Mr. Was (10 page)

I thought I was going to die.

I backed away from him, out of the kitchen, down the hall. He kept coming, his fingers white on the bat handle. I turned and ran up the stairs. He climbed after me. I figured my only chance would be to head for the third floor, to go back through the short door. I was on my way up when I heard my mother's voice.

“You leave him alone!”

“Shut up and stay out of this!” he shouted in a hoarse voice.

“I won't let you hurt him, Ron.”

“Put that down!”

Sounds of a scuffle, a grunt, and then a sound I'll never forget as long as I live, a sound both soft and sharp, like the sound of a dropped melon, followed by the thud of a body hitting the floor, then the metallic clatter of an aluminum baseball bat, then silence.

I heard only the blood whooshing through the arteries in my head. Slowly, quietly, I descended the stairs and looked out into the hallway.

She was staring up at me, her head twisted to the side, eyes unblinking, the side of her head—

The side of her head—

The side of her head in a pool of growing red, touching the sole of his shoe. The bat on the floor, wet red. My eyes went from her eyes to the blood to the bat to his shoe to his spattered pant leg up his body to his slack-jawed face, drained of all color, eyes protruding.

He said, “She made me do it.”

I fell forward onto my knees and threw up. My mother. My bat. I wanted him to pick it up and kill me, too. I didn't want to live. I pressed my forehead to the wooden floor.

Kill me, too, I thought.

I felt him walk away. I heard his feet on the stairs.

I stayed where I was, my eyes squeezed shut, trying
to stop time, to reverse it, to hold back the pain and the horror that threatened to drown me. I felt as if I were hanging over an abyss, as if to relax one single muscle would plunge me into the deep. Thoughts flapped about in the dark inside my head like a colony of frightened bats unable to land.

Did time pass? It must have, because when I finally uncurled and opened my eyes the window at the end of the hall was yellow-gray with early sunlight. I could hear the birds singing their morning songs . . . and I could hear my father's voice.

I stood up without looking at what lay beside me and walked to the window.

My father stood in the orchard, talking to the invisible man. He pointed at himself, he pointed at the house, his mouth moved. He started to take down the clothesline. I could see his face clearly. I could see the shine of tears beneath his eyes. He looked drawn, as if the crying had drained his body fluids, as if only his dried husk remained.

I tried to hate him, but I had nothing left inside. There was no anger, no pain, no sensation whatsoever. I didn't even wonder why he was untying the clothesline.

All I cared about was what I had to do next.

I
stepped through the metal door into night, starless and black and bitter cold, only the faintest trace of light from town rising over the bluff. A steady wind sucked the heat out of me. I shuffled around the house through a dusting of brittle snow, pulled a board off the window leading into the kitchen, and climbed through. The inside of the house wasn't any warmer, but at least there was no wind.

I'd had the sense to throw on my down parka and a stocking cap, but I hadn't thought to bring a flashlight. I found a box of matches in one of the cupboards. I walked through the empty rooms, lighting one match after another, the flickering flames throwing weird shadows against the peeling wallpaper.

I spent most of the night in front of the fireplace, burning scraps of paper, curtains, and hunks of an old broken chair, and whatever else I could find. I fell asleep once, but soon awakened with the image of my mother's battered head floating in front of my eyes. A couple times I almost went back through the door, but the memory of what I'd find there kept me in place.

It was a long, cold, miserable night. Morning arrived icy and gray. As soon as it was light enough
to see, I set off up the road toward Andie's. It was the only place I knew to go.

I almost froze to death. Last time I'd been there Scud had been driving. On foot it wasn't so close. My ears, toes, and fingers had all gone numb by the time I banged on their door.

Nobody answered. I pushed the door open. Warm, moist air. I shouted, “Anybody home?”

No answer. I stepped inside, unzipped my parka with clumsy, half-frozen fingers, and let the heat penetrate.

When Andie's father got home half an hour later, I was sitting at his kitchen table eating a loaf of his daughter's home-baked bread.

