing she could do was sit or lay where she was n bawl for help, and there’ll be plenty of people who’ll tell you she couldn’t move under her own power, but she did yesterday; I swear she did. She released the brake on her chair, turned it, wheeled it across the room, then somehow got out of it when it got stuck in the doorway n went staggerin off down the hall.

I stood there, just frozen to the spot for the first second or two, watchin her lurch along and wonderin what she’d seen that was terrible enough to get her to do what she was doin, to walk after her days of walkin should have been over—what that thing was that she could only think to call the dust bunnies.

But I seen where she was headed—right for the front stairs.

“Vera!” I yelled at her. “Vera, you just stop this foolishness! You’re going to fall! Stop!”

Then I ran just as fast as I could. That feelin that all this was happenin for the second time rolled over me again, only this time it felt like I was Joe, that I was the one tryin to catch up n catch hold.

I don’t know if she didn’t hear me, or if she did n thought in her poor addled brain that I was in front of her instead of behind. All I know for sure is that she went on screamin—“Dolores, help! Help me, Dolores! The dust bunnies!”—and lurched on a little faster.

She’d just about used the hallway up. I raced past the door to her room n clipped my ankle a goddam good one on one of the wheelchair’s footrests—here, you can see the bruise. I ran as fast’s I could, shoutin, “Stop, Vera! Stop!” until my throat was raw.

She crossed the landin and stuck one foot out into space. I couldn’t’ve saved her then, no matter what—all I coulda done was pull myself over with her—but in a situation like that, you don’t have time to think or count the cost. I jumped for her just as that foot of hers come down on thin air and she started to tilt forward. I had one last little glimpse of her face. I don’t think she knew she was goin over; there wasn’t nothing there but bug-eyed panic. I’d seen the look before, although never that deep, and I can tell you it didn’t have nothing to do with fear of fallin. She was thinkin about what was behind her, not what was ahead.

I snatched at the air and didn’t get nothing but the littlest fold of her nightie between the second n third fingers of my left hand. It slipped through em like a whisper.

“Duh-lorrrrr—” she screamed, and then there was a solid, meaty thud. It turns my blood cold to remember that sound; it was just like the one Joe made when he hit the bottom of the well. I seen her do a cartwheel n then heard somethin snap. The sound was as clear n harsh as a stick of kindlin when you break it over your knee. I saw blood squirt out of the side of her head n that was all I wanted to see. I turned away so fast my feet tangled in each other and I went to my knees. I was starin back down the hallway toward her room, and what I saw made me scream. It was Joe. For a few seconds I saw him as clear as I see you now, Andy; I saw his dusty, grinnin face peekin out at me from under her wheelchair, lookin through the wire spokes of the wheel that had got caught in the door.

Then it was gone, and I heard her moanin and cryin.

I couldn’t believe she’d lived through that fall; can’t believe it still. Joe hadn’t been killed outright either, accourse, but he’d been a man in the prime of life, and she was a flabby old woman who’d had half a dozen small strokes n at least three big ones. Also, there wasn’t no mud n squelch to cushion her landin like there had been to cushion his.

I didn’t want to go down to her, didn’t want to see where she was broken and bleedin, but there wa’ant no question, accourse; I was the only one there, and that meant I was elected. When I got up (I had to haul on the newel post at the top of the bannister to do it, my knees were so watery-feelin), I stepped one foot on the hem of my own slip. The other strap popped, n I raised up my dress a little so I could pull it off… and that was just like before, too. I remember lookin down at my legs to see if they were scratched and bleedin from the thorns in the blackberry tangle, but accourse there wasn’t nothing like that.

I felt feverish. If you’ve ever been really sick n your temperature’s gone way, way up, you know what I mean; you don’t feel out of the world, exactly, but you sure as hell don’t feel in it, either. It’s like every thin was turned to glass, and there isn’t anything you can get a solid grip on anymore; everythin’s slippery. That’s how I felt as I stood there on the landin, holdin the top of the bannister in a death-grip and lookin at where she’d finished up.

She was layin a little over halfway down the staircase with both legs twisted so far under her you couldn’t hardly see em. Blood was runnin down one side of her poor old face. When I stumbled down to where she lay, still clingin onto the bannister for dear life as I went, one of her eyes rolled up in its socket to mark me. It was the look of an animal caught in a trap.

“Dolores,” she whispered. “That son of a bitch has been after me all these years.”

“Shh,” I said. “Don’t try to talk.”

“Yes he has,” she said, as if I’d contradicted her. “Oh, the bastard. The randy bastard.”

“I’m going downstairs,” I says. “I got to call the doctor. ”

“No,” she says back. She reached up with one hand and took hold of my wrist. “No doctor. No hospital. The dust bunnies… even there. Everywhere. ”

“You’ll be all right, Vera,” I says, pullin my hand free. “As long as you lie still n don’t move, you’ll be fine.”

“Dolores Claiborne says I’m going to be fine!” she says, and it was that dry, fierce voice she used to use before she had her strokes n got all muddled in her head. “What a relief it is to have a professional opinion!”

Hearin that voice after all the years it had been gone was like bein slapped. It shocked me right out of my panic, and I really looked into her face for the first time, the way you look at a person who knows exactly what they’re sayin n means every word.

“I’m as good as dead,” she says, “and you know it as well as I do. My back’s broken, I think.”

“You don’t know that, Vera,” I says, but I wasn’t wild to get to the telephone like I had been. I think I knew what was comin, and if she ast what I thought she was gonna ask, I didn’t see how I could refuse her. I had owed her a debt ever since that rainy fall day in 1962 when I sat on her bed n bawled my eyes out with my apron up over my face, and the Claibornes have always cleared their debts.

When she spoke to me again, she was as clear and as lucid as she’d been thirty years ago, back when Joe was alive and the kids were still at home. “I know there’s only one thing left worth deciding,” she says, “and that’s whether I’m going to die in my time or in some hospital’s. Their time would be too long. My time is now, Dolores. I’m tired of seeing my husband’s face in the corners when I’m weak and confused. I’m tired of seeing them winch that Corvette out of the quarry in the moonlight, how the water ran out of the open window on the passenger side—”

“Vera, I don’t know what you’re talkin about,” I says.

She lifted her hand n waved it at me in her old impatient way for a second or two; then it flopped back onto the stairs beside her. “I’m tired of pissing down my legs and forgetting who came to see me half an hour after they’re gone. I want to be done. Will you help me?”

I knelt beside her, picked up the hand that’d fallen on the stairs n held it against my bosom. I thought about the sound the rock made when it hit Joe in the face—that sound like a china plate breakin all to splinters on a brick hearth. I wondered if I could hear that sound again without losin my mind. And I knew it would sound the same, because she’d sounded like him when she was callin my name, she’d sounded like him when she fell and landed on the stairs, breakin herself all to pieces just like she’d always been afraid the maids’d break the delicate glassware she kept in the parlor, and my slip was layin on the upstairs landin in a little ball of white nylon with both straps busted, and that was just like before, too. If I did her, it’d sound the same as it had when I did him, and I knew it. Ayuh. I knew it as well’s I know that East Lane ends in those rickety old stairs goin down the side of East Head.

I held her hand n thought about how the world is—how sometimes bad men have accidents and good women turn into bitches. I looked at the awful, helpless way her eyes rolled so she could look up into my face, n I marked how the blood from the cut in her scalp ran down the deep wrinkles in her cheek, the way spring rain runs in plow furrows goin downhill.

