by R.J. Ellory
Fifteen minutes and I started the pickup once more. I made it to the hospital, a miracle in itself.
Gabillard was called. I waited for him with my head down, my hands in my pockets. When he came he seemed a much older man, his hair already white at the temples.
“Joseph,” he said, and in trying to smile he looked merely pained.
“Dr. Gabillard.”
“You received my letter, then.”
I nodded.
“I am sorry—”
I raised my hand and he fell silent. “Where is she?”
He tilted his head. “Follow me,” he said, his voice a whisper, and then he turned and started walking.
I felt the hope of my future subsiding as I walked, sound of my shoes on the linoleum like the rhythm of a broken heart.
Her expression was lost. Her hair was a white shock of fine wire, her skin folded tight around the eyes and the edges of her mouth, her pupils dilated with morphine. She was set up against the headboard with pillows, a blanket tucked beneath her chin like a shroud nearly arrived, and when she looked at me I felt more insubstantial than I believed it possible to feel.
“Mary?” Gabillard ventured. “Mary, Joseph is here, your son, Joseph.”
I stepped forward, as if her field of vision could not extend to the foot of the bed.
My mother, all of forty-five years old, looked the better part of seventy.
“Joseph?” she croaked. “Joseph who?”
“It’s me, Mother,” I said, summoning everything within me to refrain from turning and running away from that death mask.
“Mother?” she said. “Are you there, Mother?”
I took another step forward.
Gabillard was behind me with a chair, set it down so it touched the backs of my knees. I sat involuntarily. I reached out and placed my hand on hers.
“Joseph, you say?”
She turned her face toward me, and I saw that my mother had long since left this shell to find some better place.
“Yes, Mother, it’s me, Joseph.”
I sensed Gabillard’s retreat. I dared not look back over my shoulder.
“Joseph,” she said, and there was the ghost of a smile on her face. “Joseph. Joseph. I have waited a long time for you, dear.”
“I know, Mother, I know.”
“But I wanted you to come so you could hear them.”
I leaned closer. “So I could hear who, Mother?”
She smiled again, and there was something in her eyes, something that made me think that we had connected, that she was aware—if only for a split second—of who she was and that her son now sat beside her.
“All of them, Joseph . . . I hear all of them now.”
“Who? Who do you hear?” My heart thundered. My mind reeled. I believed that I knew what was coming, though how I could have known I could never comprehend.
“The girls,” she whispered, and the sound was like a breeze, a rush of wind, the snuffing of a candle, the movement of a cloud, the passage of someone through a field grown high with wheat.
My heart stopped. My eyes widened.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “They know you weren’t to blame. You did nothing to hurt them.”
She turned and looked toward the window. “I knew it was him . . . I knew it after the second or third one. Knew it was him out there in the darkness with his evil-minded thoughts. I knew it right from Ellen May and Catherine—”
I shook my head. “No,” I said, my voice weak and cracked with emotion.
My mother turned her hand and gripped mine, her fingers strong, grasping like claws. She seemed to pull me closer, for I felt drawn toward her, and within a moment my face was mere inches from hers.
“All along I knew, and that’s why it had to be done Joseph, that’s why it had to be done.”
“What?” I asked, and the terror flooded up inside me like a wave.
“Never meant to hurt her . . . only him. I couldn’t tell anyone. No one would have believed me. I had to exorcise the demon and cleanse the earth where he’d walked. I had to rout him out with the light of truth . . .”
Her voice trailed away. I tried to withdraw my hand but her grip was fierce.
“I had to rout him out with a cleansing fire, Joseph . . . I had to.”
And then I knew. Before she uttered another word, I knew.
Her eyes widened, and I saw then that she was crying. Swollen tears broke their surface tension and rolled down her cheeks.
“I had to burn him, Joseph . . . had to burn him out of that house.”
I closed my eyes. My breath came short and fast. I felt nausea rush through me like a wave.
“Joseph . . . I had to.”
I pulled my hand away from hers and backed away.
“No, Joseph, don’t leave. You don’t understand, I had to do something . . . I had no choice . . .”
“Enough!” I snapped. I backed away farther, started to turn, and it was then that I saw Gabillard.
There was something in his eyes, something that told me he knew.
“She told you,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own.
Gabillard did not respond, merely glanced away, and when he looked back at me his conscience was evident.
I began to shake my head. I pushed past him and through the door, almost at a run, and gathered speed in the corridor, thundering toward the exit as if everything I had ever wished to escape from was tearing at my heels.
I burst through the doors into the cold air. My breath rushed from my lungs, and I knelt there for a moment, trying to hold everything inside, but there was nothing I could do. I retched violently until it felt as if my throat was being torn out through my mouth.
“No!” I heaved. “No! No! No!”
But the truth was out. The Kruger fire. My mother had murdered Elena and paid the price with her sanity.
For a long time I did not move. No one came out to help me. Perhaps no one saw.
When I did move, it was back to the pickup, and though I was in no condition to drive I somehow made it back to Reilly Hawkins’s house.
I had learned a simple, painful truth.
