More Oddments

Mrs. Rakubian

Three days after she murdered him with a hatchet and put his body down the dry well, Mrs. Rakubian’s husband showed up alive and kicking on the front porch.

It was a hot day and Mrs. Rakubian had been in the kitchen mixing some lemonade. She mixed it tart, real tart, because Charlie always liked it sweet and made her put too much sugar in it. That was one of the reasons she’d killed him — one of three or four hundred. It wasn’t the one that made her pick up the hatchet, though. That one was him blowing his nose on the front of his bib overalls. When he done that again, even after she warned him, she went and got the hatchet and give him half a dozen licks and that was that. Except for fetching the wheelbarrow and carting him off to the dry well, but that was one chore she hadn’t minded at all.

Things had been mighty peaceful ever since. So peaceful that she’d taken to humming a little ditty to herself while she worked. She was humming it when she carried the tart lemonade out to the front porch. But she stopped humming it when she saw Charlie sitting there in the shade of the cottonwood tree, wiping his sweaty face with his handkerchief.

“Morning, Maude,” he said. “Made some fresh lemonade, I see.”

Mrs. Rakubian stared at him goggle-eyed for a few seconds. There wasn’t a mark on him, not a mark!

“Something wrong, Maude?”

Mrs. Rakubian didn’t answer. She put the lemonade down on the porch table, went into the house, took the varmint gun off the rack, walked back out to the porch, and let Charlie have it with both barrels. Then she fetched the wheelbarrow and trundled what was left of him to the dry well.

“You stay dead this time, Charlie Rakubian,” she said after she’d dumped him again. “Thirty years of you haunting me alive was bad enough. Don’t you dare keep coming back to haunt me dead too. This time you stay put.”

But Charlie didn’t stay put. He was back again the next morning, all smiley and chipper, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth and the hatchet and varmint gun hadn’t durned near taken his head off twice.

Mrs. Rakubian was ready for him, though. She’d decided not to take any chances and it was a good thing she had. She didn’t let him say a word this time. As soon as she saw him, she took Papa’s old Frontier Colt out from under her apron and shot him right between the eyes.

“Now I’m not going to tell you again, Charlie,” she said when she got him to the well. “Don’t come bothering me no more. You’re dead three times now and you’d better start acting like it.”

She had a day and a half of peace before the sheriff’s car drove in through the farm gate and stopped right in front of where she was sitting under the cottonwood tree drinking tart lemonade. The driver’s door opened and Charlie got out.

Mrs. Rakubian was used to his tricks by now. She stared at him in disgust.

“Maude,” Charlie said, “I got some questions to ask you. Seems Ed Beemis, the mailman, and Lloyd Poole from the gas company have disappeared and they was both last seen out this way—”

She didn’t let him finish. She yanked Papa’s Colt out from under her apron and let fly at him. One bullet knocked him down but the other ones missed, which allowed him to crawl to safety behind the sheriff’s car. Then durned if he didn’t pull a gun of his own and start blasting away at her.

Mrs. Rakubian flung herself into the house just in the nick of time. She locked the door behind her, reloaded Papa’s Colt, and took the varmint gun down and made sure it was loaded too. Then she waited.

For a time there wasn’t much noise out in the yard. Then there was — a regular commotion. Cars, voices... why, you’d of thought it was the Fourth of July picnic out there. Pretty soon Charlie started yelling at her over some contraption that made his voice real loud, only she didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying. Instead she yelled right back at him.

“You Charlie, you go back into the well where you belong! Go on, git, and leave me be!”

Charlie didn’t git and leave her be — not that she’d expected he would, after all the times he’d come back from the dead to devil her. So she was ready for him again with Papa’s Colt and the varmint gun when he busted down the door and come in after her.

She thought she was ready, anyhow. In fact she wasn’t, not with just six bullets and two loads of buckshot. Mrs. Rakubian took one look at what come piling through the door, screamed once, and swooned on the spot.

It was Charlie, all right.

But the sneaky old booger had brought a dozen other dead Charlies along with him.