Shades of Eva (8 page)

And then came the rain.

I closed the shed door and ran around the
back of the shed, to my whipping place, and ducked beneath a tarp
covering a woodpile there. I could see white flickers of lightning
glowing every now and then through the thin plastic of the tarp. I
could hear Mom’s wailing from the back window of our house. I could
also hear the shed’s door banging open and then closed again like
an old wooden shutter in the wind. I ignored Mom and the lightning,
and instead, scolded myself for not having locked the shed door,
for the last thing Dad wanted was someone inside that shed besides
me or him. I didn’t want to imagine the kind of beating I’d suffer
if Dad came home and found his shed door wide open or his liquor
pilfered.

When the lightning stopped, I uncovered
myself and stood up to get a look around. Night was looming. Mom
was outside calling me, now, but she couldn’t see me. I had ducked
behind the shed again. There was alarm in her voice, and sadness,
and something else that sounded like fatigue. But still I didn’t
answer her. I hid like the earwigs hid. I didn’t want to go inside.
I didn’t want a bath. I wanted to wait for Dad, and I had to at
least lock the toolshed door.

That’s when Mom went back inside. That’s
when I heard a thump come from inside of the shed. It wasn’t the
door banging, a walnut falling, or the last audible remnant of
thunder. Something had fallen over inside the shed, and it sounded
like something the size of a grown man. 

I walked around to the front door. That’s
when I noticed the lock wasn’t there anymore. I looked around in
the grass, but I couldn’t see it. I checked my pockets for it, but
it wasn’t there, either. I had to have dropped it inside the
shed.

That’s when I noticed an odd set of
bootprints in the mud around me.

I opened the shed’s door and whispered,
“Daddy?”

There was no answer. All I could see were
faint shadows dancing on a far wall. Then, with eyes adjusting, I
saw something move. I called for my father again.
Daddy
was
the last word I said for nine weeks.

Something lunged at me. Something—or
someone—grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me in. I could not
scream. I froze. I caught a glimpse of a head covered by what
resembled burlap or a leather bag with
X
s cut out where the
eyes should be. Another hand clamped tight across my mouth. I could
barely breathe. Then the door closed behind me, exchanging the
darkness of night for the pitch blackness of terror.

I thought it might be Dad playing a joke on
me, or testing me in some way. But it wasn’t. Whoever it was tore
my clothes off of me and threw me to the floor and tied something
tight around my face so that I couldn’t scream. It was some kind of
tape, and it almost killed me, for as I struggled to free myself
from the menacing grasp of this monster, I began vomiting. Because
of the tape over my mouth, what vomit I didn’t swallow I
inhaled.

 A voice ordered me to be still and to
be quiet, and so I did. Finally, someone pulled the tape off of my
mouth, allowing an upheaval of fluids to pour out of me like poison
from an infected wound.

I was finally able to breathe, but I still
couldn’t talk. I was silently apologizing for all of my
unstillnesses, struggling reflexively, not only against the weight
of this being on top of me, but against the burning in my lungs and
from the sharp tearing sensation that seemed to be separating one
of my legs from the other. I fought until I could fight no more and
then relented in a sort of dissociative terror before finally
passing out.

I don’t know how much time passed. Maybe it
was hours…maybe minutes. There was no way to know, for I had lost
time, and a little boy doesn’t keep time very well to begin with.
But for however long this lasted, I awakened to the sound of
something like firecrackers firing. It sounded like the guns I’d
heard on TV when Dad was watching Gunsmoke—an inconsistent
pistol-like firing—but it was close, and very loud.

I looked up, trying to focus on the doorway
where someone was now standing, standing vengefully with something
metallic and heavy in hand, something smoking. I thought for a
minute it was Marshal Dillon standing in the doorway of the Long
Branch Saloon, but it wasn’t. But it was a gun in that someone’s
hand.

As my eyes focused more on that hand and the
hot steel it cradled, the stranger who had been restraining me
finally let loose of my wrists. It felt as though I had been
wearing a pair of heavy manacles that had all at once disintegrated
and I was now free.

