The End of Always: A Novel by Randi Davenport Page A

stood and went to the mudroom and came back with the newspaper and a bottle, which he uncorked with one hand. He sat down and leaned forward and ran whiskey into his cup. He lifted the cup and drank.
    I sat very still in my chair. Martha glanced at me quickly and then looked away.
    My father read the paper quietly for a time. Then he said, “This man Ira Miller was arrested last night on the charge of killing his own horses. Not two days ago this same man went to his barn to feed his horses and found two of them dead with their throats cut. He also found a note saying that there are too many horses in the world and all of Ira Miller’s horses were going to have to die. He has fifteen horses, so this must be the work of a madman. But now we know better. Now we know Miller was insured. All he wanted was the money.” He paused. “Only a very stupid man will kill for money,” he said. He took a drink from his cup and cut his eyes at me. “That is the best way to get caught, and when it is over and you are sitting in your prison cell, what do you have? Nothing. It is better to kill for principle because principle will never leave you. Twenty years later, you will still know that you did the right thing.”
    He lifted the bottle and poured a little more whiskey into his cup. He had turned his shirtsleeves up to protect the cuffs and his arms were large and well muscled. I looked at his wrists and at the width of his hand, the breadth of his palm, his unmarked skin. Always the same, one thing laid over another until the one fact that I had was too big for me to ignore.
    I never doubted that he killed my mother. I had no question of it. I had seen him beat her so badly that she had to stay in bed for days afterward, her face split like an overripe peach. I had seen him kick the chair out from under her. I had seen him crack her over her back so hard with a piece of wood that splinters flew through the air. It was not at all hard to think that on the day my mother died, my father had just gone too far. Pushed her into the sharpened end of an upended spade. Plowed into her with his knife. He tossed that knife around often enough at home and never failed to get my attention when he did so.
    I stood and picked up his plate and dropped it into the dishpan and watched it sink like a flat stone.
    “Second,” my father said. His voice drilled into my back. “You need witnesses if you are going to take a man’s freedom. Without proof they don’t have a thing. This is the way things are in America. A man’s life is his own. It don’t belong to anyone but him.”
    He stood and dropped the paper to the table. “I’m going to work,” he said. He shrugged into his coat and looked around for his hat. And then he snapped his fingers as if he had just remembered something and put his hand on Martha’s shoulder.
    “I saw that boy, that George Kolb, on the street,” he said. “He was coming this way. I told him not to bother. I told him your place is here. So we have seen the last of him, good riddance.” He narrowed his eyes. “I make myself clear?” he said. “You understand?”
    Martha nodded but she looked like someone had kicked her in the stomach. And when my father was gone, she sat at the table with her hands over her cheeks and eyes so I could not see her face, but I knew that she was crying. George Kolb had been her beau for almost a year. He was a mild-mannered young man who worked in a bank and wore tiny gold-wire spectacles and carried a leather case that contained nothing but his lunch but which he was sure would one day contain the important papers that befitted an important man. It did not seem possible that anyone would love a boy with such a high hairless forehead, but Martha said she did.
    “George will never put up with this,” I said. I did not believe that but I had to say something. “George will be back. You know George will be back.”
    She cried harder.
    “It will be all right,” I said.
    She lifted