I says, “If it’s what you want, Vera, I’ll help you.”

She started to cry then. It was the only time when she wasn’t all dim n foolish that I ever saw her do that. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, it is what I want. God bless you, Dolores.”

“Don’t you fret,” I says. I raised her old wrinkled hand to my lips n kissed it.

“Hurry, Dolores,” she says. “If you really want to help me, please hurry.”

“Before we both lose our courage” was what her eyes seemed to be sayin.

I kissed her hand again, then laid it on her stomach n stood up. I didn’t have no trouble that time; the strength’d come back into my legs. I went down the stairs n into the kitchen. I’d set out the bakin things before going out to hang the warsh; I had it in mind that it’d be a good day to make bread. She had a rollin pin, a great heavy thing made of gray marble veined with black. It was layin on the counter, next to the yellow plastic flour canister. I picked it up, still feelin as if I was in a dream or runnin a high fever, n walked back through the parlor toward the front hall. As I went through that room with all her nice old things in it, I thought about all the times I’d played that trick with the vacuum cleaner on her, and how she’d got back at me for awhile. In the end, she always wised up and got her own back… ain’t that why I’m here?

I come out of the parlor into the hall, then climbed the stairs toward her, holdin that rollin pin by one of the wooden handles. When I got to where she lay, with her head pointed down and her legs twisted under her, I didn’t mean to take no pause; I knew if I did that, I wouldn’t be able to do it at all. There wasn’t going to be any more talk. When I got to her, I meant to drop on one knee n brain her with that marble rollin pin just as hard as I could and as fast as I could. Maybe it’d look like somethin that’d happened to her when she fell and maybe it wouldn’t, but I meant to do it either way.

When I knelt beside her, I saw there was no need; she’d done it on her own after all, like she done most things in her life. While I was in the kitchen gettin the rollin pin, or maybe while I was comin back through the parlor, she’d just closed her eyes n slipped off.

I sat down beside her, put the rollin pin on the stairs, picked up her hand n held it in my lap. There are some times in a person’s life that don’t have no real minutes in em, so, you can’t count em up. All I know is that I sat n visited with her awhile. I dunno if I said anything or not. I think I did—I think I thanked her for lettin go, for lettin me go, for not makin me have to go through all of it again—but maybe I only thought those things. I remember puttin her hand against my cheek, then turnin it over and kissin the palm. I remember lookin at it and thinkin how pink n clean it was. The lines had mostly faded from it, and it looked like a baby’s hand. I knew I ought to get up and telephone someone, tell em what happened, but I was weary—so weary. It seemed easier to just sit there n hold her hand.

Then the doorbell rang. If it hadn’t, I would have set there quite awhile longer, I think. But you know how it is with bells—you feel you have to answer em, no matter what. I got up and went down the stairs one at a time, like a woman ten years older’n I am (the truth is, I felt ten years older), clingin to the bannister the whole way. I remember thinkin the world still felt as if it was made of glass, and I had to be damned careful not to slip on it n cut myself when I had to let go of the bannister n cross the entry to the door.

It was Sammy Marchant, with his mailman’s hat cocked back on his head in that silly way he does —he prob’ly thinks wearin his hat that way makes him look like a rock star. He had the regular mail in one hand and one of those padded envelopes that come registered mail just about every week from New York—news of what was happenin with her financial affairs, accourse—in the other. It was a fella named Greenbush took care of her money, did I tell you that?

I did? All right—thanks. There’s been so much globber I can hardly remember what I’ve told you and what I haven’t.

Sometimes there were papers in those registered mail envelopes that had to be signed, and most times Vera could do that if I helped hold her arm steady, but there were a few times, when she was fogged out, that I signed her name on em myself. There wasn’t nothing to it, and never a single question later about any of the ones I did. In the last three or four years, her signature wa’ant nothin but a scrawl, anyway. So that’s somethin else you c’n get me for, if you really want to: forgery.

Sammy’d started holdin out the padded envelope as soon as the door opened—wantin me to sign for it, like I always did with the registered—but when he got a good look at me, his eyes widened n he took a step backward on the stoop. It was actually more of a jerk than a step—and considerin it was Sammy Marchant doin it, that seems like just the right word. “Dolores!” he says. “Are you all right? There’s blood on you!”

“It’s not mine,” I says, and my voice was as calm as it woulda been if he’d ast me what I was watchin on TV and I told him. “It’s Vera’s. She fell down the stairs. She’s dead.”

“Holy Christ,” he says, then ran past me into the house with his mailbag floppin against one hip. It never crossed my mind to try n keep him out, and ask y’self this: what good would it have done if I had?

I followed him slow. That glassy feelin was goin away, but it seemed like my shoes had grown themselves lead soles. When I got to the foot of the stairs Sammy was halfway up em, kneelin beside Vera. He’d taken off his mailbag before he knelt, and it’d fallen most of the way back down the stairs, spillin letters n Bangor Hydro bills n L. L. Bean catalogues from hell to breakfast.

I climbed up to him, draggin my feet from one stair to the next. I ain’t ever felt s‘tired. Not even after I killed Joe did I feel as tired as I felt yest’y mornin.

“She’s dead, all right,” he says, lookin around.

“Ayuh,” I says back. “Told you she was.”

“I thought she couldn’t walk,” he says. “You always told me she couldn’t walk, Dolores.”

“Well,” I says, “I guess I was wrong.” I felt stupid sayin a thing like that with her layin there like she was, but what the hell else was there to say? In some ways it was easier talkin to John McAuliffe than to poor dumb Sammy Marchant, because I’d done pretty much what McAuliffe suspected I’d done. The trouble with bein innocent is you’re more or less stuck with the truth.

“What’s this?” he asks then, n pointed at the rollin pin. I’d left it sittin on the stair when the doorbell rang.

“What do you think it is?” I ast him right back. “A birdcage?”

“Looks like a rollin pin,” he says.

“That’s pretty good,” I says. It seemed like I was hearin my own voice comin from far away, as if it was in one place n the rest of me was someplace else. “You may surprise em all n turn out to be college material after all, Sammy.”

“Yeah, but what’s a rollin pin doin on the stairs?” he ast, and all at once I saw the way he was lookin at me. Sammy ain’t a day over twenty-five, but his Dad was in the search-party that found Joe, and I all at once realized that Duke Marchant’d probably raised Sammy and all the rest of his not-too-brights on the notion that Dolores Claiborne St. George had done away with her old man. You remember me sayin that when you’re innocent you’re more or less stuck with the truth? Well, when I seen the way Sammy was lookin at me, I all at once decided this might be a time when less’d be quite a bit safer’n more.

“I was in the kitchen gettin ready to make bread when she fell,” I said. Another thing about bein innocent—any lies you do decide to tell are mostly unplanned lies; innocent folks don’t spend hours workin out their stories, like I worked out mine about how I went up to Russian Meadow to watch the eclipse and never seen my husband again until I saw him in the Mercier Funeral Home. The minute that lie about makin bread was out of my mouth I knew it was apt to kick back on me, but if you’d seen the look in his eyes, Andy—dark n suspicious n scared, all at once—you might’ve lied, too.

He got to his feet, started to turn around, then stopped right where he was, lookin up. I followed his gaze. What I seen was my slip, crumpled up in a ball on the landin.

“I guess she took her slip off before she fell,” he said, lookin back at me again. “Or jumped. Or whatever the hell it was she did. Do you think so, Dolores?”

