by Tom Wright
with best regards
Thomas Jefferson Vickers
I heard L.A.’s breath catch, and as I finished the letter a sharp-edged image of Gramp came to my mind—a big man, whiskey-soaked but impossibly strong, with a voice like rocks rolling down a wooden chute, always good to me but somehow crossways with Mom and Aunt Rachel for as long as I could remember.
Gram said, “Silence has ruled us for too long. The time has come to put an end to that.” She honked into her tissue. “I’ve lost track of the occasions when I argued with Mrs. Bruhn that what she seemed to be driving at couldn’t be so, that so monstrous a thing wasn’t possible, not in our family. But finally the weight of it became too much, too many things began to make sense to me at last—I simply couldn’t deny it any longer.”
Just then Mom came in the front door, looking mad, confused and maybe scared all at once, but trying not to show any of it. Not so different from me, I realized. She was wearing blue jeans and sandals and a tight orange pullover top with no sleeves, not an outfit Gram would approve of, I knew, but to me she was as beautiful as ever, and at that moment I missed her so much I could hardly breathe. I wanted to hold her, to make this instant last, but I also wanted to turn away or shut my eyes or maybe even yell at her. At that point my thoughts bottle-necked, and I ended up not saying or doing anything.
Mom dropped her purse and car keys on the coffee table and flopped into the green easy chair. “Hi, baby,” she said to me as she shook out a Kool and lit it with the thin lighter from the pocket on the side of her leather cigarette case. “Hi, Lee Ann. You guys doin’ all right? I’m about burned down myself.” She crossed her legs and blew out smoke. “Rachel coming or not?” she asked the ceiling.
L.A. bit her thumbnail. Jazzy huddled in her lap, looking from Mom to Gram and back.
“You heard her say she’d be here, Leah,” Gram answered. “This would be an excellent time for her to live up to her word.”
Mom looked at Gram. “Yeah. Right. Well.” She fiddled with her cigarette and the ashtray.
Suddenly Aunt Rachel banged in through the front door, seeming not to notice L.A. looking away from her, then glanced around at all of us and sort of let her shoulders drop. “Just the women and children, huh? Good.” She shot me a look and said, “Sorry. No way we need to be calling y’all kids anymore, is there? My God, look at the size of you, Bis. Where’d you get those shoulders?” Even at this distance I smelled the alcohol on her breath. Just alcohol, no whiskey or gin smell, so it was vodka, probably straight from the bottle as usual.
Aunt Rachel was a little more hard-edged than Mom, with sharper movements and a more direct way of looking at you. Her hair, the same color as L.A.’s but not as out of control, was brushed back to show the little amethyst earrings she wore. In this light it was just barely possible to see that one of her eyes was green and the other brown. She was usually a boots and jeans kind of person but now was wearing her tan skirt with a light blue blouse. She set her purse on the end table and went into the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open and close, and a minute later she came back with a bottle of Dr Pepper.
“This stuff is an addiction all by itself,” she said and sat on the couch next to me, glancing first at Gram, then at L.A. L.A. met her eyes for the first time, and a look sizzled between them. “So is it truth time, or what?”
Gram took off her glasses, looked down at them and pinched the bridge of her nose. “In a way, I suppose that would be refreshing,” she said with a break in her voice. “I can’t say how it affected Leah, but Mrs. Bruhn has refreshed me with considerable truth lately. And dear Lord, I think today it was about all the refreshment I could’ve lived through. However, one goes on—if one can. And there are things we must deal with.”
She wiped away tears again and put her glasses back on.
“Mom,” said Mom tightly. “Why can’t you just leave it alone? What are you after here?”
Gram stared at her for several seconds, then said, “Leave it alone, Leah?”
“Yeah, leave it alone. What’s the point now, after all this time?”
Another hard look from Gram. “Then it is true,” she said.
This was one of those exchanges that sometimes happened between women—especially when one of them was Gram—seeming to me to leave out whole paragraphs but still going straight to the next page with no loss of meaning or rhythm.
