Embracing Darkness (14 page)

Unlike his father Ben, who had married at a later age, Jonathan wed before he was 25. He married his school sweetheart, Beatrice (Bea) Glover in December 1900, and the young couple settled down in Ben and Anne’s home on Holly Hill.

Because New England’s economy was in a downturn at the turn of the century, Jonathan stayed without steady employment for several months. He worked in Mason’s General Store during the warmer months, delivering ice to some of the businesses in town and even to the local courthouse, whose jail was being remodeled. The two men residing in the jail while awaiting their respective trials had to be moved to the town’s ice house until the work was completed.

Jonathan enjoyed the coolness that the ice house offered during the hot months, just as much as he appreciated his stimulating conversations with the detainees. Each man told his story of why he was in jail. Samuel Foster, whom Jonathan referred to as “that poor son of a bitch,” was in jail for robbing the very store for which Jonathan worked. He and his family were hungry, and with no work he became desperate. One night he broke into the store and stole eggs, flour, two pockets-full of beans, and some honey. Unfortunately the owner, Dave Mason, who lived just above the store with his wife Rose and their two teenage children, had a rifle that he kept next to his bed to protect his family and property. Dave was also a very light sleeper.

Jonathan loved to hear of Sam’s troubles, which made his own problems seem so much less important. Working the ice route only a few hours a day, three days a week, didn’t pay much; however, Jonathan and his wife would never starve because they were living with his parents. They would also always have a roof over their heads as long as they’d need it. This was one aspect of his life for which Jonathan Benson would never be ungrateful.

Along with Sam Foster was another detainee, whom Jonathan referred to as “one of the lowest creatures I’d ever set eyes upon.” Victor Black had been accused of a more serious offense than Sam, but he didn’t come clean about it immediately. A drifter from Taloola, Mississippi, Black made his way up to New England doing odd jobs. He had been living in New York City for several months, residing in an abandoned building with no roof in the Bronx, and had corresponded with his family that he’d eventually be coming home the first chance he got. When a cousin back down South heard of this, he got word to Victor that he’d heard of jobs with the railroad that were available in New England near Boston.

So filthy and broke Victor Black made his way up to Massachusetts, stealing food from houses he would pass, drink from puddles after a good rain, and defecating whenever he felt the urge, no matter where he happened to be. On his way up to Boston, Black passed a charming little town not far from Marlboro, Massachusetts. The town had a gazebo in the central square, and all the buildings seemed to be symmetrically arranged, which was appealing even to Victor Black’s eye.

Just about the time he’d first spotted the gazebo, Black suddenly got the urge to move his bowels, this after finishing an entire blueberry pie he had stolen from the window sill of a farmhouse outside Springfield. He walked up to the gazebo, pulled down his pants, and proceeded to defecate in a wooden box sitting in the middle of the gazebo’s floor. When he was finished, Victor Black pulled his trousers back up, fastened the button, and walked off as coolly as anyone would who’d just done the same thing in his own bathroom.

The surprise was finally discovered when Mayor Cromwell Pickering walked up to the marquee to give his Founder’s Day speech. The custom every year was for the mayor of Lower Sodbury, Massachusetts, to speak for about five minutes and then offer the townspeople a handful of chocolate fudge, which was the town’s principal commodity. Needless to say, after this particular Founder’s Day the custom was practiced no more.

Victor Black said, though
boasted
seems more accurate, that he was set to stand trial for attempted nonconsensual intercourse with a girl from Holly whom he’d accosted. Although the worst offense Black had been accused of was
attempted
nonconsensual intercourse, Jonathan was deeply disturbed by the attitude of the accused, specifically by how he bragged, “I’d a fucked her. Yes siree Bob! Would a fucked her good and proper. Pop her sweet red virgin hole right open.”

It wasn’t until after the trial was over some two months later that Jonathan, and the rest of Holly for that matter, found out that the victim was a twelve-year-old girl. From then on Jonathan would cringe whenever he heard a southern accent. Whether from Taloola, Chattanooga, or Tallahassee, it was all the same to him. It was for this reason that he’d come to appreciate being a New Englander.

With winter coming, Jonathan Benson was let go from Mason’s General Store, being out of work beginning in November. Then late in February he was offered another job by a family that harvested maple syrup. Of all of the stages in maple-syrup production, Jonathan was sent to work in the sugar shack, which was where the sap was boiled down. Jonathan boiled forty gallons of sap at a time in a huge cauldron set over a roaring fire, a process that produced a mere one gallon of maple syrup.

