“You call your mother Jewel?”
“That’s her name.”
Miss Blount shook her head. “This is all very disturbing, very disturbing. How can a grown woman be afraid of a simple thing like lighting an oven?”
“Everybody is afraid of something,” I said defensively. “Look at how you screamed and jumped around and made a fool of yourself when a little field mouse came into your classroom. With you, it’s mice. With Jewel, it’s ovens. If you think about it, Miss Blount, her fear makes a lot more sense than yours. I mean people get burned to death all the time, but nobody’s ever been devoured by a field mouse.”
I was enjoying her blushing and stammering, but it was over all too quickly. “And what are you afraid of, Darcy?” she asked, changing the subject.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?” She raised her skinny, penciled-on eyebrows.
“Well, nothing like mice or ovens. My fears aren’t simpleminded like that.”
I saw her eye twitch at being called simpleminded, but she persisted, nonetheless. “Then what, Darcy?”
I was too young to understand that my brains were being picked for evidence, so I answered truthfully, “Sometimes, I’m afraid I’ll never get out of Galen, that I’ll grow old and die here.” For truly, at that time, I could not have imagined a worse fate for myself.
“And what makes you want to leave so badly? Do you hate it so?”
“No, not especially. But there are places, Miss Blount, so many places and cities and towns beyond Galen.”
“What kind of places do you mean, Darcy?”
“Places like—well, like Kathmandu.” I was too excited now to be careful.
Miss Blount wriggled her nose as if she suddenly smelled something sharp and sour. “Kathmandu?” she asked. “Whatever is that?”
“It’s the capital of Nepal,” I told her.
“Where is that?”
“I don’t know exactly, but it’s very far from here and I like the way it sounds. Kat-man-du,” I proclaimed, rolling the syllables around on my tongue.
The teacher frowned. I had managed to sidetrack her and she was annoyed. “But what about the inn, Darcy? Are things hard for you at home?”
“No. I eat regular, and I’ve got my own room.” Having your own room was no small distinction in Galen, where most kids slept with no less than three siblings to a bed. I was mighty proud of my independence, but Miss Blount was not impressed.
“There are more important things than rooms and food, Darcy,” she said firmly.
“Like what?” I asked, unable to imagine what could possibly be more important than eating regular.
“Well, religious convictions, for one. Christian ideals…”
That did it. As soon as she said the word Christian, her ploy was laid bare.
“What has your mother done about your religious upbringing?” she asked over her glasses. “We never see you in church.”
I didn’t answer immediately. The closest Jewel had ever come to religious instruction was when, on a real nice day and the weather was fine, she’d throw her arms wide and say, “On a day like this, can’t you just feel God with both hands?” Jewel was no churchgoer, partly, I think, due to her conviction that Reverend Hamilton would have had her stoned at the altar. With me and the girls, however, she neither told us to go to church, nor to stay away.
“We’re not Protestant,” I finally blurted out in our defense.
“Then what are you?”
“I don’t exactly know the name of it. It—it’s Jewel’s religion!”
“You mean to tell me that your mother has her own religion?”
“Kind of.”
“And where is her church?” Miss Blount asked disapprovingly.
“The inn, I guess.”
Miss Blount pursed her lips. “I can tell from our talk today, Darcy, that your mother hasn’t done right by you or your sisters.”
“Miss Blount, you’re wrong. Jewel’s always done right by us. No mother ever did better.”
“All children think that, Darcy,” she said, almost kindly. “Nevertheless, I feel that it is my duty to report the neglect of your religious training and suggest that Reverend Hamilton find good Christian homes where you girls can receive proper instruction. Of course, we’ll try to keep you three girls together, but—”
I was so mad by then that I didn’t hear the rest. That afternoon, I experienced my first cold rage. Before, I’d only had hot rages, the kind where your cheeks turn red and you feel like you’ve suddenly got a fever. That time, in Miss Blount’s classroom, was different. I moved not a muscle in my face; it was as if someone had covered me with a snow cold blanket, and with the cold came the calm, the calm that could be so frightening to those who later saw it in me.
