Let Him Go: A Novel (17 page)

Would he have used it only to threaten? Or would he have fired it immediately? And if so, at whom? Bill? Blanche? Probably not the Weboy standing closest to him—Marvin, definitely Marvin—and that is a mistake, for it is Marvin, still holding the heavy rubber mallet, who first sees the gun, Marvin who strikes George a second time, and even harder than before.

Once again George falls, and the blow causes him to loosen his grip on the pistol. It slips from his hand and skids across the linoleum and under the bed.

Get it! Get the gun! Blanche cries, though she is the quickest to it, jumping from the bed and reaching under to
bring the .45 out from that dark space. Goddamnit! she says. Hold on to him—and see to it he can’t pull the trigger!

Blanche’s commands are so swift and so swiftly understood and obeyed that it seems as though all the participants must have planned and even rehearsed what happens next in Cabin Number Eight.

The Weboy brothers grab George’s hand and wrist and roughly lift his arm in the air. George’s legs are awkwardly folded under him, so he can do nothing to push himself away from the brothers’ grasp. Besides, the brothers don’t seem interested in hauling George to his feet but only in raising his arm. He tries pulling back but he’s no match for the strength of the two young men.

Margaret has barely moved toward George before Bill Weboy grabs her hair, her long gray hair that she unpinned before she came out of the bathroom and climbed into bed with her husband. He pulls hard and Margaret topples backward on the bed. Then he hurries to help his nephews.

One of the Weboy brothers lets go of George’s wrist long enough to push the suitcase off the dresser. Then the brothers jam George’s hand—or at least three fingers of his hand, since one brother has a hold of George’s thumb and little finger—against the dresser’s edge.

Shit—watch out for my fingers, says a Weboy.

Then it is clear. As if the shadows had been pushed back to the corners, everything is clear.

Look out then, says Bill Weboy as he raises the hatchet he’s taken from the canvas satchel.

And before Margaret can call out, before George can summon the burst of strength that might enable him to
pull back, pull back before it’s too late, the blade falls, passing through the skin, blood vessels, nerves, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and bones of George Blackledge’s index, middle, and ring fingers, severing all three just above the base knuckles, before burying itself in the dresser’s soft pine.

George’s grunted
Ooohh!
sounds born not of pain but of exertion, as if he had torn his own fingers from his hand. And the groan must sound familiar to Margaret, who heard something similar rush out of him earlier in the evening.

T
HE
W
EBOYS RELEASE
G
EORGE AND HE SLIDES DOWN
again, watching, as he goes, his three fingers, which seem to hold on to the dresser for an instant before they lose their grip—or so it seems—and slip to the floor. Bill Weboy kicks at them but strikes only one and it skitters against the wall.

To Blanche, Bill Weboy says, All right. He won’t be pulling a trigger again. Weboy drops the hatchet back into the canvas satchel.

Instinctively George clasps his left hand over what’s left of his right and raises both of them to slow the blood flow. He presses both hands against his chest. The blood leaking out from his hands catches in the white hairs of his chest and creates a webbed pattern.

He looks up at Bill Weboy and through gritted teeth says, You cocksucker.

Bill Weboy smiles and puts his finger to his lips. Language like that? Not in front of the womenfolk.

My God, my God, Margaret says. By now she has arrived at her husband’s side, and she takes his hands in hers and presses them to her abdomen. Blood seeps into the white cotton muslin and the stain spreads so quickly it seems as though the blood were flowing out of her. She
falls to her knees in front of him and when George sees the blood on her nightgown he pulls his hands away and falls back against the dresser. Oh my God. George . . .

Blanche is standing over them now and the .45 is in her hand. She dangles it by its trigger guard as if it were an object whose purposes were a mystery to her.

