Mockingbird Songs

by R.J. Ellory

  FIVE

  “Ides of March,” Grace Riggs told her husband on the morning of their youngest son’s fifth birthday.

  “What of it?”

  “It’s an important date.”

  “How so?”

  “You don’t know about Julius Caesar, sweetheart?”

  “Can’t say I do,” William said. “He a stock farmer or grain?”

  “You are teasing me,” Grace replied. “You know exactly who Julius Caesar is.”

  William and Grace were in the kitchen, William sat tying his boots while she busied herself at the stove. Six in the morning, children still asleep, the early-morning routine as Grace fed and watered her husband before he went to work. This day was different, however. William would wake the children in a half hour or so, share breakfast, acknowledge Evan’s birthday before he headed out.

  “I do, indeed, my love,” William told her. “He’s that feller who done run into a steer with his tractor on—”

  Grace swatted her husband with a dish towel. “Such an ignorant man, you are.”

  “Smarts is overrated,” William replied. “Don’t wanna git involved with none of that book-readin’ business, now, do we?”

  “I’m serious, Will,” Grace said. “It’s an important date. Historically significant. Lot of things have happened on the fifteenth of March. Columbus arrived back in Spain, the Red River Campaign, Tsar Nicholas abdicated—”

  “I think you’ll find, dear heart, that we human beings, for better or worse, have been around long enough to see a great many historical events on every day of the calendar. Besides, I don’t think it’s a good to idea to fill Evan’s little head with such things. I know he’s as bright as a star, but all this special attention is only going to make Carson feel left out. We spoke about this before, remember?”

  Grace was silent for a moment, her expression as one readied for rebuttal, but nothing but silence was forthcoming. She knew her husband was right, said certainty not borne out of any requirement to bend to his will, for Grace Riggs was as righteously stubborn as any woman could be when she felt her self-determination was being subsumed, but out of simple agreement.

  “Yes,” she said. “You are right, my dear. Enough.”

  William reached out his hand toward her. She stepped closer, and he put his arm around her waist. He pulled her close and pressed the side of his face against her stomach.

  “Different boys, different minds, but we cannot treat them differently,” he said. “It will only be the cause of trouble they don’t need.”

  Grace stood there beside her seated husband, one hand on his shoulder, the other touching the side of his face, and she looked out through the window as early-morning sun lit the fields like fire. She saw no purpose in reminding her husband of how distant he had been when Carson was first born. She was twenty-seven years old, and time with William Riggs had done nothing but strengthen her love and respect for the man. Never one for hearsay and rumor-mongering, she was nevertheless privy to words shared by wives in the postchurch gaggles that clucked and prattled beyond earshot of the minister. The husbands conspired to engage in late-night drinking and gambling, all the more ironic when the sermon had broached such things as temperance and abstinence, and the wives spoke ill of their husbands in such a way as Grace could never have countenanced.

  An’ I seen the way he looks at her … what with her cheekbones tucked up tight and them bee-sting lips o’ hers …

  Know when he’s lyin’ … can see it painted all across his face like whitewash …

  Staggered home reekin’ something devilish; told him to sleep in the barn, not to come near me with that disgusting thing o’ his …

  For William, Grace had other words, words like loyalty and dependability, trustworthiness and constancy. He did not look at other women, save that they crossed his line of sight, and he kept on looking wherever he’d been looking and did not follow them as they passed. He did not drink to excess, and though there had been half a dozen times when he was a little worse for wear, he had always remained jovial, never angry, and certainly never violent. One time he danced a jig for her like some half-crazed Irish leprechaun, and she near lost her breath for laughing.

  Other wives seemed to have found other kinds of husbands. May-Elizabeth Crook once sported a shiner to rival those inflicted by Jack Dempsey upon the likes of Gene Tunney and Georges Carpentier.

  “Crook by name, crook by nature, that’s my husband,” May-Elizabeth once told Grace, conveniently forgetting that she was a Crook herself.

