Mortal Memory

by Thomas H. Cook

  For a long time, he didn’t see me. Then, suddenly, he lifted his head and turned his eyes toward me, his gaze lingering on my face, but very dully, the way Jamie sometimes stared at his open textbook. For a time, his expression remained blank, the face of a mannequin in a shop window, colorless, with dim, unlighted eyes.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said.

  He didn’t answer at first, but after a moment, he smiled very softly, then said in a low, broken voice, “This is all I want.”

  This is all I want.

  Neither that evening, as I went back upstairs, nor in the years to come, did I ever give the slightest thought to what he might have meant by that. And yet, almost without my realizing it, it had always suggested to me that on that particular October night, a full three weeks before the murders, my father had already determined that we were going to die, that he was going to remove everything that stood between him and whatever it was he wanted out of life.

  What did your father do?

  After that day in November, the question took on a completely different significance. After that day, he could no longer be defined by what he “did” for a living. He could no longer be reduced to the man in the hardware store on Sycamore Street. What he “did” was kill his family.

  But as I’d watched Mrs. Fields walk to the kitchen door, knock, start to knock again, but grow rigid instead, then return to the car, I hadn’t realized that the strained, tortured look on her face was the same one I would see from now on when I answered the question truthfully. What did your father do? He killed my mother, my sister, and my brother, then waited in the kitchen to kill me.

  It was all in Mrs. Fields’s face that afternoon, the world’s response to my father, the dread and horror his image would conjure up forever.

  I could see her eyes in the rearview mirror as she wheeled the car into her own driveway, tense, darting, as if desperately trying to avoid her own terrible conjectures. Bobby was bouncing playfully on the seat beside me, the rain blowing against the car window, pounding at it with huge gray drops. Mrs. Fields opened the back door and pulled him out, almost violently, so that he squealed “Mom,” then ran into the house. I looked at her curiously, trying to determine if I’d done anything to cause the strain and alarm I could see in her face. She lifted her hand toward me, the painted red fingernails like little arrows of light in the shadowy interior of the car.

  “Come out, Stevie,” she said, still offering her hand.

  I took it reluctantly, let it tug me out into the rain, then bolted for the front door of the house. Bobby was waiting for me down the hall. He motioned me into his room. He didn’t bother to close the door, and so I could hear Mrs. Fields on the phone a few feet away. She was clearly distressed. She was calling for help.

  For help, but not for the police. She called Mrs. Hamilton instead. I could hear her voice, hesitant, restrained, and although I can’t be sure that I gathered the words in exactly, I know the kind of call it was:

  “Hello, Jane? This is Mary Fields.”

  “Oh, hi, Mary.”

  “Jane, I was just over at Dottie Farris’s house. Stevie is with me, and I was bringing him home. And well … I went to the door, the one at the kitchen, and I saw …”

  It was only at that moment, Mrs. Hamilton would say later, that she remembered the three muffled booms that had swept through the sheeting rain that afternoon, the second rapidly following the first, the third coming several minutes later.

  Several minutes.

  What, during those several minutes, did Mrs. Hamilton, the gray, overweight wife of the town’s only Presbyterian minister, think was going on across the street at 417 McDonald Drive?

  Several minutes.

  Later, when I began my search, I read those two words in the thick file which the Somerset, New Jersey, Police Department finally allowed me to see: “Witness stated that although the second shot followed closely after the first, there was a duration of several minutes between the second and final shots.”

  And then this: “Witness stated that the television program Queen for a Day had just ended, and therefore estimates the time of the last shot at between 3:55 and 4:00 P.M. EST.”

  And so, all across the Eastern Seaboard, Queen for a Day, with its bilious host and tacky audience applause meter, had just ended when the last member of my family died.

  What did your father do?

  Years later, looking at a series of police photographs while two uniformed officers watched me warily from the other side of the room, I tried to reconstruct the grim choreography of my family’s murder:

  From them it seemed clear that Jamie had been the first to die. In the pictures, a set of bloody tracks lead from Jamie’s room down the upstairs corridor to Laura’s. She’d probably been near the window when she heard first the deafening roar which came from Jamie’s room, then footsteps moving down the corridor, and last the sound of her own door as it opened toward her. Reflexively she turned toward it, and saw my father standing there, the barrel of his shotgun lowering toward her. Against its blast, she raised her hand, perhaps to shield her face, or perhaps in a pleading motion which he immediately refused.

  From Laura’s room, the tracks, still thick with blood, lead directly to the room opposite Laura’s, the master bedroom, the one with the floral curtains. He must have found it empty, because my mother was not killed in that room. There were no spattered walls, no blood-soaked carpet for the police to photograph in that dimly lighted bedroom.

  The tracks head back down the corridor, down the stairs, into the living room, and through it to the small solarium, where they move into it a little way, then turn and head out again. It is a line of trajectory which could only mean one thing. That my mother was trying to escape, but witlessly, never thinking of leaving the house, too passive even to make that final domestic break.

