The Hour Before Dark

by Douglas Clegg

  I grew up under the burden of his heroism, and I became less than a model son because I knew I was no hero. My impulses were never heroic ones. I began smoking by the time I was twelve, and when I was seventeen, I’d done all the things teenagers do that they will regret in merely a few years, scarred by such foolishness and disregard for any rule in life. I was the embarrassment of the family when I left it.

  Yet, I could look back on the love and affection of the household; on the way my father would tell me—even at my worst—that he’d done just such a thing when he’d been my age, and it was wrong, but it was not wicked, merely childish.

  His words had the effect of arms around me—it was his way of embracing.

  I took his wise words to heart and knew that despite my missteps in life, my father had gone through many more difficulties than I could dream up, and still, he had done good.

  My mother had been a slightly different story.

  5

  After she left, my father told us that she sometimes called, late at night.

  No matter how much he begged, she would not come back to us. He told us that she wanted to see us. He promised that one day she would come for us, would collect us, but that “now” wasn’t the time.

  She sent letters and postcards, as well, but none of them mentioned our names. Notes like: “I want to keep in touch, but the past is so difficult to mull over. Please don’t let’s keep in touch. I don’t want to cause you more pain.” She sent a few of these that I saw.

  I assumed my father had been writing her late at night, posting his mail without our knowing, begging her to return. “She’s got a new life,” my father would say at times, and begin to brood. “I would love to tell the three of you that she doesn’t love you, but I know she does. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever said. Even in war, nothing was this hard, but I will say it regardless. You must each overcome this. I can’t force your mother to come home. I can’t go chase her down if she is with this other man and she claims that this brings her happiness. You’ve been crying since she left, and you haven’t eaten enough, and you all have to stop it now. She is not the woman I married. She’s not the mother who brought each of you into this world. She changed. Perhaps she’ll change back. But the best we can do is hang tough and get through this. And each of you needs to pitch in and do your share. Accept this, somehow. Accept it now. Life is its own kind of war. You’ve got to fight it and win it.”

  As he spoke, I saw his eyes become glassy and distant. I couldn’t look at the sadness in his face, but glanced down at my shoes. Somehow, I felt all of us were to blame. I felt that if I had just been nicer to my mother, she would’ve stayed. If I hadn’t gotten into any trouble, she would’ve stayed. If I’d said my prayers every morning and night, she probably would still have been with us. I have no doubt that Brooke and Bruno felt the same way.

  “None of you deserves this,” he said. “Not one of you.”

  And that was all he really spoke about it.

  6

  Now and then, one of us would ask about her. He’d tell us to write a letter and he’d send it. None of us ever wrote a letter, although I started a few, but put them aside. I suppose we accepted the finality on some deep level, regardless of our wants and needs on the surface of things.

  Once she wrote to us all and mentioned a new child. She had a new child. A boy. His name was Steven. That’s all she said about him. My father tore the letter up after reading it aloud, tears in his eyes, and held us close. At other times, he went into horrible rages and locked himself in his room for an entire day, screaming, as if at the walls of the house itself.

  All this to begin to tell you: Our father was both loved and hated within his own family, he was a hero to the world and to each of us, even though he had his dark periods.

  When my father died—was killed—none of it mattered.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1

  I couldn't get the images out of my mind:

  My father was butchered.

  Sliced up.

  In pieces.

  2

  “Man, I’m angry,” Bruno said. “Sucker punched. Dazed. That’s how I’ve felt since finding out. I was just talking to him the other day. And now...” This was the most open I’d ever heard my brother be. He never talked about his inner life or feelings that I knew of. He was a mystery to my sister and me in that respect. “Brooke’s had the worst of it. She’s been depressed this fall. I don’t know why. I know she hasn’t been sleeping right since before this. Now, who knows?” He said this with an appealing meekness, as if he needed something from me. Some reassurance about the good in the world.

  I did something I’ve never done before, but I suppose you don’t do what you’re used to doing until a nasty tragedy has stomped you and your family. I reached over and hugged him to my side. Like the little brother he was to me. He put his head on my shoulder and cried for a little bit. I felt like we were little boys again, after having a bully at school say something mean to him about our mom running off, or about his glasses, or how he couldn’t play softball as well as the others.

  “They’ll get whoever did it,” I said, without much confidence. I meant it. If they didn’t, I’d make it the quest of my life to hunt down the madman.

  I would not stop until the guy was caught.

  When we got to the docks, Bruno walked ahead of me, lugging one of my suitcases, while I had the other two. We loaded the back of Brooke’s truck and headed out onto the road away from the sea.

  The sky, slate gray; the woods, like broomsticks; the air, salt, snow, and that memory-scent of winters past.

  3

  Bruno turned down Goose Creek Road with its overhang of gloomy trees.

