by Louise Corum
“Why, they certainly can. What about Amelia Earnhardt?”
“Yes, and look at what happened to her.”
“Please,” Elka scoffed. “She was a pioneer. Where would we be without people like her?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Mother said and shook her head. “But no, you will go to college, then marry a nice young man and have babies.”
“Boring, boring, boring,” Elka said, shaking her head. “I don’t want to get married, ever!”
“Oh, you will,” she told her. “When you meet the right man.”
“Like you met Daddy?” Elka asked and moved back to swat at her with a dishcloth. “Or was that after he tracked you down like an animal?”
“Elka!” she shrieked. “Don’t say that!”
“That’s what you say!” she teased and swatted at her again.
“Stop it,” she said and laughed, shaking her head. “What has gotten into you today? You’re like a wild animal!”
“Nothing wrong with being a little wild,” she said and winked at her.
“Girl, girl,” she said and shook her head at her. “What am I going to do with you?”
“Not much you can do,” Elka said and came back to the counter, leaning on it. “But, really, Mother, if we keep cooking like this, we’ll all be fat as cows!”
Elka squealed with laughter and Mother smacked her on her bottom. “You little thing, you!” she said, laughing. “One day, you won’t be able to talk to me like that! I will beat you silly!”
“Oh, Mommy, please,” she said. “You’ve been promising that forever. And you know it’s true. What would Daddy say? He likes you skinny.”
“Elka! Stop it now!”
“Oh, I will,” she said and winked. “I will. I will.” She stared over at John and said, “Hey, Rembrandt, what are you doing?”
John glanced up at her and smiled. Their eyes locked and she smiled back. “Nothing,” he said.
“Oh, he gets away with doing nothing and I have to cook,” Elka said and sighed. “I hate Thanksgiving.”
“Oh, Elka, hush,” Mother said and smiled at her. “We’re women and that’s what we do.”
“Maybe I should have been born a man,” Elka said and squealed with laughter at the look on her mother’s face.
“Stop it, Elka!” she said and pointed her finger in her face.
She shrugged. John stared at her. She was dressed in a pair of jeans that were rolled up at the bottom and saddle shoes. Her shirt was red gingham and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She was so pretty, so vibrant. Everyone loved her and John loved her too. She glanced over at him and made a monster face. He yelped and got up to run and she chased him around the kitchen, pretending to get him so she could eat him.
“Your blood is mine!” she hollered, her hands out and reaching for him.
John ran in circles as fast as he could, glancing over his shoulder to see her at his heels. “No, monster, no! Don’t eat me!”
“I am not a monster!” she purred. “I am a vampire!”
“You two stop!” Mother yelled.
Elka turned on her and hissed in her best Transylvanian accent, “You are not my Van Helsing!”
“I’m gonna be if you don’t straighten up!” Mother hollered. You’re driving me crazy! John, stop it. Now, stop it!”
They stopped, out of breath, and stared at her then Elka went after their mother, promising to be gentle as she sucked her blood.
“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” she yelled and slapped Elka with a white dishcloth. “Halloween’s been over almost a month! Now stop it!”
Elka shrugged and stopped, then leaned against the counter.
Their mother sighed and said, “Now, John, I need you to go into the cellar and get me some canned sausage. I need it for the dressing. About three jars will do.”
Even though they were rich, their mother still canned everything, even sausage she would buy from local farmers. Their cellar was full of canned beans, okra and, of course, sausage.
“Elka, you stay there and hush up,” she said, shaking her head, trying to get the hair out of her face.
Elka rolled her eyes and grabbed a red apple out of the bowl on the counter. John stared at her. She waved her hand at the door and said, “Go John! You heard the old woman!”
He jumped a little and did as he was told, listening to Elka’s laughter all the way down the stairs. It took him a few minutes to locate the canned sausage in the dark cellar, but he finally found them and brought them back to the kitchen. He looked around. Elka was gone. He asked, “Where’s Elka, Mommy?”
“She went to see her friend,” she said and smiled at him. “What do you want for dinner tonight, dear? How about a nice meatloaf sandwich? And tomorrow we’re going to have all the turkey and dressing you can eat.”
“And apple pie?” John asked.
She laughed. “And apple pie. Now go on upstairs and wash up. Your father will be home soon.”
“Can I have a piece of pie tonight?”
“Maybe,” she said and turned back to him. “Shoo now and let me get this dinner fixed.”
He shooed and went upstairs to his bedroom where he continued to draw. He lay back on the bed and before he knew it, he’d fallen asleep. He awoke to hear a commotion downstairs. His mother was crying and Elka was screaming.
“Bastards!” she screamed. “I’ll get them!”
“Elka, no!”
Then there was the sound of scuffling feet. He hurried downstairs to see Elka disappear out the front door, slamming it behind her. His mother was in the foyer, at the front door, staring after her. She heard John come downstairs and yelled at him, “Go after her! Now! She’s got a knife!”
He didn’t question her and ran out the front door and down the sidewalk to the street. He saw Elka round the corner and disappear. He tried to catch up to her but she was running too, with a purpose.
“Elka!” he yelled. “Wait on me!”
