THE WEIGHT OF GLASS
A Novel
by
Stuart Heatherington
Smashwords Edition
Published by:
Stuart Heatherington
Copyright 2010 by Stuart Heatherington
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
*****
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been possible without the unending support of so many people. I’d like to especially offer my thanks to Gina, my wife and greatest advocate, who without her trust and tolerance, this may never have been completed. This book is dedicated to you most of all.
Also, I want to say thank you to my children, Elijah and Ethan, whose time was stolen at points during two summers, when I felt I could not leave behind the characters on the screen of my computer. I owe you beyond words all of my love.
To Mom and Dad, much can be said, but your belief in me offered a strength that made the road much easier to walk.
Finally, to the supporting cast of readers, who I asked to stumble across my words more than once, thank you. Lynn Schachte, you are the bomb, Dawn Knuth and Knicole Allen, I am grateful for your gentle feedback. And to those of you in The Preserve BookClub, I appreciate all of your help in guiding me through this process.
*****
Ring the bells that still can ring
forget the perfect offering.
There’s a crack in everything
that’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen, Anthem
*****
Excerpt: A Life Less Wasted
By Amy Macon
Prologue
My childhood died at the end of a lonely hallway. It was not in some pile of bones that it passed on, but rather a moment of silence as I locked onto the brass knob of our stepfather’s door. I remembered standing in his room, gauging the mood of the darkness, how it swallowed everything down to the floorboards. How it fed on the fear and the faint sounds of him sleeping. And as I moved to the end of his bed, fingers circling the small Mason jar in my hands, I could no longer feel the sharp corners of sadness in my heart. They were gone. And with the first twist of its lid, I knew our stepfather would never rape us again.
I recalled that entire event during the spring of 2008 for my therapist. Amid tears, we both admitted it was a breakthrough moment for me. After all, I’ve died in that hallway a thousand times over the years. But before I left, she encouraged me to do more, to keep a journal of memories and dreams from that time in my life. And having left her office and crossed through downtown Manhattan, I took her advice and purchased a diary. Later on, sitting outside, I cracked open the empty cover, took out a felt-tip pen and stared at the blank white pages. It would come easier than I imagined.
I let my fingers drift into the left hand corner. But the first thing that came to mind was not that hallway from my childhood, but a picture. A spider actually. I drew it neatly along the margin. Its eyes, exposed with ink, crawled over me; black legs, like oily creases, unfolded on the page. I thought of my youngest sister. About what I told her when I fixed our stepfather. No, honey. He’ll never visit you again. But I realized then how completely wrong I was to say such a thing. Unlike real doorways, dreams are never barred, at least the ones he still comes to see me in.
*****
1
My dead sister lay on the seat next to me, a pool of ashes shifting in a brushed nickel container. Beneath the memory of a little girl I never really knew, sat a disfigured map of the road; it swallowed her like some ancient bed of bones in the rain marbled shadows. In ways I could not understand, her death flickered and carried with it a light, the wick and the flame, some dying candle perched on the seal of a forgotten window. And every now and then, I found it hard not to see myself. Sometimes there’s no more painful company than your own reflection.
I wish I knew what to say to you. But the words, as much as the past, were elusive things blowing through my head. They scared me. The way they drifted in and out, that fall of leaves on the forest floor of our previous life. To tread there, scattered among those secrets, all those dead whispers a breathing current under foot, was a path overshadowed by pain. I should know. My God, I’ve been walking around it for as long as I can remember.
More than thirty years had been spent without a shared moment between us. Because of that, I missed her more than ever. And the past three months became a tumor the way her passing left a terrible burden inside my chest. Sometimes I wished to hear her voice. Maybe that’d make it all go away. Or maybe not.
The empty stretch of pavement merged into a bridge up ahead. As a faint mist of fog ate away the corners of the windows, rivulets of gray backwash filmed the side view mirror. In the watery reflection of night, the road swam with life.
Off in the distance a strand of lights bordered the salt marsh guarded edges of Fripp Island, South Carolina. They were torch bearing sentries along a castle wall. And I steered into the path of the island’s bridge, leery of our separation, the way a reconciled father returns home unsettled by the fear of change he will face. Coming back made it harder to breathe.
A phone lit the edge of the seat. I fingered the display over. The fourth call in an hour. It vibrated twice before I did anything with it.
“About time you answered,” Amy lectured me.
“Actually, I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’m expecting another message from you any—
“Oh, sue me.”
I pictured my sister’s face, the supple twist of complexity in her lips I sometimes confused for a grin. “Why couldn’t you just let us get there first? Huh?”
“What? I was worried about the weather, Mister-I-said-I-would-call.”
I refrained from chucking the phone out the window. “Give me a break, would you? I’m not five.”
“Doesn’t mean you don’t act like it,” Nicole Fields blabbered.
My eyes strained through the next turn. “Do you have me on speaker?” Amy’s other half had a habit of dragging the ones she loved around by the neck in a conversation. Mine in particular. “I could’ve sworn I just heard Satan’s little helper.”
“Hello, assbag. And I meant that affectionately.” Nicole’s accent was a postcard for upstate New York, a sort of Holier-than-thou arrogance stamped all over it.
I held the phone out from my face and smiled. “Ahhh, the devil’s bitch. What are you up to? Pulling the wings off flies again?”
“No. Didn’t see the reason in killing off your entourage. Even piles of shit need their friends,” she replied. There was an art to her playfulness.
I laughed. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
“Well then you should call more often.”
“Technically, hell still hasn’t frozen over. And that was part of my agreement with your boss. By the way, how is Satan?”