“No,” I says, “that’s mine.” “If you were makin bread in the kitchen,” he says, talkin real slow, like a kid who ain’t too bright tryin to work out a math problem at the blackboard, “then what’s your underwear doin up on the landin?”

I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Sammy took one step back down the stairs n then another, movin as slow’s he talked, holdin the bannister, never takin his eyes off me, and all at once I understood what he was doin: makin space between us. Doin it because he was afraid I might take it into my head to push him like he thought I’d pushed her. It was right then that I knew I’d be sittin here where I’m sittin before too much time passed, and tellin what I’m tellin. His eyes might as well have been speakin right out loud, sayin, “You got away with it once, Dolores Claiborne, and considerin the kind of man my Dad says Joe St. George was, maybe that was all right. But what did this woman ever do to you besides feed you n keep a roof over your head n pay you a decent livin wage?” And what his eyes said more’n anything else was that a woman who pushes once and gets away with it might push twice; that given the right situation, she will push twice. And if the push ain’t enough to do what she set out to do, she won’t have to think very hard before decidin to finish the job some other way. With a marble rollin pin, for instance.

“This is none of your affair, Sam Marchant,” I says. “You better just go about your business. I have to call the island ambulance. Just make sure you pick up your mail before you go, or there’s gonna be a lot of credit card companies chewin on your ass.

“Mrs. Donovan don’t need an ambulance,” he says, goin down another two steps n keepin his eyes on me the whole time, “and I’m not goin anywhere just yet. I think instead of the ambulance, you better make your first call to Andy Bissette.”

Which, as you know, I did. Sammy Marchant stood right there n watched me do it. After I’d hung up the phone, he picked up the mail he’d spilled (takin a quick look over his shoulder every now n then, prob‘ly to make sure I wasn’t creepin up behind him with that rollin pin in my hand) and then just stood at the foot of the stairs, like a guard dog that’s cornered a burglar. He didn’t talk, and I didn’t, neither. It crossed my mind that I could go through the dinin room and the kitchen to the back stairs n get my slip. But what good would that have done? He’d seen it, hadn’t he? And the rollin pin was still settin there on the stairs, wa’ant it?

Pretty soon you came, Andy, along with Frank, and a little later I went down to our nice new police station n made a statement. That was just yest’y forenoon, so I guess there’s no need to reheat that hash, is there? You know I didn’t say anything about the slip, n when you ast me about the rollin pin, I said I wasn’t really sure how it’d gotten there. It was all I could think to say, at least until someone come along n took the OUT OF ORDER sign offa my brains.

After I signed the statement I got in my car n drove home. It was all so quick n quiet—givin the statement and all, I mean—that I almost persuaded myself I didn’t have nothing to worry about. After all, I hadn’t killed her; she really did fall. I kept tellin myself that, n by the time I turned into my own driveway, I’d come a long way to bein convinced that everything was gonna be all right.

That feelin only lasted as long’s it took me to get from the car to my back door. There was a note thumbtacked to it. Just a plain sheet of notebook paper. It had a smear of grease on it, like it’d been torn from a book some man’d been carryin around in his hip pocket. YOU WILL NOT GET AWAY WITH IT AGAIN, the note said. That was all. Hell, it was enough, wouldn’t you say?

I went inside n cracked open the kitchen windows to let out the musty smell. I hate that smell, n the house always seems to have it these days, no matter if I air it out or not. It’s not just because I mostly live at Vera’s now—or did, at least—although accourse that’s part of it; mostly it’s because the house is dead… as dead as Joe n Little Pete.

Houses do have their own life that they take from the people who live in em; I really believe that. Our little one-storey place lived past Joe’s dyin and the two older kids goin away to school, Selena to Vassar on a full scholarship (her share of that college money I was so concerned about went to buy clothes n textbooks), and Joe Junior just up the road to the University of Maine in Orono. It even survived the news that Little Pete had been killed in a barracks explosion in Saigon. It happened just after he got there, and less’n two months before the whole shebang was over. I watched the last of the helicopters pull away from the embassy roof on the TV in Vera’s livin room and just cried n cried. I could let myself do that without fear of what she might say, because she’d gone down to Boston on a shoppin binge.

It was after Little Pete’s funeral that the life went out of the house; after the last of the company had left and the three of us—me, Selena, Joe Junior—was left there with each other. Joe Junior’ d been talkin about politics. He’d just gotten the City Manager job in Machias, not bad for a kid with the ink still wet on his college degree, and was thinkin about runnin for the State Legislature in a year or two.

Selena talked a little bit about the courses she was teachin at Albany Junior College—this was before she moved down to New York City and started writin full time—and then she went quiet. She n I were riddin up the dishes, and all at once I felt somethin. I turned around quick n saw her lookin at me with those dark eyes of hers. I could tell you I read her mind—parents can do that with their kids sometimes, you know—but the fact is I didn’t need to; I knew what she was thinkin about, I knew that it never entirely left her mind. I saw the same questions in her eyes then as had been there twelve years before, when she came up to me in the garden, amongst the beans n the cukes: “Did you do anything to him?” and “Is it my fault?” and “How long do I have to pay?”

I went to her, Andy, n hugged her. She hugged me back, but her body was stiff against mine—stiff’s a poker—and that’s when I felt the life go out of the house. It went like the last breath of a dyin man. I think Selena felt it, too. Not Joe Junior; he puts the pitcher of the house on the front of some of his campaign fliers—it makes him look like home-folks and the voters like that, I’ve noticed—but he never felt it when it died because he never really loved it in the first place. Why would he, for Christ’s sake? To Joe Junior, that house was just the place where he came after school, the place where his father ragged him n called him a book-readin sissy. Cumberland Hall, the dorm he lived in up to the University, was more home to Joe Junior than the house on East Lane ever was.

It was home to me, though, and it was home to Selena. I think my good girl went on livin here long after she’d shaken the dust of Little Tall Island off her feet; I think she lived here in her memories… in her heart… in her dreams. Her nightmares.

That musty smell—you c’n never get rid of it once it really settles in.

I sat by one of the open windows to get a noseful of the fresh sea-breeze for awhile, then I got feelin funny and decided I ought to lock the doors. The front door was easy, but the thumb-bolt on the back one was so balky I couldn’t budge it until I put a charge of Three in One in there. Finally it turned, and when it did I realized why it was so stubborn: simple rust. I sometimes spent five n six days at a stretch up to Vera’s, but I still couldn’t remember the last time I’d bothered to lock up the house.

Thinkin about that just seemed to take all the guts outta me. I went into the bedroom n laid down n put my pillow over my head like I used to do when I was a little girl n got sent to bed early for bein bad. I cried n cried n cried. I would never have believed I had so many tears in me. I cried for Vera and Selena and Little Pete; I guess I even cried for Joe. But mostly I cried for myself. I cried until my nose was plugged up and I had cramps in my belly. Finally I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was dark and the telephone was ringin. I got up n felt my way into the living room to answer it. As soon as I said hello, someone—some woman—said, “You can’t murder her. I hope you know that. If the law doesn’t get you, we will. You aren’t as smart as you think you are. We don’t have to live with murderers here, Dolores Claiborne; not as long as there’s still some decent Christians left on the island to keep it from happenin. ”

My head was so muzzy that at first I thought I was havin a dream. By the time I figured out I was really awake, she’d hung up. I started for the kitchen, meanin to put on the coffee-pot or maybe grab a beer out of the fridge, when the phone rang again. It was a woman that time, too, but not the same one. Filth started to stream out of her mouth n I hung up quick. The urge to cry come over me again, but I was damned if I’d do it. I pulled the telephone plug outta the wall instead. I went into the kitchen n got a beer, but it didn’t taste good to me n I ended up pourin most of it down the sink. I think what I really wanted was a little Scotch, but I haven’t had a drop of hard liquor in the house since Joe died.

