Embracing Darkness (68 page)

Phineas’s punishment was simple: he was not to go out of the house for two whole weeks other than to attend school, church, and Sunday school. He feared returning to the last of these where he would suffer the wrath of Mrs. Weig, who had phoned Mary Margaret just minutes before he walked in.

“Your son ruined my whole Sunday school lesson, Mrs. Poole,” cried Mrs. Weig. “He’s got evil thoughts in him, and he’s learning terrible words like
fetus
. You need a firmer hand with the boy in my opinion, madam!”

Mary Margaret couldn’t believe that the God-fearing son she thought she’d raised was asking questions about abortion. “Where have you been gettin’ this from, Phinny?” she asked, but he only lowered his head. She waited patiently for a reply, and then it came.

“I’m sorry, mamma,” he said, his head still hanging low. “I’ll never do it again. EVER!”

Mary Margaret assumed he meant that he’d never bring up such terrible things again, but Phineas meant something entirely different.

Over the two weeks of his punishment Robert tried several times to talk to his son. He knew why Phineas had been punished, and he tried to talk Mary Margaret into leniency, but she was unyielding.

Phineas, on the other hand, was not forthcoming with his father. He did not tell Robert that he wanted nothing more to do with business in the shed and nothing more to do with
him
.

During his punishment Phineas read the entire Bible. He did it more as penance than for a better understanding of his faith. He prayed the rosary every night before bed and attended the funerals of fellow parishioners, even when he didn’t know them personally. For Phineas, however, this wasn’t enough. He felt that he needed to atone for the terrible things he had done for all eternity.

Within a few months he was going out of his way to find anyone who needed his help. There was the disheveled garden of Mrs. Pike across the street who was too old to tend it herself, so he did the job for her. When Mr. Wells’s cat was crushed to death by a falling tree during a bad rainstorm, Phineas told the man he’d set traps for the mice that the cat used to kill.

All the while Phineas still never spoke to his father. Robert tried explaining to his son that abortion’s being a mortal sin was the talk of fanatical religionists who preached perfection while rarely living by their own moral standards. Robert began to despise his wife even more since Phineas began spending more and more time with her in reading the Bible and talking about the evil of sin. After six months Robert stopped trying to reach out to Phineas. Withdrawing from circumstances in the unhappy house at 35 Faulkner Street, he put in more hours at the hospital as well as in the shed, hoping that Phineas would come out to help. But his son never did.

Due to Phineas’s lack of assistance Robert was unable to continue with his heavy workload and so eventually shortened his hours of operation to only two days a week. The girls whom he had helped earlier recommended him to others, but now they indicated that Dr. Poole had limited availability.

After graduating from high school in 1910, Phineas went immediately into seminary. At age thirteen he had decided that he wanted to dedicate the rest of his life to serving God. Only then, he thought, could he be worthy enough to enter heaven. His mother had told him from an early age, “All priests go to heaven because they have to sacrifice so much. Their whole life is devoted to helping others and serving God. How can such a person
not
be allowed into paradise?”

Dr. Robert Poole left Mary Margaret in 1911 and took an apartment in Hampton. Shortly afterwards she was diagnosed as having breast cancer. Dr. Poole told her that he didn’t feel sorry for her and that she should regard the illness as a punishment from God.

Robert came to visit his son at the seminary during Phineas’s first year. When the visitor walked into his room, he appeared thinner and sadder to Phineas, but otherwise nothing seemed different about Robert Poole.

“May I sit down?” asked Robert.

Phineas didn’t answer, so the father remained standing.

“How is your mother doing?” asked Robert.

“She’s bad,” said Phineas coldly. “The doctors say that she hasn’t got much more time. I was afraid I wouldn’t have the chance to be frank with her, so I told her about what we used to do in the shed.”

Robert’s face grew pale, and for the first time in years Phineas looked at his father.

“Don’t worry. She’s too weak now to spill our secret. Besides, reporting it would hurt me just as much as it would you.”

