Short Story Writing Contest Winner - June 2009
Monday, July 6th, 2009“In Absentia” by Vance H. White (darkeyes) was selected at the winner of the June 2009 Short Story Writing Contest.
Second place is “The Metamorphosis of Isabelle Ashley” by clairew and third place is “The Solstice Man” by thehighwar. Next time the winner could be you, see all of our contests.
Vance H. White is a published short story author and award-winning essayist residing along the sugar-white beaches and emerald waters of Northwest Florida’s Gulf Coast. Vance devotes time not spent writing, to co-chairing a critique group of talented local authors under the auspices of Emerald Coast Writers Inc–and pestering New York agents to publish his latest novel.
Vance has given us permission to publish his story as part of this announcement.
In Absentia
by Vance H. WhiteI don’t remember when I first became aware that other families didn’t live the way we did. It just crept up and ambushed me one day, an electric epiphany, flooding me with shame, instilling within a desperate desire to be someone else; anyone else. You see, my family had secrets. Not the fussy little secrets all families share, but shameful secrets, southern secrets, hanging thick and heavy like Spanish moss. Shrouded in shadow, they tormented my childhood.
I’m not a child anymore, and for me, a new day brings the welcome distraction of struggling to survive; it means neckties and commutes, tall buildings and slow elevators. In the harsh light of the dog-eat-dog world, the trying to make a living world, people’s souls don’t cast shadows and I’m invisible there. But more importantly, a new day offers the opportunity to completely exhaust myself, to trudge home so mind-numbingly weary, so utterly defeated in spirit that nothing else matters for a time.
These are the hours when lonely meals are eaten in a dimly lit kitchen, when ghosts of relationships-past stalk the vacant spaces, each having once brought the promise of sweet salvation before fading away—held back at arms length and pushed away truth be told. Brief interlopers these fortunate few, I had simply loved them too much to burden them, to draw them into my twilight world.
Some had left gladly, most had left crying, all had left unaware of the crime of their innocence and my terrible temptation to corrupt them; to draw them into my misery, to cling to them, to draw strength from their wonderfully uncomplicated lives until they shriveled up and died inside as I had so very long ago. But no, I loved them too much. You see, I have secrets.
Here lately, when the part of me that still feels, surfaces and needs, I take to the city streets. But I’m not searching for the young and smooth of skin to satisfy my urges, I’m far beyond that. Having already rejected youth and innocence, I seek the jaded. Deep down in my university-educated mind I know what I’m doing and why. I’m perfectly aware of my pathetic Jungian attempts to balance opposites as I walk the night. I don’t care and I pay them well, those of sagging flesh and haunted eyes hard as flint. They have secrets too, and I search for them, as I lay them down on sweat-dried sheets, these husks of humanity, and thrust myself upon them, playing a game of Russian roulette, spinning the wheel of life and death.
My bed faces east and the promise of the coming day as we spread our wings, wounded birds in fitful flight. Long after she’s left, I lie awake in the dark, eyes open, waiting for the window to brighten, wondering if this was the one, the one who might someday pronounce my death sentence in absentia. I don’t really care. I have secrets and they’re tearing my guts out.
It’s been twenty years since I fled the Deep South for the restless promise of New York City, this storied place, this steel-and-concrete fortress where the lights never go out. For twenty years now a host of gray ghosts have swept northward on nightly incursions into my subconscious; an unseen army, a howling horde firing salvos of accusations into my soul. They demand answers to why I just stood there so long ago, doing nothing, letting those awful things happen. I thought I could escape them in this sordid city that never sleeps, but the shadow world followed me here, it thrives here and the night belongs to them. Only the natural light of day can drive them back and recharge my soul, so I wait, and I sweat, and I remember—
The year was 1962 and I was eight years old when I became a casualty of World War II. For me, there would be no purple hearts, no parades, no silent circle of war buddies to share bottles in brown paper bags with; just shameful secrets, rock candy, and ice cream. They have a name nowadays for what was wrong with my father, post traumatic stress they call it. We didn’t have any fancy names for it back then, my siblings and I; we just knew daddy was fighting the Japs again when the ratcheting sound of a twelve-gauge shattered our uneasy sleep and sent us out the nearest window. It mostly happened in summer, when the stifling heat and humidity descended like a wet curtain and the night-sounds transported the Old Man back to the jungles of the South Pacific. We learned at an early age to sleep with our shoes on and laced up tight.
