Bitter Truth

by William Lashner

  March 31, 1923

  My Dearest Sisters,

  I can’t sleep, I can’t read, my mind is racing with an anger that I can only release in words addressed to you, my darlings. I had another row with Father about those people. I insisted once again that he force them from the property, that they be banished to where their anger can no longer infect our lives. New Jersey, I suggested, where they can do no more harm than has already been done, but once again Father ignored me. What is past is past, I argued with him, let it go, let them go. He reminded me that the property is deeded to the widow Poole and he is powerless, but even had there been no deed his answer would have been the same. I understand Father’s reasons, better than he can know, but the time for pity has passed, as the events of this afternoon demonstrate with utter clarity.

  I was in my room when the window darkened and a great cloud drifted overhead. In the face of that fearful sky I thought of the cougar and then of Kingsley and immediately went in search of my son. He was neither in the playroom nor in his area on the front lawn. The governess was having tea in the kitchen with Mrs. Gogarty. When I asked about Kingsley she sputtered something foolish and then lapsed into guilty silence. With admirable restraint I told her to find the boy. While she searched the house, I stepped onto the rear portico and down into the yard.

  The sky was gloomy and threatening, the wind brisk and undeservedly warm, like a tease of summer before cold again sets in. I first searched through the garden, peering as best I could over the shoulder-high hedges. I stepped carefully, with an unaccustomed caution, not knowing what kind of animal could be stalking me in the interstices of my maze, but the garden was empty of man and beast.

  From out of the garden I thought of returning to the house but for some reason felt drawn to the pond. It was with a dread that I stepped down the hill. That pond had scared me often, yes, and I had worried that someday my son would lose his footing and fall within its murky depths. But the surface was clear and the ducks still floated undisturbed upon the chop. Beyond the pond was the stand of woods where I dared not step and prayed that my son was wise enough to stay out while that animal was still alive and on the roam. It was at the edge of the pond that I first heard the sound, high and trilling, a voice like a bird’s almost, as best as I could tell from the distance. I followed it, moving around the pond, followed it to that decrepit wreck of a house.

  There on the decaying wooden steps sat Kingsley, leaning on his side, listening to the Poole daughter read to him. The sight of that hideous-faced girl, and the book she was holding, that book, filled me with the hatred that rises every time I see that family. But now it came from someplace deeper. She was sitting there with my son, reading from that book, and he was listening to her, raptly, absorbing every word of the vile hatred that was spewing from her throat. Is it not enough that they have wreaked their vengeance on our father and his children, must they now infect my son? It was too much to bear and the shout of outrage came unbidden from my throat.

  Kingsley jumped to his feet. I told him to get back to the house immediately and he hesitated for a tense moment, his head hanging in indecision, before sprinting past me and up the hill. I then turned my attention to the girl.

  She was still sitting on the steps, her frayed frock loose about her, her dark eyes staring at me with an indifferent hatred. As calmly as possible I said, “I don’t want you speaking ever again to my son.”

  “I was just reading to him from Thoreau.”

  “I know very well what you were reading,” I said. “Kingsley has a trained tutor who is helping with his reading. He doesn’t need your interference with his studies. You are not to see him again, do you understand?”

  “He’s a sweet boy, but lonely I think.”

  “His state is not your concern, ever. Any further interference in his affairs by you or your mother will have dire consequences to you both.”

  “My mother is too ill to even rise from her bed,” she said, as she reached behind and pushed herself awkwardly to standing. “There is not much more you or your family could do to her now.”

  It was only then that I noticed what should have been obvious from the first, the grotesque fullness of her stomach that even the loose frock could not hide. I am not proud of the words that next came from my lips before I turned and stalked away but they were drawn from my throat by the glaring triumph in her eyes as surely as water from a hand pump.

  And so I went to Father and once again pleaded that they be sent away. It is bad enough that they have stayed in that house as a reminder for all these many years, but that they should plague us with their bastard is too too much. My only solace is that the deed grants the mother only a life estate and that upon her death the land and that house revert back to our family. With the mother’s evident illness we should soon be finally free of the shackles of their enmity.

  April 3, 1923

  My Dearest Sisters,

  This night, in the strange light of a full moon, I felt compelled to again walk down the sloping hill of our rear yard and around the pond to the house in the woods, despite the danger posed by the predator cat that stalks our county. I have not stopped thinking of my encounter the other day with the Poole daughter and of learning of her shameless pregnancy. The Pooles have been a presence in that house for most of my life, ever since the death of the father, but I had never come to know them, never had a conversation with either woman until our remarks that afternoon. Their whole lives, I had been certain, were devoted entirely to the deep wounding rage they held for our family. It was a shock to imagine that girl filled with another emotion, lost in a passion that, even if for only a moment, cut her off from her angry sense of deprivation. The image of that girl rolling on the ground with another, lost in a world that admitted not the Reddmans, has haunted my mind. I see it as I bathe, as I prune the dying stalks in my garden, as I awake alone and cold in my bed.

