that someday she will be unpleasantly fat. Then he thinks, No, she will never be fat.
“Jack,” Beth says, and her voice has a note of caution in it. “I don’t see anything. What are you playing at?”
He reaches behind his back and grips the handle of the trowel, jammed down into the back of his jeans. He means to drive the point of the blade into her calf, but she turns at the last instant, and he sinks it, with a gritty crunch, into her thigh, above her left knee. She cries out and sits down among the mums with a thud. Beth draws a long, quivering breath and holds it, staring at the trowel buried in her leg. She rests her shoulders back against Bloom McCourt’s headstone.
“Get her,” Jack says to the mums. “Finish her off! She’s yours!”
The plants do not stir.
Beth lifts her chin and gazes at him with bewildered eyes, brimming with tears.
“Have you lost your mind?” she asks.
“Get her! Kill the sow!” he shouts at the mums, something almost like hysteria in his tone, but there is no response.
“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Beth asks again.
Jack stares into her pale face, at her damp eyes and quivering, girlish chin.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Jack says. “I think I am.”
His hand finds the handle of the trowel. He yanks it out of her leg. Then he puts it back in, this time in her chest. She tries to scream, but the third blow sinks into her mouth, cutting it open wide. The fourth finds her throat.
For a long time after, there is only the sound of digging, although Jack never once sinks the trowel into soil.
19.
Once he’s done making a red, chewed-up clay of Beth’s breasts and face, he tries to dig up his mums. He pulls up plant after plant and finds only the twisted white claws of roots, dirt falling off them. The sixth plant is sickly, the leaves full of holes, ants crawling up and down the roots.
Jack touches his head, which feels queer, and leaves red fingerprints on his face. Whether he has marked himself with Beth’s blood or his own, he could not say. He wonders if this is what it feels like to be hungover. His arm is sore from sticking her so many times. Butchering a full-grown woman is tiring work.
What exactly was he thinking when he led her out here anyway? It’s already hard to recall. He can never truly remember his night terrors when they fade. They are like one of those flowers that only open by moonlight, and the night is well over, the sky is brightening, turning a shade of lemon.
Beth, with her slashed, savaged mouth yawning wide, gapes blindly at the coming dawn.
20.
Jack is a while in the barn. The forty-pound plastic sacks of ammonium nitrate are piled against one wall, the white cans of nitromethane lined up next to them. He works by the shaded steel lamp on the plywood table, crafting a simple explosive out of a couple inches of copper pipe, black gunpowder, cotton swabs, and some other bits and pieces. He caps either end of the pipe, feeds a fuse punched through a hole in one end. He works in a kind of half-awake trance, without second-guessing himself, without second thoughts. There is no going back now. There is only going forward.
After due consideration he nestles the nitro tanks here and there among the heavy-duty plastic sacks of fertilizer. He uses electrical tape to secure his homemade IED to one of the cans, directly beneath the valve—then rotates the tank so the gleaming copper pipe is out of sight, facing the wall.
By the time he leaves the barn, the sun is snagged in the branches of the big oak beyond the house and the entire tree is aglow like a burning skeletal hand of glory. The grass rustles in the breeze, a hundred thousand burning filaments of green light.
21.
“Dad,” Jack says. He pushes aside the shower curtain. “Dad! I did something bad, I did something really, really bad. I need help.”
His father stands, broad-shouldered and powerfully built, in the hot and foaming spray. His face looks curiously naked without his spectacles. He twists his head around and stares nearsightedly down at his son. Hank McCourt’s face is almost innocent in its shock.
“I went out, I went to Mom’s grave—sometimes I go out in the morning, just to spend time with her—only I heard something moving in the corn,” Jack says,