Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

Tabloid News by Louis Bromfield

Louis Bromfield’s EARLY AUTUMN won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927. The author of THE GREEN BAY TREE, THE STRANGE CASE OF MISS ANNIE SPRAGG, and THE FARM has seen his later novels — like THE RAINS CAME and MRS. PARKINGTON — transformed into super-budget Class-A films which have spread the name of Louis Bromfield to the four corners of the world. Once upon a time, however, Mr. Bromfield promised his readers that in his writing he would devote himself exclusively to the American scene; alas, he did not keep that promise, but you will find in “Tabloid News” a tale of passion and murder that only an American could have written — an authentic American story, native to its deepest roots.

Homer Dilworth was born in 1881 and they hanged him by the neck until dead only last Tuesday, so he was only 50 when he died in the prime of life. He was younger than most men of 50. He was solider, rosier, clearer-eyed. His voice was alive, and his skin was soft and young. And the funny thing is that he was younger at 50 than he was at 40.

He was even younger when he died than he was at 30. He’d always been rather sour-faced and dry and bony, like a handsome tree withered by blight. And then, all at once, when he was 48 he suddenly turned young.

In a way, to have hanged him was worse than killing most young fellows, because Homer had his youth so late in life. He turned young all of a sudden, like an old apple tree blossoming carelessly in October.

His parents were respectable folk and very religious. The old woman was a little queer, and they lived in a little town called Hanover, and Homer was an only child. ’Way back when he was a boy, little towns like that didn’t have theaters or movies or automobiles or radios, and everything centered about the church. There was going to church on Sunday, and church sociables and strawberry festivals, and then, about once a year, a big revival meeting, when everything broke loose.

It was like that in Hanover. They were awful strict but just as much love-making went on there as anywhere else, only they made it nasty in Hanover.

His mother and father wanted Homer, their only son, to be a preacher, and Homer thought he wanted to be one. He took it all seriously and talked a lot about purity and the devil. He used to harangue me a good deal. We had a kind of Damon and Pythias friendship.

The other night I was thinking back over his story and I remembered a few things, mostly in pictures, the way you remember things when you’re beginning to grow old. There was a swimming hole about three miles from town where we used to go swimming together. It was a clear stream and in the middle of a wide pasture it spread out into a kind of pond.

A couple of hundred feet away there was a low hill with a house on it, but nobody lived in the house and it was falling into ruin. It was partly log cabin and partly clapboard and all the windows were broken and the bushes had grown up high around it.

There was a story about the house which happened before my time. They said that a certain old man known as Elder Sammis had lived there once and that he’d beaten his daughter to death when he found that she’d got into trouble.

He didn’t mean to beat her as bad as that, but when he found she was dead he put her body in a box under the bed and ran away, and they found the dead girl there two weeks later. They tried to catch him but they never did, because about a month later he jumped off a river boat and was drowned.

So nobody lived in the house and everybody was scared of it, so there wasn’t any reason why we couldn’t swim there in peace.

After Homer was hanged, one of the pictures I remembered was that swimming hole on an afternoon in early June when he’d come over from the Theological Seminary to spend Sunday with his folks. The water was clear and the sunlight was hot, and after we’d swum about a bit and splashed at each other like a couple of kids, we got out of the water and lay on the grass and talked.

We lay there almost in the shadow of the empty old home and for a long time we didn’t say anything. It was beautiful, with the sun on our bodies and the soft grass under us and a warm breeze blowing over us.

A calf came up and sniffed at me and went away again, and it struck me all of a sudden how beautiful Homer was lying there in the sun. He was like the ideas some people have about the Greeks, which aren’t true probably but are kind of idealized.

That afternoon he was preachier than ever. He went after me for going on buggy rides at night with old man Fisher’s girl, and for not believing in God. And he began to hash over a lot of ideas about purity that didn’t make any sense, and all the time I wanted to get up and laugh and dance, because it seemed so funny to hear all that claptrap coming out of the mouth of a young fellow, sitting on the grass beside that clear stream.

I wanted to laugh but I kept my mouth shut, and then he said something that made me want to cry. I’m not emotional or sentimental, but I guess it must have been the feel of the grass and the sun and the warm breeze that made me feel that way. He said, “I don’t care for myself, Buck. It’s because when I go to heaven I want to find you there, too.”

