Killings

“On the August morning when Matt Fowler buried his youngest son, Frank, who had lived for twenty-one years, eight months, and four days, Matt’s older son, Steve, turned to him as the family left the grave and walked between their friends, and said, ‘I should kill him.’ He was twenty-eight, his brown hair starting to thin in front where he used to have a cowlick. He bit his lower lip, wiped his eyes, then said it again. Ruth’s arm, linked with Matt’s tightened; he looked at her.” 

These are the opening lines of the story. Steve’s words foreshadow the story’s ending, and his seemingly idle threat also foregrounds Dubus’s exploration of the ways in which people mask and hide their basest instincts and impulses in order to comply with human society. The way that Ruth’s arm tightens around Matt’s also subtly reveals that, by this time, Matt has already hatched a plan to kill Richard, and that Ruth knows it. 

“Matt looked at his watch. Ruth would be asleep. He walked with Willis back into the house, pausing at the steps to look at the starlit sky. It was a cool summer night; he thought vaguely of the Red Sox, did not even know if they were home tonight; since it happened he had not been able to think about any of the small pleasures he believed he had earned, as he had earned also what was shattered now forever: the quietly harried and quietly pleasurable days of fatherhood.” 

This moment takes place right before Matt and Willis speak openly to each other about their plans to entrap and kill Richard Strout. The vague air of illicit activity is heightened by Matt’s calculation that Ruth is asleep. Throughout the story, we see both Matt and Willis keeping secrets from their wives, almost as though their murder of Richard is a kind of extramarital affair. 

“[…] at the dinner table on evenings when Frank wasn’t home, was eating with Mary Ann; or, on the other nights—and Frank was with her every night—[Matt] talked with Ruth while they watched television, or lay in bed with the windows open and he smelled the night air and imagined, with both pride and muted sorrow, Frank in Mary Ann’s arms. Ruth didn’t like it because Mary Ann was in the process of divorce, because she had two children, because she was four years older than Frank, and finally—she told this in bed, where she had during all of their marriage told him of her deepest feelings: of love, of passion, of fears about one of the children, of pain Matt had caused him or she had caused him—she was against it because of what she had heard: that the marriage had gone bad early, and for most of it Richard and Mary Ann had both played around.” 

This quote reveals the complexity of emotions that lie within Matt’s heart. He is both proud of his son (perhaps for finding love, or for finding love with a pretty woman), and sorrowful that Mary Ann is not ideal. The narrator also here reveals that Matt and Ruth’s bed, a place of great physical intimacy, is also a place of great emotional and psychological intimacy.