Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  “Mary had known all along what the brothers were plotting, y’see. She also knew the bloody ways in which her brothers amused themselves, and she was never really as ignorant of the true source of her family’s money as they thought she was. Nor was she half-witted; it was only to her advantage to pretend that she was so. Her plan was to avenge the innocents whose lives had ended at the hands of her brothers, and also to return someday for the gold. But she never returned. Soon after that, near the spot where her brothers fell, the Hessians found her. They chased her through the woods and cut her head off, and it was shipped back to England for the King to gloat over. And that was the end of Mary Rory, and in fact of the whole Rory clan, as well as their fortune. The English found the first six chests of gold, but they never found the seventh, and from that day to this, men have sought for it in vain.”

  Daddo finished his story with a self-satisfied expression, puffing away on his pipe.

  “Now that half the afternoon is wasted, ye may as well bring me a dram,” he said.

  Willie reached into his shirt and pulled out the old rusty lock from the chest. He hefted it for a moment, enjoying the weight of it in his hands. It must have weighed three pounds. It was so rusty it had come off with only a few blows of the shovel.

  “Feel o’ that,” he said, handing it to his grandfather. The old man squinted at it. He held it in his hands, turning it over and over. Then he traced the letter R, which was worked into the face of the lock.

  “Jaysus,” whispered the old man.

  “Would you say that lock is about a hundred years old?” asked Willie. “And would you say it came off the Rory treasure, Daddo?”

  The old man could not speak.

  “You’ll have as many drams as ye like, from now until the end of your days,” said Willie, struggling to his feet. “Come on. I’ve somethin’ to show everyone.”

  That night, while the festivities were still raging, Willie dragged himself off to bed. His entire family, even his mother, was drunk on whiskey, and the neighbors had begun to stream in from as far off as Clare Town to see for themselves whether the story was true.

  Willie’d had to tell over and over again the story of how he’d found the money, until he was sick to death of it. And there were, remarkably, some folks who had never heard the story of the Rory fortune itself. It was decided that the whole tale should be told over by Daddo, this time with the open chest of gold as a backdrop, as well as the fragments of bone that had lain under it, and his audience now numbered nearly a hundred people instead of just Willie.

  Those bones troubled Willie greatly. There were just enough of them remaining to identify: a rounded sort of half-dome, obviously a piece of a skull, and a couple of ribs. The rest of James Rory had disintegrated into the earth from which it had come. The bones were a grisly reminder that this gold was blood money, earned not through honest labor but by murder and treachery and slavery, and that more blood—family blood—had been shed in the defense of it, which showed to what lengths some people would go to stay wealthy.

  Willie had always thought of the Rorys as a band of horned, fire-eating devils, born evil because they were damned. But when they pulled up the chest and saw the bones of James Rory underneath, Willie suddenly understood that the Rorys were probably once a family just like the Manns, simple and poor and honest, and that somehow money had turned them against themselves and each other. Furthermore, he realized, no person was completely immune from that kind of transformation, not even his family, not even himself.

  And that night, as he slept, he had a disturbing dream.

  He was running through a deep dark forest. The trees reached up to blot out the sky, and scarcely a single shaft of sunlight penetrated the dense canopy of leaves. He ran in a panic. And while he knew he was still himself, still Willie Mann, he also knew that he was not. He looked down at his feet. They were bare, small, delicate, not his own feet at all. And he was holding a skirt up around his legs so that he wouldn’t trip on it.

  Behind him he heard shouts in a strange, guttural language. He heard the clanking of equipment and the pounding of large booted feet on the ground. Willie dared one look back over his shoulder. There were several men chasing him, dressed in green uniforms with white crossbelts and carrying muskets. One of them was holding a sword. And Willie knew that they were Hessian soldiers, and they meant to kill him.

  Suddenly his foot caught in a root and he went headlong to the ground. He tried to get up, but he tripped on his skirt and fell again, and by then it was too late. They were upon him.

  One of them kicked him over on his back. Another, the one holding the sword, planted one massive boot on his chest. Willie heard himself screaming, felt himself struggling to get away. A rifle butt came smashing down into his face and he felt his jaw shatter. Then the soldier with the sword held it high above his head, looked briefly down at Willie to gauge his aim, and brought it down swiftly to his neck.

  All went black.

  Willie awoke to hear the sounds of the party still in full swing. He was alone in the room. The night was chilly, but he was soaked through with sweat.

  “Mary Rory,” he said aloud into the black room. “It was Mary Rory.”

  The door burst open and Poky Boy came staggering in.

  “Come on, Willie!” he shouted. “’Tis no time to be sleepin’! Ye’ve made us rich, brother! We want to drink your health!”

  “Go away, Poky,” said Willie softly.

  “Eh? Are ye mad? It’s the greatest day of our lives!”

  “Go away, I tell ye!”

  More revelers came stumbling in the door. Soon the room was full of them. Several grabbed Willie by his limbs, paying no attention to his wounded leg, and pulled him out into the main room of the house. A cheer erupted from all when they saw him. A glass of whiskey was put into his hand.

