by Truddi Chase
Back at the house, so tired that putting one foot ahead of the other was an effort, she stumbled at the kitchen door and began to cry. The sweater resisted all efforts to get it off, it was too full of static, clinging to her like a white shroud.
We’re not through yet.
The smell of her mother’s body was back, along with the overpowering desire for tea. Hot tea with cream fresh from a cow and two teaspoons of sugar, a bowl of tomato soup, and a bologna sandwich, fat with butter and Hellmann’s mayonnaise, with all the crust trimmed off. Hot tea. Boiling, scalding, hot, hot tea.
The woman began to scream. Even as the first sounds left her mouth, she was trying to run, stumbling up the staircase, scrabbling at the bannisters for leverage each time her feet lost traction. She clutched the baggy skirt and blouse around a body that had become so thin that the arms and legs seemed like unfamiliar sticks. Sticks that could not run fast enough or hang on tight enough to protect her against anything.
The screams went on as she watched hot water pour into the tub. A cup of steaming tea rested on the tub rim, she had no idea how it had gotten there. Still uttering screaming, sobbing sounds she gulped the tea while kneeling on cold white tile.
Somebody yelled and began to curse. Someone else laughed and urged her both to stay on her knees and get into the tub. Somehow the words “grace under pressure,” as the laughing voice kept using them, referred to the zombie-like movements the woman knew she was making. None of it made any sense except in blinding flashes of recognition. She could not stop screaming.
She obeyed the laughing voice without question, had to because the zombie-like movements that were not her own carried her forth anyway. She lowered her body into the hot water and felt her feet slide under her. Now she was crouched there, surrounded by soap bubbles and tears and the mucus dripping into a cup of hot sweet tea. There wasn’t enough strength in her body to wipe the tears or the mucus because she felt as if she were operating with the comprehension of a six-year-old; as if someone had just beaten her to within an inch of her life, as if she were being punished. But punished for what?
Get those feet under you.
And yet another voice spoke in the woman’s head; it was heavy with some sort of foreign accent which she immediately denied. The voice questioned her in a friendly, conversational way, asking why she sat so often with her knees under her?
“I don’t know!” the woman screamed.
And someone slid it into her mind then, like a tray of rich pastry that her mother used to bake, and she watched the picture from a distance that would never again, as long as she lived, be far enough away.
The second farmhouse and she was six years old. The stepfather making a tent of the blankets, she positioned between his legs, roughhousing, as the mother called it. The first-floor bedroom, the bedstead with the chipped white paint, and sunlight on a winter day streaming in the tall windows, glinting on her mother’s auburn hair as she worked at the sewing machine by the foot of the bed. The stepfather’s laughter and his knowing look, the mother’s tight-lipped expression.
Blankets slipping with the force of activity, no longer a tent in front of the mother’s eyes. The anger in those eyes now directed to the child, not the stepfather. The pink thing in the wiry bush bobbing back and forth.
The teacup hit the white tiled floor; dark liquid splashed on the yellow bathmat. Another tray slid into her mind; the pastry this time was as rich as the first and more difficult to swallow because the picture was too clear. Sweet hot tea rose in the woman’s throat. Still six years old and seated this time on the living room floor in front of the stepfather, again on a winter’s day. Another round of “roughhousing,” his legs in old green work pants spread wide in front of her. She imprisoned between his legs, her feet just touching him where the legs met in a V. Sounds of a zipper opening, other quiet, stealthy movements. Her small feet now held between his two hands that guided them to the V; her head being snatched from above and her face slapped. The smell of her mother’s body, the bleach she used on the clothes, mingled with a softer smell of woman, some kind of face powder and deodorant, but still paramount, the odour of her mother’s flesh itself, that only a lover or one’s child could identify.
