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by
JC Robertson
Chapter 1
I was fifteen in the summer of 1984
when seven deacons of the church came to our house. I should have
been more prepared. There were, after all, reminders that it wasn’t
really our house.
We had not chosen the stark white
siding or the kelly green trim, or the ill-fitted rock chimney that
swallowed up the whole west side. Mom would have preferred a
backyard with fewer trees, more sunlight for azaleas, greener grass.
We all would have preferred that the copperheads and black snakes
not slither in from the hill just behind. It was the church’s
parsonage, but there were things about this house that made it ours.
Things the church told us we could do. And so Mom chose a lanose
blue carpet to replace the dingy beige. She tore down the dismal
wallpaper and replaced it with colors of saffron and lavender. I
planted hostas, and Dad covered the walls of my brothers’ room with
superheroes. Sam wanted the Incredible Hulk, but David argued that
the Hulk was not a true superhero. A Spiderman-Superman combination
was eventually agreed upon.
For all intents and purposes, it seemed
like our house—until that night in the summer of 1984 when Mom
opened the door to find Walter Reid standing on the porch, swirling
a toothpick between his thin lips, leaning forward, then back again,
on his pointed-toe black boots. He asked for my Dad. “Is Frank
here?” His face like stone. The Judds sang Mama He’s Crazy on
Mom’s kitchen radio, while I got a fresh dish towel and began
putting away dishes, clearing off the counter.
“What’s the matter?” Mom wiped her
hands on her apron, and turned off the radio.
“With all due respect, Mrs. Burner, I
need to talk to Reverend Burner.”
“Frank. Frank, can you come in here?”
Mom said. “Frank? David, where’s your father?”
David sat in a corner of the couch with
a book in his lap. He sat up straight and glared at Walter Reid.
“Think he’s in the bathroom.”
“Go tell him Brother Reid is here.”
David slid his bookmark between the
pages of a hardback book he got at the Southern Reynolds County
Library and sat the book in the seat of the chair as if he had to
save his place. He stood up and leaned his wiry body over the sofa
to peer outside.
“What’s all those people doing out
there?”
The deacons were scattered out across
our lawn like mosquitoes in the oppressive night heat—hovering and
waiting.
“David’s right.” Mom said, “Brother
Terrance is just standing out there. So is Brother Bill and―
“Please,” Walter Reid interrupted.
“Just get the Reverend.”
“Frank.” The unease rose in Mom’s
voice.
The toilet flushed and Dad sauntered
into the living room. His large frame pushed through the hallway,
belly and belt buckle, as if the whole world were at his back.
“What’s all this yellin’—why, Brother
Walt! What brings you here?”
“No easy way around it, Reverend. So,
I’m just gonna come out with it. You’re gonna have to move out.
Deacons done voted on it tonight.”
“Oh my word!” Mom shouted.
“You’ve got four hours to clear things
out of here.”
“Four hours!” Mom cried.
Dad tilted his head, looking at the
deacon with suspicion. His shoulders pulled back like a slingshot
and he held his stance tight. If he let out his breath, it seemed
he’d go wild. So he spoke with calm in his voice unlike anything I’d
ever heard from him.
“You’re wrong, Walt. You’re wrong.”
Walt pulled the toothpick out of his
mouth and swirled it between his fingers, seemingly studying its
texture and form.
“Wrong? You’re gonna stand there and
tell me I’m wrong?” Walter Reid shook his head disapprovingly.
“Think real hard—you know what’s wrong.”
“Why don’t you men sit down and talk
this out?” Mom’s voice shook. “I’ll get you both some tea.”
“No thanks, Mrs. Burner. Ain’t nothin’
to talk about. The deacons done made their decision.”
“Decision? Frank! Talk to him. Tell
him, Frank. ”
“Quiet!” Dad snapped. Then he told Walt
to wait outside with the rest of his army.
Walter Reid stepped back out on the
porch, tipping the front of his cowboy hat with finger and thumb.
His eyes fell heavy on Dad as he repeated, “Four hours.”
As soon as Walter Reid was on the other
side of the door, Mom began to sob.
“Where are we gonna go? Where on God’s
green earth are we gonna go?”
“I said hush!” Dad’s voice quivered.
Mom sobbed harder.
“I need help with the horses, Dave,
c’mon. Ruth, call your brother. Tell him to get over here! Then get
boxes from the shed.”
I dialed Sam’s number. He and Angie
were secretly living together, but they were talking about getting
married. According to Sam, Angie wanted to marry on Valentine’s Day
under a pink and red papier maché heart.
