Grimm Reapings

by R. Patrick Gates

  "Uh, Jen, this is Chalice, Chalice Silver, my girlfriend."

  "Chalice Silver? I'm Jen Watson. Nice to meet you," Jen said, extending her hand.

  Chalice shook it and said, "Hi."An uncomfortable silence followed in which the three stood there looking at each other. Jeremy's boisterous arrival from the house fractured the moment, and suddenly everyone was talking as they grabbedJackie's and Chalice's overnight bags and the soda they had brought with them and went inside.

  It all happened so quick that Jackie was suddenly inside the house before he could do anything about it. Since entering Northwood via Route 116, and especially since seeing the blasted tree and crow at his old house, he had felt a growing knot of trepidation in his gut. He didn't say anything to Chalice, but he was worried about how he might react when they finally got there. He had a real fear that he might not be able to go inside. But then, without a moment for thought, he was inside and-wonder of wonders!-the place didn't feel like Grimm Memorials; it was different, brighter, warmer ... almost new!

  Another ghost from the past put to rest, he thought proudly, yet fleetingly, as Jen whisked him and Chalice off on the grand tour of the renovations completed and planned, though Jackie declined a visit to the crematorium in the basement.

  Diane Nailer was having similar thoughts as she and her other son approached Northwood from the opposite direction on Route 116. What if I can'tphysically cannot-set foot in that house? she worried. It was her biggest fear; she didn't want to disappoint Jen again. Jen was so excited about the B&B and her new life, and Diane was determined not to rain on her parade. But she was scared, and like Jackie, she felt that today she would have to face more than one ghost of the past and stare them down.

  Or run away crying.

  She tried not to picture that.

  In the seat next to his mother, portable CD player in his lap, earphones dangling from his head, Steve listened to a Linkin Park album that Randy Gaste had given him and watched the scenery slide by behind the sheets of rain. Steve wasn't worried about going to the place where all the terrible things had happened to his father and family. In fact, he barely thought about that at all. Instead, he felt a sense of anticipation about going there that he couldn't vocalize or even form into a conscious thought-it was just there, like an itch begging to be scratched.

  Steve did worry, but his worries were different from those of his mother and brother. He was worried that his mother wouldn't stay at Jen's long enough for him to talk to Jackie and ask him some questions about his father, Steve Sr. He knew Jen had invited them to stay the weekend in one of the new rooms they'd just finished redoing, but his mother had declined, saying that since they only lived ten minutes away it was silly to stay over. Since overhearing that phone conversation, Steve had been racking his brain to find some way to convince his mother to stay the weekend atJen's, or at least let him stay. No matter how he worked it out he knew that his mother would never go for it. Unless ... he enlisted the help of Jackie and Jennifer, he thought with renewed hope.

  That might work.

  Just as the rain abated, Diane pulled her SUV in next to Jackie's beat-up Dodge Neon and killed the engine. She and Steve sat for several minutes, silently taking in the place, before anyone inside realized they were there. Jeremy was the first to come out, running and leaping from the porch to boisterously throw open Diane's door, lean in, and give her a huge hug before she could even undo her safety belt.

  "Mom!" he cried. "You made it! Jen will be ecstatic. I think she'd convinced herself that you'd find some way again to ditch out of coming here!" Seeing the look on Diane's face he quickly added, "I'm kidding. She knew you'd come. This is gonna be great. You will love the place Jackie already does. He's inside. Come on.

  "Hey, Little Steve!" he cried without breaking for a breath. He ran around the car, opened the passenger door, and literally pulled Steve out with both hands. "How's it goin', bro-in-law?" he asked jovially, giving Steve a playful punch in the arm and a vigorous hair tousling.

  Steve got out and staggered against the car, but not from Jeremy's roughhousing; the strangest thing had just happened as he and his mother had pulled up to the front of Grimm Memorials. A dizzying, buzzing noise-the sound of thousands of summer cicadasgrew in his head until his skull vibrated with it. At the same time, he smelled cotton candy and had the strangest hallucination of falling inside his own head; falling into the depths of his own mind. The expanding buzz in his brain set his fillings to tingling in his mouth as he fell away from his own eyes-could see them above him, two almond-shaped windows on the world-and into a swirling, churning miasma of thought, emotion, instinct, and memory that was bottomless. The feeling of falling was so real it brought intense vertigo and terror. Just as quickly as it began, it ended and everything was back to normal. Jeremy was pulling him from the car, yet Steve felt as though he had just been pulled from the depths of hell.