It was then that I realized it was Mom
standing in the doorway, and it was her hand cradling that gun.
There was a cold fury in her eyes I’d never seen before. Dark as it
was I could see it! That fury took on an energetic quality and
seemed to be emanating from every pore of her body like heat
radiating from a fire. I wasn’t sure if it was a fury meant for me
for not answering her calls, or a fury meant for the monster that
now lay limp at my side.

That ferociousness impressed me more than
any beating ever had. There was a violent, repulsive, somehow
extra-earthly energy to her. I had never felt that energy before,
and I felt it only one time after that, and that was when I found
my mother dead in her sleep. That deathly energy would throw me
backfirst into a wall as if some demon hovering over her body had
shoved me aside, and now, all at once, that same force was
propelling me outward as if the toolshed had just exploded and I
was but a piece of shrapnel being blown out of it.

I found myself lying in the grass several
feet away amidst those mysterious bootprints, staring into the
darkness of the toolshed’s interior where my mother had now
entered.

In an instant that firecracker snapping
commenced and more smoke started rolling out. It filled the shed
with an ethereal heaviness that hid my mother, and within seconds,
was rolling out onto the lawn like a chemical cloud straight toward
me. It burned my eyes, but I didn’t dare move, and when it finally
cleared, I was finally able to see inside again.

I could faintly see the stranger lying
there. He was lying motionless in a pool of ruby-red sauce. The
burlap mask that he wore had been torn away. There were deep gashes
into his thighs in which I could see long white strands that must
have been his nerves or tendons. Mom had cut him—was still cutting
him—with some sort of knife she must have found in the toolbox, and
I began to cry. That cutting was a gruesome sound with no metaphor
sufficient to describe it save those established for the fileting
of fish.

And then I saw his face. The more I looked
at him, the more familiar that face became until at once I realized
that I knew this man. He was Fred Elms, a heretofore unimposing
neighbor who lived next door to us, a man whose nondescript nature
and unassuming quality hadn’t even warranted a sentence in my
story, or a paragraph in my life to that point.

I remember arms enrapturing me. I remember
the flashing lights of the patrol cars. I remember
faces—expressions mostly—those of awestruck neighbors, who, like
me, didn’t quite understand what had just happened.

That was about all I remember. Fred Elms was
dead, and with him went the better part of the memory of what he’d
done to me, thank God. He faded as if he had retreated like an
earwig into its crevice. He faded as if he’d somehow been banished
to that darker, more secretive part of the soul that holds all
secrets. Or maybe he simply went to hell and had taken those
memories with him!

With him, wherever he went, went my voice,
too, and that part of me I used to call a child. It was as if he
had stolen the best parts of me before he died in some form of evil
irony, including the verbal part of me capable of saying, 'I’m
sorry, I’ll be still, just please don’t hurt me anymore.'

It all faded as quickly as Mom’s sanity—and
sadly her life—would fade, and as quickly as life as I knew it was
fading. Because at midnight came shock, and with shock, the
oblivion of mind-bending inebriation—mine and Dad’s.

That’s the way it was when I was five.
That’s how it’s been ever since, at least until I met Amelia. She’d
show me how to grieve, and in that sense she saved my life. If only
I could have done the same for her.

***

Shadow Journal entry

August 19, 1995

The first thing I told Elmer was that I
couldn’t imagine being born into an insane asylum, that it must
have been hard for him. It was a statement of pity, and perhaps
sympathy. My brother responded to me by saying, ‘What difference
does place make when both of your parents are insane? We might as
well have been stillborn.’  

It was a mean thing to say to me,
regardless of his age. He was just a baby. And somehow I doubted he
had even said it. It was my hand holding the pen, wasn’t it? Isn’t
it now? Or is someone else controlling these thoughts…these words?
There are other faces watching me write this: Dad’s face, and Uncle
Ully’s, Grandpa Oren’s and, of course, Grandpa Virgil’s. In fact,
wishing me stillborn sounded like something they might
say!
 

Neah Bay Hospital  

My mother’s mystery involved a firstborn
son, and that son’s conception—a conception Mom alleged to have
occurred by way of a rape. That rape was disputed by my father.

