Gentle Murderer Read Free Page A

hard?”
    He felt a constriction in his breath as though a hand were at his throat. The dream seemed to be creeping up on him again. He fastened his eyes upon her to keep from being dragged back into it.
    “Don’t look at me so funny, Tim,” the girl said. “I don’t see how anybody could fall asleep with all the racket downstairs.”
    “Oh.” He sat a moment with his face in his hands.
    “I’d better go downstairs.”
    “Don’t go yet, Katie,” he said, making an effort to be congenial then. “Let me get awake. I’ll go down with you.” He got up and went to the window. He caught her reflection in it. She was watching him, unaware that he could see her. Her eyes asked him frankly to come downstairs for her sake, just to be in the room with her, like a protector. She had come eagerly on her mother’s errand. Something hurt him in the thought of it. It was too soon after the dream, gnawing as it was at his consciousness. He flung the window to its limits and leaned out.
    “Look at the stars up there,” he said over his shoulder. “Like you could step from one to another of them and never stop going.”
    “I’d like that,” she said, when he pulled back into the room.
    He turned and looked at her. “Would you, Katie?” He answered himself, seeing the response in her eyes. “I believe you would. Just think. If we were doing that, we could reach down and pick up the earth and just toss it like a snowball.”
    She giggled at the picture. “Where would you throw it?”
    He thought about that a moment. “I’d smash it right in the face of the sun, I think. It would go f-f-ft and that’s all there’d be to it. You know that’s what’s going to happen some day. That’s how important the earth is really, Katie. A lot of people know that.”
    “It’s more important to God,” she said. “You shouldn’t say things like that, Tim.”
    “How can it be so important to God if it means so little to men? He’s got lots of worlds, and they’ve got only one.”
    “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Good. I hope you never learn it.”
    “I’ll learn it,” she said proudly, “if it’s something to learn.”
    He nodded. “Maybe. But I won’t be the one to teach you.”
    “You’d better comb your hair. It’s all messed up.”
    He went over to her then and brushed his hand against her cheek. “Poor little Katie. You don’t like to hear me talk like that.”
    “Your hand smells funny.”
    “Does it?” He drew it away and looked at it, turning it over slowly. “Have you ever thought about all the things a hand does, Katie? Without hands, how lost we would be! How would your brother make his bread? How would I repair things? …”
    The girl got up from the chair and shook her hair out from where it clung to the back of her neck. Out of the habit of household chores, she straightened the spread on the bed.
    “What were you doing with the hammer, Tim?” she asked, picking it up from where it lay with his jacket at the foot of the bed.
    He did not seem to hear her, absorbed now in his own words. This was not unusual. She was accustomed to his ramblings, sometimes directed at her, but as often spoken as though she were not there at all. She liked it a little better when he was not speaking directly to her, in fact. Although she could not explain it, those times seemed to include her more than when he did talk with her. No one she had ever known talked like Tim. The boys she knew talked baseball, cars, hot bands and getting into the big time. When they stopped talking and looked at her, every fiber in her body tightened to its defense. First the eyes and then the hands. She was drawn to it and frightened of it, hating herself. It was like Tim was saying now …
    “‘… And if thy right eye scandalize thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee … And if thy right hand scandalize thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee; for it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than