The Hour Before Dark (7 page)

I went home nearly in tears and angry enough to cuss. I asked my mother what this was all about, after she’d given me the disappointed treatment from reading the principal’s note.

Modest though she was, she had no problem setting me straight on my father’s testicular health. This was followed by a bit of birds-and-bees, and how loving, legally wed people lay very close together and then nearly a year later, a baby would be born. Even with my father’s condition, apparently he had no problem fathering three children.

My father, she told me, did indeed have one “testicle, and yes, some bad things happened to him over there,” and she took me in the library of our home—a dusty room that had always seemed misshapen to me, packed with shelves and books—and brought down a photo album. She went through my father’s childhood, his parents, the war, his capture, the news clippings, and finally said to me, “So two of his fingers are gone, and yes, his testicle was also taken, but it doesn’t make him less of a man. You just remember that. There are a lot of men who walk around with no balls whatsoever.”

I learned most of what I knew of my father’s heroics by the time I was nine.

He had fought in a war before I was born. He’d been taken captive for twenty months, had tried to escape from his captors twice, had lost two fingers on his left hand for reasons of which he never spoke, had been decorated a hero, and had returned to the plow as it were—or in his case, returned to his own father’s farm, married, and started a family.

My mother retrieved the articles for me. She substituted them for the comic books I loved to look at. She would show me the old home movies. Daddy getting a medal. Daddy standing beside a helicopter. Daddy meeting some news anchorman. Daddy standing in line with others to meet the president. Daddy and Mommy on their wedding day, with swords and guns and soldiers standing in a halo around them. The glow of heroism surrounded him in all these photographs. I felt better about my father. I loved him even more for being not just a hero to me, but to the world.

Sometimes, an old-timer from town would see me at the playground in the park and call me over and tell me that I looked just like my father did when he was my age. “Your grandfather wasn’t much good, but he made himself a good man in your daddy,” someone might say; once I heard the librarian, Mrs. Pollock, tell me that my father had been the most famous man to ever come out of Burnley, and that no one had expected he’d come back to run Hawthorn again or even try and get along when the money ran out.

“He could’ve been president or at least a senator, once upon a time,” she told me. “That’s how famous he was after the war. Not famous like movie stars or rock and roll people. Not that vulgar thing. And not rich. I mean to say famous in the ways that count. And just like you, he got in trouble as a boy sometimes. So don’t think that it’s the end of the world for you. You can be a hero, just like your father.”

Or I’d hear the story of how my father had managed to save seven men from certain death, or how my father had piloted a helicopter “without knowing nothin’ about helicopters but that they spin. And he bombed the hell out of them. He just dropped it all back down on them. And he got his men out.”

My father would rarely speak of the past that existed before meeting my mother, other than to hide the medals of valor in places where my brother and I could not find them. He’d scoff at the idea that he had ever been a hero at all. After my mother ran off, he lived under a terrible burden. He expressed little that wasn’t dour or dutiful after that. He gave lessons or lectured; he rarely spoke to me and even more rarely listened. I suppose my mother’s abandonment affected all of us, and may have been part of the fog that kept me confused about life and my place in it as I grew into an adult.

I grew up under the burden of his heroism, and I became less than a model son because I knew I was no hero. My impulses were never heroic ones. I began smoking by the time I was twelve, and when I was seventeen, I’d done all the things teenagers do that they will regret in merely a few years, scarred by such foolishness and disregard for any rule in life. I was the embarrassment of the family when I left it.

Yet, I could look back on the love and affection of the household; on the way my father would tell me—even at my worst—that he’d done just such a thing when he’d been my age, and it was wrong, but it was not wicked, merely childish.

His words had the effect of arms around me—it was his way of embracing.

I took his wise words to heart and knew that despite my missteps in life, my father had gone through many more difficulties than I could dream up, and still, he had done good.

My mother had been a slightly different story.

5

After she left, my father told us that she sometimes called, late at night.

No matter how much he begged, she would not come back to us. He told us that she wanted to see us. He promised that one day she would come for us, would collect us, but that “now” wasn’t the time.

