Full Dark, No Stars

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DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2010032866

ISBN 978-1-4391-9256-6

ISBN 978-1-4391-9259-7 (ebook)

For Tabby

Still.

CONTENTS

1922

BIG DRIVER

FAIR EXTENSION

A GOOD MARRIAGE

AFTERWORD

FULL DARK,

NO STARS

1922

April 11, 1930

Magnolia Hotel

Omaha, Nebraska

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

My name is Wilfred Leland James, and this is my confession. In June of 1922 I murdered my wife, Arlette Christina Winters James, and hid her body by tupping it down an old wel . My son, Henry

Freeman James, aided me in this crime, although at 14 he was not responsible; I cozened him into it, playing upon his fears and beating down his quite normal objections over a period of 2 months. This

is a thing I regret even more bitterly than the crime, for reasons this document wil show.

The issue that led to my crime and damnation was 100 acres of good land in Hemingford Home, Nebraska. It was wil ed to my wife by John Henry Winters, her father. I wished to add this land to our

freehold farm, which in 1922 totaled 80 acres. My wife, who never took to the farming life (or to being a farmer’s wife), wished to sel it to the Farrington Company for cash money. When I asked her if she truly wanted to live downwind from a Farrington’s hog butchery, she told me we could sel up the farm as wel as her father’s acreage—my father’s farm, and his before him! When I asked her what we

might do with money and no land, she said we could move to Omaha, or even St. Louis, and open a shop.

“I wil never live in Omaha,” I said. “Cities are for fools.”

This is ironic, considering where I now live, but I wil not live here for long; I know that as wel as I know what is making the sounds I hear in the wal s. And I know where I shal find myself after this earthly life is done. I wonder if Hel can be worse than the City of Omaha. Perhaps it is the City of Omaha, but with no good country surrounding it; only a smoking, brimstone-stinking emptiness ful of lost souls like myself.

We argued bitterly over that 100 acres during the winter and spring of 1922. Henry was caught in the middle, yet tended more to my side; he favored his mother in looks but me in his love for the land.

He was a biddable lad with none of his mother’s arrogance. Again and again he told her that he had no desire to live in Omaha or any city, and would go only if she and I came to an agreement, which we

never could.

I thought of going to Law, feeling sure that, as the Husband in the matter, any court in the land would uphold my right to decide the use and purpose of that land. Yet something held me back. ’Twas not fear of the neighbors’ chatter, I had no care for country gossip; ’twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.

I believe that there is another man inside of every man, a stranger, a Conniving Man. And I believe that by March of 1922, when the Hemingford County skies were white and every field was a snow-

scrimmed mudsuck, the Conniving Man inside Farmer Wilfred James had already passed judgment on my wife and decided her fate. ’Twas justice of the black-cap variety, too. The Bible says that an

ungrateful child is like a serpent’s tooth, but a nagging and ungrateful Wife is ever so much sharper than that.

I am not a monster; I tried to save her from the Conniving Man. I told her that if we could not agree, she should go to her mother’s in Lincoln, which is sixty miles west—a good distance for a separation which is not quite a divorce yet signifies a dissolving of the marital corporation.