Jessie was still living with Sister Ignatius in the Benson house. She and Theo, who had just celebrated his fifteenth birthday three months earlier, were the only two of the original children still living on the hill.
Jonas Hodges had left the Benson Home for Abused and Abandoned Boys in 1937 at the age of nineteen. Having decided to go back to where his roots were in Jackson, Mississippi, he had gotten in touch with his mother’s sister. Aunt Delia’s husband had been killed in a tractor accident, and she now needed a strong hand to help run the farm, which she had promised to give him when she died. For someone who had little in his past and nothing in his future, and being a black child stranded in New England, Jonas had jumped at the chance to lead a normal life that he could control.
The priest was sad to see him go. The boy had become like a son to him, and, even though Jonas’s skin color was cause for whispers among the townspeople who got wind of there being a Negro boy living on Holly Hill (thanks to Nora O’Day and Molly Kelly’s loose tongues), Phineas had never worried that the boy would be forced to leave. Now an adult, Jonas had made the decision to leave all by himself.
Over the next year they communicated with Jonas only a few times, and it was always because Father Poole initiated a phone call to the Mississippi farm. After the third time Jonas stopped coming to the phone. His mental wounds had finally healed. He attributed it to the fact that he was no longer in Holly and was no longer reminded of his former life, the tragedy involving his parents and the abuse he had endured at the hands of his now long dead father.
Unfortunately Jonas forgot all the good as well. He let his relationship with kind Father Poole and the others wither away into the nothingness that comes from forgetting. There was little comfort for him now in hearing the priest’s voice over the phone. Formerly Jonas had been fond of the man who had saved him from his misery. Now, however, the white man’s voice only reminded him of a lost childhood, one he had shared with strangers who became a surrogate family to him only because he and they had found themselves in the same predicament.
Aunt Delia had told Father Poole the few last times he called that Jonas was not at home at the moment. The last time Phineas called the excuse was outright ridiculous. “We done run outta… uhm… eggs,” Aunt Delia lied. “He be needin’ mo’, so he wen’ on down into town and lordy know when he be back.”
“Eggs?” Father Poole asked. Having grown up in a rural community, he knew that when people raise chickens (and Jonas had plenty on the farm, as he mentioned once to Father Poole), they have no need to go to the store to buy eggs. Indeed, Jonas had boasted during their first phone conversation, about two weeks after Jonas arrived at the Mississippi farm, that they averaged about six dozen eggs a day and that the yield made them a pretty penny at the general store in town.
It took eleven months and seven phone calls for Father Poole to finally get the message that Jonas’s new life didn’t include Sister Ignatius, Jessie, or him. The priest put down the receiver in his office and said to himself on that day in 1938, “This boy isn’t a boy anymore. He’s now a man, and he’s made himself clear without uttering a single word.”
Joey Foster left one year after Jonas. After moving back into Holly for a little while and getting a job as a soda jerk, he worked down by the shore at Hampton Beach in the summer of 1939. There he would often stare at the beautiful white waves crashing into the shoreline and the beautiful women who passed by on the sand.
The ocean reminded him of the day when he and his brothers and sister at the home on the hill wanted to go see the ocean but instead found trouble. When the adventure was over, one man was dead, and the children inherited a mangy old mutt. He remembered how they had brought the body to the rectory, not needing to worry that anyone was watching them. The only one present was Mrs. Keats, and with her busy in the kitchen she would be unaware of what they were about to undertake.
“What do we do with him now?” asked Rex, his voice trembling. “I mean, the guy is dead. We gotta make sure no one can find him.”
Jessie then shouted, “There!”
She pointed toward the rectory, specifically a wooden lattice just above ground level.
“There’s something underneath the building,” Jessie cried.
“I think you mean there’s nothing under the building,” said Joey. “It’s an empty space. We can bury the body there. No one will ever find him!”
