The Uninnocent (11 page)

“Not sure,” I said. My message of hope seemed stale, banal, for some reason, and the more I thought about it, the more I'd come to believe it was one better repudiated than preached. Likewise, God seemed more complicated than I'd believed Him to be. I didn't understand Him or His ways, certainly not well enough to speak His cause before others whom, by the way, I also did not understand.

Sarah withdrew her hand, stepped toward me, placed it on my head, which made me wince a little, and she said, “You're tired, dear, is all … your audiences need you, your family needs you, all of us need you to go to Louisville and shine the light of truth into the darkest corners of people's souls and help them find their way back into the sun.”

Sarah, it would appear, had been listening to my patent drivel these past years so perfectly was she able to quote me to myself. God in heaven, I almost laughed, but the idea had nothing to do with gaiety. Instead, allow me to admit, it ran more along the lines of Paul's Epistle to the Romans 12:19. Look it up for yourself.

Over the days that followed my initial confession of apostasy came many wearying pleas and petitions from my wife, my manager, even the children. My prediction regarding Rebecca was not wrong. She had become what the kids call a Goth. The dyed black hair, the black fingernails, the black dress and black boots even bigger than Luke's, if that were possible, and a girlfriend in tow dressed in the same uniform. Becca, I should say, did seem the least egregious of the lot of heretics my family had become. She at any rate didn't seem to care as much as the others whether the income from my missionary work continued or not. She styled herself, I'm guessing, as a bit of an anarchist, though we all know anarchy is best proselytized by the disaffected well-to-do. Be that as it may, Rebecca was no more able to budge me from my den than the others, and Louisville soon came and went, absent its blind featured speaker. Harrison told me we received hundreds of cards and letters from well-wishers.

Which brought me to the second phase of the plan. The revenue stream must be stopped. This was not as simple as merely dropping off the lecture circuit since, clearly, Harrison had invested wisely and, despite myself, money still flowed in with those letters.

An anonymous tip to the Internal Revenue Service informing them that my family and closest advisor were bilking our religious foundation of tens of thousands of dollars, maybe more, for personal gain, rather than funding programs for the blind and other disabled, got the job done. It all went rather quickly. The lien on our home and bank accounts, the removal of the furniture and frippery in the living room and everywhere else in the house—yes, things moved irrevocably, decisively. Sarah spent a lot of time crying, I can report. When she wasn't doing that she was arguing with Harrison. Luke simply disappeared from the scene. And Rebecca, I gathered, was spending more time over at her girlfriend's place. Harrison's indictment for fraud and income tax evasion was bittersweet for me though my residual sentimentality toward him—the former him, I should say, the man who did help me in the beginning—faded away to nothing when I learned how much we had earned over those fruitful years, and how much he had stolen from his gullible mistress. They broke up. And once my attorney—a former devotee who volunteered his time—cleared me of any collaboration in my handlers' schemes, I filed for divorce from the lovely Sarah, who, seeing there was nothing to salvage, didn't contest the action. The foundation was dismantled. The media was ruthless. An insightful if scathing article about my “amazing fall from grace” was published in the very newspaper that gave me my computer and printed my own first efforts. Fond memories. Now I was left with the house and enough money to live modestly, having such comforts as society thinks are due a poor blind fellow who'd been bruised a bit in the school of hard knocks.

While I sometimes feel a numbness in the pit of my stomach when pondering the arc of my life, I still have my Sviatoslav Richter disc of Schubert's Sonata in G Major to comfort me. I still indulge in fantasizing how my daughter Emma, had she lived, would have saved me from my hapless enemies if not myself. But the past has passed. The sole question that remains is whether or not to feign a sudden miraculous recovery of my sight after Martita becomes my new bride. God knows there's much to be said for blindness, especially when one can see. Either way, I'm sure she and I will be quite happy living here together once we get this gilt off the walls.

