by R.J. Ellory
Also by R.J. Ellory
Ghostheart
A Quiet Vendetta
City of Lies
A Quiet Belief in Angels
A Simple Act of Violence
The Anniversary Man
Saints of New York
Bad Signs
Copyright
This electronic edition first published in the United States in 2013 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Orion Books
Copyright © 2012 R.J. Ellory Publications Limited
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0655-2
Contents
Copyright
Also by R.J. Ellory
Chapter 1
Prologue
About the Author
Let’s face facts here—there’s some folks who just shouldn’t be allowed to raise kids.
Harsh, but true.
I’d have to include myself among them, for sure, but I reckon my father would get top billing.
Pretty much every sentence that came from my father’s mouth coulda fertilized a field.
He was one of the world’s greatest bullshitters. You could tell precisely when he was lying. His lips was moving. It was that easy.
One time he told me that in the town where he was from—some wide part in the road called Calhoun, Georgia—it got so hot that the corn would pop right there in the field. Cows would get all freaked, think it was snowing, and they’d lay down right where they’d been standing and freeze to death. “Dumbass cows,” he’d say, and laugh.
I believed him. I was six years old, and I took pretty much every word he said as gospel.
One time he told me about him and his brother. “Dirt poor?” he’d say. “We wasn’t poor enough to have any dirt. Tell you now, we used to play this trick on folks. Smartest trick you ever did see. Take a lil’ baby cat, walk around with this thing in a string bag, ask folks if they’d a pan we could borrow to cook him in. ‘Hell,’ they’d say, ‘come on in here and get yourself some of this red beans an’ rice we got. You shouldn’t be havin’ to eat no baby cat.’ I’ll tell you now, no word of a lie, it worked every damned time.”
Now I wonder whether anything he ever said was true.
His name was Ray Woodroffe, still is if he ain’t dead from drowning in his own bullshit. Hell, I know he’s still alive. I can feel it. People like Ray Woodroffe live forever, while everyone around them dies prematurely from the poison they sow in the atmosphere. He’ll still be living outside of Calhoun, Georgia, still be distributing his own special brand of bullshit, still be knocking my mother sideways and senseless at least once every couple of months, and he’ll still be telling the world that his sons weren’t worth a dime between them.
My name is Lewis Woodroffe. I am thirty-six years old. Tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, not a moment sooner or later, I am going to die in the electric chair because I killed a girl. My father won’t be there, nor will my mother. My father wouldn’t have wanted to come, and he would have told my ma that she didn’t want to come neither.
And then there’s my brother, Eugene. Eugene is however many hundreds of miles away, and that’s where he needs to stay. As far from me as he can get, and even further from our father.
We need to talk about Eugene, of course. We need to talk about a great many things, for sure, and Eugene is right there at the head of the list, but we’ll get there. We have time, not a great deal, but we do have time. I promise we’ll get there.
For now, let’s talk some more about Ray.
Most people harbor ill will to someone or other. Ray Woodroffe harbored ill will to everyone, and made it his business to share it whenever the opportunity presented itself.
He married my mother when he was twenty-two and she was seventeen. Her name was Martha and she came from Dahlonega, Georgia, in the Appalachian foothills. She was an Appalachian girl through and through, proud of her people, proud of her heritage, but she was a quiet one. Shy, folks called her. Timid perhaps. She wasn’t shy or timid—she was just waiting for the right moment to say whatever she had to say. Rest of the time she said very little at all. That was her way. Some people—my father being the best example around—feel that they have to keep making noise to prove to everyone that they’re still in the room. My mother is the opposite. Quiet and strong. She had to be strong to live every day in his shadow. Before she became a Woodroffe, she was a MacHendrie. The name was MacDonald clan. Her ancestors came from the lowland Scottish county of Roxburghshire, before that from a place called Argyle in the fourteenth century. She said her people were a wild and fierce warrior people, where every man had red hair, and every woman had killed at least one Englishman before she made her teens. “They called them Sassenachs,” she said. “And the girls had to kill at least one Sassenach with her bare hands before a man would marry her.” Or so she told me. Later, looking back, I don’t believe she ever said one word of a real lie to anyone, save to protect us or to calm her husband. Maybe what she told us were just stories, but they made us laugh, me and Eugene, and—to this day—I do not believe there was a wicked bone in her body.
My father came up to Illinois for work. It was the thirties, and things were tough. He had two small boys, a wife in tow, and I believe he regretted both the marrying and the procreation. I worked it out later. Martha MacHendrie was pregnant all of eight months when she married Ray Woodroffe. Maybe her daddy came down from the mountains with a cannon full of buckshot and told Ray Woodroffe he’d better marry this daughter of his or he’d be breathing through a great deal more holes than his mouth and nose. Ray Woodroffe can’t have married Martha MacHendrie for love. You don’t marry someone for love and then treat them like a dog.