“For God sake, that’s enough,” my sister interrupted. “I can’t tell when you’re playing and when you’re not.”
I squinted up one street and down the other, unsure of which way to go. “Just tell Cruella they’re having a sale on spotted dogs at the shelter.”
“Now you’re just being an asshole.” Amy said. “I said to stop. She’s not even on the phone anymore.”
I brushed off the comment. “I’m not that bad.”
“Oh, yes you are. Let’s not kid each other. You should open up phone calls with an apology and get it off your chest.”
The sound of my own laughter startled me. “Why would I do that?”
“I’m being serious, because you really are an asshole sometimes,” she explained. I imagined her sitting on her bed in that exposed metal and brick Manhattan loft she called a home, with legs crossed, and smoking a cigarette. “And actually you can practice with me. Say I’m sorry, Amy, my dear sweet, loving sister, whom I adore and wish nothing but the best for—I’m an asshole. The words should come second nature to you.”
“That’s it?”
She hesitated. “That’s it.”
“All right, but just for you.” I caved to my sister’s demands. “I’m sorry. I’m an asshole and you’re the greatest living lesbian on the planet.”
“If I thought you had a nicer bone in your body I’d make you do it again.”
“Thanks.”
“See, that wasn’t so hard.” There was a note of satisfaction, as if Amy had managed one side of a Rubik’s Cube. “So where are you?”
I turned up the road in what I thought was the direction of the beach. “I’m here. But it’s not the same anymore.”
“What’s not the same?”
“Fripp,” I said, taking note of the way the landscape had changed. Clusters of new houses occupied the roads.
“Are you lost?”
My neck tightened. She had a way of reading minds. “Only a little bit.”
The phone crackled, and I switched ears as if that might help.
“Is Darla with you?” she asked.
The sound of our sister’s name rang like bells for the dead. A loud uncomfortable noise intensified by the wish I could remember more. It brought back the time of holding hands on the beach when she was still small enough to be washed over by the waves. That as children, I taught her to skip shells in the surf, or instructed her in the fine art of building sand castles on the graceful beaches of Fripp Island’s shores. Through it all, my habit of forgetting grew out of a restless childhood like oaks without roots; the tree line of my mind lay toppled in deadfalls. “Shouldn’t have to do this twice.”
Amy’s voice softened. “We made a promise, didn’t we?”
Like a rotting socket, her words throbbed at the ear, an abscessed tooth full of decay. It hurt to think about. “Jesus, you had to bring that up, didn’t you?”
“How often does someone die twice in a life? Besides, what were you going to do mail her back return to sender?”
I didn’t have answers to either of those.
“It’s our sister,” she whispered. “Spreading her ashes is the reason we’re coming down.”
I bit my lip when it finally hit me. I hadn’t seen the beach house in more than a decade, and something about that made my heart swell like rotting wood, heavy and soaked in the loss of time.
“Lee, I’m really glad we’re coming down. This is a good thing. It’s closure for us. You know that right?”
“Yeah. No, I am, too.”
“Don’t lie to me. You’re never happy anymore.”
I sighed. “I’m trying to change. I really am.”
“You say that like you mean it. By the way, where are you with the book? You were supposed to let me know a week ago.”
My neck drifted back onto the headrest and I closed my eyes.
“Lee?”
Listening to her on the phone I glanced across the seat at the manuscript flipped open on the passenger floor. Amy’s memoir. An unjustified margin of black teeth stared up from the past. Her words filled its white space and left that place in my throat, which plummets in the wake of cold panic, unsettled and nervous. The night it arrived I managed the first 30 pages and it shook something wicked out of the cracks of me.
“You have to read it,” Amy said. “You promised me.”
“That’s before you told me what it’s about.”
“Would it matter if I did?”
My head was shaking back and forth before I even answered. “Probably not.”
“Then it’s time to talk about it,” she said.
“You see. That’s where you and I differ. I’d rather forget our childhood. Just act like it never happened. Make up a fantastical new family and insert ourselves in the middle of their mundane world.”
“Don’t do this,” she said. “You know I love you. You know that, right?”
Her words touched at the fabric holding me together and, as hard as it was to explain, it threatened to tear me apart. “I can’t do this right now.”
“This what?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Okay. But we’re talking about it tomorrow.”
“We’ll see.”
“Oh, there’s not going to be any seeing about it,” she snapped, and the call dropped dead.
“Nice talking to you, too,” I muttered, powering off the phone.
When I looked up two deer stepped out of the woods, their piercing red eyes a dark reflection in the lights. Oh, shit! I worked the brakes hard, chest catching under the seatbelt, teeth locking into place. Darla’s ashes slid off the map into the glove box with a metallic thud. The tail of the car veered to a stop on the wet pavement, and I heard the urn spin across the floorboard, the sound of running steel in a pinball machine.
Turning my attention out the window, two doe stood close enough for me to touch. Their large eyes pressed into mine with a tremor of uncertainty. Then we both turned to leave, them into the woods and me to an empty house down the street surrounded by a shifting grave of dunes.
Houses with complex southern smiles hovered on brick legs above the strategic lighting marking their faces. Amazed by the growth, my jaw hung open at the multimillion-dollar homes blanketing the street where once there were none. Windows sat black and empty, soulless things gobbling up the night. Most of them, for sure, probably only used two or three months out of the year.