Dad claimed paternity, and he said it was by
no rape that this baby was conceived. He said there was no mystery,
that there was only the problem of Mom’s holy memory—a memory full
of holes, to be exact. She just didn’t remember the conception, Dad
used to tell me, which didn’t say much about Dad’s performance in
bed. Mom was conducting more electricity than I&M Power in
those days, though. Maybe she did just forget.

Mom’s mystery involved the fate of that
baby, as well as his paternity. He was born into the mental
hospital where my parents were residing, and taken from there just
days after his birth. He was never seen or heard from again.

That much—this baby’s birth and his
disappearance—were the two things Mom and Dad agreed on. Thing was,
Dad said the baby was dead, but I don’t know how he would have
known that. Mom disagreed. She said her baby was taken, but not
killed. I don’t know how she’d know that, either.

Those little disputes about paternity, and
the life or death of this mysteriously-conceived baby, were
probably what Amelia’s aunt—and now Amelia—were interested in
looking into. Just so happens that Amelia was about forty years
late, and I was just about beyond give a fuck.

Amelia had just finished reciting me her
aunt’s poem, that tragic, grieving poem that seemingly had no name.
I’d just fallen into another dark period of sleep, and when I
awakened, there was another poem on my mind. I gave my arms a
much-needed stretching, and told Amelia, “My mother used to recite
a poem, too. She called it “Two Sons.”’ I asked Amelia if she
wanted to hear it. She said yes, and I recited it as best I could
remember. 

Two sons born in insane times—

Similar in every feature.

One thinks and dreams of things unknown.

One dies and returns a creature.

“Mom used to tell me that her best days were
spent in that hospital,” I added, which, to me, sounded like a
pretty schizophrenic thing to say. “If ever there was a definition
of crazy,” I told Amelia, smiling incredulously, and then laughing,
“being happy in a mental hospital is just that.”

Amelia gave me a chastising look, and then
one of contempt. “It’s an asylum!” She scoffed. “Don’t get the two
confused! They don’t do what they did to your mother and my aunt in
hospitals.”

I stood corrected. “Fine then! Asylum!
Choose your noun.”

Amelia shuffled in her chair and then lit
another cigarette.

“You can’t smoke in here,” I said, finally
addressing the habit.

“Why not?” Amelia replied, taking in a
defiant draw and then exhaling it right at me. “You aren’t on
oxygen!”

“They’ll kick you out!”

“That’s about what you’re going to do if I
read you right, isn’t it?” She smiled and took in another deep
draw.

I didn’t argue with her. I just held my
breath for a bit. Amelia changed the subject, but kept the
cigarette. For once, she blew her smoke toward the window.

“When was your mother committed,
Mitchell?”

“First time or second?”

“First.”

“I’m not sure. All I knew was that she said
she was a girl when it happened. She’d been having what she called
crying jags, and reduced the reasons for that committal to not
being able to stop crying. She—”

Amelia blew a long, punitive stream of smoke
in my direction and interrupted me. “She was fourteen-years and
two-months old! The year was 1950! Do you know how long she was
there?”

“Not really,” I said. “I really don’t think
she knew, either, tell you the truth.”

Amelia just sat there staring at me, waiting
in vain for me to regurgitate facts I was never privy to. She took
in another draw of smoke. I braced myself for more fallout.

“Seven years, two months, and twenty days!”
Amelia’s words lingered in the air with the smoke she exhaled. “She
graduated highest in her class from all the drugs they pumped her
with, but you lay there smiling like none of this matters to
you!”

I was smiling, but not because these facts
didn’t matter. I was trying to save face. I should have known the
answers to those questions. I should have been told, by family or
by friends. I should have looked into things better, but I hadn’t.
Instead of apologizing, all I could think to say was, “Mom was
sick! It’s what happens, isn’t it, in asylums for the insane?”

Amelia took my defensiveness as more apathy,
more excuses for my self-induced amnesia. “Is that what your daddy
told you?” Amelia barked. “That she was sick? Is that what you’re
telling me? That you blame your father for not knowing the answers
to those questions?”