The end of the rope

It was Saturday, and Gerhardt had allowed his sons, Matt and Wilfred, to sleep later than usual before helping with the farm chores. The sun peeked from the eastern horizon, but the spring air in northwest Iowa still had a nip.

The boys were washing up for breakfast, when Gerhardt entered the house.
“Boys,” he yelled, “come along.” They saw that his usually stony face registered concern, even alarm. He turned the crank on the Model T, and it coughed and shook and settled into a rough tappa-tappa-tappa-tappa idle. They drove off down the dirt road, Gerhardt wrestling with the steering wheel as he negotiated the deep, muddy ruts produced by rains that fell frequently this time of year. In late fall, the ruts would freeze and glisten with frost in the early mornings, resembling silvery railroad tracks mangled after a train wreck.

Gerhardt told them something bad had happened at the Bernie Wubbinas. Wubbina, who operated a ninety-acre farm four miles to the southwest, was a squat man of forty-one years whose gentle, easy-going manner belied a shrewd business sense. He owned the threshing machine that eight of the farmers in the area rented each summer to harvest their oat crops. Another neighbor had driven by the Rutgers farm and told Gerhardt he’d heard the sheriff was at the Wubbinas’ place, and there was a big commotion. He thought it involved Mrs. Wubbina, but wasn’t sure.

As Gerhardt and the boys pulled up at the long driveway leading back to the Wubbina farm, they saw several black Model T’s, just like their own because that was the car common folks owned, if they owned one at all. One of the cars had Sioux County Sheriff in big red letters emblazoned on the driver’s side and the rear. Gerhardt pulled the car up behind the others, and they all got out, stopped to look for a moment, then advanced slowly and warily to where several area farmers and the sheriff were gathered in a circle. The group surrounded an open, narrow well, peering over the edge. Three of them—hefty men—held a thick rope in large, gnarled hands.

“I’ve got ’er!” came a hollow, urgently strained voice from below. “Pull me up!”
The three men bent down, their broad backs arched, gripped the rope lower, and gave a mighty upward thrust. The two in the rear held the rope stationary while the one in front reached down for another grip, which the other two duplicated, one after the other. They repeated the maneuver about a dozen times until a man’s rubber-encased feet came into view, then the man, wearing a black rubber suit. The diver’s hands grasped the ankles of a woman, and the others in the circle grasped him and the woman, laying her limp body on the ground. Her dress and matted hair were soaked and her face was ashen, the mouth agape and the open eyes staring crazily at nothing. Gerhardt and the boys saw that it was Emma Wubbina.

Wilfred spun around and covered his face. Gerhardt’s jaw dropped, and Matt stumbled backward. Someone fifteen feet to their left moved, and they turned to see Gordie Wubbina—at age sixteen, a year ahead of Matt at the academy—begin to collapse, his face frozen in shock. His father, Bernie, caught him and led him staggering half-consciously into the house. The men stood silently for a few moments, staring at the body. Then the sheriff’s deputy asked them to carry the body into the house, saying he would summon a hearse.

Gerhardt told the boys to go and wait in the car. He approached the young, slim deputy and asked if he knew how Emma Wubbina could have removed the thick oak well cover, which had been bolted at angles into the concrete sides of the unused well. A strong, voluptuously shaped woman of five feet seven inches, she nonetheless would not have had the strength to accomplish the feat, even with tools, and none was found. The deputy said Bernie had reported finding the well open after he woke at 5 a.m., saw that Emma was not in the house and went outside to check, almost stumbling into the well himself because of the kerosene lantern’s limited illumination. Bernie had roused Gordie and, telling him only that his mother was missing, had driven with him to the sheriff’s sub-office in Millersville. The deputy said he would have to investigate.

Two weeks later, the banner headline in the weekly Millersville Bulletin read, “Well Victim Mystery Solved.” A young, muscular, handsome blacksmith in Millersville, one of three in the town, had admitted having sexual intercourse with Emma Wubbina after he had finished shoeing Bernie’s team of horses, while Bernie and Gordie were away helping a neighbor harvest the first cutting of alfalfa hay. He had come to the house to be paid, and Mrs. Wubbina had greeted him wearing only a corset and brassiere. After they had made love, she’d asked him to break open the well cover, telling him her husband was going to have the well filled with dirt. The deputy surmised that she replaced the cover before her husband and son returned so they wouldn’t notice it was off, then arose during the night, removed it and plunged headfirst down the well.

Matt and Wilfred’s mother, Wilhemina Rutgers, had died of pneumonia four years before. For months after the well incident, Matt had a frequent nightmare. He would be waiting beside the well, and when the diver emerged with the woman, his mother’s face would appear, smiling wanly. He would waken and sob silently until sleep overcame him.

On a weekend morning that summer, Gerhardt rose before dawn to begin the farm chores. He climbed the stairs to the barn’s haymow to pitch alfalfa down a hatch to the cattle below. Setting the lantern down to the side of the opening, he grasped a pitchfork from against the wall, and stepped toward the pile of hay. In the lantern’s glow, the outline of a form loomed above the hay, seemingly suspended in the air.

Warily moving closer, Gerhardt could see that the form was a body. He squinted, and glimpsed a slender rod extending downward from a rafter. Edging ahead, he saw that it wasn’t a rod, but a rope, and at the end was a head.
“Oh no!” he gasped, dropping the pitchfork. “Matthew.”