And that’s when he made his presence known to us. A voice from the doorway of the living room startled us all. “Well, well, well. Isn’t this a love in?” As usual, after spending a day with his welding mask’s straps pressing down his hair, it was greasy and hung over his eyes, a dark pile of strands that made him look psychotic amid the orange glow. He looked to me like a mad man, with his slinky posture and cruel eyes, standing amidst a room engulfed in flames.
I looked at Simon then, his eyes were wide with surprise. Everett flung forward at him, knocking Mama out of the way and sprawling her across the rug. He grabbed at Simon’s hands and snatched away his prize. “What’s this?” he asked as he looked down at the knife with a grimace of disgust. He’d been drinking, you could tell by his posture, by his mannerisms, and by his smell. It was Johnny Walker Black Label, no doubt about it. Running his own fingers over the engraved initials, he scoffed, “—Ha! Daddy’s jackknife, eh?” He seemed to ponder a moment, his head lolling a little in its cradle, looking for the most effective words he could come up with. “Your father wasn’t even a man. Is that what she’s trying to tell you?” He looked over at Mama, “—that he was a fine, upstanding man who provided well for his family?”
His voice slowed; it became a smooth, slick drop of oil. His eyes turned to thin lines. His hair was pasted in greasy streaks across his forehead. “Well that wasn’t the case at all. If that was so,” he said, slipping the blade from its resting place beneath the handle and turning it around in his big gaunt, dirty hands, and looking at Mama with a narrowed eye, “Why did he leave you without a cent? Hmmm? Why was that?” I don’t know that Everett really wanted an answer to his question and Mama didn’t give him one. The look on her face was strained and scared. “Why did I have to come in here and fix his situation for him? Hmmm? He was a coward, a wimp. A pantywaist that couldn’t get his act together. . .”
Then he added, at Simon, “Just like you’re gonna be.” He backed away from us then and I saw Simon lower his head. He didn’t want to get in a fight tonight. Not after Mama had given him his Daddy’s jack knife. There had been a moment, at long last a moment, just a few minutes before, when it seemed to all of us that things were going to be okay again. That things were going to feel better, like they had before. The three of us had probably been the closest in a long time that night on the living room rug, while the sun faded from the sky. Why did Everett have to come in and spoil all that with his loud mouth and his foul presence and his drunken breath?
Everett rolled the opened blade of the knife in his hand and ran his thumb across it, feeling its sharpness against the skin of his finger. Like most of Daddy’s things it had been meticulously kept. It was perfectly sharpened and had not one minute spot of rust. He came back at Simon suddenly and without warning, stopping but an inch or so from his face, with the little knife held in his sweaty grip. Simon’s eyes widened at the quick movement, and I was afraid that the man was going to cut right through him with that one thrust. He didn’t though. He held fast, the blade hovering right in front of Simon’s face. “Yeah, just like you’re gonna be.” Tears began to well up in my brother’s eyes and Everett began to laugh at that. His laugh was an insidious little giggle and his hot breath, foul with Black Label, on my brother’s face must have made him feel too close.
So fast and so sudden that I wouldn’t in a million years have guessed he would do it, Simon swung his arm out against Everett’s. The collision, just below the elbow, banged the knife away and it flew across the room bouncing across the rug a few times with dull thuds and finally settling with the blade poking into the thick rug. The handle stuck out almost upright. The next thing we all knew, Simon’s mouth was open and his teeth bore down on the arm outstretched in front of him. Everett yelled at this and grabbed at the back of the boy’s neck, where his disheveled hair met his scalp. He flung the boy against the arm of the couch, and we heard a terrible whack as it happened. Mama was almost instantly propelled to her knees thrusting forward against Everett from behind and to the side of him. “Leave him aloooone!” she wailed. I could see in her eyes that she was shocked this was even happening.
