Four Octobers

by Hautala, Rick

  Andy tried to speak but couldn’t. He was staring at her, his eyes wide. The room felt unnaturally cold, and he hugged himself as a shiver ran up his back. He wanted to get up and leave.

  Get out of here!

  Now!

  Leave this crazy old woman to herself!

  But he couldn’t move. Every muscle in his body was locked.

  “Robert Draper…” she said, her voice drawling. “Robert Matthew Draper.”

  Miss Henry’s voice was wistful as tears filled her eyes, and she gazed off into the distance far beyond Andy. It took him a moment to realize that she was staring at the photograph on the wall behind him. Slowly, he turned and looked, fascinated once again by the oddly familiar expression on the soldier’s face.

  “That man there is your Uncle Arnie,” Miss Henry said when Andy’s back was turned to her. Her words fell like a hammer blow between his shoulder blades. A chill shot up his spine, and the air in the room seemed suddenly too thin to breathe.

  Andy didn’t know what to think, but through his confusion, one clear thought occurred to him. He gasped involuntary when he turned back to face the old woman. She was staring straight ahead, regarding the photograph with an intense but wistful look. She had another prescription bottle in her hand and was slowly twisting off the cap almost as if she wasn’t aware she was doing it.

  Terrified, Andy watched as she shook several pills into her hand and still, without taking her gaze away from the photograph, tossed them into her mouth and swallowed them down with a few dry gulps.

  “We were engaged to be married, Arnie and me,” she said, her voice distant and hollow. “We were supposed to get married after I—” Her voice caught, but she forced herself to continue. “After I had the baby.”

  Tears filled her eyes and spilled down her wrinkled cheeks, running like rain through a dry gully. The distant glow in her eyes looked positively insane now, but Andy knew that she wasn’t insane. She was lost in a deep, desperate sadness… a sadness that the years had never healed.

  And then, like a bolt of lightning, he realized the truth.

  Robert Matthew Draper must have been the baby she and his uncle had before they were married. The baby had died before they got married, and then—married or not—Uncle Arnie had gone off to fight in the Korean War and had never come home. They were the uncle and cousin he never knew.

  “Once he was gone… once little Bobby died and Arnie was off to Korea, and after he was—” She had trouble saying the word but finally managed to choke it out—“Killed.” She paused and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, then forged on. “I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t live with the heartbreak and pain, so I… so I did what I had to do.”

  “Stop it!” Andy shouted as he leaped from the couch and started toward Miss Henry. “Why are you doing this?”

  Her hand was already clutching another prescription bottle, shaking as she opened it and dumped out the entire contents, and then stuffed them into her mouth.

  “I did what I thought was right… what was best,” Miss Henry said after washing the pills down with a gulp of water. Her voice was slurred and dragging, but her eyes were still bright as she focused on Andy.

  “Come here… like a good boy,” she said, waving to him feebly.

  Moving on automatic, Andy walked over to her and stood beside her chair. Miss Henry let out a long, deep moan as she reached out to him. Her fingers were bent over, looking a little like a bird’s claw, but he clasped her hand and gave it a firm but gentle squeeze. He was surprised by how fragile and warm it felt in his grip. He remembered the time he’d caught a barn swallow in his grandfather’s barn and held it, warm and trembling in his hand.

  “After Hugh and Etta lost their boy—”

  She choked on her tears that were flowing freely. Her lower lip was pale and trembling, shaking like she’d gotten a chill.

  “I—I only did what I had to do.”

  “Hugh and Etta. My parents? What do you mean? What are you talking about? Was Robert my brother?”

  Miss Henry’s eyes held their distant, vacant glow as she smiled at him and shook her head slowly from side to side. A strand of white hair fell across her eyes. Moving dreamily, she brushed it away and sighed. The warmth of her breath blew across his face.

  “Hold my hand… tighter… my boy,” she whispered.

  Her voice was dragging terribly now as she leaned her head against the back of the chair and inhaled deeply. Her nose made a high whistling sound, and then, without warning, her body convulsed. Jerking violently forward, she exhaled noisily, blowing snot from her nose. The rancid smell of her breath made Andy wince.

