Page 110 of The Night the Lights Went Out
I hadn’t heard the window break, but I’d been in the opposite corner of the house. I could only hope that my mother had heard it and locked her door or at least thought to hide.
“Well, hey there, Sugar.” Curtis Brown stood at the bottom of the steps looking up at me like he’d been invited to tea and I was expecting him. “It’s so nice of you to greet me. I was a little disappointed you weren’t at the other house, but this is fine, too.”
I didn’t say anything and remained where I was, wondering how bad I’d get hurt if I jumped from my bedroom window since the sash was already open. But I couldn’t leave Mama. She was downstairs, and Curtis was between us.
“I brought my trunk, figured I’d stay awhile. See, once I decided the army wasn’t cut out for me, I’ve been at loose ends. I hear your daddy’s travelin’ again. Isn’t that convenient? And with that retard brother of yours dead and his nigger friend diggin’ trenches somewhere across the ocean, it looks like it’s just you and me and your idiot mother. So I thought you could use some company.” He smiled, and in the moonlight it looked like a snarl, his teeth pockmarked with black shadows.
I couldn’t speak or shout or move. It was as if I’d become suddenly paralyzed, my feet glued to the floor. Curtis had been climbing the stairs as he spoke and had reached the halfway point before I’d decided what I was going to do. What I had to do. I still had the binoculars around my neck, and they were heavy enough to do damage with enough force behind them. I clutched them with one hand, feeling how heavy they were. How solid.
“Curtis Brown.” I almost didn’t recognize my mama’s voice, since those were the first words I’d heard her speak in a very long time.
He kept moving up the stairs toward me like he hadn’t heard anything, my grip on the binoculars tightening. The loud click of a gun’s hammer being pulled back made him stop. I knew it was Daddy’s gun, the one he now kept in his bedside table because of several burglaries on neighboring farms that had been happening over the last couple of months. But I had no idea that Mama knew where it was. Or how to use it.
“Curtis Brown,” she said again, her voice low and scratchy from disuse, but it was definitely hers.
He turned around. “Now, Miz Prescott. You shouldn’t be carrying a gun. You might hurt yourself, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?”
He began walking slowly back down the stairs, casually, like he wasn’t in any hurry. “Why don’t you just give me the gun, and then you can go back to sleep while I finish up some business I have with your daughter?”
He took another step before Mama lifted the gun and aimed it at him. “Get out, or I’ll shoot,” she said, her weak voice making a joke out of her words.
He threw back his head and laughed, then took one more step so he was close enough to reach out and grab the gun. “Let me have the gun, Miz Prescott, and we can all go back to what we was doing.”
She took one step back, allowing him enough room to turn toward the front door. He looked in that direction, and for a brief moment I thought he would leave, that he’d disappear out in the darkness and we’d never see him again.
Except he didn’t. He took a step toward Mama and the night exploded with a burst of fire and gunpowder. Curtis dropped like a puppet with cut strings, a dark puddle slowly seeping onto the pine floors.
The gun fell from Mama’s hand and landed near Curtis’s head. She was so still, and she wouldn’t stop looking at him. I knew I needed to turn on a light to make sure he was dead, but I couldn’t do that with her still there. I thought of Tom, and his love for me, and that gave me the strength I needed to think and to do what had to be done.
I put my mother back to bed and gave her some of the sleeping medicine Dr. Mackenzie had given her. Then I returned to the foyer and turned on the light. Curtis was wearing his khaki uniform top and pants, but all insignia had been removed. It was like when he’d decided not to return to the army, he’d excised them from his life but had been too practical to return clothing he could wear.
The bullet had hit its mark in the middle of his chest, just like a bull’s-eye, and although it had done the job quickly, I felt oddly disappointed. Like he should have suffered more for what he’d done to me and my family. His eyes were open, caught in the moment of surprise, blood pouring out from under his back and crawling its way to the entranceway rug.
