Beneath the Weight of Sadness

by Gerald L. Dodge

  “It might be easier to understand than you think. Where was Truman going the night you and Mr. Engroff last saw him?”

  “I don’t know, Mr.…”

  “Parachuk.”

  “Yes. I don’t know. Truman didn’t say. He was very private most of the time.”

  “So he didn’t say where he was going. Didn’t mention anything during the day? He didn’t have someone who he knew you might assume he was going to see?”

  From the look on her face I could tell she thought the question was stupid and didn’t deserve an answer. When she didn’t offer one up, I said, “I’ve been told by the students who knew Truman at school, and his teachers and administrators, that he was brilliant.”

  “Fuck them,” she said with equanimity.

  Her fierce words were made even more startling by her flat aspect.

  “Do you respond that way, Mrs. Engroff, because you think they had reason to fabricate that judgment?”

  “No, I say it because all the people are terrible. All of them.” She glared at me for a moment and I was certain she was including me.

  She stood and walked to a long table I hadn’t noticed on my first visit. There was a decanter of wine and two wine glasses. She poured a glass and, with the decanter poised, asked, “Would you like a glass of wine, Mr. Parachuk?”

  I put my hand out like I was surrendering.

  “No, thank you.”

  She walked back to the couch and sat, took a large sip of wine.

  “I’m not supposed to drink, but then…” she didn’t finish.

  “In general, Mrs. Engroff, how do you think people felt about Truman…in school? In Persia?”

  For the first time I saw some small sign of torment and sadness.

  “I told Ethan we shouldn’t move here. I told him it was a horrid place with horrid people.”

  She said this with a violence in her voice and I suddenly understood she was blaming her husband. I wasn’t surprised: Someone had to be at fault.

  “Why?” I asked.

  She laughed but it was a laugh like heat lightning, there and gone in an instant.

  “Go through Truman’s things and then ask that ridiculous question. No…don’t you dare go in that room!”

  I could hear the tick of a clock somewhere and I had to wonder who’d taken the time to wind it. Like before, silence went on too long.

  “Tell me about Persia, Mrs. Engroff.”

  Again, there was a short, derisive laugh.

  “You don’t know for yourself, Mr. Parachuk? You haven’t lived here long enough to know how egregiously close minded these people are?”

  A tear rolled down her cheek. She drained the wine in her glass and wiped the moisture away with her frail, white hand.

  “Do you think a lot of the people here resented Truman’s lifestyle?”

  “You mean the fact that he was…is gay? You can say it. Watch how easy it is to say: gay, gay, gay…or fag or cocksucker or…”

  She stood again and went to the decanter and poured another glass. She emptied half of it while she stood there looking beyond me. I don’t normally feel emasculated by people—especially women—but now I felt the urge to stand, to meet her gaze at eye level. I didn’t.

  “Your husband said you and Truman were very close—that you had a unique relationship that maybe would help us know more about who might have wanted to harm him.”

  “Have you gone through the Persia phonebook? That might be a place to start.”

  I tried a different tack.

  “Mrs. Engroff, tell me about the relationship between Carly Rodenbaugh and Truman. I’m told they were best friends until recently.”

  She finished the rest of the wine and placed the glass on the coffee table in front of her. She folded her hands together as if in prayer.

  “I remember when Carly came to Truman’s sixth birthday party. She’s only a few days younger than he. Even then I could tell they were meant for each other. There were the usual amount of children in attendance…before Truman became…well, Truman.” A sadness crossed her face. “We had games and prizes, and all the children ran and played in the lawns out back with a tent set up and a clown we hired. I could tell the children were having a grand time.”

  I watched her relive the entire moment and for the first time she looked tranquil.

  “And the only person Truman wanted to be with was Carly, and she him.”

  She looked past me at the pictures on the piano, and I could see that in those few moments Truman was alive for her once again.

  “Just imagine that, Mr. Parachuk. Just imagine how someone that young could already know his only true friend was there.”