The tray slid again, pushing time forward a notch. Her mother that same night, eyes narrowed into slits at the child sitting on the floor in one corner of the kitchen. Everything curiously still. The mother’s voice breaking the stillness, shouting an order: “Get those feet under you. Sit there, don’t move, you don’t move until I tell you.”
Time passing, legs beginning to cramp.
“Get those feet under you.”
The skin on the child’s ankles beginning to puff and turning deep reddish-blue as the circulation was cut off.
The pain.
* * *
The woman didn’t understand how she drove to Page’s house and back, or how she kept the smile on her face. Page got ready for bed. The woman kept busy by unpacking Page’s suitcase and hanging her clothes in the closet. The pulse between her legs continued to beat. She wanted to vomit. Kill him. It was crammed in among all the voices roaring in her head. The unbalanced feeling, the sensation of falling grew worse each time “Kill him” surfaced. The idea grew steadily more appealing. By the time she’d stashed away Page’s underwear and the books she’d brought along to study, the image of the stepfather’s imminent death was full-blown in her mind. Blood from his gaping knife wound and the bullet hole in his twisted face materialised as Page watched her from the big bed under the skylight.
Page, pajama-clad and excited, talked about a school field trip as she snuggled in the bed. Strands of strawberry-blond hair caught in the white eyelet pillowcases; her eyes were glowing as she asked if they could get away this summer. Would they? The woman didn’t know. Things happened around her, not through her. She made plans or believed she did, and then they changed as if the reins guiding any outcome were held by someone else.
The woman hoped that her face did not betray the thoughts leaping in her mind. She tried to straighten up the loft, with her head turned away from Page’s view. The thoughts were too exquisite (“exquisite” was Catherine’s word, just as the murderous thoughts were Catherine’s too, but the woman didn’t know that) to wait until she was alone. The smell of blood in her nostrils, the excrement from the stepfather’s burst intestines stuck under broken fingernails that were ragged from full and glorious battle. . . . She put aside the intestines just long enough to gather up Page’s blue jeans and T-shirt from the floor, and to stick her tennis shoes under a chair.
Where had Page’s pink ruffled pinafores and lavender hair ribbons gone? Gone away with the little-girl voice and the wondering eyes. Promises, too many over the years since she’d left Norman, crashed to the floor between Page and herself, all broken. Not mercifully forgotten, just broken.
The roar of voices in the woman’s head made the stepfather’s intestines glow bluish-red. A lovely, hellish colour. It grew in her mind, that colour, until it ignited and burst in the mind of Black Katherine. Now it wasn’t just voices inside the woman’s head, there was also Black Katherine’s banshee scream that first, at its lowest ebb, blended with all the other voices. It reached a crescendo then, and hurled itself on to a fever pitch. Black Katherine was beside and inside the woman, her being personified by gritting teeth and flashing, glaring eyes.
Now do you understand why you’ve got to hurry, bitch?
For a reason she could never afterward identify, the woman understood that the voice referred to the recall that had been brought to her in the bathtub. No, if it could be helped, she’d just as soon not see any other child go through that. Did her others really feel that the book would do that much good? That it could, perhaps, stop mothers from punishing the child, instead of the abuser?
“I always understood,” the woman said silently. “Somewhere inside me I understood, without knowing you were saying it.”<
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Do you know me? Do you like me? A number of Troop members would say the same thing Black Katherine was saying, as soon as they emerged. Revealing themselves was painful. Few believed they could be liked. Black Katherine had been sure of her reception today but she asked anyway.
The woman stood in the loft, appearing quite normal to Page’s sleepy eyes, while protesting silently against too many marauding thoughts, none of which were her own. But even as she summoned up the iron will to deny, the solid irrefutable presence of Black Katherine blocked it. For one tiny moment the woman stood facing all that it meant, all that it would mean, and then Black Katherine drifted away as if she’d never been there.