He did not seem pleased to see me.

Old man Murphy turned out to be an okay guy, once he got over the shock of finding me in his kitchen. I had to tell him something, and he wouldn't have believed the whole truth, so I made up the story as I went along, sprinkling the lies with bits of fact. I told him I'd hitchhiked up from Chicago looking for a job. I told him my mother was dead. Saying it out loud felt like coughing up a softball—my throat clamped down and I started to cry. The old man just sat there looking at me all stony faced, trying to figure out what to do with me.

I knew he wasn't going to send me back out in the cold. It would have been like sentencing me to death. After I managed to get hold of myself,
he asked me what kind of work I was looking for.

“Any kind,” I said. “Why?”

“On account of I could use an extra hand around here.” He held up his right arm and, for the first time, I noticed his wrist was swollen up to about twice its normal size.

“Just tell me what to do,” I said.

What I remember most about those first days on the Murphy farm is the numbness in my brain. My mind had just turned itself off, and I went through the motions without much using the thinking part of my brain. I didn't want to think, I didn't want to remember. I wanted to pretend it had all been a dream. Everything. I imagined that my entire body was shot full of Novocain. I wore the numbness like a shield. Nothing could get in, and I would let nothing out.

Each morning I would wake up to a banging on the cellar door. I would sit up in my cot wrapped in the prickly, ugly green wool army blankets, cold cellar air swirling around me. I would get dressed in the long Johns, flannel shirt, and denim overalls that the old man had given to me. I would report to the kitchen table, where Andie would have laid out a big farm breakfast of pancakes, eggs, sausages, bacon, bread, biscuits, coffee cake, and apple cider. The old man would already have it half eaten. I would sit down and start eating, and I would keep eating until he growled that it was time to get to work.

I went through the motions, letting the old man order me around, content to be told what to do. He worked me like a slave, always yelling and watching and telling me how everything I did was wrong. Since I was numb anyways, it didn't much matter to me. I just did what he told me and, after the first week, the old man slacked off and started treating me like I was a human being. But I still had to work my butt off.

A lot of the work seemed to involve shoveling large quantities of manure. Fifty percent of farming is feeding the animals. The other half is cleaning up after them, shoveling their crap. In fact, that was what the old man had been doing when he'd slipped and fallen and sprained his wrist.

It was hard work, but right then hard work was what I needed. I wanted to stay busy, to exhaust my body, to get so tired that when I finally fell into my cot at the end of the day I'd be too tired to think, too tired to remember.

I wanted time to pass.

About fifty-five years.

Because that was how long I'd have to wait to undo my mother's death.

What is most interesting to me now, looking back on that time in my life, is how quickly the memory of my mother's murder faded from my thoughts. It was not that I forgot it—how could I ever forget such a thing?—it was more that the memory lost its intensity. It was still there in my mind, but without the harsh
edges, without the horror, without the power to twist my mind into an agonized knot. As each hour on the Murphy farm passed, the memory of that horrible day seemed to recede into my past by days or weeks.

I now know that this softening of memory is common to those who pass through time. It does not seem to matter whether they travel through time a day at a time, or pass through a fifty-five-year door. The effect remains the same. The memories never completely disappear, but they become as distant as a remembered dream, and as changeable.

M
y mind is full of boxes. Places I can store things that I do not want to look at too closely or too often.

My mother's death was in one box, the fact that my father had killed her was in another. And ever since I'd found out that Andie was Scud's girlfriend, I'd tried to put her in a box, too, but she wouldn't stay there. We were living in the same house. I saw her every day.

And every time I looked at her face, my insides would melt all over again.

Fortunately, I didn't see much of her during the day. The old man kept me busy, and she would be at school or running errands in town or busy in the kitchen cooking. But mealtimes were bad. We would sit across from each other at the kitchen table. I tried to keep from staring at her, but sometimes I just couldn't help it. She had a glow on her that pulled at my eyes the way a lightbulb grabs hold of a bug. To make things even worse, the old man would be there watching us both, his head swiveling back and forth. Sometimes Andie would catch me staring right at her, which made me blush, which made her laugh, which made the old man start talking in an overloud voice about whatever
was on his mind, be it cow manure, the price of plug tobacco, or the war in Europe.