“I’m going home,” said Aunt Rachel. She didn’t move.
Gram looked at all of us one at a time, even Jazzy. “Leah, you and Rachel are my flesh and blood,” she said. “So are these two youngsters. I love all of you with my whole heart, and what has happened to you hurts me more than I can express, more than I think you will ever know. But we are not going to live under this poisonous cloud of deceit any longer.”
“That’s easy for you to say . . .” said Aunt Rachel, drawing a line with her finger down through the beaded condensation on her Dr Pepper.
“No, dear, it isn’t,” said Gram. “Far from it. But I am through with willful ignorance, and so are we all if I have any say in the matter. I needed to hear Mrs. Bruhn today, like it or no. And I need for us all to face the truth right now.” She looked at each of her daughters.
“Good Christ,” said Aunt Rachel.
“Yes, I’d like to think so,” said Gram. “But I do often wonder.” She closed her eyes for a second, then said, “But I ask—no, I demand—that you tell me here and now, both of you, why I didn’t know this terrible, terrible thing about you and your father. Why neither of you found a way to talk to me. Or to someone.”
There was a long silence. Finally Mom said, “Oh, fuck,” and stabbed her cigarette out in the ashtray. “That’s totally unfair, Mom. Would you have even heard it back then? Could you have stood up to him?”
“Shut up,” said Aunt Rachel.
I noticed L.A.’s jaw was tight and her eyes full. Gram took a jerky breath and looked down at the tissue she was holding. “I suppose that’s a reasonable question,” she said. “Evidently neither of you thought I could.” She looked up. “Was I, for the love of God, the only one in Rains County who didn’t know?”
“I was just so scared,” said Mom.
“Shut. The. Fuck. Up,” said Aunt Rachel through her teeth.
Mom looked at her sister, then at me, and down at her own hands. “At first I didn’t understand it,” she said. “I didn’t know things like that weren’t supposed to happen. Then later when I did understand, he said if I told I’d be taken away and locked up and never see you or Rachel again.”
“Jesus, Leah,” said Aunt Rachel. “Like you didn’t follow him around. Like you didn’t offer it to him.”
“Goddamn you, Ray!” Mom screamed. “You are so full of shit! At least I never asked for it in the mouth! Asked for it, Ray! Down on my pretty little knees!” She thumped her knees with her fists.
Throwing her head back and baring her teeth, Aunt Rachel let out a strangled moan and grabbed a fistful of her own hair in each hand as if she were trying to tear it out.
“No!” Gram stood up suddenly and threw her glasses to the floor with both hands. “By God, no! That’s enough! This is not what I brought you all here for, and I won’t have it!”
There was a crackling silence. Mom and Aunt Rachel glared at each other, panting, as I bent down to pick up Gram’s glasses. L.A. was holding Jazzy tightly and looking bleached out. Jazzy trembled all the way out to the ends of her whiskers.
“Your father was an alcoholic,” said Gram. “I didn’t fully comprehend that then and I probably don’t even now. Thomas himself certainly didn’t. I was raised to expect men to drink; it was simply the normal thing. Even if it hadn’t been for the church and what people might have thought, I wouldn’t have left him. Not just for that. Not with you two girls to support.” Gram slowly sat back down, accepting her glasses as I held them out to her. “But dear God, if I’d only known about the rest of it,” she said. Glaring at her daughters one after the other, sh
e said, “How dare you not tell me!” She slammed her fist down on the chair arm, her voice breaking. “How dare you!”
I saw Gramp again in my mind, this time on his tractor, dressed as he usually was at home in overalls and a railroad shirt, muddy brown boots on his feet and a straw hat on his head, his veined hands big as catcher’s mitts and hard as hickory knots. Because I was so good at eavesdropping, I knew most of what had happened to him: it had been late in the year, on a clear, cold, windy day. Coming home from her Eastern Star meeting, Gram had found him dead in the gazebo behind the house under the big willow that stood by the lily pond where he’d hung a swing for the kids. After buying a new box of Federal shells at the Western Auto store in town he’d taken the old .32 revolver that he kept in his sock drawer out to the gazebo along with his whiskey bottle, a glass, a green Scripto pencil and Gram’s stationery tablet, and sat in the wooden glider he himself had built for Gram. Before putting the muzzle of the pistol to his temple and pulling the trigger, he’d used the Scripto pencil to write the letter L.A. and I had just read.