Up ahead, drifting into view, were the familiar outlines of a one story home on cinderblock stilts. The one we called Rabbit’s Hole as children. I stopped the SUV and, with eyes closed, worked the windows to their seals. Sounds of the ocean rushed inside on a crest of wind, bringing with it the flavors of a Carolina coastal island. The last of the evening storm bathed my ears with the familiar roar of waves. And for an instant I could taste raw oysters in my mouth, the pungently fragrant nectar I grew to love as a boy.
I opened my eyes again, overwhelmed by the familiar A-framed shape of Rabbit’s Hole. Its simplicity of design resonated with my dead grandfather. As a soft spoken architect in Atlanta, he still touched me through the openness of his vision. It spread through the endless stacks of windows cresting the beachside view, squares and rectangles of glass, softly shaped ovals, those never ending transoms that watched over the summers of our youth.
As it were the beach had eroded with passing hurricanes and even swallowed certain dunes almost whole. Distant bands of white gave chase to the moon through broken clouds. Pale irises washed over the face of the beach in long mirrored images.
I wasn’t a child anymore, but a father myself, and for reasons of my own, both explainable and not, I’d missed more than a decade of stirring the architecture of its sands. When I stepped out the door I already held my shirt in hand. The deeper, more hidden elements of the island whispered in sounds and touch. They formed in the delicate exchange of salt spray and skin, of the backwash of waves, or in the complexity of sand. And because no age limit came with those secrets, I pleaded to share in their charms, to open up and listen, to allow it to take me by the hand.
Deep, penetrating laughs struck away at the darker layers of me as I hit the surf. Cold water pounded my skin and swallowed the sand at my feet, beckoning me out to deeper water. Majestic waves rocked the surface of the ocean. I dove into them, surfacing for air as I stretched out the distance between myself and land. At the point I could no longer stand I laid back and closed my eyes; let pulling currents stir at the restless spirit of the boy forgotten inside me. I’m here. I’ve come back.
The taste of salt filled my mouth and nose. Its intoxicating perfume a seductive draw and I let it take advantage of me long enough that the stars shed their cover and reclaimed their rightful throne in the night.
“If I said I didn’t miss you, I’d be lying.” Part of me meant it, and the resounding clarity of that brought with it surprise. I hadn’t expected to feel any remorse with the place.
I threw on my boxers and bundled up the rest of my clothes, tossed them on the passenger seat and drove up to the house.
Up top, above the dunes, sand, and ocean, stood the most breathtaking view. From there the moon washed in on waves of reckless blue electric slides. Far out in deeper waters sat a tanker, portside lights along its bridge aglow on the horizon like bright shimmering diamonds.
In the dark of the porch I unsnapped my keys from the door. Water still dripped from my hair as I sat my bags down. I found a towel above the laundry and dried off in the living room. The dark and the quite of the house fed me its history in shapeless words, enough to whet the appetite of memory.
When I finally turned on a light it illuminated the outside kitchen wall facing the foyer. Picture frames hung everywhere: brown and red ones mixed with a few too many black to count, the occasional silver, even some without frames made it with the help of tack and tape. A collage of young and old faces filled their eccentric borders, and left me speechless.
I drifted over them without thinking. Some appeared new, ones left behind by longtime vacationing families, a few of which I recognized. But something drew my eye to a larger black and white. Older than the others, the age of the small boy in it could be no more than five or six. His handsome smile basked familiar with love, a love so deep it still navigated the rivers of my heart. Around his shoulders sat the weight of a father’s arm. Looking at it wasn’t fair. I desperately wanted to remember that time, but I couldn’t; the picture remained a secret from me. I knew it had been taken here. Shot somewhere on the beach maybe.
My fingers touched the glass. The shear action of it reconnected with the past. I let it stay too long. Long enough to understand I still missed Dad.
Later on, I envisioned him sitting across the room, working on a score of music, the way he did when I was little. I nodded in his direction, but he never looked up. Amy’s memoir sat on the table between us like a conversation piece. Our family turned out to be a wreck, you know that, right? I picked up a bottle of Jack Daniels from the counter, found a glass, and walked over to the couch. Sitting down in front of him, I closed my eyes. Dad was welcome to stay. But the dreams due to come with sleep, I didn’t care to remember. Most of them never knew when to leave. Others needed to be erased.
*****
2
Excerpt: A Life Less Wasted
Memories of rape still bar the door at the end of my childhood. When I close my eyes, it’s the lingering smell of a stepfather’s lust that reminds me of the scars he left behind. Those things, which are not easily forgotten, are shaped in the darkness. They rise out of the fields of the mind, where the seeds of things are best left buried. Maybe that’s why at the age of 54 I still sleep with the lights on. I fear what grows there.
Even now I dream of the spiders almost every night, dark ashen things without color or pretence to them. They sidle up to me in faithful whispers, their black eyes hidden by the secrets of sin. I watch the fiddles behind their heads speak in the music of death and I know I should fear them, but I don’t. They visit in the night like storytellers come to turn the page. Once upon a time the spiders say…
There was a man. But God knows he’s always been more monster than man. He raised my brothers and sister and carried us through the world for a time, but he knew how to put us down in it just as easy. Broken things and broken children. He could have killed more than my spirit if he chose to. Probably would if he knew the things I’d done. Yet there would’ve been nobody to blame but himself.
Some part of me likes to think it never happened, all of the heartache of my childhood. I don’t go out of the way to look for it any longer. I don’t have to. There are the constant reminders, the parting reflections in the sea of glass and mirrors carved out of life. Beyond that I moved on in someway. I learned two things about the time that happiness left and the dreams began. I believed if I closed my eyes I could forget the past and that somewhere along the way the little girl in the mirror would go away—but then I’ve always been the recipient of my greatest lies.
