You could hurt a man with that belt buckle, Shawn thought.
He looked at the bed.
His mother was facedown, her head turned toward him. Her eyes were closed, but even with the stuttering light from the wood fire and the lanterns, Shawn could see that her face was wet. Tears and blood. Blood was running from her nose like a lazy worm, and her lip was puffy and split open. There was already bruising around one of her eyes. She’d have a black eye in the morning. She was being smashed down into the mattress by his father, each thrust of his father’s body causing a snuffling huff of air to jump from his mother’s mouth. His father looked fierce, urgent, his porcine grunts sounding almost primal. He was working away at her with no regard.
Shawn stepped closer. He had the end of the belt in his left hand, and his small, ten-year-old right hand wrapped around the middle of the black leather. He let the heavy silver belt buckle swing back and forth and back and forth. That belt buckle had left its marks on Shawn in the same way that it had left its marks on Shawn’s father. He hated that belt buckle, and he hated the way his father would point to the dimple at the corner of his own eye and tell Shawn that he got that when he was ten for mouthing off to his own father, Steven Eagle, and that Steven Eagle had a scar on his leg and had inherited the belt from Shawn’s great-grandfather. That belt buckle had been giving bites of misery for generations.
He took another step, and then he froze. His father, thrusting, grunting, turned his head to the side, and for a moment, Shawn thought Simon was looking right at him. But no, he went back to work on Shawn’s mother. Shawn took one last step, so that his thighs were pressing against the edge of the bed, and as he did so, his mother opened her eyes. It took a second for her eyes to focus, and when they did, they opened wide. With the bloody nose and split lip, with the beginning of a plum bruise under her eye, in the flickering light of fire and lantern, she looked half an animal herself, and the cry that came out of her fit the spectacle.
“No,” she said. Her voice was a pitched plea, and though Shawn knew that she was talking to him, that she saw his face and read the intent, that the swinging silver belt buckle glinted in what light there was, Shawn’s father thought she was talking to him. Simon took it as an affront. A willful act. And any willful act, in Simon’s mind, needed to be stamped out. She needed to be reminded who was the boss, who was the man in this family. How dare she tell him no? He’d already had to give her more of a tune-up than he should have had to, and still, even now, she was defying him? No. That wouldn’t do. Simon stopped thrusting into her long enough to swing his hand back, ball it into a fist, and bring it down into the side of her face as hard as he could. Let’s see her try to talk back after that one.
The other punches he’d already landed on his wife would normally have been enough to have her call on the doctor. The punches on the softer flesh of stomach and side meant the toilet water would be tinged red for a week. He usually stayed away from her face; the broken nose was a new thing. When he punched her in the nose she heard the snap and grind of bone, felt the blood gagging the back of her throat. Her swollen lip hid the ragged edge of a chipped tooth that they couldn’t afford to fix and that she’d have to live with for whatever time was left to her. But it was this final punch that did the real damage. Simon Eagle was a strong man, like his father had been and his grandfather before him. He could swing a hammer all day, haul rocks, load logs, dig a ditch. And he was a brawler. He could take a punch, but more important, his fist, all the men swore, was like an anvil. He wasn’t the biggest man or the scariest to look at, but god almighty, if you were in a fight in Whiskey Run, you wanted Simon Eagle to have your back, because the only son of a bitch dumb enough to get in the way of Simon’s fury was somebody who was either just passing through or was going to learn in a hurry that it was time to leave. You took a swing from him and you’d swear he kept a roll of quarters tucked behind his fingers. He’d sent more than one man to the hospital after things had gotten out of hand at Ruffle’s. And he knew he had the kind of punch that could kill a mule.
Because of that, and because he knew that even in Whiskey Run men would keep their own counsel for only so long, he’d always taken it easy on his wife. Black eyes and bruises up and down her body, pinched flesh, slaps and shoves, a broken arm—all things that could be explained away. Never the face. And he’d never swung as hard as he could. He was afraid to, really. In his mind, hitting her was never something he did in anger; it was just to teach her a lesson. He wouldn’t have hit her unless she deserved it. But this time. Oh, this time. He’d put down five pitchers of beer and as many cans of Genny as he could drink in the fifteen miles from Whiskey Run, because why not? He worked his ass off for that ungrateful bitch and her little shit-snot of a kid. A few drinks was his right. Was it unreasonable to expect that when he came home from a day of work his wife might show him a little warmth? But no, not from that ice-cold bitch. So he’d given her a few little light touches already that night. Nothing that she couldn’t handle. Enough that she should have known her place. And she was still mouthing off to him. Who did she think she was to say no to her husband?
So he’d swung as hard as he could.
A sledgehammer coming down on a fence post would have made the same sound as his fist smashing into the side of her face.
He didn’t know it at the time and neither did Shawn, but that punch was enough to smash the orbital bone around his wife’s eye, to cave in part of her skull. It wasn’t enough to kill her—and for that, his wife decided once and for all that she was done with what few silent prayers she did offer up, because if there was a God, he would have let Simon’s blow take her home—but it did leave her blind in one eye, and despite the best efforts of the doctor at the hospital in Syracuse who put her back together and then fruitlessly brought a police officer in to talk with her, Simon’s punch left a permanent dimple on the side of her face. A mark that could not be undone.