Robert didn’t know what to say. He could hear the hatred in Phineas’s words. He was tormented by how his son loved Mary Margaret so unconditionally without knowing what she had done to have him and how she had cruelly forced Phineas’s twin sister to be given away. This was a secret he could no longer keep to himself.

Robert proceeded to tell his son the truth about how Phineas had been conceived and exactly what his mother had done, but he stopped short of revealing that Phineas had a twin sister. Robert figured that his son would suffer enough of a shock in finding out that the woman he’d known his entire life as his mother was in fact someone who had lied and manipulated her way into motherhood.

As Robert waited for Phineas’s reaction, he contemplated whether he should disclose the other secret.
If
all
goes
well,
he thought,
then
I’ll
tell
him
about
the
baby
girl
.

To Robert’s disappointment, however, Phineas did not respond well to the news about Mary Margaret. Instead, he got up from his chair, picked it up, and hurled it at his father. “YOU LIAR!” shouted Phineas, as the chair shattered upon impact with the wall.

“I tell you it’s the truth,” said Robert. “Go ahead and ask her, if she’s still lucid enough to give you an answer. What she did is unforgivable—to me, to you, to your real mother, and to your… .”

Robert almost mentioned Phineas’s sister but was interrupted. “GET OUT!” screamed Phineas.

Dr. Poole turned slowly and walked to the door. Before he left, he turned back to his son and said, “I’m sorry that you feel as though I ruined your life, Phin. Perhaps someday you’ll forgive me.”

Mary Margaret died in November of that year. Phineas never confronted her about what she reportedly had done years before, but somehow he knew that his father had told him the truth, since there was no reason to doubt a man who’d been as honest as Dr. Robert Poole. Phineas forgave his mother, however, ultimately looking at her ruse as something she had done out of love for her father.

Robert Poole secretly attended the funeral at the cemetery in Portsmouth, keeping far back from Phineas as well as Seamus Brennan who was now confined to a wheelchair. It was at that moment that Robert realized that his son still cherished Mary Margaret’s memory, even if she wasn’t the one who had given birth to Phineas.

Father Poole was awakened by the bus driver’s announcement, “Holly! This is Holly! Watch your step!” As he gathered his things, everything of which he’d dreamed was fresh in his mind: his parents, 35 Faulkner Street in Portsmouth, the shed, Mrs. Weig, Mrs. Fisher, the abortions, the kites, the park, the seminary, the letter from his father during his first year at St. Andrew’s.

Father Poole went back to the rectory, took out a notebook, and began to write down all of his memories. When the chronicle was finished, he would stick it in the drawer, the same one where he’d kept the wrinkled letter his father had written him in 1926 asking for his forgiveness, which Father Poole was certain would never come.

Father Poole reflected back on his brief and unpleasant encounter with Bishop Ramsey, his relationship with the father whom he despised, and his childhood full of sad memories. He also thought about the terrible sins he’d committed in the shed. He was for the most part content as a priest, the more so since Sister Ignatius and Jessie had come into his life, but still Father Poole resented his father for indirectly compelling him to give up any hope of a normal life in order to save his soul from eternal damnation. When Phineas thought of the lifelong sacrifice he was making, and when he dreamed about the life he could have had, it made it all the easier to hate Robert Poole.

He removed his feet from atop the desk and bent over to open his lower right-hand drawer. There he saw an object covered by three Bibles and random correspondence from the diocese. It was the journal of his childhood. He wanted to read it but reconsidered, seeing the letter from his father sticking out from the pages.

As the rubber band that Father Poole had been playing with snapped and shot across the room, he heard a scream. It was the scream of a young girl. At first he thought it was Jessie. He ran out of the rectory and saw Sue Ellen Hartley, who had her arms around a bruised and battered Jessica Benson.

Sue Ellen said in a trembling voice, “It’s Jessie! She needs help!”

Father Poole ran to them and knelt down in front of Jessie, who had since collapsed at Sue Ellen’s feet.

“She told me only bits and pieces,” Sue Ellen continued. “She’s real shaken up.”

He noticed that Jessie was holding her arm, which was wrapped in a white rag. “What happened to her arm?” he asked, as he tried to stroke Jessie’s hair to comfort her, but she wouldn’t let him touch her.