I drew a glass of water n found I couldn’t abide the smell of it—it smelled like pennies that’ve been carried around all day in some kid’s sweaty fist. It made me remember that night in the blackberry tangles—how that same smell came to me on a little puff of breeze—n that made me think of the girl in the pink lipstick n the striped dress. I thought of how it’d crossed my mind that the woman she’d grown into was in trouble. I wondered how she was n where she was, but I never once wondered if she was, if you see what I mean; I knew she was. Is. I have never doubted it.

But that don’t matter; my mind’s wanderin again n my mouth’s followin right along behind, like Mary’s little lamb. All I started to say was that the water from my kitchen sink didn’t use me any better than Mr. Budweiser’s finest had—even a couple of ice-cubes wouldn’t take away that coppery smell—and I ended up watchin some stupid comedy show and drinkin one of the Hawaiian Punches I keep in the back of the fridge for Joe Junior’s twin boys. I made myself a frozen dinner but didn’t have no appetite for it once it was ready n ended up scrapin it into the swill. I settled for another Hawaiian Punch instead—took it back into the livin room n just sat there in front of the TV. One comedy’d give way to another, but I didn’t see a dime’s worth of difference. I s‘pose it was because I wa’ant payin much attention.

I didn’t try to figure out what I was gonna do; there’s some figurin you’re wiser not to try at night, because that’s the time your mind’s most apt to go bad on you. Whatever you figure out after sundown, nine times outta ten you got it all to do over again in the mornin. So I just sat, and some time after the local news had ended and the Tonight show had come on, I fell asleep again.

I had a dream. It was about me n Vera, only Vera was the way she was when I first knew her, back when Joe was still alive and all our kids, hers as well as mine, were still around n underfoot most of the time. In my dream we were doin the dishes—her warshin n me wipin. Only we weren’t doin em in the kitchen; we were standin in front of the little Franklin stove in the livin room of my house. And that was funny, because Vera wasn’t ever in my house—not once in her whole life.

She was there in this dream, though. She had the dishes in a plastic basin on top of the stove—not my old stuff but her good Spode china. She’d warsh a plate n then hand it to me, and each one of em’d slip outta my hands and break on the bricks the Franklin stands on. Vera’d say, “You have to be more careful than that, Dolores; when accidents happen and you’re not careful, there’s always a hell of a mess. ”

I’d promise her to be careful, and I’d try, but the next plate’d slip through my fingers, n the next, n the next, n the next.

“This is no good at all,” Vera said at last. “Just look at the mess you’re making!”

I looked down, but instead of pieces of broken plates, the bricks were littered with little pieces of Joe’s dentures n broken stone. “Don’t you hand me no more, Vera,” I said, startin to cry. “I guess I ain’t up to doing no dishes. Maybe I’ve got too old, I dunno, but I don’t want to break the whole job lot of em, I know that.”

She kep on handin em to me just the same, though, and I kep droppin em, and the sound they made when they hit the bricks kep gettin louder n deeper, until it was more a boomin sound than the brittle crash china makes when it hits somethin hard n busts. All at once I knew I was havin a dream n those booms weren’t part of it. I snapped awake s’hard I almost fell outta the chair n onto the floor. There was another of those booms, and this time I knew it for what it was—a shotgun.

I got up n went over to the window. Two pickup trucks went by on the road. There were people in the backs, one in the bed of the first n two—I think—in the bed of the second. It looked like all of em had shotguns, and every couple of seconds one of em’d trigger off a round into the sky. There’d be a bright muzzle-flash, then another loud boom. From the way the men (I guess they were men, although I can’t say for sure) were swayin back n forth—and from the way the trucks were weavin back n forth—I’d say the whole crew was pissyass drunk. I recognized one of the trucks, too.

What?

No, I ain’t gonna tell you—I’m in enough trouble myself. I don’t plan to drag nobody else in with me over a little drunk night-shootin. I guess maybe I didn’t recognize that truck after all.

Anyway, I threw up the window when I seen they wasn’t puttin holes in nothin but a few lowlyin clouds. I thought they’d use the wide spot at the bottom of our hill to turn around, and they did. One of em goddam near got stuck, too, and wouldn’t that have been a laugh.

They come back up, hootin and tootin and yellin their heads off. I cupped m‘hands around m’mouth n screamed “Get outta here! Some folks’re tryin t‘sleep!” just as loud’s I could. One of the trucks swerved a little wider n almost run into the ditch, so I guess I threw a startle into em, all right. The fella standin in the back of that truck (it was the one I thought I recognized until a few seconds ago) went ass-over-dashboard. I got a good set of lungs on me, if I do say so m’self, n I can holler with the best of em when I want to.

“Get offa Little Tall Island, you goddam murderin cunt!” one of em yelled back, n triggered a few more shots off into the air. But that was just in the way of showin me what big balls they had, I think, because they didn’t make another pass. I could hear em roarin off toward town—and that goddam bar that opened there year before last, I’ll bet a cookie—with their mufflers blattin and their tail-pipes chamberin backfires as they did all their fancy downshifts. You know how men are when they’re drunk n drivin pick-em-ups.

Well, it broke the worst of my mood. I wa‘ant scared anymore and I sure as shit didn’t feel weepy anymore. I was good n pissed off, but not s’mad I couldn’t think, or understand why folks were doin the things they were doin. When my anger tried to take me past that place, I stopped it happenin by thinkin of Sammy Marchant, how his eyes had looked as he knelt there on the stairs lookin first at that rollin pin and then up at me—as dark as the ocean just ahead of a squall-line, they were, like Selena’s had been that day in the garden.

I already knew I was gonna have to come back down here, Andy, but it was only after those men left that I quit kiddin myself that I could still pick n choose what I was gonna tell or hold back. I saw I was gonna have to make a clean breast of everything. I went back to bed n slept peaceful until quarter of nine in the morning. It’s the latest I’ve slep since before I was married. I guess I was gettin rested up so I could talk the whole friggin night.

Once I was up, I meant to do it just as soon’s I could—bitter medicine is best taken right away—but somethin put me off my track before I could get out of the house, or I would’ve ended up tellin you all this a lot sooner.

I took a bath, and before I got dressed I put the telephone plug back in the wall. It wasn’t night anymore, and I wasn’t half in n half out of some dream anymore. I figured if someone wanted to phone up and call me names, I’d dish out a few names of my own, startin with “yellowbelly” n “dirty no-name sneak. Sure enough, I hadn’t done more’n roll on my stockings before it did ring. I picked it up, ready to give whoever was on the other end a good dose of what-for, when this woman’s voice said, ”Hello? May I speak to Miz Dolores Claiborne?”

I knew right away it was long distance, n not just because of the little echo we get out here when the call’s from away. I knew because nobody on the island calls women Miz. You might be a Miss n you might be a Missus, but Miz still ain’t made it across the reach, except once a month on the magazine rack down to the drugstore.

“Speakin,” I says.

“This is Alan Greenbush calling,” she says.

“Funny,” I says, pert’s you please, “you don’t sound like an Alan Greenbush.”

“It’s his office calling,” she says, like I was about the dumbest thing she ever heard of. “Will you hold for Mr. Greenbush?”