Sometimes our one solitary policeman, charged with keeping law and order for an entire North Florida backwoods county would come, drawn by the bark of the shotgun. Cautiously prowling the dirt roads surrounding our eighty-acre tract, he would pause long enough to gather us up one by one, his flashing red light a beacon of safety in the night. Night horrors hide from the light, we learned that early on. And the police don’t venture on foot into the dark piney woods where crazy men lurk with shotguns, we learned that too.
The old pharmacist who owned the drug store in our sleepy little town, was one of daddy’s drinking buddies, and he treated my wounds when I didn’t run fast enough one night. Dipping my mothers’ steel knitting needles in boiling water, with trembling alcoholic hands he passed fiery pieces of antiseptic gauze through the flesh wounds in my legs. The shadows protected me that moonlit night as I lay cradled in the boughs of a magnolia tree, dripping dark drops onto pure white blossoms, hiding and holding my breath, cringing at the crack of sticks in the underbrush and praying to God for the light of day
With dawn came a return to sanity and the Old-Man brought a long ladder and took me down. Sounding a low keening from the depths of his soul, he clutched me to his breast, horrified by what he’d done. Smelling of sweat, bourbon, and gunpowder, he ran from the woods carrying me that morning. He didn’t drink for awhile after that.
They did have a name for what was wrong with my mother, even back then: The baby blues they called it. We didn’t have any fancy names for it, my siblings and I; we just knew that when mother grew quiet and rocked in her chair, the cruel time, the mean and petty time was at hand. A transplanted Catholic from Boston, she was twenty years younger than my father when she started having his babies in 1952; and somewhere along the line, way before baby number-eight was born, she quietly went insane. Rocking in her chair in a sweltering tin-topped house, chain-smoking Salem cigarettes and drinking Seven-Up, married to an alcoholic and far, far away from her Massachusetts home and family, the shadows came one day and took her mind without her ever knowing it.
Singling out one each of my younger brothers and sisters, she began inflicting psychological and physical tortures upon them and we did nothing—I did nothing and that’s what hurts most of all. God help me, but in my cowardice I was afraid to say or do anything for fear she would turn on me next. One of her favorite cruelties, when she wasn’t making them drink Tabasco-sauce or touching lit cigarettes to them in passing, was depriving them of sleep.
I have night-memories of the two of them in tattered clothing standing with their arms around each other, asleep on their feet, tiny dancers swaying softly in the dim light filtering into the small pantry she kept them in. They were always gone by daylight, restored to their beds for a few merciful hours lest the Old-Man discover them on his way out the door to work. I could see them through the open doorway of my room night after night and I did nothing, absolutely nothing. I should have done something;I should have at least said something. To my everlasting shame, I knew what she was doing was wrong and still I did nothing. Like all the others I was too frightened and too worried about my own skin.
Sometimes in later years, usually while watching old movies on an old black-and-white television someone traded to us, the mother we had once known would come back to us for a while, rising up from her rocker to make cookies and sing and laugh with us. But these visits became less frequent as time passed. Mostly she just rocked and smoked and Daddy just worked, drank, and fought the Japs.
The county sheriff, an alcoholic himself, continued his habit of patrolling around our landholding on moonlit nights. He never once said anything to daddy, easing his conscience by hauling us out of the woods to the safety of his house across town. Each year his aging patrol car became a little more crowded as more of us were brought into the world.
Like good little soldiers, us older ones didn’t leave anyone behind on the battlefield, and always took the babies with us: two of my sisters in the front seat, three in the back; my two brothers and I would sit on the edge of the open trunk with our legs hanging over the bumper. I remember the trunk lid banging down on our heads when he gunned the engine, bouncing and chattering through the sand-beds, high-beams and flashing lights boring a protective tunnel of urgency and official business through the night.
I remember his wife, a plain-looking and kindly woman who gave us root beer and ice cream before bedding us down in the living room on makeshift pallets. She was the first woman I ever felt that way about. Approaching thirteen years old at the time, I was coming of age and her hair smelled faintly of strawberries and her breasts felt firm and wonderful when she drew me close and comforted me. She took to comforting me a lot that summer and before long we shared secrets too; hot, sweaty, grown-up secrets.
The kids living in the neatly groomed, paved-street neighborhood bordering our property weren’t permitted to associate with us. Not that it really mattered, except for going to school we weren’t allowed off the home-place anyway, secrets require privacy you know. Every weekday morning during the school year, we’d watch them parade by our bus stop in their parents’ shiny cars. The boys with starched collars and Brillcreamed hair, the girls in pig-tails and pink dresses, they’d pass by with freshly scrubbed faces staring straight ahead, bound for the next bus-stop two miles away.