Forgetting modesty, I pulled my nightgown over my head and shoved it under him, hating the feel of him beneath my fingers. I needed to alert the sheriff. Needed to tell him my mother had shot Curtis Brown. It was clear he’d broken into the house. That we were two lone women trying to protect ourselves.
But then I thought of my mother shooting him to protect me. Of doing something nobody would have thought her capable of—least of all herself. Even though she’d saved my life, the person she’d once been and perhaps still was would die a thousand deaths if people knew what she’d done. Knew she’d killed a man in cold blood whether he deserved it or not. Maybe the sheriff would press charges—I had no way of knowing what circumstances would allow my mother to escape formal charges. But to her, even in her addled mind, the court of human opinion was all that mattered.
With a calm resolve, I went back upstairs and put on a dress and shoes without stockings. Then I threw on a coat and ran all the way to Willa Faye’s house and rapped on her bedroom window. She must have seen that I was in shock and took over. It’s what I loved about Willa Faye. Because she was silly and pretty, nobody gave her credit for her brains or her ability to figure things out and know exactly what needed to be done.
She picked the spot in the woods for Curtis’s grave and we spent most of the night digging the hole and burying him. I felt nothing when I dumped the first clod of dirt on his face, watching until we couldn’t see the moonlight reflect against his skin anymore. It was Willa Faye’s idea to bury him without his uniform so that if the body was ever found it would be harder to identify. We still had his trunk to deal with, so we figured we’d put the uniform in there. We were going to throw rocks in the trunk and sink everything in the lake—including my nightgown and the rags we’d used to clean up the blood—but Willa Faye said we should hold on to something in case there was ever a reckoning for what had happened that night. Mama was a religious person, and I knew Willa Faye was right. But I knew I’d never speak of it to anyone while Mama was still alive.
So we got a sheet from the house and wrapped most of what was in the trunk and all the bloody rags and my nightgown with a bunch of rocks and sank it all in the lake. Willa Faye said she’d put the trunk someplace where it would be forgotten. I didn’t ask where and we never talked about it. Willa Faye was small, so I knew she couldn’t have moved it very far, but it didn’t matter. Nobody would be asking after Curtis Brown.
I’ve kept the weeds off Curtis’s grave all these years because I think Mama would have wanted me to. But that’s all, because he doesn’t deserve any more than that. And I keep the secret still in honor of Mama’s memory.
We never spoke of that night again. Even Mama. She retreated back into her world and didn’t speak another word until she died. But Willa Faye and me, not a word about it between us. It bonded us. Branded us as best friends. Because I will always remember that when I told her I needed help burying a body, the first thing she said was, “Let me go get my shovel.”
Thirty-eight
MERILEE
“Mom! Come here!” Colin shouted from the front porch.
Merilee quickly put down the pine boughs with red and green ribbons she’d been using to decorate the mantel—following specific directions from Sugar—grabbed her crutches, and moved as quickly as she could out onto Sugar’s front porch, expecting to see their arriving visitors. It was early, but if Sugar was involved, Merilee was prepared to see them get there up to an hour earlier than expected.
She nearly collided with Lily, who was jumping up and down with excitement. “Hurry, Mom,” she said, helping Merilee down the steps and then around the side of the house. The ground was hard with the first frost, making it easier to hobble across the grass with crutches. She wondered if all the excitement was about Sugar’s sheep wearing the bright red bows that Wade had been threatening to dress them in for more than a week.
Trying to catch her breath, she paused at the corner of the house and looked at the woods. She still wasn’t used to seeing the swath of red earth where trees had been just a month before, the scent of pine still thick. Sugar had given Wade permission to clear the felled trees, but that was all. At least for now. Lindi and a law school friend were helping her establish a trust that would forever preserve her woods and family cemetery and the farmhouse, barn, and cottage in perpetuity. To remind future Sweet Appletonians of what it had once been like long before roundabouts, SUVs, and coffee shops had taken over the landscape.