She caught me so by surprise the name didn’t sink in at first—I knew I’d heard it before, but I didn’t know where.

“What’s it concernin?” I ast.

There was a pause, like she wasn’t really s’posed to let that sort of information out, and then she said, “I believe it concerns Mrs. Vera Donovan. Will you hold, Miz Claiborne?”

Then it clicked in—Greenbush, who sent her all the padded envelopes registered mail.

“Ayuh,” I says.

“Pardon me?” she says.

“I’ll hold,” I says.

“Thank you,” she says back. There was a click n I was left for a little while standin there in my underwear, waitin. It wasn’t long but it seemed long. Just before he came on the line, it occurred to me that it must be about the times I’d signed Vera’s name—they’d caught me. It seemed likely enough; ain’t you ever noticed how when one thing goes wrong, everythin else seems to go wrong right behind it?

Then he come on the line. “Miz Claiborne?” he says.

“Yes, this is Dolores Claiborne,” I told him.

“The local law enforcement official on Little Tall Island called me yesterday afternoon and informed me that Vera Donovan had passed away,” he said. “It was quite late when I received the call, and so I decided to wait until this morning to telephone you.”

I thought of tellin him there was folks on the island not so particular about what time they called me, but accourse I didn’t.

He cleared his throat, then said, “I had a letter from Mrs. Donovan five years ago, specifically instructing me to give you certain information concerning her estate within twenty-four hours of her passing.” He cleared his throat again n said, “Although I have spoken to her on the phone frequently since then, that was the last actual letter I received from her.” He had a dry, fussy kind of voice. The kind of voice that when it tells you somethin, you can’t not hear it.

“What are you talkin about, man?” I ast. “Quit all this backin and fillin and tell me!”

He says, “I’m pleased to inform you that, aside from a small bequest to The New England Home for Little Wanderers, you are the sole beneficiary of Mrs. Donovan’s will.”

My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and all I could think of was how she’d caught onto the vacuum cleaner trick after awhile.

“You’ll receive a confirming telegram later today,” he says, “but I’m very glad to have spoken to you well before its arrival—Mrs. Donovan was very emphatic about her desires in this matter.”

“Ayuh,” I says, “she could be emphatic, all right.”

“I’m sure you’re grieved at Mrs. Donovan’s passing—we all are—but I want you to know that you are going to be a very wealthy woman, and if I can do anything at all to assist you in your new circumstances, I would be as happy to do so as I was to assist Mrs. Donovan. Of course I’ll be calling to give you updates on the progress of the will through probate, but I really don’t expect any problems or delays. In fact—”

“Whoa on, chummy,” I says, n it came out in a kind of croak. Sounded quite a bit like a frog in a dry pond. “How much money are you talkin about?”

Accourse I knew she was well off, Andy; the fact that in the last few years she didn’t wear nothing but flannel nighties n lived on a steady diet of Campbell’s soup and Gerber’s baby-food didn’t change that. I saw the house, I saw the cars, n I sometimes looked at a wee bit more of the papers that came in those padded envelopes than just the signature line. Some were stock transfer forms, n I know that when you’re sellin two thousand shares of Upjohn and buyin four thousand of Mississippi Valley Light n Power, you ain’t exactly totterin down the road to the poorhouse.

I wa’ant askin so I could start applyin for credit cards n orderin things from the Sears catalogue, either—don’t go gettin that idear. I had a better reason than that. I knew that the number of people who thought I’d murdered her would most likely go up with every dollar she left me, n I wanted to know how bad I was gonna get hurt. I thought it might be as much as sixty or seventy thousand dollars… although he had said she left some money to an orphanage, and I figured that’d take it down some.

There was somethin else bitin me, too—bitin the way a June deerfly does when it settles on the back of your neck. Somethin way wrong about the whole proposition. I couldn’t put m‘finger on it, though—no more’n I’d been able to put m’finger on exactly who Greenbush was when his secretary first said his name.

He said somethin I couldn’t quite make out. It sounded like blub-dub-a-gub-area-of-thirty-million-dollars.

“What did you say, sir?” I ast.

“That after probate, legal fees, and a few other small deductions, the total should be in the area of thirty million dollars.”

My hand on the telephone had started to feel the way it does when I wake up n realize I slep most of the night on it… numb through the middle n all tingly around the edges. My feet were tinglin, too, n all at once the world felt like it was made of glass again.

“I’m sorry,” I says. I could hear my mouth talkin perfectly well n perfectly clear, but I didn’t seem to be attached to any of the words that were comin out of it. It was just flappin, like a shutter in a high wind. “The connection here isn’t very good. I thought you said somethin with the word million in it. Then I laughed, just to show how silly I knew that was, but part of me must’ve thought it wa’ant silly at all, because that was the fakestsoundin laugh I ever heard come outta me—Yar-yar-yar, it sounded like.

“I did say million,” he said. “In fact, I said thirty million. And do you know, I think he woulda chuckled if it hadn’t been Vera Donovan’s dead body I was gettin that money over. I think he was excited—that underneath that dry, prissy voice he was excited as hell. I s’pose he felt like John Bears-ford Tipton, the rich fella who used to give away a million bucks at a crack on that old TV show. He wanted my business, accourse that was part of it—I got a feelin that money’s like electric trains to fellas like him n he didn’t want to see such an almighty big set as Vera’s taken away from him—but I think most of the fun of it for him was just hearin me flub-dubbin around like I was doin.

“I don’t get it,” I says, and now my voice was so weak I could hardly hear it myself.

“I think I understand how you feel,” he says. “It’s a very large sum, and of course it will take a little getting used to. ”

“How much is it really?” I ast him, and that time he did chuckle. If he’d been where I coulda got to him, Andy, I believe I woulda booted him in the seat of the pants.

He told me again, thirty million dollars, n I kep thinkin that if my hand got any stupider, I was gonna drop the phone. And I started to feel panicky. It was like someone was inside my head, swingin a steel cable around n around. I’d think thirty million dollars, but those were just words. When I tried to see what they meant, the only pitcher I could make inside my head was like the ones in the Scrooge McDuck comic books Joe Junior used to read Little Pete when Pete was four or five. I saw a great big vault fulla coins n bills, only instead of Scrooge McDuck paddlin around in all that dough with the spats on his flippers n those little round spectacles perched on his beak, I’d see me doin it in my bedroom slippers. Then that pitcher’d slip away and I’d think of how Sammy Marchant’s eyes had looked when they moved from the rollin pin to me n then back to the rollin pin again. They looked like Selena’s had looked that day in the garden, all dark n full of questions. Then I thought of the woman who called on the phone n said there were still decent Christians on the island who didn’t have to live with murderers. I wondered what that woman n her friends were gonna think when they found out Vera’s death had left me thirty million dollars to the good… and the thought of that came close to puttin me into a panic.

“You can’t do it!” I says, kinda wild. “Do you hear me? You can’t make me take it!”

Then it was his turn to say he couldn’t quite hear—that the connection must be loose someplace along the line. I ain’t a bit surprised, either. When a man like Greenbush hears someone sayin they don’t want a thirty-million-dollar lump of cash, they figure the equipment must be frigged up. I opened my mouth to tell him again that he’d have to take it back, that he could give every cent of it to The New England Home for Little Wanderers, when I suddenly understood what was wrong with all this. It didn’t just hit me; it come down on my head like a dropped load of bricks.

“Donald n Helga!” I says. I musta sounded like a TV game-show contestant comin up with the right answer in the last second or two of the bonus round.

“I beg pardon?” he asks, kinda cautious.

