The Black Chronicle (5 page)

              “You tell me. Anything else you need me to do?”

              “Well you could double-check this month’s direct DVD sales and send them out?”

              “Consider it done.”

              “Thanks Erin.”

              Mary, anxious to get home and unwind, scooped up a stack of papers and folders and began to stuff them into her duffel bag like a bank robber stuffing money in a sack. Among the stack was a black envelope with a single name scrawled across it in white-out: Mister.

Jeremy was dressed head to toe in black. In the heat of the day, he would feel all the more smothering for it, but for the moment the central air of the funeral home kept him relatively comfortable.

              His son Charlie, also completely in black save for a crisp white tie, no doubt a touch from Katie, sat next to him. They were in the basement of the funeral home, which served as a kind of refreshment room. It was just the two of them, everyone else was upstairs or still arriving. In Jeremy’s hand was a Styrofoam cup of coffee that he had just gotten from an old machine in the corner. It was awful but he still hadn’t slept and so it served its purpose.

              “You sure you don't want anything?” Jeremy asked.

              “Yeah, I'm sure.”

              He knew there was something he was supposed to say to his kid here. Something fatherly or poignant about life or death, but he just didn't know how to spin this in such a way as to make it meaningful. 

              “You can go upstairs and sit with your mom if that's what you want.”

              “No, it's okay Dad.”

              There was something in the way he said “Dad” that moved Jeremy. He hardly ever referred to him that way. It was only ever, “Yes this” or “No that,” never “Yes Dad,” “No Dad.” Perhaps this was the silver lining—that at the loss of Chris they may learn to appreciate each other. He wanted to say this to him, but looking at him sitting there, sitting with him and just quietly being there for him, Jeremy understood that his son was already one step ahead of him.

              “I love you Charlie,” Jeremy said, putting his hand on his son's shoulder. “I know I don't say it much, but I do.”

              “I love you too.”

              He hadn’t heard him say that in…how long had it been? Years? Charlie was a good kid but he was at that magical time in life when exerting independence was synonymous with a ‘fuck everyone, they’re stupid’ attitude. But Jeremy knew it could be worse. The boy was wicked smart and had a quick, insightful mind that was truly impressive. That’s if you could get past the impression he tended to give that it was his curse to be the only person with a full and functional brain in world full of idiots. But that’s as far as his teenage angst would take him. Charlie would never go off the rails. He would get into university somewhere, possibly even follow his old man's footsteps into psychology and go on to do something truly special... if that's what he wanted.

In his first year of high school they’d wanted to put him into a special class for gifted students and he reacted as though they were trying to send him to a leper colony. He just wanted to fit in and Jeremy understood that. That's all he’d wanted too, when he was the boy’s age. But despite his fear of being seen as different or dorky or whatever, and without any more urging from him or Katie, Charlie had decided on his own to go into the advanced program the following year.

              Jeremy looked at his son, sitting there stoic and strong, and wondered how much all of this was affecting him. He wasn't particularly close with his uncle; Chris' condition made that difficult. But he wondered whether the fact that they’d shared the same face might be making it harder for Charlie. It was a small comfort that he and Chris now looked less similar than they once had. His diet and habits had made him very skinny and frail. Still, in a few minutes Charlie would have to see, essentially, the image of his father lying dead in a coffin.

              “You okay?” Jeremy asked, throwing the coffee in the garbage, unable to stomach it anymore.

              “Yeah, I'm okay. Are you okay?”

              “Yeah... I just wish... I don't know... I just think I could have done more for him.”

              “Dad, you did everything for him.”

              Was that true? He didn't know.  When they were eight their father had died—suicide—their mother, stricken with grief, had left them in the care of their aunt and uncle who’d raised them or at least, provided them with the essentials of food, clothes, shelter, until they were eighteen and ejected from their care. Jeremy had to grow up quick for Chris' sake. Sometimes it felt like they were two incomplete people that together still didn't make up a full person. And now he was gone.

              “You couldn't fix him Dad,” Charlie said seeing the sullen look on his father's face. “Nobody could. It was just… one of those things.”

              “I know…I know. Come on, let's go get this over with,” he said leading Charlie upstairs.

The Golden age of the nineteen-fifties didn't seem so glamorous in small town, corn town, cow town America. In fact to Jacob Codwell, who had just celebrated his seventeenth birthday, it often felt like whatever the opposite of that would be.

              His childhood dream of killing Nazis would now never be realized as the goose stepping sons of bitches had been defeated before he’d barely had a chance to get out of grade school. To fight for his country would be his one sure escape. The one escape nobody could deny him, not even his father. And besides, girls are suckers for a guy in a uniform, or so his older brother Peter had said the last time he’d seen him. In any event, that was only an added benefit to the gig, and not what had led him to dream of fighting in the Great War. He would rather have risked dying a virgin, blown to bits by German mortar shells, than be stuck in this nowhere land of crops and tractors and illiterate drunken fathers.

