Embracing Darkness

by Christopher D. Roe

The boy began to speak in a louder voice, as he was beginning to feel a bit safer with Mr. Nichols. “Jonas Hodges,” he said.

  “Well!” the schoolteacher exclaimed. “Jonas Hodges. That’s a wonderful name, a magnificent name! And tell me, Master Jonas Hodges, is your family new to Holly?”

  The boy lowered his head again and chose not to answer, which made Nichols think he had struck a nerve. Was it the word ‘family’? he wondered. Perhaps he has no family. Maybe someone dear to him died. He asked again, “Come now, son. You do have a family, don’t you?”

  Jonas raised his head slowly. “Yeah. I do gots one. Me, my mamma, an’ my daddy.”

  Nichols had so many questions for the boy, but it wouldn’t be long before dozens of people started walking up and down this part of the street, and he didn’t want to cause a scene. He assumed people would think that he, Holly’s newest retired teacher, would attempt to enroll this Negro boy at the Academy, and Arthur Nichols was well aware of people’s potential prejudices.

  Nichols wanted to inquire again as to where the boy came from but thought he’d ask in a different way. “Do you live nearby?” he inquired politely.

  Jonas looked over his right shoulder, seemingly a bit worried. As he did so, Nichols noticed that the fabric around the shoulder of the boy’s shirt was torn. Jonas opened his mouth and paused, wondering whether he should answer the nice white man. Without taking long to think it over, Jonas decided in favor of congeniality. “We live over this place. It real popular at night. It get loud real late. Sometimes it be hard to sleep.”

  Arthur Nichols knew right away that the boy was referring to “The Watering Hole,” a local speakeasy in the center of downtown frequented by many and known by all where both the elite and the dregs of Holly would converge. Among the well-to-do social butterflies, Holly mayor Errol Aberfoyle would most surely be in attendance, as well as almost all the town elders. There also would be the chief of police, who was paid under the table for not closing down such an establishment. Then of course you’d have to count the rest of the population. It was the place for people from all walks of life who had one thing in common: they weren’t going to let the government take their liquor away. For the sake of the town’s reputation, it was known as a restaurant that had live shows (including ones with naked ladies), and due to the nature of the business on the ground floor this was assuredly the cheapest building in which to find an apartment.

  “What does your father do for work?” Mr. Nichols asked.

  “He ain’t got none,” Jonas replied. “We just come up from Boston las’ week.”

  “Oh?” Nichols asked inquisitively. “And is Boston where your family is from?”

  Again Jonas looked nervously behind his shoulder, and as he did so Arthur Nichols noticed a gash in the boy’s scalp that had scabbed over. Nichols wanted to inquire about the wound and the torn shirt, but he knew from experience that confronting a child about injuries could frighten them if they came at the hand of a parent. Right now the retired schoolteacher didn’t know what to think.

  “I tell you what, Jonas,” Nichols began. “My wife has got a stove full of breakfast she’s cooking. I’ve already had mine, but my Mabel always makes too much. And her banana-chocolate chip pancakes have won the Annual Rockingham County Bakeoff six years in a row. They’re not on the menu this morning, but I’ll have her scare you up some. What do you say? Would you help us get rid of all that food? It’ll just go into the garbage otherwise.”

  The boy stood still as a rock and licked his lips again as he imagined those pancakes.

  “Wouldn’t you like to come inside for a minute?” Nichols said, sounding as if he were pleading with the child.

  He waited impatiently for a reply from Jonas and didn’t have to wait long. As soon as he’d finished speaking, Jonas blurted out nervously, “No sir. I can’t. My daddy, he be comin’ quick ’round that corner. I suppose to be waitin’ on him. He get powerful mad if I… .”

  Jonas stopped and seemed to be looking right through Arthur Nichols, who turned his head a bit in wonder.

  “If you what, Jonas?”

  The boy didn’t answer. He just turned his head to look over his shoulder again, this time looking over his left shoulder. Nichols saw that the back of the boy’s right upper ear was deformed, as if it’d been partially torn off.

  Then Jonas said, “I bes’ be waitin’ on my father on the other side o’ the street.”