And then the sun disappeared. It had slipped down behind the desolate Sammis house and was shining through the empty holes where the windows used to be, and the breeze wasn’t so warm any more and I began to pull on my clothes; and then Homer, seeing that all his talk wasn’t having any effect, began to dress, too.

After we dressed we sat around for a while and Homer said presently, “Let’s go up and look through old Sammis’s house.”

We’d never done it as kids on account of the story that Hester Sammis’s ghost was always in the house. I don’t believe in ghosts, and that afternoon I knew for the first time that it wasn’t really the thought of ghosts which had scared me but something else. I knew that it was because of the sadness that clung to the old house itself.

We didn’t go into the house, but all the way home he kept kidding me about being afraid of ghosts and I didn’t try to explain to him. Lately, I’ve been thinking I was wrong not to have talked about it and that if I’d tried as hard to convert him as he tried to convert me, they mightn’t have hanged him last Tuesday.

The trouble was that I was finding my heaven right here on earth and not worrying much about what happened afterwards, and he was afraid of this earth and worrying himself about the next and he wanted me to be in heaven with him. I guess he cared a lot more for me than I knew in those days.

It was that afternoon that he told me he was going to get married as soon as he was out of college. I was glad, because I thought it would be good for him.

But I didn’t see the girl until after they were married and came back to Hanover to live. He didn’t become a preacher, after all, because his uncle died and left his hardware store to Homer’s lather and Homer’s father thought it over and decided the cash drawer of a good-paying hardware store was better than the rewards of saving souls.

So Homer came back to Hanover to live and set up his wife in a house alongside his parents’ house and took over the hardware store.

The hardware business flourished because Homer was honest and reliable and sold only the best hardware, and his father kind of looked after the business, because Homer wasn’t very good about things like that. He was really romantic and all that squeezing into a hard pious shell couldn’t change that in him. It was always bursting out somewhere.

After he got married he took to reading all kinds of romantic novels like The Three Musketeers. He really wanted to travel to places alone, looking for adventures, but he’d got himself married when he was twenty-one and his wife had twins, and after that there was a baby about every eighteen months until there were five, so he couldn’t very well do anything but look after the store and take care of the children when his wife Etta was doing church work.

And his wife wasn’t much. I’m kind of an idealist, and before he got married, I always pictured him taking up with a woman who was as fine and beautiful as himself. There was something wonderful in the idea of a beautiful girl marrying such a handsome fellow as Homer and in their having a lot of beautiful children.

But when he came back and invited me to supper one night to meet Etta, I felt kind of sick when I saw her. I knew right away that Homer had been up to his old tricks. He’d married the kind of woman he’d been brought up to marry and not the kind he’d been meant by Nature to marry.

She didn’t take to me and I certainly didn’t like her, and after that first meeting, Homer and I began to see less and less of each other. She was the kind of woman who wasn’t going to let her husband have any friends.

It wasn’t just women. She wouldn’t let him have men friends, either. And I guess she thought I was the devil himself, so she wouldn’t even let Homer go on trying to save my soul so I could be in heaven with him.

Once she buttonholed me on the street and called me a sot and harangued me until I got away from her, and after that Homer was ashamed and he’d walk around a block or go into a store if he saw me coming. I guess there’s lots of women like her in America.

Of course, with all that going on, she didn’t have much time for housework. The children were always sick and the dishes were never washed, and Homer used to have to stay at home to look after the children and take care of the house while she went to meetings and traveled about lecturing and haranguing.

I always thought he had too much character to do things like that, but I guess she just wore him down with abuse and whining and nagging. But he did have enough character to preserve a kind of dignity in spite of everything. He just gave up going out anywhere and lived between his house and the hardware store. He was crazy about his children.

But marriage didn’t do him much good. Instead of growing fat on it like most men, he seemed to grow dry. He looked older than he was and there were hard lines in his face that oughtn’t to have been there, and I only found out the reason when he sent for me at the Mitchellville jail after he got into trouble.

When I got word that he wanted to see me, I could have died of surprise, because he hadn’t seen me in fifteen years for more than long enough to say “Howdydo” when we passed in the street. I guess his mind must have gone back a long way, beyond Etta and all she’d done to him, to that day when we went swimming together for the last time and lay on the soft grass behind the haunted Sammis house.