While the pay and the hours were more than those at Mason’s General Store, Jonathan hated his new job. The worst part was that, from the time he started at six in the morning until he finished at five in the afternoon, he’d be stuck in the sugar shack in front of a merciless fire. Sweat would drip so profusely from his brow that some of the boys on the job called him “Niagara Falls.” By seven in the morning his shirt would be soaked with sweat. As with delivering ice, Jonathan knew that he wouldn’t last long at this job either. He’d make it to the end of the sugaring season, which ran from late February until late April, or succumb to the other workers’ taunting.

Another thing Jonathan hated was how impossible it was to get used to this kind of work because the season was so brief. He’d only been promised employment by the Ward family, who owned the property, until April 30th. This was a knife that cut both ways for Jonathan, to be sure. On the one hand, he’d soon have to find new work, a task with which he was becoming all too familiar; on the other hand, at least he wouldn’t have to stand for hours on end in front of a fire that sometimes reached higher than himself.

One night, in late November 1901, Jonathan asked his mother and father to sit with him at the kitchen table. He called his father from the porch and his mother from her usual after-dinner post in front of the stove. “There’s something very important I need to discuss with you and pop,” he told his mother, as she was the first to arrive at the table.

“What is it, son?” Anne Benson inquired. “You’ve got me wonderin’.” She set her palms flat upon the table, leaned all of her upper body’s weight on them, and finally collapsed slowly with a final thud into her customary chair.

When Ben came in, he put his newspaper down on the place mat in front of his chair and sat down with an even louder thud than his wife. “Okay, boy. Out with it. What is so damn important that you got us comin’ to the dinner table as if you were Teddy Roosevelt and your mother and I were the Vice President and Secretary of State and you were gettin’ ready to tell us you’re aimin’ to kick the stuffin’ outta Spain for a second time ’cause o’ some lingerin’ animosity about what happened to the
Maine
?”

Although no one wanted to acknowledge it, Bea Benson had been holed up in her room, sick with nausea and crying for some time now. She hadn’t come down for meals in two days. The only time Anne Benson had said anything about it was the night before when Jonathan reported that Bea was not feeling fit enough to eat. Anne had replied, “Well, she threw up all her guts this mornin’, now didn’t she? She’s gotta eat somethin’. Sta’ve a cold and feed a fever.”

In the back of her mind, however, Anne knew it wasn’t influenza. There were no fever or chills, just nausea, which was at its worst in the morning. Anne recalled two weeks before when Bea mentioned that her menstrual cycle had been late.

Jonathan noticed his trembling hands, he inhaled deeply and was about to speak. Ben, still having no clue as to why his son had asked for this unexpected meeting, became irritated and said briskly, “A’e we goin’ to have a talk or ain’t we? If we ain’t, I’m goin’ to go back to the porch.”

“Bea has been poorly of late,” Jonathan blurted out, not realizing at first that he’d even begun speaking. “She, uh, she hasn’t been herself.”

“What?” Ben replied. “So does this mean you’ve examined your wife like some country doctor? You goin’ to tell us you’re goin’ into the medical field ’cause you’ve examined your wife and think you’re goin’ to tell us what’s wrong with her? You… .”

“Hush up, Benjamin!” Anne interjected.

Ben Benson quieted down immediately and looked at his wife as if to say, “You ain’t talked like that to me in a long time, Annie. What’s got you sta’ted now?” It was the first time in several years that Anne had raised her voice to her husband, and it was the first time in their marriage that she had told her husband to be quiet.

“Go on, Jonathan,” said Anne, her voice now mellow and soft again. “Your father and I are listening. You were tellin’ us about Bea.”

“She’s pregnant,” continued Jonathan, locking his fingers together and squeezing them together tightly as if this pain could take his mind off the mental anguish he felt from telling his parents that they were going to be grandparents.

Ben was completely unprepared for the news. After a few seconds in which to digest what Jonathan had said, he jumped up, slammed his fist on the table, and yelled, “Pregnant! You mean to say, son, that your wife is expectin’? And what do you think? We’re goin’ to be proud o’ you? Why should we be happy about this, Johnny? Didn’t I tell you that while you live under this roof you’re goin’ to get yourself established first? You were supposed to go to college! You were supposed to make of yourself something I ain’t never made of myself! We had plans for you, Johnny! And now this!”