Most of them lived less than a block from where we caught the bus and they got off there after school. We had our own special place at the front of the bus, carefully segregated from the others by two rows of empty seats. By unspoken rule, the driver would usher us off first, waiting until the woods swallowed us up before opening the door for the others. It seems like there were always at least two mothers with clenched jaws and folded arms leaning against their parked cars waiting to enforce this. We were white trash and they were making sure their kids didn’t play in the garbage.
I don’t recall any of us ever getting a single Valentine in elementary school. We were not to be encouraged. We brought them to school year after year, one for each boy or girl as appropriate; sincere homemade offerings carefully cut from colored construction paper, neatly labeled with little heart-shaped candies scotch-taped to them. We were dirt-poor and couldn’t afford store-bought like everyone else, and we labored especially hard over them, sweating the details, finding just the right unblemished candy heart with just the right sentiment for each classmate. Thrilling to our own daring, we wrote the word “love” before our names on those special few, agonizing over it after the deed was done, the same as any other young kid.
By the end of the day the wastebasket by the teachers’ desk would be overflowing with them. Parents teach their children well.
Hardly anyone ever came down the dirt road running by our house unless they were lost. We didn’t have sleepovers or slumber parties and we didn’t get invited to any. No one ever said or did a damn thing or so much as lifted a finger until the late summer of 1969 when one of my sisters was poisoned. By then it was too late. Ironically, my mother had nothing to do with it, but that didn’t stop them, these fine upstanding citizens of the south; most of whom couldn’t open a closet in their own homes without a skeleton falling out, from witchhunting. Taking a break from civil unrest, uppity-negroes, Vietnam, and men walking on the moon; the whole town put on their Sunday best and had themselves a good old-fashioned scandal and newspaper trial. I punished my mother that summer, I could have stopped the whole thing dead in its tracks, should have stopped it dead in its tracks. But I didn’t; for me the cruel time, the mean and petty time was at hand and my parents had taught me well. You see, I knew who did it and God help me I never said a word.
There was a small bayou that brushed one corner of our property before leading out into the saltwater bays beyond. And on that bayou, clinging to the side of a steep little hill; stood a small house undercut with an open basement. And in that house lived a man and his wife. He was a happy man and a simple man who built small boats for a living. I helped him in the summers and after school when I could get away with it.
With my mother rocking and puffing in her own little world and my father at work from dawn to dusk, I’d cross the property line and sneak over there and it was all our little secret. He paid me twenty-five cents an hour, and I spent a lot of happy hours in that basement working on the most beautiful wooden boats imaginable. He had a side-business selling fish, and I helped him pull his nets and clean the catch he wrapped in newspaper and sold from a little tin-roofed shack built out over the water on pilings. His wife fried mountains of fish, hush-puppies and crispy French-fries for our lunch, and made gallons of sugary-sweet iced tea to wash it all down with. Sometimes when it was especially hot, we’d cut open an ice-cold watermelon and eat it in the cooling breeze of the big shop-fan where the flies couldn’t bother us. It was a place of peace and refuge for me, and one fine Spring day a baby girl was born to them. After that, I’d often hear the sound of his singing echoing across the bayou in the early morning hours on my way to the bus stop.
As the years unfolded, I don’t know what would have happened to my state of mind without that peaceful sanctuary. We were growing on up now, my siblings and I, and all of us were coping with the madness around us in different ways. My older brother quit school and ran off to live with the hippies the day he turned sixteen; just vanished one day without saying a word. Mama and daddy didn’t appear to notice. My older sister had immersed herself long ago in the blood of Jesus, and could be found speaking in tongues down at the Pentecostal church most Sundays. Me? I built boats, net-fished with my only friend, and sought escape through reading, hot-footing it over the scorching summer sand, stripping briars between my toes running for the bookmobile waiting Tuesday afternoons along the far edge of the property.
Then there was the next oldest under me, another sister whose desperate desire to be somewhere else transmuted itself into the most extraordinary artistic ability. With sketchpad and homemade easel, she wandered our acreage, creating stunning landscapes, crisp charcoal sketches, and vivid watercolors. She envisioned and manufactured her own perfect dream world where everyone smiled and held hands, waved from passing cars, and lived in neat houses with bright sunflowers on tall stalks. She envisioned it so intensely that it actually manifested itself for her. She simply stayed on the bus after school one day and went home with a new girl who didn’t know any better. Other than once when she had to for a little while, she never came back. I don’t think she planned it, things just worked out that way and she lived with them for years. Allowed to sit in the back of the bus with the quality folk now, she was embarrassed by us and pretended we didn’t exist. I can’t say as I blamed her, she was free.
