A Good and Happy Child (40 page)

I had never visited the rector’s before. I was herded through a vestibule thick with hung coats into the middle of the living room, a Victorian confabulation of whitewashed walls, robin’s-egg carpet, and muscular antique chairs. And in those chairs, in a circle, around a spitting fire, sat Uncle Freddie, Tom Harris, and Finley Balcomb. They were sipping sherry out of silver goblets, wearing jackets and ties.

“Good Christ!” boomed Uncle Freddie, when he saw me. He dropped his drink and cursed as he mopped sherry off the table. “What the hell is going on?”

No one flinched at Uncle Freddie’s use of bad language in the rector’s home. They all stared. A pool of dirty water gathered at my feet. My trousers and jacket were soaked from the waist to the cuffs. Mud smeared my face; grit and sand clung to me; leaves still flecked my
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hair. My jacket had a tear across the right shoulder—the wool liner hanging like a flag in defeat. My hands and face stung scarlet from the cold, and from the branches I’d run through. My breath came in painful waves. I kept turning from face to face, waiting for someone to understand. “It’s over!” My voice came out louder than I intended, a shout.

The shocked silence continued.

“What’s over, George?” asked Finley finally.

“The exorcism!” I said. “I don’t need it.”

No one moved. I felt a burst of teeth-clenching energy. I grasped with both hands the lapels of my jacket, and like a superhero revealing his true identity, ripped the jacket off my body in one motion. I laughed—it seemed like the funniest thing I’d ever done. It was then I began to shiver violently.

“Well for frig’s sake, let’s get a blanket on him,” blustered Freddie. The rector charged from the room, calling for his wife to put tea on, and where were some spare blankets, and did they have any of the children’s old clothes. Uncle Freddie followed, running to look for towels. Tom Harris began peeling away my jacket, while Finley Balcomb pulled my soaking shoes and socks from my feet. All the while Tom Harris peppered me with questions, bending awkwardly with his crutches so he could look me in the eye. How had I gotten there? Had I walked? Run? I was soaked, he said.
It’s snowy out,
I babbled.
Dark,
too. It’s dark when it snows, because of the, because of the cloud cover. Aren’t
you proud, Tom? I did it by myself. I got tired of waiting.
Tom Harris exchanged a look with Finley. Did my mother know where I was? he asked. I shrugged.
Didn’t you hear me? I did it!
I said.
I must be better
than my dad. If I could do it, no practitioner.
Tom Harris frowned and stumped from the room, bellowing to the rector for a phone. Clattering and motion filled the rooms beyond. I found myself alone with Finley Balcomb, who removed his jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders. I shuddered violently again.

“Come over here,” he said softly. “Come sit closer to the fire.”

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He guided me to an ottoman near the hearth. Then he drew back the fire screen. The full heat of the flames roared out at us—my frozen skin felt like it was cooking. Finley bent down, and with his small, pink hand, he placed a log on the bed of flame. Then he dragged over a stool to sit next to me.

“Ah, thank you, Ruth,” he said, as the rector’s wife passed him several big, woolly, mint-green towels and a quilt. She clucked at me. “Those pants are ruined,
and
those shoes.”

Then she muttered, “And so is my ottoman.” She began to savage my hair, legs, and arms with the towels. “He’s going to get hypothermia. How long were you wet?”

“I’ll take care of him, thank you, Ruth,” said Finley firmly. When she withdrew, he methodically wrapped the towels around my legs and draped the quilt over my shoulders. “I was in the war,” he smiled, “in the Pacific. I know how to treat shock.”

“Not in shock,” I said through clenched teeth.

“You’re shaking,” he corrected.

A shudder seized me for a full minute. I felt my lips quiver and heard an
uv-uv-uv-uv-uv
sound escape my lips. Finley placed a hand on my back and frowned. “Quiet now.”

“I fought him,” I said, smiling through my chattering teeth. “Just like my dad.”

Finley’s eyes met mine. But instead of beaming back at me proudly, his eyes registered deep concern.

“What do you mean, George?”

“Just now,” I said. “I don’t need an exorcism after all. I got rid of him. I don’t feel him.” I shivered again. “He’s gone. I’m sure of it.”