  Willie looked again at the open chest sitting on the dining room table. Andy and Father were guarding it fiercely, allowing no one too close. They were both drunk, and Willie saw his brother snarl at a man who reached out to feel a piece of the money. The expression on his face was savage; not quite murderous, but close.

  “I just want to touch it,” said the man, who was also drunk.

  Andy grudgingly relented. The man reached out one tentative hand and picked up a piece of gold. Still holding it, he turned to speak to someone behind him. Andy followed his gaze, relaxing his watch on the piece the man held. This was precisely what the man had planned. Casually, he slipped the doubloon into his pocket and began to walk away.

  Hardly had Willie seen this when Andy realized what had happened. He dropped one powerful hand on the man’s shoulder and spun him around. With the other he made a fist and sent it crashing into the man’s soft mouth. The man flew backward, striking heavily against the wall, and slid to the floor. Andy advanced on him. The man attempted to rise and Andy hit him again, on the top of his head this time. The man went limp. Andy went through his pockets and retrieved the gold piece. He put it reverently back on the pile of gold in the chest. Then, after a brief conference with Willie’s father, they closed the lid and locked it tight.

  The party was going full steam ahead, and hardly anyone seemed to have noticed what had just taken place.

  Willie put the glass of whiskey down on the table. He had already been forgotten by everyone. Nobody saw him limp out of the house and out across the field, still in his nightshirt. He went to the hole he had dug earlier that day. There he lay down on his back, staring up at the clouded night sky, the dew soaking through his nightshirt. He closed his eyes, found himself seeing into the future, and he wished, quite simply, that someone else had found the money. Nothing was going to be the same for the Manns from now on.

  The End.

  8

  My Fifteenth Year; I Kill Mr. Simpson

  Willie Mann and the Rory Fortune” was my first short story—the first thing I’d ever made from beginning to end, the first thing I’d accomplished entirely on my own. Maybe t
hat was why it was so hard—because it was also, up to that point, the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. There was nobody to help me with it, nobody to talk to about it when I got stuck. In my more reflective moods, I realized that I didn’t even know why I was doing it.

  I began work on that first short story of mine the summer I turned fifteen, and I didn’t finish it until just a few months shy of my sixteenth birthday—just over nine months in the making. An adult woman can produce an entire human being in that time. I, a juvenile male, was happy with fifteen solid pages of prose. When I began the story, my face was smooth, my skin still clean and soft with childhood. By the time it was done, I had, to my immense delight, ten or fifteen whiskers on my chin. Less thrilling was the appearance of that dreaded stigma of adolescence—zits. My body was evolving even as I sat hunched over my clattery old Royal.

  It seems to me entirely characteristic of myself in those days that while other boys were looking forward to their driver’s licenses, their first cars, their first dates, I was sitting up in my bedroom endlessly rewriting the same story and teaching myself how to type at the same time. I used the hunt-and-peck-with-the-index-fingers method at first, a poky and frustrating business. Soon I developed a more efficient three-finger method, then a promising four-finger style. Four-fingered, I could type faster than I could write with a pen. Then I hit the point that I have since heard other writers describe as the moment when they knew for sure they were meant to be writers—I could type at the speed of my thoughts. The words seemed to flow out of me like a river, limited only by the need to stretch my aching lower back, or to race frantically into town on foot to buy a new ribbon—or to race even more frantically to the always enthusiastic Elsie Orfenbacher, to relieve the frequent and lightning-fast urges I felt for her warmth and softness. By the time the story was finished, I had learned two things: I could type like a professional, and I was utterly ignorant of what to do next. A novel? Another short story? Was I done? Was I any good?

  It was a lonely business, teaching myself to write.

  That fall had passed by with barely a glance from me, and then the winter, and then the spring, the succession of seasons the only thing that reminded me there were other things going on in the world. Annie and I still walked to school every day, but we saw less of each other than we used to. I knew without asking that it was because of what had passed between us in the car that night.

  “You already know me,” she said. “There’s nothing left to say.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” I said.

  “No, really,” she said, but she didn’t look me in the eye anymore, and she was quiet much of the time as we walked. Sometimes she didn’t say anything at all. I decided she was embarrassed she’d told me. I had to admit I was sort of embarrassed too.

  “Have you told anyone?” she asked me once.

  “No,” I said—because I hadn’t, even though I was going to. Any day now. In fact, I didn’t know why I hadn’t yet. “Of course not.”

  “Good,” she whispered. Head down, feet shuffling through the dirt. She never used to walk like that. She was being beaten down. I was losing her. The time was coming for me to do something. But I still didn’t know for sure if telling was the right thing. Maybe I had to do something myself. But what? It was a big job. I had to have a plan, and none seemed to be forthcoming.

  And to tell the truth, though I’m ashamed to admit it even now, I had other things besides Annie’s plight on my mind.