  Nichols wanted to know more. “Just tell me, Jonas. Where are you from? I mean, before Boston. You don’t sound like you’re from this part of the country.”

  The boy answered quickly, again looking over his left shoulder. Nichols was able to catch another glimpse of the deformed ear. It appeared worse than the first time, perhaps because he was able to examine it for more than two seconds. There were bite marks around the remaining flesh. It even looked as though there were some burn marks on the skin around it.

  “We from Mississipp. We come up here ’cause there be no work for my daddy. But he can’t find nuttin’ here neither. He be powerful angry at night. He out lookin’ all day. Nuttin’ in Jackson. Nuttin’ in Boston. Nuttin’ here. I reckon we ain’t gonna be here too long.”

  He liked the man and knew that he was being friendly, but Jonas wasn’t used to white people’s being so kind. He remembered white people down in Mississippi dressing up in white sheets and terrorizing people, whose only crime, as his mother used to put it, was “’Cause God done made us all too dark in the eyes of white folks.”

  The Hodges had left their home in Jackson so that Mr. Hodges could find work, traveling up through Tennessee and Kentucky into Ohio. Never settling down for more than a week in each state, the family made its way through Pennsylvania and New York, then through Massachusetts, and finally ended up in New Hampshire. Mr. Ezra Hodges once told his missus, Wilma, that after New Hampshire “It gonna be Canada. An’ after Canada it gonna be the damn Norf Pole!”

  Just as Jonas finished speaking, and just as Arthur Nichols was about to ask another probing question, the former schoolteacher saw a tall, wide-shouldered, and frankly frightening-looking black man walking toward them. Nichols noticed him first, and he could tell that the man was angry and potentially dangerous.

  “Boy!” Ezra Hodges shouted to his son from twenty feet away.

  Jonas turned around immediately. His body trembled more visibly as his father walked closer toward him and Mr. Nichols.

  “You bes’ be comin’ when I calls you!” Hodges continued. Then he faced Arthur Nichols as though he had no idea he was there. “Oh. Beg pardon, sir!” He removed his hat politely to Nichols, and Nichols reciprocated with a tilt of his head.

  “How do you do, sir? I’m Arthur Nichols.”

  The former schoolteacher couldn’t remember ever being as frightened as he was at that moment, including the day he found out that he was going to teach twelve-year-old Otto Evans, who was more than six feet tall and had a temper to match his size. Ezra Hodges was around two inches taller than Arthur Nichols remembered Otto Evans being, and he had massive hands. His longest finger could have measured five inches from bottom knuckle to the tip.

  Although he was wearing a hat, Mr. Hodges’s hair was grown out and messy, and he also smelled of whisky. From the way Jonas had spoken about his father before and seeing how he cringed when his father had yelled for him, not to mention the tattered shirt and the scars on his body, it didn’t take Mr. Nichols long to realize that this boy was being beaten by the giant. Being the size that Jonas was, a skinny boy just shy of five feet tall, he must have regarded Ezra as colossal.

  Nichols extended a shaky hand to Mr. Hodges. After an awkward hesitation of about four seconds, Ezra Hodges finally accepted Arthur Nichols’ hand and gripped it tightly, shaking it up and down once and quickly letting go.

  “I terribly sorry, sir, for my boy. He done
got away from me. We was walkin’ over to the livery. I be lookin’ for work an’ all.”

  Arthur Nichols shifted uneasily and replied, “In any case, I wish you the best of luck, Mr. Hodges. I’m sure you’ll like our little town.”

  Hodges placed a heavy hand on his son’s shoulder, causing Jonas to succumb to its weight. The father was apparently angry again. Ezra asked, clenching his teeth and gazing down at his son, “How you know my name? My boy tell you?”

  Nichols now feared that he may have gotten the boy into trouble. “Why, yes. Yes he did,” Nichols replied, sounding as though it were a harmless thing for Jonas to tell a stranger.

  Hodges, still holding onto his son’s shoulder, said, “Boy done open his mouth again. What else he say? He done tell you somefin’ else?”

  “No,” Arthur Nichols said nervously. “I just asked him his name, and he told me. “I must say that your boy is a tough nut to crack. He didn’t want to say anything to me, but I gave him a little candy, and he opened up to me a bit.”