So he packed us all up and we headed northwest through Tennessee and Kentucky and settled in Taylorville, Illinois. My father worked in factories, he worked on farms, he even dug coal. That was the best time—six months in the middle of 1935 when he was away ten days at a time, then home for two. That was when I found out what my mother was really like, and what she would have become had she not been taken in by the smooth-talking liar that was my father.
The Woodroffe house was out of the way. You only arrived there if you planned to arrive there. There was no route—coming or going—that would deliver you by accident. She schooled us at home, me and Eugene, and we helped any which way we could with chores and the like. When our father was gone, it was good. When he was home, it was walking on eggshells one day, walking on hot coals the next. Unpredictable. That was the word. Not whether he was going to be mean, but how mean.
“That boy don’t took a lick to a snake!” he’d shout when he figured me for lazy. “Goddamned useless bag of skin an’ bones, he is.”
One time mom was talking of Christmas, saying how she’d like to have a chicken or some such, maybe a little tree that she could decorate with us.
“Shit in one hand, wish in the other,” he replied. “See which one fills up first.”
His words were surely mean, b
ut his actions were meaner. He didn’t beat her often, maybe once every couple of months, but when he beat her, he beat her good. Took days for the swelling on her face to go down, for the busted lip to heal, for the eye to finally open.
One time I fought him back. First time was also the last. Not because of him, but because of her. He took the belt to me, striped me six ways to Sunday and back to Thanksgiving. Still have those scars on my back, my hand, my legs. They’re faint, but I can see them. That was the first time he used the belt, but good. Not the last time, of course. The belt became something all its own after that.
My ma made me promise, promise, promise on her life that I would never try and help her again.
“Just let him work it out,” she said. “It don’t ever last long.”
I saw the light in her eyes get dimmer every time. Some folks build others up. Some folks is so bitter they just set themselves to drag you down in the hole they’re in. Ray Woodroffe was that way. A failure with delusions of grandeur. If I can’t have it, then no one should. If it ain’t my money, then it’s worthless anyway.
One time Ray Woodroffe kicked his wife so hard she landed in the hospital. She said she fell. There wasn’t nowhere that high to fall from where we lived. I used to think her brave, stoic, resilient. Now I think she was just her own kind of crazy. Maybe where she came from the men were all like Ray Woodroffe, a whole crowd of moonshiners fighting with the revenuers, everything worth saying had to result in bullets and broken bones or it wasn’t worth a damn. Me and Eugene got out of Taylorville as fast as we could, Eugene into the army for two years, me out to Chicago to escape my history and seek my fortune.
But I knew I took my father with me. Hell, we all carry the tunes our ancestors and forebears sang, but that don’t mean we have to sing ’em for our kids. Doesn’t mean we have to, but doesn’t mean we don’t.
Ray Woodroffe sang them tunes good, and he sang them over again until they was inside me real deep. Eugene didn’t hear so much of it. He was the younger one, the littler one, and me and ma did everything we could to shield him from the wrath that came down from the head of the house.
Eugene enlisted in the military in November of 1946, all of eighteen years old. The war was all done and dusted, GIs were coming home, and Eugene went in to fill up a space that was left behind. He wrote me every once in a while, even said he might be going to Germany, but he never did. After a while he stopped writing, and that was fine. Meant he was leaving his history behind, leaving his connections to that history too, and that was just fine as fine could be by me. I wanted the best for him. Just as much as his father wanted the worst, I wanted the best. Did I feel guilty about Eugene? Some. Maybe. Perhaps I could have covered his ears a little tighter, figuratively speaking. I had always tried to be a buffer between my father and my younger brother, but perhaps I could have been taller, wider, a little more solid.
But whichever way it all hung together, Eugene was out, I was out too, and though I kept on hearing those echoes of the past, I believed that Eugene was somehow free of them, and that pleased me no end.
I went straight to the big city. My ma told me to go, to get out of there. “You boys make him mad,” she said. “Everything and everyone makes him mad. I know you don’t take it personal anymore. But with less things around to make him mad he’ll be better.”
Christmas of ’47 I went back to see her. I was there two hours, and I could see he was aggrieved before I even sat down at the table. After less than an hour he walked me out to the porch with a squirrel gun and told me to leave and never come back.
“You weren’t no good as a kid,” he said, “and you’re still no better now. You think you can just come on back here any time you damn well please and eat food off of my table, drink my whiskey, talk your shit like it’s something I need to hear? Well you got it all wrong, mister. Now git.”
I snatched the barrel of the squirrel gun and wrenched it sideways. It took him by surprise. I turned that gun on him and jabbed him in the chest.
He went down on his ass. I pressed the muzzle of that rifle right between his eyes and told him not to move a damn inch. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t say a word. He just looked at me, and never have I seen such hatred in any human eyes. There was fierce fire up in there, but I saw that there weren’t nothing back of that fire. Like there was no one home. No one at all. What you saw was what you got. He was as crazy as I ever believed, and nothing I could say or do was ever going to change it.
I didn’t know what to say. Now I had the upper hand there was just nothing I could say to him.
My ma came out. She screamed. She threw herself down beside him, grabbed his shoulders, pleaded with me not to hurt him.
