Dead Men's s Boots

‘So would it be fair to say that you and Myriam had an unhappy childhood?’ I asked. ‘I mean, did you feel that-?’

Juliet cut right through my measured and mealy-mouthed phrases. ‘Did your father abuse you?’

Ruth folded the napkin three times with excessive care before putting it back down on the plate. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He did.’

‘Sexually? Or did he just beat you?’

‘The one shaded into the other. I was happy when he died, because he was the fountainhead of violence in this house. It all flowed from him.

‘How did he die?’ I asked.

Ruth seemed to consult her memory – or at least she paused, looking into the depths of her lemonade, before she answered. ‘Well,’ she said, almost dreamily, ‘he slipped and fell off the roof of the barn when he was fixing it for winter. I wrote to Myriam to tell her, and she wrote back that she’d already heard. She said she was happy he hadn’t died in his bed, but sorry it wasn’t slower.’

‘And your brothers?’ Juliet asked.

Another pause. ‘Tyler died first,’ she said. ‘Some men from out of town came into the Pit Stop Bar in Caldwell. A blond man in a white suit, they said, and two others. They picked a fight with him, and they took it outside. Beat him to death, more or less, though he lived a couple of days on a machine.

‘Zack got himself drowned in some mud, over by Caldwell Creek. There’s a wallow there that’s very deep, and he fell into it and didn’t come out. Perhaps he was drunk.

‘And Paul died from a heroin overdose. That was a big scandal, as you can imagine. Nobody even knew you could get heroin around here back in those days. The doctor said it had to be the first time Paul had ever tried it, because there were no needle marks anywhere on his body. So I guess he didn’t know how strong the dose was, and he just took more than he could handle. I gather that’s easy to do.’

When Ruth finished this litany of disasters, nobody spoke for a moment or two.

‘How long ago did these thing happen, exactly?’ I asked, breaking the strained silence.

‘A long time,’ she said. She met my gaze and stared me out.

‘While Myriam was still alive?’

‘Yes. That long ago.’

‘So is it possible . . . ?’ I left the question hanging. Ruth put her glass back down on the tray, hard. It hit the side of the jug, and the ringing sound hun«ngisp;g in the air for a second.