  Ezra Hodges now seemed more furious than before.

  “He give you somefin’, boy?”

  Jonas bowed his head and shut his eyes tight.

  “You answer me, boy,” Hodges said calmly but with rage in his voice.

  Jonas spoke softly, “Y-y-yes sir, but I didn’t want it. I swears!”

  Nichols didn’t know what to think at this point. Adding to the awkward nature of this whole encounter was that apparently Hodges wasn’t the least bit worried about how Nichols perceived him.

  For a few seconds Ezra Hodges didn’t speak. Then Nichols opened his mouth, poised to say anything to break the silence, but Hodges beat him to it. He tilted his hat again, “Awful nice meetin’ you, sir!” And before Nichols could react, Hodges grabbed his son violently under the armpit and dragged him in the direction from which the two had previously come.

  Arthur Nichols watched for a long time as the Negro father and son made their way down the street en route to the other side of town. He kept looking until Hodges ducked into a side street, yanking his son behind him.

  Nichols sighed deeply, shook his head, and walked back to his porch. He noticed that his wife hadn’t brought out his coffee after all. He didn’t care at this point. All he could think about was Jonas Hodges and his father. Nichols couldn’t shake off the image of that giant beating his fragile child. He also kept thinking about how the man pulled his son away like a mutt on a leash, as though Jonas didn’t mean anything to him.

  Then Nichols recalled something he had stuck under his arm several minutes ago. It was his morning newspaper. And as Arthur Nichols sat back down on his porch swing, he opened the paper and read the headline on the front page: “WALL STREET CRASHES!”

  Eleven

  Four Years on the Hill

  A cold and windy November rolled into Holly, taking everyone by surprise. The summer had been so hot and sticky, continuing through October, that people were beginning to think autumn would never come. So when the townspeople awakened on the morning of Sunday, November 3rd, to find frost on their lawns and chrysanthemums, many started to wish that summer would return. The sky overhead was completely overcast; the trees danced flamboyantly in the gusty wind; and the late arrival of chilly air glided across the town from one end to another. Several pieces of lawn furniture and ornaments were swept away as a result.

  Mr. Lawrence Walsh, wealthy financier and chief lender in town, lost half of his lawn decorations. His ceramic statue of the Greek god Poseidon toppled over onto the brick walkway, cleanly breaking off the raised arm holding his trident. This was due to the wind’s shearing off one of Mr. Walsh’s shutters, which knocked over the sundial, plaster base and all, causing Poseidon to lose his balance as well as an arm.

  None of this devastation, however, perturbed Lawrence Walsh, beset as he was by a larger calamity. It had been five days since the worst of the Wall Street panic. It began on Thursday, October 24th, when stocks began their sell-off. Walsh clenched his fists as he saw his own stocks hit hard. Then on Friday, the 25th, stocks headed sharply lower. The following Monday was even worse, and Walsh said to himself, I’ll give it till Wednesday. If things don’t improve by then . . . . The next day the worst occurred. And on October, the 30th, when Lawrence Walsh opened his paper at breakfast, he knew that this was worse than he had ever thought possible. Eminent banker and the wealthiest of Holly’s residents, Walsh put his newspaper down calmly on the kitchen table next to his bowl of porridge, quietly made his way upstairs to the bathroom, and drew himself a bath.

  On Saturday, November 2nd, Mr. Lawrence Walsh was found lying naked in his bathtub by two policemen sent to the house to look for the popular businessman, who hadn’t been seen around town in several days. With his bank closed, scores of people who needed to get their money out had panicked. Their frenzy got the attention of town officials, who mandated that two policeman go to the home of Lawrence Walsh to see whether perhaps he’d absconded with the town’s money.

  They found Mr. Walsh with a red-stained copy of the Portland Daily Chronicle dated Wednesday, October 30, clenched ever so tightly in his bloody left hand, which hung over the side of the tub. He had sliced open every major vein in his wrist. In his right hand, which lay on his thigh, he held his shaving razor. The headline of the newspaper read, “LOCAL COMMUNITIES HIT HARD BY WALL STREET MESS.”

