1922

1922 Plot Summary

Introduction

In the sweltering Nebraska summer of 1922, Wilfred James stares across his hundred and eighty acres of prime farmland, knowing that everything he loves hangs in the balance of a single, terrible decision. His wife Arlette wants to sell her inherited hundred acres to the Farrington Company for their hog slaughterhouse, threatening to drag their fourteen-year-old son Henry to the city and leave Wilfred with nothing but memories of the land his father died working. The dispute has poisoned their marriage, turning dinner conversations into battlegrounds and quiet evenings into silent warfare. But Wilfred James is not a man who surrenders easily. The land flows through his veins like blood, and he would rather see Arlette dead than watch concrete and steel rise where corn once swayed. What begins as desperate scheming soon transforms into something far more sinister, as the Conniving Man inside Wilfred whispers of permanent solutions to temporary problems. In eight years' time, he will sit in a shabby Omaha hotel room, surrounded by rats and memories, writing his confession while the ghosts of 1922 scratch at his door with vengeful claws.

Chapter 1: The Hundred Acres: Seeds of Murder in Nebraska, 1922

The argument always came back to the same hundred acres. Arlette would slam her coffee cup down on the kitchen table, brown liquid sloshing over the rim, and declare that she wouldn't live another day downwind from a hog butchery. Wilfred would set his jaw and remind her that cities were for fools, that the land belonged to farming families, not corporate slaughter mills. Between them sat Henry, their son, watching his parents tear each other apart over dirt and dollars. "We could move to Omaha," Arlette would say, her voice taking on that dreamy quality that made Wilfred's stomach turn. "Open a dress shop. Live like civilized people instead of dirt farmers scratching in the mud." The boy favored his mother in looks but his father in temperament. When pressed to choose sides, Henry would mumble about staying on the farm, about not wanting to leave his friends or his sweetheart Shannon Cotterie. This only enraged Arlette further, and she'd storm from the kitchen, leaving the men to finish their meal in uncomfortable silence. Winter bled into spring, and still they argued. Wilfred felt something dark growing inside him, a voice that whispered solutions no Christian man should contemplate. The Conniving Man, he called it, and by March of 1922, that voice was growing stronger. It suggested that Arlette's stubbornness was really just another word for cruelty, that her threats to take Henry away were worse than violence. When Sheriff Jones later asked about their marriage troubles, Wilfred would claim they'd been trying to work things out. But the truth was uglier. The truth was that by early summer, Wilfred James had already decided his wife would never see another Nebraska winter.

Chapter 2: The Conniving Man: Plotting Arlette's Death with a Reluctant Son

The plan began to take shape during those long evenings in the hay-mow, where father and son would retreat to escape Arlette's increasingly bitter tirades. Wilfred painted pictures of Henry's future in the city: friendless, mocked as a country bumpkin, forced to attend school with children who would never understand the rhythm of seasons or the satisfaction of honest work. The boy's face would crumple with worry, and Wilfred would press harder. "She means to take you from everything you love," Wilfred whispered, his voice carrying the weight of prophecy. "And for what? So she can play at being a city woman while you wither away in some concrete box." Henry's resistance crumbled slowly, like riverbank soil in spring flood. When Arlette slapped him during one particularly vicious argument, calling him his father's mindless echo, something cold settled in the boy's eyes. That night, Wilfred led his son to the old well behind the cow barn, the one they'd used for slop water before it went bad. It was only twenty feet deep, perfect for their purposes. "It would be quick," Wilfred promised, though he knew no more about murder than he did about brain surgery. "And when it's over, we'll be free to live as men should live. On the land. In peace." The boy wept, but he didn't say no. Wilfred took that silence as consent, though years later he would wonder if Henry's tears had been grief for his mother or terror of his father. Perhaps both. Perhaps something else entirely. In the gathering dusk, with the corn whispering secrets around them, they shook hands like conspirators sealing their doom.