Ben Benson began to weep uncontrollably. All he could see was his son’s future destroyed. He had known that with no steady work it would take a while for his son to save up enough money for school, but now with another mouth to feed there was no way this was going to happen.

“We were goin’ to let you stay here, weren’t we?” Ben cried. “Free room. Free board. And all the money you were makin’ at the general store and at the sugar house, plus what you’re makin’ at the town hall as a pa’t-time janitor’s assistant. All that money you earned. Gone!”

Ben couldn’t say anything more. He turned on his heels and walked slowly out of the kitchen like a man defeated. Before retreating to the refuge of his porch, he stopped at the front door. As he opened it, his head down, he said in a low voice, “Congratulations to you and your wife, Johnny.”

Jonathan turned to his mother, awaiting her reaction, but she had none. She simply sat there, staring into space. She said nothing for the rest of the evening.

Well aware of his father’s disappointment in him, Jonathan sat in bed that night with his wife while the young couple worried together.

“But what else can we do?” Bea asked her husband, a tinge of worry in her voice.

Detecting the sour vomit on his wife’s breath, Jonathan wanted nothing more than to ask her to brush her teeth again, but he refrained from doing so because he didn’t have the heart to hurt her feelings, especially given her delicate condition. Wanting to comfort Bea in any way he could, Jonathan wrapped his arm around her shoulders and squeezed her closer to him. As he did so, Bea tucked her head lovingly into his neck. For several minutes the two just lay there, quiet and motionless, contemplating what to do. Several ideas had popped into Jonathan’s head: giving the child up for adoption, working two jobs while going to school, and asking Ben and Anne to watch the baby while Jonathan went to school and Bea worked. None, however, seemed feasible.

First, as opposed as Ben and Anne were to Jonathan and Bea’s starting a family without being financially secure, they would not allow the young couple to give up their first and only grandchild. Second, Jonathan could barely find steady employment in one job, so how could he hold down two indefinitely? Third, his pride was too great to allow his wife to work, no matter the reason.

By the time Jonathan had thought of these three ideas, quickly followed by one reason why each would never work, he saw that Bea had drifted off to sleep. He was happy to see her look so at peace. By 3:00 in the morning, however, Jonathan could still not fall asleep. He had rolled Bea over onto her left side an hour before so that he could try to doze off, but too many things were dancing through his mind. Finally he got up, put on his robe, and went downstairs. He was headed toward the kitchen to see about getting some warm milk to help him sleep when he saw a faint light through a window adjacent to the porch.

He opened the front door and was immediately greeted by a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. Ben was sitting in his chair, rocking back and forth and puffing on his fourteenth cigarette since dinner.

“Hi, pop,” Jonathan said happily. “What are you doing out here at this hour?”

This was the first time in his whole life that Jonathan had seen his father up past midnight, except for the time they had attended Ben’s best friend’s son’s wedding in Londonderry. The Bensons were the last ones to leave the reception at almost 1:30 that particular morning. It was also the one and only time that Jonathan saw his father dance. He would later attribute this to his father’s having had one too many gin and tonics.

Ben guffawed and shook his head. He seemed in a far better mood than earlier that evening. “Heh! A grandfather!” he snorted. “I’m goin’ to be a grandfather. I didn’t think of that until after I left you and your mother sittin’ there, wonderin’ if I was goin’ to do myself in.”

Jonathan sat in the small wooden chair next to his father and grinned. “I know, pop. This must be hard for you, but believe me we weren’t planning on this.”

Ben put his hand on his son’s, the cigarette between his index and middle fingers shaking so much that Jonathan thought the long ash would fall onto the back of his hand. “I want you to know, son, that I’ve always been proud of you. You find work in the lowest shitholes of this goddamn town. You do the work, and you keep your mouth shut. You do it for your family. You’re like me. I did the same thing when I was your age. I went to work, built me this house, and married your mother when I was established and had some sort of equity. I mean, it wasn’t much, but we never sta’ved. I did odd jobs around town. Even helped out a bit with that church over there, helped bring up the lumber and set the foundation. Hell, I even helped build that house over there. Yep! But gory if I didn’t do it all for my family. I worked even ha’der when you were born. But times ah’ different now. I didn’t have the sma’ts you got. You got a brain in you, son. I know you can make somethin’ of yourself. That’s why I was so ha’d on you tonight. I don’t want you to be what I become, an old man with no future.”