But she was gone. He searched for her for a good half-hour then went home. His mother was waiting in the foyer and asked if he’d found her.
“No,” he said.
“Oh, John,” she said and put her arm around his shoulder. “Oh, John.”
“What happened?” he asked and stared up at her.
She stared down at him and shook her head. “I’m not sure, honey.”
“Mother, do you—”
“Go upstairs and wash off,” she told him.
He wasn’t a disobedient child and when she commanded him to do something, he did it. He went upstairs and into the bathroom. He washed his hands, then paused and listened. Elka was back.
He raced downstairs to see her standing in front of their mother crying, holding out her hands and shaking. Her clothes were torn and dirty and her face swollen, as if someone had hit her. John didn’t like that thought, the thought of someone hurting his sister. Then he saw the blood. Elka’s hands were covered in blood.
“Oh, God, Elka,” his mother said and began to cry. “Oh, God, Elka, how could you?”
“Mother!” she screamed. “He forced me and they stood by and let him!”
“Who?” she screeched. “Who did this to you?”
“James!” she screamed. “James O’Neill!”
“Oh, Elka, oh, Elka, I told you not to go,” she sobbed. “Why didn’t you listen to me?”
Elka saw John standing at the foot of the stairs and something seemed to change in her. She suddenly began to convulse and then she fell to the floor. His mother bent down beside her and grabbed her, pulling her convulsing body next to her. She stopped shaking for a minute and she pulled her up and half-drug, half-carried Elka out of the house and to the car, calling out to John to stay in the house and that they would be back soon. They were gone a long time. It was past dark when they came home. His mother took Elka into the sitting room and laid her on the couch. They didn’t say a word to John even though he asked questions.
Soon, his father came into the sitting ro
om, wiping his hands with a dishcloth. John was startled to see him and asked him where he’d been. He shook his head at him, silencing him. John noticed his hands were very dirty, as if he’d been digging in the dirt. John had never seen his father dirty before.
“John, you need to get to bed,” his mother said and stood, coming towards him and giving him a quick kiss on the forehead.
“Can I do anything for Elka?” he asked.
“No, honey, you can’t,” she said as tears streamed down her cheeks. “No one can help her now.”
How right she’d been.
*
“Let me just say,” Kathleen said. “That I pieced all this together a while back, but I didn’t know there was a body buried in the backyard. Velma only said that your daddy had taken care of the boy, not how or what he’d done exactly. If I had known that, we would have ripped up the yard years ago.”
John nodded, thinking about how awful that would have been. But as Kathleen talked, his mind seemed to clear and for the first time, he was able to remember things as the new information pushed the fog out of his memory. And so, together, they were both finally able to figure out what had happened to drive Elka over the edge and how the other body had ended up in the backyard.
That day, Elka hadn’t been going to see a girlfriend; she had been going to see a young man she’d been seeing on the sly. He wasn’t the kind of boy Elka was supposed to cavort with and she kept him a secret. His name was James O’Neill.
They weren’t in love, they were in like, or, at least, Elka was. The boy had other ideas and thought that Elka was going to marry him as soon as she got a little older. He was older than her by a few years and very cunning. He thought that with her he’d step into a good job and into a good life. He worked with his father, who was a neighbor’s gardener. That’s how they had met; talking at first through the wrought iron fence in front and over the stone wall in the back before meeting face to face. They hit it off and soon were sneaking off to have make-out sessions.
But Elka was just playing around, having fun with him. He was cute, Elka had confided in their mother, with dark blonde hair and blue eyes. “Probably the cutest boy in Knox County,” she had told her. Their mother had replied, “Elka, you can’t do much with cute. Cute don’t pay the bills. Don’t take this any further. Break it off with him.”
She would, in time, but for now, she was having fun, sneaking off to meet him after school. But she knew he wasn’t the right one and decided to break up sooner rather than later. Elka wanted to travel and go to college. She wasn’t ready to take a chance with this boy. When she told him it was over, he had snapped. Elka had told her mother about it, told her that he had slapped her and yelled at her. Her mother had warned her to stay away from him, that he was trouble and to never see him again. Elka had promised.
Kathleen said, “He was a little son of a bitch to do that to her.”
How true, John thought.
Unfortunately for Elka, she felt bad about what had happened and, to a certain degree, trusted the young man. When he asked her to meet him one last time, she had agreed, telling her mother she would only be gone a little while and lying about who she was seeing. He’d led her into an abandoned house. This was a place where they had met before to make out. Inside the house were several other boys waiting for her. After he had lured her there, he and the other young men had raped her and beaten her. She had finally managed to get away and when she came home, she was in a blind rage, screaming about what they had done and grabbing a knife off the kitchen counter. Then she’d gone back to the house where only the young man who’d betrayed her was waiting. He told her he knew she’d come back and she had. He told her that she was his and if she ever tried to break up with him again, he’d kill her. She told him that he was crazy and pulled the knife on him.
James had smirked and told her that she was too afraid to use it. They fought for the knife and it sliced through her hands, leaving deep gnashes, but she’d finally won out and stabbed him in the stomach, a deep, crimson red slash. That’s how she’d gotten the blood on her hands and why her hands were later bandaged.
