Free Red House Blues by sallie tierney Page A

chair,
looking like he could topple out of it and onto the green linoleum
any second. How small he seemed sitting there like that. Once, too
long ago, he’d been confident, strong. The mill had been booming
then and he had hopes of expanding down to Tacoma. They bought the
old house on Fir and started fixing it up, adding a second bathroom
and installing modern electrical wiring. Their dream home. People
could afford a dream or two before the crash. She had loved him.
Perhaps she still did, but it didn’t matter anymore.
    “Martin, it’s not about loyalty. There is
nothing else I can do. Don’t you see, maybe you’ll be better off
without me right now.”
    “Sure, and maybe I can just go down to
Hooverville - find myself a nice cardboard box to live in. Is that
your idea of better?”
    “There is still some work to be had, Martin.
You’ll make do if you don’t have to worry about supporting the two
of us. You could work a few hours here and there until things turn
around. When you are working steady again I can come back. We can
start over,” she said.
    “That’s your idea, Rosemary? I should
scrounge food behind the soup kitchens? I should shine shoes and
collect firewood on the tide flats like a bum? I ran the biggest
mill in Seattle! I’d be a laughing stock. Is that what you want?”
he said.
    “I’m not laughing. I don’t see a thing
that’s funny here, Martin. You don’t want to collect firewood like
a bum? Take a look at yourself. You are worse than a bum. Every
dime you can put your hands on goes for bathtub booze in some
speakeasy on First Avenue. You disgust me the way you are,” she
said.
    How it happened he didn’t know but suddenly
he was out of the chair, grabbing the iron off the end of the
board. He just wanted her to stop talking. He couldn’t stand to see
that look of pity on her face. He saw it in her eyes. He was a
failure. Useless. She’d gone too far. He swung the iron at her
mocking face.
    She fell sideways against the sink. There
was a sound like a branch snapping in a storm. He didn’t understand
what it was at first. Then Rosemary slid to the floor. It all
happened so fast.
    He couldn’t take his eyes off her, lying
there so still, blood flowing out over the floor beneath the sink.
He knew there must be something he should do. He sat back down on
the kitchen chair. He had to think what to do.
    He hadn’t meant to hurt her. He knew that.
He’d never hit Rosemary before, ever. He wouldn’t ever hurt her. It
wasn’t her fault. It was his own miserable bad luck. Like a curse.
First the mill, then the house, now this. His stomach lurched and
he wanted to be sick, as if that would help anything. If only he
could vomit up all the bad luck like a bad batch of booze and
everything would be set to rights again. It was like a sickness,
this bad luck. He didn’t deserve it but now it was eating away
everything he once was. And there is no way to fix it, no way to
fix this. The police will come and they would know right away what
happened. He killed his wife. He could say it was an accident.
Maybe they’d believe that. But, no. She was hit with the iron
before she fell. Anyone could see that. He’d go to jail at the very
least. Maybe he would hang. He deserved to hang. He was a
miserable, murdering drunken failure.
    Martin, sitting in the kitchen chair,
looking at the corpse on the floor, did not feel the infinitesimal
tremor that wormed its way up through the house’s foundation,
through old-growth timber beams into the heavy fir flooring, up
through lathe and plaster. The tremor was like incoming tide
sliding in over the marsh flats. It was like a creeping fungus, its
mycelium enveloping the wooden structure that encapsulated the man
sitting in the oak chair. Even if he had not been buried in his own
thoughts he might not have perceived so small a shiver, so gently
did the house stir. It could not have been called an intelligence,
no more than a virus, or a sudden electrical