“Her kids!” I says. “Her son and her daughter! That money belongs to them, not me! They’re kin! I ain’t nothing but a jumped-up housekeeper!”

There was such a long pause then that I felt sure we musta been disconnected, and I wa’ant a bit sorry. I felt faint, to tell you the truth. I was about to hang up when he says in this flat, funny voice, “You don’t know. ”

“Don’t know what?” I shouted at him. “I know she’s got a son named Donald and a daughter named Helga! I know they was too damned good to come n visit her up here, although she always kep space for em, but I guess they won’t be too good to divide up a pile like the one you’re talkin about now that she’s dead!”

“You don’t know,” he said again. And then, as if he was askin questions to himself instead of to me, he says, “Could you not know, after all the time you worked for her? Could you? Wouldn’t Kenopensky have told you?” N before I could get a word in edgeways, he started answerin his own damned questions. “Of course it’s possible. Except for a squib on an inside page of the local paper the day after, she kept the whole thing under wraps—you could do that thirty years ago, if you were willing to pay for the privilege. I’m not sure there were even obituaries.” He stopped, then says, like a man will when he’s just discoverin somethin new—somethin huge—about someone he’s known all his life: “She talked about them as if they were alive, didn’t she. All these years!”

“What are you globberin about?” I shouted at him. It felt like an elevator was goin down in my stomach, and all at once all sorts of things—little things—started fittin together in my mind. I didn’t want em to, but it went on happenin, just the same.

“Accourse she talked about em like they were alive! They are alive! He’s got a real estate company in Arizona—Golden West Associates! She designs dresses in San Francisco… Gaylord Fashions!”

Except she’d always read these big paperback historical novels with women in low-cut dresses kissin men without their shirts on, and the trade name for those books was Golden West—it said so on a little foil strip at the top of every one. And it all at once occurred to me that she’d been born in a little town called Gaylord, Missouri. I wanted to think it was somethin else—Galen, or maybe Galesburg—but I knew it wasn’t. Still, her daughter mighta named her dress business after the town her mother’d been born in… or so I told myself.

“Miz Claiborne,” Greenbush says, talkin in a low, sorta anxious voice, “Mrs. Donovan’s husband was killed in an unfortunate accident when Donald was fifteen and Helga was thirteen—”

“I know that!” I says, like I wanted him to believe that if I knew that I must know everything.

“—and there was consequently a great deal of bad feeling between Mrs. Donovan and the children.”

I’d known that, too. I remembered people remarkin on how quiet the kids had been when they showed up on Memorial Day in 1961 for their usual summer on the island, and how several people’d mentioned that you didn’t ever seem to see the three of em together anymore, which was especially strange, considerin Mr. Donovan’s sudden death the year before; usually somethin like that draws people closer… although I s’pose city folks may be a little different about such things. And then I remembered somethin else, somethin Jimmy DeWitt told me in the fall of that year.

“They had a wowser of an argument in a restaurant just after the Fourth of July in ’61,” I says. “The boy n girl left the next day. I remember the hunky—Kenopensky, I mean—takin em across to the mainland in the big motor launch they had back then.”

“Yes,” Greenbush said. “It so happens that I knew from Ted Kenopensky what that argument was about. Donald had gotten his driver’s license that spring, and Mrs. Donovan had gotten him a car for his birthday. The girl, Helga, said she wanted a car, too. Vera—Mrs. Donovan—apparently tried to explain to the girl that the idea was silly, a car would be useless to her without a driver’s license and she couldn’t get one of those until she was fifteen. Helga said that might be true in Maryland, but it wasn’t the case in Maine—that she could get one there at fourteen… which she was. Could that have been true, Miz Claiborne, or was it just an adolescent fantasy?”

“It was true back then,” I says, “although I think you have to be at least fifteen now. Mr. Greenbush, the car she got her boy for his birthday… was it a Corvette?”

“Yes,” he says, “it was. How did you know that, Miz Claiborne?”

“I musta seen a pitcher of it sometime,” I said, but I hardly heard my own voice. The voice I heard was Vera’s. “I’m tired of seeing them winch that Corvette out of the quarry in the moonlight,” she told me as she lay dyin on the stairs. “Tired of seein how the water ran out of the open window on the passenger side.”

“I’m surprised she kept a picture of it around,” Greenbush said. “Donald and Helga Donovan died in that car, you see. It happened in October of 1961, almost a year to the day after their father died. It seemed the girl was driving.”

He went on talkin, but I hardly heard him, Andy—I was too busy fillin in the blanks for myself, and doin it so fast that I guess I musta known they were dead… somewhere way down deep I musta known it all along. Greenbush said they’d been drinkin and pushin that Corvette along at better’n a hundred miles an hour when the girl missed a turn and went into the quarry; he said both of em were prob’ly dead long before that fancy two-seater sank to the bottom.

He said it was an accident, too, but maybe I knew a little more about accidents than he did.

Maybe Vera did, too, and maybe she’d always known that the argument they had that summer didn’t have Jack Shit to do with whether or not Helga was gonna get a State of Maine driver’s license; that was just the handiest bone they had to pick. When McAuliffe ast me what Joe and I argued about before he got chokin me, I told him it was money on top n booze underneath. The tops of people’s arguments are mostly quite a lot different from what’s on the bottom, I’ve noticed, and it could be that what they were really arguin about that summer was what had happened to Michael Donovan the year before.

She and the hunky killed the man, Andy—she did everything but come out n tell me so. She never got caught, either, but sometimes there’s people inside of families who’ve got pieces of the jigsaw puzzle the law never sees. People like Selena, for instance… n maybe people like Donald n Helga Donovan, too. I wonder how they looked at her that summer, before they had that argument in The Harborside Restaurant n left Little Tall for the last time. I’ve tried n tried to remember how their eyes were when they looked at her, if they were like Selena’s when she looked at me, n I just can’t do it. P’raps I will in time, but that ain’t nothing I’m really lookin forward to, if you catch my meanin.

I do know that sixteen was young for a little hellion like Don Donovan to have a driver’s license—too damned young—and when you add in that hot car, why, you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Vera was smart enough to know that, and she must have been scared sick; she might have hated the father, but she loved the son like life itself. I know she did. She gave it to him just the same, though. Tough as she was, she put that rocket in his pocket, n Helga‘s, too, as it turned out, when he wasn’t but a junior in high school n prob’ly just startin to shave. I think it was guilt, Andy. And maybe I want to think it was just that because I don’t like to think there was fear mixed in with it, that maybe a couple of rich kids like them could blackmail their mother for the things they wanted over the death of their father. I don’t really think it… but it’s possible, you know; it is possible. In a world where a man can spend months tryin to take his own daughter to bed, I believe anything is possible.

“They’re dead,” I said to Greenbush. “That’s what you’re telling me.”

“Yes,” he says.

“They’ve been dead, thirty years n more,” I says.

“Yes,” he says again.

“And everything she told me about em,” I says, “it was a lie.”

He cleared his throat again—that man’s one of the world’s greatest throat-clearers, if my talk with him today’s any example—and when he spoke up, he sounded damned near human. “What did she tell you about them, Miz Claiborne?” he ast.