I’ll tell you what’s going to happen next, Blanche says, and her words seem as practiced as everything else that has happened in the past few minutes. You’re going to get him to the hospital quick as you can. And while you’re there and the doctor is working on Mr. Blackledge, we’ll be at the sheriff’s office. Stanley Munson is his name. We’ll rouse Stanley from his bed, and I’ll tell Stanley what happened here. How your husband pulled a gun on us, and how rough things got, and how we took it away from him, and what happened in the process. For proof, I’ll put the gun on Stanley’s desk. Now, Stanley and I go way back. He’s a good man and he’ll listen to what I have to say. By the time he talks to you, he’ll know the whole story. How you came here looking to take a child away from his mother. First with sweet talk and then with a gun.

Blanche bends down close to the Blackledges. Of course it’ll be up to Stanley and the state’s attorney but I’ll try to convince them to let the two of you go on back to North Dakota.

She stands up again. Because I don’t think you’re going to make any more trouble here, are you?

Without being given a command to do so, the Weboy brothers and their uncle start backing up toward the door. Blanche pivots smartly and follows them. In the open doorway she stops and looks back at the Blackledges. Lorna told
me you don’t even go to church. And yet you think you’re the ones who ought to be raising that boy.

Then the Weboys are gone, and for a moment Margaret holds her husband close, pulling his head to her breasts. Oh George, she wails. What have I brought us to! What have I done! What have I done to you!

You haven’t done a goddamn thing to me. Not yet, anyway. But you’re about to. You’ll have to drive me to the hospital.

Margaret throws her mackinaw over her bloodstained nightgown and pulls her boots on over her bare feet. Together they manage to get George’s dungarees on, and Margaret covers his bare shoulders with his shirt. Then they both discover something about what the coming years will mean, though neither says a word about the subject. A man missing three fingers on his right hand will have to learn new ways of buttoning a coat and pulling on his boots.

Y
OUNG
L
AWRENCE
W
YATT
,
THE PHYSICIAN ON CALL AT
Gladstone’s Good Samaritan Hospital, has been telephoned and summoned, and he arrives at the hospital within a half hour. When he unwraps the blood-soaked towel covering George’s hand, the doctor’s eyes, heavy-lidded with sleep until that instant, widen in shock. In order to regain his professional demeanor, he brings his face close to George’s hand and narrows his eyes. Jesus, the doctor says, what the hell happened?

Somebody chopped them off, George answers.

Dr. Wyatt quickly steps back. He addresses his next question to the nurse, a tall, trim, attractive older woman with tiny maps of varicose veins on her cheeks. Have the police been called, Adeline?

It’s Margaret, however, who answers. The sheriff, she says. He’s been made aware. And he’ll likely be here soon enough.

Once again the doctor directs his question to the nurse. Do I wait?

Adeline shakes her head slowly. You do not.

I believe it would be best, Dr. Wyatt says to Margaret, if you waited outside. In the waiting room.

Margaret makes no move to leave but when George
tells her, Go, she walks numbly out of the brightly lit room, her boot heels echoing on the tile floor.

The doctor, a rusty-haired young man who possesses, incidentally, long delicate fingers, carefully turns George’s hand over and examines the back as well as the palm.

An axe, you said? Dr. Wyatt asks.

I didn’t, George replies. But no. A hatchet.

Well, he keeps it sharp. This is a very clean cut. You must have held still for it.

Didn’t have much choice, George says through gritted teeth.

I didn’t mean . . . I’m sorry. Never mind. The doctor steps back. My God. Someone who’d do this . . . barbaric.

To this George says nothing. He has tilted his head back and seems to be concentrating on nothing more than breathing in and breathing out.

I’ll give you the choice, Dr. Wyatt says. I can put you under, or I can numb it up and you can stay awake.

I’ll stay awake.

But you’ll have to keep still.

I’m not going anywhere.

After numbing George’s hand, Dr. Wyatt smokes a cigarette and makes certain he has everything he needs near at hand. Once he begins, he works slowly and deliberately, as if he’s following a checklist in his mind, and he asks no more questions of George, either about his life generally or about the savagery recently unleashed upon him.

