Murder in the Wind Read Free Page A

there with over seven thousand dollars and now we have twenty-one hundred left, and the car, and what we’ve got with us. Clothing that has seen better days.
    If it was only that. A loss like on a crap table, or taken by somebody who forced a window. But there’s the other loss. Esteem. Husband who couldn’t make it. Father who dropped the ball.
    And he knew that was the area of greatest soreness. Father:
    … sitting there in the dark front room on a winter afternoon. A room seldom used. Front room in a mill town house, one of a row of houses all rubbed gray as with a dirty eraser. Down across the viaduct were the slag piles, with skin frozen harsh in winter so that they could be the great dead lizards that Miss Purse told the class about—nobody knew why they’d all died. She said some men thought that a small rodent-like animal had multiplied and it was that animal that ate their eggs.
    Slag heaps, and down beyond the town the silent red night fire of the furnaces—silent in the distance but when you went down there they huffed and roared like dragons that were alive.
    Jerry’s dad comes home at night black as licorice. And startling white around his eyes. Comes home walking, trudging up the hill, loose Thermos in the black tin bucket going clink as he steps. But your father is at the mill, not in the mines, and he comes home clean because foremen have a place where they can wash up. His nails are black but he smells of hard yellow soap and when you are little you run down the hill and he picks you up and his great arm is like a bar of iron, holding you once too tightly so your leg went to sleep but you didn’t tell him, and fell when he put you down on the porch.
    Now he is home on a winter afternoon when you get out of school and it is like the world has fallen apart. Things have been strange at school this winter. The town has been strange this winter. But a strangeness that has not touched you. Except in little ways. The end of the piano lessons. Maybe you can start again later, dear. And a disappointing Christmas, but you did not let them know how badly you had wanted the Elgin Bicycle, and how certain you had been that you would get it, so certain that you got up in gray dawn and went down to look at it and touch it there under the tree, and if it was up on its stand perhaps turn the rear wheel and watch the spokes go around in silver pattern. Maybe they would bring the bike in later, but they did not.
    Then he was home when he should be at work.
    —Don’t go in there and bother your father.
    —But why is he home?
    —Go on out and play. Don’t think about it. Don’t worry about it. Go on out and play. Or go to your room and read.
    Laid off. When you found out that those were the words they had a funny sound. Not laid down. Or laid away. Laid off. Off in a far place.
    Home every day. Mend the porch. Paint the fence. Fix the roof. Fix the chair. Then nothing. Sit. Then be gone all day and come back and sit. No smile. Never again the laugh that made the walls spread out to make the room and the house and the world bigger.
    And the funny time at supper that night. Later, when it was warm and the doors open. He held his hands out and he looked at them and curled the fingers and looked at his hands and his face was funny and he made a strange sound. Sam! mother said. Sam! But he went away. Bang of the chair falling. Bang of the front door. Clump of feet on steps and gone then.
    —Eat your food, Harold.
    The god did not die quickly. He died little by little. There were other jobs. Some of them were little jobs, very little jobs. They did not last long. They all worked. He remembered the exact moment when the god was finally dead. It was the summer before his senior year of high school. He had a road job. The first few weeks had nearly killed him, but he had lasted and the work became easier and he felt his body growing wider and tougher. He got paid and rode back into town and had some beers, home-brewed