And when I thought about it, Andy, I realized she’d told me a hell of a lot, startin in the summer of ’62, when she showed up lookin ten years older n twenty pounds lighter’n the year before. I remember her tellin me that Donald n Helga might be spendin August at the house n for me to check n make sure we had enough Quaker Rolled Oats, which was all they’d eat for breakfast. I remember her comin back up in October—that was the fall when Kennedy n Khrushchev were decidin whether or not they was gonna blow up the whole shootin match—and tellin me I’d be seein a lot more of her in the future. “I hope you’ll be seein the kids, too,” she’d said, but there was somethin in her voice, Andy… and in her eyes…

Mostly it was her eyes I thought of as I stood there with the phone in my hand. She told me all sorts of things with her mouth over the years, about where they went to school, what they were doin, who they were seein (Donald got married n had two kids, accordin to Vera; Helga got married n divorced), but I realized that ever since the summer of 1962, her eyes’d been tellin me just one thing, over n over again: they were dead. Ayuh… but maybe not completely dead. Not as long as there was one scrawny, plain-faced housekeeper on an island off the coast of Maine who still believed they were alive.

From there my mind jumped forward to the summer of 1963—the summer I killed Joe, the summer of the eclipse. She’d been fascinated by the eclipse, but not just because it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Nossir. She was in love with it because she thought it was the thing that’d bring Donald n Helga back to Pinewood. She told me so again n again n again. And that thing in her eyes, the thing that knew they were dead, went away for awhile in the spring n early summer of that year.

You know what I think? I think that between March or April of 1963 and the middle of July, Vera Donovan was crazy; I think for those few months she really did believe they were alive. She wiped the sight of that Corvette comin outta the quarry where it’d fetched up from her memory; she believed em back to life by sheer force of will. Believed em back to life? Nope, that ain’t quite right. She eclipsed em back to life.

She went crazy n I believe she wanted to stay crazy—maybe so she could have em back, maybe to punish herself, maybe both at the same time—but in the end, there was too much bedrock sanity in her n she couldn’t do it. In the last week or ten days before the eclipse, it all started to break down. I remember that time, when us who worked for her was gettin ready for that Christless eclipse expedition n the party to follow, like it was yesterday. She’d been in a good mood all through June and early July, but around the time I sent my kids off, everythin just went to hell. That was when Vera started actin like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, yellin at people if they s’much as looked at her crosseyed, n firin house-help left n right. I think that was when her last try at wishin em back to life fell apart. She knew they were dead then and ever after, but she went ahead with the party she’d planned, just the same. Can you imagine the courage that took? The flat-out coarse-grained down-in-your-belly guts?

I remembered somethin she said, too—this was after I’d stood up to her about firin the Jolander girl. When Vera come up to me later, I thought sure she was gonna fire me. Instead she give me a bagful of eclipse-watchin stuff n made what was —to Vera Donovan, at least—an apology. She said that sometimes a woman had to be a high-ridin bitch. “Sometimes,” she told me, “being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.”

Ayuh, I thought. When there’s nothin else left, there’s that. There’s always that.

“Miz Claiborne?” a voice said in my ear, and that’s when I remembered he was still on the line; I’d gone away from him completely. “Miz Claiborne, are you still there?”

“Still here,” I sez. He’d ast me what she told me about em, n that was all it took to set me off thinkin about those sad old times… but I didn’t see how I could tell him all that, not some man from New York who didn’t know nothin about how we live up here on Little Tall. How she lived up on Little Tall. Puttin it another way, he knew an almighty lot about Upjohn and Mississippi Valley Light n Power, but not bugger-all about the wires in the corners.

Or the dust bunnies.

He starts off, “I asked what she told you—”

“She told me to keep their beds made up n plenty of Quaker Rolled Oats in the pantry,” I says. “She said she wanted to be ready because they might decide to come back anytime.” And that was close enough to the truth of how it was, Andy—close enough for Greenbush, anyway.

“Why, that’s amazing!” he said, and it was like listenin to some fancy doctor say, “Why, that’s a brain tumor!”

We talked some more after that, but I don’t have much idear what things we said. I think I told him again that I didn’t want it, not so much as one red penny, and I know from the way he talked to me —kind n pleasant n sorta jollyin me along—that when he talked to you, Andy, you must not’ve passed along any of the news flashes Sammy Marchant prob‘ly gave you n anyone else on Little Tall that’d listen. I s’pose you figured it wa’ant none of his business, at least not yet.

I remember tellin him to give it all to the Little Wanderers, and him sayin he couldn’t do that. He said I could, once the will had cleared through probate (although the biggest ijit in the world coulda told he didn’t think I’d do any such thing once I finally understood what’d happened), but he couldn’t do doodly-squat with it.

Finally I promised I’d call him back when I felt “a little clearer in my mind,” as he put it, n then hung up. I just stood there for a long time—must’ve been fifteen minutes or more. I felt… creepy. I felt like that money was all over me, stuck to me like bugs used to stick to the flypaper my Dad hung in our outhouse every summer back when I was little. I felt afraid it’d just stick to me tighter n tighter once I started movin around, that it’d wrap me up until I didn’t have no chance in hell of ever gettin it off again.

By the time I did start movin, I’d forgot all about comin down to the police station to see you, Andy. To tell the truth, I almost forgot to get dressed. In the end I pulled on an old pair of jeans n a sweater, although the dress I’d meant to wear was laid out neat on the bed (and still is, unless somebody’s broke in and took out on the dress what they would’ve liked to’ve taken out on the person who b’longed inside of it). I added my old galoshes n called it good.

I skirted around the big white rock between the shed n the blackberry tangle, stoppin for a little bit to look into it n listen to the wind rattlin in all those thorny branches. I could just see the white of the concrete wellcap. Lookin at it made me feel shivery, like a person does when they’re comin down with a bad cold or the flu. I took the short-cut across Russian Meadow and then walked down to where the Lane ends at East Head. I stood there a little while, lettin the ocean wind push back my hair n warsh me clean, like it always does, and then I went down the stairs.

Oh, don’t look so worried, Frank—the rope acrost the top of em n that warnin sign are both still there; it’s just that I wa’ant much worried about that set of rickety stairs after all I had to go through.

I walked all the way down, switchin back n forth, until I come to the rocks at the bottom. The old town dock—what the oldtimers used to call Simmons Dock—was there, you know, but there’s nothin left of it now but a few posts n two big iron rings pounded into the granite, all rusty n scaly. They look like what I imagine the eye-sockets in a dragon’s skull would look like, if there really were such things. I fished off that dock many a time when I was little, Andy, and I guess I thought it’d always be there, but in the end the sea takes everything.

I sat on the bottom step, danglin my galoshes over, and there I stayed for the next seven hours. I watched the tide go out n I watched it come most of the way in again before I was done with the place.

At first I tried to think about the money, but I couldn’t get my mind around it. Maybe people who’ve had that much all their lives can, but I couldn’t. Every time I tried, I just saw Sammy Marchant first lookin at the rollin pin… n then up at me. That’s all the money meant to me then, Andy, and it’s all it means to me now—Sammy Marchant lookin up at me with that dark glare n sayin, “I thought she couldn’t walk. You always told me she couldn’t walk, Dolores.”

Then I thought about Donald n Helga. “Fool me once, shame on you,” I says to no one at all as I sat there with my feet danglin so close over the incomers that they sometimes got splattered with curds of foam. “Fool me twice, shame on me.” Except she never really fooled me… her eyes never fooled me.

I remembered wakin up to the fact—one day in the late sixties, this musta been—that I had never seen em, not even once, since I’d seen the hunky takin em back to the mainland that July day in 1961. And that so distressed me that I broke a long-standin rule of mine not to talk about em at all, ever, unless Vera spoke of em first. “How are the kids doin, Vera?” I ast her—the words jumped outta my mouth before I knew they were comin—with God’s my witness, that’s just what they did. “How are they really doin?”