  He frowned, nodded at Jeremy, and mumbled, "Hiya. "

  Diane saw Steve's consternation and misunderstood it. She was about to explain that he didn't want to be called "Little Steve" anymore, butJen and Jackie came out of the house before she could.

  "Mom! I don't believe it! "Jen screamed shrilly, causing Jackie, in closest proximity to her, to wince and cover his ears. Jen tore across the porch and down the steps into her mother's arms in a mad dash that had everyone holding their breath for a moment as she stumbled on the stairs and nearly fell. She wrapped her arms around her mother and smothered her face with sloppy kisses.

  "You've lost weight since the last time I saw you! " Jen said approvingly between kisses.

  Flustered at first, then embarrassed by the compliment, Diane tried to cover it up with forced laughter and grabbed fen's face with both her hands. "Married life agrees with you," she told her, taking a moment to look her up and down. She winked at Jeremy, who came around the car with one hand on Steve's shoulder and the other carrying the bag of ice cream they'd brought. "I can tell you're taking care of my only girl," she said. "Keep up the good work. Really. I've never seen her look happier or healthier."

  Mother and daughter hugged again and went up the stairs arm in arm to where Jackie, now joined by Chalice, waited to introduce her and give his mother a hug and a kiss before all went inside.

  She rides an ocean of thought-which she can sometimes hear and understand, sometimes influence....

  The moments of strength, when she can clearly hear and understand the world through the boy's conscious thoughts and see through his eyes, are short, but give her hope. She is getting stronger. The Machine is still working, without her doing anything, just as it always has and always will, for Grimm eternity.

  She laughs but not for long. She listens for an echo of mocking laughter... .

  Silence ...

  A good sign.

  An unexpected jolt of clarity, like a strong electrical current, thrusts her into the boy's conscious mind once again. It is like being on the other side of a one-way mirror in a police interrogation room. She can see and hear everything the boy does, but he is not aware of her presence. At least, she doesn't think so. The moment does not last long, but it makes an indelible impression on her and fills her with such hope more than she's had since the night of the boy's first wet dream. In that instant of reality, looking through the boy's eyes, she realizes she is looking at none other than her own house, the funeral home.

  Grimm Memorials.

  A feeling of such exhilaration sweeps through her at that moment that she loses contact, and slips back into the darkness.

  But the image remains.

  Home!

  The boy has somehow managed to bring her back to Grimm Memorials Funeral Home, the place of her birth, where she spent all of her life, which still holds secrets only she knows about.

  It can't be a coincidence. It has to be the work of the Machine.

  Empowered and renewed by this knowledge, she struggles to reemerge and exert herself more than ever to reopen that connection to the
boy's eyes, ears, and mind.

  "A toast!"

  They sat around a long, handmade (by Jeremy) oak banquet table bedecked with a plethora of dishes for the Thanksgiving meal. In addition to the massive, thirty-pound turkey, Jen, with the help of Mrs. Holcromb, had prepared three types of stuffing, meat, bread, and cranberry, plus mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, turnips, butternut squash, acorn squash, beets, corn, peas, creamed spinach and pearl onions, buttermilk biscuits, and salad. As if the traditional dishes weren't enough, she had also prepared lasagna and meatballs and a baked ham with a raisin sauce glaze, which waited on the sideboard in the dining room. To accompany this feast were several bottles of wine, and to start it off, shrimp cocktails.

  "Wow! " Steve said and everyone nodded their agreement with his summation of the banquet before them.

  At the head of the table, Jeremy Watson brandished a carving knife and fork for the turkey and declared, "I love fuckin' turkey!"

  To which Jackie jokingly replied, "You pervert."