Jonas was the first to protest. “Come on, man. Ain’t no way we can bury him under our house! Make sense, Joey.”
Joey smiled, put a hand on his shoulder, and said calmly, “How long have we been living here? And Jessie’s just now found it!”
The two oldest boys bent down in front of the lattice and pulled it off, exposing a hole, approximately three feet by two feet, large enough for nearly any of them to crawl through. Jonas offered to check it out first. He had Theo fetch some candles and matches. When Theo came back ten minutes later from Mrs. Keats’s kitchen with birthday candles, Jonas merely patted his brother on the head and told Jessie and Rex to fetch some others.
They came back two minutes later with three long white candles whose wicks seemed already to have been burned. Each had a small red cross on one side and the outline of a dove with a sprig of leaves in its mouth flying away from the cross. These were candles from the church altar.
Jonas cocked his head, but Jessie defended their decision to take them. “Well, we couldn’t find the house candles,” she began, “and you didn’t really say what kind of candles we should look for, just that they shouldn’t be birthday candles.”
Joey lit one candle and gave it to Jonas, who then slipped into the space under the rectory. The ground was mostly dry, with thin patches of stray grass, and the ground was level to the outside. There wasn’t much room to stand. Jonas could only stay on his knees if he wanted to keep the rest of his body erect.
“Throw him in here, y’all!” Jonas called out to the others.
Joey had left to get two shovels from Argyle Hobbs’s tool closet. He had to jimmy the lock to get it open and later told Father Poole some lie that they’d been playing hide-and-seek and that Argyle had absentmindedly left the tool closet unlocked. Jessie, the story went, had hidden inside, and as the older boys walked by, assuming that the groundskeeper had forgotten to lock it, snapped the lock back into place. It wasn’t until Jessie’s cries could be heard minutes later that the boys had to resort to breaking the lock in order to free her.
Joey came back just in time to see Rex and Theo pushing the dead man into the rectory’s crawl space. Jessie held back the dog, who appeared to be a bull terrier mix of about seven or eight years old. She had fondly started to call him General Lee, based on Sister Ignatius’s history lesson a few months earlier on the Civil War. She’d passed around an old portrait of the high-ranking Confederate. Jessie couldn’t help but notice, even through the sepia-toned photograph, his bright white hair, which even extended into a thick moustache and beard across his face. Jessie drew an immediate comparison to Robert E. Lee and the dog’s pure white coat.
“General Lee?” Rex and Theo had questioned in unison, not believing their ears the first time they heard their sister call the dog by that name.
“I’d wait before I get attached to that mutt,” Rex said. “Sister isn’t gonna like your having a dog around.”
“She’ll love him just as I do,” Jessie replied. “He saved us from that man!”
“Keep your mouth shut about that!” Joey snapped, throwing the shovels into the space under the rectory. “THEY CAN NEVER FIND OUT!”
Jessie wanted to be angry with Joey for the way he was acting toward her, but she couldn’t. She knew he was telling her that for her own good and that of all concerned, including Father Fin and Sis.
After Joey disappeared into the dark space, the younger ones remained outside as Jonas and Joey dug furiously. After a
bout forty minutes Theo noticed movement from his peripheral vision. It was Father Fin and Sis finally returning from their trip into town.
Theo jumped to his feet and said frantically, “They’re back! They’re back!”
Jessie, Rex, and Theo heard the digging suddenly come to a halt. It seemed to the three children that Jonas and Joey were not moving a muscle and had even stopped breathing.
As Joey heard the thunderous crash of an oversized wave as it hit the shoreline, he turned back to the ocean again and thought of how burying the dead man on Holly Hill under the rectory turned out to be the beginning of the end for that era in his existence.
Returning to the present, he heard a request for a soda pop. He turned and saw a beautiful young blond woman about his age. She cracked a smile and repeated her request. Joey Foster was in love.