She cried No, and two things happened simultaneously: Simon smashed the side of his wife’s face in, and Shawn Eagle swung that belt as hard as he could.
Even though he was only ten years old, he was a ten-year-old who hauled buckets of water up from the river, who split firewood, who lived in a ramshackle, falling-down building and who spent his time, when he wasn’t in school, doing chores or playing in the woods. Which is to say, ten years old or not, when he swung that belt, the heavy silver buckle cut through the air fast enough to sing like a bird. When it crashed into Simon’s temple, it knocked him partly off Shawn’s mother.
Maybe if Shawn had stopped then, Simon would have been on him, would have caught his son and turned the belt on the boy, and if that had happened, it would have turned into something horrible and unimaginable, but Shawn didn’t stop. He got partway up on the bed and swung again and again and again. He swung as hard and as fast as he could, trying to drive that belt buckle through his father’s head. He wanted to slay the beast. He could see blood flowing from his father’s head, flooding across the muzzle of his face. Another gash on Simon’s cheek. The hot, wet thwap of the buckle on Simon’s back, his arm, his chin. And the strike that probably saved Shawn’s life: Simon’s bad knee. Right on the bone.
It sounded like a branch breaking in a storm.
“You piece of shit!” Spit flew from his father’s mouth. “Shit bastard!” Simon was roaring, and it was like nothing Shawn had ever heard before. A steaming locomotive dropped off the side of a building. Ten thousand dogs tearing at a hare. Pure, unbridled fury.
Simon lunged at him, but Shawn swung again and caught him on the wrist, just before his father’s hand would have clenched around his ankle. He danced back off the bed, jumping to the floor, and the thing he saw then scared him more than anything in his life had. It was his mother’s face.
He didn’t know what he’d expected. He hadn’t really been thinking of anything other than his shame and anger. Why had he acted tonight instead of all the other nights?
Shame.
Because tonight he had thought, I’m glad it’s not me, and had been flooded with shame so pure that he knew the only way to get rid of it was to do something drastic. If he’d thought about it, however, he would have expected something else on his mother’s face: pride, relief, even thankfulness. But what he saw instead was pure fear. And looking at her face, for the first time in his life he truly understood that the reason she stayed with Simon was that she knew what he was capable of, and that look on her face was enough for Shawn to understand what his father was capable of, too.
His father was cradling his wrist and swearing, and Shawn and his mother locked eyes.
“Run,” she said. She said it so calmly and quietly that he wasn’t sure he’d actually heard her. The tone of her voice was at such odds with the look on her face. “Run,” she said again, but this time her voice was louder. He still didn’t move, and then, a third time, but this time screaming, shrieking, as loud as she could yell, the sound of her voice matching the terror on her face. “Run, Shawn! Run.”
He ran. He dropped the belt and ran, bursting out the door and running as fast as he could toward Eagle Mansion. It was a clear night. Full moon and bright stars, enough light to turn the woods and the hills and the thin coating of snow into something magic.
But the flip side of magic is always terror.
Shawn pumped his feet across the gravel drive, not feeling his feet bruising and shredding, then across the light slick of snow on the grounds. The mansion loomed dark and fearsome above him, a face as caved in as his mother’s had looked to him.
The door into the servants’ quarters from the outside was long gone, so he didn’t even have to pause to open it before entering Eagle Mansion; the building swallowed him whole. It was darker in there, but there was enough light through the windows—or the open scars where the windows had once been—and the cracks in the walls and the holes in the roof for him to see.
Jesus.
Shawn Eagle, thirty-six years old, opened his eyes and looked at the scars of smoke and fire in the groundskeeper’s cottage, at the broken sink, at the tortured metal of the stove. He didn’t want to remember any of this. He wanted to keep it locked and buried away. Why hadn’t he just let Fisker bulldoze this building? For that matter, why couldn’t he just leave well enough alone? He could have let Eagle Mansion continue its downward spiral of rot and ruin. He’d come back once already, after college, and hadn’t that resulted in enough violence? What was the dark hold that Eagle Mansion had on him? There had been no earthly reason for him to come back a second time, to fix the estate up, and yet here he was, trapped by the memory of something he’d tried so hard to forget. He should have stayed away. Stayed in Baltimore and played with his shiny toys and left the past to be the past. These ghosts couldn’t haunt him in Baltimore. But it wasn’t that easy, was it? He closed his eyes again, tried to remember the sound . . .
. . . of his father swearing and chasing him. “Shit bastard!” The shuffle step of his father’s bad knee, a drunkard’s bounce off the wall as he followed Shawn into the mansion, his gait made worse because Shawn had tagged him that good one right across the kneecap. And the sound of the belt. He didn’t have to look behind him to know that his father was swinging the belt. He could hear the heavy buckle cutting through the air.