  The tracks then move back through the living room, a little wider now, for he is searching for her desperately, taking longer steps, perhaps in fear, or rage. Certainly, he is moving faster.

  The tracks are seen in the dining room next, then in the kitchen. Still, she eludes him. He wheels around, leaving a slender mark on the tile floor to indicate the fierceness of his turn, how for just an instant, he lifted almost entirely from the ground, whirling on the backs of his heels.

  The tracks move again, toward the door that leads to the basement, then down the wooden stairs toward its flat cement floor. At the third step from the bottom, they stop.

  Because of the hard rain which had been falling for hours by late that afternoon, water had seeped into the basement, a small lake gathering near the middle of the room. My mother passed through that puddle several times, her watery trail making a bizarre and illogical pattern on the cement floor. Perhaps she ran about, zigzagging in her terror, while he stood on the third step, laboring to bring her into his sights.

  At last, she came to rest in a back corner, behind the huge cardboard box in which she stored our Christmas decorations. It was there that he raked her with a third and final blast.

  All of this, then, was what my father did.

  And in the years that followed, it was to this single horrendous act I had reduced him. All his life had collapsed into a single savage and explosive instant. I couldn’t imagine his life before or after it. My father was frozen forever as he had stood upon that third step, his shoes still glistening brightly with my brother’s and my sister’s blood.

  But there had been a life before that one murderous instant. Not a great life. Not a life of high achievement, or even noble failure. But a life nonetheless, the kind that most of us live, plain but sturdy, building day by day a structure that holds up.

  My father, as I came to discover, was a country boy. Throughout all his early years, he lived on a small farm in rural New York. Each day, he did the chores common to children on a farm. He gathered eggs, milked cows, cleared the weeds that sprouted intransigently among the neatly proportioned rows of the family garden. In the summer he swam in the
great blue lake several miles away. In the fall he went to a country school named for Daniel Webster where he learned to read and write sufficiently to carry out the basic tasks of life. Later, when he was fourteen, he transferred to the high school in the nearby town of Highfield. It was named for a local boy who’d died in the Spanish-American War, and my father graduated from it at somewhere near the middle of his class in June of 1931. In the class photograph, taken at the town ball field on graduation day, he is positioned on the back row, the fifth boy from the left, his black hair greased back, staring at the camera with an ordinary smile. Inside the high school yearbook for that same year, a slender volume made of cheap paper and bound in leatherette, and which I found in one of the boxes I inherited from Aunt Edna, he is said to have been a member of the baseball team. A picture shows him individually, dressed in a flat black suit and bow tie, his nickname printed underneath: Town Crier.

  Town Crier. What had his classmates meant by that? Was there something in him that suggested warning and alarm, a sense of being startled from one’s sleep? Had the faces of his classmates ever grown taut as they stared into my father’s youthful eyes? When some of them later read of what he did, were there a few among them who had not been surprised?

  I wondered about his parents, too. In photographs they are a sturdy, farming couple, plain in that way that makes plainness seem beautiful, noble, and even a little superior to more sophisticated and elaborate things. At night, when the lights were out, and they lay together in the darkness, had they ever voiced the slightest concern for some odd look or disturbing word they’d noticed in their only son?

  During all his early years, my father lived with his parents on the same small farm. It was nestled in a grove of trees, with a broad expanse of field on either side. The house still stands, and only a few weeks before Rebecca, I visited it for the first time. Peter, my nine-year-old son, had spent the summer at a camp in upstate New York, and around the middle of August, Marie and I drove up to the camp to pick him up and bring him back home. I had a Volvo station wagon then, and we piled all his belongings into it and headed back toward Connecticut.

  I hadn’t intended to visit the little house where my father grew up, but on the way to the expressway I saw a small sign for Highfield. I recognized the name, although I’d never been there. My father’s parents had died within a year of each other when he was only twenty-five, and evidently he’d never felt the need to visit the farm after that. I don’t think he ever took my mother there, or Jamie or Laura. At his parents’ death, it appeared to have dissolved from his mind.

  But it hadn’t dissolved from mine, and according to the sign, it was only twelve miles away. Even so, I continued straight ahead, expecting to turn onto the expressway well before I reached the town. It was Marie who stopped me, looking quizzically in my direction only a few seconds after we passed the sign.

  “Highfield,” she said finally, her eyes drifting over to me. “Isn’t that the town your father came from?”

  I nodded silently and kept driving.

  “He was born there, right?”

  “On a little farm right outside it.”

  “When did he leave?”

  “When he graduated from high school, I think.”

  Marie turned back toward the road. She knew about my father, of course, and I think that something in him, his sudden, inexplicable murderousness, had always interested her. Early on, she’d asked a great many questions about what he was like, probing like an amateur, somewhat Freudian detective, looking for the reason, as if there were some twisted secret in his past, which, if unearthed, would bring everything to light.

  “Wouldn’t you like to see the house?” she asked after a moment.

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because he was your father,” she answered.