THE UNINNOCENT

I
N OUR INNOCENCE,
we burned candles. We got them from a nearby church, and because my sister believed what we were doing was holy, she said it was fair to take them. Churches, Sister said, were not in the business of making money off children. “Alms for the poor,” said she. “Suffer the little ones to come before me and unto them I shall make many gifts.” My sister enjoyed creating scripture. She had an impressive collection of hymnals, though neither of us could sing. And, as I say, many candles. I worried about her logic and thefts sometimes, but made it a point never to contradict her. She was older than I, and anyway, what was a hymnal but paper and ink? What was a candle but so much wax and string?

The yellow tongues at the ends of their tapers would flutter when the wind flowed off the lake, and we'd look at each other, down there in the old boathouse, our eyes wide, our mouths agape. And yes, when the flames made shadows all over the rustic wooden walls, where the canoes lay on their shelves and oars were lined up like rifles in a gun case, we would know that
he
was there. We weren't, to say the least, objective in these exercises, these private séances. It didn't occur to either my sister or me that the flickering of the candle flames might have been caused by our own expectant breath. The wind, we knew, could have nothing to do with it. No, it was him. He had come back. He never failed us. After all, he was our Christmas brother.

He never spoke. Our task was to decide what his signs meant. Everything had deep meaning. If the smoke of the candles drifted in a certain direction, it was up to us to deduce what such a thing portended. If a bat flew out of the boathouse, if a flock of chorusing birds lit in a tree overhead, if a mouse danced along the length of the wall, by our reckoning there were valuable ramifications. We took it upon ourselves to determine what the signs were, and interpret. This must, I know, sound indiscriminate and childish.

An instance. Down by the lake. Blind old dear Bob Coconut, the dog, stiffened in the legs, lying in the long grass. The air blue. Autumn. The water was cold, and red and brown leaves clotted the surface of the lake near the shore, like an oil slick. Angela and I had a sign that day. We'd found a dead ovenbird that'd flown into the kitchen window, and we knew what that meant. Out in the boat, we got our friend Butter calmed down enough so that he would let us tie him up like we always liked to do, and tickled him, and warned him if he laughed we would throw him overboard. The blue air was turning toward purple as the sun moved down into the trees and evening was on us. We'd been so hard at our game we hadn't noticed how quickly the hours passed.

Butter wasn't having a very good time. Nice boy with his round face and wide-open pale-gray eyes. He couldn't complain, of course, because those were the rules, and because my sister had wrapped her muffler around his mouth. “Don't worry, little guy,” Angela told him. “We're taking you home now.” And he squirmed a bit before falling back into the bottom of the boat to breathe. “Don't you cry,” she finished, “or Angie will have to hurt.”

I was slowly rowing us in. Butter's parents would soon be worried. The evening star was up, a tiny eye of foil, winking. And then I saw him, our brother. He was standing on the lake. He was a milky swirl. His feet were in the mist that had come up out of the water into the warm and cool atmosphere. My sister put her palms over Butter's eyes so that he couldn't see. She thought he had been through enough, and she didn't want him to be so scared that he'd never come out to play with us again. Moreover, she felt that nobody deserved to see our brother but us. Butter sobbed in the bottom of the boat. Angela and I cried too, while the evening star got brighter and brighter.

Butter was drawn into all this because one of the candles went out at just the moment he walked into the boathouse when we were praying for the ovenbird's soul. Too bad for Butter, my sister told me later. And true, it was too bad, because from that moment on, all Butter's problems became a matter of fate. Nothing we did, said Angela, was because we decided to do it. Our Christmas brother—who was one with fate—told us what to do and we did as we were told.

Looking back, I must admit to some surprise at how unparented we were. My father's persistent absences were difficult to fathom, and what I've since been able to fathom is difficult to articulate, for the shame of what I think I understand. He worked hard to support us. He had a long daily commute from our rural home into the city. He was a tall, meek, square-headed, decent sort of man. And I've become unshakable in my conviction that he was a dedicated philanderer. I have no proof, and I never confronted him. My deduction is the nasty product of all those days and nights of fatherlessness coupled with my sure memory of his wandering, unprincipled eyes.