She sent letters and postcards, as well, but none of them mentioned our names. Notes like: “I want to keep in touch, but the past is so difficult to mull over. Please don’t let’s keep in touch. I don’t want to cause you more pain.” She sent a few of these that I saw.

I assumed my father had been writing her late at night, posting his mail without our knowing, begging her to return. “She’s got a new life,” my father would say at times, and begin to brood. “I would love to tell the three of you that she doesn’t love you, but I know she does. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever said. Even in war, nothing was this hard, but I will say it regardless. You must each overcome this. I can’t force your mother to come home. I can’t go chase her down if she is with this other man and she claims that this brings her happiness. You’ve been crying since she left, and you haven’t eaten enough, and you all have to stop it now. She is not the woman I married. She’s not the mother who brought each of you into this world. She changed. Perhaps she’ll change back. But the best we can do is hang tough and get through this. And each of you needs to pitch in and do your share. Accept this, somehow. Accept it now. Life is its own kind of war. You’ve got to fight it and win it.”

As he spoke, I saw his eyes become glassy and distant. I couldn’t look at the sadness in his face, but glanced down at my shoes. Somehow, I felt all of us were to blame. I felt that if I had just been nicer to my mother, she would’ve stayed. If I hadn’t gotten into any trouble, she would’ve stayed. If I’d said my prayers every morning and night, she probably would still have been with us. I have no doubt that Brooke and Bruno felt the same way.

“None of you deserves this,” he said. “Not one of you.”

And that was all he really spoke about it.

6

Now and then, one of us would ask about her. He’d tell us to write a letter and he’d send it. None of us ever wrote a letter, although I started a few, but put them aside. I suppose we accepted the finality on some deep level, regardless of our wants and needs on the surface of things.

Once she wrote to us all and mentioned a new child. She had a new child. A boy. His name was Steven. That’s all she said about him. My father tore the letter up after reading it aloud, tears in his eyes, and held us close. At other times, he went into horrible rages and locked himself in his room for an entire day, screaming, as if at the walls of the house itself.

All this to begin to tell you: Our father was both loved and hated within his own family, he was a hero to the world and to each of us, even though he had his dark periods.

When my father died—was killed—none of it mattered.

1

I couldn't get the images out of my mind:

My father was butchered.

Sliced up.

In pieces.

2

“Man, I’m angry,” Bruno said. “Sucker punched. Dazed. That’s how I’ve felt since finding out. I was just talking to him the other day. And now...” This was the most open I’d ever heard my brother be. He never talked about his inner life or feelings that I knew of. He was a mystery to my sister and me in that respect. “Brooke’s had the worst of it. She’s been depressed this fall. I don’t know why. I know she hasn’t been sleeping right since before this. Now, who knows?” He said this with an appealing meekness, as if he needed something from me. Some reassurance about the good in the world.

I did something I’ve never done before, but I suppose you don’t do what you’re used to doing until a nasty tragedy has stomped you and your family. I reached over and hugged him to my side. Like the little brother he was to me. He put his head on my shoulder and cried for a little bit. I felt like we were little boys again, after having a bully at school say something mean to him about our mom running off, or about his glasses, or how he couldn’t play softball as well as the others.

“They’ll get whoever did it,” I said, without much confidence. I meant it. If they didn’t, I’d make it the quest of my life to hunt down the madman.

I would not stop until the guy was caught.

When we got to the docks, Bruno walked ahead of me, lugging one of my suitcases, while I had the other two. We loaded the back of Brooke’s truck and headed out onto the road away from the sea.

The sky, slate gray; the woods, like broomsticks; the air, salt, snow, and that memory-scent of winters past.

3

Bruno turned down Goose Creek Road with its overhang of gloomy trees.

