"Anyway, that's not what you want to ask. Ask what you want, Lisey. Go ahead. I'll tell you. I'm not going to keep secrets from you - not after what happened this afternoon - but you have to ask."
What did happen this afternoon? That would seem to be the logical question, but Lisey understands this cannot be a logical discussion because it's madness they're circling, madness, and now she's a part of it, too. Because Scott took her somewhere, she knows it, that was not her imagination. If she asks what happened, he'll tell her, he's as much as said so...but it's not the right way in. Her post-coital drowse has departed and she's never felt more awake in her life.
"After you jumped off the bench, Scott..."
"Daddy gave me a kiss, a kiss 'us Daddy's prize. To show the blood-bool was over."
"Yes, I know, you told me. After you jumped off the bench and the cutting was done, did Paul...did he go away somewhere to heal? Is that how come he could go to the store for bottles of dope and then run around the house making a bool hunt so soon after?"
"No." He crushes his cigarette out in the ashtray sitting on top of the book.
She feels the oddest mixture of emotions at that simple negative: sweet relief and deep disappointment. It's like having a thunderhead in her chest. She doesn't know exactly what she was thinking, but that no means she doesn't have to think it any mo -
"He couldn't." Scott speaks in that same dry, flat tone of voice. With that same certainty. "Paul couldn't. He couldn't go." The emphasis on the last word is slight but unmistakable. "I had to take him."
Scott rolls toward her and takes her...but only into his arms. His face against her neck is hot with suppressed emotion.
"There's a place. We called it Boo'ya Moon, I forget why. It's mostly pretty." Purdy. "I took him when he was hurt and I took him when he was dead, but I couldn't take him when he was badgunky. After Daddy kilt him I took him there, to Boo'ya Moon, and burrit him away." The dam gives way and he begins sobbing.
He's able to muffle the sounds a little by closing his lips, but the force of those sobs shakes the bed, and for a little while all she can do is hold him. At some point he asks her to turn the lamp out and when she asks him why he tells her, "Because this is the rest of it, Lisey. I think I can tell it, as long as you're holding me. But not with the light on."
And although she is more frightened than ever - even more frightened than on the night when he came out of the dark with his hand in bloody ruins - she frees an arm long enough to turn out the bedside light, brushing his face with the breast that will later suffer Jim Dooley's madness. At first the room is dark and then the furniture reappears dimly as her eyes adjust; it even takes on a faint and hallucinatory glow that announces the moon's approach through the thinning clouds. "You think Daddy murdered Paul, don't you? You think that's how this part of the story ends."
"Scott, you said he did it with his rifle - "
Chapter 15
"But it wasn't murder. They would have called it that if he'd ever been tried for it in court, but I was there and I know it wasn't." He pauses. She thinks he'll light a fresh cigarette, but he doesn't. Outside the wind gusts and the old building groans. For a moment the furniture brightens, just a little, and then the gloom returns. "Daddy could have murdered him, sure. Lots of times. I know that. There were times he would have, if I hadn't been there to help, but in the end that isn't how it was. You know what euthanasia means, Lisey?"
"Mercy-killing."
"Yeah. That's what my Daddy did to Paul."
In the room beyond the bed, the furniture once more shivers toward visibility, then once more retreats into shadow. "It was the bad-gunky, don't you see? Paul got it just like Daddy. Only Paul got too much for Daddy to cut and let out." Lisey sort of understands. All those times the father cut the sons - and himself as well, she presumes - he was practicing a kind of wacky preventative medicine.
"Daddy said it mos'ly skip' two generations and then came down twice as hard. 'Come down on you like that tractor-chain on your foot, Scoot,' he said."
She shakes her head. She doesn't know what he's talking about. And part of her doesn't want to.
"It was December," Scott says, "and there come a cold snap.
First one of the winter. We lived on that farm way out in the country with open fields all around us and just the one road that went down to Mulie's Store and then to Martensburg. We were pretty much cut off from the world. Pretty much on our own hook, see?"