Beach Music (58 page)

Bringing some of the river with her, she trailed that same water into her house looking for her children, who watched the scene from a boulder that gave them an overview of the farm where their childhood had gone wrong. She knew by heart where everything in her house was placed and she went to a kerosene lamp and the drawer where she kept matches and lit a light that took a bite out of the gloom. Walking out in the yard, she lifted the lantern to her face so her children could see her if they were hidden away but keeping watch. She called for them in the owl’s voice she could imitate perfectly. Later, both children would remember this haunting mimicry of owls more than the sound of her own voice. Quiet as algae, they hung on the rock waiting to see if their father would appear to strike down their mother. The whole mountain seemed endangered by his arrival. Sensing the quiet, Lucy gave a signal by squeezing her brother’s arm and they moved toward their house down a stony path they knew by heart.

They met their mother bringing a great length of thick rope out of the barn and the nervousness of disturbed chickens made the night noisy, unsettled. The river’s voice calmed them as they neared the hard, grassless yard.

“Harness the mule,” their mother said to the night more than to Lucy or Jude, and both children moved toward the barn as Margaret entered the house with a length of rope so heavy she staggered while carrying it. The lantern light poured out into the yard, feral and yellow as a hawk’s eye. There was great economy to her movement after she’d decided what she had to do. Drunk, on his back and snoring, A.J. lay on the bloody bed where he had killed Boy Tommie and where both their children had been conceived in all the sorrow of their cutoff circumscribed lives. His throat was swollen from the poison. A.J. did not feel the rope as Margaret threw it over his chest and tied it tightly against the bed’s steel frame. She then wound the rope around him, going under the bed and crawling to the other side, and pulling the rope tight against his body. As patiently as a garden spider, she wrapped him in a rope thick enough to tether a full-grown bull. Over his body and under the bed, she pulled the rope tight against him until he looked like a moth enfolded in deadly silk. She wanted there to be no chance of escape because she now knew what the stakes were and what hatred tasted like on the tongue and in the pit of the stomach. Margaret did not own a mirror and would have chosen not to look at herself as she felt the rough, hurt places on her face, traced them with an index finger that had been hurt on the rocks. Every time she moved she could feel the broken places catch on fire in her central nervous system. But she worked slowly, methodically, and she had a plan. She helped her children load all the food in the house in the wagon, and all their clothes and blankets and provisions. The children followed her commands to the letter and did not speak. She had become spectral to them, a strange woman holy enough to sleep with the man beloved by serpents and married to a man frenzied enough to try to kill them both.

Margaret went to the river and picked up a rock the size of a child’s shoe. She liked the feel of it, its heft and weight and shape. She told her children to get into the wagon and try to fall asleep amid the bed linen and clothing. Jude fell asleep immediately, but Lucy only pretended to sleep and watched her mother go back into the house where the light was and where much of the knowledge she would take through her life about the relationship of men and women was about to reveal itself.

A.J. Dillard awoke to the terrible pain of the snakebite on his back and shoulders, which was serious enough to torture but not to kill him. The whiskey had dulled its sharpness before he had passed out unconscious on his bed. His mouth was dry and he needed a drink of water when he woke from a dreamless, restless sleep. His mouth tasted of cotton and sand and he began weeping as he felt his wounds burning and tried to turn over but felt the rope roughly cut into the veins of his throat. He screamed out Margaret’s name and was sorry when she answered his call.

“Untie me, woman,” he ordered as he saw her shadow enter the room, but he was in far too much pain to notice details. It was the detail of the stone in her hand that he failed to notice. “Then I’m gonna finish killing you. Then the girl what put a snake on me.”

“You won’t be leaving that bed,” the woman said, moving toward him.

“A drink of water then if you’re meaning to kill me.”

“No water needed where you be going,” Margaret said, climbing into the bed and straddling him between her legs, sitting on his chest staring into his eyes.

“I beat you ugly,” he said, laughing through his pain.