  Jennifer shot them both disapproving glances, glad that Mrs. Holcromb was in the kitchen and out of hearing range. Upon the old housekeeper's return to the table, Jen held her wineglass up to her youngest brother. "Steve, since you are no longer little"-she winked at her mother, who'd made a point of telling everyone as soon as they'd come inside-"I think you should make the Thanksgiving toast."

  Shyly, Steve stood and picked up his glass, unsure of what to say. He looked around the table at everyone, coming at last to Jackie. He suddenly knew what to say.

  "To family," he said, never taking his eyes off his brother. "May we always be honest with each other."

  There was an uncomfortable extended silence at the table that gave Steve the satisfaction of thinking that almost everyone there was thinking about what had happened in that house and feeling guilty about the years of lies they had fed him.

  "Hear! Hear! "Jeremy cried, breaking the moment. "An excellent toast, my man. Let's dig in."

  "Wait!" Mrs. Holcromb spoke. "Do you not say grace at Thanksgiving in this family?"

  "Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub! Yeah, God!" Jackie intoned rapidly.

  "Very funny, Jackie, but that's not what Mrs. Holcromb had in mind,"Jen said.

  "How about `Through the lips and over the gums, look out, stomach, here it comes'?"Jeremy added, grinning mischievously.

  "That's hardly a prayer," Mrs. Holcromb said with as much disdain as her voice could hold.

  "No, it isn't,"Jen added quickly to stop Jackie or her husband from any further witticisms. Jackie had that look on his face he got when he was seriously putting someone on. "Would you do the honors, Mrs. Holcromb?"

  Mrs. Holcromb launched into the Lord's Prayer, and heads lowered around the table. Jackie and Chalice rolled eyes at each other, and Steve was suddenly overcome with a wave of nausea that made his skin clammy with cold sweat and left him slightly dizzy and out of breath. By the time she reached the last line-"For thine is the power and the glory forever and ever"-Steve thought he was going to puke or pass out. Mrs. Holcromb finished her prayer, and the table exploded in a flurry of hands reaching for food, but Steve hesitated-the smell of the food suddenly sickening to him.

  "What? What's that? "Jackie pushed his empty plate away and slowly rose from the table, holding his right hand to his ear.

  A concerned expression seized Diane's face. "What's wrong?" she asked, the concern threatening to blossom into fear and panic; she did not feel comfortable in that place no matter how much they had changed it. Since arriving, she'd been on edge, getting edgier.

  "Oh, okay!" Jackie continued, giving his mother a quick wink to let her know he was kidding. "I'm coming." He turned to the others. "You'll have to excuse me, the couch is calling to me like the sirens once called brave Ulysses, and I must obey."

  "Ah yes!" Jeremy quickly agreed, standing. "The Couch Goddess awaits, and we must lie upon her and feed her sacrifices of football for hours on end." The two headed for the living room and Jackie motioned for Chalice to join him.

  "No, no. I'll help clear the table. It's obvious I'm dealing with a typical male chauvinist pig-this is something I never knew about you. Maybe your mother and sister can tell me more," she said, smiling coyly.

  "Oh, please, no,"Jen said, starting to clear the table. "Mrs. Holcromb and I can do this. Everyone else can go relax. We'll have coffee and dessert in a little bit."

  "Don't be silly, Jen," Diane said. "Of course we'll help. Let the men go. They'd only break something and get in the way." She turned to her youngest child and said, without thinking, "Come on, Steve, you can help."

  Steve had barely touched his dinner. He still wasn't feeling well. He didn't know why or how, but Mrs. Holcromb's prayer had made him feel so bad, and now, to top it off, his mother had to embarrass him. He sat frozen, seized with an anger so furious he could have exploded if it weren't for humiliation holding him in silent check. No one noticed; they were too busy clearing the table. He sat seething with flush-faced emotion until everyone had left the room. He rose, pushed back his chair, and stormed out the front door. Outside, he ran down the front steps and around the parked cars, not caring where he was going, his eyes hot with tears. A path off to the left led him behind the right side of the house to a small graveyard surrounded by a rusted and dilapidated wrought-iron fence. He stopped, mesmerized by the sight.

  It was dizzyingly familiar.