  Word was that Yale Killebrew was sharing his bed with Montie Jennings’s new wife, and the womenfolk used words like blowsy and sluttish. Seemed to Grace that people should check for muddy footprints on their own porch before commenting on the state of others’.

  And so Grace listened to her husband, not out of duty, but out of a mutual understanding and agreement that the life they shared was the life they created together. They stood back-to-back against the world, reliant upon no one but themselves for their own mental and emotional survival. Whatever bed they made, they would be lying in it, and that went for their children, too.

  It was Evan’s fifth birthday, and that was the only required significance for this, the Ides of March.

  Until later, of course, but later had yet to arrive and thus was as unknown a territory as the rationale of Calvary’s collective womenfolk.

  Five years was old enough for a horse, and that’s what Evan got. Set with saddle and stirrup and rein and bit, that narrow-haunched paint was a gentle beauty. Sire and dam were different, a bay and white for one, a sorrel and white for the other, and this one came up kind of hazel, except for a white hock-to-hoof splash on the forelimbs. Grady Fromme, two farms east, gave William Riggs a fair price for a good steed, ideal for a little ’un, and in the three days that William and Grace had kept that horse hidden in the barn, there had been nothing to indicate that the pony was anything but perfect in nature and temperament. He was a quiet one for sure, nudging up against William with an affectionate manner. William’s experience was more bovine than equine, but he’d been around horses all his life and they were a good animal. Smarter than steer—that went without saying—and there was a devotion to be found in a horse that was equaled only by a hound. Good horse would carry you as fast as it could go until its own heart burst, and that was a fact. He’d seen it happen, heard of it more often, and that was something William could never fathom save were it for your own kin.

  Breakfast done in a whirlwind of pancakes and spilled juice, Grace and William Riggs walked out to the porch with both of the boys. Carson was all of nine years old, had gotten his own pony at five but never really took to the thing. Two years on, William had sold it and bought the boy a bicycle. Didn’t take to that, either. Each to his own, though what was Carson’s own they had yet to learn.

  Grace stayed up on the veranda with the boys, and William headed on down to the barn to fetch the paint. When he led him out across the yard and Evan saw him, there was a whoop of delight the like of which neither parent had seen nor heard before.

  Grace sensed the envy. It seemed to swell around Carson. Like some sort of airborne virus, it infected the air as an unpleasant odor, an unsettling sound of indistinct origin.

  “Go,” Grace urged Evan, and Evan nearly tumbled appetite over tin cup as he barreled down the porch steps and hurtled across the yard toward his father.

  The pony seemed untroubled by the whirlwind of arms and legs and laughter that gamboled toward it, and when William hoisted the boy up and settled his boots in the stirrups, when he started to lead that horse down the driveway and onto the grazing range, Grace couldn’t believe how happy such a sight made her feel.

  After ten minutes Carson wanted to go inside. He tugged at his mother’s sleeve, but Grace wanted to stay and watch as her youngest bonded with the pony.

  Carson went inside by himself, and when she heard a door slam upstairs, she knew there was a storm brewing.


  It would not have been fair to say that Carson Riggs arrived into a world that did not love him. Despite his father’s original reticence, the arrival of Evan had done wonders to smooth whatever edges and corners might have existed. Tradition seemed to dictate that the eldest was the favored, certainly when that eldest was a boy, but here it was different, tangibly so, and Grace was aware that Carson was aware, and that mutual awareness was something she wrestled with most every day. Those outside would perhaps have noticed nothing out of the ordinary but—as with all things—when you knew what you were looking for, you saw it all the time. Details, simple matters, the fact that William would pass the vegetables first to Evan, the fact that come an evening when William saw fit to listen to the wireless, he would have Evan on his knee while Carson sat cross-legged on the floor below. The devil was in the detail, and Grace knew that if they were not cautious, then the devil might find its way into Carson as well. Having said that, Carson was not a bad boy. He was solid and reliable and conscientious in his own way. He was easy to love, for there was a simplicity in his outlook and manner that possessed its own immutable charm. Carson would never be fickle nor absentminded; nor would he be stricken with wild flights of fancy. Where Evan was akin to the newest and latest, Carson was the all-too-familiar sense of nostalgia that accompanied an old pair of boots that could never be discarded.