Sam fit in around Swanee better than
David or me. He moved out of the house and started working at a
pallet mill the day after he graduated from high school. He only
moved a mile or so away, but we hardly ever saw him.
I waited as his phone rang. And I
watched as Mom began to pack. She poured sentiment over our things
with excruciating detail. Gathered things slowly in her own way.
What would appear random to someone who didn’t know her was simply a
hierarchy of needs to her. The family albums, then her jewelry, next
the letters she used to get from her mom. Mom was a stickler about
the chronological order of these things and about the way they were
cared for. Letters always folded in four perfectly lined creases.
“Sammy?” I whispered into the phone.
“Yea.” His voice groggy.
“You sleeping? It’s not even 8:00.”
“You go to work at five in the morning
and see how it is. Got put on the nailer today. No way anyone can
keep up with that damn thing. What you want anyways?”
“Deacons are here, Sammy. It’s real
bad. They’re kicking us out. Something Dad did, I guess, but he’s
not saying what. Nobody’s saying much of anything.”
“Think he stole money?”
“I don’t know. But he told me to call
you. Tell you to get over here.”
“Get over there like I’m just some—
“Sam! We’re getting kicked out!”
“What about Mom? How’s she?”
“Get over here and see for yourself.”
I hung up and told Mom that Sam was on
his way.
“Poor boy doesn’t need to be troubled
with our problems now. He’s got a life of his own.”
Mom and I would never see Sammy the
same. As a boy he was allergic to everything and bit by a dog before
I was even born, so Mom coddled him. But he was my big brother, the
oldest, the bravest, and I liked how he never slouched. He walked me
to my kindergarten class and he always told me I was pretty. When I
was having nightmares about dying and going to hell, Sammy was the
one who told me I needed to get saved. “All your bad dreams will go
away then.”
David was nothing like Sam. He never so
much as got the sniffles when winter turned to spring, and once when
a he climbed on a tire swing a nest of wasps charged after him
stinging his thighs till it was the color of a stormy sky, but he
didn’t so much as cry. Still, he didn’t seem as strong as Sam.
Even fragile at times, but Mom never saw the need to baby him, or
maybe he wouldn’t let her. He was always preoccupied with the future
too. Reading books on the long school bus ride every morning, even
reading during recess. He and I would go down by the creek and
listen for the train on clear blue days. I mostly went along just to
listen to him describe the red velvet seats he imagined people sat
in and the plush gold curtains with tassels he described draping the
train’s windows. Where it was travelling to and what the people on
it were probably like. Sometimes I tried to draw pictures from his
imagination. He said he could write a book and I could draw the
illustrations. But his wink was my cue not to take him seriously.
At those moments I tried to ignore the sinking feeling that he
didn’t need me as much as I needed him.
David stormed back into the house,
yanking off his work gloves, mumbling something about horses being
nothing more than glorified mules.
“Diamond giving you trouble?” I said.
“Don’t worry, she’s loaded up. Did you
get boxes?”
“Not yet. Just called Sam.”
“I’ll go get the boxes from the shed,”
Mom said, still wiping her eyes. “Don’t think we have many, though.”
“Get to work, folks!” Dad roared
through the back door, clapping. “We’re the underdogs here in the
seventh inning, and I feel a homerun, how about it folks! Okay? Come
on now, box stuff up there. Time’s a ticking!”
“We could put clothes in trash bags,” I
suggested.
Mom came back from the shed with an arm
full of broken-down boxes. “This will help.”
“We’re gonna come out swinging! You
hear me!” Dad bellowed on, sweeping books and photo frames off the
shelves into trash bags with little regard. “With God on our side—
“Frank,” Mom grabbed the trash bag
from his hand. “Let me pack up in here. No one can pack up your
office but you, so maybe—.”
“I’ll tell you what, we ain’t comin’
back. The First Baptist Church of Swanee thinks they don’t need us,
we don’t need the First Baptist Church of Swanee!”
“Hello?” Sam came cautiously through
the back door. In just a year’s time the pallet mill had weathered
his skin to a saggy brown and tired his eyes far beyond his nineteen
years.
“Sammy.” Dad enveloped him with his
bulk. “Thanks for comin’, son. You may not live here no more— ”
“What’s all the deacons doing just
standing in the front yard like toy soldiers?”
“That’s right, son, toy soldiers, I
like that.” He slapped my big brother on the back with approval. “Go
help your Mom, would you?”
“Thanks for coming,” I whispered.