******
Dark clouds roared through the sky the afternoon I saw my oldest brother beaten for the first time. I carried that secret, and many others, with me for a lifetime. It was as if the movement of the wind and trees themselves brought about Mr. Warren Tucker’s rage. And I grew to fear the subtle nuance of his smile. A man of God, his temper hid underneath a collar of starch and impeccable speech.
Two years following the death of our father in 1967, Olivia Macon chose to remarry. As her children, we witnessed the courtship of a grief stricken woman to a Baptist minister of a small church in Atlanta, Georgia. It was safe to say we never understood the attraction in her pick as a suitor. Right away there existed an uneasiness about him, which placed us on high alert. I can only assume the heartache of our father’s death blinded her to the direction she took her family.
My oldest brother, Lee, voiced his displeasure more than any of us. It may have been that he sensed the inevitable. Or he simply understood the subtle polarity between truth and deception. Whatever the reason, he never fully shared it. Instead, out of the sacrificing gesture of a loving brother, he acted as a barrier for what would become Warren Tucker’s hatred of his stepchildren. It was a burden he carried upon his shoulders until the time he left for college.
“You will not do this to me.” Olivia Macon’s eyes blazed as she caught Lee’s arm and pulled him into the hall with a jerk. Never had I seen my brother so defiant.
“Mom you don’t understand.”
“There will be no place in this house for your tone of voice,” she fussed at him behind the door and I heard him begging her no.
Through my tears I studied Mr. Tucker from across the room. Shadows swept over the long wooden drape of his jaw. And he reminded me of an unforgiving king, all bones and nobility.
“So that’s it?” I asked. “You’re just going to move us?”
“I’m afraid there’s no other way,” he said, his lips coiling back from his teeth. My breast absorbed the finality of his answer as though a thin target sheet, the sound of his voice a killing stone.
I found it hard to maintain the steady influence of his eyes. The seams of the rug drew me to a chair and I fell back in dismay. Knots of wet tissue wrestled inside my hands. Tears slipped down my throat and I wiped them away. Our mother had ruined our lives with one fateful word. Yes.
“Amy,” Mr. Tucker said. “God came to me when I knelt in prayer last night, asking for His guidance and direction. He told me you must look at this with open eyes and a clear mind. God has wonderful things in store for this family.”
I lifted my head. “Why would He do this?”
“It is not for you to question God. When Moses led his people into the wilderness, he did not ask where and for how long. He asked that the Lord take him where He needed.”
Lee came back into the room, Mother pulling at his arm again. “What about our friends in school?”
“You’ll make new friends.” Mr. Tucker cut his eyes at my brother and I swore an oily fire raged behind them. I did not want those things on me.
“I don’t want any new friends,” Lee said. “I want the ones we have. Why do we have to move to Alabama?”
“Because someone retired there,” Mother repeated for the third time. “And Warren is taking on the position of their new pastor.”
I hate you, I thought. I hate you right now so much I could rip a fistful of your hair out. I kept shaking my head. It was as if her words had no meaning to me. “Mother, what have you done us? Did we do something wrong?”
“I’m afraid the decision has been made. But I’m sure that you will be equally happy in Alabama.” Mr. Tucker stood up and came to my side. I slid across the couch away from his touch. Then he folded his hands in his lap and looked at me. “It’s truly for the best.”
“What’s for the best?” Lee argued. “You’re not part of this family. You don’t know anything about us.” He looked at mom then. “How will we be able to visit Dad’s grave? We have family here. We shouldn’t have to go just because he has to take a job.”
Mother walked over to the window. She was crying with her arms across her chest and I heard her say, “We can always come back.”
Lee rushed to her side, hands tugging at her arm. “No, we won’t. That’s a lie and you know it.”
Mr. Tucker moved to the edge of the couch and for a split second his eyes turned into cold and bottomless things in waiting. Intense constrictions rolled up his neck while he watched my brother. I recoiled into the couch. Chills fought over the skin on my arms. He possessed the movements of a snake and I half expected him to engorge himself on the meat of my brother’s legs. That long jawbone of his unbuckled as if to speak, eyes clearly unfocused, and I envisioned him accommodating Lee’s torso and chest in some crazy attempt to eat him.
“Lee, lets you and I take a walk,” Mr. Tucker said, going to my mother’s side. “You won’t mind will you, Olivia? It will give us a chance to work out our differences.”
“Mom, I don’t want to go outside with him.”
“Oh, but we have so much to talk about.”
Mr. Tucker swept his arm around my brother’s shoulder. Lee’s eyes shifted to find me as they were turning away. The desperation of his face haunted me in the weakening bones around my heart. And at the same time I felt guilty over the relief that spread through me. My body trembled at the thought of being alone with him and I couldn’t explain why.
“Be good.” Mother looked around as they turned to the door. “Open your heart and listen to him, Lee. That’s all I ask.”
“He will, Olivia. I promise,” Mr. Tucker said, his hand gripping Lee’s wrist with the intensity of pliers and half dragging him away.
When they were gone, I stood from the couch and pleaded with our mother. “Don’t you love us?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then how could you do this?”
She pointed for me to leave the room. “Go look after Paul and Darla.”
Why? I shook my head, thinking of my little brother and sister. “They’re fine in their room.”
“No,” she said, wiping at her face and leaving her hand there, “I’m sure they’re not. Now leave me alone.”
I turned and, scooping my hands into my dress, ran through the foyer into the kitchen and up the stairs to my room. Across from the bed, a bank of windows blew in a hot breeze. I sat down on the floor in front of them, dress crumpling around my legs as I cried into its hem. The ability to breathe seemed completely foreign to me; my chest shuddered as if in fits of spasms.