Next in line were the brother and sister imprisoned in the house. As an adult I have no childhood memories of ever being at play with those two, no baseball, no birthdays, no horsing around. They were non-people, never around in my self-conscious world. Pale and silent companions on ghostly night rides, faces passed in the hallway at school, nothing more. To acknowledge them was to acknowledge my own shortcomings, so I ignored them.
They were getting older too, and bless their resilient souls, starting to rebel against mothers’ abuse in small ways. At the trial to come I would have trouble understanding why they defended her so fiercely, practically holding her up for sainthood. It would be many years before I learned about Stockholm Syndrome and its devastating effect on the human mind and spirit.
Then there was Helen; sweet little doe-eyed Helen. Four years old at the time, she was a happy little soul; curious and into everything, laughing and smiling, always happy to see you, completely and mercifully oblivious to the bleak circumstance and danger surrounding her. I’d developed a soft spot for that little girl soon after she was born, and in the back of my mind planned to take her away with me when I was old enough to leave. I always picked her up on the way out when the Japs came, holding my hand over her mouth, making a game of hiding in the woods. By now we all had secret hideouts in case the sheriff didn’t come. Little “forts” like all kids make except ours were serious business. Mine was dug deep in the ground, carefully camouflaged, and built with a handy back way out.
During the day, my anonymous brother and sister, hopelessly shackled to my mothers’ abusive state of mind and a miserable life of indentured servitude, protected and cared for young Helen and the two-year old baby girl still in the crib. Mother didn’t tolerate happy people around her and she certainly wasn’t capable—or interested—in taking proper care of any toddlers or two-year olds. The rest of us didn’t venture under the shadow of her dark cloud unless forced by hunger, or at night when the Old Man was around and she had to pretend. She was shrewd and calculating in her cruelty, cunning like a wild animal, keeping careful score of any transgressions committed or advantages taken during “safe” times and promptly doling out her punishments at the earliest opportunity.
So powerful and intimidating was the psychological sway she held over us that no one ever said a word to the Old Man about what went on when he wasn’t there. Personally, I think he was so relieved each morning to discover he hadn’t killed one of us in the night that everything else went right over his head. He was starting to get old now, and seldom went on night patrol anymore, preferred instead to barricade-up in the house and hold himself ready to repel “banzai” attacks from there. In a terrifying twist, he’d gone silent when the madness was upon him and simply nudged us awake with the barrel of the shotgun now; first demanding the “password,” then threatening to shoot us for falling asleep on post.
It seems that during the war it was widely believed the Japanese couldn’t pronounce certain syllables in the English language—particularly L’s, G’s, and H’s—and American soldiers quickly learned to devise clever passwords to guard against infiltrators. Our password was “Lola’s thighs.” We’d overheard that one and a few others during the times daddy’s war buddies showed up to drink and talk about some place called Guadalcanal.
Ordered to “defilade” from behind overturned couches and overstuffed chairs, and make ready to lay down “grazing fire or flanking fire” or do other things we didn’t understand, we’d hunker-down in the dark with him, whispering the password up and down the line periodically. Sweating it out, waiting for daybreak, knowing we’d find him asleep in his “foxhole,” one arm draped across his neck to keep the Japs from cutting his throat while he slept.
Sometimes, though not very often, he would shoot out a window, startled by something outside only he could see. The sheriff would come then, alerted by the neighbors. His password was “piggly wiggly.” Mistaking him for an officer in his policeman’s uniform, the Old Man would snap-to and report. An ex-military man himself, the sheriff would then relieve him and order him to the “rear,” keeping him down at the jail for the rest of the night. We’d see him again by suppertime the next night and everyone would pretend nothing had happened. We weren’t anywhere near normal, but we were still a family and families protect their secrets.
Usually though, he just woke up at daybreak, put the shotgun away, took a shower and went to work without saying a word. Then it was mothers’ turn and those of us who could scattered, sneaking in and out to filch sandwiches or whatever we could grab when we were out of school for the summers, careful not to make too much noise or slam the refrigerator door. I remember she had this long wooden backscratcher with a little scratchy-hand on one end and she’d run you around just whacking the living tar out of you if she caught you in “her” refrigerator. She never let up and I figure those two trapped in the house took a lot of extra punishment for Helen and that baby. Still, they couldn’t be everywhere all the time, and sooner or later, something terrible was bound to happen. And sure enough, it did.