Aunt Rachel had arrived just after it happened, and she and Gram had come up with a story about a gun-cleaning accident that satisfied the sheriff, but they knew the truth then and we all knew it now, even if none of us had ever spoken it.
And now it was obvious why Mom and Aunt Rachel had never seemed to want to go out to Rains County, where Gram and Gramp lived then. Thinking about all of it, I became aware that I couldn’t look at Mom. I had an image of Hubert saying, “Ooh, sweet mama!” and grabbing himself as he grinned at her, and I clenched my teeth against the nausea that boiled up in my throat.
Gram said, “May God forgive me for my failures. I’ve been weak and I’ve been blind and I am sorry, but there is more than enough blame to go around. Except for these two youngsters here, none of us is innocent.”
She looked at me and then at Mom, who concentrated on her fingernail. I didn’t know what was in L.A.’s mind, but I didn’t consider myself the least bit innocent. Maybe words like that had different meanings at different stages of life.
“I realize that Jack may not face any legal consequences for what he’s done to James,” Gram went on. “But at least we’re going to function as a family this time.” Her fierce gaze went around the room. “Aren’t we?”
Aunt Rachel had crossed one leg over the other and was waggling her foot up and down. She frowned at her Dr Pepper.
“And it’s not just what happened to you girls and to James,” said Gram. “Someone will tell me right now about Lee Ann and Camden.”
“What do you mean?” said Rachel.
“I want to know what has happened to this girl.”
L.A. and Jazzy looked at Gram. So did Mom.
Without meeting Gram’s eyes, Aunt Rachel said, “You mean why her and Cam couldn’t get along?”
“What little intelligence I have is battered enough, dear—please don’t insult it further.”
“Then what the hell are you trying to say?” Aunt Rachel asked, setting the Dr Pepper bottle on the floor. “Make sense, Mom.” Looking at her expression, I had the feeling she knew as well as the rest of us how dumb and hopeless this sounded.
Gram ignored her. L.A.’s face was whiter than ever, and I saw that she and Gram were now looking at each other as if no one else were in the room—a full female eyelock. Large, dangerous things were being decided.
“Your father used you sexually, didn’t he, Lee Ann?”
“Whoa, HEY!” Aunt Rachel yelped.
L.A. kept her eyes on Gram’s, breathing like she’d just run up a flight of stairs. Jazzy’s whiskers went on trembling and she glanced at Aunt Rachel, then up at L.A., then put her chin down on L.A.’s knee.
“Is this what you got me over here for?” Aunt Rachel gritted out. “I’m getting sick and damn tired of this shit, Mom.”
But nobody paid any attention to her. Finally L.A. looked down at her own hand as it ruffled Jazzy’s fur and then looked back up at Gram. The silence was almost impossible to endure. After a second or two Gram drew in a deep breath through her nose. The answer had passed between L.A. and her, and I knew nothing could ever be the same with us after this. Looking at L.A., seeing her in a way I never had before, I remembered her curled up asleep in her clothes under all those pillows on the bed with the light still on and my Swiss army knife clutched in her fist.
Gram hung her head, weakly twisting the used-up tissue in her hand. Finally she said, “My God in heaven—the sins of the mothers.” She wiped at the corner of her eye with what was left of the tissue.
Aunt Rachel said, “Goddamnit, Mom! How can you be doing this? Haven’t we got enough trouble as it is?”
Mom had been staring at Rachel, her mouth half open. She said, “So that’s why she—”
“Don’t you start up again, Leah!” yelled Rachel.