That’s when I heard them at the back of the house. I glanced up, hands drying my face. Sounds of their voices rose to the window beside me.
“Stop it! Let me go.” I heard Lee’s fright hanging below the sill.
Easing up on my knees, I hid against the molding and glanced down into the backyard. My nails dug against the wall in worry. I wanted to reach out for him. To help. But I kept still out of my own fear.
The sky grew dark over the trees. Warren straightened his vest. Crisp starch held his sleeves and collar at attention. Sweat already formed on his brow, marking the material of his shirt with speckles of gray. He removed a pocket watch from a small flap, snapped open its lid and gazed heavily upon its face. Then he peered up at the storm clouds, his eyes a cold rage of veins.
I didn’t realize it then but half my childhood would be spent studying the ice fields of his face and, becoming proficient in their recognition, constantly navigating a course across the thin fractures of hate that lay hidden so well there.
“Lee, Lee, Lee,” he said. And I heard the contempt even as he looked down, the bitter shape of his words sharp as a knife.
“Yes, sir,” Lee stuttered.
Mr. Tucker replaced his timepiece. “I want you to be nice to me, Lee.”
“I don’t understand?”
“You’ll want to be nice to me.”
I saw my brother looking down the side of the house. And from where I sat I couldn’t tell if he was looking for help or looking to run.
“I’m not sure I follow you, sir.”
“Sir? Don’t make me laugh with your attempt at respect.”
Lee took a step back. “I’m sorry if—”
“Are you afflicted?” He jabbed him in the side of the head with a hard finger and Lee twisted over his face. “Do you have a problem listening?”
I could see Lee shaking his head as Mr. Tucker turned him against the wall of the house with his gaze. “I just don’t follow the direction of the conversation is all.”
“Then let me be clear. You’ll want to learn to watch your mouth with me. I’m the good shepherd, boy. Do you understand that?”
Lee said nothing. And I heard myself pray, say yes sir, Lee, over and over in my head.
“Yes sir,” Lee finally admitted and I remembered to breathe.
“That’s right,” Mr. Tucker said, and his hand gripped Lee by the throat and mashed him hard to the wall, “you will be nice to me if it kills you. Time and patience has taught me how to deal with your illness, boy. And it is an illness. One passed down by Satan himself I suppose. And if I have to I’ll beat you with a hickory stick until the skin rolls off your back. Do we have an understanding?”
The emotions of my face ran to the edge of my lips and hung in a quiver. Oh, my God, I thought. My arm shot over my mouth. I wanted to scream.
Then Mr. Tucker stood back. A kitten from the new litter that lived under our house rambled out of the bushes and swirled around his leg. He bent down and gripped it by the back of its neck with his fingers. The fingers of his free hand nestled it under his neck. “What’s the matter, you at a loss for words?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, let me tell you something then,” Mr. Tucker said, almost eager to explain. “She won’t believe you. That is what you’re thinking isn’t it? You’ll just go running into your mama and excite her with your stories. But it won’t work. And do you know why?”
Lee nodded his head slowly.
“I want you to focus, boy. Focus and tell me the lesson.”
I couldn’t see my brother’s face, but I could hear him crying. And the sound of it made my bladder weak. I shook as I pinched my legs to make it go away.
“Because I’m too young,” he said.
“That’s right. And as your father I’m going to be watching over you like the good and faithful shepherd over his flock. Jeremiah 3:14 through 3:15 says, ‘Return, O faithless sons…for I am a master to you, and I will take you one from a city and two from a family, and I will bring you to Zion. Then I will give you shepherds after My own heart, who will feed you on knowledge and understanding.’”
“What does that mean?”
“It means your father was a useless man. The reason he died was because he couldn’t control his family. He was weak in his heart. Like you. But I’ll fix that,” Mr. Tucker said. “I will set right the flock again.”
What was he talking about? He didn’t know our Dad.
“You shouldn’t say such things,” Lee managed.
“Your daddy was a thorn and the Lord took him for it.”
With those words my fists clenched tight and I could hardly see straight.
“You’re a liar,” Lee yelled at him. “You didn’t know him.”
Mr. Tucker pushed close, nearly on top of him. “I’m the Good Shepherd. I know everything.”
“I don’t care what you know. Don’t talk about my Dad like that.”
“Your father is rotting in hell.”
“That’s not true.”
“Wrong!” He grabbed Lee by the scruff of his shirt and threw him to the ground. “Stay there.”
But Lee wouldn’t. He pushed his back against the house and managed his feet. “I don’t believe you.”
“There is but one truth. They say, come, take of my fields and be full that you will know the way of the Lord.”
“Preachers don’t talk like you.”
“But they’re false prophets. I am the word, I am the way.”
“No you’re not,” my brother answered.
And Mr. Tucker slapped him across the face so hard his head spun perfectly to the ground. My mouth dropped open and I had to keep from screaming. I dropped down behind the sill and pressed my head back in disgust. Tears poured off my face. I stared at my shaking hands and I couldn’t control them.
The sound of Mr. Tucker’s voice filled my ears. “I will love you, Lee. And in that you will know the truth. The first book of John says, ‘There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is perfected in love.’ I will spill your blood to have you believe. Be nice to me, Lee. Be nice to me.”
There was a moment of silence then. And I prayed that it was over.
“Now wipe your mouth and get on your feet.”
“What so you can hit me again?”
“No,” He said. “You need to take care of your cat.”