“He burned her with a lighter. He told her that he’d set her on fire if she didn’t lie still.”

“Who is
he
?” asked Father Poole, visibly more distraught than a minute before as he now saw blood around the crotch of Jessie’s dress and understood what had happened to her. A tear fell from his eye as he crossed himself.

Sue Ellen stroked Jessie’s tangled hair as Jessie brushed off Father Poole’s touch for the third time.

“‘Horrible… face,’” said Jessie, trembling and staring blankly. “He t-told me, ‘Don’t m-move, you l-little sow.’” Father Poole and Sue Ellen exchanged glances. Jessie added weakly, “It was a pig. An awful, hideous pig.” Then she began to scream uncontrollably, her cries echoing over the hill.

Twenty-Five
Cleaning Up the Mess
 

After Sue Ellen’s assault we missed our competitive game of “Hump the Whore,” but we
did
feel sorry for Swell. We suspected what had happened to her, even without her coming out and admitting it. She was traumatized; that much was clear. Every time she saw one of us she would put her head down and walk in the other direction. A simple attack could cause such a reaction, but after debating the subject we older boys decided that there was much more to the story than Swell had told the police. Furthermore, like Captain Ransom, none of us believed her about Billy

“Even Mr. Hartley’s been acting real strange,” said Jordan. “He doesn’t come over to the rectory anymore; he doesn’t say hi to any of us; and he won’t let Swell out of the house, not that she’d wanna come out anyway. I mean, okay, some creep attacked her. He should know that it wasn’t any of us.”

We nodded our heads in agreement without needing to verbalize what the rest of us were thinking. Then, hearing a whistling down below, we listened as the sound grew louder. Dylan was the first to spot the man walking around the rectory to where the hose was. He carried with him an empty bucket.

It was the man known as Jack White, still in the same dirty clothes he’d worn since Father Poole’s replacement of the shabby Army uniform the stranger had worn upon his arrival on the hill.

“It’s that asshole,” said Charlie, “the one who kicked me in the… .”

Jordan interrupted Charlie before he could finish. “We know. He was a pubic hair away from closing down your baby-making factory for good.”

“Shut up!” said Theo in a raspy whisper. “We don’t want him to know we’re up here!”

The whistling stopped, and the stranger turned around slowly as if in response to what had just been said. Jack White dropped the bucket and walked toward the maple. We began to stir nervously because we feared him more than any other person we had known, even our own abusive fathers.

The man stopped and fixed his eyes on us high up in the tree. His mouth slowly curled into a menacing smile. We all smiled back nervously, hoping that he would leave us alone.

His smile then turned to a scowl, and he said loudly, “‘It’s that asshole,’” imitating Charlie Ryder, “‘the one who kicked me in the… .’” Then, mimicking Jordan St. James, he continued, “‘We know. He was a pubic hair away from closing down your baby-making factory for good.’”

We were all too terrified to move a muscle, as if sitting like rocks and not muttering a sound might make the stranger magically disappear.

“‘Shut up!’” the stranger rasped, now sounding almost exactly like Theo Thomas. “‘We don’t want him to know we’re up here!’”

All of us read Jack White’s sinister smile clearly. The stranger was signaling that he was here to stay and that we had better stay out of his way. He wanted us to know that he was far stronger and more intelligent than all of us combined and that he could do anything he wanted to any of us at any time.

After a minute or so, when the man disappeared behind the rectory, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. It was now certain that none of us was ever going to get along with him, and we were convinced that he was out to make our lives unhappy and difficult, whether we avoided him or not.

Ironically the only one who liked the stranger, despite his less than auspicious first encounter with him, was Ziggy. To the little boy Jack White resembled one of his uncles who had tried several times to fight off his brother, Ziggy’s father, when the man took out every frustration he could on the five-year-old’s face.

Ziggy therefore was intrigued by the stranger and grew increasingly fond of following him around. With Billy Norwin now gone, no one was there to give Ziggy the attention he craved or the boost up the maple on which he depended. Acting like a protective big brother, Billy had also been the one who watched over the boy at night.