In the distance, I saw the beginning of the woods that would guide the narrowest of roads up to the house where I’d been born and raised, and where Raglans had lived ever since they’d been in America. We turned up Dunstable Road, and Hawthorn came into view just over the ridge. There were police cars along the road, and three news vans from the television studios, nearly blocking the driveway. We passed the smokehouse to the left, and I didn’t want to look at it, but I couldn’t help myself. It was surrounded by what looked like a makeshift wire fence, with orange police tape up around it.

“Christ,” I said.

“Feeling some Jumblies?”

“Definitely,” I said.

“Can I tell you something?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve never really told anyone this, it makes me feel guilty. Right now. Promise not to hold it against me?”

“Okay.”

“I hated him,” Bruno said. “I hated Dad. He didn’t like me much either. But I hated him. He drove our mother away. He drove you away. As far as I’m concerned...” Then he stopped himself. A bit more evenly, he added, “It’s terrible this happened. I feel this awful guilt. As if it’s my fault.”

I wasn’t sure how to reply to this. “Bruno,” I said, and thought, what the hell do I tell him? It’s okay to hate the guy who was just butchered? It’s okay to hate the guy who raised and clothed and fed you? That yes, he drove me away, when in fact I did a damn good job of just driving myself away? That he could not have driven our mother away any faster than she had run herself, out the door with her red dress and her suitcase and all the money she took, and the secret lover she had when she should’ve kept her love for her young children and her devoted husband? Bruno had, within him, a little of what we all felt—an undercurrent of anger, directed at our father, but really meant for our mother, who had left us when we were nearly too young to remember. Somehow, we had all blamed the one who had remained behind to some extent.

Now that he’d been murdered, guilt followed these feelings.

“Don’t tell Brooke,” he said. “Promise me. She idolized him. She’d hate me. Now, I guess, more than ever.”

“All right,” I said. It was our family sickness, I guess: Don’t tell someone else in the family haw you really feel. Hide it Bury it. Make it go away. It had been ingrained in us from an early age. Its origins were as hard to pin down as the fog that surrounded Hawthorn for half the year: Who had made us feel that way? Was it something within ourselves? Some organic sense of burying, the way dogs bury bones?

Part of me felt like lashing out at him for being so cold-hearted as to talk like this within two days of our father’s death. Part of me wanted to understand him as I never had before.

And I hated to admit it, but part of me agreed with Bruno. I couldn’t understand it—why had I disliked my father so much? Had I blamed him for things? Had I made him too responsible for the confusion I so often felt?

He had been rough on us, that was the bottom line. And we had rebelled.

That big GUILT I generally felt was going into hyperdrive in me.

I was not looking forward to any aspect of this homecoming.

4

The old house, on the outside, was still haggard-looking, as it had been ten years before. It was a grandfather of a house. It had even turned a bit gray in the intervening years.

Slowly maneuvering around the vans and cars, Bruno turned down the drive. The gate was closed, of course. I got out of the car, feeling the blast of icy air again, and ran to open it.

Bruno drove through, and I shut the gate to the driveway again. I glanced up at the road. There were people in jackets and trench coats up on the roadside, watching.

5

“Brooke,” I said, when my sister met me at the front door. I did everything I could not to imagine her naked in a storm, her fingers reaching down below her flat belly. I regretted that Bruno had ever told me that story.

Too late to move out of the way, I was jumped by her two enormous greyhounds, Mab and Madoc, and I went backward onto the porch. A pain in my butt told me I’d landed on part of the flagstone walk. Dog licks covered my face. Despite the pain, I began laughing and shoving the dogs away.

Brooke stood over me, doing her best to pull the dogs back by their collars, but they were out of control.

Then she offered me her hand, helping me up.

6

My sister Brooke: an unkempt beauty.

Her hair, darker than I’d remembered it, hung down and around her shoulders, somehow framing her face so that her eyes seemed owl-like. She wore no make-up, looked as if she had just rolled out of bed. She wore a stretched-out gray wool sweater that came down to the ends of her fingers and fell nearly to her knees, baggy khakis. Barefoot on the porch. Oddly, there was the smell of turpentine about her—I noticed what might’ve been paint on her sleeve. Had she been painting something?