"I'll be late tonight,"  Jim apologized, slipping into his jacket.  "Tony Blakely took my fifth period English.  I've got to cover his after school detention."

When Jim was gone Ellen put Gabriel in his high chair, but he began an impatient whine to be picked up again.  Sighing, Ellen lifted her son and opened her shirt.  "That nasty old man knows you and I are lovers."

"How could he know that?"  The word  "lover"  grated.  Lovers like  one another.  Ellen and I were only bored, and fucking.  I turned my back, stared through a window at the pasture behind the house.  A shallow depression dimpled the earth, a scar of the pond where Mary Lorena Stoneman died.

"He knew."

"Maybe we should stop."  I was remembering how Lester looked at me.  "If Jim had come home ahead of those two..."

"But he didn't,"  Ellen said.  "And if we stop I might go crazy.  Do you have any idea what it's like, all day with nothing but babies to talk to and cornfields to look at, while Jim spends every spare minute at that school...?"

"I've been thinking, maybe I'll try with Barbara again."

For a moment she stared at me, mouth gaping her shock at hearing the words.  "If you go, I'll tell Jim I've been fucking his great and good friend Tom Stockwell."  Ellen's eyes flashed fire and poison.  "We were practically divorced until you showed up and gave me a reason to stay."

"I'm going for a walk,"  I snapped, reaching for the bourbon.

"I'll tell him,"  Ellen shouted as I fetched my coat from a hall closet.  Her voice raised half an octave as I opened the back door.  "See if I don't!"

I hiked the perimeter of the farm for hours, long after dark, raising the bottle whenever ceaseless prairie wind made me shiver.  By the time the bourbon was nearly gone an alcohol haze filtered my resentment.  In the morning, Ellen's anger would have burned out, and we'd talk like adults, about my leaving.  We'd talk in my bed...

I swallowed the last of the whiskey, tossed the bottle into a field and lurched toward the back of the house.  After ten paces I stopped, transfixed by a half acre of water, the moon's thin crescent reflection broken to rippling shards by the wind.

A woman eased herself into the pond, despite a long dress that would make swimming impossible.  I shouted something when the water reached her waist, and lights came on in the house.  I jogged toward the pond, breaking into a run when the water rose to her shoulders.

As I reached the pond's edge the woman turned in the direction from which she'd come.  A man on the opposite bank, in an old fashioned oak and steel wheelchair, raised a shotgun from his lap.  "Go on,"  he said.

"Charles, this is..."  she whimpered.

"Justice is what it is,"  the man interrupted.  "If you make the other side, keep goin'.  You'll be out of range then."

"I can't swim."  Moonlight silvered her tears.  "You're murdering  me, Charles."

The man gestured with his weapon.  "Go on.  See can you save your whorin' life."

The woman looked toward the house.  "Ruben!"  she shrieked.  "Help me!"

Charles laughter was cold as his voice, utterly without mirth.  "You'll see him in hell.  Now go on."  He thumbed the old gun's hammer.  "Or before God I'll kill you where you stand."

The woman turned and waded further in the dark.  She didn't try to swim until wavelets lapped at her face.  A mermaid wouldn't have lived in the heavy dress, and her awkward floundering was useless.  The man turned to me and smiled, eyes bright as the water.

Paralysis broken, I screamed a long  "No!"  and lunged into a drunken dive.  The man laughed as I dropped onto hard, dry earth.  Breath knocked out of my chest, I could still hear his insane giggle when Jim Carrol put his hand on me and asked,  "Are you all right?"  On my knees, I fought to fill my lungs with air.  "Tom, what's wrong?"  Jim shook my shoulder insistently.

"Where'd he go?"  I blurted.

"Who?  Where'd who go?"

"The guy with the gun."  I struggled to sit, at the edge of the depression behind the house.  There was no pond, no water, nothing but grass and rocks where Mary Lorena Stoneman died.

A white something glided toward us and I jerked away from Jim's hand, turned toward the motion and shouted, "There she is!"  It was Ellen, worried and frightened in a pale flannel nightgown.  I tried to explain.  "I saw a guy with a shotgun, right over there.  He was in a wheelchair, and there was a woman..."

Kneeling beside me, Jim's eyes searched mine.  "Somebody shining deer,"  he conceded.  "I see spotlights sometimes, when poachers come this way."

