Sourland (22 page)

We began to notice, Sonny was getting mean. He was short-tempered with his mother, even with his aunt Devra. The kinds of silly jokes Lyle and I had played with him only a few months before just seemed to annoy Sonny now. One evening Lyle crept up on Sonny sprawled on the sofa, drinking a beer and clicking through TV stations with the remote control, and Sonny told him, “Fuck off.” His voice was flat and
tired. He wasn't smiling. His jaws were bristling with dark stubble and his T-shirt was stained with sweat. Whatever was on TV, he stared at without seeming to see. Compulsively he poked and prodded a tooth in his lower jaw, that seemed to be loose.

Poor Lyle! My brother crept away wounded. He would never approach Sonny again in such a way.

I knew better than to tease Sonny in such a mood for he didn't seem to like me much any longer, either.
I hate you! I don't love you. Fall out of some damn tree and break your damn neck, see if I give a damn.

These brash-Mickey words I whispered aloud, barefoot on the stairs a few yards away. Where I could watch my boy cousin through the doorway, slumped on the sofa poking at a tooth in his lower jaw.

 

In the fall, Momma had her hair trimmed in a feathery cut that floated around her face and made her eyes, warm liquidy brown, look enlarged. She was living her secret life that left her moody and distracted vehemently shaking her head when the phone rang and it was for her and whoever wanted to speak with her left no name and number only just the terse message
She'll know who it is, tell her call back.

She was still working at Herlihy Realtors. Unless she'd quit the job at Herlihy Realtors. Maybe she'd been fired by Mr. Herlihy? Or she'd quit and Mr. Herlihy had talked her into returning but then after an exchange she'd been fired, or she'd quit for a second, final time? Maybe there'd been a scene of Momma and her employer Mr. Herlihy in the office after hours when everyone else had departed, when the front lights of
HERLIHY REALTORS
had been switched off, and Momma was upset, Momma swiped at her eyes that were beginning to streak with mascara, Momma turned to walk away but Mr. Herlihy grabbed her shoulder, spun her back to face him and struck her with the flat of his hand in her pretty crimson mouth that had opened in protest.

And maybe there'd been a confused scene of Momma desperately pushing through the rear exit of Herlihy Realtors, blood streaming from a two-inch gash in her lower lip, Momma running and stumbling
in high-heeled shoes to get to her car before the man pursuing her, panting and excited, could catch up with her.

Maybe this man had pleaded
Devra! Jesus I'm so sorry! You know I didn't mean it.

Or maybe this man had said, furiously, snatching again at Momma's shoulder
Don't you walk away from me, bitch! Don't you turn your back on me.

 

It was 9:50
P.M.
, a weekday night in December 1981. Aunt Georgia picked up the ringing phone already pissed at whoever was calling at this hour of the evening (knowing the call wouldn't be for her but for her sister Devra who'd been hiding away in her room for the past several days refusing to talk to anyone even Georgia, even through the door, or her son Sonny who'd been out late every night that week) and a voice was notifying her that it was the Chautauqua County sheriff's office for Mrs. Georgia Brandt informing her that her sixteen-year-old son, Sean, Jr., resident of 2881 Summit Hill Road, was in custody at headquarters on a charge of aggravated assault. It seemed that Sonny had confronted Mr. Herlihy of Herlihy Realtors in the parking lot behind his office earlier that evening, they'd begun arguing and Sonny had struck Herlihy with a tire iron, beating him unconscious. Georgia was being asked to come to headquarters as soon as possible.

Aunt Georgia was stunned as if she'd been struck by a tire iron herself. She'd had to ask the caller to repeat what he'd said. She would tell us afterward how her knees had gone weak as water, she'd broken into a cold sweat in that instant groping for somewhere to sit before she fainted. She would say afterward, over the years, how that call was the second terrible call to come to her on that very phone: “Like lightning striking twice, the same place. Like God was playing a joke on me He hadn't already struck such a blow, and didn't owe me another.”

 

Sonny would say
Well, hell.

Sonny would swipe his hand across his twitchy face, he'd have to agree
Some kind of joke, like. How things turn out.