As for Mother, she was transformed into a cipher, a drifting and listless creature, by the Christmas brother's death. We never knew her any other way, though Father told us she used to be a happy girl. She took it all to be her fault. She was the one who slipped on the ice. No one pushed her. The miscarriage that followed her accident was quite probably the end of her life, too, along with that of the blackened holiday fetus. Angela and I—who came along later—were unexpected, were not even afterthoughts. Mother carried us, birthed us, but gave us to understand we would never be our brother. Nothing would ever replace him. Much as I loved him, sometimes he made me want to do bad things.

In our innocence, sometimes we were compelled to go to extremes to get our brother to come to us. We felt forced to do things we weren't proud of, yet never lost our faith in him even when, in our mad desire to tempt him home, we hurt things that didn't deserve hurt.

We always feared Christmas. We couldn't understand that other world, that parallel world where he resided, we couldn't see why Christmas made him so reluctant a guest. Here, we thought, was the one time of year when families should celebrate together, reunite and rejoice.

Angela was the one who decided to hurt Bob Coconut. I didn't make the connection between the dog and our brother, but Angela told me to trust her and I did. This was during Christmas, of course. My father and I had brought in the tree we'd sawed down at the tree farm. A prickly, nasty blue spruce. Ornaments, twinkling lights, cookies, the train set, cards hung over pendant string from end to end on the mantel. Bob Coconut lay on a rug before the fire, and twitched pleasantly under the influence of his dreams.

“You think Coco remembers when he could see?” Angela asked me.

I didn't know, but I thought so.

“Coco?” she whispered in his old ear. “Oh, Co-co.”

“Let him sleep,” I said.

“I bet Coco could see him if he wanted to. Dogs have those abilities, you know. They can hear things we can't hear. And they can smell better than we can. I bet he can see right into that other world, can't you, Coco dear?”

“Doubt it,” I said.

“Hey, I've got an idea,” she said.

I don't want to write down what my sister did to him. I wasn't surprised, though, that it failed to work. Our brother was farther away from us than ever, after that. From then on, I decided to trust nothing my sister said or did. Instead, I began to observe her.

Two Angela stories.

First Angela story. There was a period when she thought she was our brother, after he stopped appearing to us. “He's in me now,” she announced one night. She liked possessing him, liked being possessed. On occasion, she allowed me to pose questions. “What is it like being dead?” I asked. “You'll know soon enough,” he answered through his medium. “Do you love me?” I asked. “I love you fine, but I love Angela better,” she said, her eyelids closing to narrow slits, the corners of her mouth lifted into a satisfied smile.

Then she found out one day that she wasn't our brother. Something mysterious happened to her, and Mother told her she was a woman. And so it was time for her to start wearing dresses. I got to shave her legs. My sister even photographed me while I shaved them, telling me it was good for both of us, a sacrifice. She wouldn't let me shave the hair under her arms, though. She said this was because she couldn't take a picture of me doing it. I would be too close to her. That is what she said. The real reason she wouldn't let me do it, I think, was that part of her still believed she was our brother. She could walk around with her glistening and smooth white legs in the sun beneath the pleat of her billowy skirt, a young woman with strong calves and hard thighs, and we could admire her lush femininity, but we could never release her from her masculine possessiveness.

Second Angela story. Once there was a parade in the little upstate town where we lived. I don't remember what holiday it was. There were a couple of makeshift floats. There were marching bands from county schools. I remember because it was the day my sister ran away from home. She was eighteen. She managed to vanish—“like a ghost,” said our mother—and was not heard from for many years. She was a missing person. Some people thought she was dead. I knew better; I knew she was truly missing.

In our innocence, we grew up. Tonight is his birthday, or would have been. He'll always seem older than me, no matter how many years I keep on going. Angela is married and lives in New Hampshire now, her personal cold complementing its heavy winters. She has been married twice. She's been around, as she likes to phrase it. She has three children—she may be cold, but she's not frigid—and mentioned in a recent letter that she wants another.