Sam leaned in to confide. “I called
Granddaddy. Don’t say nothin’. He’s gonna act like he just decided
to drop by.”
“Why’d you call him?”
“Somebody’s gotta keep Dad in line.”
“He’s not so bad, actually.”
“He may be delirious—never know.”
“What’d you tell Granddaddy?”
“Same thing you told me.”
“Could one of
you get me a black magic marker?” Mom said. “I’m ready to label
these boxes.”
“Dar-len-e,” Dad added a syllable to
Mom’s name when he was frustrated. “I know it’s hard, but we don’t
have time for all this organizing and labeling. You heard Walt,
we’ve got four hours. Three now.”
“Leave her alone,” David blurted.
“It’s okay, David sweetie.”
“No, it’s not. None of this is okay.
What did you do, Dad? What did you do to get us kicked out like
this?”
At seventeen, David stood six feet tall
and eye to eye with Dad. His limbs, awkward, still trying to adjust
to their new-found reach, dangled; and his shoulders, only beginning
to square up, diminished in close range to Dad’s broad build. But he
stood up strong and firm to Dad when he spoke.
“You just assume I’m to blame, don’t
you, boy? You just assume.”
David turned and threw open the front
door. “Hey, Walter Reid,
mister-chairman-of-the-holier-than-thou-deacons, which one of us is
to blame for this whole business of getting kicked out?”
Dad charged back into his office,
refusing to dignify Walter Reid’s answer.
Walter Reid still stood on the porch
with his toothpick hanging on his lower lip. He seemed mildly
entertained.
“It’s between the church, the Lord and
your Daddy.”
David slammed the door. “Did everyone
hear that? Dad’s the reason for the homeless season. Dad! Not any
of us. Dad!”
“Fine. Go tell him yourself, you
moron.”
“Sammy, don’t call your brother a
moron.”
“Well, he is. You think Dad don’t
already know he’s to blame? And since when have we listened to
anything Reid said?”
“How about you boys stop laying blame
and carry some stuff to the truck. Things are bad enough without all
this hollering at each other.” Mom pointed to her neatly stacked set
of boxes labeled “living room pretties.” David scooped them up and
headed to the front door.
“Through the front?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“Don’t go out
the front door, sweetie,” said Mom. “Best to avoid Brother Walt and
the others.”
“First of all he’s not my Brother.
Second of all—”
“Those men don’t want us here, sweetie.
Let’s just go quietly. Why cain’t we just leave with some dignity?”
David set the boxes on the table and
knelt down next to Mom, rubbing the blue cotton shawl that covered
her freckled shoulders. Her mahogany hair stuck to her tear-stained
face and her forehead crinkled with worry.
“Dignity is precisely why I’m going out
the front, Mom.”
There were noises coming from Dad’s
office. Small crashes and clanking of glass and metal and wood
tumbling. Ink pens bouncing off of pencils, papers rustling,
fighting for space. We could hear him mumbling about how a man
should have something of his own; how a man shouldn’t have to live
in a house that belongs to someone else.
David picked the boxes up off the table
and walked out the front door. Walter Reid stood on the porch, his
grin the shape of a half moon. The deacons, still sprinkled like
flecks of paint all across the front yard, stood with their feet
steadfast on the ground and their crossed arms anchored against
their chests. There was Terrance Leeds who had more head of cattle
than just about anyone in southern Missouri. He stood in the middle
of the lawn with his hands on his hips and his feet spread ready to
attack a wild boar. Tom Wagner, who ran the gas station at Junction
B and sat on the school board, stood close to our truck. Dad was a
big supporter of Tom getting elected to the board. I remember Dad
keeping him in our dinner prayers the whole week leading up to the
school board election.
Tom’s face was soft and thick like a
baby’s; his movements that night were anxious, apprehensive. He kept
eyeing his watch.
“Excuse me.” David, steadily carrying
Mom’s living room pretties, glared at Walter Reid. “I need to get
through.”
“How’s your mom?”
“How the fuck you think?”
“Don’t use that language with me, boy.
Just askin’ a question.”
David stepped forward, but Walter Reid
blocked his way.
“Think you need to apologize.”
“Leave him alone,” Terrance Leeds
shouted. “We only gave them four hours.”
But Walter Reid leaned in and spoke low
in David’s ear. What he said made the muscles in my brother’s jaws
twitch and his blood vessels swell up against his smooth, strong
neck.
“I said, ‘Let him by,’” Terrance Leeds
shouted.