“You beat me for the last time,” his wife said and struck him in the head with the stone. He screamed once and the second blow caved in the upper bridge of his teeth. She kept striking his head and face until she could not recognize it as his face at all. It was covered over with blood and snot and tears. Lucy took it for as long as she could, then could no longer stand the sound of her father’s begging. He kept saying he was sorry for all he had done and wasn’t ready to leave this life yet and face the wrath of eternal judgment. The more blood he lost the more religious he became and the more he began to sound like Boy Tommie.

Lucy ran to her mother and tried to pull her off her father, but the woman was unloosed in her fury and would not tolerate restraining. She hit her husband’s face again and again until her arm grew tired. Then she went to a bucket of water and washed her hands and face clean of all traces of his blood.

Finally her mother began to pour kerosene on the pine floorboards, spilling it over the curtains and makeshift furniture without
any concern for waste or the future. Though Lucy did not understand why her mother was spreading kerosene all over the table and wallboard, her father did and he began to try to break the knots of the great rope by straining against them. He managed to lift the bed off the floor and it moved slowly, inch by inch, across the room, but then Margaret poured the last of the kerosene all over him.

“You don’t have the guts,” her husband said, but he knew little of the depths and the capacity for outrage his wife harbored in the secret caves and nests of her womanhood.

From the doorway, Margaret Dillard said good-bye to her husband. “Kiss Satan for me, A.J.” And she hurled the lantern toward the bedroom and ran for the wagon.

The noise of her father dying took Lucy out of the Horsepasture Valley, and stayed with her down the long, treacherous dirt road that led out of those mountains toward Seneca, South Carolina. No one lived near enough to them to see the fire or heed A.J.’s agonized entreaties. Their mother never gave her house or mate another thought and concentrated on keeping the mule centered in the road.

They encountered unasked-for kindness on that journey out of the mountains where Margaret had spent every hour of her hill-encircled life. Farmers’ wives, keen with the expertise of their own solitude, recognized the daring, unspeakable impulse that had brought the broken-cheeked woman to their door begging for food. They fed her eggs and milk and cheese because she was a woman and because she had two children. None would have been so generous to a man traveling alone.

For a solid month they roamed the back roads and visited the small towns of South Carolina as Margaret tried to come up with a plan. She caught sight of her own face in a mirror at a farm she stayed in outside of Clinton, South Carolina, and she wept when she saw the damage A.J. had inflicted. Once, she had been proud of her prettiness, but now felt the peculiar shame that ugliness grants a woman at no extra charge. She did not believe a young man could ever fall in love with such a disfigured, undermined face. If she herself was repulsed by her own image in a mirror, she could not hope to attract the attention of any decent or kindly disposed man. Because she had no clear idea of what to do or where to settle, she
kept on pushing her mule from town to town hoping for a miracle. No miracle was in the making for Margaret Dillard and her children and outside Newberry her mule died.

In the next town, she walked her children to the front gate of a Protestant-affiliated institution called the Orphanage of the Ministry of the Lamb, which was run by missionaries who had spent time preaching the word of God to sub-Saharan tribes in Africa. It was located on the road between Newberry and Prosperity in the town of Duffordville. It was built along a railroad track and its houses had that anonymous blankness that small towns assume will keep disaster at bay. There was not a single note of vainglory in the architecture or setting of the town. At the entrance to the orphanage, Margaret pointed out the main building, a two-story wooden structure with shutterless windows and two unpainted Doric columns that looked like crutches holding up the house.

“They take orphans,” Margaret said to her children. “That’s where you’ll live.”

“But we have you,” Lucy cried out. “We’ve got a mother.”

“I know that,” her mother said, but dreamily, absently.

That night they camped beneath a trestle and built a fire that warmed them and Margaret fed her children the last scraps of food she had saved. Indecision had defeated her and her eyes had given up on all thought of deliverance. She had prayed as hard as a being could pray and the only thing she got out of it was a dead mule and a tired, overworked heart. Margaret Dillard sang a lullaby to her children and whispered to them that their faces looked beautiful in the firelight. While they slept, she kissed them and covered them with her own blanket, and hanged herself with a short piece of rope on the trestle above them. She looked upon her death as the last and only gift she could ever give to her children. The children woke to that gift.