  “So I would assume she would know if he had enemies. People who might want to hurt him.”

  I’d interrupted her recalling the past and it was a mistake. She looked at me with a kind of incredulity. “Are you kidding me? Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? This is Persia! These people” and she looked at me accusingly “hate anything that hasn’t been sanctified by them. Truman isn’t them.”

  I knew what she meant, in a sense. I’d grown up in Persia when it was a blue-collar town and it had always been conservative, even after it gentrified. Part of the gentrification was brought on by white flight, part of it was some desire to stake a claim to a piece of land, like the pilgrims, I guess. But whatever the forces behind the cementing of Persia’s values, there wasn’t much tolerance. Vagrants were arrested; drunks were sent to rehab; kids with nose piercings, tattoos or shaved heads were sent to boarding schools. I knew. I’d seen it all. And now here was this woman whose son had been found face down in trampled mud with his head caved in, his body so broken from blows even the local coroner had to step away for a moment, all because he was gay, I supposed.

  “Mrs. Engroff, I know you think maybe there was something you or your husband could’ve done to prevent this, but there wasn’t. Now the only thing you can do is help me find who did this to Truman. It won’t bring him back, but it will help.”

  “I watched Carly and Truman grow up together, always together. They used to go up above the garage in a room we have up there. They’d be there for hours alone—just the two of them.”

  Like I wasn’t even there.

  “It was like that until Carly started high school—always together, always laughing, kissing, holding hands.” She closed her eyes and there was a long moment of remembering. “Ethan and I would joke about how they would eventually marry, spend the rest of their lives together. Truman and Carly’s children, our grandchildren. But then it all changed. Truman began spending more time alone in his room, less time with Carly. By that time Carly had begun to hang around with a boy a year older than she, Tommy or Timmy Beck? I don’t remember.”

  She looked past me again and at the photos.

  “He is an awful boy, like his parents. I could never, ever see what Carly sees in him.”

  “How is he awful?”

  She was suddenly conversant.

  “Oh, he’s like his parents, I suppose. A star athlete. A jock, I guess they call boys like that. He isn’t terribly bright.” She laughed and covered her mouth with her hand. “Truman said his brains were probably in his ass, because he’s such an asshole.”

  “Was Truman jealous of him?”

  “Good Lord, no. Truman was Truman. He wasn’t jealous. He didn’t have to be, Mr. Parachuk. My God, please.”

  “I’m trying to understand, Mrs. Engroff. You tell me that Truman and Carly Rodenbaugh were inseparable for as long as you and your husband can remember, and then when they reached high school they weren’t any longer, and that may or may not have been brought on by a boy named Tommy Beck. And then you tell me Truman wasn’t jealous, wasn’t resentful.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know, Mrs. Engroff.”

  “He’s gay!” she said, frustrated.

  “I understand that, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that they were inseparable.”

  She put t
he wine glass down. “Look, you don’t understand. Truman is different. He loved Carly, but Truman didn’t always need people. He could live inside his own head. He could move on to something else.”

  She suddenly put her hands to her face and began to sob. Her whole body shook and I had the urge to go to her, comfort her, but I sat still. When it passed she looked down at the floor.

  “I don’t know who did this awful thing to my son, Mr. Parachuk. I don’t have even a clue. Not even a thought of it. I know you came here looking for some insight, and you thought I could help you, but I can’t. I don’t even want to. I want Truman there,” she pointed toward where the stairs were leading to his room. “I want him to walk down here right now. I want him to come up to me with his Truman smell and I want him to kiss me on the top of the head. Beyond that truth there isn’t anything I can help you with. Not one single thing.”

  She picked up her wine glass, walked to the table and filled it from the decanter, and then walked from the room.

  From the hallway I heard her say, “You can let yourself out, Mr. Parachuk.”

  As I got into my car and started it, I realized she had never once called me detective or officer or lieutenant. To her I was but an intruder into a world occupied only by her dead son.

