Cabin Secrets

Dedicated to my sister Sue

He knew that he must keep still while he waited for the razor to liberate his face and neck of lathered stubble.

Keep still.

Even though the straight edge was keen and her hand slow and sure, something tugged at him like a piece of clothing hung upon a stiff bristle of leg hair. Maybe it was the fire and lantern-lit glint in her eyes, or the twitch of her thin and wide Irish lips.

Outside of their isolated frontier cabin, in the corral, a horse whinnied, and something opened his eyes to a dreadful possibility.

THE SADDLEBAG.

Why had it taken him so long to consider that disturbing scenario?

THE SADDLEBAG.

Whisper soft, Marie brought the blade across and another light row of weekly beard disappeared. Her body was close—almost brushing against his. She wiped the blade clean against a rag draped over her left arm.

Chicago seemed 100 years ago even though only one month had passed since his brief stay there. Marie was glad to welcome him back to this new cabin home in Montana.

It was a merciful thing that she did not know what he had done in Chicago. It was only a year ago in Boston when the mere suspicion of his exploits inflamed a rage that galvanized her into throwing one of his portfolio cases into the fireplace. He had since hoped he would never witness it again. Rope-like tendons and veins stood out on her neck—eyes boiling out of her head. Frantic, he fetched his smoking works from the flames and grabbed her shoulders to console.

“It’s not true Marie! I – “

That was when she punched him. The force sent him stumbling. “Prove it!”

It amazed him how such a violent and ugly display could so possess such beautiful and graceful a vessel as she.

“I will, I will!” Alex found himself blurting through a bloodied mouth. “Thomas will attest to my whereabouts that night.”

She shoved him over. “If you shame me and bring dishonor to our marriage and my family—God help me!”

” … God help me!”

” … help me!”

Alexander could hear the high pitch of each hair dying against the thin, narrow blade.

“What’s wrong honey? You’re so tense.”

Was it his imagination or was there something wrong with her voice? a flatness that failed to convey true concern.

Saddlebag. The saddlebags were hanging empty by the front door where he had left them.

In these days, in this society, not only were the affairs inside a marital bedroom private, but affairs outside of it were kept in the strictest confidence. Back in Boston, Alex had made his friends aware of only enough to tell them that his infidelity ran against the grain of his conscience and that what led him astray was a terrible weakness in his core makeup.

His affair with Aneste was as ardent as it was wrong—being borne on roiling crests and troughs of passion and guilt, pleasure and hunger, wispy fulfillment and heavy emptiness, with a whirlpool of confessions Thomas and other faithful confederates helped conceal. Even after he and Marie had moved from their hometown of Boston to build this frontier cabin in Montana, he allowed the affair to continue long distance. It was a filthy crime, and though unpunished, its prize was elusive and fleeting. The reward of those high crests, though—how seductive and pleasurable they were.

In the sea fog of lust, their last tawdry encounters were but a splash of what could not last and was doomed to heartbreak. Still, Aneste was like an opium addiction.

“I await for that day with you, my love, when we will meet again in Chicago… Two weeks,” was the end of her last telegram. Yesterday, without a thought, he stuffed it deep inside a saddlebag of supplies. The day’s lone ride from their cabin to the rail station and back (for mail, telegrams, and supplies) was so long that he had come home drained and forgot to dispose of that damning missive. A short time after his arriving back— before he could empty the saddlebags—he thought he found Aneste’s message nearer the top of one of those full bags, and in a different position than where he had left it.

Marie, however, had seemed normal—yet at the same time—quieter and more pensive—perhaps even with a stiffness about her. When he had asked if she was in good spirits, she answered in the affirmative. He wondered now whether or not she had been influenced by some dark rumination and, if so, how dark was it? After his believing her and dismissing her perceived behavior as an unrelated distortion, he now wondered if he had made a serious or even a fatal misinterpretation.

“Relax,” she cooed. Her left hand pressed flat against his chest to guide his upper body down against the bed on which he had been sitting.

Behind her was a black pot of water she had drawn to warm the waiting bath. It now hung lukewarm over the fire, but a parallel function of his spinning mind could not gauge when the water would boil or boil over. When would the hissing snakes of the hearth tell of the scalding cleanse?

“We’ll have you shaved and washed in no time,” she murmured, straddling him before he could protest. The lantern captured in her dark green eyes an unsettling glaze. For a moment she towered over him and smiled—obviously enjoying this. What could be a vindictive blade caught a lick of that lantern light before disappearing under his right cheek.

His thoughts felt like a runaway train ready to derail: Scant but welcome was her reassurance that this would not be his last shave when she mentioned their intended bath. Why would she say such a thing if his naked body were destined to be left out for the wolves?

He tried to relax and act as if everything were normal, but an adrenaline steam engine rumbled underneath his pulsating, slick, and dripping skin.

There was another idea, though—this one as dark and perverse as a black widow perched upon his nose.

What if the promised bath was to comfort him with the assurance she needed to ease herself close enough for that first and final swipe? Her deft hand could be swift in delivery—unleashing a warm, gushing flood of life. His strength would be quick to flag under her pinning body weight. In those final moments of struggle, she would drape herself over his drunken attempts to rise as his vision dimmed and his eyes rolled back into a skullward revelation of death. Her soft singing would tumble down the wells of his ears in that last sense darkness chased…

He knew that he must keep still while he waited even though his system was surging towards a dizzying and sickening consumption of dread as a fever of possibilities assailed him.

Was the telegram placed differently, or had he been too tired to recall HOW he had left it?

When she had suspected, back in Boston that time over a year ago, shortly before Marie and he had left for this frontier, and after the portfolio in the fire place, and the punch in the mouth, and the push, and after Thomas and his other friends vouched for him, (they had suffered long and endured in his defense) after all that, his wife had approached him, burst into tears, and embraced him. “I’m sorry I doubted you, Alex. I just couldn’t live with the shame of your betrayal. I’d much rather kill you and myself than endure it.”

In frustration he asked himself why that memory settled onto him just now and not when he had suspected the saddlebag discovery? The answer was that his suspicion had been driven into his subconscious. He had done this in ignorance—as if his doing so would blunt any danger from harming him.

The difference in the saddlebag had been so small… (

There was too the possibility that she had not read the missive at all.

When playful and mischievous, she sometimes liked to tease him and drive him wild with games. This could be one of those occasions.

She must not suspect that he was afraid of her this second, because on the very real chance that she was NOT aware of his infidelity, his fear could set her wondering and she would be persistent to plumb the depths until satisfied. His friends were not around to bail him out, this time.

Her lithe frame arched a shadow over him and he could feel the light pressure of the blade ever-so-slowly dragging against his skin. It seemed to stop over his pulse.

His now watering eyes grew slightly wider: “Dearest…”

Outside, the starry night with its seemingly supernatural creatures carried on, oblivious. Wolves howled and night birds called, but no eyes would see and no soul but the two of them would ever know exactly what went on inside that isolated cabin.