My eyes sprung open in terror. I slid around on my knees and leaned up once more. Looking down, I saw the motionless Tabby. Blood streamed from its mouth. Mr. Tucker’s foot nudged the orange body and lifted it through the grass until it lay still beside Lee.
My brother looked at it and made an effort to get to his feet. His hand went out to the brick to steady himself. Then he buckled over and his stomach gushed onto the ground. Mr. Tucker held him by one arm. And with a rough dusting, he knocked the grass from his clothes and extended a handkerchief. Lee tried to move away but Mr. Tucker jerked his head back, locking one hand on his shoulder and wrapping the other in his hair.
“Hold still. We need to clean your chin off.” He worked on Lee’s face with spit and a rough hand. “If you ever play that kind of game with me again, you’ll be wiping up more than just the blood falling from your wounds, but maybe your teeth as well. And as for the cat. There are worse things than that.” He patted the wall of the house. “I can promise you.”
I fell over from the window onto my back as if the sheer force of his hand had knocked me backward. Scrambling under my dress, my feet pushed at the floor until the familiar wood of my bed slammed me forward. I bit the thick of my lip so hard it left a mark for days.
Sitting there crying for my brother, I realized Reverend Warren Tucker was a man not to be crossed. His promise sent waves of fear circling the pit of my stomach. More than that, he scared me in ways I didn’t fully understand. When I closed my eyes, I thought of his horrible teeth. Those long curved things belonged to something in a dream.
*****
3
I jerked my eyes open, a 12 year stranger to the walls around me. Short breaths sputtered against my lips, and my eyes cast about in the gloom. My bearings were all over the place, heart hammering like a pickaxe in my chest. I singled out the corners of the ceiling and felt them gradually moving down. And against the seams of the room it swallowed whole corners, walls closing in tighter around my eyes until I couldn’t take the pressure of it anymore. When I finally sat up and swung my legs out from the covers, sweat was pouring off me. Reaching back, I gripped the damp pillow where my head rested, now cold and clammy to the touch, and slung it out on the floor. At that point I realized my hands were shaking so bad I could barely keep them still.
The tight stitch of my erection told me the length of the dream lasted longer than my memory of it. I used my hand to push it back into my underwear and reached over to the night table. A bottle of Jack Daniels sat under the lamp. Half of it wasted earlier on the porch. I twisted the cap free and brought it to my lips. Like usual, it burned for only a second.
Pain shot through my knee as I stood up, the surge of alcohol spreading through my stomach again, warm and familiar. Stepping across the room, I slid the glass door to the side and stumbled for the rail on the deck. In the distance the sound of waves emerged out of the dark in murmurs and finished as the grumblings of some old man. I pulled myself free from my boxers and, no longer fully erect, relieved myself off the deck railing.
Back inside I trekked to the kitchen and found an apple in one of the bags by the cooler. I took a huge bite, resting it on the counter, and stared over at the living room. Amy’s manuscript lay on top of the coffee table, its pages fraying at the corners where I’d read through it last night. I wished I had forgotten it in the car.
What did you read it for dumbass? Nobody put a gun to your head. A row of black teeth spiraled across its spine in a clapboard sided grin that spoke of brutal secrets. It offered a refresher course on the ugly side of growing up. And I couldn’t stand the reminders. I should have left it alone, because if the first 30 pages scared the shit out of me, the rest had fed my nightmares. Maybe that explained my sister’s reminder in the dream. Like a solvent, stripping my ears clean, her words repeated themselves over and over. He raped me, Lee. And I let him. Did you see it? Did you even know?
“I wasn’t there goddamnit.” I heard my apple roll off the counter onto the floor behind me, as I ran across the room and side armed the damn manuscript against the door. The cover flew open and the binding cracked back as it slammed into the glass. A clatter of pages poured out of its broken smirk. Standing there, I watched as the guts of the thing spread in a layer of white on the floor. My shoulders dropped with contempt. Fuck you.
I spun around toward the kitchen and grabbed the trashcan. On hands and knees, I fought with the mess. Damage control waited in the carport and I couldn’t settle the score fast enough. At the bottom of the stairs, I threw open the grill lid and turned out the book on the charred grate. For a second I stood back and observed the wreck of pages in disgust. Then I flipped the gas knobs to high and closed the top. The smell of gas leaked out of the sides of the grill and hit my nose as I pushed the igniter. Flames leapt from under the base in a loud whump. I stepped back as crackles of ash spilled out of what holes it could find and my eyes turned to slits over the searing vapor.
I took a seat on the steps and listened to the tune of the fire. For a minute the sound was hollow and distant in my ears. And like rocks dropped into a well, it played altogether different from the songs in my memory.
******
In late July of 1991, the sun slowed its march to the west, leaving the pinks and richly felt amber colors I loved as a boy, masking the first stars of nightfall. Amy and I walked barefoot in the warm surf of Fripp, bellies exhausted on oysters and crab. The taste of the low country filled our heads. And by the second bottle of wine we were drunk.
We spent most of the week successfully avoiding our past. Like well paid plastic surgeons we fixed only the things on the surface. The ones which made us smile. Nothing else mattered. Our family began its slow, arduous demolition when we were younger, but certain events in our later life acted as the devices that tore us apart completely.
“You haven’t spoken to him still?”
I chuckled, shaking my head. “I’ve been tied up since he graduated last March.”
“Don’t be funny, Lee.”
“What’s funny is the fact that our worthless brother will call me once a week, begging for cigarettes and cash, when he’s hanging out in the joint. But stamp his parole papers and he forgets my number. Or maybe he’s busy running down through the want ads, circling out prospective employers and tweaking his resume.”