  In the distance, I saw the beginning of the woods that would guide the narrowest of roads up to the house where I’d been born and raised, and where Raglans had lived ever since they’d been in America. We turned up Dunstable Road, and Hawthorn came into view just over the ridge. There were police cars along the road, and three news vans from the television studios, nearly blocking the driveway. We passed the smokehouse to the left, and I didn’t want to look at it, but I couldn’t help myself. It was surrounded by what looked like a makeshift wire fence, with orange police tape up around it.

  “Christ,” I said.

  “Feeling some Jumblies?”

  “Definitely,” I said.

  “Can I tell you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve never really told anyone this, it makes me feel guilty. Right now. Promise not to hold it against me?”

  “Okay.”

  “I hated him,” Bruno said. “I hated Dad. He didn’t like me much either. But I hated him. He drove our mother away. He drove you away. As far as I’m concerned...” Then he stopped himself. A bit more evenly, he added, “It’s terrible this happened. I feel this awful guilt. As if it’s my fault.”

  I wasn’t sure how to reply to this. “Bruno,” I said, and thought, what the hell do I tell him? It’s okay to hate the guy who was just butchered? It’s okay to hate the guy who raised and clothed and fed you? That yes, he drove me away, when in fact I did a damn good job of just driving myself away? That he could not have driven our mother away any faster than she had run herself, out the door with her red dress and her suitcase and all the money she took, and the secret lover she had when she should’ve kept her love for her young children and her devoted husband? Bruno had, within him, a little of what we all felt—an undercurrent of anger, directed at our father, but really meant for our mother, who had left us when we were nearly too young to remember. Somehow, we had all blamed the one who had remained behind to some extent.

  Now that he’d been murdered, guilt followed these feelings.

  “Don’t tell Brooke,” he said. “Promise me. She idolized him. She’d hate me. Now, I guess, more than ever.”

  “All right,” I said. It was our family sickness, I guess: Don’t tell someone else in the family haw you real
ly feel. Hide it Bury it. Make it go away. It had been ingrained in us from an early age. Its origins were as hard to pin down as the fog that surrounded Hawthorn for half the year: Who had made us feel that way? Was it something within ourselves? Some organic sense of burying, the way dogs bury bones?

  Part of me felt like lashing out at him for being so cold-hearted as to talk like this within two days of our father’s death. Part of me wanted to understand him as I never had before.

  And I hated to admit it, but part of me agreed with Bruno. I couldn’t understand it—why had I disliked my father so much? Had I blamed him for things? Had I made him too responsible for the confusion I so often felt?

  He had been rough on us, that was the bottom line. And we had rebelled.

  That big GUILT I generally felt was going into hyperdrive in me.

  I was not looking forward to any aspect of this homecoming.

  4

  The old house, on the outside, was still haggard-looking, as it had been ten years before. It was a grandfather of a house. It had even turned a bit gray in the intervening years.

  Slowly maneuvering around the vans and cars, Bruno turned down the drive. The gate was closed, of course. I got out of the car, feeling the blast of icy air again, and ran to open it.

  Bruno drove through, and I shut the gate to the driveway again. I glanced up at the road. There were people in jackets and trench coats up on the roadside, watching.

  5

  “Brooke,” I said, when my sister met me at the front door. I did everything I could not to imagine her naked in a storm, her fingers reaching down below her flat belly. I regretted that Bruno had ever told me that story.

  Too late to move out of the way, I was jumped by her two enormous greyhounds, Mab and Madoc, and I went backward onto the porch. A pain in my butt told me I’d landed on part of the flagstone walk. Dog licks covered my face. Despite the pain, I began laughing and shoving the dogs away.

  Brooke stood over me, doing her best to pull the dogs back by their collars, but they were out of control.

  Then she offered me her hand, helping me up.

  6

  My sister Brooke: an unkempt beauty.

  Her hair, darker than I’d remembered it, hung down and around her shoulders, somehow framing her face so that her eyes seemed owl-like. She wore no make-up, looked as if she had just rolled out of bed. She wore a stretched-out gray wool sweater that came down to the ends of her fingers and fell nearly to her knees, baggy khakis. Barefoot on the porch. Oddly, there was the smell of turpentine about her—I noticed what might’ve been paint on her sleeve. Had she been painting something?

  Somehow, she still managed to radiate beauty. Some women have organic beauty—their bodies are formed as if meant to be appreciated. This is simply nature, and no doubt many have had it who were undeserving. Some women have magical beauty—where their features aren’t symmetrical, or their face looks slightly off-beat, but they have an aura about them that creates beauty around them. My sister had a bit of both. She had the same beauty our mother had possessed, when I could remember our mother’s face. Brooke did whatever she could to hide her looks in sweaters and sweats and a general sloppiness. But it was still there: that touch of our mother.

  7

  First thing Brooke did was whisper so softly that I was afraid I wouldn’t hear her. “Do I look scared, Nemo?”