  It being a school day, the boys were packed up with books and lunch pails by eight. Evan, predictably, didn’t want to go, but he didn’t put up a fight. Never one for tantrums and the like, Evan seemed philosophically resigned to the fact that though his elders were not necessarily always his betters, they still had the say-so in the general run of things. He hung back as William returned the pony to the barn, said goodbye to the thing, and headed for the road with Carson and his father.

  “You gotta find that pony a name, son,” William said.

  “Will do, Pa.”

  “You any ideas yet?”

  Evan shook his head. “Nope. He’ll tell me when he’s ready.”

  “Darn fool thing to say,” Carson interjected. “Horses don’t talk, you dumbass.”

  “Carson. Enough of that. Animals have a sense, and some folks have a sense for animals. Lot of things we don’t understand—”

  “Understand that horses don’t talk,” Carson jibed.

  “Not another word out of you, young man,” William Riggs replied, and there was a sharp edge in his tone.

  Carson fell silent, knew better than to challenge his pa.

  William drove them to school in the buggy, had some business over the other side of Calvary and school was en route. Little more than half a mile, they ordinarily walked and the walk was good for them. Got some air in their lungs, some limber in their muscles. And when school was done, Evan was all but falling over himself to get back to see his horse.

  “That dumb pony done telephoned you and told you his name yet?” Carson needled.

  “Don’t be such a fool, Carson. Horses don’t use telephones.”

  “And horses don’t talk, you dumbass.”

  “You’re the dumbass.”

  “You’re the king of all the dumbasses in the world.”

  “I reckon you are so.”

  Thus it went on, back and forth, trading petty insults until the farm came into view and Evan started running.

  Carson let him go. He didn’t care to see the horse; nor did he much care that it was his younger brother’s birthday. Birthdays were a whole heap of nothing disguised as something, and that you could take to the bank.

  But it wasn’t nothing. It was something. It was like a seed caught in a tooth that wouldn’t give up. A hangnail that snags and catches. And Carson sat on it for three days before he did something cruel and foolish.

  Perhaps it was nothing more nor less than jealousy, the innate knowledge that he was not as well loved, that the years before Evan’s arrival were marked by some cool distance between himself and his father, but there was a ghost of something in the boy’s mind. He loved Evan, no question there, but he envied him as well. Grace sensed it. William trusted Grace’s female intuition about such things, and he was responsible enough to recognize that he was as much to blame for the situation as Carson himself.

  Had the action been impulsive, it would have been seen as nothing more than childish and spiteful, albeit malicious, but it was the forethought that troubled both William and Grace Riggs.

  Three o’clock in the morning, Monday the eighteenth of March, nine-year-old Carson Riggs, no slouch but never the brightest light in the harbor, crept out of bed, down the stairs, across the yard, and hurried out to the barn where his younger brother’s pony was stabled. He then proceeded to let the thing loose. He raised a good ruckus, waving his arms and stamping his feet, and the little horse bolted. Had it been a bigger horse, with perhaps a sharper temper, Carson Riggs might have gotten his head kicked off, but no, the animal was just spooked some and took off like a whirlwind.

  Took William a day to reunite heartbroken boy with skittish horse, and even then it came back of its own accord. William drove the perimeter of the farm, the farms adjacent, put word out that he was looking for a young hazel-colored paint, distinct for the white hock-to-hoof splash. Returned the first evening with no word of the thing, wondered whether it was gone for good. Evan had wept himself into a dreadful state, took no consolation from anything, and only when that pony made its cautious way up the drive toward the house did it look like the world was not actually at an end.