              Not that he didn't have his own wars to fight already. He had lived his entire life behind enemy lines, it seemed. At least in the army he would have comrades. He had been alone on his little battlefield since his brother had left for the war, and though he didn't think it was possible, he’d felt even more alone after Pete died in combat.

Pete had been a gunner in a B-17 Flying Fortress and been shot down over Schweinfurt, Germany on his way to drop a payload of bombs on a ball-bearing factory. Jacob would often have nightmares about it. He was always in the plane with his brother, sometimes as part of the crew and other times as a kind of a ghost, watching it all play out, unable to warn them of the coming disaster. Inevitably they would be hit; anti-aircraft rounds would rip through the metal of their so-called flying fortress like it was nothing more than tinfoil. Then the aircraft would sputter and spin, turning this way and that, at weird angles, trying uselessly to fly to safety like a dragonfly with one of its wings plucked off.

              Sometimes they would all scream to God, or to each other, or cry for their mothers. Other times they would just stare at each other with their young, barely-men faces and wide panicked eyes, too lost in their thoughts to utter last words, thoughts maybe of their families or their sweethearts back home. Jacob often wondered what his brother's thoughts were in those final moments as he plummeted towards certain death, caught in the horrible transition between one dimension and the next.  Did he think of him and his short life back in Clementine, Tennessee, or was he thinking of the life to come?

              But always the plane went down. The black smoke of the engines trailing behind the screeching metal and glass like the tail of an American-made comet.

              The Germans would look up from their fortified nests and celebrate. The flames from his brother’s exploding aircraft reflected in their gleeful, bloodshot Aryan eyes, sauerkraut and foam dripping from their snarling lips, “Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler, may the Reich never end!”

              And sometimes right before Pete's plane exploded into the cold ocean or crashed against the jagged rocks of some foreign mountain, he would turn to him, his eyes full of that calm strength Jacob admired so much, and say, “Don't let him hurt you.”

              And then he would awaken back in his room. Back home in his lonely little war against one. His father still Fuhrer of his life.

              But the Germans were defeated. American had its revenge. The enemy now was the Reds, the evil champions of Communism. Jacob secretly hoped for all-out war.

              Fear seemed to live everywhere. Bomb drills were routinely practised at school. The bell would ring and the little children would dive under their wooden desks giggling like it was a game. The older kids with half a brain in their heads would comply only grudgingly for the sake of appearances, but left wondering what these Russian bombs were made of that they would be able to penetrate the roofs of their schools but not the one inch thick tops of their wobbly classroom desks.

              Jacob found it more ridiculous than most. Why on earth would the Reds choose to target                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       anything in Tennessee of all places?
That's right
, he realized one day while sitting cross-legged under his desk, observing all the different flavours of fear in his classmates’ eyes.

Targeting these bunch of hicks is brilliant. Kill off all the stupid because the intelligent people aren't threatened enough by the communists’ ideas to go to war over.

              And even though America had never been bombed, the fear and tension persisted. Kindly grandmothers set apple pies on windowsills like villagers setting out garlic to ward off vampires. Baseball games and barbeques and all-around good ‘ole boy-ness were observed like holy sacraments of the Church of America. It all bored Jacob to tears. But between school and chores and his sweetheart Becky, he barely had time to resent it all. He did manage to get his resentment in when and where he could , and nothing was easier to resent than his old man.  

              “
Roast beef again?” his father complained one night
at dinner between sips of whiskey.

              “We haven't had roast beef in at least…” his mother started to explain.

              “—We have it all the time!”

              She knew better than to speak back to him.

              Jacob tried to block them out. 

              “Don't you tell me,” his father spat and took another long drink. “You think I can't remember what I eat?”

              “Sorry dear,” his mother squeaked between timid forkfuls.

              Jacob could feel his father's rage building but didn't bother to look up. If they both just ignored him chances were he would get bored and calm down.

              “Yeah, ‘sorry’? I'm the one sorry to be eating the same sawdust-dry roast beef every night.”

              Cutlery clinked on plates. Food was slowly chewed and swallowed. The grandfather clock in the hallway measured the growing tension with its slow and steady tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.

              “And what about you?” his father asked directing his disdainful drunken eyes towards him. Jacob could smell the liquor on his breath from all the way on the other side of the table. He tried to just ignore him. He was too tired and wanted only to finish eating and go to bed.

              “I'm talking to you, boy.”

              “Yes?” Jacob finally had to say.

              “You finish your chores?”

              “Yes.”

              “Yes what?”

             
Here it comes.
Jacob looked up at his mother but she was still just staring down at her mashed potatoes.
She's not going to find any help in those potatoes
.

              “Yes
sir
,” Jacob said and started to cut bigger bites.