  She had an air of the bittersweet about her—pale and rosy and golden at the same time, her lips bitten and her eyes lost. Botticelli hair falling around her woolen shoulders—the perfect result of the blending of my mother’s Northern European fairness and my father’s Welsh darkness. “Do I? I feel scared. But I don’t want them to see it. I don’t want the world to see it.” She pointed to the news van out on the road. “Goddamn buzzards,” she said, her voice rising to its normal tone. “Come on in, Nemo. Good you made it. Carson greet you?” Her New Englandese turned the perv’s name into “Cahsehn,” and I had to admit I liked hearing it. Carson was known for seducing island sheep and for masturbating from the front seat of his small pickup truck at the harbor as a kind of welcome wagon.

  “Nope,” I said. “No miraculous vibrating truck.”

  “Dad called it the ‘Burnley Hello,’ “ she said. “He said it just a week ago. Better than what most men do with those things, I suppose.” Then the bravado left her face, a sudden retreat. She whispered, “I don’t want them to see me upset. I feel like I’m being watched all the time.”

  She clapped her hands, and the dogs went running back into the house ahead of us. A loud crash—Brooke swore a blue streak—and when we got to the kitchen, the dogs had already knocked over a small chair by the glass table. Brooke shouted, “Kennels!”

  The dogs, finally obedient, ran to their respective, enormous wire crates that edged the living room.

  In personality, Brooke was solidly Yankee in a way that neither Bruno nor I had remained. She had the strongest accent, which was vaguely masculine despite her petite softness. She was a category of woman who lived on Yankee islands, just as there was a category of men who did as well, who had thick hair that always needed cutting, and ruddy complexions from constant movement in the cold, a nearly downcast expression as she spoke, as if gravity were her only make-up; she used profanity the way insecure chefs used spices: as if no sentence were complete without at least a “fuck” or a “goddamn.” In this way, she was unlike any of us. She was as Yankee as the low stone walls that had surrounded Hawthorn for more than two centuries. She was like a weathervane on the roof, or the shingles themselves: part of the way things looked in New England, part of its charm, but also part of its expectation. Few on the island could out-island my sister. She had an old soul for the place, as if she were the reincarnation of my great-grandma Cery (pronounced Cherry) Raglan, a salty bitter woman of enormous bosom and the iron will of a mule.

  As I held her for a moment, I smelled our mother’s scent—particularly the essence of lime—and for a moment, I was truly happy. Happy to be with my sister. Happy to be home again. Happy that at least the three of us would be here for the time being.

  Even if for all the wrong reasons.

  8

  When I entered Hawthorn again, I felt enveloped in its plain New England arms, its brick and wood and white walls and smell of earth and coffee and winter spice.

  Its length seemed less like a serpentine pattern and more like a series of Christmas boxes waiting to be opened.

  Why had I hated this place so much?

  Why had I left it behind and done everything I could to let work and life get in the way of coming back?

  Now it was late in the game. My father, gone. I’d thought I’d have some time later in life to sort out our problems. Maybe in my forties. After I’d somehow established my own territory in the world. Sometime in the future, when he was older and softer and I was wiser and more understanding of my own nature. I had made a huge mistake by running away from my problems.

  Despite the length of the house, it wasn’t that wide, nor were the ceilings high. It was built for Welshmen and women—my great-greats, none of whom were tall. It wasn’t until my father married my mother and produced two sons who had some Norwegian and German in them, that the house seemed smaller and less grand to my dad. He told me that no one should really be taller than five-foot-six anyway.

  I could practically feel my father still alive in the entry-way—and yes, though my mother was long gone, I felt her there, too, and saw her in my sister’s face. I looked for the penknife notching in the doorframe—and there they were. The notch that was me at four, then at six, then at twelve; and Brooke and Bruno’s notches, as well, all of us lined up against the doorframe every few years to check our progress.

  I went to hug my sister, and she whispered in my ear, “Good to see you again.”

  My sister and brother and I had seen each other in the years I’d been gone—but not more than once or twice. I hadn’t seen her in nearly six years, though, and we’d been so
close growing up, that I felt my eyes tearing up just to be there, in the house, with both her and Bruno. It was enough for the time being.

  Brooke loved the island more than she loved life itself, and Hawthorn was the heart of her love. She had told me as a child that she wanted to grow up to either be a fisherman, or a fisherman’s wife, and she had danced along the edge of the shoreline on many summer twilights, stretching her arms up to the pink sky, while her friends gathered around a bonfire that had just been set for the night—but she was separate from them, a nature spirit on the island.

  Some heaviness had come into her—not in terms of weight, but an aura, as if remaining on the island had tugged away at her vitality, her ability to dance on the shore or love the smell of the fishing boats as they came into the harbor.

  I suspected that, whether she ever married or not, she would always remain in that house, always caring for it and tinkering with its upkeep, and making sure that someone remained to remember the Raglan history. It was as if the doors were not open for her.

  9

  Brooke went to flick on the kitchen light, and when her back was turned, Bruno whispered to me, “Sedatives.”

  “Yes,” Brooke said, turning to face him. She shot him a poisonous look. It nearly scared me, because it didn’t seem like the soft gentleness I’d remembered her having. “You drink, and I get a pill now and then.”