Harry & Ruth (25 page)

“And the times we went fishing were usually good times. He'd wake us up, cook pancakes for us, about the only time he ever cooked. He'd even bait our hooks for us when we got where we were going in that old boat of his. But this didn't seem like one of those times. He didn't seem all that jolly. Frankly, though, the jolly times made me more nervous than the rest; you knew what followed would be worse than normal, just to balance things out.”

It was turning into a beautiful day. The last of the clouds were scudding away. The high water across the tracks shone like a big ocean studded with trees. There was always water there, but except for the creeks that spider-webbed through it, it usually was hidden by all the tangled underbrush.

Naomi got a sweater to wear over her dress. Something felt wrong, and she considered running in the other direction, toward the temporary safety of the Fairweather Grill, but what was she going to say? What had Henry done?

She helped him get the boat onto the bed of his ancient pickup truck, and then got in as he backed it to the edge of the tracks, from where they could slide the boat out and be right on the levee. He made sure the poles and tackle box were in, along with some banana sandwiches, a Pepsi for her and a fifth of bourbon for him.

Henry Flood had lived on the farm his whole life. He was alleged to have once taken his jonboat all the way across to the East Branch of the Campbell River, more than 20 miles from Saraw. The East Branch has no creeks leading off it that can be found on a map, but Henry got there, by water. He had to call a drinking buddy from a country store to come get him and the boat, because not even Henry Flood could find his way back across the swamp with the sun going down.

In the years leading up to end of 1975, Henry would spend more and more nights haunting Kinlaw's Hell.

He would stay out all night sometimes, possum hunting, spotlighting deer, doing whatever he wished to do. He claimed to have gotten close enough to the Saraw Lights to see Theron and Belle Crowder swinging their lanterns, although almost no one really believed that. He swore he had seen, more than once, a cat deep in the swamp that was far too big to be a wildcat.

Once he shot and killed a bear that weighed more than he did and somehow managed to get it into the boat and back to Saraw.

Henry Flood knew the swamp he'd grown up beside better than anybody in the world, better than he knew anything or anyone else.

Naomi pauses from her story to light another cigarette. Harry gets up to open a window.

“Sorry,” she says, “but I don't think I can do this without my nicotine delivery system.”

By the time they got into the swamp, she told Harry, it was half past noon. Naomi took off her sweater and folded it, very neatly, in the back of the boat. She soon lost count of how many rights and lefts, half-rights and half-lefts they took, how many sweet bays and loblollies they turned at. The swamp closed around them.

“It was just the kind of spring day we had all been waiting for,” Naomi says. “And once we got away from the house and on the water, he didn't seem threatening. He would point out a hawk or a blue heron, or a water moccasin sunning itself. He seemed almost normal. I actually felt safe.”

They'd been in there about an hour, and it was getting almost hot. The big trees that reached straight up to the sun knocked off the breeze without providing much shade.

“Now,” Henry Flood said to her, and she realized he hadn't spoken in quite some time, “I'm going to show you something, and you've got to promise not to tell anybody else about it.”

Naomi promised. Only one of them knew how to get out of Kinlaw's Hell.

Henry steered the boat hard to the right, where there seemed to be no exit to the little branch they were on, only leaves and Spanish moss.

“Watch your head,” he told her, and then they were through the bushes and into another stream, one so tight that Naomi wondered how it could possibly lead anywhere.

But it eventually widened. They went along this new stream for what Naomi estimates now to be 200 yards, twisting and turning, riding the slow, tea-colored current for the most part. Then they came to a split, and Henry went left. They went a few more yards, through a thicket of undergrowth 10 feet high, and then, with one last turn, they were there.

Henry told her he had figured out years before that the hidden opening they had gone through earlier was the dividing line between what fed into the Saraw River and what fed into the Campbell, which joined the Saraw downriver at Newport. It wasn't a clear divide, of course, but he said that you could put a leaf down on the west side of that thicket and it would wind up floating down the Campbell River, while on the other side, the side they came in on, it would end up in the Saraw.