“Miss Blount.”
“What is it, Darcy?”
I leveled my eyes to meet hers and saw her shift in her chair. “I want you to know that I could never let anybody separate my family. It may not seem like much of a family to you, but it’s mine, and I will always keep it together…no matter what I have to do, or who I have to hurt.”
She looked away, suddenly uncomfortable. “You’re too young to know what’s best for yourself and your sisters.”
I kept my eyes locked on her own. “We belong together, Miss Blount, and there’s nothing I won’t do to keep us together. And if anyone ever tried to divide us, I’d do anything to stop them, even things so terrible that a good Christian lady like yourself couldn’t even begin to imagine them.”
She stared at me, mouth dropped open in surprise, and I thought I saw her shiver. She shuffled some papers before saying, “My, my, my, it’s getting on to five o’clock, and you did say you had to be home by then.”
I was almost amused, watching my teacher’s desire to save me wrestle with her greater desire to save herself. And, of course, with someone like Miss Blount, the latter always won out, and I never heard talk about taking us away from Jewel again. Which was as it should be. Sometimes the family you find yourself in, though not the one you might have chosen, is the family you belong in for reasons that are beyond knowing but become important later in life. I know that’s convoluted, but it’s the best I can explain it.
Reverend Hamilton was another story. He’d had Jewel arrested four times for fortunetelling. Jewel kept changing her title, hoping to get him off her back. Sometimes she used the picture cards to tell the future, sometimes a crystal ball, or tea leaves, or plain old playing cards. She called herself by turns, advisor, reader, sister, mystic, seer, and spiritualist. But it was all “evil divination” to the reverend and the police, and she got locked up just the same. But never for very long, so that it was more a nuisance than anything else.
I know now what made the reverend so dangerous. He could do things that were wicked and hateful and convince himself that he was doing right, so that the more wicked he got, the more righteous he got, too, and the more elevated he supposed himself to be.
Sometimes, you remember things more clearly than you experience them and understand more about an event the farther away you get from it. Looking back, I think that Hamilton loved Jewel almost as much as he hated her, but he didn’t love her or hate her for herself, but for the parts of his own self he saw in her. Or maybe, he hated himself for loving a woman like Jewel, when his own Good Wife Gale left him unmoved.
I’ll say one thing: If Gale Hamilton had believed herself any more good and chaste and pure than she already did, she’d have built a shrine to her own likeness and worshipped at the altar. One year, around Christmas time, the church put on a play about the night Jesus Christ was born. Naturally, Gale, being the minister’s wife, got to run the whole thing, including picking out the six-to ten-year-olds in her Sunday school who would play the parts. Predictably, Joseph, the innkeeper, and the Three Wise Men were chosen fro
m the biggest church-supporting families in Galen. But didn’t everybody get a surprise when none other than Herself came riding in as Mary on a cardboard donkey. I guess when it came right down to it, Gale couldn’t bear for anyone else to play the role that was clearly written for her. She looked positively murderous when little Jamie Baumeister couldn’t remember his line and answered yes, when asked if there was any room at the inn. Perhaps Gale would have preferred to play the role of Jesus Christ, a part that was given to the only one on stage who didn’t overact, a plaster of Paris dummy. Had it been possible, I swear Gale Hamilton would have wrapped herself in swaddling clothes and jammed herself in that manger.
Gale Hamilton should never have been a mother, or the reverend, a father. It didn’t seem right that a person had to get a license to hunt or fish, but anybody, no matter how godawful or crazy, could have children. Jewel might not have been everybody’s first choice, but when I considered the Hamilton boys, I always felt myself real fortunate.
Maybe it was because of Reverend Hamilton’s constant pressure to be so good—or at least to appear so—that Aaron and Seth turned out so bad. There’s some kind of scientific law that if a thing’s pushed too far one way, it’ll eventually swing back the other way, with all the more force for having been pushed.
