Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  I nestled Frederic’s flag carefully under my leather jacket and rode home in a pensive mood. The Simpsons must have been guilty of great sins to have earned from fate the complete extermination of their line. Such a punishment, I’d learned in school, was usually reserved for the villains of ancient Greek mythology, those who committed patricide or fratricide or incest. But the gods of the ancient world were all asleep or dead, and had been for centuries; and even if they’d been alive, it seemed unlikely to me, a twentieth-century boy whizzing along on his motorcycle, that they would aim their vengeful thunderbolts in the direction of western New York State. Perhaps, I mused, the Simpsons hadn’t done anything wrong at all, and it was only chance that they should have disappeared in this manner. Or perhaps the twisted soul of the Simpson whom I knew simply as Mister, father of Annie and the nastiest, most brutal human I’d ever encountered, was enough to cause their downfall. In that case, it was true, if outrageously unfair, that the sins of the fathers were visited upon the sons.

  Which made me wonder, ever so briefly, if Eddie had really been some sort of secret criminal.

  But I discarded that thought immediately without really admitting that I’d had it. I arrived home and stowed the flag in one of my dresser drawers. Then, on second thought, I took it out again, wrapped it in paper, and addressed it to Annie. I’d included no letter with the obituary I’d sent her, nor did I write one to accompany the flag. None was necessary. It was another eighteen-year-old poetic gesture, one that I hoped would be poignant enough on its own. Annie never required explanations of me. None were needed.

  At the last moment, though, I didn’t send it.

  “Sure are a lot of Simpsons up in that graveyard,” I said to Grandpa later that afternoon.

  He and Mildred were sitting side by side in their rocking chairs, teetering gently back and forth in perfect unison. In the old days he’d have had a glass of whiskey in his hand. Now he sipped herbal tea.

  “What? What do you mean?” he said.

  “Well, I was looking around,” I said, “and I guess I just never noticed how many Simpsons were buried up there.”

  “Yeah,” said Grandpa. “Well, those are the good Simpsons.”

  “Why are they good?”

  “Because!” He gave me an impish grin. “They’re dead!”

  Mildred whacked Grandpa on the knee. “Shame on you,” she said.

  “The only good Simpson is a dead Simpson!” Grandpa crowed. He laughed and sipped his tea.

  “Hey,” I said, “Annie’s a Simpson.”

  The smile left Grandpa’s face.

  “Relax, boy,” he said. “I forgot about her. I didn’t mean her.”

  “Well, I certainly haven’t forgotten about her!”

  “Maybe you should,” said Grandpa darkly. “No good can come of that.”

  “What do you mean?” I was growing irritated; it hurt me to hear Grandpa speak in this way of the girl I’d loved all my life.

  “Never mind.”

  “What do you mean, never mind? I have a right to know everything!”

  “Not everything, you don’t.”

  “Damn it,” I said in frustration. “There were more than a hundred Simpsons up there. They’ve been here longer than we have even. What happened to all of them?”

  “Who cares?”

  “I care. Have we been fighting with them all this time? Since the seventeen hundreds?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” said Grandpa.

  “Well, I do,” I said.

  “Well, so what?”

  “What do you mean, so what? I have a right to know!” I was angry now. It was rare for Grandpa to pull rank on me, so to speak; he’d always treated me like an adult, or at least with respect for the fact that I had a mind of my own. But now he remained silent. He’d stopped rocking and I could see by the tightening of his lips that he was angry too.

  “How long have the Simpsons and the Manns known each other?” I asked.

  “Oh, I forget,” he said coldly. “How’s your bike running?”

  “Nice try,” I said. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “About what? I was just asking—”

  What happened next surprised even me. I picked up Grandpa’s teacup and saucer and smashed them on the floor. They shattered into tiny shards. Then I leaned forward and rested my hands on the arms of his rocking chair.

  “Don’t you fucking lie to me,” I said. “Don’t you ever fucking lie to me again. I’m asking you some serious questions and you’re going to tell me the answers. I’ve had it with you and your games. You think you’re the only one who can take the truth? You tell me what happened. Now. Not later. Not sometime. Now. I have a right to know.”

  My voice was low and even. Grandpa leaned back in his chair and stared at me.

  “Billy?” said Mildred.

  I stood up.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’ll get a broom,” said Mildred.

  “No, let me do it,” I said. “I’ll clean it up, Mildred.”

  “No, I want to do it,” Mildred said. Her voice was shaking. I could see I had scared her. But Grandpa had not been fazed at all. I turned to him in embarrassment.

  “I didn’t mean to do that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  Grandpa was staring out the window at the yard.

  “I know you didn’t,” he said. “But you did it.”

  I said nothing.

  “Let’s you and me go out to the garage and have a little talk,” he said.

  “There was another Frederic,” I said, once we were in the garage. “In the Civil War. He has a stone up in the cemetery.”

  “You were poking around up there, huh?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “Father Kinney said I could.”

  “Well, I kinda knew you had to find out sometime,” he said.

  “This other Frederic died in the Civil War?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Did he and Willie know each other?”

  Grandpa put a hand over his eyes.