Cupping a hand to his ear, his left ear where the hearing had been impaired following a beating (fellow inmates at the detention center? guards?) he refused to speak of, refused to allow Georgia to report saying
You want them to kill me, next time? Chill out, Ma.

Each time we saw him, he was less Sonny and more somebody else we didn't know. In the orange jumpsuit printed in black
CHAU CO DETENTION
on the back, drooping from his shoulders and the trouser legs so long, he'd had to roll up the cuffs. The guards called him kid. There was a feeling, we'd wished to think, that people liked him, Sonny wasn't any natural-born killer type, not a mean bone in that boy's body my aunt Georgia pleaded to anyone who'd listen. If only Mr. Herlihy hadn't died.

I only just hate that man worse, God forgive me.

Georgia made us come with her to church. Not Momma (you couldn't get Momma to step inside that holy-roller Church of the Apostles, Momma proclaimed) but Lyle and me.
Pray for your cousin Sonny, may Jesus spare us all.

I wrote to Sonny, saying how I missed him. How we all missed him. We missed him
so
! But Sonny never answered, not once.

Aunt Georgia said Sonny meant to answer, but was busy. You wouldn't believe how they keep them busy at that damn place.

Momma said maybe Sonny didn't “write so good.” Maybe Sonny hadn't paid much attention at school when writing was taught, maybe that was it. So he wouldn't want to show how like a little kid he'd write, that other people might laugh at.

Laugh at Sonny! I was shocked at such a thought. I could not believe that Momma would say such a thing.

Still, I loved Sonny. My heart was broken like some cheap plastic thing, that cracks when you just drop it on the floor.

2.

“Aimée.”

Mrs. Peale's voice was low and urgent. My heart kicked in my chest.
I saw a look in the woman's eyes warning
Take care! You are a very reckless girl.
Later, more calmly I would realize that Mrs. Peale could not have been thinking such a thought for Mrs. Peale could not have known why the dean of students had asked her to pass along the pink slip to me, discreetly folded in two and pressed into my hand at the end of music class.

My trembling hand. My guilty hand. My tomboy-with-bitten-finger nails-hand.

It was a rainy afternoon in October 1986. I was sixteen, a junior at the Amherst Academy for Girls. I had been a student here, a boarder, since September 1984. Yet I did not feel “at home” here. I did not feel comfortable here. I had made a decision the previous day and this summons from the dean of students was in response to that decision I could not now revoke though possibly it was a mistake though I did not regret having made it, even if it would turn out to be a mistake. All day I'd dreaded this summons from the dean. In my fantasies of exposure and embarrassment I'd imagined that my name would be sounded over the school's loudspeaker system in one of those jarring announcements made from time to time during the school day but in fact the summons, now that it had arrived, was handwritten, terse:

This was funny!
Promtly.

My first instinct was to crumple the note in my hand and shove it into a pocket of my blazer before anyone saw it, but a bolder instinct caused me to laugh, and saunter toward the door with other girls as if nothing was wrong. I showed the note to Brooke Glover whom I always wanted to make laugh, or smile, or take notice of me in some distinctive way, but my bravado fell flat when Brooke, who'd wanted to leave the room with other friends, only frowned at the dean's note with a look of baffled impatience, like one forced to contemplate an obscure cartoon.
That Dean Chawdrey had misspelled
promptly
made no impression on Brooke for whom spelling was a casual matter. She'd misunderstood my motive in showing her the note, made a gesture of sympathy with her mouth, murmured, “Poor you,” and turned away.

Now I did crumple the incriminating note and shove it into my pocket. My face pounded with blood. A terrible buzzing had begun in my head like the sound of flies cocooned inside a wall in winter. I left Mrs. Peale's classroom hurriedly, looking at no one.

Well, hell.