The first time I heard him mention the war in Europe, I'd said, “You mean World War Two?”

He shook his head. “Won't be no World War Two,” he said. “We're stayin' out of this one like we shoulda stayed out of the big one.”

“But what about Pearl Harbor?” I asked.

He gave me the blankest look you can imagine. “Pearl what?” he said.

I had to literally bite my tongue. I hadn't been much of a history student, but I remembered that World War II had started up when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. For a moment I wanted to tell him, to warn him of what was to come, but I knew it would be a mistake. I was living in this time now, not a time when World War II was ancient history. Even if he believed me, which he wouldn't, what good would it do for him to know that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor? What could he do? Call the president?

This wasn't my world, anyway. I hadn't even been born yet. I was just a visitor. Besides, I couldn't remember the date the attack was supposed to happen. I couldn't even remember the year.

“This is real good chicken, Andie,” I said, trying to change the subject.

“Why, thank you, Jack.”

“Andie always makes good chicken,” her father growled, tearing into a thigh with his long white
teeth, giving me a look like I shouldn't say nice things to his daughter.

After supper Andie would do her homework, or sometimes she would sew buttons or patches on clothing. I would sit and read. I was making my way through a stack of old
Saturday Evening Posts,
trying to get a feel for life in 1941. The old man would turn on the radio to listen to Amos and Andy or Burns and Allen or Jack Benny. When he heard something he thought was funny he'd slap his thigh and laugh so sharp and loud it could stop your heart if you weren't expecting it.

The old man was fascinated by my down-filled rip-stop nylon parka. He'd sit in his chair rolling the bright blue fabric between his fingers saying, “Never seen nothing like it. You say you got this in Chicago?”

“That's right,” I said.

“Wonder if they have such a thing up in Minneapolis.”

“I don't know,” I said. I had no idea what they had in Minneapolis in 1941.

“Looks expensive,” he said.

“I don't know.” I really wanted to change the subject, but now that he'd got me thinking about the future I decided to ask a question that had been on my mind. “Say,” I said, “is there a family around here named Skoro?”

“Skoro?” the old man blinked and sat back in his chair. “Skoro? Sounds sort of familiar, but I don't
believe so.” He looked over at Andie. “You know any Skoros hereabouts, girl?”

Andie shook her head. “Never heard of no Skoro.”

The old man squinted at me, his head against the back of his rocker. “Why you askin'?”

I shrugged. “I heard there was some Skoros living up here.”

“Relatives a yours?”

“Just a name I heard my mom mention once. Before she died.”

He pressed his lips together and moved his chin slowly up and down, his eyes fixed on mine. “That's a hard thing, to lose your mama.”

I heard Andie get up and walk into the kitchen.

“But I don't know no Skoro. Not that I know every blessed person in the county.”

“No big deal,” I said, both relieved and confused. I was sure that Mom had said that Grandpa Skoro had grown up in Memory. Maybe he'd moved here later on.

“But I hear of any, I'll tell you so.”

Or maybe he had never lived here. Maybe I had traveled to someone else's past.

One thing we didn't talk about much was Scud. Every once in a while his name would come up, but the old man made it pretty clear he did not like Franklin Scudder, so Andie didn't talk about him much.

I'd been on the farm three days the first time Scud
stopped by. I remember he walked into the barn where, as usual, I was shoveling manure.

“Hey,” he said. “Is that Jack the apple thief? Or is it Jack the counterfeiter?” He wore a long, mousecolored wool coat over a clean chambray shirt and dark brown pants. Except for the huge zit on his chin, he looked like a movie star. His checkered porkpie hat was cocked one way, his wide smile the other. It was hard to not like a guy who could smile like that.