have to live with now for the rest of my life, then I started searching for the things I needed. There was an extra bedsheet in a little locker out in the kitchen, but that wasn’t heavy enough. I had to have something thicker than that so he wouldn’t drip blood all over me and onto the trail while I was carrying him down to the lake. In a minute I found it, an old canvas hunting coat in one of the dresser drawers.
Feeling the nausea well up and turn over in my stomach, I reached down and touched him, rolling him over onto his back. The eyes were open, staring up at me, and I would have lost it then if there’d been anything left inside me. Sweating, fumbling, in a near panic, I slipped the canvas coat over his arms, backward, then rolled him again, away from the pool of blood, and pulled the coat together around his back and buttoned it. It was big, like all hunting coats, and there was slack enough to make it reach around that way.
I stood up, thinking. It was nearer to the lake if I went straight out beyond the side of the house, on that path she used when she went swimming, rather than going clear down to the boat landing. And, too, if I took him out that way and went down and brought the boat around to him, it would keep her from having to see him and possibly becoming hysterical again. Stooping, I put my hands under his waist and lifted. He was limp and awkward to handle, but not as heavy as I had thought he would be. Maybe the fright and the urgency gave me extra strength. Anyway, I managed to get him across my shoulder without too much trouble. Stepping carefully around the blood so I wouldn’t get my shoes in it, I went out through the kitchen and across the clearing. The trail through the timber was dim, and cooler than the sunlight, and for an instant I remembered that other day when we were out here and how we had come running back when we heard his boat. Suddenly, that reminded me of the fact that we hadn’t heard the boat at all this time, and I knew he had cut the motor far down the lake and used the oars. He had known I was up there, or had thought I was. What was it she had said—“After so much of that running maybe you start to crack up and suspect everybody”? There couldn’t have been much reason for his thinking I was up here, unless he had recognized me down the lake, but he had, and now he was dead. It wasn’t a pretty thing to think about—the way you had to live when you were on the run like that. And now, unless this idea of mine was good, we were the ones who would be running.
I put him down at the edge of the trees along the lake and walked away a few steps so I wouldn’t have to see him and stopped to get my breath. While I was doing that I suddenly remembered something else I had forgotten. I had to have something heavy to weight him with. In this warm water he’d come to the top in a few days. That’s too much forgetting, I thought uneasily. I’ve got to stop that. Once you start something like this, you can’t overlook anything.
I tried to think of something I could use. It had to be some object that wouldn’t be missed if anybody searched the place, as of course they would. There was his big outboard motor, but that would be missed right away. And I couldn’t use part of the kitchen stove for the same reason. Well, Christ, I thought, the thing to do is go back there and look—not stand here worrying about it like an old woman.
There was nothing under the house, no rocks or bricks. In the kitchen I found a flatiron, but only one, and it was too light. I stood there looking around, cursing the delay and feeling my nerves beginning to jump again. There had to be something. In desperation, I bent down and looked under the bed. And there it was. I hauled it out, another outboard motor, a small one he probably used for trolling. It was a two-and-a-half horse, and would weigh about thirty pounds, which