Page had turned out her reading light. The voices in the woman’s head died down and some of the off-balance sensation left as she fell onto her own side of the bed, pulling the sheets up to her neck. The darkness held welcome, the promise of escape through sleep. The woman believed tonight’s recall was all over so she didn’t react too badly when the trapped, smothered feeling that Black Katherine’s words had given her moments before came right back. The fright when Page leaned over and planted two kisses, one on each side of her face, was something she couldn’t turn away from.
Affection is dangerous. Affection is always followed by pain. We’ve always known that. Now you know it, too.
That night, as Page slept peacefully beside her, the woman’s others brought her something else, something she would fight over with Stanley for many months to come. They slid another tray into her mind: the memory of her mother with a pair of shiny silver clippers in her right hand. The other hand grasped a hank of the half brother’s hair. The mother didn’t just cut his hair, she applied the teeth of the clippers to the base of his skull and cut until there was a wide bald ribbon of scalp showing, from the base of his neck right up over the top of his head and on down to his forehead.
“Did your mother cut the children’s hair?” Stanley would ask her when she told him later.
“Yes,” the woman had to answer. “But I must have been hallucinating that night. Why would my mother do such a thing for no reason?”
“Was there a good reason for any of the abuse that took place?”
The woman would be unable to answer, aware by now that her standard, “Because we were bad,” was unacceptable to Stanley.
“The half brother wasn’t bad,” a small voice would speak up then. “The mother was mad at everyone that day. The half brother had begun to notice girls and he wanted a new shirt. He was growing and only two shirts still fit him. The mother got tired of his hounding, she wanted to teach him a lesson. Just like she taught all of us.”
Stanley would remember the times in the last two months when the woman had mentioned gagging at the sight of anything silver and shiny. The recall that had made her ill each time had finally surfaced. She was making progress.
Nobody had told him about the recall in the cellar. So of course he couldn’t know just how much progress.
* * *
Lamb Chop cried in the darkness of the loft that night, while clouds scuttled across the face of a pale dead moon. Mean Joe let her cry. Sometimes people had to do that without interruption, without being shushed to death and told that it was alright, things would get better.
Lamb Chop had been rattled since the last session. First, hearing the “dead essence” of Olivia II in the well, then seeing Olivia I’s child mirror-image, and finally having the “dead essence” of the other child emerging almost on top of her . . . it had been a lot to handle.
“They were so different from me,” Lamchop sobbed in spite of the yellow gumdrop Mean Joe had given her. “What’s wrong with them?”
“They’re dead,” Mean Joe told her.
“I was scared. Am I dead, too?”
“No, you’re not dead, and everybody’s scared.”
“Even you, Mean Joe?”
“Especially me, and I’m supposed to be the strong one. You could do us all a favour.”
“What’s that?”
“Make up your mind how you want to spell your name. You write Lamb Chop, Lamchop and Lambchop. It’s never the same. You confuse whoever is typing the manuscript.”
“Too bad,” Lambchop said. “That’s the way I like it.”
Mean Joe reached over and put another gumdrop, purple this time, into her waiting mouth.
The child folded her hands across her chest. The gumdrop slid around on her tongue. “Your skin is pretty, Mean Joe. I wish it were mine.”
Lamchop closed her eyes. Her steady breathing indicated the beginning of sleep. Mean Joe quit smiling. The fragrance of Opium perfume drifted up from the pillowcases. He lay in the darkness thinking about Olivia II, who had died in the well. That day not so long ago when the woman had first seen the face reflected in the puddle of rainwater and the well recall had started for her, Olivia II had come to life again. But life by what definition? Mean Joe shook his head. Could dead people scream? Olivia II had ceased to be over thirty years ago in the well at the second farmhouse. When he’d reached down into the Tunnel that time and scooped her up from its dark, wet depths, she’d lain in his arms, a sodden bundle of long-dead flesh and bones.
But there in the session today, there’d been that tiny voice. She’d finally won. She’d said what she wanted, until her essence had run out of steam, and Olivia I’s child mirror-image, terrified and angry, had finished it for her.
