by R.J. Ellory
Once home, he would sit me at the dinner table. He’d open up the bible in front of me.
“Read,” he’d say, and he would point.
Off I would go.
“When pride comes, then comes disgrace; but with the humble is wisdom. The integrity of the upright guides them, but the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them. Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death. The righteousness of the blameless keeps his way straight, but the wicked fails by his own wickedness. The righ . . . right—”
And then it would happen.
The slightest mispronunciation, the slightest falter, and he would grasp the back of my neck in a vice-like grip, and with all his strength he would slam my face down into that book.
“Righteousness!” he would holler. “Righteousness! You can’t say the word, can you boy? You can’t say the word because you are not righteous!”
A lot of blood was spilled on a lot of pages.
I would sit there, my nose pouring, my hands gripping the edge of the chair, my father standing over me enraged and full of hate, and I would hear my mother crying in the kitchen.
And then there was the belt.
The belt was for special occasions maybe, though when those special occasions came along there was no way of knowing or predicting.
You’d think everything was just fine, as fine as it was ever going to be with Ray Woodroffe, and then he would turn. I had failed to address him with sufficient importance. I had failed to demonstrate sufficient regard or consideration for his needs or wants. Very simply, I had disrespected him. He’d look at me, and he’d shake his head, and then he would fetch the belt. He had two belts—one for his pants, and one for me.
I watched him one time. He made me watch him. He took a nail in a pair of pliers, and he just heated that nail up some in the fire, and then he used it to punch a hole through that belt. That belt wasn’t for beating me, and it sure as hell wasn’t for holding up no pair of pants. That belt went around my neck, and he’d draw it up tight, so tight I could barely breathe, so tight I couldn’t say a single word worth hearing, but never so tight as to choke me completely.
And then he’d leave me down there in the woodshed for an hour, two hours, however long he figured was required to teach me whatever lesson I needed to learn.
And he’d always say that same thing.
“Respect someone, you earn respect for yourself. It’s that simple. And if you can’t say a good word, then you shouldn’t be speaking at all.”
It was at times like this that I vowed to kill him.
I vowed to kill him so many times it became a mantra.
I would become vengeance.
Not only for what he did to me, but for what he did to my mother, to Eugene, to anyone who walked across his path.
I would become justice.
Not only for crimes committed, but for all the crimes yet to be committed.
In his eyes I saw all the wrongs he had perpetrated, and all the wrongs he was still fixing to do.
I was a victim of circumstance, fate, history, drunkenness, promiscuity, the wanton disregard that he showed toward me. I was a victim of his creation and existence, and he had to pay.
I believed I was innocent, but perhaps I was already guilty. Maybe I was guilty of some unknown crime, and this was my penance. Perhaps some earlier life. Perhaps I killed someone in some former existence, and this was now my punishment. To be brutalized and tortured by Ray Woodroffe. I began to believe that no one was innocent. Everyone had secrets, and they did their best to hide them. If I was guilty, then I did not know of what. Regardless, this was where my desperate and pitiful existence had carried me, and this was where the imbalance of all things had to be rectified.
I would kill him matter-of-factly. I would kill him with little compunction or thought or consideration for mercy.
I promised myself this, but I never kept that promise.
Perhaps my mother was brave to stay with him, or maybe she was just too scared to run.
I could have killed him many times, but I did not. It was stupid to imagine that life would be any different while he was around.
I suffered in silence. I harbored ill will, but not to everyone. Only to him.
I left him behind, my mother, too, and I believed I had escaped his shadow.
I ensured that Eugene was away safely, and then I disappeared.
Until the girl. Until that happened. And then I knew that however far I ran from my roots, they were still seeded within me.
After that Christmas, the Christmas when I knew I could never kill him, I returned to Chicago half the man who’d left.
I felt weakened, adrift, uncertain.
Perhaps I imagined that in killing him I would be killing something of myself. Perhaps I believed that he was such an inherent and intrinsic part of me that his death would result in my own.
Perhaps I had to kill someone, and in failing to kill him I had to find someone else to inflict my vengeance upon.
The girl.
Maybe even she was paying some penalty for sins in some former life.
But that was later. Much later.
I sought solace in more work, and then more again, but I could not work that desperate feeling out of me. I was dumb enough to believe that money would change my life for the better.
I could not deal with women. I was twenty-four years old. I had never even touched a girl. I ached for their company, but they terrified me. I had heard that they had a way of asking questions that could never be answered. How much do you love me? Questions like that.
I saw myself dead at fifty, perhaps sixty, and I was close to halfway there. I wondered why it took so much of your life to see how much of your life you’d wasted.
I thought about going back to school. I thought about learning a trade. I thought about being a plumber, an electrician, a builder, a painter, a carpenter.