Walter Reid
finally stepped aside. His flabby middle-aged body looked pathetic
next to David’s lean fresh-cut form.
As he moved on by, none of the deacons
said a word. They either looked at him with sympathy or they lost
their nerve to look at all.
“Ruthie,” Mom said, “please quit
looking out the window and do some packing.”
“Give me a box. I’m going out the front
door too. David’s right.”
“You two beat all I ever saw.”
I walked past Walter Reid without so
much as looking at him. Heard him say something about how this
wasn’t about me. I walked on past Brother Terrance, who wouldn’t so
much as look my way even when I tried to smile. The only one to
acknowledge me at all was Tom Wagner. “Let me take that,” he said.
But David swiped it out of my hands and
gave Tom a cool glare.
“How you doing with all this, Ruth?”
“Don’t talk to my sister!”
“He asked me.”
“He has no business pretending to care
about you. Do you now, Tom?”
“I only meant—”
“We don’t give a damn, not one iota
what you meant! C’mon, Ruth.”
Tom stuffed his hands in the front of
his jeans pockets and bit down on his lower lip, stifling whatever
he may have wanted to say.
“Brother Tom was just trying—”
“You’ve got two brothers, Ruth, that’s
it! You’ve got Sammy and you’ve got me.”
We jumped up on the porch, past Walter
Reid again. “You remember what I said, boy.”
The air
conditioning welcomed us back like cool water ridding us of sweat
and tension.
“What was that all about?”
“What?”
“Him telling you not to forget something he said. I saw
him whispering something. What was it?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“Shut up.”
“You got any idea what this is about?”
“Nope.”
“Liar.”
“Shut-up, am not.”
“Shh! You hear Mom talking?”
“Better check on her.”
“Mom?” I said, peeking in her bedroom.
She was rambling on and on to the photos as she took them off the
walls and the dresser, her voice rapid-fire, unsteady and edgy, her
hands still calm, self-possessed.
“Mom?”
“Yes, sweetie! Oh, sorry, guess I
was…what is it, hon?”
“You got anything more for me to take
out?”
“No, not right now. Go pack up your
stuff. Did you see your Dad? Oh, never mind. Goodness, you should
have seen him a while ago. Blew through here like a hurricane. Not
that I’d know what a hurricane’s like ’cause they only happen at the
ocean and I ain’t never been to an ocean, and ain’t never gonna go,
either. Hand me that box over there.”
“Mom, really, it’s gonna be fine.”
She plopped down on the bare mattress
next to her neatly stacked bed sheets.
“We ain’t never gonna see the ocean.”
“Sure we will. I bet Dad has a plan
right now that we don’t know about.”
“Oh, dear Lord, I hope not. Those are
the worst plans of all. He’s been promising me we’d go to the ocean
for the past four summers, but have we gone? No! And we ain’t never
gonna go! Now look at us. I’ll be grateful if we just have a house.”
“Granddaddy says we have some of the
prettiest water right here. He says that natural springs are rare,
and that people come from all over to see Blue Springs.”
She wiped the rims of her eyes lightly
with her fingers. “Blue Springs is hardly the Atlantic Ocean,” she
said, patting me on the knee as if my efforts were duly noted but my
words had failed to be of any consolation.
I packed up Mom’s dresser drawers of
intimates and sweaters while she talked.
“It’s okay, sweetie, you got your own
stuff to pack up. Save some good packing material for your artwork.
Pack’em up real good.”
“It’s all gotta get done, Mom.”
“Those are important, Ruthie. Mr.
Caldwell says you got a chance for a college scholarship with your
talent. That you’ve got more talent in your pinky finger than—”
Ruth chimes in along with her mom. She
knows how the sentence ends. She’s heard it before“than most do in
their whole hand.”
“Just pack’em up in somethin’ with a
hard back to it so they don’t get bent up.”
“Okay.” I picked up her stack of
hatboxes.
“Give those on to the boys to load up.”
She sniffled. “Thanks for helping, sweetie. I just cain’t bear it.”
The sconces she bought at a flea market
made me smile. But she sobbed all over again when I took her framed
embroidery down off the wall. It was a striking needlework of
Mediterranean colors, boats and homes by the sea. She worked on that
embroidery ‘most every night one winter when I was seven.
“Everything’s gotta be wrapped with
three or four layers.”
“We’re running out of everything, Mom.
Boxes, newspapers, even magazines.”
“Guess we’re gonna have to pick and
choose what gets wrapped real good now.”
“You gonna be okay, Mom?”
She shrugged.
I asked her if we should throw some of
this out, but she was unresponsive.