Sitting there in the cell of the Mitchellville jail, he told me all about Etta and about everything else, too. After the fifth child was born, she told him the doctor said if she had another child it would kill her, so they couldn’t live together as man and wife any more. And that happened before Homer was 30. So for seventeen years they lived together as if they weren’t married.

The summer that Homer was 48 Etta said she had to have a rest because she was all worn out. Homer didn’t want to go away but she kept nagging him, and at last he left the hardware store with his clerk and his oldest boy and they went up to La Vallette. He was looking bad himself, all gray and dried-up.

He hardly spoke to anybody any more, and just lived between his home and the store. He’d just given up all his old friends, and somehow he’d got all bitter inside.

La Vallette is a little town up on the lake where all sorts of religious cranks go for a cheap rest. There are some cottages and three or four cheap hotels and a wooden tabernacle.

Homer and Etta were just like all the others. Etta, of course, knew most of the dreary lot. She’d made herself into a kind of celebrity. They all knew the crusader, Mrs. Etta Dallet Dilworth. I guess she enjoyed it a great deal, holding court in a rocking chair on the hotel porch and speaking now and then at the tabernacle, but Homer got a bit fed up being just Mister Etta Dallet Dilworth and he took to going for long walks along the lake front.

It was a desolate country but beautiful in a wild way. There were miles and miles of dunes with the whitest sand glittering in the sunlight. And here and there were marshes and inlets where wild birds settled.

Homer went walking along the shore in and out among the dunes, skirting the marshes. At first he’d go off for an hour or two, and then he began to go off in the morning and stay until lunch time, and then one day he began taking a box lunch with him.

He’d been unhappy for so long that he liked to get away from people and hide. I guess getting away from Etta and the pack of gabblers who surrounded her was kind of a relief, too. And being away all day like that got him to thinking.

It’s dangerous for a man of 48 to think too much about his own happiness, especially when he’s had a life like Homer’s. And the marshes and the lake and the sunlight and the wild birds began to do things to him.

He said it was like slipping backwards. He kept going back and back until he got to feeling a little the way he used to feel when we went swimming together. And one day he found himself taking off all his clothes and lying down on the clean white sand among the dunes to eat his lunch. And all at once he was kind of frightened.

It was the first time the sun had touched his body since that day he lay on the grass by the haunted house, and the feel of it began to do funny things to him. He sat up and looked at his body and saw suddenly that it wasn’t old and soft and fat. It was dry and the muscles were sharp and hard but not rounded the way they’d been when he was young. But it struck him suddenly that he wasn’t old. He was 48, though, and wouldn’t have many more years of health and vigor. And the feel of the sun and the soft warm breeze made him kind of dizzy.

He said he felt as if he was beginning to grow all over again inside himself. Suddenly he saw that he was happy for the first time in twenty years; but that frightened him and he began to be afraid of sin again, and he got up quickly and put on his clothes.

He tried to give up his long walks but when he stayed at the hotel all he saw were gabbing old women and skinny men, and soon he began going off again for the day among the dunes, and after a day or two he began taking off his clothes again and lying in the sun.

He began to grow tanned all over. His muscles began to grow round and plump and solid again.

He felt happier, and once or twice he got up at 4 in the morning to go out to the lake and see the sun rise. The sun became the center of all his existence. It was kind of as if he had a rendezvous every day with the sun out there among the white dunes.

Sometimes on cloudy days he thought he was going crazy, but as soon as the sun came out he felt all right again, and sure of himself. After a time he began to be troubled because the more he thought of it the more it seemed impossible ever to go back to live at Hanover in that untidy house that Etta kept so badly.

Etta noticed that he went off alone a good deal and she began to nag him about leaving her alone so much and not going to the tabernacle. But he didn’t seem to mind even that. He just didn’t hear her and managed to endure it until he could escape to the dunes.

One day she made a terrible scene in the dining room because she said he was being too kind to the waitress and looked at her too often.

After it was over she went to the management and demanded that the girl be discharged, but the management wouldn’t do it because Etta couldn’t prove the girl had done anything at all. They couldn’t discharge a girl just because she “looked” at a man. They just transferred her to another table and put an ugly old woman to wait on him and Etta.