  I glanced in her direction. “I think you’re the one who wants to see it.”

  She shook her head. “No. You do.” She smiled. “It’s only natural. Why don’t we drop by?”

  I shrugged. “Okay,” I said.

  And so I didn’t get on the expressway that afternoon, but headed toward Highfield, then drove through it, searching for the small road that Quentin had long ago described, a road that wound off to the right at the end of a stone wall.

  The road came up shortly, looking like little more than a cattle trail through a green field. A narrow sign marked it with the words I’d seen on the letters my father had written to his parents during the brief time he’d lived in New York City: Lake Road.

  I slowed as I neared the sign, stopped just before I got to it and looked at Marie. I remember very well the clipped, un-dramatic exchange that followed:

  “Should I?”

  “Why not? … It’s just a house.”

  And so it was. Just a house, run-down a bit, but otherwise as I might have expected. The yard was neatly mowed, and a line of flowers had been planted along the small walkway which led to the front door. Two large trees kept the grounds heavily shaded. It had a gravel driveway, but no garage, and as I got out of the car, I could see an old wooden fence, weathered and dilapidated, which, I suppose, my father had helped build.

  I left Marie and Peter in the car, walked up the small walkway to the house and knocked at the door. The woman who answered it was middle-aged, plump, her hair pinned up behind her head. She was wiping her hands with a dishcloth bordered with small red flowers.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She nodded, neither friendly nor unfriendly, simply curious to know who I was.

  “My name is Steven Farris,” I told her.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “This is a little strange,” I added, “but years ago my …” I choked briefly on the word, but nonetheless got it out. “… father lived here, in this house.”

  The woman smiled. “Oh,” she said and, without another word, swung open the door. “I guess you’d like to see it then.”

  “Well, I don’t want to disturb you.”

  “No, not at all,” the woman said. She leaned out the door slightly. That your family?” she asked, eyeing the people in the Volvo.

  “Yes.”

  They want to come in?”

  “I guess so,” I told her, then turned and waved Marie and Peter toward the house.

  We were only there for a short time. Marie engaged the woman in conversation, the two of them finally heading up to the second floor, while Peter sat indifferently in the foyer, lost in one of his electronic games.

  And so, for a moment, I was alone in my father’s house. Not alone physically, of course, but alone in the way that I could look at it without distraction.

  At first, I wandered into the living room, glancing at the old fireplace, the neatly arranged furniture, the varnished wooden floor. A great number of family photos hung from the walls, sons in uniform, daughters in communion dresses, and later, grown older now, these same boys and girls with strangers at their sides, children on their knees, the boys with moustaches or thinning hair, the girls with wrinkled eyes. Time went forward on the wall, and hair retreated even more, faces grew more slack. The children left their parents’ knees to dress in uniforms and bridal gowns, choose strangers from a world of strangers, have children of their own.

  “Steve, you want to look upstairs?”

  It was Marie’s voice. She was standing on the staircase, leaning over the rail. “His room must have been up here,” she said.

  I headed toward her, walking up the stairs, touring the house now as if it were a black museum, my father’s room cordoned off as Washington’s or Lincoln’s might have been, all the furniture in place, but with an atmosphere altogether different, sinister and grave.

  Marie was standing at the end of the short corridor, poised beside an open door, the woman standing beside her, smiling sweetly.

  “This must have been it,” Marie said. “There are only two bedrooms up here, and the other one’s big, so it must have been for his parents.”

  It
was the amateur detective at work again, and as I walked to where Marie stood like a guide waiting for a straggling tourist, I remember resenting how flippantly she had come to regard the story of my father, treating it more as a childhood tale, an imagined horror. Of course, I’d been partly to blame for that, answering her questions matter-of-factly, without emotion, like a reporter who’d covered the story, rather than a child who’d lived it. Perhaps, because of that, she’d come to think that the whole dark history meant little to me, that I no longer felt its grisly power.

  And yet, for all that, Marie didn’t go in my father’s room, but remained outside, waiting in the corridor.

  I have often wondered why. Was there something in that tiny room that warned her away, the ghost of the black-haired boy his friends had called Town Crier?

  In any event, I went in alone, stood on the circular hooked carpet at the center of the room, and turned slowly to take it in. I felt nothing. Everything that might have given me some sense of my father had long ago been removed. His bed was gone, along with whatever he might have tacked to the walls, maps or photographs or pennants. If he’d ever had a desk or chair, they were gone as well. In their place, the new owner had put a small worktable and wooden stool. The table was covered with spools of different-colored yarn, along with an assortment of needles and brass clips. “I make things for the crafts fairs we have up here,” the woman said as she stepped up beside me. Then, glancing about the room, she added, “It makes a nice little work space, don’t you think?” She smiled. “Very cozy.”

  She offered coffee and cake after we’d all gone back downstairs, but neither Marie nor I felt inclined to take her up on it. Instead, we thanked her for her generosity, returned to the car, and headed home, the old house growing small in my rearview mirror before it finally vanished behind a sudden curve.