It was quiet for a while. We each did
what we had to do as quickly and thoroughly as possible. The
folding, stacking, packing, labeling—it all seemed to ease us a bit.
I cleaned out my dresser drawers and pulled out from under my bed
all the back issues of Vogue magazine that Miss Nell gave me
from her beauty salon. Mom went to Miss Nell for perms, haircuts,
and sometimes just to have her hair sprayed with overpowering
hairspray—the kind not sold in stores.
Miss Nell introduced me to the high
fashion world between the covers of Vogue one afternoon when
I was eleven and waiting impatiently as Mom got a perm. The cover
models, with their taut expressions, outrageous eye shadows and
necklines that draped so long they really had nothing at all to do
with necks fascinated me. When Miss Nell retired, she gave me every
Vogue magazine she had. I memorized all of them. There was no
way I could take all of them with me, so I packed up the two issues
from 1983 and the May 1980 issue because of a gorgeous black gown I
dreamed of wearing someday. Putting the others in with the trash
didn’t seem right, so I left them stacked in the corner of the room
with the hope that the next person who moved into my room would want
them.
For a while I heard Dad packing up
things in his own brute manner, but even that subsided and he worked
in his own way—methodical, intense.
~ ~ ~
“What was that?” Mom stood out in the
hall.
I poked my head out my bedroom door.
We heard it again and looked to each
other for an answer. It thundered in our ears again. A disturbing
thud. A wallop. Then again and again. A deep, seething boom. Then a
human moan. And the rhythm quickened.
We ran toward the noise. Mom cried out
for Dad or Sam or David, but her words bounced off the bare corridor
walls. We searched the bedrooms as we ran past them. We ran through
the living room and kitchen as the seething rhythmical blows
steadied. Our house already cold, stale, emptied.
“It’s coming from outside. Out the
front!” I said.
“Oh my word! My
word! What’s going on?” Mom cried.
She leaped off
the porch and landed on top of David. Her scream pitched so high it
was barely audible. At first I grimaced at the sight, and turned
away. Then, I looked. And I couldn’t stop looking. I watched my
brother pound his fist, deep, then deeper, into Walter Reid’s flesh.
“David! Please!” Mom struggled. “Get
off him! Dear God! David! Get off him!” But her small frame was of
no consequence. David was relentless. His legs straddled over Walter
Reid’s body, his fist angling into Walter Reid’s jaw. Walter Reid,
in an effort to defend himself, tried to grab on to David’s neck,
but his arms were too short—he was too weak, and David’s neck was
too slimy from Walter Reid’s own blood splatterings. Walter Reid
gave up, but my brother kept pounding.
My brother, who loved Louis L’Amour
books, strawberry ice cream, Cardinal baseball, and Frank Sinatra,
now appeared to be a monster. My brother, who taught himself to talk
like Walter Cronkite because good grammar, he said, was the best
ticket out of Swanee, was smashing a man’s face with his bare
knuckled fist. My brother seemed more like a crazed lunatic than
someone who gave thought to the power of language.
It wasn’t enough when Walter Reid’s
arms lay lifeless on the ground no longer attempting to defend him
or that his face was marred beyond recognition—David kept pounding.
“Stop it, stop it! Help! Frank! Sam!
Somebody help me!” Mom wailed. “Where is everybody?”
“Granddaddy’s over there!” I pointed
across the lawn. “Look at him—what’s he—”
Granddaddy
seemed a little shaken, but with the deacons rounded up and huddled
like cattle under the aim of his gun, he was undoubtedly in
control.
“Dear Lord!” Mom exclaimed when she saw
Granddaddy. I gave one hard tug at David, but then I stood back. Mom
ran back in the house, crying out for Dad or Sam. I saw a silhouette
at the side of the house near the oak tree where David’s tire swing
still hung—I thought it was Dad, but it couldn’t be and there was
too much chaos to be sure of anything. While David struck blow after
blow and Granddaddy aimed his gun and Mom cried out for help, I did
nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
But it was then that I began to
understand my brother. I watched, unmoving, but not unmoved. I was
shaken, yet satisfied, as his fist clenched with fury and power. As
he pulverized the deacon’s face. And with each blow to Walter Reid,
I heard David say, “Amen! Amen! Amen! Amen! Amen!”
~ ~ ~
NOTE: This manuscript
is completed and currently being reviewed by two independent
publishers. If you are a publisher and would like to consider this
novel please contact JC Robertson or request her agent
information through the About Us page.
Thank you. | 