  Ethan

  Four days after Truman’s death

  We buried Truman in a cold April rain. Only Amy wanted the service private. The rest of the family, including me, wanted it to be open. I wanted people to come and see what had happened to a boy who never hurt anyone, never tormented anyone, never pried into anyone’s business. I wanted Persia to watch my only son, my grandfather’s namesake, be lowered into the ground.

  “How dare you allow those people there,” Amy spit at me with a venom I’d never felt from her before. “How dare you allow those people to see Truman leave our lives as if it were some kind of sideshow where they can all go home later and sit at their tables and eat their meals and watch their TVs, and fuck in their beds while our Truman is not in his own house, his own bed. How dare you, Ethan Engroff.”

  We were in our bedroom together for the first time since the morning the police had arrived to tell me our son had been murdered. She’d come upstairs soundlessly. I was standing by my desk looking out the window overlooking the lawns behind our house. I was thinking of a time when Truman and I had been out near our patio, and I was teaching him to catch and throw a baseball. He was such a gifted athlete. It only took a few times for him to get the rhythm of it: watching the ball fall into his glove and then taking it out and throwing it to me, his arm swiveling back over his shoulder, his feet set properly. But like everything with Truman, only part of him was there, only part of him interested in the fact that he was mastering something so easily. Other kids would’ve swelled with pride.

  I must’ve been deep in thought, because I didn’t hear Amy until she was standing beside me at the window.

  The clouds had already rolled in and I knew the day was going to bring rain. We stood together for the longest time without touching or saying a word to each other. It was the fourth day—Wednesday—and I’d only seen her passing in the house from room to room and then at the memorial service the night before. My brother had driven us there in his Lexus SUV and we had sat in the back in silence. I don’t think either of us knew what to say. Our only conversation that day had been hours before when I’d begged her not to wear a flowered dress to the service. I remembered I’d cried.

  I’ll change then, Ethan. I’ll change to black if it will satisfy your desire to follow this morbid fucking protocol.

  I’d smelled liquor on her breath, and she’d looked at me as if she were looking at someone she’d never met before. Now she was here in the bedroom staring at the gray day with me as if gray was the only thing we still shared together, and I again I smelled liquor and again she had on a flowered dress.

  “Don’t worry, Ethan, I’m wearing black. Don’t you worry yourself about that. But let me ask you something.”

  I didn’t say anything. I felt like I was in a black hole and the only light left had been extinguished by the disappearance of Truman.

  “Why would you want strangers to help us watch our boy go into a hole from which he will never return? I thought I knew you. I thought you knew who Truman is.”

  “I can’t explain it, Amy. It has something to do with…”

  “It has something to do with making Truman normal. Finally he’s normal for you, Ethan. He’s not a fag anymore. Now he’s just a seventeen-year-old boy being put into the ground. Just a normal, dead boy!”

  “Please don’t, Amy.”

  “Please don’t what? Please don’t what? Please don’t speak the truth?” she yelled. “Please don’t have the people come into our house who don’t belong here? Who is that man to come in here and ask me questions about Truman? Who is he to sit in our living room and ask me if there’s anyone I know who hated my son enough to kill him? You allowed that to happen. You were up here looking out this fucking window at our fucking lawns, the lawns Truman once walked on, while I was downstairs with a stranger who asked me about this fucking town and this fucking life you and I have led with our son. Our son! And while I was answering his inane fucking questions I should have been paying attention for Truman. I can’t allow him to leave because if he does I will float away never ever to return! Fuck you, Ethan!”

