by Brian Hodge
He looked over the back of the boarding house, and up at the stars, and at the fog all around—glad, for once, to see every bit of it, and more. He held a hand in front of his eyes, pleased he’d not had to stretch it out and beg, trading pride for coins.
“Bloody old world looks awful good sometimes, you know, William?” he said. “Even from in ‘ere.”
Burke just glowered at him. “Wot kinda sneaky talk is that?”
Another moment later, explaining himself to his inferior was the lowest of his priorities. His skin itched and his internals burned and his bones ached. He felt gripped in the hand of God, eager to stir his parts and whip them into something new.
“William…?” he warbled. “Whatta you done, William?”
“Can’t get yourself a Hyde one way, you gets ‘im another,” said Burke. “Stuff ain’t easy to come by now…that bad batch o’ Jekyll Juice. Best to know the proper people. And it ain’t cheap, no matter who ya knows. Talk is, they burnt the madder what brewed it up. For the best, prob’ly.”
Hare dealt the bars a fierce but futile shaking, and only now did he notice that the cage was resting on their flatbed cart, ready for transport.
“Come on, William…you don’t wanna do this.” He felt the bristles sprout across the back of his neck. “What’s Burke without ‘is Hare, eh?”
“Guess I’ll be earnin’ enough wedge to find out.” Burke sucked at his teeth. “Get ourselves to Pretorius, and we’ll call you and me even, right? Doc won’t be expectin’ a live one, but I’ll bet ‘e knows lotsa ways to put one down and get the most use of ‘im.”
Hare gripped the bars and watched his knuckles pop and swell. And the punters paid money for this, thought it was fun? “You show up there without me, ‘e’ll know something’s up!”
“Think ‘e’ll care?” Burke laughed. He never laughed. “‘William, ‘e’s ‘is own man, goes ‘is own way’—that’s wot I’ll tell the doc. ‘And me? Since last night’s cock-up? I ain’t seen Hyde nor Hare of ‘im.’”
OUR TURN TOO WILL ONE DAY COME
They’re the phone calls we hate most. That unnerving 2 a.m. jangle that drills your gut the way a dentist drills a tooth. If you’ve been out of college for much longer than a year, nobody has anything to tell you after midnight that you want to hear.
And could you bring a shovel? I can’t find ours.
Things like that least of all.
*
Yes, I went to college. Took a year or two longer than it should have. I had a habit of arguing with professors. Except for the extended trip back to the auld ancestral homeland—a given, in our family, a rite of passage that somewhere along the way seems to have lost most of its original significance—college was the farthest away from home I’d ever gotten for any length of time.
Otherwise, thirty-eight miles—that’s it. I rolled down the mountains, bounced across the foothills of the Rockies, and had just enough momentum to make it as far as Boulder. Not a bad place to land, really. It put a little distance between me and where I grew up, but not so much that I didn’t have a ready sanctuary close by in case I ever needed it. In case I had another of those phases in which I couldn’t quite trust my eyes and ears.
The drive back up, I’ve never minded it in the day. At night, that’s something else. Get past a town called Lyons and the spine of the North American continent starts to wrap around you. The road winds. A lot. Cliffs tower on one side while gorges yawn on the other. Narrow, as gorges go, and not terribly deep, but enough to swallow your car and leave you broken on a rocky streambed below.
When the settlers of the New World left their homes in the Old, it was only natural that they look for things that would be a reminder of what they would never see again. The Dutch who founded New Amsterdam, later to become New York, were drawn to Manhattan because the encircling river there reminded them of the lowland waters back home. Germans who made it past the Mississippi found, another hundred or so miles west, a region around the Missouri River that seemed very much like the Rhineland.
And the Scots from whom my sister and I descended? They had to go farther before they were satisfied. Occasionally I’ve wondered whether it was blind chance or ordained fate that drew them up into the Rocky Mountains until, at the site of what would one day become Estes Park, they looked around at the peaks and crags, and knew that here was as passable a substitute for the Highlands as they were ever likely to find.
While staking their claims in a world that could be as hostile as it was unfamiliar, these immigrants couldn’t have helped but take comfort in whatever semblances of home they could find. I’ve always understood that.
What I never really thought about was what they might have brought with them.
*
She was waiting for me outside the front door, Noelle sitting on the ground with a candle. I didn’t know if the candle was for her benefit, to keep her occupied, or for mine, so I wouldn’t trip over her in the dark. This house sits on the edge of town, up against the old scar where pines were cleared to make room for cattle, so you can’t see much here at night. There are no streetlights here. There never have been. There probably never will be.
Not much of a street, either. More like a neglected road and a pervading sense that what happens around these old pines and aspens stays within them.
Noelle’s candle was a big, fat pillar brimming over with melted wax. My sister took hold of it and tipped it, poured the molten wax over her hand, over the crust already there. Turning her hand as it ran, cooled, hardened. She must have done that when we were kids, although now wasn’t the moment to ask. There were times when we were growing up that I wondered how her hand got so chapped looking, but only ever the left one, and just as often in the middle of summer as the dead of winter.