When she came home, his mother had taken her to the doctor, who had given her a “nerve” pill—the same type of medicine she’d been on since that day. When John thought about that, he wondered if the nerve pills were what kept her in such a mental state. While what had happened did shake Elka up quite a bit and would have definitely scarred her to a certain degree, the pills might have actually kept her in that state being non-lucid and sometimes drooling, always playing around in some sort of fantasy land. She was on the things for years. No, decades. He remembered a time just before he met Kathleen that she had begun to speak more clearly and had refused her pills for weeks, though John had forced her to take them either by pushing them in her mouth or putting them in her food. He wondered if he’d just thought to take her off the pills might she have gotten better. The thought made him feel terrible. But how was he to know? If he had taken her off them and she’d done something drastic, he would have been to blame for that as well. He had to not only protect Elka from herself but from others. The only option was to keep her on the pills but he was sure they probably had contributed to her mental state. How could they have not? She had been ingesting the things for almost all of her adult life.
However, it didn’t really matter now. John had only done what John had been told to do.
His mother hadn’t revealed anything about the rape other than the fact that something had happened to Elka and she had been to the doctor and then brought home. While this was happening, his mother had called his father and told him what was going on. It was his father that had gone to the old abandoned house where the young man still laid and had taken the body, then buried him in their backyard. His father had probably figured that this was the safest place because he never had any intention of selling the house.
Somehow, no one ever came by to inquire about James O’Neill. John figured that they knew better and had kept it quiet because they had raped Elka. John hadn’t witnessed his burial but he did recall that the ground was all torn up in the backyard and had asked about it. His mother had told him they had prepared the soil for some early spring planting, that in the spring there would many beautiful flowers there. Sure enough, in the spring, mounds of beautiful flowers sprung up.
He now remembered that he’d been coached to never talk about that day. His mother and father had pounded it into him to protect his sister at all costs, to never say anything to anyone about her. And it was never mentioned again and he had grown older and over time, he had forgotten all about it.
But in the end, the combination of the rape and the knowledge that she had killed another had done her in. From there on out, none of their lives were normal again. Everything following that awful day was fractured and tainted in some way. John realized he’d longed for normal his whole life and, when he’d met Kathleen, he had a glimpse of it. However, normal had come at a price.
Kathleen read from his mother’s journal, “Albert died. I know the thought of what had happened tormented him day in and day out. He couldn’t take it anymore. But I have to be strong. I have to be strong for my children. I have to hope that God can forgive us all.”
She shut the notebook. John found himself sobbing, crying for all the lost hope, for the loss of his sister’s sanity, for the broken family and for the boy that deserved to die. He cried for Elka, mostly, because it hadn’t been her fault. She was lead astray, she’d been fooled by this boy, this boy that he now had a name for: James O’Neill. James O’Neill was the boy in the grave and he was brother of the man who’d come to the house looking for answers and money. James O’Neill caused all of this, quite possibly because he saw Elka as his own way to normal. If only… No. There was no need to go down that path. What was done was done. It was best to let it lie.
Kathleen came over and sat beside him, taking him into her arms. “Shh, honey, shh…”
“Oh, God,” h
e said. “How could I have hurt her after she’d been through that?”
“Shh,” she said. “It’s okay. I love you. Shh…”
“How can you love me after this?” he asked, pulling away.
“I’ll never stop loving you, John,” she said with such sincerity it broke his heart.
“Yes, you will,” he told her, hoping to match her sincerity. “And it’s fine if you do. You gave me the best six years of my life. I was the happiest man alive. Most men don’t get what I had. You’ll never know how much it means to me.”
“That’s just silly,” she said. “It’s just silly to talk like that.”
“I could have done better,” he said and stood up. “I could have done better by her.”
“You did the best you could,” she said.
“You know that man that came by a few years ago?” he asked. “That Amos O’Neill? He said Elka killed his brother. He said his name was James. James was the one who… You know.”
“I know,” she said. “I listened outside the door.”
He stared at her.
“The man looked troubled,” she said. “I felt bad for him. I wanted to see what he wanted.”
“If you knew all this,” he said. “Why did you make such a big deal yesterday?”
“I thought Elka was in an institution, John,” she said. “And when I realized what had really happened, it did upset me. I thought I was going out of my mind or something.”
He nodded. Everyone went a little crazy sometimes, didn’t they? It’s just the degree of crazy you went to that mattered. He knew everyone was capable of it at some time. But then again, hadn’t it really been an accident? He knew it had and he was sorry he’d handled it the way he had. He should have just taken responsibility for it and done the right thing. But sometimes the right thing was the hardest thing in the world to do. There was sacrifice in the right thing, there were a lot of tears in it and there was pain. But in the end, it’s worth all that because you can look back and always said, “I did the right thing.”
He knew that eventually things would go back to “normal” and he probably wouldn’t be charged with anything concerning Elka’s death, or the boy she’d killed. He wouldn’t go to jail or do any time mainly because of who he was and the number of people he employed. It wasn’t exactly fair but it was the way it was. Being a prominent citizen did have its perks.