  Because you saw it on that TV show, he told himself. That had to be it. But could there be another reason? He felt like there was and he should know it, but he couldn't quite remember.

  Strange.

  He opened the waist-high gate, which had an intricate floral design soldered into its bars, and walked slowly along the weed-rampant center path between the rows of stones. He counted thirty-one headstones in all, but one in particular drew his attention. An old, black, slate stone, circa 1700, it jutted at a backbreaking angle as if someone had pushed on it.

  Or fell on it, he thought, randomly.

  A strange thing happened next as he approached the stone. Before reaching it, he suddenly knew what was inscribed upon it.

  He read the words and shivered more from them than the brisk November air.

  "That was weird," he said softly. How did I know that? He had no explanation for it and fell back on the TV show, even though he knew that wasn't true.

  "Hey, Steve!"

  It wasJackie. Steve waved, feeling a moment of happiness to see his brother had followed him, but then he was seized with such an intense feeling of hatred for his sibling that it actually made his vision blurry and set off a pulse-driven headache in his temples.

  Jackie called to Steve and jogged over to the cemetery. When Steve disappeared Jen had ordered Jeremy to go find him and see if anything was wrong, but Jackie had insisted that he, as Steve's big brother, should do it. He needed to move anyway after such a big meal. The couch had done nothing to aid his digestion. Joining Steve, he noticed his brother was trembling and his eyes were red, as if he'd been crying or close to it.

  "What's up?" he asked.

  "Nothing," Steve said softly, not meeting Jackie's eyes, looking at his nose instead.

  "Come on, Goober," Jackie cajoled, using the nickname he had dubbed Steve with years ago because of his love of the candy by the same name. "I can tell when something is bothering someone, and you are definitely bothered by something."

  Steve glanced sideways at his brother. "Will you tell me about my father? Every time I ask you about him, you and Jen clam up and say, `Go ask Mom'! Well, she won't tell me nothin' and I'm sick of it. I want you to tell me, what was he like? Was he ... okay?"

  Jackie was caught off guard. This was the last thing he had expected. He gave in. "What can I tell you? Yeah, he was a great guy. Jen and I really liked him. Our real dad wasn't a very nice guy. I don't remember him much, butJen does. He used to beat Mom and drink and do drugs. A couple years after he got killed in a car accident, driving drunk, M
om met your dad, and he was the exact opposite of our real dad. We were glad he was going to be our dad," Jackie answered cautiously.

  "But was he, you know, normal? Okay? You know!" Steve persisted.

  "Yeah, I guess. I'm not sure what you're getting at.,,

  Steve took a deep breath and asked his most important question: "Was he effeminate like me?"

  Hearing that question, Jackie felt a sudden deep pang of sympathy for Steve. "No, he was ... he was just who he was," he said, careful not to use words that might insult Steve.

  "But he wasn't like me?"

  "No, "Jackie answered truthfully. "You're more like Mom than him. Why are you asking such a weird question?"

  "I was wondering if I naturally took after him or if I'm this way because Mom has always treated me like a girl. Now I know the truth, she turned me into a fag," Steve said bitterly and began to cry.

  Jackie didn't know what to say. Finally he came up with, "If you're gay, Steve, it's okay. It won't change anything or how any of us in the family feel about you. I know that! "

  "I'm not gay! Jeez! Even you think so!" Steve screamed at him, releasing a good portion of his pent-up rage. "She treats me like I am-everyone does-but I'm not! I don't want to be like this. Everyone thinks I'm gay because of her!"

  "Come on, Steve, you're being too hard on yourself and on her," Jackie said.

  "Yeah? You think I'm too hard on her? How hard should you be on someone who lies to you your entire life and hides the past from you?"

  Jackie's face must have showed his shock.

  Steve nodded. "That's right. I know about everything that happened here." He waved his arms to encompass all of Grimm Memorials.

  "You saw the TV show," Jackie said quietly.

  "Yeah. "

  Jackie stood mute. To tell the truth, he hadn't thought much about Steve and how the TV show might affect his life.

  "Everyone lied to me," Steve said when his tears had abated. "All my life I've been fed lies and I'm sick of it. I want to know the truth once and for all."