He and the girl, Marcy Bellows, wed that September, and she became pregnant fifteen minutes after leaving the church. They moved to Providence, where Joey became a manager in a small grocery store. The last anyone heard from Joey, he and his wife were happily married with nine kids, two of whom were twins. People who knew him best when he was a kid commented on how wonderful it was that he had finally found a way to put his sperm to good use.
As Sister Ignatius rounded the post at the bottom of the stairs, she felt a sudden sharp pain in the middle of her forehead, which caused her to lose her balance and collide with the antique wooden chair that acted more as a conversation piece than practical furniture. She banged her knee against the chair’s front left leg as she went down.
She never had liked the chair, probably because it had always reminded her of when she was a child in Exeter. The chair was almost identical to one that sat at the bottom of the orphanage’s staircase. Its purpose was simple. Whenever a girl acted out, and Ellen F. acted out plenty, she was forced to sit for the entire afternoon in the chair that looked exactly like Ben Benson’s solid oak one.
Neither one was very comfortable. The seat was as hard as a rock, and it had no arms. What’s more, the orphanage’s chair had five spiral bars going down its back, a pattern that dug into the sitter’s muscles. Yet, for all its negative attributes, Sister Ignatius felt compelled to sit down in that Ben Benson pre-Civil War chair, whose seat was still hard but whose support bars were at least flat and smooth.
As she sat in the chair, she thought of Jessie, the girl whom she’d raised since infancy. It was her fifteenth birthday today. The nun’s most vivid memory of Jessica as a baby came to her when she plopped herself down in that old relic. She remembered putting the baby in that very chair on the morning of Ben’s, Johnny’s, and Georgiana’s funeral.
With both hands the Sister rubbed her long fingers over the sides of the chair, nearly staring off into space. It was almost as if the chair acted as a time machine that brought back a myriad of memories, both good and bad. She reflected back on the one and only time she had ever hit Jessie six years ago when she and Father Poole had come home after spending a good part of the day in town. They had left Jonas, Joey, Rex, Theo, and Jessie in Mrs. Keats’s care during their absence. When they reached the rectory, all the children were by the front stairs and acting very guilty.
Sister Ignatius assumed it at once to be guilt for having taken in a stray dog without permission. “What are you doing with this filthy animal, Jessica?” the nun had said sternly.
“His name is General Lee,” Jessie had replied innocently, but when she inadvertently looked over to the gaping hole below the rectory’s first floor, Father Poole and Sister Ignatius looked as well.
“What in the name of… ?” began Father Poole, but he was interrupted by Sister Ignatius.
“Children!” she screamed. “What are you three up to? Where are your brothers?”
She shouted out their names three times. After the third shout General Lee barked at the nun.
She screamed, “WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE BARKING AT?”
“Let him be!” Jessie yelled.
In an instant Sister forgot about the dog and impulsively slapped Jessie hard across the face, causing Jessie to lose her balance and fall.
Father Poole reacted immediately, calling out her name and quickly going to her aid. He was about to ask Sister Ignatius how she could have done such a thing, but two things stopped him. First, he didn’t want to undermine her authority in front of the children; second, he quickly recognized her instant remorse.
“Oh, baby!” Sister Ignatius began. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it!” Bending down, she pushed Father Poole away, who in turn lost his balance and fell backwards, landing in a small puddle of urine that General Lee had just left.
She hugged Jessie tightly until the dog let out another bark. Sensing that all attention was now focused on him, he wagged his tail, dangled his tongue, and managed another yelp, though not as loud as the first.
Father Poole got up and immediately realized that his coat carried a strong scent. “I’m going inside to change,” he said, embarrassed, mounting the steps and disappearing inside the rectory.
As Sister Ignatius followed him up the stairs, she peered down at Jessie. “Why don’t you three get that mutt cleaned up,” she said. “He looks a fright.”
Jessie’s face brightened at once. “Really? You mean it? We can keep him?”