The two of them collided and the impact brought them towards me. I moved out of their path, towards where Simon lay. Everett recoiled his bloodied, bitten arm and swung it towards Mama. It met her temple and she was immediately thrown backwards, with a mottled stain of blood just above her eyelid. That’s when the stunned Everett came towards Simon and me again. He lunged and grabbed Daddy’s jack knife from where it had pierced the carpet. Those next few moments are hazy for me, but I remember the essence of it. Simon lunged at his step father and was again taken in the man’s grip. He picked Simon up off the ground and held the knife to his face, while Simon’s legs dangled helplessly above the floor. I truly thought he intended to kill him then. “That’s right, boy,” He wailed, “Yer daddy was nothing but a coward. He couldn’t deal with his petty little bills so he kilt himself. Yeah, that’s right, he gone and done himself, too scared to fess up to the fact that he couldn’t take care o’ his own family no more. . .”
He stared at Simon with a mad look, happy with what he’d said. Simon’s own look was that of anger. His eyes were dark and his face was red. It almost seemed like he didn’t understand that Everett held his life in his hands. Either that or he suddenly didn’t care. What he said next was calm and collected, like most of the things my brother said. His voice was low and it didn’t waiver. “My father was a good man. Not like you. You’re the coward.” And then he added the part that really stung, “A real man wouldn’t pick on his wife or his two boys—two boys and a wife that can’t defend themselves.”
At that Everett went ballistic. His yell was as loud as I’d ever heard it. I’m sure he would have rammed that blade right into Simon if I hadn’t lunged at his legs. For the second time that night, Everett got a surprise he could never have seen coming. He’d never struck me, threatened many times, but never actually took the swing. The fact that he hadn’t was almost certainly the reason I had the courage to charge him that night. The orange of the sunset had already faded to just a hint of pink against the walls and the room was quite dim. I don’t think he even saw me coming, nor did he suspect I could ever summon the strength or the sheer will.
I rammed into the man right at his crotch, harder than I even thought was possible. He fell back, his grip on Simon instantly loosening enough for him to escape. But just as soon as Simon was away from him, that sweaty, blackened hand found its way around me. Before I knew it, Everett’s other hand, the hand with the little polished jack knife, swung against my face. I felt a cool rip across my cheek, starting at the temple, run jaggedly down towards my jawbone. Blood spurted out from my face up across Everett’s neck and down his gray shirt. His eyes were suddenly wide and white in the gloom. I fell to the shaggy rug, with my face slit open like a filet from the cooler at Harlow’s Grocery.
I didn’t cry that night. The shock, I suspect, was too great. Laying on the floor, I saw everything on a strange slant. Everett was wide-eyed and disbelieving, staring down at his bloodied hand holding the knife. Everything had seemed to fade into shades of swirling gray at that point all moving to and fro, on this canted angle from where I lay. I could see Simon’s mouth open in extreme exaggeration and could hear a distant holler coming from him. Mama, too was yelling, her face contorted with half sobs, half screams. I couldn’t hear anything, only saw the scene, only hung on to their lips as they moved in slow motion. The whole room seemed so far away...and soon it was gone.
2.
Mama told me in the weeks to come that Everett was sorry. It was a terrible accident, she’d said, but that was all she said. I slept a lot in the days afterwards, slipping into sleep when it was dark, coming to when it was daylight, often never sure if it was the next day or the one after. My face was held tight in a gauze dressing that Mama changed every night after washing my face with a wet cloth. Apparently I had been taken to Dr. Morrow on the mainland t
hat night for fifty-seven stitches across my left cheek but I don’t remember any of that.
When Simon came to see me in my room, he seemed even quieter than usual. He was brooding, his head held low, like the night I had lunged at Everett. When we were alone, he came to the bedside and knelt close to me. He had closed the door and whispered so low I could barely hear him. “Rupe. We’re gonna get ‘im for this.”
“We’re gonna take care of ‘im. Good and proper. He said things about ar Daddy that he ain’t gonna get away with. He’s done things to Mama. He’s done things to me. And now he’s done things to you. He ain’t gonna hit us no more. He ain’t gonna cut you again...”
“But what are we gonna do Simon?” I was scared. I was scared and I didn’t know what he meant. Most of all I was tired. It felt like that wallop I’d given Everett had sucked the life out of me. As though it had been all my strength. Or more likely, I had bled all my strength across the living room rug and I’d never get it back.