Aaron Hamilton was a little older than Caroline, and his brother, Seth, was born the same year as Jolene. Their house was just a mile down the road from the inn, but their father had issued strict orders that they were never to play with us, which probably made the prospect all the more tempting.
As I said before, even as a child, I did not play, preferring to keep my dignity and authority intact. Seth was content to fool around with Jolene and Caroline, but Aaron was forever begging me to join in with their games. When I steadfastedly refused, he’d sit out the game with me and try to make conversation.
I never liked Aaron Hamilton and instinctively tried to avoid him. Even young as he was, there was something unnatural about him. Jewel realized it, too, after the funeral parlor incident. Most people in Galen held funerals in their own homes and thought that those who availed themselves of funeral parlors for this purpose demonstrated a lack of respect for the dead. Jewel worked briefly for a funeral director fixing dead people’s hair. She often said that dead people made the best customers because they never complained. (Of course, on the other hand, she said, they never tipped either.) Sometimes, when the reverend was called on to comfort the bereaved, he’d bring his boys with him. Once, Jewel left a body to get a comb from upstairs; when she came back down, she found Aaron doing something terrible with the body. She never would say what he was doing exactly, just that we were to stay away from the Hamilton boys and to promise that when she died we’d lay her out at home and bury her near the Inn. And not to worry about her hair. She said once she was dead, she didn’t much care how her hair looked.
I tried to avoid both boys, but Aaron was not to be discouraged, despite my ignoring him and yelling at him to leave me alone. Aaron always came back for more abuse, and eventually I came to understand why.
One afternoon, while the girls and Seth were playing hide and seek and Aaron was leaning back against a tree, watching me read, the reverend appeared. Usually he was too busy off ministering to poor unfortunates to keep track of what his boys were up to. But that day, furious that his sons had defied his orders never to play with us, he made Aaron take his shirt off and hug an apple tree. Then he made a cat ’onine tails and whipped Aaron until great red welts rose on his bare back. Then he did the same to Seth, who screamed each time the whip cut him, though he dared not run. But Aaron had never made a sound. That was the difference between them. Somewhere inside Aaron Hamilton was a scream, and many years would pass before Galen heard it.
Next day, both boys were back, and curiosity made me break my silence. “After the beating you took yesterday,” I said, “how can you take the chance coming back here?”
Suddenly, Aaron looked very serious, without his usual smirk. “Nothing will keep me away from you, Darcy,” he said gravely. “Not flood. Not pestilence. Not famine. Not hell nor high water. Nothing.” And the way he said it made me shudder. This was not the idle pledge of a smitten school boy but the first stirrings of obsession, an omen of things to come. The oak is always in the acorn.
To say I became childhood friends with Aaron would be exaggerating, but sometimes he wore me down to the point where I would answer him when he asked me something, if all it took was a yes or no, and I might listen halfheartedly when he talked. The year I turned thirteen, Aaron started confessing things to me, telling me things I’d have slept better not knowing.
“Know that fire in old man Zook’s barn?” he asked, grinning.
I nodded yes. Old man Zook was a Mennonite with queer ways and Aaron for some reason had always hated him.
“I did it,” he said proudly. “Whooosh, that barn went up like human hair.”
A few minutes passed before I gathered myself enough to say, “Why?”
He shrugged his thin shoulders. “I love watching fires. They’re so pretty. All orange and gold.”
“Two of his horses got killed,” I said dully, feeling sick to my stomach. “And the old man nearly got killed himself trying to free them.”
“Ain’t my fault,” he said, and I didn’t argue with him.
Seth was almost as bad as his brother, but stupidity and clumsiness kept him from being as dangerous. Lacking Aaron’s cunning and imagination, Seth would willingly tag along with his brother’s schemes.
I never told Jewel about what Aaron had said about old man Zook’s barn. She’d have called the sheriff and he wouldn’t have believed me; even if he had, there was no proof, and Jewel would likely bring trouble down on our heads once again. So I kept my mouth shut and watched the old man painstakingly rebuild his barn with arthritic hands and a gimp leg. I never heard him complain. I guess he was used to having the things he worked for destroyed and resigned to the tedious labor of trying to restore them. Sometimes, my conscience bothered me, but I had my own family to think about. If I had helped old man Zook, then it might be our inn that Aaron took a match to next.
