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Always Had Been by Jim Wilsky
He had killed her sometime ago. She was still in there, still sprawled on the big country kitchen floor where he had left her. Sitting in their simply decorated but spotless living room, he drug his eyes from the kitchen door back across the room to stare again out their big front window. How long he had been sitting there he didn’t know, could have been fifteen minutes or two hours. Looking west across his freshly harvested fields he thought the sun had lowered quite a bit though. A soft whistle under the eaves signaled the wind coming up a little. Maybe some rain tonight, he thought absently.
He got up stiffly on weak knees, taking a wobbly sideways first step as he lumbered towards the bathroom. Tom was a big man––wide and tall. He looked like trouble and could be on occasion when pushed, but she had always handled him just fine. In fact, Lu had owned him. She knew the buttons to push, knew how to run him, how to curb him. He was a gentle man at heart and she had always played that.
Bracing himself on the sides of the old-fashioned pedestal sink, he shuddered once, then reached in slow motion to turn on the cold tap. The well water, a little brackish at first, cleared gradually.
Cupping his shaking hands, he splashed the face of a haggard, hollow-eyed stranger that was returning his look over the sink. He had come close, even dangerously close, to losing control before but of course never actually followed through. Actually hurting her, hurting his Lu, was something he never allowed himself to even imagine. It had happened though, oh yes it had.
The mirrored reflection began to blur as he replayed the nightmare.
***
They had loved each other once, but that steadily eroded, then dissolved completely. Over the years they had become merely strong medicine for each other. Like cancer treatments that make you sick or even kill you before possibly curing you.
As usual, the argument after lunch had been about farming and money. She kept screaming into his face when he asked her not to. She punched him a few times on the arm and chest, like she always did. Then finally, when he decided to just walk away, she turned him around and slapped him hard. Putting everything into it, she had almost left her feet delivering it.
In the past, she would later always make a half-hearted apology for hitting him and make a hollow promise to never do it again. Swearing never to say and do such hateful things. This time she would truly never do it again. The almost audible snap of Tom Hanson was loud and final.
He had stood there for a moment, blinking his eyes twice and then a third time, the angry red welts from the slap already beginning to pulse on his jaw. Staring down at her for another long pregnant pause, he looked into her eyes as if he had never seen her before. The house was completely silent at that moment except for her frenzied breathing. Her teeth were clenched.
If he were the type to see such things, he would have noticed her eyes. Her eyes that were always squinted and cold were now widened just a bit. It was a realization on her part. A realization that something had just changed in him, something had shifted. She had finally pushed too hard.
His eyebrows had slowly bunched together in a bewildered expression at first, but he quickly focused his concentration, his face serious and determined, as it had been when trying to beat the rain he could see coming while harvesting. He would finish it. He raised his arms in slow motion and clamped large weathered hands around her neck.
In a last-ditch attempt to control the situation, she had started to say something but it came out a squeak and then broke off entirely.
Lu was farm strong, always had been, but all she managed to do was claw at his neck a few times and grab the collar of his faded blue denim shirt. As he choked her with relentless and increasing pressure, he bent her slowly backward, up and over the sink. She kicked him hard in the thigh in one last desperate effort but it had no effect.
At some point a glass had been knocked over, rolling first on the counter and then dropping off the edge. The shattering sound when it hit the floor finally broke his grip. Dazed, he lowered her limp body gently to the kitchen floor. She still bore the frozen face of fury, eyes wide with her upper lip partially curled under her front teeth. Her small but rough hands were still balled into fists, forever ready to fight.
***
Drying his face off now and turning away from the bathroom mirror, he headed towards the kitchen. The only sound was the old grandfather clock, standing soberly in the corner of the living room, somehow matching its rhythmic tick-tock with his walk.
Absently and out of nowhere, a thought came of where he might bury her. Underneath the grain silo flashed into his head as a possibility, or maybe out in the small stand of windbreak trees, one section over, east of the house. Another scattered question came unexpectedly. Would he claim Lu was just up and missing or would he tell them that just as she had always threatened to do, Lu had finally followed through and left him.
He shook his head sadly for even thinking such things. Tom Hanson knew what the right thing to do was and that’s what he’d do. He reluctantly rounded the corner into the kitchen and moved around the island counter. His eyes were still sad, with no surprise registered yet as he stared at where she should have been lying.
His troubled mind was slow to catch up, far too slow.
Behind him then he sensed movement––a quick push of air was followed by the first of many deep, stabbing pains.
She was farm strong, always had been.
THE END Jim Wilsky © 2007 |