  William and Grace Riggs knew who’d done it. It was obvious. Even the vain efforts to get involved in the search did not assuage their certainty that Carson had been responsible.

  Once Evan was settled for the night, William took Carson aside and let him know.

  “No use to lie, son,” William said. “We know you let the pony go. No other way it could have happened. I am mad enough already, son. Don’t get me madder by telling me it wasn’t you.”

  Carson dropped his gaze to the floor, stayed silent.

  “The last thing I wanna do is beat you, boy, but I ain’t rulin’ it out. You tell me now. You let that pony go, didn’t you?”

  Carson didn’t raise his eyes or his head, but he nodded and said, “Yes, sir.”

  William sighed. “Now, what in the world inspired such a notion? Tell me that much at least. I got you a pony when you turned five. You never took to it. Even got you a bicycle and you didn’t take to that neither. Evan’s a little kid, son. What on earth did you hope to gain by breaking his heart like that?”

  William knew that Carson was not sufficiently self-aware to answer such questions, but he had to ask them anyway. Had to get them out of his mouth; they tasted coppery and sour, and that taste would not dispel until the words were spoken.

  “Don’t know,” was all Carson could manage.

  “I know you don’t, son, and I ain’t really askin’. I’m groundin’ you. You got extra chores, extra for you, and you’ll be doin’ Evan’s chores for a month as well. In the morning you’re gonna say sorry to your brother, and you’re gonna mean it from your heart. You understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now git, ’fore I change my mind and take your hide off with a horse whip.”

  Carson slunk away, shamed and disgraced.

  Later, lying in bed, Grace said, “I think we got a live one, William. Scared he’s not only troubled, but troublesome and a troublemaker to boot.”

  “Kids ain’t dogs or horses. You can’t train ’em the same way. They come with too much that’s indelible.”

  “Where’d he get it from—that’s the question,” Grace said. “That streak I see in him worries me.”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart, but punishin’ him ain’t gonna do nothin’ but make it worse. You beat a child and you just provin’ to him how he can rile you. Instinct gonna make him do it again just to get revenge.”

  “You’re a good man, William Riggs.”

  “Was a champion asshole ’t
il I met you, though. Got the blue rosette and ribbon to prove it.”

  Grace laughed. She kissed him. They lay beside each other and settled into a restless sleep. William Riggs rarely dreamed, but that night he did. Come morning he would recall little of it save the vision of his eldest son saying something vicious through the bars of a jail cell.

  SIX

  Nancy Quinn had the radio on in the kitchen. Howard Ulysses was nowhere to be seen. George McGovern had won the Democratic presidential nomination.

  Henry was in the doorway for a good thirty seconds before his ma realized.

  “You leavin’, then?” she asked. “Again?”

  “I didn’t leave you last time, Ma. I went to prison.”

  “Same thing, however you name it.”

  “I’m not gonna start a fight with you,” Henry said. He could see she was hungover. Her actions were measured, as if trying to do everything without making a sound, as if to move suddenly would surprise even herself.

  “Seems from my corner it’s already started.”

  “Then you win,” Henry said. “You are the undefeated title holder.”

  “You always had a sharp tongue.”

  “Had the best teacher, Ma.”

  Nancy Quinn turned from the sink. She looked her son up and down and then shook her head resignedly. “When did we get to this?”

  “To what, Ma?”

  “Sticking pins in each other to see who howls first?”

  “Is that what we’re doing?”

  “You’re still doing it, Henry. I didn’t make you how you is, and I sure as hell am not to blame for you getting yourself in Reeves. You done that all by yourself.”

  Henry looked down at the floor. His feet were cramped into a pair of Luccheses that hadn’t been worn for three years. They would stretch and give in a while.

  “If you gotta go, then you gotta go,” Nancy said.

  “I gotta go.”

  “Do you know where you’re going?”