“You just wait, Rupe. You just get better and wait. We’ll get ‘im though. We’ll get ‘im good and proper.”
For most of that August, I didn’t do much at all. I slept long nights and I ate meals by myself. Mama played some games with me in my room, sang songs to send me off to sleep, and every night she washed my face and re-wrapped me with fresh gauze. I hadn’t looked in a mirror without the bandage so I had no idea how bad it had been.
Eventually things returned to a kind of normal. The stitches were taken out in time for school but my scar continued to itch and sting. Although Mama remarked at how fast it seemed to heal, the thin scar that remained was a distinct reminder of that night in July when the sun’s gaze fell just so on our living room wallpaper, and Everett swung my Daddy’s knife at me.
The days of early September were hot indeed, even hotter than August that year. I gave a lot of thought each night, as I lay my head down on the pillow, to my brother down in the dank basement doing his best with the swarm of cold crawling things moving across his naked body in the dark. I didn’t hear anything from down there, not the sump pump, not Simon, nothing.
3.
It was on one of the weekend mornings when he finally shared his plans with me. Mama had been invited for dinner at the Walsh’s across town. She politely declined on behalf of Everett who had made a big stink about the affair. “Now why in the hell would I want to go to some goddamned dinner party at the Walsh’s in this goddamn heat--” he hollered at dinner the night before. He smacked his hand down on the table hard enough to make the dishes clatter, “—-When I can stay here, have some fried chicken and watch the game on my TV?” Mama didn’t press him, after all I don’t think she wanted him to be there any way. The last time she had gone anywhere was to take me to the doctor for stitches a month earlier. Before that her last outing alone was to the mainland for her mother’s funeral. Everett hadn’t gone then either.
4.
Mr. Parson, the owner and proprietor of the only hardware store on the island knew Simon quite well. Daddy used to take Simon there when he needed supplies, would prop him up on the counter while he made his rounds, and Simon returned time and time again long after Daddy had been gone. He’d bought wallboard, light fixtures, bulbs, wire, string, all kinds of things. And each time, he just told Mr. Parson that he was making something for his Mama or helping Everett with some repairs.
The day that Mama went to the Walsh’s for dinner, Simon and I went to Parson’s Hardware looking for something rather unusual, certainly not more fixtures or bulbs.
Mr. Parson was by no means a drinker, not by the standards of most folks in town. No, certainly not. But he did keep a bottle behind the counter. On slow afternoons, he’d sit at his stool behind the register and have a shot as he looked out onto Broadway and watched the people meander through the hot day.
He was a pleasant man, that’s for sure, and certainly not a man prone to have more than a glassful. But the bottle behind his counter was a constant, and everyone on the island knew of it, just the same.
Parson’s bottle of choice was Johnny Walker, Black Label, of which we knew the sweet stench well from Everett’s breath when he was in a particularly nasty mood. Everett’s favourite hard liquor happened to be the same. When he had a shot, this was his shot of choice.
The plan was simple. Simon and I went to the hardware store to get Mama a pair of gardening shears. We couldn’t afford them, but Parson wouldn’t know that. We would need Mr. Parson to unlock the cabinet that held the shears along with some expensive drill bits and power tools. When he was away from the counter, kept there by me, Simon would lean as far over the counter as he could and snatch the bottle of Black Label from its spot beneath the register.
It all went smoothly. Mr. Parson wanted to know how Mama was doing, as he hadn’t seen her in some time. Worried, as he was since Daddy had died, he never failed to ask us about her when we were in the store, “Oh, fine sir,” I said to him, as he reached the shears out of the cabinet for me. Behind him, I could see Simon standing by the register. He motioned for me to continue talking to Mr. Parson. “She’s doing just fine. Just this evening she’s going to the Walsh’s for supper.”
“Oh, good. Good. Those Walsh’s are good people. It’s good that she’s getting out of the house.” He answered almost despondently, looking at the jagged scar that ran across my left cheek. I was holding the shears in my hand and he was standing a little closer now, blocking my view of the front counter and Simon. By now, Simon would surely have the bottle and be out of the store.