There was a strange kind of settled, broken look on Gram’s face as she watched L.A., the two of them totally disregarding the noise Aunt Rachel was making.
Gram put her hand on L.A.’s knee. “Have you told Dr. Ballard?”
L.A. gave one quick shake of her head.
“I think I can imagine why not,” Gram said in a shaky voice, trying without much luck to control her tears. “But at some point it’s going to be necessary, isn’t it?”
Aunt Rachel paced around the room, running her hands desperately through her hair, as if there were things in it that had to be clawed out. She turned to Gram. “Mom, for God’s sake, they’ll lock him up, don’t you know that? Is that what you want?” She faced L.A. “Is that what you want? Your own father in jail?”
L.A. gazed at her mother as the seconds went by. Finally she said, “I don’t have a father.”
“Oh, shit!” Rachel screamed. “Shit shit SHIT!” She held up her arms as if praying for rain.
For a while now Mom had been watching her with a funny expression. Then she said quietly, “Ray, you’re trying to act like you didn’t know, but you did. You had to.”
“What? What the hell’s wrong with you, Leah?” Aunt Rachel stopped pacing and glared at Mom. “Hell, no, I didn’t know. I don’t know. It’s not true, goddamn it!”
“You knew,” said Mom.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Rachel yelled. “Can you please just shut the fuck up, Leah? For once in your goddamn life?”
“When you quit sleeping with Cam and moved into the other bedroom, Ray. Or didn’t come home at all. That’s when you gave Cam your daughter.”
L.A. turned her face away. I could see she was going to cry. I already was.
“You’re all goddamn NUTS!” Aunt Rachel screamed.
“You knew,” said Mom. “There’s no way you didn’t.”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
“All those books and magazines full of naked kids stashed everywhere—I bet he whacks off a dozen times a day.”
“No-no-no-no!” yelled Rachel, covering her ears. She bent forward as if she were going to throw up.
Gram got to her feet. All of us but Aunt Rachel watched her walk unsteadily across to the telephone.
6 | Casualties
I DON’T want to tell Dee Campion’s story, at least not this part, the part about how it ended, but I have to. And I won’t disrespect him, or Gram, by saying this is what happened to him. Gram taught me better than that. I have to tell what Dee and his dad and I did. What it all means is probably not for me to say, but it made me wonder for the first time in my life if it’s actually possible to sell your soul.
One of the most important things to know about Dee is that he was an artist, and the way I’ll always see him in my mind is standing at the easel in his room, painting some arrangement he’s set up on a little card table in the light of the north-facing window. I see the same light surrounding Dee, making him glow like a religious painting himself as he moves the tip of his brush around in the paint and water and then touches it to the paper to create a curled root hair or almost-transparent seed. As he works, his face bec
omes still and neutral and he seems to lose track of the world.
I never spoke to Dee or made any unnecessary noise when he was like that, knowing he was in a place that wasn’t mine to enter or disturb. In that way he was like a placekicker or a diamond cutter, impossible for regular people to really understand.
But Mr. Campion didn’t see Dee or his paintings the way I did. Sometimes he’d stand for a minute watching Dee at the easel and his face would go red, or he’d hitch up his pants and march into his study, where everything was leathery and solid. On the study walls were what seemed like dozens of photographs of Mr. Campion smiling at the camera from between the horns of downed game, or shaking hands with some ballplayer, or sitting on a horse, and at the center of everything, a rosewood-framed gold putter he’d won the year before last in the pro-am at Cedar Crest. He’d rock back in the chair at his desk and twiddle a pencil or play with the letter opener as he looked up at the stuff on the walls.
Some days he’d take me out to the driving range to hit a bucket of balls, Dee not saying anything as we left, just standing there with a brush or paint rag in his hand. Sometimes I’d look back at him as we walked out to the car, trying to understand his expression, half wanting him to object. Other times Mr. Campion and I would go into the den, find a game on TV and talk defensive alignments and quarterback tendencies while Mrs. Campion did something in the kitchen and Dee painted in his room.