“You’ve hurt your hands, George,” said Finley quietly. He took one. My knuckles and the back of my hands were scratched, speckled with fresh, ruby-red scabs. He turned my hands over. Three thick rope-burns intertwined on my palms, turning them the color of raw steak. Finley started.

“What happened?” he said.

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“I told you,” I said triumphantly. “I fought him.”

Finley’s brow furrowed, and he raised his eyes to mine. “You got these . . . fighting a demon?”

I nodded.

He returned his attention to my hands. “The scars we receive from the enemy are not of the flesh,” he murmured. He turned my hands over and placed them back on my lap. “What have you been doing, George?” he said quietly. “Please tell me.”

All the character in Finley’s unimpressive face—the folds of pale and liver-spotted flesh, his pinkish scalp with its wisps of hair—seemed suddenly pinpointed in his tiny brown eyes. They drilled into me. They seemed to sweep across my mind, like a remorseless searchlight. I shrank away and pulled the quilt closer around my shoulders.

“I did something my father never did,” I whispered, staring into the fire. “I killed one of them. I got revenge.”

Finley’s gaze softened. He took my trembling hand again. His own glowed with a comforting, dry warmth. He stared into the fire alongside me, patiently, as if we were an old couple holding hands, watching TV.

“Always remember, George,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Christ is ever and always with you. No matter how far you stray from him.”

“What are you talking about?” I snarled.

“Just remember,” he said. “Will you promise me? It is the devil’s worst snare, to make us think our sins are unforgivable. But none of them is, not one.”

In the baking heat of the fire, my hands enclosed in Finley’s soft pink mitts, my maniacal energy slowly drained away. Terrible fatigue, worse than the Thorazine at its dullest, replaced it. I slumped. r r r

When we arrived, my mother—even with her arm in a sling, even with me wrapped in four layers of towel, blanket, and coat—clutched me to a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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her in a grip of life and death. At last she pulled away and greeted Tom Harris, Finley Balcomb, and Uncle Freddie, with a strange, distant formality, as if they had not been in an argument that same day. Kurt, she explained, noticed me missing as soon as I left the house. There was a burglar alarm—of which I was ignorant—that went off as soon as I opened the back door. Kurt ran out to look for me. That had been at seven-fifteen. It was now nine-thirty. Kurt had not returned.

“Did you see him?” my mother asked me.

“Yeah,” I said, raising my head. “But I ran away.”

“I called the police an hour ago,” my mother continued. “They don’t begin a search before a person’s been missing twenty-four hours. But they said they would look for George, since he’s a minor, and it’s cold. There’s a risk of freezing.” She pursed her lips. “I asked them to send Kurt home, if they saw him. Hope he’s okay.”

As the guests prepared to leave—toddling toward the door in their herringbones and scarves, mumbling encouragement—Finley took my mother aside: “I think you’ll notice,” he said quietly, “that George has hurt his hands.”

Mom led me upstairs to the bathroom and found a crinkly old aluminum bottle of calendula. She perched on the edge of the bath. Her movements were slow, marked by constant rests while she overcame some invisible stab of pain or adjusted the padding still taped to her jaw. She stroked my meat-red palms with the transparent, oily lotion.

“Why did you leave, George?” she asked.

I was too drained to speak. “Dunno.”

“How did you hurt your hands?”

I said nothing.

“I want you to listen to me.”

I did. Her ministrations ceased. She sighed. I could tell that moving her face pained her. She did not want to cry because it hurt too much.

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“When your father died, I knew I had a mission.” She sighed.

“And that was to raise you as happy as I can make you.” She sighed again, deeper this time. Her eyes were full of tears. “If you think you’re better off with me than at the home,” she said, “then I trust you. You’re my smart boy,” she smiled, as the tears spilled over, down her cheeks.

“I’ll keep you with me. We don’t have to be apart again.”

“I’m sorry I ran away,” I slurred. The fatigue overwhelmed me. She shook her head, slowly, holding the forgotten calendula in her palm. “I can’t stand this,” she wept.

“Mom,” I said.

“I just can’t. I can’t, I can’t.” She cried. I sat slumped, fighting to keep my eyes open. Finally she wiped her face with her good hand.

“We’ll all run away,” she sniffed, forcing a smile. “All together.”