The actual trial started in late October, and by the time all the evidence, psychiatric evaluations, and expert witnesses were gathered-up and heard, ran all the way through the middle of November. Way before any of that though, the HRS or “Home Reckin’ Service” as they we’re called around the house, swooped down and took us kids away. Suddenly eager to demonstrate that they were on top of their game despite having ignored our situation for years, they had us living two counties away, scrubbed up, stuffed into brand-new clothes, and ready to present to a judge for interrogation before you could say what happened—except they called it a deposition. In less than two weeks the Old Man’s lawyer had us all living right back at the home place.
With the exception off my older sister, who couldn’t bear the thought of putting her hand on the Bible and lying to Jesus, the rest of us did what we had been conditioned to do; we circled the wagons and lied through our teeth—including our absentee artist sister and underage hippie brother. Swept up by the HRS along with the rest of us, they just wanted to get it over with and go back “home.” Five out of six consistent stories and no real evidence presented the judge with a dilemma and he reluctantly ordered us back home where things really got tense. Mother wasn’t acting quite so crazy anymore and really scared the hell out of us by smothering us with kindness. Suddenly, daddy wasn’t drinking a drop. They spent a lot of time yelling at each other, and the Old Man suddenly got real interested in what had been going on all those years while he was at work. We weren’t home for long, but while we were the Japs didn’t show up one single time and that was a blessed relief. We still slept with our shoes on though.
Things were different at school too. With the local newspaper buzzing with updates, rumors, and innuendo; some of the kids, put up to it by their parents no doubt, were suddenly interested in talking to me. The two-row buffer zone on the bus ceased to exist for awhile as they crowded in, pressing for details. Flattered at first, I was too smart and too gun-shy to say much and kept mostly to myself. But that didn’t stop the rumor-mill. Before long, outlandish stories were being whispered around, and it seemed everybody from the Ku-Klux-Klan to Devil Worshippers had been spotted down on our place dancing around bonfires and burning black candles. It was a time of supreme humiliation, and still I said nothing about what I knew, nothing at all.
With the initial knee-jerk reaction and legal posturing over, there was still the matter of a little girl laid up in the hospital on the critical list. The poison had done terrible things to her, causing a stroke that paralyzed the left side of her body, and it was Gods own mercy she stayed in a deep coma for thirty-nine straight days while the doctors did spinal taps, drilled holes in her skull, and did other horrific things in the struggle to save her life. Meanwhile, someone had committed felony crimes and had to pay. Facing both an election year and public outcry, the judge convened a Grand Jury and it wasn’t long before he ordered my parents bound over for trial.
The sheriff showed up just before dark one evening to arrest them both, and still I said nothing. Silent men in suits ransacked the house, opening cabinets and drawers, taking household cleaners and chemicals from under the sinks and placing them in plastic bags. Before they left the HRS showed up, and this time there was nothing daddy’s lawyer could have done about it. I didn’t put up any fuss, I just got in the car and left without saying a word.
I didn’t see my brothers and sisters again until the trial started three weeks later. Hastily installed with a foster family in a neighboring county, I was enrolled in a new school where only a handful of the teachers knew who I was, and they discreetly pointed me out to the ones who didn’t. The men silently shook their heads, and the women made sad faces and clucked over me like a bunch of hens. I hated every minute I spent in that school. But on the bright side, the kids didn’t seem to know anything, and I could sit anywhere I wanted on the bus or in the lunchroom. I was given thirty-five cents to pay for my lunch everyday, instead of an embarrassing, bright yellow free-lunch punch-card, and for the first time in my life I was invisible at school. About the time I settled in and got used to regular meals it was time to go to court. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d be doing my schoolwork in a back room of the courthouse for quite awhile.
Court was a strange and foreign place populated by slow turning electric fans standing tall in the corners. There were red-faced men in wilted suits shouting at each other across acres of polished wood, and lots of church-going women armed with little cardboard fans thoughtfully provided by the local business community—colorfully printed with their advertisements of course. Except for the baby who was too young to testify and was living God knew where, the rest of us sat in the witness box over to one side, and we could hear those cardboard fans working behind us and up in the gallery like the soft rustle of birds wings. Unfortunately, our ancient courthouse, despite its imposing marble columns and stately appearance, lacked proper air conditioning and it was hot as a firecracker inside that place.