 

To get you out of that environment. Away from those people, that way of life.
My aunt Agnes had come for me, to save me. Her expression had been frowning and fastidious as if she smelled something nasty but was too well-mannered to acknowledge it. Aunt Agnes refused to discuss Sonny with Georgia, though Sonny was her nephew. She refused to hear what Momma had to say about the situation. Yes it was tragic, it was very sad, but Agnes had come to Ransomville to rescue me. She would arrange for me to attend a girls' boarding school in a Buffalo suburb, a “prestigious” private school she knew of since her college roommate had graduated from the Amherst Academy and was now an alumni officer. She would arrange for me to transfer from Ransomville High School as quickly as possible. At the time, I was fourteen. I was ready to leave Ransomville. Momma had accused her oldest sister
You want to steal my daughter! You never had a baby of your own
but Agnes refused to be drawn into a quarrel nor would I quarrel with my mother who'd been drinking and who when she drank said wild hurtful stupid things you did not wish to hear let alone dignify by replying
Momma you're drunk, leave me alone. Haven't you hurt us all enough now leave us alone.

At this time Sonny was gone from Ransomville. There was shame and hurt in his wake. There was no happiness in the old farmhouse on Summit Hill Road. No happiness without Sonny in that house he'd started to paint a luminous cream-ivory that glowered at dusk. Sonny was “incarcerated” in the ugly barracks of the Chautauqua County Youth
facility north of Chautauqua Falls and he would not be discharged from that facility until his twenty-first birthday at which time he would be released on probationary terms. I had not seen Sonny in some time. I still wrote to Sonny, mostly I sent him cards meant to cheer him up, but I had not seen Sonny in some time and from my aunt Georgia the news I heard of Sonny was not good.
Like he doesn't know me sometimes. Doesn't want me to touch him. Like my son is gone and somebody I don't know has taken his place.

When Sonny was first arrested, after Mr. Herlihy was hospitalized in critical condition, the charge was aggravated assault. He'd told police that he had only been defending himself, that Herlihy had rushed at him, attacked him. He had never denied that he'd struck Herlihy with the tire iron. But when Herlihy died after eleven days on life support without regaining consciousness the charge was raised to second-degree murder and Chautauqua County prosecutors moved to try Sonny as an adult facing a possible sentence of life imprisonment.

At this time, we'd had to leave my aunt's house. Momma had had to move us to live in a run-down furnished apartment in town for she and Georgia could not speak to each other in the old way any longer, all that was finished. Always there was the shadow of what Sonny had done for Momma's sake, that Georgia could not bear. There was no way to undo it, Momma acknowledged. Her voice quavered when she uttered Sonny's name. Her eyes were swollen and reddened from weeping. When Georgia screamed at her in loathing, Momma could not defend herself. She spoke with the police. She spoke with the prosecutors and with the judge hearing Sonny's case. She pleaded on Sonny's behalf. She blamed herself for what he'd done. (She had not asked him to intervene with Mr. Herlihy, Momma insisted. Though she had allowed him to see her bruised face, her cut lip. She'd told him how frightened she was of Herlihy, the threats he'd made.) Momma testified that her nephew had acted out of emotion, to protect her; he'd had no personal motive for approaching Herlihy. He had never seen, never spoken with Herlihy before that evening. Sonny was a boy who'd grown up too fast, Momma
said. He'd quit school to work and help support his family. He'd taken on the responsibilities of an adult man and so he'd acted to protect a member of his family, as an adult man would do. Others testified on Sonny's behalf as well. Authorities were persuaded to believe that the killing was a “tragic accident” and Sonny was allowed to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter as a minor, not as an adult, which meant incarceration in a youth facility and not in a nightmare maximum security prison like Attica.

Lucky bastard
it was said of Sonny in some quarters. His tree service buddies seemed to feel he'd gotten off lightly: less than five years for breaking a man's head with a tire iron when not so long ago in Chautauqua County, as in any county in New York State, the kid might've been sentenced to die in the electric chair.

At the Amherst Academy where I was one of a half-dozen scholarship students out of approximately three hundred girls, I would speak only guardedly of my family back in Ransomville. Now my mother had married, a man I scarcely knew. Now my aunt Georgia had sold the farmhouse and was living with one of her married daughters. In this place where talk was obsessively of boys I would not confess
I'm in love with my cousin who is five years older than me. My cousin who killed a man when he was sixteen
. Never would I break suddenly into tears to the astonishment of my friends
I am so lonely here where I want to be happy, where I am meant to be happy because my life has been saved
.