“Doesn't make any difference anyhow,” he laughed. “They both wind up in the Atlantic Ocean. Everything winds up at the same place anyhow.”

Past that last turn was the cabin. It had been made out of pine, hauled in a few pieces at a time, whatever a boat would carry, or hewn from the trees in the swamp itself. It looked as if it had been there for decades. It had a tin roof and wood weathered to gray. There were no windows. In front was a small wooden deck that didn't look as old as the rest.

It sat on the highest piece of ground Naomi had seen since they entered the swamp. Otherwise, the high water would have been up to the front door. The land a few feet around it had been cleared.

“He must have built it when he was a boy,” Naomi tells Harry. “It must have taken him years. Maybe his parents or his brother knew something about it, but they were gone by then. And to my knowledge, no one in my family, not even Mom, had ever seen it. At least she never mentioned it to me, and I certainly never mentioned it to her. I suppose he maintained it over the years. Inside, I remember it had a couple of wooden ladder-back chairs, a rug made from a deer's hide, and not much else. The rear wall was the most amazing thing; it was stacked halfway up with empty liquor bottles. And there was a camera sitting on a little table next to the bottles.

“The bed was in the back.”

For two minutes Naomi says nothing; it seems longer to Harry. He can hear the gulls screeching outside over hum of the air conditioning.

“Naomi?”

She shakes her head as if she's trying to clear cobwebs.

“Sorry,” she says, and continues.

Henry Flood dragged the chairs out to the deck. He took out the sandwiches and sipped bourbon while his stepdaughter drank her soft drink, now warm from the trip.

“Then, just out of nowhere, he turned to me and said he bet that a pretty girl like me had lots of boyfriends. But I knew it was coming, Harry. I knew it.

“He was sitting on my left, and he put his right hand down beside my bottom, not two inches away. I swear I could feel the heat from it.

“At that time, I had kissed one boy, a boy named Kenny Painter. We had gotten together at a school dance and slipped outside with one of my friends and one of his. I suppose, the world being fair and somebody watching out for the bad guys, I would have graduated to French kissing pretty soon, maybe light petting the next year. I might have let somebody get to third base by my senior year, maybe gone all the way before I got to college. Maybe met some dark, handsome Italian boy in Rome and given my virginity to him.

“But Henry Flood saved me the anxiety and hassle of all that. He did a couple of things to me that afternoon that I didn't let Thomas do until we had been married awhile.”

“Naomi, I'm sorry.” Harry puts his hand on the bed near where his daughter is sitting and realizes the inappropriateness of this just as she jumps.

“Nobody's fault,” she shrugs. If her anger were electricity, Harry thinks, they could light the whole house with it. “But I wish somebody, some damn body, God, my mother, somebody, had been there. I know they weren't; I know I can't change it now. But I can still hate it, still mourn it. I can do that, can't I, Harry?”

He nods.

Henry Flood had stood up quickly and scooped Naomi into his arms, carrying her inside the cabin. He made it quite clear that there was no other human being for miles.

“No use calling for help,” he had whispered into her ear. “And I don't want to hear no crying, neither.”

“You know the worst thing?” Naomi says, staring straight ahead as the ash grows on her cigarette. “I couldn't, or wouldn't, even scream. And as athletic as I was, he could hold both my wrists in one of his. He seemed to enjoy the terror, the control. I believe he was acting out of spite and anger a lot more than any lust for my pitiful 13-year-old body.

“He made me take off all my clothes and fold them neatly on the chair, so I wouldn't come back looking like I'd just been raped, I suppose. I begged him to have mercy, and it just seemed to make him more excited. He had on these old coveralls, and he was out of those and his undershorts before I could blink. He didn't even bother to take off his shirt or socks. Very romantic, huh?

“I had never seen a man's penis hard like that before. You can't imagine, Harry, how scared I was. I was trying not to cry, because I was afraid he might beat me or even kill me. He put his hand over my mouth to muffle me. They'd never even find my body, was what I was thinking. Never, before or since, have I ever felt half as helpless. I actually did faint once, and when I came to, he was still inside me.”