  “I… It’s time for me to die,” she said feebly. “Past time.” Her eyes rolled back in her head, exposing the red-veined whites all around the pupils. “I can’t live with the pain any longer. I tried. I thought… I had hoped that I would be strong enough, that I could be here and see you… watch you grow, but I… I can’t bear it any longer.”

  Andy’s eyes stung as he tried to stop his own tears while he gazed at the old woman. Numbing cold wrapped around his heart like dead, grasping hands. Terror of the absolute finality of death gripped him. She was dying right here in front of him, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Even if he hurried and called the ambulance now, it wouldn’t get here in time. She was fading away before his eyes as she clung to his hand.

  “No, Andrew, Robert wasn’t… your brother… He was… your cousin.” Her voice was heavy and labored. The blood was draining from her face even as Andy watched. “You… you were my baby… Arnie’s and my little boy. I gave you up because… because I knew… after Arnie died… I couldn’t raise you alone… not in this town, anyway. The memories… The memories are too—”

  Her voice cut off as another, stronger convulsion squeezed her body, making her eyes bulge and her face momentarily flush.

  Andy cried out in fear, “No! Don’t do this!”

  He wanted to turn and run, but she held his hand so tightly he couldn’t tear himself away. His vision blurred with tears as he looked down at her chalky face. There was no way he could understand or accept what she was saying.

  “You were mine… ours… Arnie’s and mine, and we—I had to give you up… to them… to Hugh and Etta… to raise. Once your father died… in Korea, I had nothing left to live for… Not even you… And I couldn’t keep you. I couldn’t raise you on my own. My heart was broken… Do you see? Can you understand and forgive me?… My heart’s been broken all these years… all these years.”

  Her voice had a ragged, tearing quality. Andy cringed at the sound. He remembered all those uncountable times he had gone past her house on foot or on his bike, and she had shouted at him, scolding him to stay away.

  Was this why?

  Was it because she knew who he was, and seeing him only reopened the wounds in her heart for her lost love and for her lost child?

  Gripping his hand, Miss Henry pulled him closer. Her eyes had a milky glaze as she stared at and through him. Flecks of mucous speckled her lower lip. Her body trembled as wave after wave of pain wracked her. The light in her eyes was dimming rapidly.

  “You… you… were… always… my… baby …”

  Andy tried to pull away, but her grip was strong. He didn’t want to hear this. He didn’t want to know. If this was true, then his father and mother weren’t really his father and mother. They were strangers, imposters who had raised him as their own, knowing that their son—their real son, Robert Matthew Draper—was dead and buried in Hillside Cemetery. His whole life up to this point had been based on a lie.

  “No… Stop… Please,” he whispered, shaking his head slowly from side to side and wishing he could blot out her voice to keep it from echoing inside his head.

  “You… have… to… know… I’ve… always… loved… you… Andrew… and… I’ll… always… be… with… you.”

  Andy was so lost in panic that he hardly noticed it when Miss Henry shuddered befo
re letting out a long, wheezing sigh. With one last convulsion, she slumped back in her chair. Her head rolled to one side, and her eyes remained wide open, staring, but no longer seeing anything.

  As Andy stared blankly at her, a horrible image arose in his mind. He imagined that he was somehow outside his body, standing in the street, looking up and seeing Miss Henry in her living room window, staring out at him as he stood there on the sunlit sidewalk. He imagined that the doily behind her head was the tattered remnants of the yellowing lace curtains that surrounded her bloodless face and her blank, unseeing eyes.

  Trembling and whimpering softly, Andy pried his hand loose and let her hand fall. It hit the side arm of the chair and dangled over the edge, just barely grazing the threadbare carpet. Her chest was motionless. A loose strand of hair hung across her left eye down to the corner of her mouth. He reached out and gently brushed it away, expecting to see her flinch, but she remained absolutely, frighteningly motionless.

  She’s dead!

  A sickening hollowness filled his stomach.

  She’s really, honest-to-God dead!

  Tears flowed down Andy’s cheeks as he stared at Miss Henry and tried to absorb what she had told him. He wanted desperately to believe that she had said them only to hurt him or frighten him. He needed to believe that it was all a lie, but deep in his heart he knew the truth.