I awoke with sickly pale light on my face. I had fallen asleep with the drapes open. My head throbbed. Then I realized the pounding might be something else: someone was rapping on the front door. I scrambled out of bed and down the staircase, with the comforter still wrapped around my shoulders and the floors freezing my feet. A head of light-brown hair was visible, man height, through the porch windows. I ran across the front hall and jerked open the door.

“Kurt!”

A policeman stood on the porch, heavyset, young, but somber. My face fell.

“Your mother here?” He did not smile.

“She’s sleeping.”

“Better wake her.”

“She needs her rest,” I said. “Can you come back later?”

“Come back?” he said, incredulous. “No. Tell her we found her friend.”

“You found Kurt? Where is he?”

His mouth tightened. “Better get your mother,” he repeated. a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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•

•

•

I shook my mother awake.

“Policeman’s here,” I whispered.

“Did they find him?”

“Yeah.”

“They did?”

“That’s what he said.”

My mother rose stiffly, dressed, and limped down the stairs. She stopped short when she saw only the policeman in the hall. “Where is he?”

she said, her voice now full of mistrust. “I thought Kurt was with you.”

“Ma’am,” said the policeman, shaking his head, “I don’t know how in the hell he got up there. But I’m going to ask you to come take a look before we cut him down, see if you have any idea. You better leave the boy here,” he added.

My mother’s eyes widened. She gripped my hand. “I need you now,” she whispered.

I helped her—slowly, painstakingly—down the drive and over the short wall of snow created by the snowplows, to the road. A police car was parked on the gravel shoulder, along the guardrail. Its lights twirled, its door stood ajar. We heard staticky voices on the CB. Day had scarcely broken into a cold, white morning. We shivered. The policeman led us across the road.

My mother hesitated, confused. “Where are we going?” she demanded, irritably.

“This is the reason we didn’t find him last night,” explained the policeman. “We were looking for him, well . . . on the ground. We didn’t think . . . we wouldn’ve looked . . .” He stood gazing out over the water. My mother and I followed and stood dumbly at the rail.

“I don’t get it,” said my mother.

In response, the policeman pointed. We followed his finger. The sky remained heavy—later that day, it would resume snowing—and the bare trees’ gray fingers seemed to reach into the
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clouds. I squinted along with my mother, trying to determine what in the world he could mean by leading us to the river and pointing at the sky. I found him difficult to see, at first. The sky and the landscape intermingled in a patchwork of winter shapes—the bare boughs, the conifers on the opposite bank rising away to a rocky slope. Kurt’s body dangled as if it were any other bundled frozen mass—a squirrel’s nest, a broken branch. He had been hanged from the rope swing. The rope was pulled taut. The frayed end had been coiled tightly twice around his neck. It wrapped around yet a third time, almost lazily, like a flung-over scarf. His head twisted at an acute angle. His stiff form—linear, arrowlike—pointed downward: an arrested plunge, a stillness that expresses violence.

Kurt’s face bloated from the upward pressure of the rope. His cheeks, nose, forehead, were waxy gray. One lidded eye lay closed. The other eye had popped open—a freakish, accusatory witness. Kurt’s heavy arms swung; his legs dragged in the river up to his knees, wetting his jeans to the crotch. The current pulled at him. I felt something buzzing in my ears. A white noise, a terrible keening, which seemed to block out both sound and time. Movement drew my gaze away. My mother had fallen to the pavement in a faint. The policeman rushed over and fell to his knees in the gravel, struggling to raise her up. I saw his lips moving. He was calling for me to help. I licked my dry lips. I could not stir. April, This Year

Istarted whining, not like a child, pleading and negotiating, but like a dog does, a high-pitched, nonverbal beseeching, for release from acute discomfort. My eyes filled with tears, and my environs swam: just an ordinary examining room, crummy, beat-up, with a strong whiff of disinfectant that did not quite cover the odors of next-door garbage and urine.
Not enough like the one back in Charlottesville, not enough like the
one they almost put me in
—because it should have been exactly like it. They needed to take me back to that exact spot where I had failed, where I had turned my mother and me into shadows; frozen the world; made us fakes, people who instead of April tulips or May graduation days or June weddings open their eyes and see a single day, a day full of cold and death.