but her mother hadn’t raised any fools. Now she did what Joe told her and rarely argued. She guessed Brett was that way too. But she feared for the boy sometimes.
She went to the window in time to see Brett run across the yard and into the barn. Cujo trailed at Brett’s heels, looking hot and dispirited.
Faintly: “Hold this for me, Brett.”
More faintly: “Sure, Daddy.”
The hammering started again, that merciless icepick sound: Whing! Whing! Whing! She imagined Brett holding something against something—a coldchisel against a frozen bearing, maybe, or a square spike against a lockbolt. Her husband, a Pall Mall jittering in the corner of his thin mouth, his T-shirt sleeves rolled up, swinging a five-pound pony-hammer. And if he was drunk . . . if his aim was a little off . . .
In her mind she could hear Brett’s agonized howl as the hammer mashed his hand to a red, splintered pulp, and she crossed her arms over her bosom against the vision.
She looked at the thing in her hand again and wondered if there was a way she could use it. More than anything in the world, she wanted to go to Connecticut to see her sister Holly. It had been six years now, in the summer of 1974—she remembered well enough, because it had been a bad summer for her except for that one pleasant weekend. ‘Seventy-four had been the year Brett’s night problems had begun—restlessness, bad dreams, and, more and more frequently, incidents of sleepwalking. It was also the year Joe began drinking heavily. Brett’s uneasy nights and his somnambulism had eventually gone away. Joe’s drinking had not.
Brett had been four then; he was ten now and didn’t even remember his Aunt Holly, who had been married for six years. She had a little boy, named after her husband, and a little girl. Charity had never seen either child, her own niece and nephew, except for the Kodachromes Holly occasionally sent in the mail.
She had gotten scared of asking Joe. He was tired of hearing her talk about it, and if she asked him again he might hit her. It had been almost sixteen months since she’d last asked him if maybe they couldn’t take a little vacation down Connecticut way. Not much of a one for traveling was Mrs. Camber’s son Joe. He liked it just fine in Castle Rock. Once a year he and that old tosspot Gary Pervier and some of their cronies would go up north to Moosehead to shoot deer. Last November he had wanted to take Brett. She had put her foot down and it had stayed down, in spite of Joe’s sullen mutterings and Brett’s wounded eyes. She was not going to have the boy out with that bunch of men for two weeks, listening to a lot of vulgar talk and jokes about sex and seeing what animals men could turn into when they got to drinking nonstop over a period of days and weeks. All of them with loaded guns, walking in the woods. Loaded guns, loaded men, somebody always got hurt sooner or later, fluorescent-orange hats and vests or not. It wasn’t going to be Brett. Not her son.
The hammer struck the steel steadily, rhythmically. It stopped. She relaxed a little. Then it started again.
She supposed that sooner or later Brett would go with them, and that would be the end of him for her. He would join their club, and ever after she would be little more than a kitchen drudge that kept the clubhouse neat. Yes, that day would come, and she knew it, and she grieved for it. But at least she had been able to stave it off for another year.
And this year? Would she be able to keep him home with her this November? Maybe not. Either way, it would be better—not all right but at least better—if she could take Brett down to Connecticut first. Take him down there and show him how some . . .
. . . some . . .
Oh, say it, if only to yourself.
(how some decent people lived)
If Joe would let them go alone . . . but there was no sense thinking of that. Joe could go places alone or with his friends, but she couldn’t, not even with Brett in tow. That was one of their marriage’s ground rules. Yet she couldn’t help thinking about how much better it would be without him—without him sitting in Holly’s kitchen, swilling beer, looking Holly’s