“I don’t think these are exactly what my Mama wants, Mr. Parson.” I said to him then. I looked down at the shears in my hand for the first time and realized that he had handed me the most expensive pair in the cabinet, not the pair I had asked for. They were shiny and the blade was sharp. I looked up when the realization hit and saw Parson standing over Simon at the counter. Simon was clutching the bottle of hard liquor against his body looking up at him.
“Now, what the devil are you doing, boy?”
Simon had been caught.
5.
Simon let Everett’s words eat away at him. The night Everett drove Daddy’s old blade across my cheek, spilling blood on the living room carpet in the light of an orange dusk, Everett had told us what he believed. That our daddy had been a coward of a man.
Rupe, Simon said to me in my room a few days after. We’re gonna get ‘im for this. I knew Simon meant the bandages on my face. I knew that. But he was also talking about Something bigger. Deeper.
Those words of Everett’s, I suspect they were the straw on the camel’s back.
We’re gonna take care of ‘im, Simon told me. Good and proper.
But Everett had been right. And that’s what stung my brother so hard. The murmurs through town—from the Avenue on the south side, up to Main, over to Broadway, and all the way out here north of the creek—were all the same after Daddy’s death: “Did he kill hisself?” “Was it really true?” And it was.
But as I was learning in this world, there was more to it than that. It wasn’t exactly how everyone imagined it. Simon told me the whole truth.
Daddy had lost a considerable amount of weight in the weeks before his death. He couldn’t keep food down. Mama said that Daddy didn’t feel well, and Simon and I both knew it was much more than that. Morrow and the rest of those doctors he went to couldn’t tell Mama what was wrong but he had headaches, stomach pains and bad dreams for most of that summer.
November came and the cool weather set in. Soon, Daddy was waking up most every night, his gaunt face and wide eyes betraying the terror he felt after whatever nightmare he’d been witnessing. He never spoke of the dreams, only that someone or something was coming to get him. The paranoia became incessant and he couldn’t even get any work done. The bills began to pile up. I think the fact that his Daddy had suffered something similar a year or so before I was born was what scared him the most. Watching your father die in front of you is a difficult thing to do, es
pecially when you know that there’s nothing you can do for him. Then, suffering the same fate and feeling helpless yet again must have weighed heavy on Daddy. I was too young to really understand it that well but I think Simon did. Even now I only remember shadows of those events in November of that year.
One thing I do remember, as clearly as if it was today, was the gunshot sounding in the distance.
Daddy had taken some aspirin and told Mama that he’d be out in his work house, the shed out on the edge of Predis field, waiting for the headache to go. It helped him to be in that shed, I think, where he and his own Daddy had spent so much time tinkering with converters and engines and things. Mama found him that afternoon. After the shot broke the silence of the cold day, she ran out across the brown field of grass, to the shed, thinking the worst and finding it there.
Simon told me the day of the funeral, that I shouldn’t believe all the nasty talk in town. Daddy did not kill himself. Something made him do it. There was no note, no sign that he had meant to do it. He told Simon that he had been hearing voices inside his head. They were like the dreams, but instead they came when he was awake and he couldn’t stop them. They were worse, so much worse, he said, because he couldn’t escape them no matter how hard he tried. He didn’t tell Mama about them though, couldn’t. She’d just worry. He wouldn’t have told her about the dreams either but she was, after all, right there beside him each night when he woke in a sweat, mumbling incoherently or worse, screaming against that unseen force inside his head.
I believed my brother when he told me that Daddy had been driven to fire his own hunting rifle into his mouth, leaning it against the worktable in the shed and pulling the trigger with his toe. “He just wanted the voices to end,” Simon said on the afternoon of the funeral, tears in his eyes, “Just wanted them and those bad dreams to go away. It had nothin’ to do with no bills or the shop. He was lookin’ after us just fine, Rupe. Don’t you let no one tell you anythin’ else. Ar Daddy loved us and he was takin’ care of us just fine until them dreams and them voices.”
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