I thought about my mother, and I wondered if her husband had killed her yet.
I thought about so many things, but most of all I thought about how to rid myself of the ghost of my father.
He was over my shoulder, behind me, around each corner, seated quietly in the kitchen when I returned from work, there when I rose, there when I closed my eyes to sleep. He was inside, outside, every which way I looked.
Sometimes he talked to me. Sometimes I had no choice but to listen.
Sometimes he shouted. But when he whispered it was worse. Oftentimes the best way to get yourself heard is to speak real low, and then folks have got to lean in close to hear you. He knew that. And so he’d whisper.
You ain’t no more use than a one-wheeled bicycle.
If you was twice as smart, you’d still be dumber than a fencepost.
Are you always this much of a screw-up, or do you do it special for me?
Sometimes I’d drink, and he’d leave me alone. Sometimes I’d drink, and he wouldn’t. Sometimes I would turn up the wireless real loud, and still I would hear him through the music.
And then that day came.
I met her unexpectedly. It was unplanned, a chance, a happenstance. I was on the way to work, stopped briefly, and there she was.
She talked to me like I was an equal. She asked my name, told me hers, shook my hand gently and laughed. But not in a mean way. She laughed in a shy way perhaps, and it was charming and sweet and kind. I looked at women and they seemed to possess some slant, some angle, some cool facet of deception that could be employed at any moment to remind you of your place. Not so this girl. Not so at all. We talked that morning as if we had known one another for years. As if we had always been friends. It felt right, it felt normal, and even as I talked I could hear my own voice and I sounded different. I sounded like Lewis, not Lewis in the shadow of Ray. Just Lewis. Just myself.
I said something and she laughed so much she nearly spilled her coffee. She touched my arm. She touched my hand.
Electricity was there in the tips of her fingers
, and I felt myself jump.
Everything around her seemed to blur away and become unimportant. She listened to what I had to say as if it was something worth hearing. I heard every word that passed from her lips as if each one was the most important word that had ever been spoken. Not just to me, not just then, but to anyone, ever.
She asked if I was going to work. I told her I could go to work, or not go to work.
She asked if I wanted to spend some time with her. We could go somewhere, talk, not talk, walk, not walk, perhaps catch a movie later, get lunch, dinner, a drink at a nice bar somewhere downtown. Anything I liked.
“What would you like to do?” I asked.
“I had plans,” she replied. “But they could as easily be plans for two. You could come with me, or we could go elsewhere, I don’t mind.”
“Let’s do what you planned to do today,” I said, “and I’ll tag along beside you.”
So we did. We went where she had planned to go, and I went with her, and we spoke with people and we did not hurry, and later we had lunch in a diner, and then we walked some more, and we talked some more, and then we went to a bar and had a drink.
The world was a different place.
The world was not the same, and never would be.
My father was not in that world, and he would never gain entry.
And hours had never seemed so long, minutes even, stretched out ahead of me as if they would never come to an end.
I knew I was dreaming, and then I knew I was not. And then I knew I was dreaming again.
Whatever was happening was not from the same life as Calhoun, Georgia. It was not from the same world as Ray and Martha Woodroffe. Here I was neither as dumb as a fencepost nor as useful as an absent wheel. Here I was just Lewis Woodroffe, a good guy, the kind of guy that could be liked, the kind of guy a nice girl would wish to spend the day with.
And she was a nice girl. She was more than nice. It sounds corny, but she was so bright she illuminated things in me I believed had long since died. She made me feel worthwhile. She made me feel wanted.
Later she kissed me. I kissed her and she kissed me back. She had her hands on my face, and I could feel that electricity through her fingers, and my emotions were all afire, and I could feel things that I had never felt before, and they all felt so right and perfect and necessary, and I knew that now I would discover what life was really all about, that here was someone I could love, someone who could love me, and we would be together forever and I would be happy, and she would be happy, and everything in the world that had never made sense seemed so breathtakingly simple and easy to understand, and now that we had found this there would never be any other place I would ever want to be, and she would always and forever want to be by my side, and this was love . . .
And then she said No.
Looking back, it was evident what would happen.
I was drunk. I was anxious. I was desperate, perhaps.
I heard my father, right there in my year.
See, even she doesn’t want you. I told you, boy. I told you no one would ever care for you. I told you that everyone hates you.
Someone like you will never earn respect.
You see that, don’t you?
Somewhere I lost the thread. I was tied to this new world by a thread, and that thread snapped, or it slipped through my fingers, and I never should have kissed her, I never should have stepped inside the doorway with her. I should have wished her goodbye at the end of dinner, and we should not have gone to that bar and drank more, but we did, and then we were kissing one another, and then she let me undo her clothes, and I touched her skin so gently, and I felt as if some chasm had opened up before me, and then she said No, and I fell headlong into that chasm, and there was such depth and darkness, and things clawing at me as I tumbled, like cold, damp fingers against my skin, and my heart was in my mouth, and I could taste my own blood, just as I had on Sundays when I read from The Bible and disgrace follows pride, and the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them, and the wicked fails by his own wickedness . . .