Mean Joe laughed in his silent fashion and his eyes in the moonlight were cold. Did all dead souls, the wronged ones in particular, somehow manage to pass their messages in voices that could be heard long after they were gone forever? Or were the sins of their tormentors simply buried with them, never to be known?
Was there some high-flown intellectual concept that allowed for the possibility of such a phenomenon? Mean Joe, if he’d put his mind to it, could have come up with a thousand high-flown intellectual concepts. But since he’d been born at the second farmhouse, his job had been as today—only to protect. He left, for the time being, intellectual concepts to people like Catherine, who, when she wasn’t simmering with suppressed rage behind a cocked eyebrow and a deceiving smile, was busy leaping on her own flaws and those of others. She leapt with both feet and a red-hot determination, as if flaws were base and only perfection, or at least change, would make her world safe.
He did not blame her for the rage. She hadn’t as a child been able to explore her world with the freedom of physical or mental movement that her creative talent needed to grow. She hadn’t even been able to go past the stepfather on the staircase without the man’s hands on her. Once, when she had been five years old, the stepfather had grabbed her off the stairs as she’d tried to get away from him. He’d gripped the top of her head with one hand and jammed the other right up her vagina. Holding her aloft with her feet just touching the stair treads, like a human Popsicle with his arm for a stick, the stepfather had laughed and dared her to run up the stairs ahead of him.
No wonder Catherine craved mobility, larger-than-life accomplishments, and power. Beside him in the darkened loft, Lambchop sighed in her sleep. Mean Joe reached over and removed the last shreds of the purple gumdrop from her mouth. Olivia II, the idea of her, continued to roam his mind like a vagabond warrior searching for a battleground. Mean Joe thought about Olivia I’s mirror-images: one, the child who had emerged, lisp and all, in the session today, just like a ghost—and the other one, Catherine, the adult. The child mirror-image had never grown, never would. As for Catherine, she had called out to him in the session with more human feeling, more passion, than he’d ever glimpsed in her before. Catherine was no hypocrite. In those pleading eyes she’d let him see a message not totally altruistic. She’d been thinking of her own skin as well as that of the sleeping cores, who lay directly behind and right in the path of the child who’d finally emerged with the strong lisp—the other wandering, ghostly, child core’s mirror-image.
The woman would never awaken, she had no mechanism for it. But she would become fully aware of her true state and look herself in the eye and probably scream. Maybe he was using the wrong expression, Mean Joe thought. Maybe it wasn’t a question of the woman becoming aware, because the message had been passed to her a hundred times: “For you, there isn’t any more.” He’d stood at her shoulder as she stared out at the squirrels that day and realised that she didn’t exist. No word for the state of her mind in that one moment really fit except the word “nonexistent.” Because as she stood there for that one brief moment, he’d made sure that no Troop member passed her anything to divert her attention from what he wanted her to know: no problems, no emotions, no feelings, no nothing, had passed to her from anyone, including himself. And she had grasped the reality of her state of being; he had felt it. Except that she was like a lamp with its cord unplugged from the socket. That’s how much it had affected her.
But the woman was being bombarded these days; it would continue. The battle was on. The one who lived in the deepest part of the Tunnel had said that this Christmas would be the high feast to end all high feasts. Mean Joe shivered, knowing that the plans being contrived, re-evaluated, and recontrived, had nothing to do with tinsel or fancy tree ornaments.
Beside him, Lambchop stirred. The cores cried softly, and from a long distance away, the one who slept in the well began to scream.
TWENTY
THE Troop Formation now fell into four categories: those who had made a conscious decision to speak more directly to each other and to the woman by thought transference and aloud to Stanley and to outsiders; those who had been pushed to do so against their will by emerging recall; some who spoke only to each other and not to the woman or Stanley; and a few diehards who chose to lurk in the background, as yet “unevidenced” to anyone but themselves.