After that he really took to noticing the girl for the first time, and he saw that she was big and blonde and voluptuous, and in spite of himself, he began stealing glances at her across the room. Once or twice she saw him and smiled. He knew that what he was doing was sinful and tried to put her out of his mind.

Etta grew more and more difficult. He said he thought it was because she couldn’t bear to see him looking well and happy. And one day she said she’d told the hotel they were going to leave at the end of the week.

The idea terrified him because it meant the end of the only happiness he’d known since he married her and it meant a return to the awful house in Hanover. He’d been so used to doing what she wanted that he didn’t say anything, but that afternoon, while he was lying in the sun, he made up his mind that he wasn’t going to leave and go back to Hanover. As he dressed himself, he made up the speech he was going to say to her, repeating it over and over to himself in the silence of the dunes to give himself courage.

He was walking home through the dunes, kicking the white sand and thinking how he meant to defy Etta, when he heard a curlew crying, and looking up to see it, he saw something else. Just ahead of him, lying in a hollow between two dunes, he saw the figures of a man and woman. They were asleep in the sun.

At first he wanted to run, and then he was overcome suddenly by a return of his old bitterness. He was outraged and indignant. And then he saw that, like himself, they had thought themselves alone among the dunes because it was a spot never visited by the people who came to La Vallette.

He tried to run away and could not. He was only able to stand there, his feet fixed in the white sand, staring.

Suddenly he was no longer shocked. These two people were like himself. They weren’t like Etta. Like him, they worshipped the sun!

He did not know how long he stood there. The sun slipped down towards the blue lake and the girl stirred, and he saw then for the first time that the Venus of the sands with the golden hair was the waitress over whom Etta had made the scene.

He turned and ran, fearful lest they should discover him, and as he ran he knew that he meant to stay on at La Vallette, and that maybe he would never go back to Hanover at all. When he got home he went to Etta and told her he meant to stay, and when she couldn’t find out any reason she tried everything to gain control over him again. She even flung the washbowl on the floor and broke it and dashed her head against the door, but all her hysterics seemed to have no effect upon him.

That night he dared not look for the waitress, because he saw her in a new way and looking at her became intolerable to him.

I imagine she was good-hearted and easy-going and meant well to everybody, and was just born to be good to men and make them happy. She felt sorry for Homer, I guess, being married to a dried-up whiner like Etta.

Anyway whenever he did look at her, she looked back and smiled, and that set Homer to thinking of everything he’d missed and that he was 48 and pretty soon he’d be dead without ever having lived at all.

After that day when he went to walk he tried not to go past the place where he’d seen them lying in the sun among the white dunes, but always, in spite of anything he could do, he’d find himself moving towards the spot. Sometimes he found them there and sometimes he didn’t. And they never knew that all the time there was someone watching their rendezvous.

And then one day on the streets he saw the boy dressed in a shirt and an old pair of trousers and looking for all the world like himself 30 years ago, and when he asked who he was, they told him that the boy’s name was Henry Landis and that he came to La Vallette in summer to take the baggage of the summer people to and from the train.

Then one day the boy disappeared, and Homer asked what had become of him, and they said he’d gone away because his mother had died in Appleton and that he wouldn’t be back until next summer.

So Homer went out and bought a cheap handbag and wrote a note and put it inside and asked one of the waitresses to give it to Frieda, the big blonde girl.

Just before he died he told me that he thought he must have been going crazy all that time. Up to the very end he couldn’t make out whether he’d been crazy all those years he’d been married to Etta and only began to be sane when he took to lying in the sun among the dunes.

At night he always went to the tabernacle with Etta, but that night right after the second hymn he told Etta he would have to get some air. So she stayed and he went outside and walked down to the boat landing, and there in the shadow of some bushes stood Frieda waiting for him and carrying the handbag he’d sent her.

At first he thought he was going to die of excitement and of fear. He began to shake all over. His teeth chattered and he waited for a little while till he got control of himself before he went forward to meet her.

For a long time they stood looking at each other in the darkness talking awkwardly about the cheap handbag and the moon. He said it was kind of as if all that he’d missed all these years had been rolled up and burst out of him at last. There was so much he wanted to say that he couldn’t say anything at all.