  “Grandpa? Did they?”

  He took his hand away.

  “Yes, they did,” he said.

  “How well? Were they friends?”

  “No,” he said. “I mean yes, they were friends, but they were more than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were cousins,” said Grandpa.

  I sat in silence for perhaps a full minute, absorbing this. The connection this implied between Annie and myself was obvious, but my reeling mind chose not to look at it right away. I couldn’t.

  “Kid,” Grandpa said, “there’s a lot of things I haven’t told you.”

  “How could you not tell me that? Of all the things you had to leave out, how could you not tell me that?”

  “How could I?” Grandpa said. “How could I tell you the girl you were in love with was related to you by blood?”

  He put his hand over his eyes again. He was leaning against his workbench, and he turned now and bent over it, resting on his elbows. Underneath his T-shirt I could see his thin shoulders begin to shake. How could I ever have wanted to hurt him? I thought. His old body was thin and frail and wasted. He’d never looked so small to me before. My grandfather is dying, I thought, and ten minutes ago I was shouting in his face. A wave of tenderness and regret washed over me with such enormity I had to sit down or I knew I would fall. The nearest object was the old riding lawnmower, the same one I’d ridden to Grandpa’s rescue all those years ago. I slumped in the bucket seat and pulled my knees up to my chest. My eyes were hot and wet.

  “Did Annie know?”

  Grandpa pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and honked loudly into it.

  “She might have,” he said, “but I doubt it. He never told Frederic. His son, I mean. He was as ashamed of it as I was.”

  There was no need for him to say who he was. We both knew he meant Annie’s father.

  “That’s why you didn’t want me to g
o to Montreal to visit her,” I said. “That’s why you kept saying it wasn’t right. Not because she’s a Simpson. Because we’re related.”

  Grandpa sighed.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “That’s why you said you had an obligation to go to Mr. Simpson’s funeral,” I went on. “Because he was family.”

  Grandpa nodded dumbly.

  “Jesus,” I whispered. Simpson was family. Family. That meant I was related to Mr. Simpson too. Nausea welled up briefly inside me as I remembered how Simpson had looked the morning he died, overweight and naked, with his one open eye twisted back into its socket. All along I thought we were alone in the world, I said to myself, and there I went and murdered my own flesh and blood.

  “Did my father know about this?”

  Grandpa shook his head sadly. “I never got the chance to tell him,” he said. “I was gonna, when he was older. But he didn’t get older.”

  “So he and Frederic never knew they were related?”

  “No.”

  “But you didn’t mind that they played together when they were boys?”

  “Hell no. In those days I thought there was a chance everything could be forgotten. I figured, why poison what the boys got going? Let them grow up with each other, and that way when they get to be men, once they found out the truth, they could just laugh it off. I never liked feeling bad toward Jack Simpson. I didn’t see any reason to pass it on.”

  “So you kept it a secret from my father?”

  “Every family has secrets, boy.”

  “But why keep it secret from me? Why? I’m the last Mann! I have to know everything! You told me that yourself!”

  “I’ve never lied to you,” said Grandpa. “But sometimes I leave things out. There’s a reason for that. It’s not because I thought you couldn’t handle the truth. It’s because there’s some things that need to be pulled out of the world. If nobody knows something, then it isn’t true any more. That’s why there’s things I haven’t told you. To filter them out, like. To kind of clean things up. We’re never going to get back to where we were if we stay stuck in the same old shit. The only way to purge badness is to kill it. Or to take it to the grave.”

  He sighed.

  “But I never figured on Annie entering the picture,” he said. “I felt God-awful bad for that girl, but I was relieved when she left town. I didn’t know how much you cared about her. I should have seen it. I guess I just didn’t want to. And now that you’re asking, I can’t lie to you,” he said. “That was one thing I swore I’d never do. And I knew you’d find out someday, when the diary came back. But I figured by then I’d be dead and gone.”

  “All right,” I said. “I understand.”

  “Did you and her…” He hesitated, blushing.

  “What?”

  “Did you and Annie ever…did you ever get together with her?”

  “You mean did we ever…?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No,” I said. “Never.”

  “Phew,” he said. He seemed greatly relieved. “Okay. Sorry. I had to ask.”

  “So where did it all start?”

  “You mean the feuding?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a long story,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, and then I paused. I wanted to pick my words carefully. My first instinct was to say, “No shit! Suppose you tell it anyway!” But I was disgusted with myself for smashing his teacup; in doing that, I’d hurt myself as much as I’d hurt him. I’d crossed some barrier in losing my temper, broken some silent taboo, one I’d never been aware of before but of whose violation I was now sharply aware. Thou shalt not throw one’s grandfather’s teacup to the floor. Thou shalt not threaten the elderly. Thou shalt not use the word fuck in front of Mildred. Inwardly I was wincing in shame.

  “Grandpa,” I said instead, “this is very, very important to me. Okay? I need to know it. And you know I need to know it.” And, I did not add, time is running out. You’re dying. Tell me now, please. Please. You have a very limited supply of tomorrows left, and the next one might be your last.