Things got off to a brisk and dramatic start with the state attorney pacing the floor and mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, drinking glass after glass of ice-water poured from sweaty pitchers by his assistant. He used big words like “preponderance of evidence,” and “premeditation” while explaining to the jury how the State would prove in excruciating and exacting detail just what kind of monsters they were dealing with.
Rising in brief rebuttal, the Old-Man’s lackluster lawyer yawned and declared the State’s case complete hogwash, promising everyone a quick trial, an inescapable verdict of not guilty, and a speedy return to their homes. As it turned out, he got one out of three right.
Off and running now, each side began trotting out the expert witnesses and crossing swords over them. I learned all about something called the Rorschach Inkblot Panel and other strange tests the experts had administered to my mother and father. Next, for a solid week I discovered what the results of these tests might, might not, or could mean, with both sides fighting it out to an obvious draw—at least in my mind.
Along with the others, I was called to the stand twice that first week, and I never said a word about the light blue pick-up I saw easing down our dirt road at dawn on the day my sister was so cruelly struck down. I didn’t say anything about the patch of gray primer on the passenger door, or the gloved hand I saw reaching out from the driver’s side and tossing things over the cab like someone delivering newspapers. I didn’t say anything about the chewed-up piece of meat I found lying under the bushes where my sisters’ spasmodic hand had flung it when the poison took hold, and I didn’t say anything about the stray dogs I later found dead and scattered all over our woods. I was fifteen years old and this was my chance to get even, to redeem myself and wipe clean the slate for everything cruel and outrageous my mother and father had ever done. In my immaturity it was too good to pass up and I kept quiet. I was getting some of my own back.
The following week they racked my father pretty good and the lawyer he’d hired actually did a competent job. Calling forth a platoon’s worth of character witness’s, he explained away the Jap attacks and nocturnal gunfire as nothing more than coon hunting parties, a popular pastime in the South. Under oath, the sheriff didn’t tell any outright lies so far as taking us home and keeping us overnight on occasion, and the question of the Old Man’s more recent habit of barricading himself in the house wasn’t brought up and he didn’t volunteer anything.
The sheriffs’ wife caused a minor sensation by passing out in the gallery when I was singled out and called up to substantiate her husbands’ testimony about the overnight “visits.” She packed-up and left town the next day, but she needn’t have worried; I knew how to keep secrets. I simply told the lawyers we all hated coon hunting and had lied to the sheriff all those years just to get at the root beer and ice cream always waiting over at his place. Of course, no one believed me but there was bigger game afoot, and my older sister, who took the stand and swore that a lunatic had stalked us in the woods on those nights, was the proverbial voice in the wilderness and the trial moved on. Apparently it was mostly legal and perfectly okay to go crazy occasionally so long as you didn’t call attention to yourself by hurting someone.
As far as mother was concerned, the south’s deep-rooted prejudice against northerners worked to her advantage. Yankee’s were about two notches lower on the totem pole than even black folks at the time, and for that reason the townspeople had shunned her all the years she’d lived among them. No one really knew her to talk about her. All the state really had were those ambiguous inkblot tests and they hammered away at her in the most outrageous fashion for two full days. The lawyer the Old-Man later paid-off with ten acres of our land never objected once.
Things turned ugly when the doctors took the stand, loosing another stampede of expert testimony over the next week as they discussed the contents pumped from my sisters’ stomach, speaking at length of poisons, household cleaners, combinations, effects, analysis, prognosis, and so on. This was the State’s moment to shine, to haul out the big guns and convict, to nail down the coffin lid. This was what everyone had sat fidgeting and sweating for weeks to hear. This was the good stuff, and the fanning in the gallery grew louder as the gallows-crows in their lacy dresses gasped in shock and beat their cardboard wings in outrage, nearly causing a mistrial when they printed the word “guilty” on the blank side of their fans and held them up for the Judge to see.
The old gray-haired Judge, who seemed half-asleep from heat exhaustion most of the time, came alive when he saw that. Half-standing, he pounded the bench with his gavel, yelling for the bailiffs to clear the court. Closing the trial to the public, he placed something called a gag order on the press and sequestered the jury. Calling all of us witness’s into chambers along with the jury, he questioned us closely on what we might have seen. Satisfied with what he heard, he denied a defense motion for mistrial, but indicated he wouldn’t oppose a motion for change of venue if so desired. In an incredible display of stupidity, the defense declined and the trial resumed the very next day—but in a very different courtroom. You could here it echo in there now.