  To my surprise, I found myself dreading our morning walks to school. Also, school itself had begun to seem so irrelevant that one day I decided simply to stop going. It was that simple. I made it in once or twice a week for roll call, and then I just went home. Amazingly, nobody seemed to mind. Certainly we never got any phone calls from the school about it, although that may have just been another period when I forgot to pay the phone bill. And Grandpa never noticed I was playing hooky, or else he pretended not to notice; actually, I doubt he even knew I was home. He spent a good deal of his time passed out in the rocking chair, or else sleeping off his latest drunk in bed. On the few occasions when he asked me what I was doing at home, I told him school had been canceled for the day. He always accepted that without further questioning—if he even heard me, which I doubted.

  Grandpa drank more now than I’d ever seen him drink before. I bought his whiskey for him at Gruber’s, so I had a clear handle on how much he was drinking and when—a bottle and a half a day, no more and no less. Mr. Gruber sold me the whiskey at a discount, a case at a time, with a wink and a friendly nod. It was against the law, but he knew it wasn’t for me.

  “How’s the old man these days?” he’d ask every once in a while—or maybe he was asking, “How’s the old Mann?” But that was mostly just for form’s sake. He knew how it was with Grandpa and me.

  “Same as always,” I would say.

  That’s a small town for you. We ignore the most obvious things—Jack Simpson up the hill molests his daughter, Elsie Orfenbacher is banging a fifteen-year-old boy, old Thomas Mann is an alcoholic and his grandson has to buy his booze for him because he can’t even make it out of the house anymore.

  I guess if I’d known how alcohol, like a cat, will torture its victims mercilessly before dispatching them, I would have been alarmed at how much Grandpa was drinking. But I was a teenager, and teenagers rarely bother to look beyond the ends of their own noses—at least I know I didn’t. Too, it must be remembered that I grew up with Grandpa drinking. No, not just drinking—drunk. Constantly. I thought it was normal, so I didn’t worry about it much. I thought instead about becoming a writer, and sometimes about Annie, and sometimes about Elsie. That was about it.

  Of course, as I was writing the story, I thought about the Rory fortune and how it had changed us. That was when I really began to understand what had happened to the Mann family in the last one hundred and twenty years.

  It was hard for me not to think about the story of Willie Mann’s money, because everything around me had been created by it, or at least affected by it in one way or another. The old farmhouse Grandpa and I lived in had been built by that money. The original Mann home, the tiny three-room shack in which Willie once lived with his family, had stood on the same spot where the farmhouse stood now. I’d heard about it in little snatches here and there from Grandpa. Destroying the shack and erecting the farmhouse in its place was just one of the many improvements Willie would make with the blood money of the Rorys. He was able finally to give the Manns what they desired most: not just plush living quarters, but privacy. Privacy had been hitherto unknown to the Manns. It was the greatest luxury he could imagine. He wrote:

  To be able to sit at my little desk and write at whatever hour of the day or night I please, without being disturbed by any person, is to me a source of deep joy.

  But Willie, like me, was also tortured by an ancient guilt:

  I must never allow myself to forget that I live like a king because thousands of others lived like animals. To enslave a person is to rob them of their dignity, their rights, their past and future. I am tormented by nightmares, and by one nightmare in particular. Even though it was not I who traded decency for gold, I still reap the benefits of that transaction.

  Willie also made sure the house contained a special room for Daddo, one not isolated from the others. It was placed in the geometric center of the house, so that Daddo was sure to see everyone as they passed back and forth on their daily business. It was a small room, a point that Daddo had insisted on, and plainly furnished, according to his taste, but it had doors in each of its four walls, which were left open so he could watch his family in the course of their comings and goings. It was the nexus of the farmhouse. Grandpa and I still referred to it as “Daddo’s room.” Willie had sensed the pain the old man’s enforced solitude had caused him, and felt it almost as keenly as the old man himself.

  “No one should have to be alone when they are old,” he instructs us.

  But perhaps the greatest
reminder to me that this story needed to be written was the nightmare. During the time I was writing my story, the nightmare, which had been absent for a couple of years at least, came back in full force. I had it every night. It abated somewhat as the story came, but if I happened to stop work, it returned like a raging disease whose treatment has been discontinued too early. I had no choice but to finish the story, for I knew that as soon as I did, the nightmare would leave me for good. I knew it the same way I knew that the ghost of Willie was watching me, not always but from time to time. And I was right. I haven’t had the nightmare since. And I also knew that if for some reason I were not to finish the story, Mary Rory would never leave me, and eventually would drive me mad. A person can only have his head cut off so many times, after all, before he starts believing it is gone.

  Soon after I finished my story I took it to Doctor Connor. I needed the opinion of an adult; I wasn’t sure if it was any good. Mannville was pretty short on writers, and Connor was the only person I knew who’d been to college, so he was the logical choice. He read it in his consulting room while I toyed with the paper on his examination table. His eyes, when he finished, were glowing with excitement and elation.

  “Where did you learn to write like this?” he demanded.

  “I didn’t learn anywhere,” I replied. “I taught myself.”

  “My God!”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Like it? I love it! It’s fantastic!”

  I blushed. A warm feeling of success swelled up in my chest.

  “It’s not like I made it up,” I said modestly, because the events of the story were all true, and I had gotten them piecemeal from Grandpa. History had invented this story, not I.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “There are a million different ways to tell a story. You chose one that works. You have a vivid imagination.”