My mother was as guilty as Gunther Kruger had ever been.
Twice I was sick in Reilly’s house. He sat quietly, rubbed my back as I leaned over the sink and brought up nothing but more pain. He didn’t say a word, not until I gathered myself together and sat at the kitchen table.
When I looked at him he smiled. “It was your birthday,” he said.
I frowned.
“Three days ago, your birthday, remember?”
I tried to smile. Shook my head. “No,” I whispered, my voice hoarse, my throat like razors.
“Yes,” he said. “And if I’d known you were coming I would have bought a gift.”
“If you’d known I was coming I trust you would have warned me to stay in Brooklyn.”
Reilly Hawkins smiled sympathetically. “How could I have known, Joseph?”
“I was speaking hypothetically.”
“I don’t know that we’ll ever really know the truth—”
“I’ve had enough truth for a good while,” I said. “I don’t think I can deal with any more.”
“You can’t be sure that she did this thing. She’s . . . well . . .”
“Crazy,” I said matter-of-factly. “Yes, she’s crazy as they come. And I think this is why.” I leaned forward and rested my forehead on the edge of the table. “I don’t know what happened that night. Maybe she thought he was there alone . . . God knows, Reilly.”
“And God will judge her, Joseph, it’s not our place to—”
I looked up and smiled. “I can’t deal with any religion, Reilly, not right now, okay?”
Reilly nodded. “Okay, Joseph, okay.” He reached forward, closed his hand over mine. “So tell me about Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn?”
“Sure, Brooklyn. Is it everything that you imagined it would be?”
I thought
of Aggie Boyle and Joyce Spragg. I thought of Paul Hennessy, Cecily Bryan, the St. Joseph’s Writers’ Forum. I thought of the ragged handfuls of pages that were supposed to be the start of The Great American Novel. I thought of what Alex would think of the person I was trying to become.
“Brooklyn is a world all its own,” I said. “Brooklyn and Augusta Falls don’t even belong to the same world.”
“And you’re working on something? You’re writing?”
“Some,” I said. “Nowhere near as much as I’d hoped, but yes, I’m working on something.”
“Called?”
“Just a working title,” I said. “But it’s called ‘The Homecoming’.”
“And there’s some shred of autobiography in there, yes?”
“No, nothing autobiographical. Purely fiction.”
“So what are you gonna do?”
“Do?” I asked. “How d’you mean?”
“About this thing . . . this thing with your mother.”
“I’m not going to do anything, Reilly. What would you have me do? Gunther Kruger is dead, Haynes Dearing has left, God only knows where he’s gone . . .”
“Down the neck of a bottle someplace, at least that’s what I heard.”
“Speaking of which, do you have anything?”
“A bottle of mash,” he said, and rose from his chair. He fetched it down from the cupboard above the sink, brought a couple of shot glasses, and filled them.
He raised his glass once he was seated. “To life. To the future of something other than this, eh?”
“Good enough,” I replied, and downed the whiskey. The raw heat filled my chest. It was a new sensation, something different from fear and nausea, and for this I was grateful. I reached for the bottle and refilled my glass.
“You’re going to go back?”
“To Brooklyn? Sure I am. I have nothing to stay here for.”
“True,” Reilly said. “And you’re going to write this book?”
“I’m gonna try, Reilly, I really am gonna try.”
“So stay the night, okay? Stay just the one night and go back tomorrow.”
“That I can do,” I said. “I can stay one night.”
“I have another bottle, we drink ’til we pass out.”
“There’s a language I truly understand, Reilly.”
TWENTY-THREE
OVER MY HEAD THERE ARE FALL LEAVES. LEAVES CURLED UP ON their branches like infants’ hands: some final, plaintive effort to capture the remnants of summer from the atmosphere itself and hold it close as skin. Soon it would be hard to recall anything but the brooding, swollen humidity that seemed to forever surround us. This winter was a bold and arrogant enormity of a thing, all clenched fists and sourmash-breath.
The little girl.
She digs and scrabbles. Hands like tight little bunches of knives as she scratches at the ground.
She thinks that if she scratches at the ground some deep, almost subliminal message will be transmuted by osmosis, absorption, anything . . .
As if the earth will be able to see what is happening to her and relay the message through soil and roots and stems, through the eyes and ears of worms and bugs and things that go scritch-scritch-scritch in the night when no one can see them, sort of things that cannot be seen with the human eye . . .
Scratching, clawing, fighting, kicking, punching the ground …
That by doing those things someone might hear her and come running and see the man.
Hunched over her with his skin that stank of outhouse and fetid swamp, of swollen river dirt and raw fish.
Someone would come and see.
Gunther Kruger working hard at his job. His real job.
But no one came.
I wrestled the sheets and blankets away from me.
A choking sound rushed out of me, and I fell sideways and landed on the cold floor. I lay there stunned and breathless for some time until I heard footsteps. For a heartbeat I believed that Death had come, walked down along the High Road to carry me away on the black river, my heart slowing, breathing staggered, falling silent now, closing my eyes . . .
“Jesus, what the hell happened?”