Chapter 3: Blood in the Well: A Killing That Would Not Stay Buried

The opportunity came on a humid June evening when Arlette decided to celebrate what she believed was Wilfred's surrender. He'd told her he was ready to consider selling, ready to discuss their future in Omaha, and she'd opened a bottle of wine to toast their new beginning. One glass became two, two became four, and soon she was singing bawdy songs and making crude jokes about their son's romance with Shannon Cotterie. "That little baggage," she slurred, gesturing obscenely. "If Hank don't know the color of her nipples by now, he's slower than cold molasses." Henry fled to his room, but not before Wilfred saw the naked hatred in the boy's eyes. This was their moment. When Arlette finally passed out in her chair, Wilfred carried her to their bedroom and summoned Henry with a kitchen knife in one hand and a burlap sack in the other. The killing went wrong from the first cut. Arlette wasn't as unconscious as they'd thought, and when Henry pulled the sack over her head, she began to thrash and scream. Wilfred slashed through the burlap, opening her throat, but still she fought. Blood sprayed across the counterpane, the walls, their faces. She clawed at them with desperate fingers, her eyes wide with betrayal and terror, and died hard with that terrible ear-to-ear grin carved into her face. They wrapped her body in quilts and carried her to the well, but even in death, Arlette refused to cooperate. She landed wrong, sitting upright in the murky water like some grotesque queen holding court twenty feet below ground. Wilfred vomited at the sight, then covered the well and tried to convince himself that the worst was over. But in a story like this, the worst is never over.

Chapter 4: The Vengeance of Rats: Nature's Retribution for Unnatural Acts

The rats came for Achelois first. Wilfred found the cow in her stall one night, bellowing in agony, a massive Norway rat hanging from her teat like some obscene decoration. The creature had torn the pink flesh clean away and was eating it even as Achelois tried to shake it loose. Wilfred killed the rat and treated the cow's wounds, but he knew this was no random attack. The rats had found their way out of the well through an old pipe that connected to the barn. They'd been feeding on Arlette's corpse, growing fat and bold, and now they wanted more. Wilfred plugged the pipe with canvas and cement, sealing most of them in their underground tomb, but some had already escaped. They watched him from the shadows with knowing black eyes, as if they understood exactly what he'd done and why. The next attack came months later, hidden in Arlette's red hatbox where she'd stashed her secret money. When Wilfred reached for the cash he needed to pay for Henry's pregnant girlfriend's care, teeth sank deep into the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. The bite became infected, nearly killing him, and he spent days in fever-dream conversations with Arlette's rotting ghost. She told him things no living person should know. She whispered of Henry's crimes in Omaha, of bank robberies and shootings, of a pregnant girl dying in a Nevada line shack while snow piled against the windows. The rats were her messengers now, her loyal subjects, and through them she would have her revenge on the husband who'd opened her throat for the sake of a hundred acres of dirt.

Chapter 5: The Sweetheart Bandits: Henry and Shannon's Doomed Flight

Henry ran away to save Shannon Cotterie from the Catholic home where her father had hidden her shame, but salvation was the last thing he delivered. Desperate for money to finance their escape, he robbed two Omaha banks, shooting a security guard in the second job and crippling the man for life. With Shannon heavy with child and winter closing in, they fled west like characters from a dime novel, calling themselves the Sweetheart Bandits and leaving a trail of small-town bank jobs across Colorado and Utah. The newspapers made them romantic figures, young lovers driven to crime by circumstances beyond their control. But there was nothing romantic about the reality: a pregnant teenager who'd rather die than return home, and a guilt-ridden farm boy whose moral compass had been shattered the night he helped murder his mother. They killed a man in Ogden when he tried to stop their getaway, crossing the final line between desperation and damnation. Their luck ran out in Nevada, where a diner counterman recognized them from old newspapers his mother had sent from Nebraska. When Henry tried to reason with the man, the rusty old pistol the counterman grabbed misfired twice before finally putting a bullet in Shannon's back. Henry carried her to an abandoned line shack in the desert, where she died giving birth to their stillborn child. Alone with two corpses in a tin-roof shack while a blizzard raged outside, Henry James put his gun to his temple and pulled the trigger one last time. By the time the authorities found them, the rats had been at work, hollowing out their eye sockets and stripping flesh from bone. Even in death, even hundreds of miles from Nebraska, Arlette's subjects had found them.

