Embracing Darkness (42 page)

“How ’bout we only go so far as the end of ‘The Path to Salvation’?” Rex said. “We can’t make it all the way to the shore and back again before dark. And besides, Father Fin’d be so mad.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Jessie said, “but I’ll go down the hill. Father Fin and Sis are in town. They won’t be back for a while. Hobby’s also in town getting a new hammer cause he broke his other one.”

“Yeah,” said Theo. “And thince they won’t be back for another hour or tho, and Mitheth Keat-th never cometh out-thide, no one will thee uth.”

It was decided then. The children made their way down “The Path to Salvation” for the first and last time, deliberately defiant. Once they were there, they didn’t know what to do. Jonas and Joey wanted to forge ahead into town to explore it, while the other three demurred.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Jessie said.

“Aw, come on now, guys. Don’t be a bunch of pussies,” Joey replied, which wasn’t like him, but he was losing patience with the younger ones. Nearly a man, he wanted to make new friends, get a job, and have an independent life.

As Jonas was about to concede defeat and agree to retreating back up the hill, they all heard a dog’s yelp.

“GODDAMN MUT!” cried a man’s voice. The children ran to a deserted corner of Atchison Street, where they saw a man in greasy overalls with an unlit and half-smoked cigarette in his mouth kicking a mangy white dog that appeared to be a stray.

“GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE BEFORE I COOK YOUR HIDE INTO GLUE, YOU PIECE O’ SHIT!”

Joey cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “HEY, SHIT-FOR-BRAINS! THEY COOK
HORSES
INTO GLUE, YOU ASSHOLE.”

The man turned around quickly. “YOU LITTLE SHITHEAD! I’LL TEACH YOU!”

He pursued all the children, but they quickly dispersed. Rex and Jessie ran back toward the hill, Jonas to the left toward town, and Joey and Theo to the right. The man caught up to Joey and pulled him by his hair. The boy began screaming, “GET THIS FUCKER OFF ME!”

The other children ran to his aid, jumping on the man in greasy overalls and pummeling him until he let go of Joey and fell to the ground. He screamed while they kicked and punched him. Shortly thereafter, the man lay senseless. They all came to the conclusion that he had suffered enough. As they walked away, the children realized that he was watching them go back up the hill. They heard him scream, “I’LL GET YOU FUCKERS! I SEE WHERE YOU’RE GOING! I’LL FIND YOU ALL! YOU’LL BE SORRY!”

They all raced up “The Path to Salvation” as quickly as they could, pursued by the filthy dog-abuser whom they had pummeled. In fact, as beaten as he was, he was gaining on them with surprising speed. Jessie was the fastest of the children and made it to the top of the hill before anyone else. Because Theo was the slowest, the man in the greasy overalls caught up to him first.

Hearing Theo scream for help, they all reacted to protect one of their own, running halfway back down the hill to assist their brother. Before they could get to him, however, Theo’s attacker shrieked loudly. The dog that he had been abusing had come back for retribution
.
He first bit the man on his backside, causing him to release Theo almost immediately. After Jonas helped Theo to his feet, the two boys ran up the hill. Meanwhile, not relenting, the dog continued to maul the man.

Throughout all of this Joey, Theo, and Rex reflected back on their own beatings prior to entering the Benson Home for Abused and Abandoned Boys, imagining the dog’s satisfaction as he took his revenge. They didn’t share their thoughts with one another, however, because they were afraid the others would think it was cruel to wish death on a person who was struggling to survive.

The man made one last scream for help before the dog latched his jaws onto his tormentor’s throat and didn’t let go until he went limp. The dog then let go and looked up at the children in the distance, his white fur now stained red.

“He’s dead,” Rex said.

“Only got what he deserved,” replied Joey, the most emotionally detached among the group.

“That there dog protected us,” Jonas added, as the children regrouped on “The Path to Salvation.”

“Yeah,” Rex commented. “And this guy would’ve told on us to the police. They’d find out about us living up here. Father Fin and Sis’d go to jail because of us.”

“You’re right,” Joey said after a long pause. “This is for the best. No one knows what happened. No one below ever pays any attention to what goes on up here. So let’s just clean this up.”