“Come and take your medicine, you little shit bastard! Come and take what’s coming to you. There’s no use in running. You’re just going to make it harder on yourself.” His voice starting to sound almost seductive: “You stop right now and I’ll take it easy on you. Just a couple of licks to teach you a lesson,” rising into a howling roar, “but if you keep running, I’ll make sure you remember this one, Shawn. Shawn! You shit bastard! I’m going to beat you until your skin peels off. I’m going to cut off your dick and smash your little squirrel shit brain in. I’m going to lay into you until every inch of your flesh is smashed in!”
Shawn ran.
Through the kitchen and behind the dry storage. He was afraid to look back, to see how close his father was. If it even was his father. A part of him knew that if he looked, the moonlight would reveal the truth: he wouldn’t see his father, he would instead see some monster, some leathery, scaled beast, bloody fangs and hair. Eagle Mansion was finishing the job that the drink had started, baring his father’s true soul to the world. No, he couldn’t look back, because Shawn knew that if he were to see his father’s essence, he would freeze in his tracks. He’d be done.
The stairs.
He took them as fast as he could, the sound of the shuffle step behind turning into a clopping plod up the wooden staircase. There was the sound of something deep and solid striking the planks at irregular intervals, and Shawn realized it was the belt buckle, bouncing off the stairs as his father followed him.
“Where do you think you’re going, you little shit bastard? Do you think you can outrun me forever?”
Shawn hit the landing of the second floor. If he pushed through the ornate metal-banded door, he could run down the hallway past the numbered rooms that used to be full of swells and fast women and then go out the staircase on the other side. If he was fast enough, he could double back to the groundskeeper’s cottage, grab his mother, hustle her into the truck, and leave his father behind. Maybe this time she wouldn’t insist on coming back home. They could go off to . . .
The thought made him sick. There was nowhere to go off to. His aunt Beverly had tried to get his mother to leave, over and over again, but something sick and invisible kept her tethered to his father. She’d never leave. He understood that now.
Behind him, with the inevitable thud of the belt buckle on the wooden planks, his father’s limp up the stairs was getting closer.
Shawn grabbed at the doorknob that would have opened the hallway to him, but it snapped off in his hand. He felt the beginnings of laughter bubbling up from somewhere inside him. Of course! Eagle Mansion had been built by his great-grandfather and then passed on to his grandfather. It had always been diseased and decaying, from the moment it was built, infected by the blood madness of the Eagle family, the poison more evident with each and every generation. And now his father held on to the estate with the closed grip of a man who didn’t understand that the person he was choking was himself, that the building was alive to its own history. Eagle Mansion would never let him go free. The water seeping through the gapped roof and broken windows, the unchecked vines and bushes, the ghosts of every guest who had stayed here—they all came together to turn the building into something living and breathing, a monster in its own right. Shawn knew it was a ridiculous thought, but it felt right and true: the building had an agenda of its own, and it didn’t mean to let Shawn get away so easily.
There was a reason, Shawn thought, that he was so scared of Eagle Mansion at night. With its broken windows looking like teeth, it had loomed over his entire childhood. During the daytime he sometimes played in the old mansion, but at night, at times like this, Shawn remembered some of the stories he’d heard his father telling his mother. Gambling. Murder. Women chained in—
No.
There was no time.
He threw his shoulder into the door with little hope. He was only ten, and he could see the way the door had warped and splintered in its frame. It wasn’t going to move.
He stepped back to throw himself at the door again, but for some reason he glanced back toward the stairs. It was just enough for him to flinch away from the blow; his father was still a few steps from the landing, leaning forward and swinging the belt in a great looping curve. The silver buckle cut through the stiff air, catching a glint of moonlight from the triptych of windows running up the stairs.
The buckle missed Shawn by an inch. No more than that. The distance of a flinch.
He didn’t hesitate. He ran for the next flight of stairs, to the third floor. He wasn’t supposed to play in the main section of the mansion. His mother was afraid that he’d fall through the rotten floor or that he’d get stuck in one of the rooms or th
at a wall would collapse on him, but he was a curious boy and brave enough when the sun was out. Sometimes he played in the mazelike tunnels and cellars that connected the groundskeeper’s cottage to the main building and went out under the lawns, and sometimes he played in the mansion’s old casino, which, with its broken windows and vine-choked space, resembled a fairy tale more than it did a room that did a roaring business during Prohibition. But often, when he stole away, it was to go up to the third floor, because that was where the guest rooms had been reserved for high rollers and important guests. All the rooms were suites, but Shawn’s favorite was the one his father claimed had once been used by Babe Ruth.
Shawn knew that the door to the third hall was open, because he’d been up there the week before, and he knew that if he could make it down the hallway, all the way to the end, the door to the Ruth Suite would still be standing open, the way he’d left it. And if he could get through the door without his father catching him, he could shut it and slam the lock home, and maybe it would keep his father at bay long enough for him to go sleep off his drunk. That was his only hope. Oh, Shawn would still get what was coming to him when his father woke up in the morning. He wouldn’t walk away scot-free, but he’d be a lot more likely to see the leather end of the belt than the silver end. It would be the kind of whipping that would leave him unable to walk for days, unable to sit for weeks, maybe with a broken arm, too. But, he thought, probably, maybe, making it into the Babe Ruth Suite and bolting the door would mean a beating he could survive.
The Mansion Page 24