  I stood behind the tall thin trunk of an oak and watched the house through the windows. The mother was in a bed on the first floor, weak, white, her face drawn and tired. The room was lit by a harsh bare bulb in the ceiling. The girl sat by her mother, book in lap, and read out loud. Once, while I was there, the girl rose and walked into the kitchen, bringing back a glass of water, and she helped her mother hold it to her thin lips. There passed between them the habitual tenderness of family and I thought of you, dear sisters, as I watched and I wept for what we have lost. After a time the mother’s eyes closed and the girl laid the back of her hand softly upon her mother’s brow. She sat there, the pregnant girl, alone with her sleeping mother, before she rose and turned out the light.

  I walked back up the hill and into our monstrously empty house. Kingsley was asleep in his room and I stood over him and stared as he slept, transfixed by the very rhythm of his breath. In many ways my boy is as foreign to me as those people down the hill, so full of mystery. There was a time when I was his whole world.

  How is it possible to survive in this life when we can never forget all we have destroyed?

  April 5, 1923

  My Dearest Sisters,

  Her movements, as she works about the kitchen, are full of a surprising grace, despite her condition. She was making a soup tonight, and I watched as she chopped the vegetables and placed them into the pot and fed the old wood stove as the water came to a boil. With an almost dainty movement of her wrist she pulled from the pot one ladle full of scum after the other. There was a innocent intentness about her work, as if nothing was in her mind to disturb her preparations other than the necessities of the soup, not her evident poverty, not the failing health of her mother, not the bleak prospects for the bastard child she carries within her. For a short moment she came outside, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, and lit for herself a cigarette. I pulled back behind the tree I was leaning against but still I stared. The light from the house was streaming from behind her as she smoked and so I could not see her face, but there was an ease in the way she held herself, even with her bloa
ted belly, a comfort in the way she casually brought the cigarette to her lips. She is a woman who feels secure in the love that surrounds her. There also must be more than I could ever have imagined to the old woman awaiting death in that house, if her love can provide such comfort.

  April 7, 1923

  My Dearest Sisters,

  It is a wonder that I had once thought her ugly. It is true that her features are not perfectly regular, and her nose is somewhat long, but there is about her movements and her face a brightness and a beauty that is unmistakable. All day I think about her in that house, hopelessly pregnant but still caring for her mother. I await anxiously for the night so I can see her. When Kingsley is to bed and Father alone and drinking in a vain effort to quell his shaking hands, I slip from the house as quietly as I am able and I glide down the hill to my spot at the oak. This evening I watched as she prepared for bed, watched her disrobe and wipe the sweat from her body with a sponge. Her round belly, her swollen breasts, the areolae thick and dark as wine, the nipples erect from the cold of the water. She must be farther along than I had imagined. Her skin is fresh and taut about the white round of her belly. She carries her burden with a dignity that is remarkable. I feel cleansed just in the watching of her. She prepares for the night as if she were preparing for a lover, which is heartbreaking, knowing that she has only her dying mother to keep her company. We are sisters in our loneliness.

  I have been thinking of that child she is carrying. It may be a chance to make amends with all that has colored our past. When the time is right I will raise the possibility with Father.

  April 8, 1923

  My Dearest Sisters,

  When I returned from my nightly vigil I was startled to see Kingsley at the twin French doors to the rear portico, waiting for me. He asked me if I had heard it. The light mist of the evening had turned suddenly into a rain and I wiped the wet from my face.

  “What are you talking about, dear?” I said, fighting to compose myself.

  “The cougar,” he said. “Daddy told me their mating calls are like a wild scream. I heard it just down the hill.”

  “It must be something else,” I said.

  “No,” he said, his face revealing a rare certainty. “It’s the cougar, I know it.”

  “Then what are we to do?”

  He didn’t answer me, but with all the sureness of his eight years he turned and led me into Father’s library, to the case mounted on the wall in which Christian stores his guns. It was locked but Kingsley reached beneath the case and pulled out the key. He stood on a chair and inserted the key into the lock. The glass door swung wide.

  The gun he pulled off the rack was the largest of the four. It was Christian’s father’s gun. Kingsley cracked the barrel open and checked to be sure the cartridges were inside. Then he smacked it shut again. I shivered at the sound of the gun closing.

  He led me back through the house to the doors leading to the portico and opened them to the night. The rain had grown heavy, drowning whatever light escaped from the house before it could touch beyond the patio. The night was preternaturally dark.

  “Turn out the hall lights,” my son commanded and I did so.

  “Shouldn’t we get Grandfather?” I asked when I had returned to my place behind him.

  “He shakes too much,” he said simply.

  “What about your father?”

  “He’s out,” he said, and in those two short words there was not a note of judgment against the parent who had more and more absented himself from his family, who had betrayed it, abandoned it to the fearful felines of the night. “But if the cougar comes this way,” he said, his voice suddenly shaky, “Father taught me what to do.”