“Clean what up?” asked Theo.

“I mean, get rid of the body.”

“Why do we have to get rid of it?” Jessie asked. “Let’s just roll him down the hill.”

“Because, stupid, it’s evidence,” Joey said angrily, causing Jonas to get in his face.

“Hey!” Jonas challenged. “You don’t need to be callin’ nobody names.”

Joey considered what he’d said, then turned to Jessie.

“Sorry, Jess. I’m just scared too.”

“Tho what do we do?” Theo asked, holding an arm that had been bruised by the man in the greasy overalls.

“The dog’s got blood all over him,” said Joey, “and this man’s got his tonsils ripped out of him through his neck. Folks are gonna put two and two together and find out that he’s been mauled. They’ll kill the dog.”

“No!” Jessie screamed, running over to the dog and hugging his neck.

“That filthy mutt’s one selfless dog,” Joey added.

“What do you mean?” Jessie asked, rubbing the side of her face against the dog’s.

“He didn’t care about himself,” answered Joey. “While this man was beating the shit out of him, he didn’t attack. But after we helped him, he didn’t hold back once the man went after us. All of a sudden it was like he stopped worrying about himself.”

“Then let’s get rid of the body and give the dog a bath,” Jonas said.

The children surrounded the corpse and contemplated how all this happened.

“It was all because we wanted to see the ocean,” Jonas admitted out loud.

“The one time we go down the hill on our own, a man gets killed,” Rex said.

“Yeah,” Joey replied. “We wanted to see something amazing. We got our wish.”

Twenty
One Big, Happy Family
 

“I can’t believe it’s been as long as it has,” whispered Sister Ignatius to Father Poole as she got up from their bed to make breakfast on a spring morning in 1942. It was early Saturday and quite cold out, despite its being early June. She wrapped her robe tightly around her thin, naked body and walked lazily to the mirror above the large dresser that had once belonged to Ben Benson, her slippers scraping rhythmically against the wooden parquet.

“What are you talking about?” Phineas asked, the side of his mouth still pressed against the pillow.

Though his words were muffled, she understood him perfectly. After all, they had been lovers for the past thirteen years. Despite the popular notion that thirteen was an unlucky number, Ellen gleamed with affection for her partner in a relationship of such longevity.

Standing before the mirror, she began to twist her long blond hair into a spiral above the nape of her neck and set it with a handful of bobby pins. She smiled at Phineas’s question and managed a tiny laugh.

“She’s fifteen today,” Ellen said. “Our Jessie is
fifteen
.”

Phineas grunted, only half awake. After she made no further attempt to carry on the conversation, he rolled over and rubbed his face, then abruptly started slapping his cheeks, first one and then the other, until he felt alert enough to open his eyes. A few seconds later, sitting up in bed and squinting without his glasses, he saw Ellen rubbing her temples while staring at herself in the mirror.

“Are you still getting those headaches?” he asked.

Her eyes met his in the mirror. “It’s fine,” she replied weakly. “I suppose I just got up too fast.”

She then walked over to the bed, sat down on its edge, and hugged him. “Our girl is fifteen years old today, and I remember it all as though it were only yesterday.”

They kissed again, and then she left Phineas alone to get dressed. As Sister Ignatius walked down the stairs of the Benson house, which she had come to call her own for well over a decade, she reflected on the events of the past several years, although now thinking too much made her head throb. Her headaches were becoming more frequent, intense, and longer-lasting. Today, however, she refused to think of herself. It was Jessie’s birthday.

Jessie was still living with Sister Ignatius in the Benson house. She and Theo, who had just celebrated his fifteenth birthday three months earlier, were the only two of the original children still living on the hill.

Jonas Hodges had left the Benson Home for Abused and Abandoned Boys in 1937 at the age of nineteen. Having decided to go back to where his roots were in Jackson, Mississippi, he had gotten in touch with his mother’s sister. Aunt Delia’s husband had been killed in a tractor accident, and she now needed a strong hand to help run the farm, which she had promised to give him when she died. For someone who had little in his past and nothing in his future, and being a black child stranded in New England, Jonas had jumped at the chance to lead a normal life that he could control.