And so Henry Flood spent the better part of two hours using his stepdaughter as many times and in as many ways as he could manage.

“Harry,” she says now, to the silence, “you can't imagine. Maybe if you were snatched up out of your comfortable stockbroker's life and dumped in some prison, then buggered repeatedly by psychopaths, it might have been the same. But even then, you would have built up some mental callouses, some higher threshold of psychological pain, just from living in the adult world. But my universe, up until some time in the early afternoon of April 25, 1957, was this fantasy world where God benignly ruled and you knew that your prince, all handsome and kind and gentle, would come some day.

“Except my prince preferred to come in my mouth, and insisted that I call him ‘Daddy' afterward.”

Before he let her get dressed, he took several pictures, threatening her with worse things yet if she didn't stop crying and look the way he wanted her to look.

Harry has no words. At that moment in 1957, he thinks, he probably was in his swank office at Martin & Rives, making a few more dollars, fantasizing about the new secretary, when he should have been wading through Kinlaw's Hell with a shotgun in his hands in anticipation of blowing Henry Flood's psychopathic head off, but only after a couple of shots to his knees and one to his genitals.

Afterward, Naomi says, he helped her clean up as best could be managed with a couple of old rags and some swamp water. Then it was over. They came out of the swamp the same way they'd gone in, father and daughter back from a fishing trip.

“I never felt normal after that day,” she says, “not to this day. He got us back a little after 3, because he knew Mom would call me shortly after that.

“Do you know what he told me? He told me, ‘If you let anybody know, I'll swear you asked for it, that you couldn't keep your hands off me. You will forget this ever happened, if you know what's good.'

“You know, people hear about girls being molested by monsters like Henry Flood and they can't believe it. We were at a party a while back, and they were talking about this man out in California who had allegedly raped three of his daughters over a period of several years. And my best friend said she couldn't imagine such a thing, didn't anybody notice anything, why didn't the girls tell somebody? She wouldn't shut up.

“But they just don't know, Harry. You think, what did I do to bring this on? And you think, God help you, that at some point you might have actually cooperated with him, might have pushed forward to meet him. And I'm sure I never heard the words ‘statutory rape' until I was in college. And you're just sure that, if you aren't actually at fault, everybody will think you are.

“It seems easier, Harry, to just shut up and try to do what he said: forget it ever happened. Deep down, there's that voice inside you whispering that you're bad, that you asked for it.

“Except, of course, you can't forget it.”

He raped her on two other occasions, once in her bedroom, once in his and Ruth's, despite Naomi's best efforts to stay away from him.

And then it stopped. He quit trying to find ways to be alone with Naomi.

“You know what I think? I think I got too old for him. I think 14 wasn't quite innocent and defenseless enough for the bastard.”

She thought—half afraid, half hoping—that Ruth, of all people, would notice. She tried to stay away from her, but part of her wanted her mother to somehow intuit the damage that had been done and protect her.

“But she didn't,” Naomi says, with real bitterness now. “Either she was too busy with that damn grill, or she just didn't want to deal with that kind of information.

“And by the time she figured it out, well, it was too late, you know? It wasn't long before Henry died. She found some old pictures or something. She told me, tried to apologize, but, what the hell. I told her it wasn't her fault. How could I really blame her?

“Except I do. I can't help it. I do.”

They are quiet for a minute or more, and then Naomi looks over at Harry. Her eyes are red.

“Did she tell you?”

Harry can't lie, not now.

“But I just knew he raped you. I never knew how bad it was.”

She smiles the thinnest smile Harry has ever seen.

“You still don't.”

Harry thinks to himself that, promises or not, Naomi may have to hear a story herself.

TWENTY-FIVE

Even in 1972, with the loose threads of her life coming together like some preordained quilt, Ruth thought, in unguarded moments, about what would have happened if she had, once upon a time, hung on to Harry Stein with both arms or, failing that, not been quite so committed to the concept of for-better-or-for-worse.