I remember closing my eyes.
I remember stepping back.
“I want you to leave now,” she said.
I looked at her.
“I want you to leave now,” she repeated, as if I was deaf and stupid, as if I didn’t hear her the first time, and I felt so ashamed, so utterly ashamed, and I knew that there was no going back from this, and my father was right, I would never find anyone who cared for me as I was, and I was foolish and ignorant and naïve and pathetic, and why had God even permitted me to be born when I would never serve any worthwhile purpose on this earth?
She looked at me, and in her eyes I saw bitterness. I saw the hidden deception there. The one that all women carry. The ability to turn. The ability to be one thing, and then be something else, and pretend to themselves and the world that they never were that first thing, they were only ever the second thing, and shame on you for even thinking that they were capable of being that first thing that they really were, and you knew the truth, and they knew the truth, and they lied to you right in your face and yet made you feel like you were the one who could not be trusted.
“Leave!” she said, and she raised her voice.
I was scared.
What could she do?
I wanted to be with her, I wanted her to like me, to love me. What had happened? What had gone wrong? Oh, what had I done?
“Please,” she said, her voice now cold and hard and tough. “You have to get out of here now. I don’t want you to be here anymore . . .”
My father had shown me what to do.
The belt slipped from its loops, and was in my hands without a thought. I don’t think she even saw me do that.
“Enough,” I said. “Enough now.”
I had the belt around her throat.
Her eyes were wide—disbelieving, shocked.
I tightened.
“Let go of me!” she gasped, and her voice was still loud, and all I could hear was my father’s voice, Ray’s voice, and that voice cut right through me like a hot knife through butter, and if I’d had a knife I would have cut her throat, but I did not have a knife, and there was no way in the world that she was going to threaten me and talk to me like that and raise her voice to me and make me feel like this . . .
There was no way she was going to disrespect me.
And she had to be quiet now, and she had to be silent, and then everything would be okay . . . everything would be okay . . .
The crookedness of the treacherous destroys them.
If you can’t say a good word, then you shouldn’t be speaking at all.
She went limp then. Quiet first, and then limp, and there were scratches on my hands where she had clawed at me, and only then did I see them and realize that I should have felt something, but I had felt nothing at all, and I lowered her down to the ground and looked at her, and she was silent and still like a rag doll and she wasn’t moving at all, not an inch, not a breath, and I knew I had killed her and she was dead . . .
Dead forever.
I stood there for a long time, and then I breathed out.
I felt dizzy.
I walked around her body and I looked at her for a long time, and then I kneeled down and I extended my right hand and touched her cheek with the tips of my fingers, and I knew she wouldn’t move, but somehow I half-expected her to.
And then I got up, and I looked at her some more, and then I put my belt back on, and then I washed my hands.
I can see her now. I can see her face. I can see her eyes wide open staring at the ceiling—not at me, but at the ceiling—and I wondered if there was a human spirit and the spirit that she was had now left her body, and she was up at the ceiling, looking down at her own dead eyes looking up at her, and if she was cursing me for killing her . . .
She was so young.
She was nineteen, and I was twenty-five, and her name was Caroline McCready, and I killed her at about eight o’
clock in the evening on Tuesday, May 10, 1949, and when I left her house I hoped that I would not see her parents because they were at the theater and were due back anytime now.
I wanted to tell someone, but there was no one to tell.
Eugene had been out of the army for about six months, but he was somewhere outside of Chicago, and I did not want to tell him anyway.
Eugene would not have understood, and could never have understood, because Eugene did not have the poison of my father’s blood in his veins.
Not like me.
I walked away from that house, and I never heard another word about Caroline McCready.
Not even in the newspapers or on the wireless.
No one came asking for me.
No one, it seemed, had seen us together.
No one ever challenged me in the street.
No one even spoke to me about this terrible thing that had happened just four blocks from where I lived and worked.
The perfect murder, but a murder that was never meant to happen.
I killed that girl, and I had to bear the burden of guilt for killing that girl, but my father told me where to put my hands, and he told me how hard to squeeze her neck until she was silent.
And so I did.
And that was all that happened.
For a long time I tried not to think about her. I fought it, resisted it, pretended that I had made some small progress in forgetting what had happened.
After a year I understood that only by embracing and accepting what had happened would I ever overcome it.
I allowed Caroline McCready back into my life, and she moved in without a word.
We shared everything. Every meal, every waking hour, every dream, every thought and hope and fear and frustration.