The stumps are cleaned with water and alcohol. Some tissue is debrided. The doctor’s comments about a clean cut notwithstanding, a few slivers of bone have to be tweezed from the third finger’s pulpy mass. The oozing blood vessels
and still-wriggling nerve ends are cauterized. The doctor recruits as much loose skin as he can and stitches the flaps together with a network of black thread. Once the sutures are all tied off and the doctor has finished his work, the nurse gives George two injections, one an antibiotic and the other a tetanus vaccine.

When the entire procedure is over, Margaret is called back into the room. George smiles wanly at her and holds up his bandaged hand. Now I’ll be wearing mittens instead of gloves.

Margaret ducks inside his raised arm and kisses him on the forehead, just above the cut he received when he banged into the bed frame. It’s a gash that might, under other circumstances, have warranted a few stitches. Tonight it’s been covered with two Band-Aids. Margaret repeats the phrase that she uttered over and over again as she drove her husband to the hospital. I’m so sorry, she says.

Enough of that, George replies.

We’re going to send him up to one of the wards, Dr. Wyatt says. We want to watch for any sign of infection.

The sheriff show up yet? George asks his wife.

Margaret shakes her head. That could have been a bluff.

Did she strike you as the bluffing kind? No, me neither. I expect he’ll wait until morning now.

Again, Dr. Wyatt says, we can call the police. Or the sheriff. We should . . . after all, whoever did this—

—knew what he was doing, says George. He tries to smile but a grimace appears instead. To Margaret he says, I don’t want you going back to the motel alone.

I won’t be long. But I need to get cleaned up. And get dressed. Margaret smiles shyly at this, as if the doctor and
nurse could see what she’s wearing under her mackinaw. And I’ll pack up the car—

Before she finishes, George shakes his head. No. Not alone.

Nurse Adeline steps forward and puts a hand on Margaret’s back. He’s right, hon. Whoever did this? You need to stay close.

We know very well who did this, Margaret says angrily.

And you’ll need to tell the authorities, Dr. Wyatt says. But the swiftness of his remark makes it clear:
But don’t tell us.

Adeline rubs Margaret’s shoulder. Here’s what we’ll do. I’m going to find a bed someplace where you can lie down. My shift is over in a couple hours, and then you and I can go get your things. To George she says, It’ll be light then.

George is pale with exhaustion and pain, and he assents wearily to the nurse’s plan. He does this with a tired but adept wave of his bandaged hand, as if he’s already learned a use for a hand with three fingers missing.

T
HE EMPTY BED THE NURSE HAS FOUND FOR
M
ARGARET
is on the obstetrics ward. Only one newborn is in the hospital’s nursery, and the instant he begins to cry he is swaddled, lifted out of his bin, and taken to his mother in a ward down the hall from Margaret. The crying stops almost immediately.

The two o’clock feeding, Margaret says to Adeline.

About three hours late. But yes.

I had twins. And I could never get them on quite the same schedule. I’d get one fed and just about when I was ready to fall asleep the other would wake up.

Me, I had six. In nine years. My milk cow years, I call them. More than a decade of raw nipples. Felt like there wasn’t an hour or a day when I didn’t have a hungry squalling baby coming at me with an open mouth. But now that they’re mostly grown and scattered I don’t sleep any better. So I’m always willing to work the night shift.

I always said a woman sleeps different than a man. Mother or not.

We’ve got a woman down the hall who’s in her second day of labor. Think we should go down and tell her to turn back now?

She won’t need much persuading, says Margaret. Two days? My God. Have you locked her windows?

Adeline shakes out a hospital gown. You can put this on. And if you like I can take that nightdress of yours straight down to the incinerator.

Margaret looks down at her nightgown. George’s blood has dried to the color of mahogany and the largest stains have stiffened the fabric. No, Margaret says. No, I better keep this. A reminder of what I got us into.