“Be serious.”
“Hell, I am. I swear on every single one of Paul’s employment chances.” I grinned. “And, no, not once since his parole. Our loyal and faithful brother is a moron.” I slung a shell out into the ocean. “We live in the same town, for Christ’s sake, and I wouldn’t care if he came begging at Thanksgiving, I wouldn’t give him the dark meat.”
“He wouldn’t eat it anyway.” Amy’s mouth curled up like a yoyo walking the dog.
I followed the movement of her hand as she swiped her hair back behind her ear and said, “How can one man have so much hate built up inside of him?”
“And you didn’t.”
“I had hate aplenty, sweetheart. I was a regular card carrying member of the IFHWTC.”
“IFHW…what?” Amy turned to face me with a smile.
“IFHWTC.” I spelled it out nice and slow. “The I Fucking Hate Warren Tucker Club. If I remember, I started the official campaign drive. Hell, I was its inaugural president.”
She laughed. “You were its only member.”
“My solemn duties to uphold the office kept me off the recruiting trail.” I pointed out with a grin. “Or else I would have sworn you in as my Joint Chief of Staff.”
“I would have been honored.” She bowed before me in the tide, still very much drunk.
I grabbed her arm when she nearly fell over saluting me.
“Well, it’s not too late,” I said. “Annual dues are practically nothing. We’re a society of cheap bureaucrats, founded on worthless principles.”
“Those are the best kind.”
“Okay, raise your right hand and repeat after me.” Amy raised her left hand, and I corrected her. “Your other right hand.”
“Oopsy.” She giggled and nearly fell over again in the surf swapping them out.
“I, Amy Macon.”
The wine reeked havoc on her words. “I, Amy Macon.”
“Do hereby accept all the duties imposed by the secret society of Warren haters.”
“You just make that up?”
“Say it.”
“Do hereby blah de dah dah…I do.”
“Welcome to the club.” I lifted her up out of the water and spun her around in drunken circles. Cold salt water soaked my pants and eventually I lost my balance, sending both us toppling over into waist high waves that drowned out our delight. As kids we made each other laugh at the drop of a button. Sometimes so hard we begged each other for a bridge to breathe.
She pulled her wet hair to the side and rung it out. “I propose as our first order of business that we change the name of the club.”
“Okay,” I said. “Our first session is called to order. I’ll recognize the distinguished lady with the wet ass.”
“Thank you for noticing. The floor nominates that the name of the club be changed in lieu of the events surrounding this evening.”
“The nomination is recognized. What would be the suggestion for the new club name?”
“WFHWTC, the We Fucking Hate Warren Tucker Club.” Amy clapped her hands like she was changing the world.
I looked around at the empty beach. “I guess I have to second that nomination. All in favor say I.”
Two I’s went up into the night, mixed under a thick spray of salt air.
“Amazing, it carried a unanimous vote, and not one official had to be bribed.”
When we dragged our wet bodies out of the ocean we laid up on the beach, night sky etched above our heads in a kaleidoscope of brilliant stars. I propped my knees up, hands behind the head, and licked the beading salt water from my lips.
I turned my head to stare at my sister who lay motionless on her back, arms folded loosely across her chest, brown hair slicked back onto her scalp and sprayed out across the sand in a thick fan of silver moonlight. “You know something? Paul’s what he is today because of that bastard.”
“It doesn’t give him permission to be a racist.”
She turned to me then, eyes softening in the thin light. “Do you hate him, Lee?”
A part of me did. “I hate certain things about him. When he marched through Bascomb with that goddamned sign partitioned to his chest like he was a living billboard for the mentally impaired assholes of America. I hated that.”
“You’re so crude.”
What the hell ever. “It’s the damned truth. I know there’s a part of him that doesn’t like me—has never liked me probably—but I mean, for Christ’s sake we’re brothers. Oh, wait, my mistake, that doesn’t mean shit to dear ol’ Pauly boy, keeper of all that’s stupid and mindless. What am I thinking?”
“You weren’t there the last few years like I was.”
“I was there enough to know I got the shit beat out me plenty. But I don’t run around setting crosses on fire in front of black folks’ homes or trot on down to the local Salvation Army, looking for white sheets that’ll knock ’em dead at the local Klan rally,” I said with a cluck of the tongue. “For the most part I’m normal.”
“Don’t push your luck.” Amy prodded me in the arm.
We climbed to our feet and turned back down the beach. Night clouds hung like a pale fog far out to sea. I breathed in the wonder of it. The sound of waves crashed around us, a cover of warm water over our feet. Amy’s hand entwined mine, and I glanced at her watching the darkened horizon. We looked nothing like sister and brother except for when we smiled. That singular trait, if it could even be called one, stood as the only thing capable of passing us off as children born of the same womb.
When we made it back to the beach house, I stripped down to my boxers and rinsed off my feet and legs from under the shower tap. Up on the porch the warm reflection of ocean cast itself like a net on the window panes. I stood before it and peered through my image and the image of the world behind me. I could see my daughter, Charlie, still asleep on the couch. She hadn’t moved from the time we left.
Yellow oak stretched across the center of the room, scratches swirling in its finish. Sand lived in the house no matter what we did. We always fought it with a broom, but it was the hardest battle to win. I felt its imprint underfoot from the kitchen on through to the laundry area, where I finished changing.
Two cold beers rested in my hand when I laid stake to the redwood chair on the porch. I passed one of the bottles to my sister. A cigarette ember crept from her face in a puzzle of orange shadows and knotted towel. I took a swig of beer and closed my eyes, not caring how drunk the night was leading up to. Tomorrow’s hangover was tomorrow’s hangover. I’d deal with it then.