  I put my hands to my face and began to cry. I didn’t know why I had allowed the funeral to be open. It wasn’t just to avenge this son. I think it had something to do with me having the chance to look at faces, to see if I could find one face that had enough hate in its eyes to do what had been done to Truman. But it wasn’t fair for Amy to say I wanted Truman to be normal—that I never thought he was normal. He was normal to me. He was my boy, my son, my life. In that moment, I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to erase those words from my mind, or to forgive Amy for saying them. How was Amy’s grief any greater than mine? How was that gauged? Because she walked around the house silently? Refused to enter Truman’s room? Refused to go outside unless she drank half a bottle of wine? She thought I didn’t know that, except for Truman’s service, she hadn’t left the house since he’d died.

  “I have a say too, Amy. You’re not the only one who has a say in this. Someone is out there and…”

  I didn’t finish the sentence, but I finished the thought in my head. Vowing to myself that I’d find whoever beat my son to death, and that, when I found him, or them, I would kill them. I wouldn’t say that to Amy. She didn’t need to know that my grief was turning into the purest, darkest hatred. I had never before experienced the kind of loathing I felt as I stood alongside my wife, looking out at the grayest day of our lives.

  Amy

  Four years before Truman’s death

  I looked every place I could think of for the damn book. Books can be frustrating because when you can’t find them you begin to visualize where they were the last time you had them. In this particular case, The Scarlet Letter should’ve been in my book bag or on my desk at home or at my office. I’d taught the novel the fall before and now, before the semester began and I taught it once again, I wanted to reread it.

  My copy was invaluable to me because of the notes inside; the post-its; the references in the margins of criticism seminal to my discussions; but mostly for the reminder that Ethan had bought it for me in the Camden, Maine, bookstore, The Owl and the Turtle Bookshop, on a rainy afternoon when I was in another section of that lovely town. He must’ve paid for it and slipped it inside his jacket pocket, because he didn’t give it to me until the next morning as we sat looking out at the harbor from our window with coffee and the burn of our lovemaking from only hours before. On the inside jacket he wrote: To my lovely and brilliant wife. I wish I could sit in on every class you teach.

  Ethan said he had not seen it, hadn’t borrowed it. I spent an entire afternoon looking through my own bookshelf in my office adjacent to our library and then through the three wall
s of bookshelves in what was mostly Ethan’s library. Nothing. Nowhere. I tore my car apart—under seats, in boxes of student papers in the back of the SUV, in Ethan’s car. I even looked in Truman’s small bookshelf in his room one day while he was at school. I knew it couldn’t be there, he was only thirteen, but I thought perhaps he’d seen the title and the rather alluring depiction of Hester with the letter “A” emblazoned on a dress that showed a ridiculous amount of cleavage. The painting was by an obscure American painter from the fifties, E.L. Trolp.

  Of course it wasn’t there, nor was it in his closet or under clothes in his drawers or under cushions on the couch he’d insisted I buy him a year earlier, or under his bed. I felt I was violating something sacrosanct by being in his room uninvited, let alone rummaging through his things, but I was desperate. It wasn’t anywhere in our house. I was sure of that.

  I began asking colleagues at the college if they’d borrowed it or if I’d forgotten I’d lent it to them, although I never would’ve parted with that copy. After frantically searching for over two weeks that hot August, I came to the conclusion that some former student of mine had filched the novel. I was heartbroken.

  Yes, Hawthorne was one of my favorite writers, and The Scarlet Letter was one of the great American classics, and I had written so many notes in the margins of every page, had highlighted half the words written in the novel with asterisks alongside them. But the fact that Ethan had given me the copy was the saddest part of this incomprehensible loss. Oddly, I began to dream about the book. I dreamed it would be on my desk under a single sheet of paper, and once I dreamed it was in the refrigerator leaning against a half gallon of milk, the spine as red as strawberries.

  My classes began in less than three weeks and so finally, reluctantly, I bought a copy in the small bookstore in Persia. I wasn’t surprised I had to order it. A single copy of The House of Seven Gables was the only Hawthorne book in the shop. The lady behind the counter, someone I’d seen on occasion at church and in the small shops in the square, assured me she would have it for me in two days. I weighed my options and placed the order. I really had no other choice. I had to read the novel and take notes before the semester began.