The priest was sad to see him go. The boy had become like a son to him, and, even though Jonas’s skin color was cause for whispers among the townspeople who got wind of there being a Negro boy living on Holly Hill (thanks to Nora O’Day and Molly Kelly’s loose tongues), Phineas had never worried that the boy would be forced to leave. Now an adult, Jonas had made the decision to leave all by himself.

Over the next year they communicated with Jonas only a few times, and it was always because Father Poole initiated a phone call to the Mississippi farm. After the third time Jonas stopped coming to the phone. His mental wounds had finally healed. He attributed it to the fact that he was no longer in Holly and was no longer reminded of his former life, the tragedy involving his parents and the abuse he had endured at the hands of his now long dead father.

Unfortunately Jonas forgot all the good as well. He let his relationship with kind Father Poole and the others wither away into the nothingness that comes from forgetting. There was little comfort for him now in hearing the priest’s voice over the phone. Formerly Jonas had been fond of the man who had saved him from his misery. Now, however, the white man’s voice only reminded him of a lost childhood, one he had shared with strangers who became a surrogate family to him only because he and they had found themselves in the same predicament.

Aunt Delia had told Father Poole the few last times he called that Jonas was not at home at the moment. The last time Phineas called the excuse was outright ridiculous. “We done run outta… uhm… eggs,” Aunt Delia lied. “He be needin’ mo’, so he wen’ on down into town and lordy know when he be back.”

“Eggs?” Father Poole asked. Having grown up in a rural community, he knew that when people raise chickens (and Jonas had plenty on the farm, as he mentioned once to Father Poole), they have no need to go to the store to buy eggs. Indeed, Jonas had boasted during their first phone conversation, about two weeks after Jonas arrived at the Mississippi farm, that they averaged about six dozen eggs a day and that the yield made them a pretty penny at the general store in town.

It took eleven months and seven phone calls for Father Poole to finally get the message that Jonas’s new life didn’t include Sister Ignatius, Jessie, or him. The priest put down the receiver in his office and said to himself on that day in 1938, “This boy isn’t a boy anymore. He’s now a
man
, and he’s made himself clear without uttering a single word.”

Joey Foster left one year after Jonas. After moving back into Holly for a little while and getting a job as a soda jerk, he worked down by the shore at Hampton Beach in the summer of 1939. There he would often stare at the beautiful white waves crashing into the shoreline and the beautiful women who passed by on the sand.

The ocean reminded him of the day when he and his brothers and sister at the home on the hill wanted to go see the ocean but instead found trouble. When the adventure was over, one man was dead, and the children inherited a mangy old mutt. He remembered how they had brought the body to the rectory, not needing to worry that anyone was watching them. The only one present was Mrs. Keats, and with her busy in the kitchen she would be unaware of what they were about to undertake.

“What do we do with him now?” asked Rex, his voice trembling. “I mean, the guy is
dead
. We gotta make sure no one can find him.”

Jessie then shouted, “There!”

She pointed toward the rectory, specifically a wooden lattice just above ground level.

“There’s something underneath the building,” Jessie cried.

“I think you mean there’s nothing under the building,” said Joey. “It’s an empty space. We can bury the body there. No one will ever find him!”

Jonas was the first to protest. “Come on, man. Ain’t no way we can bury him under our house! Make sense, Joey.”

Joey smiled, put a hand on his shoulder, and said calmly, “How long have we been living here? And Jessie’s just
now
found it!”

The two oldest boys bent down in front of the lattice and pulled it off, exposing a hole, approximately three feet by two feet, large enough for nearly any of them to crawl through. Jonas offered to check it out first. He had Theo fetch some candles and matches. When Theo came back ten minutes later from Mrs. Keats’s kitchen with birthday candles, Jonas merely patted his brother on the head and told Jessie and Rex to fetch some others.

They came back two minutes later with three long white candles whose wicks seemed already to have been burned. Each had a small red cross on one side and the outline of a dove with a sprig of leaves in its mouth flying away from the cross. These were candles from the church altar.

Jonas cocked his head, but Jessie defended their decision to take them. “Well, we couldn’t find the house candles,” she began, “and you didn’t really say what kind of candles we should look for, just that they shouldn’t be birthday candles.”