They sat down on the grass and all he could do was sit and look at her. The moonlight came through the trees on her hair. I guess she was a pretty swell looker. The people I talked to at the trial told me so. She wasn’t very bright and she didn’t have any ambition or she could have had almost anything she wanted.

While he was looking at her, he suddenly remembered Etta sitting at the tabernacle waiting for him to return, and he said to Frieda, “Will you meet me tomorrow afternoon?” And he told her where to meet him, among the dunes not very far from where he’d seen her and the boy.

He didn’t sleep any that night and went off early to spend the day among the dunes. It was a brilliant day, late in September, with wonderful sunlight, but it seemed to him the time would never pass until he’d see Frieda coming along the shore.

She came at last, dressed all in white in her waitress’ clothes, with her gold hair shining against the blue lake.

And for the first time in his life Homer knew what it was to be free and happy. When he told me about it, it all sounded simple and beautiful. I wanted to cry.

Two days before the hotel closed, Etta came up from the front porch and found a note pinned to the pillow. It said that Homer had gone away and that she needn’t try to look for him and that she’d never see him again. He wrote that he’d taken the money that was in the bank at Hanover and left her and the children the hardware store, which would keep them all well enough.

At first they thought he’d committed suicide and Etta fainted and screamed a good deal. They tried dragging the water by the boat landing, but about 6 o’clock one of the waitresses said it wasn’t any use because he’d run off with Frieda.

Then Etta screamed and fainted a lot more and took the next train for Hanover, and about two days later the newspapers ran them to ground in a little town up in northern Michigan and printed a lot of stuff about the elopement, so they had to run away again. They kept running from town to town till the newspapermen got tired hounding them, and at last they disappeared.

Etta tried to have them arrested, but nobody could or would do anything about it. She wouldn’t divorce him — she just got more and more righteous and martyred. It made an awful scandal in Hanover, but it died down pretty soon.

I was glad because I’d always wanted to see Homer have a little fun in life, but I couldn’t say anything. He’d been a stranger to me for twenty years, all dried-up and sour from living with Etta. I couldn’t understand how he did manage to do it until two years afterwards when I opened the paper one morning and read that a girl called Frieda Hemyers had been killed with some man and that Homer Dilworth, who had been living with her, was arrested for both murders; and a week later I got a letter from a town called Mitchellville, in Missouri, where they had him in jail.

It was from Homer himself, asking me to come and see him and help him. I went right off, and that was when he told me everything.

I expected to find a dried-up man on the verge of old age, but when they opened the door of the cell I saw a vigorous man of about 35 or 40. I couldn’t have believed it was Homer except that he looked like himself when he was young.

He must have grown 15 years younger since I last saw him on the street in Hanover. He was always a good-looking fellow and he’d got handsome again, just as I said, like an apple tree that suddenly blossoms in October.

And when he spoke, it was harder still to believe that he was Homer Dilworth.

He looked at me and sort of grinned and said, “Well, Jim, I guess you thought I was the last person in the world you’d ever find in a fix like this.” I saw that he had a kind of manliness about him he’d never had even in the days before he married Etta, because then he was always kind of soft and good.

He told me to sit down on his cot. He didn’t seem to be discouraged. He just said, “I did it, Jim. I didn’t mean to do it, but I did it. They can do with me whatever they like.”

The funny thing was that he didn’t seem to care.

He told me he’d sent for me because I was the only one he knew who’d understand. It wasn’t any good sending for church people because they’d just lecture him and pray over him, and he didn’t want to see Etta, even if she would have come.

She never did come and she wouldn’t let any of the children come to see him. And in the two years since he’d run away with Frieda they’d had to go from place to place, so they’d never stopped anywhere long enough to make friends. In the end he went back 30 years, to that last afternoon we’d gone swimming together, and sent for me.

He told me all the story of what happened to him at La Vallette up to the time he ran off with Frieda, and then he told me what happened afterwards — how they were followed from town to town by newspapermen, and then how they’d always get found out and be forced to move on. He said they’d been to 27 little towns in two years.

He had the money he’d drawn out of the bank, and when that gave out he worked, sometimes as dishwasher, sometimes as farmhand, doing anything he could find to do. And he was happy all the time because Frieda was easy-going and good-natured.