Chapter 6: The Reckoning: A Father's Harvest of Guilt and Madness

Sheriff Jones brought word of Henry's death on a cold December morning, finding Wilfred half-dead from infection and fever-mad with guilt. The old lawman helped bury the boy who'd once been the pride of Hemingford County, though few mourners came to see Henry James laid to rest on Christmas Eve. Most believed the banker's son had been corrupted by circumstances, led astray by a pregnant girlfriend and desperate times. If only they'd known the truth. If only they'd understood that the real corruption had begun the night a father looked at his son and saw a co-conspirator instead of a child in need of protection. Wilfred tried to drink himself to death after the funeral, but even that small mercy was denied him. The rats followed him to Omaha, appearing in his factory job, his library position, anywhere he tried to rebuild something resembling a normal life. The farm was lost, of course, sold to the Farrington Company at a fraction of its worth. The hog slaughterhouse rose where corn had once grown, and Hemingford Creek ran red with blood and offal just as Wilfred had always feared. But the greater crime wasn't what the corporation did to the land; it was what Wilfred had done to his family. He'd murdered his wife for dirt and dollars, corrupted his son for the sake of acreage, and destroyed three generations of honest farming folk for nothing more substantial than stubborn pride. The rats knew the truth, and they never let him forget it. They whispered it in the walls of every building he entered, scurried across every page he tried to read, reminded him daily that some debts can only be paid in blood.

Chapter 7: The Hotel Room Confession: Wilfred's Final Hours

In the spring of 1930, Wilfred James rented a room at the Magnolia Hotel in Omaha and began writing his confession. The rats had found him there too, lining the baseboards like a jury waiting to render their verdict. They were bigger now than they had any right to be, fat on eight years of guilt and madness, their black eyes reflecting knowledge that only the dead should possess. The confession poured out of him like poison from a lanced wound. Every detail of that summer night in 1922, every lie told to Sheriff Jones, every moment of watching his son transform from innocent farm boy to bank robber to corpse. He wrote until his fingers cramped and his eyes burned, racing against the rats that crept closer with each page. On the final night, they came for him. Not just the rats, but Arlette herself, shuffling down the hotel corridor with Henry and Shannon beside her, their faces ruined by time and teeth, their clothes hanging in tatters. They'd come to collect the debt he'd been accumulating for eight long years, the interest compounded by every night of restless sleep and every dawn that brought fresh memories of what he'd done. Wilfred reached for the pistol he'd bought in the same Omaha pawnshop where Henry had purchased his gun, but his hands were covered with rats now, tearing at his flesh with needle teeth. In his final moments, he understood that this was Arlette's true revenge: not death, but the knowledge that every person he'd ever loved had died because of his choices, his pride, his inability to accept that some things matter more than land. The hotel security guard found him days later, bitten to death in a room with no rats, clutching the shredded remains of his confession. The official cause of death was suicide by self-mutilation, the ravings of a madman who'd lost his grip on reality. But scattered among the torn paper were fragments of a story too terrible for any sane person to believe.

Summary

Wilfred James won his battle for the hundred acres and lost everything that made victory worth having. His wife died with his knife at her throat, his son died with a gun in his hand, and the land he'd killed for became exactly what Arlette had warned it would: a festering wound on the Nebraska prairie, poisoning everything downstream with the stench of industrial slaughter. The rats that served as judges in his final hours understood what the human world refused to acknowledge: that some crimes echo through generations, that blood spilled on farmland seeps into the groundwater and poisons every well. Wilfred's confession, scattered and mostly illegible when authorities found it, stands as testimony to the price of putting property above people, of choosing dirt over love. In the end, his greatest punishment wasn't death but memory—the certain knowledge that everything he'd done to preserve his way of life had guaranteed its destruction, and that the land he'd died for would remember his betrayal long after the last rat had gnawed the last truth from his bones.

About Author

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Stephen King

King interrogates the boundaries between the supernatural and the ordinary, using his writing to delve into the dark recesses of human nature. His early life experiences in Maine, marked by familial challenges and economic instability, deeply influenced his narrative style and thematic focus. These experiences led him to explore themes of isolation and fear in works like "Carrie" and "The Shining". His storytelling often revolves around small-town settings infused with supernatural elements, where the horror of the unknown mirrors the inner turmoil of his characters.\n\nStephen King's career, notably marked by his ability to blend horror with elements of suspense and psychological depth, has made a profound impact on literature and popular culture. While his breakthrough book, "Carrie", allowed him to transition from teaching to full-time writing, his subsequent works, such as "Salem's Lot" and "The Dead Zone", further cemented his status as a master of modern horror. Beyond his books, King’s contribution to literature has been recognized through numerous awards, highlighting his influence in transforming horror into a respected literary genre. \n\nFor readers and aspiring writers, King's bio serves as a testament to the power of perseverance and the importance of grounding fantastical narratives in relatable human experiences. His work not only entertains but also offers a lens through which to examine societal fears and personal anxieties. The author’s profound impact on horror and beyond demonstrates the enduring relevance of his storytelling methods, which continue to inspire and captivate audiences worldwide.

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