I couldn't decide which was crazier, knowing I'd really seen the harsh tableau on the bank of a long gone pond, or believing illegal deer hunters could explain it.  I was certain I wouldn't be staying much longer in that house, where dead water came to life, where an old man looked deep enough into my soul to observe the betrayal of a friend, where I saw what happened to Mary Lorena Stoneman.

Even jealous rage from a betrayed friend seemed small against the possibility of watching Mary Lorena die again.

Jim let me lean on him as we walked back to the house.  In the kitchen he brought out another bottle and poured us both a shot, tossing his off like medicine.  "You scared hell out of me, standing out there, screaming."

I don't remember Ellen staying with us at the table.  I stopped seeing her, or perhaps she went away rather than hear what I told her husband.

My problems with Barbara stemmed from a failure to keep my hands off other women.  I recounted  "conquests"  that seemed tawdry and shameful, omitting only the most recent.  I described the week my son Joey was born.  On three successive nights I left Barbara at the obstetrics ward, and stopped at a saloon to persuade strange women to come home with me.

At the end, I would have given anything to have kept it all to myself.  Jim laughed out loud several times, and when I hushed he said,  "I'd never have the guts to do that."  His face was an admiring, buddies-telling-stories-at-the-tavern grin.

Exhausted, I reached for the whiskey, have only a vague memory of finding my bed that night.  Perhaps I crawled up the stairs, dragging numb legs like Charles Stoneman.

I woke at dawn, lying on my side, facing the window and new morning's faint light.  There was soft breath from the foot of the bed, and I assumed Ellen had come into the room.  Turning, I found the man in the wheelchair, watching me.

"They done the same thing to me,"  he said at last.  I flinched when he lifted his hand, but he only stroked his beard.  "Mary Lorena and Ruben Schmidt, a hired man."  Charles Stoneman's eyes narrowed.  "Like you and that other one."  He jerked his eyes in the direction of the room where Ellen and Jim slept.  "They paid,"  he hissed.  "Do you hear?  And so will you."

In that moment I knew if someone excavated behind the house, below the level of an abandoned root cellar, they'd find whatever time had left of Ruben Schmidt's bones.  The image of Charles Stoneman faded with full light, and I was alone again.

I stayed in bed until Jim left for work, and began packing.  Ellen came in the room before I was finished.  She didn't argue about my leaving, just sat on the bed and watched.  "This house is dangerous,"  I told her, and repeated Charles Stoneman's warning.  After a final cup of coffee, I was gone.

That was 1980..

Five years ago, half a continent from Hoosier prairie, years past seeing Charles Stoneman's ghost by the foot of my bed, I waited in a San Francisco restaurant for the wife of a business associate.  I looked forward to hearing a recitation of the excuses clever, creative Marlys invented for the husband who didn't appreciate her.  Movement across the street caught my eye, and I glanced idly through smoked plate glass.

At the corner,  Mary Lorena Stoneman pushed an antique wheelchair toward the hotel, her eyes dull and dead, but a cheerful Charles Stoneman lifted one hand to wave at me.  Behind Mary Lorena, Ellen paced the stumbling gait of someone dosed with too much thorazine.  The man following Ellen looked dazed and miserable.

Ellen's funeral had been just after Christmas.  She lost control of her car in a snowstorm.  The man with her died as well, and at the service there was nasty speculation about where Ellen and Don Millsap were going at three in the morning.

I told her the farm was dangerous.  I told  her.

I have no idea if Marlys ever arrived.  I'll never know if she wondered why I stood her up, or merely shifted her attentions to some other playmate.  There was a week of dreams about Ellen, and visions of following behind the wood and iron wheelchair before I came here.

After hearing my story, Brother Francis, the Abbott, looked into my eyes and suggested I  "make a retreat."

My  "retreat"  has been half a decade of working hard to make a safe place for myself.  I do jobs the most devout Brother avoids, clean grease traps in the kitchen, wash floors on my knees, carry gallons of water to the gardens.

But somewhere, Mary Lorena Stoneman pushes an anachronistic wheelchair.  I watch her struggle in horrible nightmares.  Ellen Carrol and Don Millsap stagger behind, and Charles Stoneman smiles, waving an invitation to take my place with them.

Brother Francis tells me God is merciful and insists I have nothing to fear.

I've never believed him.