  Miss Henry hadn’t lied to him.

  She had lived with this secret her whole life, and finally, she had wanted all the misery and loneliness to end. But before she died, she had to tell him the truth. In some weird way, he already accepted it because—somehow—on some deep level, he had known or suspected it all along. He wondered when he had first gotten a hint of what was going on, but he couldn’t pinpoint any specific incident, nothing particular that anyone said or did. All he knew was that he had seen the truth in her eyes just as he had recognized his own face in the frozen half-smile of the soldier in the framed photograph on the wall behind the couch. Even now, Andy could feel the steady gaze of the man—his real father, now long dead—boring into the back of his skull.

  As he turned to leave, Andy was feeling as fragile and hollow as a glass bottle. From now on, and for the rest of his life, he knew that, whenever he passed Miss Henry’s house or even thought about her, her steady, piercing gaze would burn into his skin, and he would hear the watery rattle of her voice, calling to him.

  And he knew that, from this day on, Miss Henry would be watching him from the window of her living room, watching him like a silent, patient spider in the center of her decaying web.

  Bracing his shoulders, Andy wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. He wasn’t sure what to do next, so he just left the house by the back door, blinking his eyes as he stepped out from the gloom into the bright morning sunlight. The chilly air stung his lungs as he took a deep breath and held it so long his head began to spin. The school bus had long since come and gone without him. He knew he was going to have to go home and tell his mother he’d missed it. As he started up the street toward home, a bone-deep cold penetrated his being, freezing his blood and making him feel suddenly very much older.

  And even then, as young as he was, Andy knew that, no matter what else happened to him, no matter what sorrows and joys he experienced, from now on, the coldness that ached deep inside him was never going to go away.

  (Special thanks to Bill Ollie for his eagle eye. —RH)

  Blood Ledge

  August & October, 1971

  Part One: The Jump

  “Maybe you are chicken-shit.”

  Danny Talvela stared blankly at his best friend, Tommy Salo. Gritting his teeth, he shook his head in adamant denial, but he knew it was more than the midday heat of the August sun that was making his ears feel suddenly inflamed. Tightening his two-handed grip on the beach towel he had slung over his left shoulder, he shifted from one foot to the other and, looking straight at Tommy, heaved a sigh.

  “No, I ain’t chicken-shit.” There was a low tremor in his voice. “Besides, you should talk. You don’t dare to do it, either.”

  His gaze shifted from Tommy to Carl Holmquist, then back to Tommy. “I just don’t wanna do it, okay?”

  Tommy lived on Oakland Avenue, two houses down from Danny and had been Danny’s best friend since before either of them could remember. He was a skinny kid with a chipped front tooth that he got one night when his father came home drunk after playing cards with some of the fishermen down on the wharf. Everyone knew about it, but nobody ever talked about it. Tommy was always smiling, and in the summer, his face tanned “as dark as a berry,” as his mother always said.

  Carl, better known as “Booger,” lived on Curtis Street, the next street over from Oakland. He was Danny’s second closest friend and had earned his nickname in kindergarten because he had a habit of picking his nose and eating whatever came out. Although he no longer did that, at least as far as any of his friends could tell, he was apparently going to be stuck with the nickname for the rest of his life. In fact, he took a measure of pride in it. His favorite joke, which he repeated to his friends’ perpetual irritation, was to ask someone if they thought his hair looked like it was turning green. Before they could answer, he would snort loudly, wipe the flat of his hand across his nose, and then run it up over his forehead to the back of his head and say, “I don’t have any idea why!”

  All three boys were thirteen years old. In another few days, summer would be over, and they would start eighth grade at Stonepoint Junior High School. It was early in the afternoon, an hour or so after lunch, and they were on their way to Nickerson’s Quarry to have a swim before they decided what they were going to do for the rest of the day. Tommy had heard that, around three o’clock, there was going to be a pickup baseball game on the big league diamond at Pingree Park; but on a hot day like this, the air was like a wet wool sweater wrapped around your face. None of the boys really wanted to get all sweaty and dirty again after cooling off at the quarry.