  Mr. Walsh, now bankrupt, had few things his surviving relatives needed to divide up since, surprisingly, he had no will. His possessions included his house; all its furnishings (except for his canopy bed that ex-wife Sylvia wanted because, as she put it, “Some of my best extramarital affairs took place in that bed”); some jewelry such as his solid-gold pocket watch and wedding band, which he kept hidden at the bottom of his sock drawer; and a gold chain that his mother had given to him on her deathbed. The last words out of her mouth were, “This chain was my father’s. I want you to have it. And before I go to God, one last thing: DON’T MARRY SYLVIA BETTANCOURT. SHE’LL STEAL YOUR BALLS!”

  While the business of getting Mr. Walsh’s meager assets in order was going on in the town below, Father Phineas Poole was holding Sunday Mass at St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Church up on Holly Hill. Though many called Father Poole “more Catholic than the Pope,” the interior of his sanctuary did not seem the least bit Catholic. In fact, it could have been mistaken for a Lutheran or Methodist church.

  There were no beautiful statues of saints, not even one erected to St. Andrew himself. The walls were whitewashed, the pews were constructed from pine, and the floor creaked no matter where you stood. The slightest shift in weight from one foot to the other would make the floor “sing,” as Sister Ignatius used to put it. “With all that damn noise coming from the floorboards,” she told Father Poole once after Easter Mass in 1928, “who needs a choir?”

  The stained-glass windows were for all intents and purposes just colorful glass with no meaning. There were no depictions of holy scenes from the Bible, just a blur of assorted colors. The crucifix that hung high above the altar was the only unmistakable icon in the entire church.

  When Father Poole first set eyes on the inside of St. Andrew’s four years earlier, Sister Ignatius explained the purpose of Mrs. Keats’s ritualistic bleaching of its wood floors and seats. “Often, when the townspeople come for services, a virus is brewing in their bodies. All it takes is for them to sneeze into their hands and then touch a pew. Bleach is the way to go, Father. Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”

  Father Poole, however, had become increasingly aware of and disturbed by public opinion. He feared that the church was headed for a reputation of being self-centered and impractical, and he was sure that many congregants of different denominations already felt this way.

  At the time Miss Dolores Pennywhistle, Holly Orphanage’s head of adoptions, had been up on the hill only once in her life, and for a lifelong resident of Holly
that was something to brag about. Dolores Pennywhistle had said: “I was up there one Sunday to speak after the service. I told all twenty-six people present… . Yes, that’s all there were. How embarrassing for them, and what a waste of time for me! Have you ever tried climbing that hill? Oh, my dear. Your heart’d burst if you even tried! It’s more of an incline than I’d ever care to climb, and, what’s more, it takes a year and a day to get to the top. Anyway, as I was saying, twenty-six people heard me solicit funds for our orphanage. And even that contemptuous Father what’s-his-name boasted with a smile that he would set aside ten percent of the collection plate every week for the next six weeks and donate it to the orphanage. But I ask you, Elvira, what is ten percent when you look at it this way? I saw what was in that collection plate when it came back up to the altar. There was barely enough in that basket to make a whole dollar. Disgraceful! But let’s just say it was a whole dollar, just to make the math easier. That’s ten percent of one dollar times six weeks. Sixty cents! That’s what we’ll get from the Catholics. Sixty cents! Nearly half of our orphanage is made up of the children of dead Irish and Italian immigrants. He should give us half his collection plate! But then that’d only give us three measly dollars! Let him keep his money. The Pope can wear his robes of gold and that ring the size of Monte Carlo. And St. Andrew’s is perched up on that hill, as if that’ll get them closer to God. It looks like a common town hall with a giant crucifix hanging from the ceiling. They have that ‘hotel’ next to the church that’s twice the size of my orphanage. He should donate that building to the orphanage and keep his stinking sixty cents!”

  Dolores Pennywhistle was a talker, that’s for certain. No matter how small the problem or how minor the event, she would blow it up into an utter catastrophe. She was truly a woman of drama, and the way she told stories was proof of it. She also talked a mile a minute, so telling Elvira Nelson about St. Andrew’s took her all of twenty-six seconds, pausing only twice to breathe and continue.