Things went pretty quick after that. It turned out the States’ whole case, ridiculously enough, hinged on cookies; and not just any cookies, but very special cookies. During the rare times mother acted normal, we usually gathered in the kitchen to make something she called preacher’s cookies and that’s what the doctors pumped out of Helens’ stomach. And sure enough, we’d made a batch the very day it all happened. Called from a backroom to the stand one by one, when it was my turn, I explained how you melted butter, and mixed together cocoa, sugar, oatmeal, salt, and raisins, brought it all to a slow boil, and then dollopped it out on cookie sheets. Next, you put it in the refrigerator to cool, and 30 minutes later, preacher’s cookies; no baking necessary.
After four interminable days of listening to the State flounder around with this thin and anticlimactic line of questioning, during which it became evident that none of the chemicals ingested by my sister could possibly have originated from the common household cleaners confiscated from our cabinets and cupboards, the whole thing ran out of steam and wilted like a neglected house plant. With the excitement of the crowds gone, the whole business had become boring and tedious and everyone just wanted it over with.
The state prosecutor tried his dead-level best on summation. Strutting around like a poor man’s version of Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind, he paced the length of the jury box in his rumpled suit, thumbing his suspenders and exhorting the jury to convict. But he was a bad actor playing to an empty house. He had already lost his audience and now he was losing his jury as one after another they folded their arms and sat in stony-faced silence. It wasn’t hard to read their faces; they had expected dramatic and conclusive evidence, something irrefutable to ease their collective conscious and make their job easy. They wanted cut and dried and what they got was cookies, unbelievable!
Following a short and innovative closing by the Defense, during which he urged everyone to enjoy the expensive cookie recipe so thoughtfully provided by the State at taxpayer expense, he finished by inviting the jury to make haste in convicting his clients. That way he could get home in time for supper, get a good night’s rest, and make idiots of them all with the appeal he intended to draft first thing after breakfast. It took less than thirty minutes for them to return a verdict of not guilty.
And just like that, with a slap of the gavel, we all went home. But it was a very different home we went back to. Whatever madness had possessed our mother seemed to have vanished, and suddenly there were clean clothes, regular meals, and being tucked into bed every night. The Old Man was different too, he still wasn’t drinking and the Japs seemed to have disappeared completely. Suddenly he was spending time with us, the five of us who were left anyway, taking us fishing and on long rides through the forest on weekends. It all seemed too good to be true and, as usual, it was.
Three months later the divorce proceedings started and we all landed right back in the same courtroom in front of the same judge. But before all that, something happened that changed me forever. At fifteen years of age I nearly killed a man in cold blood. I’m talking about premeditated murder and it was a very near thing. For a long moment, it could have went either way as I hid in the bushes and held a gun on a man who didn’t even know I was there.
Around this time my taste in reading focused mainly on frontier tales—Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and the like, and I had gotten it into my head to bag me a deer. Why not? They were running wild on our eighty acres and I knew where to look. I didn’t know if I had it in me to kill another living creature, but I figured to find out when I grabbed one of the Old Man’s rifles and took off for the deer woods one afternoon.
Around the turn of the century, turpentine had been big business in the South and you could still find traces of old, dim, mule-and-wagon roads in the pine forests, and it was down one of these that I came across a light blue pick-up about an hour before dark that day. Easing my way through the underbrush, it wasn’t long before I ghosted up on a man and he was acting awfully peculiar. Seated on the ground with his head resting on his knees, he was moaning softly and rocking back and forth, a pistol held to his temple. Quick as a flash the rifle was at my shoulder and I was taking the slack out of the trigger. All I could think about was my sister and her terrible suffering at the hands of this man.
Needing specialized care we couldn’t afford to provide, little Helen, the best one of us all, the one filled with such innocence and promise, the one I’d sworn to protect and someday take away from the hellhole we called home, was now a Ward of the State. Institutionalized and lost to us, her records had been sealed. We weren’t allowed to see her or even know where she was, and here sat the man responsible. I was so enraged and shaking so badly it was Gods’ own miracle I didn’t pull the trigger by accident.
In the end I couldn’t bring myself to kill the only friend I’d ever had, and it was a different person who walked out of the forest that evening. A more mature person, someone who did a lot of growing up in few short seconds. Someone who had held sway over life and death way too young.