Most people in Galen would have liked nothing better than to see the Hospitality Inn go up in flames. There’s no denying the place was an eyesore. Years of neglect had taken their toll, and the sorry state of the guests we attracted didn’t help matters any.
Jewel was prone to romanticize innkeeping, but for me, there was nothing romantic about having a hoard of strangers regularly tramping through your house. “But we meet such nice people,” she’d insist. As for me, I lived in fear that one night one of those nice people would slit our throats for cigarette money while we slept. I bolted my door every night, though Jewel and the girls refused to do the same. Jewel thought the best way to protect yourself from something was never to think about it, to never even consider the possibility. Whereas I was certain that the best form of self-protection consisted of imagining every dark thing of which humanity was capable and putting a sturdy barrier between yourself and it.
I never forgot any of the guests who passed through over the years, which isn’t to say I remembered them either. Instead, they floated in some kind of limbo in the back of my mind, and from time to time, one or the other would step forward.
When Norma and Leon came to mind, I always had to laugh. They’d discovered the inn on their way to find factory jobs in Pittsburgh. One day, a pounding came at the door that was so powerful and immediate it rattled the hinges and shook the casing. I opened the door to find Leon on the stoop
“Open then the door,” he proclaimed grandly. “You know how little while we have to stay, and, once departed, may return no more.” As it happened, they stayed for a year. They were strange people, or I should say, strange for the world, but ordinary for the Hospitality Inn. Of course, they didn’t have enough money to pay, so Jewel told them about the Inn’s Spec
ial Savings Program, that only she herself had ever heard of before. Norma and Leon had the distinction of being the only couple whose failure to pay didn’t bother me. I figured that what they provided in entertainment more than made up for what they lacked in cash.
Norma was fat and fortyish, but she had a pretty face which is what everyone always says about fat girls, but she really did. Leon was thin and had a homely face and a querulous disposition, not unlike my own. Naturally, I liked him immediately. There were enough bones of contention between them to keep a dog chewing for years, and we all wondered how they had ever gotten together in the first place.
Norma hated Leon’s mother, and though she hadn’t seen the woman in more than three years, just knowing that she continued to draw breath was enough to vex Norma. “Go to your mother, Leon!” she’d say. “She’s waiting for you with open legs—I mean arms.” Then he’d go for her throat and Jewel would step between them.
Leon complained that Norma never kept up with her wifely chores, and it was her neglect of the laundry and ironing that particularly annoyed him. In spite of their limited funds, Leon was quite the dandy when it came to dress. “I never got no clean socks,” he lamented. So one day, when Norma had had enough of his sock talk, she marched upstairs, filled the bathtub, threw in Leon’s dirty socks, sprinkled them with powdered soap, removed them dripping wet, and flung them over the banister, where they landed across his upturned face. “Here’s your socks,” she announced, “clean as a whistle.”
For Leon’s part, his major crime in his wife’s eyes was the gold front tooth he proudly displayed when he smiled. Norma was convinced he had chosen gold over porcelain just to spite her by making himself look like a farmer. Most people harbor no ill will against farmers. Some are even grateful to them for feeding humanity. Norma was not one of these. But as with all our likes and dislikes, loves and hates, there was a reason for it.
Norma had grown up on a farm in Kansas where her father used to wake her at five each morning to feed the chickens. It had gotten so that Norma not only hated her father and chickens, but farms and farmers, and feathers and dirt, and anything that could even remotely remind her of the whole experience. When she came of age, she fled to New York City where she met Leon, as far from being a farmer as she could imagine. He’d been selling insurance at the time and always wore nice clothes, with his hair neatly slicked back with pomade. “Now here we are, twenty years on, and the bastard’s gone and gotten himself a gold tooth and started parting his hair down the middle just to drive me insane!” she cried.
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