  We waited there together inside the frame of those doors, just inches from the fierce rain, my son with the gun and I behind him, my hand tentatively on his shoulder. It felt wrong to me, being there with him and that gun, as if our positions were terribly reversed. It was I who should be protecting him, but I was too devastated to act on my feelings and was warmed into acquiescence by my son’s evident concern for my safety. We were a team, together, just the two of us, guarding the homestead from intruders, and I couldn’t break myself away from the delicious warmth I felt beside him, even as I could feel a shivering terror pass through his body to my hand. The minutes flicked away, one after another, flicked and died away and I couldn’t even begin to tell how many passed before I saw something crawl upon us in the rain-blanked night.

  “What’s that?” I whispered.

  A shadow flitted across the edge of the portico.

  “There,” I said.

  The boy swung the gun to his shoulder.

  “Now,” I said.

  The explosion tore the night, the light from the barrel blinding for a second before it disappeared, leaving the night darker than before. We were deafened to any sound, even the flat patter of the rain was swallowed by the burst of fire.

  The boy steadied the gun and fired again and once again. The night tore apart. I screamed from the sheer beauty of the power and then a quiet descended.

  The servants scuttled from their rooms and down the stairs and they saw us there, standing in the doorway, Kingsley with the gun. I explained to them what had happened and ordered them back to bed. Father was too sedated, I assume, to have even heard.

  Kingsley wanted to go out and see if he had actually killed the cat but I refused to let him. “It will wait until tomorrow,” I said as I closed the portico doors. “I don’t want you outside in the dark until we’re sure it is dead.”

  “I need to clean the shotgun,” said Kingsley. “Father told me to always clean it before I put it away.”

  “Clean it tomorrow,” I said. “Everything tomorrow.”

  I followed him as he went back into Father’s study and replaced the gun. When he locked the cabinet I took the key. It is beside me now as I write this. I can’t explain it, dear sisters, but I feel purged by the sudden explosions of this evening. I have regained my son, regained my power, suffered and survived the betrayals of the last twelve years. I can make everything whole, I believe. With our father’s strength and the deep desires of my soul I can heal our world.

  April 19, 1923

  My Love,

  It is ten days now since we found you and I still bear the agony of the sight. Our dear Kingsley has not left his bed for a week. I sit with him and feed him broth but he is insensible with longing and pain. How he will survive his misery and guilt I do not know, but he must, he absolutely must, or all our dreams and hopes are for naught. He is your legacy, dear husband, and you will live forever through him.

  You will be warmed to know that the Pooles have left us for good. Mrs. Poole succumbed to the illness that had been plaguing her. Father attended the funeral, I could not. It was a lonely affair, I am told, and at the internment in the gravesite beside her husband only the daughter and my father were in attendance. Father offered, he said, to help the girl in whatever way he could, but she refused his proffer and has now disappeared. Their house is empty, all their possessions crated up and taken or abandoned. Just this morning I walked among the empty rooms, the floorboards creaking beneath my feet. It feels haunted, my love, inhabited by a drove of ghosts.

  I am bereft without you. Every day I visit the statue where we passed our vows. I sit before it for hours at a time and think of you. I have not yet found the courage to enter your room and touch your things, to smell your precious smell as it has lingered on your shirts. For the rest of this life that the Lord has cursed me with, know that I will love you and honor you and do all I can to glorify your name. I pray for you, my darling, as I pray for our son, and I am confident now that the paws of tragedy which have pounced upon our family far too many times will no longer threaten us and that what is left of our future will be full of peace and love and redemption. I will do all in my power to make it so.

  34

  I WAS SITTING AT MY DESK, staring at the message slip as it glowed pink in my hand. My
secretary’s handwriting, normally only barely legible, was this morning a series of mystical hieroglyphs. I had to squint to make it out. “Rev. Custer,” it read, atop a phone number. I called out to her from my desk. “Who the hell is this, Ellie?”

  She scurried into my office and stood behind me, peering over my shoulder at the slip of paper. “Your reverend.”

  “I don’t have a reverend, Ellie, I’m Jewish, remember? We have mothers instead, and mine’s in Arizona.”

  “Well he said he was a reverend, he said, Rev. Custer, just like that. You don’t know him? He only left a number.”

  What I figured just then was that this Reverend Custer guy was one of the wackos in Beth’s cult, calling about the meeting Beth had set up for me with Oleanna, guiding light, so I called. What I got was not a New Age answer line but instead a soft-voiced little girl of about six.

  “Hello,” she said, “you want my mommy?”

  “No, sweetheart,” I said, pronouncing my words with utter care in that annoying way all unmarried and childless men seem to have when they talk to strange little girls. “I’m really looking for a Reverend Custer.”

  “Mommy’s in the shower.”

  “What about the reverend?”

  “In the shower.”

  “He’s in the shower too?”

  “Mommy.”

  “No, the reverend.”

  “Are you a stranger?”

  “I don’t know, am I?”

  “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

  Click.