An Annie Dillard Reader by Annie Dillard Page B

you…as it happens.” Both men stood in the decorated parlor, their arms tense at their sides. Obenchain, coiled in his loose stained clothes, pressed his jaws together. Clare held himself still.
    â€œI am going to kill you, shortly…for my own reasons…with which you need not concern yourself.” His voice was a pressured baritone; it filled the small, still parlor the way the brocade-draped organ’s noise filled it when June pumped it andplayed, panting, and her shoes knocked on the pedals and the whining notes swelled.
    â€œâ€¦concern yourself,” Clare thought.
    Obenchain’s white forehead rumpled. “You might view it in this light: you have not much longer to live.” When he lifted his head, Clare saw that his eyes, set close in the moist skin, were glassy; they caught the lamplight and reflected it in gleams. Clare had never been truly fond of the fellow.
    â€œWhat are you saying, man?”
    â€œI have considered it a part of…justice to impart this knowledge to you.”
    Obenchain was earnest, frightened, and arrogant; he rarely looked at Clare. The men were standing within a foot of each other. Clare crossed his arms. He wondered if Obenchain always packed a revolver. He heard June climbing the back stairs.
    â€œI was going to mend this doll’s head,” he thought. He understood that Obenchain did not expect him to speak or respond in any way; his role was to listen until the speech wore itself out. “The topic of justice,” Obenchain said, “has long interested me.”
    He raised his thin hands upward, to the height of his shoulders. “Your life, Mr…. Fishburn, is in my hands.” His lips spread, and he looked, Clare thought, right tickled with himself. The man read too much. Everyone knew that.
    Clare tried to concentrate on what Obenchain was saying; he wanted to learn his place in this scheme. He could not, however, follow it. “…always by your side,” he was saying, “waking and sleeping, early and late.” His dark lips were askew, and his voice was urgent.
    â€œIt need not, of course, have been you, but it…was you, delivered up to me this evening, you”—Obenchain’s voice surged and fell, his high-crowned derby bobbed—“whose life I hereby…take.” Clare could see only that Obenchain believed himself. He was uttering a creed. Clare hoped to get him out of the house—mighty carefully—so he could think, or sleep on it. How long had it been since he had faced someone his own height? Obenchain was burly and wide—twice the man Clare was. Obenchain’s agitated face seemed to loom above himclosely, as if the moon had inched up on the earth, causing people who noticed it near on the horizon to look away, embarrassed.
    Obenchain broke off. He held himself in control. Was this the young man Clare knew from the high school shop, Beal Obenchain who finished his work early—he made his birdhouse, cookie cutter, bookshelf, doorbell—and read books in a corner, licking his fingertips? Now with his head cocked back he was examining Clare as if he were an unusual binding on a book. He flashed his wide smile and confided, “I picked your name at random from a…cedar bucket.”
    Clare wondered what June would say. Would he tell her? The weather would be clearing any day now; it would be a shame, if Obenchain killed him, to miss a fine northeaster, when he had waited so long, without grousing, for a clear day. What would the sheriff say? He had seen Obenchain and the sheriff together in the Lone Joe Saloon, playing chess. Perhaps the new doctor could declare Obenchain unfit, and send him away. A weariness overcame Clare, and intolerance, and a wish to sleep by his wife in their bed.
    â€œYou will excuse me now,” he said. “I was just going upstairs.” Clare was ready to turn his back on him and start mounting the stairs. If Obenchain