              “You muck them stalls?”

              “Yes sir.”

              “You fill the troughs?”
              “Yes
sir
,” Jacob growled, feeling his blood begin to boil.

              “You better take that goddamn tone out your voice boy!” his father warned, straightening his big meaty frame upwards.

              Jacob opened his mouth but felt his mother’s tension immediately spike so he bit his tongue, literally. He swallowed his fear and anger along with another big mouth full of roast, which, incidentally was really not that dry at all.

              “Goddamn it,” his father cursed, his lazy drunkard hand pushing past his glass and going directly for the bottle. Lifting it to his lips he took a long harsh gulp, the whole time his menacing eyes fixed on his son. Jacob caught his eyes, and found himself unable to look away. Unable to tuck his tail for the millionth time and just let his father intimidate him. He stared back, barely trying to mask his hatred.

              “If there is a God,” his father snarled, “then He must hate me. He must see fit to reward hard work with punishment. Gives me a lazy woman, who gets fat as a cow no sooner than the ring is put on her finger. And gimme a boy who is as lazy and spineless as a worm. Praise be to God!” he declared loudly lifting his hands up to the sky in mock worship.

              Jacob glared, hypnotized by the man's ignorance, mystified that he was even related to this drunken old fool. How had this miserable son of a bitch been the door through which he had entered life? There were no words, so he just stared. He didn't try to keep his face and his eyes from saying what he’d wanted to say for a long, long time: that he hated him. He hated his father as much as anyone could hate anyone. 

              “You got something to say to me, boy?”

              “Why are you such a bad person?” Jacob asked with as much measure as he could muster. 

              Finally whatever fascination her potatoes were holding for her waned, and Jacob's mother looked up with the kind of shock one might display if their child had suddenly started speaking in perfect Japanese.

              “What did you say to me?” his father asked, half shocked, half amused.

              “You're a bad man. You're rotten. There's nothing,
nothing,
in you which I want in me. I hope, and I try and I pray every day that I will never be anything like you. And if there is a God, I promise you, you're going to burn in hell old man!”

              Their world had never stood so still, the old farm house never been so utterly, perfectly silent. Tick… tock… tick… tock…

              When Jacob glanced at his mother again she was already staring back down at her plate. She didn't want to see what was about to happen.

              In an instant his father was on his feet, his boots thump, thump, thumping around the table. Jacob just had time to stand before he felt his father's powerful hands grip him around his throat. A big fist came walloping down at him like a boulder thrown from a catapult. Jacob was too disoriented to notice that two of his front teeth had been knocked loose to the floor.

              His mother had left; her body was still there, but her mind had gone somewhere else. Somewhere where she didn't have to watch her husband beat her youngest like a dog who’d shit on the rug; Somewhere where she wasn't culpable for just sitting by while this happened, yet again.

              The fists came pummelling down on him faster than he could react. He turtled, trying his best to cover the most vulnerable points on his body, though every time he squirmed or used his arms to protect a rib or his stomach, his father's cruel fists would find a hole somewhere else, forcing him to try and protect that too. He felt small again, just a boy being spanked by a cruel parent, unable to do anything but try and get through it. It's not as though Jacob hadn't been in this position before, but this time something was different. This time, he wasn't sure if his father was going to stop. Trying to weather the storm might not work out this time.

              And then it hit him, hit him harder than his father's fists ever could. The realization that this sad, broken man hated his own son. That he may very well have been in the process of
killing
his own son. He didn't love him. He was his boy—now his
only
boy—but still, he didn't love him.

              Something moved inside of him, something hot and growing and untameable, And just before the world dimmed around him like the lights going out before a picture show, Jacob found himself in the grip of a choice that wasn't much of a choice at all: it was fight or die. He could feel the blood rushing from his pounding heart to his head and then his fist. And before he knew it he had scrambled from underneath his father's massive frame.

              Jacob knew how to throw a punch also. His father thought he was spineless and weak but, what he didn't know was that his father was the only person he had ever let hit him. He had always fought back against bullies and could even have been a bully himself if he’d wanted to, but that wasn't him. But now he was going to show him he could be.

              Jacob was still on wobbly legs when the drunken old farmer got to his feet. The first punch Jacob threw was filled with so much wild rage that he would have spun himself around twice and landed right back on his ass if it hadn’t connected. And though it did, the blow didn't feel nearly as forceful as he’d hoped.  But he knew he couldn't stop there. If he stopped there he was dead. 

              So he kept swinging. He swung and swung and swung, landing more than he missed. His fists were pulsating balls of fire that exploded in pain each time he connected with his father's face. The punches came whizzing at his father so fast that he couldn't even mount a proper defence, he just sort of wilted.

              He saw a look in his father's eye. It was only there for a second, but Jacob had dreamt of putting that look on his father’s face every single day: fear.