Reilly Hawkins standing over me, his hand outstretched, helping me up until I sat with my back against the bed.
I opened my eyes and looked down at my hands. They were shaking. “A dream—”
“Nightmare more like,” he said, and then his hands were beneath my arms and he was lifting me until I sat on the edge of the mattress.
“You want a drink of water?”
I nodded.
Reilly hurried from the room and went downstairs. I held my hands out in front of me. It was impossible to keep them still.
I pressed them against my chest, felt like some great winged animal was fighting to break free of my rib cage. I closed my eyes and leaned back.
And saw my mother’s face . . .
Had to rout him out with a cleansing fire, Joseph . . . had to . . .
“No!” I shouted, an involuntary sound.
Reilly appeared in the doorway, a glass of water in one hand, the bottle of mash in the other.
He set them down on the floor and then helped me to my feet and down the corridor. He sat me on the edge of his bed, pulled a blanket up around my shoulders, and then returned for the glasses.
“Just the water,” I said, and took the glass from him.
He smiled awkwardly. “Whiskey is for me,” he whispered. “You scared the living Jesus outta me, Joseph.”
He uncorked the bottle and took a swig.
“I’m s-s-sorry,” I stuttered.
“Don’t be,” he replied. “You have a right to be out at sea for a while.”
I nodded, tried to breathe deeply.
“Lie down,” Reilly said. “Try to go back to sleep. I’ll stay with you, okay?”
I said nothing. I handed him the glass and lay down slowly. I felt sleep tugging me back, and I was scared to go.
But I did go, eventually, and it seemed that whatever darkness was inside me had dissipated.
Homecoming, I thought, and drifted away silently.
Late the following morning, four days after my twenty-third birthday, my mother faded silently as well.
She was two months and four days shy of forty-six.
I was not present when she died, and felt grateful, as if some small mercy had been bestowed on both of us. She had found her escape.
It was early evening when I learned of her death, seated there in Reilly Hawkins’s kitchen, a meal before me untouched, my mind insufficiently strong to focus on anything, the day having stretched out behind me absent of all definition and clarity. Reilly had stayed with me but we had spoken little. He had not asked me about my departure, my intended return to Brooklyn, and had he asked I would not have been able to answer.
Dr. Piper drove down to Hawkins’s place because he figured that’s where I would be.
When he came I knew what he would say, but he told me well, and it seemed that such a thing was in the warp of his being.
“Gone,” he said quietly. “With peace, with a smile, Joseph, but she is gone.”
He did not know of her crime, and I would not be the one to tell him. I would tell no one. The secret she had shared with me would stay in my heart for as long as I could bear to hold it.
Perhaps there are scars—in the mind, in the heart—that never heal. Perhaps there are words that can never be spoken or whispered, words to write on paper that fold into a boat that sails out on a stream to be swallowed by the tide. Perhaps there are shadows that forever haunt you, that close up against you in those moments of private darkness, and only you can recognize the faces they wear, for they are your shadows, the shadows of your sins, and no earthly exorcism can ever expel them. Perhaps we are not so strong after all. Perhaps we lie for the world, and in lying for the world we lie for ourselves.
Later, when Dr. Piper’s words were nothing more than a memory, I cried for my mother.
&
nbsp; I cried for Elena Kruger: the one I’d promised to protect.
Early morning. Sky like hammered copper. Heart like a blunted fist. Rain fine as dust.
Buried my mother. Same plain deal coffin as my father. This time there was no Southern wake. I did not tie her clothes to a branch of sassafras and burn them. Gunther Kruger did not carry her body down the country blacktop on a flatbed truck. Afterward, there was no gathering in the kitchen of my childhood to tell tall tales of the life she had led.
This time there was nothing.
I did not cry for the woman who’d died; I cried for the woman I remembered. I stood over the grave and said some kind of prayer, a few words built on a thin hope with my eyes closed tight, screwed up in wrinkles like twists of paper. The rest of the world was elsewhere, seven leagues before me and still ahead of the wind.
And then I walked away, Reilly Hawkins on one side, Dr. Thomas Piper on the other.
It was Wednesday, October eighteenth, 1950.
“Maybe there’s a better place,” Reilly said.
“Maybe there isn’t,” I replied.
“Seems to me it’ll be a good while before either of us finds out, eh?”
I nodded but did not speak.
Two days later, on Friday afternoon, Reilly Hawkins drove me to the bus station in Augusta Falls.
I began the long journey back to Brooklyn.
I promised myself I would never return to Georgia.
TWENTY-FOUR
BY THE SUMMER OF 1951 I HAD RETURNED TO MY WRITING. The money from the sale of the house had been released, and I had received more than three thousand dollars. I stayed on at Aggie Boyle’s, but many things had changed. I had watched as my heart slowly healed, and of my mother’s confession I said nothing. My relationship with Joyce Spragg, however meaningful it might have been, died a slow but painless death. I continued my allegiance to the Writers’ Forum, and Paul Hennessy had become my closest friend. It was he who encouraged me to continue The Homecoming.