In the years that followed, Lucy could never say the word “orphan” aloud without the word quivering with a terrible resonance. To her, an orphan was a child where evil could come sweetly home to rest, an innocent surrendered as a sacrifice to harm’s way. At age ten, Lucy Dillard had seen her father murdered and her mother hang by her neck from a train trestle and she had every right to think that
she had seen the worst the world had to offer a young girl. Then she met the Reverend Willis Bedenbaugh.

Very early, Lucy learned that for ordinary people an orphan was a hard thing to love. An orphan was something discarded, abandoned, and put out on the side of the road, completely dependent on the charity and sufferance of strangers. In stories and movies it would later infuriate her to see orphans always taken in by generous, warmhearted families who would treat them as though they had arrived in their midst the normal way. She learned that there were too many Willis Bedenbaughs in the world and that they cut their teeth by preying on the orphans of the world.

The Reverend Bedenbaugh was a softer version of the man of God than the ones the mountains of North Carolina made. He was proud of his milky complexion and his burnt-blond hair, which gave him the appearance of a large, self-satisfied peach. His shoes were expensive and immaculately shined by an eighteen-year-old orphan, brain-damaged and violent, who could never be placed with a Christian family. His name was Enoch and he lived in a stall at the back of the barn.

Since there was no school, the eighteen orphans attended chapel twice a day where they endured sermons by the reverend that he read to them verbatim out of a book entitled
The Art of the Sermon
. His voice carried over the small chapel and it had a brushed, soothing quality that Lucy found attractive. The Reverend Bedenbaugh was the first person she had ever known who had been to college. For the first couple of meetings, she and Jude wondered to themselves where the snakes were. They could not figure how a Christian would measure his love of Jesus if he didn’t pass along a snake that could bite and kill him in the process. But they kept their own theology private and grew accustomed to the more rotund, constrained oratory of the South Carolina midlands.

The Reverend Bedenbaugh did not rape Lucy until she had been there a month. After he raped her, he dried her tears, and read to her a long passage from Ephesians and warned her about the wantonness of every woman and how women’s bodies drew out the lust in godly men. He rewarded her with a piece of licorice candy and she hated the taste of licorice from that day forward.

Lucy discovered that he did not rape all the orphan girls, but had his favorites who received extra portions at dinner and were spared the more laborious chores on the orphan-run farm that supported them. When he drank he would come to the large room where the orphans slept in bunk beds. He usually came at three in the morning to make his selection. All the girls he favored had to sleep on the bottom bunks and none could wear panties. Soon, Lucy became his favorite prey and she learned to hate the smell of scotch as much as she loathed the taste of licorice.

One night when the reverend was inside her, Lucy opened her eyes and saw her brother, Jude, staring down at her in pity and fury and with the helplessness of all boys who witness such a scene. She lifted her hand up toward him in the darkness and Jude reached down and held her hand until the reverend finished his business and rolled off her. Afterward, he would retire to his office on the same floor, read his Bible, and smoke his pipe. The smell of tobacco leaf would enter the lightless dormitory and the children would drift off to sleep knowing they were safe that night from further attacks. Then he would turn his kerosene lamp off and sleep on a small cot beside his desk.

In November, he had raped a new girl the first night she slept in the orphanage. The others had heard her struggling and screaming in the darkness and heard Reverend Bedenbaugh order her to shut her mouth and submit to the will of the Lord. They had also heard the moment he broke her neck. Before morning, Enoch had removed the girl and buried her next to Margaret Dillard in the paupers’ graveyard that adjoined the orphanage. The drinking got worse after that and it was then that Bedenbaugh began to favor Lucy because she did not struggle and she made no sound. Her brother, Jude, made no sound either, but he held his sister’s hand as she was violated on the bunk bed beneath him.