But the sound of Amy crying stirred me out of the darkness. Earlier in the week I witnessed a similar episode, which she’d blown off for reasons that left me concerned.
“You okay?”
Her hand turned over, “I like to think I’m fine, but I really don’t get what that means anymore.”
For a long time I sat there stumbling over the right words to say, but they escaped me. “Is it work?”
“No,” she said. “That’s perhaps the only thing that keeps me sane.” Amy pulled at the cigarette, using the towel to wipe her face dry. “How’s Charlie doing?”
I cocked my eyes back at the door. “Asleep on the couch.”
“She’s a sweet girl. And loves her Daddy more than anything.”
I nodded. “I tried to give her a good home.”
“Anything was better than ours,” Amy said, crossing her arms over her chest and turning away.
The thought of her words clawed at the base of my neck. If they could have buried themselves in my head they would. I sat there uncomfortably numb, as flashes of faces reeled off in my head like some terrible camera blurring over into shades of gray. And a hush filled the porch for the longest time.
“How did we survive our childhood?” The weight of my tongue grew thick and heavy, even as the question spilled out.
She blew smoke out through the screen covering, which separated a small deck from the run of sand fifteen feet below. “Would you really call us survivors?”
“I’d call us ingenious rebels,” I lied to her knowing the truth.
“That might work for you, big brother. You lived in the woods as much as a boy possibly could. I know it was you who rode out to the church on his bike and let the air out of the Good Shepherd’s tires every other day. And I also suspect you got him fired. Lee, the great saboteur,” she said, as though I were a saint she prayed to.
I measured the distance to the ocean with my eyes. I wanted to be lost in them. “You’ve got me confused with the wrong kid.”
“See there…you and your secrets. You knew how to keep them. I’ll give you that. But I belong in the survivor category. And every morning I’m reminded in the mirror that nothing will change that,” Amy said, almost on the verge of tears again. “Even when I don’t think I can anymore, they’re always there.”
My mouth dried out like a rusty socket, as I watched her graceful shoulders sink a part. She stood up and walked to the railing and looked down below us. “See what, Amy?”
“Every time I open my eyes,” she hesitated, “they’re all over me.”
I sat forward. “All over what?”
“The little girl.” Her voice collapsed under the reckless crash of waves.
And something in her words scared the shit out of me. The way telling campfire stories about a desperate child lost in the woods still raised the flesh on my back. “What little girl?”
“The little girl in the mirrors,” she said, turning around, “the one that looks just like me. I see them covering her like a disease that never goes away. All the horrible bruises and blood coming out of her.”
She shook her hands violently, as if flinging something from her skin. The glass bottle between my legs hit the floor as I jerked forward out of my seat. I grabbed her arms, pinning her against me as I tried to settle her down.
For several minutes we rocked in each others embrace. Eventually she dug her arms into my chest and cradled her shoulders. It gave me the opportunity to hold on to her for dear life and that’s just what I did. With all the love and tenderness I could find. After several minutes she pulled away and sat down in the chair again.
She lit a fresh cigarette and stared at its tip, lost in the glow. “There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you this week and it’s not to get you upset. You’re the last person I want mad at me,” she said. “I don’t think I could handle that.”
“It’s okay. You can tell me.”
She glanced up then, eyes wide. “I almost killed myself,” she said, as though the words had come off a chalk board somewhere, and were not her own. “Came real close before coming down here.”
My mouth caved open in total surprise and I sat motionless, like someone snapped their fingers and bound me in place.
“Don’t look at me that way. My doctor gave me a script of Xanax—which is really good stuff I might add—and for about a week I went through the motions. Or whatever you want to call it.”
“Amy—”
“I’m not done,” she said, and placed her finger against my lips. “You should know I’ve had a lot of close calls, too. But this was the first time in a long while.”
I brought my hands up to my face and pressed them against my nose. Through the gap of my fingers I fixed on her. “How long has it been going on?”
“Long enough to know better. But I’m here. Sometimes that’s all you need, you know?”
I studied her face in the darkness, thinking back to what she said about the little girl in the mirror. At times I struggled to make sense of that, as depressing as it was. It seemed a moving wall of sand stood between me and the past. And I thought if I placed my hand on it hard enough it would bend, maybe break like a thing dying to spill out and shower me whole in its terrible secret. Trying to understand the fate of my sister caused a blaze of nausea to churn through my stomach. I tried to gather the countless ways she could come undone, and there were so many I believed it nearly impossible to imagine. Yet, I was certain it had to do with our stepfather.
“Lee,” she interrupted the dismal silence, “what was the worst thing you ever did?”
I put my eyes squarely into hers. “What you said earlier. That I got him fired.”
“Somehow, I don’t think you feel bad about that.”
“Sooner or later they would’ve got him caught sticking his pecker in one of them.”
Her head was shaking. “God I still remember the look on his face.”
Black grooves stretched the length of the porch like longitudinal lines across some planet. I traced their furrows into the cindery shadows. Anger crawled out of the darkness and surfaced with the stench of hate all over it. “He deserved a hell of a lot more.”
“A public crucifixion wasn’t enough?”
“Upside down would have been nice,” I added.
“You never asked for any help.” She winked at me then and I caught the blemish of a smile fading into the corner of her mouth.
“Did you always know it was me?” The whole time I’d been sure no one knew of my exploits into the ranks of revolutionary behavior. The last few years of high school I became a one-man army and the Good Shepherd, long by then my sworn enemy, the focus of all my resistance efforts.