“Brandt,” she said. The name of her ex-husband came out of her as if it had been lodged deep, had to be yanked out skewered on the barbs of a fishhook. “He killed her. He’s killed my baby.”
It cut the legs right out from under me. Down on the ground, hugging my sister, feeling that if I didn’t have her to hold onto, I’d just keep falling, up to my clawing fingertips in clotted earth.
Should I lie, to pound home the sense of tragedy? Prattle on about what a little beauty queen my niece was, radiant and full of poise and charm beyond her years? That’s what sells the grief: the image of a potential that people can recognize at once, without having to look deeper or think; someone they want to wrap their arms around and protect from every bad thing until she’s old enough to fuck.
Except she wasn’t a cute child. Not on the outside. It was like she’d taken the least appealing attributes from both parents, then made the worst of them. Maybe she would have grown out of it, duckling into swan, but probably not. So this is what she would’ve grown into: a homely young woman ignored by the world, except for the parts that she touched directly because she loved the world anyway. Six years old and already, on some level, she knew what lay ahead, so she’d begun to prepare. Bugs and plants and mammals, Joy just couldn’t get enough of them…especially the herds of elk that ambled through Estes Park every autumn rutting season. I adored her all the more for it—that hopeful, melancholy spark of awareness.
So did her father. That’s what I want to think: that he loved her more than he simply hated losing. Loved her enough to break into his one-time home and try to take her away into his new world. Except he didn’t love her enough to do it competently. In the middle of the night, the haste with which he was trying to get the job done…maybe she didn’t realize who it was, just that she was draped over some man’s shoulder and that was how you made the news, as long as you were cute enough. No wonder she fought. Six years old and groggy and still she sent a grown man down a flight of 125-year-old stairs.
In a just world, Joy would’ve landed on her father, not the other way around. He would have broken her fall instead of her neck.
Noelle’s hand was starting to look truly deformed. I should’ve blown out th
e candle, except that would’ve left us in the dark, and just hearing her cry would’ve been worse somehow than seeing her.
“A shovel—did you bring one? I looked and looked for ours, but…”
No one could blame her for not thinking straight. What jury would fault her for finishing the job on her ex-husband that the stairs had started? What cop wouldn’t have coached her, however subtly, to spin her story to eliminate her culpability? Okay, she took the big iron fireplace tongs to the back of his skull—so?
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I told her. “There’s nothing to bury here.”
I’m more familiar than I would like to be with how, even in the most crushing moments of her life, a woman can look at you as though you’re the biggest fool she’s ever seen.
Noelle peeled the wax from her hand and snuffed the candle, then stood, and like a wraith, turned and walked toward the front door.
*
This house. We’ve always lived in this house.
It was built by ancestors who died when my grandparents were young, by that first generation of immigrants who came and saw and set down roots, sinking them deep in the cool, mist-dampened earth.
This house. Sprawling and dark, its timbers hug the land as if it had come to a respectful truce with the hills and trees rather than trying to defy them. When it was new, could anyone have looked at this house and not seen that it was built by people who were determined to dig in, hunker down, and stay? Could anyone have failed to recognize that these were people who would love the land and bring down a terrible wrath on neighbors that might oppose or try to cheat them?
It’s their blood that flows through my veins, even if these people couldn’t be much more remote if they were characters from myth. Their names were spoken with reverence even in my own lifetime, during my first few years, with my grandparents living in their own wing of the house.
We’ve always lived in this house. But there was never the remotest chance that it could one day be mine. It’s always been passed down to the daughters.
Tradition like that, you change it at your peril.
As for the boys, I suppose we learned to never ask why.
*
Inside the house, Brandt lay where he’d died. He had managed to get up and stagger away from where he’d landed at the foot of the stairs, but appeared not to have made it far before Noelle brained him.
“I hit him once to keep him still right after it happened. So he wouldn’t get in the way while I was taking care of Joy,” Noelle told me. “Then…when I knew…I must have come back and hit him some more.”
The back of his head was buckled and broken, mostly intact but smashed in like the shell of a hard-boiled egg. His face seemed to have shifted, displaced from the inside, his eyes protruding and his jaw jutting crooked. Everything a head could leak had oozed out of one orifice or crack or other.
The fireplace tongs lay nearby, a huge iron scissors-like utensil ending in curved pincers big enough to grapple onto burning logs. This contraption had fascinated me as a boy, one of those things that you instinctively know has a history, has been gripped by generations of hands, as much a part of the fireplace as the flat blackened stones of its hearth. I would imagine our great-great-grandfather pausing in negotiations with someone who had come to buy cattle, or sell him horses, stooping before a blazing fire and using the tongs to wrestle the biggest log into place. I imagined him standing up straight again without setting the tongs aside, instead flexing their heavy, hinged handles and clanging the pincers together to knock loose the ash—once, twice, three times—but eyeing his guest in such a way as to tell him that this display was really to demonstrate that my family had a long reach.
I can only think that this forefather would’ve been fiercely proud of Noelle.