  “Well I think you are chicken-shit,” Booger said. He took a step closer to Danny. “’Cause if you weren’t, you’d come over to Blood Ledge with me and Tommy.”

  “Tommy’s not gonna jump. Wait and see.” Danny didn’t like the nervous edge he heard in his voice and wondered if his friends noticed it.

  Booger was known for his quick temper, and Danny was praying that he wouldn’t really start a fight over something as stupid as this. Narrowing his eyes against the white glare of the sun, Danny shook his head tightly as he sawed his teeth back and forth across his lower lip.

  “I just don’t want to, is all,” he said with a helpless shrug as though the decision wasn’t entirely his to make. “’Sides, Judy Martin said she and Karen might come out for a swim later. They’d stay over on this side. I don’t want to miss them if they come.” He took a breath and added, “’Specially Karen.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet,” Tommy said, cupping his hands in front of him to indicate Karen’s growing breasts as a wide smile spread across his tanned face. “You just can’t wait to see what she looks like in a bikini, right?”

  “And you can?”

  Tommy didn’t have a comeback for that, and Danny smiled, knowing he’d scored a point.

  “’Sides,” Danny continued, “my parents don’t want me going over to Blood Ledge.”

  “Like they’d even know,” Booger said. He shook his head and snorted with laughter. Danny watched to see if he put his hand anywhere near his nose, but he didn’t. “What they don’t know ain’t gonna hurt ’em.”

  Tommy stroked his chin thoughtfully and nodded. “I think you’re not coming ’cause you’re scared to jump.”

  “Am not.”

  “Are too,” Booger said. He moved closer to Danny, hawked up a gob of saliva, and spit it onto the pile of granite boulders beside them. “I know it’s ’cause you’re afraid you’ll end up smearing your pathetic guts all over the cliff.”

  Danny shrugged again and shifted his weight back and forth from one
foot to the other. Just thinking about Blood Ledge made his stomach feel like he’d swallowed a helium balloon, but he knew he couldn’t let his friends see how afraid he was. For one thing, just the name of the cliff bothered him.

  Blood Ledge.

  That was bad enough, but the thought of actually jumping off it, of falling that far down before hitting the water, absolutely terrified him. He couldn’t believe some of the high school kids actually dove off it.

  The red granite ledge stuck out in a huge, jagged V-shape that overhung the still, black quarry water below. From a distance, it looked like the downward-tilting prow of a rusted, sinking ship. Everyone said it was thirty-two feet to the water, but Danny often wondered if anyone had ever actually measured the drop, or if this was just guesswork that was simply accepted by everyone.

  To him, it looked more like fifty feet straight down.

  Along the side of the cliff, there were numerous rock shelves and angled ledges where, years before, when Nickerson’s was a working quarry, huge granite blocks had been drilled and blasted away. They scored the slanting cliff side all the way to the waterline and even below the water. In the green shallows, the rock wall angled down into the depths. No matter what time of day, no matter what the angle of the sun, the face of the cliff seemed to be cast in perpetual shadow that deepened its red color. In a few places where underground springs ran out, it really looked like the rock was streaked with fresh blood.

  People who actually dared to jump off the cliff had to make sure they got a good running start because straight down below the cliff, the water was less than six feet deep. A jumper had to get a good bit of distance, maybe eight or ten feet out, in order to land safely in deeper water. If they didn’t, they’d break their legs on the submerged ledges, for sure.

  Many years ago, Danny had asked his grandfather, Jussi, who worked in the quarry before the Depression, how the cliff had gotten its name. He had always assumed it was because of the red granite, whereas the rest of the cliffs around the quarry were composed primarily of lighter, gray granite, but his grandfather told him about an accident that had happened back in the late 1920s. A stonecutter, a Finnish man name Markku Salminen, had gotten trapped between two huge granite blocks when they shifted off the loading platform. He’d been crushed to death, squashed like a fly between the two stone slabs. Nothing much was left of him except a pulpy smear of shredded flesh and pulverized bone. The blood that had squeezed out of him had flowed from under the stone blocks and run in a gory stream across the top of the ledge and down into the water below. Some kids said, if you came out to the quarry after dark, you could still hear him screaming in agony.