He spoke about her as if she wasn’t dead at all. Sometimes he was jealous of her, and once or twice they’d quarreled when she spoke to a man younger than himself.

It seemed he was frightened of younger men. He knew that he was getting old and that some day he’d lose her to a younger man because she was still young. It got to be a kind of obsession with him.

And finally they came to that little town in Missouri, and nobody found them out. He had a job checking off grain bags and hogs at the river landing and it looked as if they were going to be safe and happy at last, because there weren’t even any men in the place more vigorous than himself.

They had a little house and were furnishing it from a furniture catalogue. And then one day he came home when she was out and found a letter addressed to “Miss Frieda Hemyers care of Mrs. John Slade,” which was the name they were living under.

It was postmarked “Appleton, Wisconsin,” and when he asked her about it she said it was from the boy who’d wrestled the baggage at the hotel in La Vallette, the same one he’d seen with her among the dunes. Later, when he asked her what was in it, she said she’d burned it and told him there was nothing in it — the fellow only wanted to know how she was.

But the thing stuck in Homer’s brain. It wasn’t, he said, that he was jealous. He had a kind of funny affection for the boy, even though he’d never spoken to him.

He kind of felt that Frieda really belonged to the boy if he wanted her. It was all mixed up in his head and he kept trying to think it out.

And then one day the river boat was a day late and he went back to the house an hour or two after he’d left it. He opened the back door but there wasn’t anybody in and when he called Frieda’s name she didn’t answer, so he went to their bedroom and found the door was locked, and all at once he knew what had happened.

For a moment he just stood still, feeling that he was going to die. He turned cold all over, and then for a moment he couldn’t see. It seemed to him that it was the end of everything, because he’d got to feel that all his life that went before was nothing at all and that he’d been alive only since he ran off with Frieda.

In his brain the thought was born that the only thing to do was to finish it then and there, and to finish it, he’d have to kill Frieda and the man who was in there with her, and then himself.

The funny thing was how clearly he remembered it all, because he was certainly insane at that moment. He took a chair and smashed down the door, and then, with a revolver, he just fired blindly into the dark room until the revolver clicked empty. And when he tried to shoot himself there wasn’t any bullet left.

It was an awful moment when he stood there in the doorway. The emptiness of the pistol seemed to bring, him to himself, and suddenly, because he was really a good man, he wanted to save them both.

But it was too late. Frieda was unconscious and dying, and the man was dead.

It was only then that he discovered it was the boy who had wrestled the baggage at La Vallette. He’d come all the way to Missouri to find her and run off with her.

It made him sick, and the funny thing was that the remorse he felt wasn’t so great because he’d killed two people, but because the two people were Frieda and the boy. If he’d known that Frieda had the boy with her, he’d have gone away quietly and left them together forever.

They were young and love belonged to them. He was old and finished, and he was left alive. And it was terrible, too, that he’d killed the two people who had set him free. They were the two who had given him life and he’d killed them. For a moment he said he had a horrible feeling that instead of killing the boy, he shot himself as he was 30 years before.

After a long time he got up and laid the two bodies on the bed and covered them with a sheet, and then went into the kitchen and put his head into the oven of the stove and turned on the gas. One of the neighbors who ran in to borrow some eggs from Frieda found him there.

He wasn’t dead yet. They dragged him out and brought him to and then found the bodies.

I stayed with him up to the end.

He didn’t make the least effort to save himself. If Frieda had been his wife they’d have let him off maybe with manslaughter, but of course, all their story came out at the trial and he didn’t have a chance.

But Homer didn’t give them any satisfaction. He was sorry he’d killed Frieda and the boy, but he wasn’t repentant about anything else, and he was glad of the two years of happiness he’d had with Frieda. He just sort of smiled when the judge sentenced him.

I took his body back to Hanover and buried it alongside my grandfather, because Etta wouldn’t have anything to do with it. In Hanover, he became a great Example. The wages of sin is death, they said, but they never said anything about the wages of the way Homer was brought up, or the wages of living with Etta.

Last week Martha and I drove out to Ontario to see about buying our winter apples and before I thought about it we were passing the old Sammis house. The roof had fallen in and it was almost hid by bushes, and the pasture where Homer and I had lain in the sun was muddy and frozen. The cattle stood with their heads together and their tails towards the November wind.