I remember she was sittin in the parlor at the time, knittin in the chair by the bow windows, and when I ast her that she stopped what she was doin and looked up at me. The sun was strong that day, it struck across her face in a bright, hard stripe, and there was somethin so scary about the way she looked that for a second or two I came close to screamin. It wasn’t until the urge’d passed that I realized it was her eyes. They were deep-set eyes, black circles in that stripe of sun where everythin else was bright. They were like his eyes when he looked up at me from the bottom of the well… like little black stones or lumps of coal pushed into white dough. For that second or two it was like seein a ghost. Then she moved her head a little and it was just Vera again, sittin there n lookin like she’d had too much to drink the night before. It wouldn’t’ve been the first time if she had.

“I don’t really know, Dolores,” she said. “We are estranged.” That was all she said, n it was all she needed to say. All the stories she told me about their lives—made-up stories, I know now—didn’t say as much as those three words: “We are estranged.” A lot of the time I spent today down by Simmons Dock I spent thinkin about what an awful word that is. Estranged. Just the sound of it makes me shiver.

I sat there n picked over those old bones one last time, n then I put em aside and got up from where I’d spent most of the day. I decided that I didn’t much care what you or anyone else believed. It’s all over, you see—for Joe, for Vera, for Michael Donovan, for Donald n Helga… and for Dolores Claiborne, too. One way or another, all the bridges between that time n this one have been burned. Time’s a reach, too, you know, just like the one that lies between the islands and the mainland, but the only ferry that can cross it is memory, and that’s like a ghost-ship—if you want it to disappear, after awhile it will.

But all that aside, it’s still funny how things turned out, ain’t it? I remember what went through my mind as I got up n turned back to them rickety stairs—the same thing that went through it when Joe snaked his arm outta the well n almost pulled me in with him: I have digged a pit for mine enemies, and am fallen into it myself. It seemed to me, as I laid hold of that old splintery bannister n got set to climb back up all those stairs (always assumin they’d hold me a second time, accourse), that it’d finally happened, n that I’d always known it would. It just took me awhile longer to fall into mine than it took Joe to fall into his.

Vera had a pit to fall into, too—and if I’ve got anything to be grateful for, it’s that I haven’t had to dream my children back to life like she did… although sometimes, when I’m talkin to Selena on the phone and hear her slur her words, I wonder if there’s any escape for any of us from the pain n the sorrow of our lives. I couldn’t fool her, Andy —shame on me.

Still, I’ll take what I can take n grit my teeth so it looks like a grin, just like I always have. I try to keep in mind that two of my three children live still, that they are successful beyond what anyone on Little Tall would’ve expected when they were babies, and successful beyond what they maybe could’ve been if their no-good of a father hadn’t had himself an accident on the afternoon of July 20th, 1963. Life ain’t an either-or proposition, you see, and if I ever forget to be thankful my girl n one of my boys lived while Vera’s boy n girl died, I’ll have to explain the sin of ingratitude when I get before the throne of the Almighty. I don’t want to do that. I got enough on my conscience—and prob’ly on my soul, too—already. But listen to me, all three of you, n hear this if you don’t hear nothing else: everything I did, I did for love… the love a natural mother feels for her children. That’s the strongest love there is in the world, and it’s the deadliest. There’s no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.

I thought of my dream as I reached the top of the steps again, n stood on the landin just inside that guard-rope, lookin out to sea—the dream of how Vera kept handin me plates and I kep droppin em. I thought of the sound the rock made when it struck him in the face, and how the two sounds were the same sound.

But mostly I thought about Vera and me—two bitches livin on a little chunk of rock off the Maine coast, livin together most of the time in the last years. I thought about how them two bitches slep together when the older one was scared, n how they passed the years in that big house, two bitches who ended up spendin most of their time bitchin at each other. I thought of how she’d fool me, n how I’d go’n fool her right back, and how happy each of us was when we won a round. I thought about how she was when the dust bunnies ganged up on her, how she’d scream n how she trembled like an animal that’s been backed into a corner by a bigger creature that means to tear it to pieces. I remember how I’d climb into the bed with her, n put my arms around her, n feel her tremblin that way, like a delicate glass that someone’s tapped with the handle of a knife. I’d feel her tears on my neck, and I’d brush her thin, dry hair n say, “Shhh, dear… shhh. Those pesky dust bunnies are all gone. You’re safe. Safe with me.”

But if I’ve found out anything, Andy, it’s that they ain’t never gone, not really. You think you’re shut of em, that you neatened em all away and there ain’t a dust bunny anyplace, n then they come back, they look like faces, they always look like faces, and the faces they look like are always the ones you never wanted to see again, awake or in your dreams.

I thought of her layin there on the stairs, too, and sayin she was tired, she wanted to be done. And as I stood there on that rickety landin in my wet galoshes, I knew well enough why I’d chosen to be on those stairs that are so rotted not even the hellions will play on em after school lets out, or on the days when they play hookey. I was tired, too. I’ve lived my life as best I could by my own lights. I never shirked a job, nor cried off from the things I had to do, even when those things were terrible. Vera was right when she said that sometimes a woman has to be a bitch to survive; but bein a bitch is hard work, I’ll tell the world it is, n I was so tired. I wanted to have done, and it occurred to me that it wasn’t too late to go back down those stairs, n that I didn’t have to stop at the bottom this time, neither… not if I didn’t want to.

Then I heard her again—Vera. I heard her like I did that night beside the well, not just in my head but my ear. It was a lot spookier this time, I c’n tell you; back in ’63 she’d at least been alive.

“What can you be thinking about, Dolores?” she ast in that haughty Kiss-My-Back-Cheeks voice of hers. “I paid a higher price than you did; I paid a higher price than anyone will ever know, but I lived with the bargain I made just the same. I did more than that. When the dust bunnies and the dreams of what could have been were all I had left, I took the dreams and made them my own. The dust bunnies? Well, they might have gotten me in the end, but I lived with them for a lot of years before they did. Now you’ve got a bunch of your own to deal with, but if you’ve lost the guts you had on the day when you told me that firing the Jolander girl was a boogery thing to do, go on. Go on and jump. Because without your guts, Dolores Claiborne, you’re just another stupid old woman.”

I drew back n looked around, but there was only East Head, dark n wet with that spray that travels in the air on windy days. There wasn’t a soul in sight. I stood there awhile longer, lookin at the way the clouds ran across the sky—I like to watch em, they’re so high n free n silent as they go their courses up there—and then I turned away n started back home. I had to stop n rest two or three times on the way, because that long time sittin in the damp air at the bottom of the steps put an awful misery in my back. But I made it. When I got back to the house I took three asp’rin, got into my car, n drove straight here.

And that’s it.

Nancy, I see you’ve piled up purt-near a dozen of those little tiny tapes, n your cunning little recorder must be just about wore out. So’m I, but I come here to have my say, and I’ve had it—every damn word of it, and every word is true. You do what you need to do to me, Andy; I’ve done my part, n I feel at peace with myself. That’s all that matters, I guess; that, n knowin exactly who you are. I know who I am: Dolores Claiborne, two months shy of my sixty-sixth birthday, registered Democrat, lifelong resident of Little Tall Island.

I guess I want to say two more things, Nancy, before you hit the STOP button on that rig of yours. In the end, it’s the bitches of the world who abide… and as for the dust bunnies: frig ya!