I went to bed without my shoes on that night, staring at the ceiling, thinking about my friend and reliving the sharp crack of a pistol shot echoing through the trees. I thought about the time we had iced a big load of fish in the back of his truck and hauled them north to the fish- hungry farming country. Selling them all before noon, we stopped on the way back at an old, run-down country store and he showed me how good a Coke tasted with a pack of salty peanuts in it. While we were in that ramshackle store, a mule belonging to an elderly and apologetic black man kicked one side of the truck, denting the door. It had been my hand that sprayed the primer on the repair a week later.
I thought about the afternoon I showed up after school at the workshop and found no one home; but I did find a bucket of meat scraps on his work bench, soaking in a pungent bath poured from bottles marked Malathion, Cop-R-Tox and the like. He was forever going on about stray dogs getting into his trash cans and how tired he was of cleaning up garbage. I thought about how long it had been since the sound of his singing echoed across the bayou in the still morning hours, and I thought about his little girl who would now grow up without a father.
I never said a word to anyone about what happened in the woods that day. I bottled it up inside along with the rest of my secrets, and it was two days before the body was found. By then the wild animals had been at him. With fresh grist, it didn’t take long for the rumor mill to start-up anew, and pretty soon the whole sorry-ass town was buzzing again.
After the divorce, the years went quick and the family scattered to the four winds, with the girls marrying off as fast as they could and my younger brother joining the Marine Corps. The Old Man died in 1984 of acute alcoholism, still trying to drink the Japs away, and Mother died of a heart attack two months after that. She was forty-one years old when the shadows reached out and clutched her icy heart.
Their bodies lie in unmarked graves in a small cemetery in our hometown, or so I’m told. My older sister wrote and told me that before she moved off to the mid-west somewhere and I lost track of her. She also mentioned she didn’t believe in Jesus anymore and I think that’s a sad thing. It’s been over twenty years now since I’ve seen or heard from any of the others. We don’t exchange Christmas cards and I don’t know their children or even if they have any.
From time to time, some enterprising soul tracks me down with an offer to buy the old home place, and I suppose that happens with the others too. I pay the taxes every year and just let it lie. Dark and restless things abide there; clawing things, whispering things, and they’re best left alone.
Me? I work for the City of New York, Division of Child Protective Services and I get the tough cases, the ones nobody else has the stomach for. I’m the person called in when they find kids so beaten down, so starved, and so traumatized they can’t be coaxed from their dark cages and closets. In other words, they call me everyday, all day and most nights too. These kids come to me and everyone calls me a miracle worker. People don’t understand that these children can see inside of me and that’s why they run out and throw their arms around my neck and hold on tight. I can feel the fragile bones of their emaciated bodies and the flutter of their small hearts as I carry them into the light. They cling to me, sometimes for hours, and they smell of urine and neglect as they feed on my strength, emotional vampires, thirsting for a kind word to tell them it’s all right, and for a human touch that doesn’t sting. They look at me with eyes wise beyond their years, and they bite into my soul and drink deep.
I’m on call twenty-four hours a day and I sleep with my shoes on and laced up tight. I step on needles, whiskey bottles, and crack-pipes in the dark tenement halls of festering buildings. I bare my soul and I wrest these kids from the cruel whispering shadows: black kids, white kids, Hispanic kids, Asian kids; all kinds of kids; it makes no difference to me and it shouldn’t to you either. I have no secrets from these kindred spirits and they know they’re not alone. They so desperately need to know that. It’s a terrible thing to be alone in the dark and frightened.
The women where I work think I’m sensitive and wonderful. They fall in love with me, and sometimes I’m tempted by their sweetness and the promise of redemption I see in their eyes. Sometimes I want to rest my weary head and confess all. But I can’t afford to lose my edge, so I push them away for their own good and mine. Sitting alone in the dark I prepare for battle, teasing the shadows, taunting them, waiting for the phone to ring, and sweating; careful to feed only on my own kind, subsisting on the emotional bread and water of prostitutes when I can’t take anymore and must reach out. I wait for the rising sun to recharge my soul and push back the night so I might rest a little while with my guard down. I’m a different kind of vampire and I’m sad to say there are a lot of us around. We fear the dark and embrace the light. I’m told of a small town in Alaska where night doesn’t fall for three whole months. It sounds like heaven, and maybe I’ll go there when these kids don’t need me anymore. It might be awhile though. I hear the phone ringing.
The End