The nun replied with a wide grin, “Yes, you can keep him, but we’ll need to castrate him so that he doesn’t go wandering any further than the edge of the summit. We don’t need people down in town complaining about him.”
The children said nothing else but just smiled.
“Alright,” announced Sister Ignatius. “Go clean that dog up. And put the cover back over that hole. I don’t want any shenanigans down there. It’s not a play area. And hurry up because you need to have your lunch.” The nun spotted the blood of the man in the greasy overalls, which stained the dog’s mouth.
“And clean around that dog’s mouth! Goodness! What did you do, feed him leftover hamburger? He’s got ketchup all over himself!”
At half past eight Father Poole finally got out of bed, realizing that it was far later than when Jessie usually woke up on a Saturday morning. Paramount in his mind every morning he found himself in Sister Ignatius’s bed was never to allow any of the children to know of the intimacy the two of them shared. Of course, there were nights when Phineas would stay at the house well after Jessie’s bedtime. She would kiss the two of them goodnight and scurry upstairs, never thinking twice about just how long it would be until Father Fin retired back to the rectory. After her door shut, Phineas and Ellen would wait a good hour or two before venturing upstairs.
Usually the first thing Phineas thought of in the morning was how they were going to manage financially. At the same time he struggled with the morality, or lack thereof, of his actions: his sexual love affair with a nun and his appropriation of money from the collection plate in order to pay the bills every month, one of which was a bribe of silence.
As he put on his last night’s clothes, the priest remembered now-departed Jonas Hodges and Zachary Black. Joey was gone now too, and so was Rex Gunther. “Poor Rex,” thought Father Poole.
Rex was seventeen when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. News of the surprise attack had struck him differently than the other children. During Sister Ignatius’s history lesson one winter morning in early 1942, hearing of the bravery of men and women in the U.S. armed forces, Rex was transfixed by her accounts of selfless acts of heroism. As he heard all this, Rex sat motionless. Nothing would please him more than to go to war for his country and fight “the Krauts in Germany or the Japs in the Pacific,” as he put it.
He presented the idea to Father Poole that night at supper.
“Please, Father Fin,” Rex began. “This means the world to me. I have to serve.”
Father Poole and Sister exchanged glances. Neither wanted
to see the boy go off to war for many reasons: besides not wanting him to come back in a body bag, they knew that in an Army barracks a sexual deformity such as Rex’s could not be hidden for long, even if it went undetected during his entrance physical.
“You can’t go, Rex,” Father Poole said bluntly.
“WHY NOT?” Rex shouted, causing everyone at the table except Mrs. Keats to look up from their plates in surprise.
Quickly becoming aware of the scene he was causing, Rex excused himself quietly and left the table, first bunching his napkin together before tossing it onto his plate of unfinished salmon. Father Poole nodded to Sister Ignatius. The two got up and followed Rex to his bedroom.
No sooner had Rex collapsed onto his bed in bitter disappointment than Father Poole knocked softly at his door. Indignant, Rex shifted from lying on his right side to his left, giving both of them his back. Father Poole didn’t knock a second time. He and Sister Ignatius approached the bed. Phineas remained standing while the Sister sat by Rex’s feet. She put a hand on Rex’s knee, but he jerked it away from her almost immediately.
“I don’t wanna talk about it anymore,” the boy said, angrily. “You two have decided for me already. I don’t need to hear anymore about it. It’s at an end. FINISHED!”
To Rex’s surprise neither of them replied. In the distance they could hear the clamor of dishes, children’s laughter, and mumbled talk in the dining room.
“Well, Father Fin? Sis?” said Rex. “Aren’t you gonna box my ears for talking back?”
Silence again.
“Come on, you two. Yell at me. Tell me you’re gonna punish me for talking back!”
Still the two said nothing.
“I don’t get it,” Rex said.
“We worry about you,” Sister Ignatius said, her eyes sad. “Terribly so.”
Embracing Darkness Page 33