Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [114]
“Yes, it was horrible, and I promised her she would never have to go.”
“Yes, and after what all you went through to get to keep her at home? I’m just afraid if they find out she shot a man, they could take her away from you, and put her out there for good.”
Louise burst into tears. “I’m so confused. I don’t know what to do.”
Elner cracked the door open a little and looked over at the large lump underneath the red and white checked tablecloth for a moment, then closed the door again and said to her friend, “You know, Louise, normally I’d say that everybody deserves a decent funeral, but any man that would try and rape a little retarded girl, well, that’s just a horse of a different color.”
“Oh, Elner. I just don’t know what to do.”
“I know you don’t, Louise, so listen to me. Nobody knows about this but us, and Polly’s not going to say anything. By the way, who is he, anyway?”
“Just a drifter looking for work, as far as I know. I don’t even know his last name.”
Elner looked out at him again. “Well, it’s not like he’s a family man and will be missed, and who’s to say he hasn’t done this before or what he might have done to some other poor girl in the future.”
“What are you saying?” asked Louise.
Elner closed the door. Twenty minutes later when the two women came out of the pantry, they had a plan.
As soon as the sun went down and Polly was sound asleep, they moved into action.
About ten minutes later Louise came back into the kitchen with all of the hired man’s things in a duffel bag.
“Did you get everything?”
“Yes.”
Elner then walked over and leaned down and picked the man up by his arms. She stood him up against the counter and then heaved him up over her shoulders. “Open the door, Louise.”
“Can you carry him all by yourself? Don’t you want me to help?”
“Honey, I’m a big strong farm woman, just open the door…and get the shovel.”
Louise looked over at the table. “Should we bury the gun with him?”
“Good Lord, no. If somebody does find him, we don’t want your gun to be with him. Leave it and I’ll get rid of it later.”
After Elner had thrown the hired hand into the back of her truck and they had driven him a good distance away, back to the very end of Louise’s property, Elner and Louise got out and dug the hole. When they finished, Elner heaved him over the side and they started filling it back up with the loose dirt.
“What if they catch us?” asked a nervous Louise. “What if somebody comes looking for him?”
“If anybody does, just say he left. You don’t have to say he left feet first.”
When they were driving back to the farmhouse, Elner said, “Just promise me one thing, Louise.”
“What?”
“Be careful about who you hire from now on. People may act nice, but you never know.”
As Elner’s husband, Will, always used to say, “Think what you want, but some days luck is just on your side.” Being so far out in the country, nobody heard the shot out at the Franks farm, except a few men shooting quail in a field about two miles away, and they figured it was just other hunters. Nor did anyone ever ask about the hired hand, whose fatal mistake had been trying to drag Polly to the bedroom. Polly may have been retarded, but that day all she knew was that her mother had told her not to leave the kitchen under any circumstances, and she hadn’t. No matter how hard that man had tried to drag her out, she was not going. It had been sheer plain old good luck that in the struggle in the pantry the gun had landed next to her. Poor Polly didn’t know the difference between a Roy Rogers cap pistol and a real gun, and pulled the trigger. Another piece of good luck: she had shot somebody who was not well liked, or even missed, for that matter.
The night of the shooting, after she’d helped Louise clean up the mess, Elner had taken the gun home and had hidden it in the henhouse. She figured if someone