  Because, to tell the truth, I’d never fully believed the diary was going to show up, and I was sure that if Grandpa didn’t tell me himself, I would never know. And that was unthinkable.

  But I didn’t need to voice my most hideous thoughts. I looked at Grandpa as I thought them, and he looked at me, and he knew once again what I was thinking without my saying a word. A moment of understanding passed between us then. I sensed his body as though it was my own somehow, felt it growing frailer, felt his essence slipping slowly out of him. I had to grab with both hands onto the lawnmower; I felt, for a moment, that I was leaving my body. It was only a brief instant, but it was one of the more terrifying experiences of my life, and I still believe to this day that for a fraction of a second I ceased to be myself and became instead my dying grandfather, and moreover that he’d somehow caused me to feel that way, on purpose. It was that damned Mann telepathy again. Annie had complained once that it wasn’t easy being friends with a psychic, but that was nothing compared with how difficult it was to be one.

  “All right, boy,” he said. “You listen good. I’ll tell you everything. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Grandpa stepped up on a toolbox and boosted himself onto the workbench. He looked absurdly like a small child sitting there with his legs dangling off the edge. He stared for a moment at the wall behind me. I knew he wasn’t looking at anything in particular; he was, with his considerable mental powers, pulling away the curtain that veiled the past, to remind himself for a moment of what was there before he started describing it. For most people, this is a difficult task, requiring great energy and concentration. For Grandpa it had always been as easy as pulling on his socks.

  When he’d seen everything there was to see, and reminded himself of everything there was to be reminded of, he started talking.

  “You know about as much about Willie as everyone else in this town does,” he said, “but you don’t know as much about Willie as Willie himself would have wanted you to know. He would have wanted you to know the whole story, and if he were here, he would tell you himself. He felt shame, sure, but he got over it when he was an old man. Willie understood how important it was to tell the truth. But he didn’t go around town blabbing and confessing to everyone about what he’d done during the war, not because he was ashamed of it, but because he was a hero, and Mannville needed a hero bad. Every town does. Look around you. We don’t have much going for us. We have a grain mill, we have a bunch of farms, a few stores downtown. A decent beach. Your dad was the last real hero this town ever produced. Willie built a hospital, a school, a library, all the stuff people needed to feel like they were important. Like they were worth something. Like living in Mannville wasn’t a big waste of time. Willie wanted everyone to feel that way, and he knew that if people found out the truth about him, everyone would just want to curl up and die of embarrassment.

  “But me—he wanted me to know the truth. He hadn’t really been a war hero. That was just a story that got told around, kind of the same thing that happened to me when I came back from my war. People like to blow things out of proportion. Willie himself never made anything up. In fact, for years after he came home, he never said a word about the war to anyone. He clammed up tight, and that made everyone think he was just being modest. Next thing you know, he’s a legend. Finding that money didn’t help any, of course. Folks like to think there are a select few who are born to greatness. Willie was just that type, they thought. They figured if he was lucky enough to find the Rory treasure, then he was probably also a war hero, and the stories got bigger and bigger, and next thing you know they had him sitting next to Lincoln at the signing table at Appomatox, or giving advice to Grant on how to win battles.

  “Anyway. None of that was the real Willie. The real Willie was a scrawny sixteen-year-old kid when he left home to join the Army, underfed, wearing raggedy clothes, barefoot. In tho
se days the Manns were so poor they couldn’t even afford shoes—in fact, one of the reasons he wanted to join up was so he could be sure of getting regular meals and having decent clothes. Willie was bright, too, and he was a hard worker, but like most smart kids he hated farm life with a passion. That’s certainly understandable. I was none too fond of it myself. It’s grinding, boring work, day after day the same thing, rain or shine, summer or winter, and there’s always something broken that needs fixing, always some damn thing going on to get you out of bed or make you miss your dinner.

  “So when a war comes along, farm boys are usually first in line to enlist. War is glory, they think. Lots of guys leave home for a few years and come back heroes; why couldn’t it happen to them? They never stop to think that probably they’re just going to get an arm or a leg blown off, or even get killed outright, or if they don’t get hurt they’ll be haunted for the rest of their lives by the things they did to other men just like themselves. Every veteran on earth has nightmares, I can guarantee you that. I have them still. Your father probably had them even before he came home. I’m damn glad we’re not at war, boy, or you would most likely be in it yourself. You’re just like I was at your age. Then you would know what I’m talking about, and I hope to God you never do find out what I’m talking about.

  “So Willie hears about the war coming, and he gets all fired up. In those days there was just the tiny little shack here, three rooms, dirt floor, and there were—lemme see—six people living in it. Willie, his folks, his two brothers, and Daddo. So right there’s another reason he jumped at the chance to fight. Better food, new clothes, don’t have to live all cramped up in one little house anymore. So Willie heads off down the road to Buffalo, which in those days was a good three-day walk along the Lake Road. He was barefoot, and he had an old gun Daddo gave him. It was a muzzle-loader. Willie said it was longer than he was and it weighed a ton. After one day of walking with that gun he almost gave up and came home again, it was that heavy. But he didn’t. He stuck it out.