What about Joy, though—would he have thought much of her? Her ungainly little body, her inquisitive scrunched-up monkey face? He probably would have, for her love of animals, but even if not, one thing mattered much more: She was one of ours, and she’d been taken from us by a thief in the night.
I’d always sensed that, both here and in Scotland, our family was no stranger to feuds and blood.
Joy lay on the sofa where Noelle had put her, still wearing her pajamas, pale blue and full of Dalmatians. My sister had straightened her head so she would look like she was only sleeping, but then, there was that awful bruise down the side of her neck.
I knelt to hold her, and remembered so much, and never until this moment knew which of my feelings for her had outweighed the other: love, or pity.
Noelle leaned against my back, her freshest tears on my shoulder.
“You should start digging,” she said, finally. “One for each of them. Near the treeline. Anywhere along there should be good. And not too deep.”
“Wouldn’t in the trees be better?” I still wasn’t sure why we were going through with this. Maybe I would strain and sweat awhile before she came to her senses and realized, no, that’s not the way we handle things in this day and age. “Not so…in the open?”
“It needs to be away from too many roots,” she said. “So you really never knew? You never actually saw anything before, or figured anything out on your own?”
Whatever that implied, I had to tell her no, I must not have.
“I want to stay in here with Joy as long as I can. But not with him around.” She pointed at Brandt. “Can you get him out back on your own?”
I found an old blanket that would do for dragging him. Didn’t much want to touch him to get him onto it, though.
But the fireplace tongs fit his neck just fine.
*
It wasn’t until I was old enough to not much care that I realized our family was different in some ways. Like my grandparents, and the flashes of memory that I swear I have of my great-grandmother although everyone says I was too little when she died to have remembered anything.
In virtually all the families I’ve known, or heard friends reminisce about, it’s the grandfathers who like to scare you—all in fun—while the grandmothers sit back and shake their heads and tut-tut and warn the grinning old men that they’re going to give the children nightmares.
In our family it was the other way around. Which isn’t to say that our grandfather couldn’t play the game, it’s just that our grandmother was the one to send us off to sleep burrowing under our blankets and watching for shadows.
Bedtime stories—if Noelle and I heard this one once, we must’ve heard some variation of it two dozen times:
My grandparents—your great-greats—they wasn’t poor when they come over. Not like so many of ‘em back then, especially them scraggly Irish. No, they had a nice tidy sum that had come down through the family. Always been wealth in cattle. And there always will be.
But back then, there wasn’t no planes to fly in, the way there is today. Back then, if you had a long trip you needed to take, you had to do it slow, no matter how fast you wanted to put some distance between you and wherever you was coming from. So to cross that wide old ocean, they had to get on a big ship. That was the only way in them days. It was one of them big pretty ships like the Titanic, except older and not as fancy, plus this was one of the ones that didn’t sink.
So it was big and pretty enough, all right, but it was slow. Some of ‘em took about a week to cross the ocean, but that’s if you got a captain on board that knew his business. Not all of them captains did, you know. Some of them captains were just as dumb as rocks and didn’t even have the good sense to realize it, so they’d get lost and the trip might take a little longer. And some of ‘em took a lot longer. They might be out there a month or two. And some of ‘em never did find their way into port, so they must still be out there today, sailing ‘round and ‘round and not even knowing it, maybe not even knowing they’ve been dead most of this time, too. Terrible, just terrible.
But the voyage our family come over on was one of the regular length ones, or near to it. Except it was long enough for what usua
lly couldn’t be avoided on trips like that. People died during the middle of it. Nothing sinister about that, just tragic, from natural causes. It’s bound to happen. You get that many people together on one boat, especially when they’re packed together the way them Irish traveled, and some of ‘em are bound to turn toes up. They show up sick and near to dead already, and the strain of the trip finishes ‘em off. Or they show up not too bad off and might’ve survived the crossing, except for breathing somebody else’s sick air, and the combination takes its toll.
Now, they couldn’t just give them poor folks a burial at sea. It wasn’t like the Navy. Their families was right there, and if the sailors had’ve dumped them bodies over the sides and let the waves take ‘em, the families would’ve raised holy hell. Maybe there would’ve even been a mutiny, and throats would’ve got cut, and that wouldn’t’ve been good for anybody. So what they done was wrap them bodies up decent and respectful, and box ‘em up in crates, and put ‘em way down in the hold, in the bottom of the ship, where it was nice and cool and they might keep a little fresher.
Except what do you think they found after they got to port and it was time to give them families back their dead?
It was only a surprise the first time. All the other times I knew what was coming. I kept hoping that somehow the story would turn out differently for a change, and this part never did.
That’s right—there wasn’t any bodies left. Just the biggest of the bones and some old dried stains, and the tore-up shrouds, and the holes in the crates where they’d been pried into.
But our family was lucky. They was healthy and strong when they stepped on the ship, and they stepped off the same way. And down that gangplank they walked, your two great-great- grandparents, and my own momma, just a girl then, and my two uncles, and the two babes in arms that my grandma and momma held close and wouldn’t ever let another soul see, and nobody kept asking once it was explained how sickly the pair was.