He brushed her aside, just continued glaring at me.
“If you’re gonna do it, then do it,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “Otherwise just turn around and keep walking . . . and you better take that rifle with you and throw it in a ditch five miles hence. I see you coming back here I’m gonna finish you good, boy.”
I turned and started walking. I did take the rifle with me, and I did throw it in a ditch way down the road. I walked for three hours, maybe four, and I knew that I would never go back. Not even for her. She had made her bed, and she was determined to lie in it. You make your choice, you pick a side, and that’s the way it is. I knew which hand had filled up first, and there wasn’t nothing I could do about it.
So I went back to the city. I got busy. Busier than a one-legged cat burying shit on a frozen pond. I took a factory job, learned to drive, started delivering early papers before the day shift even begun. Packed groceries at a store on a Saturday. There wasn’t nothing that was too much sugar for a nickel. I got some dollars in my pocket, found a place of my own. It wasn’t a great deal, but I had my own door and my own bathroom and a cheap TV set, and the food in the kitchen wasn’t no one else’s but mine. Sharing berthing ain’t so bad, but you never know who you’re gonna be sleeping next door to, and sometimes the quiet ones were more aggravating than the loud ones.
But I knew he was always there. Ray Woodroffe. The shadow was there, you see. Right there in my heart, my bones, my blood. I wondered if what he had was some kind of special crazy, and it was hereditary. And now I had it, and it was inside of me, and there wasn’t nothing I could do to get it out. Like a virus maybe. Like some kind of genetic thing.
It did come out one time. The time I killed that girl. And hell yes, I know you want to know all about that, but there’s a ways to go before we get there.
That was what was eating at me, always and forever. They say the apple don’t fall so far from the tree. Eugene was different. I knew that. When Eugene enlisted in the military he still had some of the kid inside of him. I got the kid beat out of me before I even reached my teens. Eugene still had a sense of humor. I couldn’t tell a wisecrack from a one-liner even when it was signposted three blocks away and lit up with neon. Eugene could talk nice to folk and not be watching them sideways to see what they was after. Me, I couldn’t strike up a conversation with a no one, ’cept if it was to ask for the time or buy a paper, and that wasn’t really a conversation at all. For me, regular people had always been strangers, and I believed they was gonna stay that way.
There was a bitterness in me. It was like a sediment way down in the base of everything that I was, and life didn’t seem to do nothin’ but shake me up and make that sediment more evenly spread. I knew the world didn’t think much of me, and –frankly—I didn’t care much for the world.
I worked hard, and I watched TV and I minded my own business. That was my life. Seems to me that the most conversation I ever did have was with the police about the girl. Seems to me the most attention I was ever paid was for what bad I done, not what good. The world has a ways of doing that to you, don’t it? All too eager to remind you when you messed up, very slow to tell you that you got it right.
That may seem cynical, sure, but cynicism is a bitter taste left behind from all the sour words yo
u hear. It’s right there in your throat, your gullet, the pit of your gut. It resides there, and there ain’t nothin’ to do to get it out. There’s one God for the rich folks, another for the poor. Our God is forgetful most of the time. He forgets your name, forgets your prayers, forgets when you’re in trouble, forgets when rent is due or food is needed. Or maybe He just don’t listen in the first place. Maybe He figures we’re all too bitter and cynical to be worth the time of day.
Whichever way it goes, I now done got myself here. I got these four walls and a rock-solid door. I ain’t going no place ’til the preacher comes back in the morning. Father Henry. He’s a decent enough old feller, but he don’t know shit from Shinola about the real world. I let him talk to me about all of that Jesus and God Almighty stuff because he’s pretty much the only person who talks to me. I like the sound of his voice. It ain’t the voice in my head, and it ain’t the voice of my father, and that’s good enough for me.
Anyway, we’re sidetracking. Ray. Back to Ray and the pure stream of sunlight that he shone into all of our lives.
It is hard for me to think of him in specific terms and events. I can remember some, of course.
The woodshed. Being tied in there for a day or two straight, nothing more than a bucket of water to drink out of. “Man can last three weeks without food,” he said. “Three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without nourishment. You get a drink, but you get nothin’ else, you little runt. Teach you to waste good food, I will.”
Church days, when he was of a mind to get himself to church. Rare, sure, but when it happened it happened good. I don’t know what it was that prompted his sudden and unexpected flashes of religious fervor, but fervent they were. Usually it was when he came home from a trip away. Later I would figure he’d maybe fucked a hooker in the city or something, and he was now repentant for his sins and seeking forgiveness. We’d be up at five, breakfasted, dressed, shoes shined, all spit and polish, hair combed neat as paint, and we’d walk. Two miles we’d walk, to a church my father didn’t frequent more than three times a year. And if we spoke out of turn, if we said a damn word during the sermon, if we missed a beat on some hymn we’d never sung before, he would give me the look. I was responsible for Eugene. I should make sure that Eugene was something. I should make sure that Eugene was the other. I should this. I should that. On and on and forever.
