Ethel told her that children would stop being friends with her if they were afraid of her. When she had finished explaining how some children are tough and some are gentle, and the tough ones have to be kind to the gentle ones, the girl looked at her through vagrant strands of blond hair and said:
"If they're weak, they should stay home where they won't get hurt."
Connie Sara blinked, and went on eating. Ethel was struck for the millionth time by the resemblance. Her mother's eyes and her hair color had skipped a generation. For Ethel, not even a glancing blow, but her daughter was the spitting image of Shirley. She had her eyes exactly: small slivers of blue ice with a sly expression. Her eyes seemed to tease and laugh even when she was serious.
After she dropped the girl off at pre-school for the morning, Ethel returned home and tidied up. She washed the breakfast dishes and put them away. She settled in front of her sewing machine with a fresh cup of coffee and a spool of the yellow rickrack she was adding to a new skirt for Connie Sara.
Now that the child was away for part of every weekday, she had some time to herself, and she was grateful. She sometimes thought if she had been forced to spend another month stuck in the house with Connie Sara, she might have done something awful. Fortunately that was over. She would do anything to keep the girl in pre-school. Again she ran through a list of reasonable arguments she could offer in favor of keeping her daughter among children her age.
Kids were often defiant, even mean. It was part of growing up and facing the world without the protection of their parents. All of the parenting books said so. Soon Connie Sara would move on to another phase and become more generous.
Even as Ethel thought these things a thin, cruel voice in her head told her she was lying. Her lie was selfish and dangerous to other children. There was something wrong with the girl. There always had been. The cruel voice said she had missed her chance to do what was right. She had been stronger than the baby, but she wasn't stronger than the girl.
By the time she had started pre-school Connie Sara seemed remarkably resilient in body and in will. She was slender, with no awkwardness or baby fat. She was tall for her age and was constantly moving, with an athletic rather than nervous energy. She had delicate features: pale blue eyes that shifted to a metallic gray with lapses in sunlight, a fair complexion, and an abundance of unruly blond hair. She was hearty and tomboyish. By mid-spring she had a bit of suntan, far ahead of the boys who played outdoors in any weather.
Ethel told friends that her daughter was just a tomboy, but she felt afraid. What she knew frightened her, and she was sure there were things she didn't know. There were secrets, now that the child could roam free outdoors and get into trouble.
Ethel made rules and the girl ignored them. That much was obvious. With Burt she was pretending, preening, and playing with his emotions. With Ethel she was openly defiant.
Connie Sara climbed trees, tall oaks mainly, and used trellises and drainpipes to scale neighbors' homes, often in the middle of the night. She would survey the dark patches of forest and the freeway from rooftops.
She stole a boy's knife, called it a gift, and whittled her own slingshot from a block of wood supplied by Burt, who was amused by the odd request and then too amazed by her accomplishment to consider punishing her. Later, alone in the meadow behind the Sanders' house, Connie Sara spent hours perfecting her aim at squirrels and blackbirds. In the evening she would lay low in the weeds and hunt feral cats for practice.
A Special Talent
Across the road from the Sanders family lived a retired mill worker named Jim Jasper. Years ago when Mrs. Jasper was alive, the family had kept a blind goat named Hank after their favorite singer, Hank Williams. They liked the name so much they also called their son Hank. With lighthearted humor and without intending any harm, Mr. and Mrs. Jasper had kept track of these three by calling them Hank-the-singer, Hank-the-goat, and Hank-the-boy.
Unknown to his parents, for years Hank-the-boy led a train of classmates and cousins all the way to school. Down the hill they ran, and across a meadow, shouting at the boy's back:
"Hey, sing that song again, Hank! Beh-eh-eh!"
When he was fifteen, Hank ran away from home and his parents never heard of him again. It broke his mother's heart, but she accepted the loss. He wasn't the first person to disappear from Skillute without a word. It was the kind of place that inspired clean breaks, when they finally occurred.
For a long time Hank-the-boy's former classmates would sometimes pay tribute to him after a long night of drinking. Stumbling home in the moonlight, they would stop by the rusty back gate that led to the Jasper ranch house, throw their heads back, and bleat the first bars of "Your Cheatin' Heart."
After his wife died of cancer Jim Jasper lived alone for a while. He grew a beard and people said he drank whiskey in the middle of the day.
The same year Burt took over his dad's old property across the road, Jasper bought a pit-bull and named it Kojak. He kept Kojak on a chain in the yard most of the time. The dog had everything he needed: a plywood house, a ceramic water bowl, and a food dish.
Jasper fed the dog scraps of steak and wild rabbit. Whenever he went to town he took Kojak along on a leash with a muzzle. The dog rode in the cab beside him without the muzzle, smiling and slobbering out the window. He was a good-natured animal and his master loved him like a child.
Eventually Kojak began to slow down a bit. He was still in fine condition but he wouldn't live forever, so Jasper took him to a breeding farm and when the litter was born he adopted the strongest and smartest puppy and named him Baretta. Now the two dogs shared the yard, Kojak on his chain and Baretta in a small pen.
Soon after the puppy arrived Connie Sara began sneaking across the road to Jim Jasper's house. She had been strictly forbidden to go there. She was told that the dogs were dangerous and if she got hurt on Jasper's property it would be her own fault. Secretly she took bits of cat fur and rabbit skin late at night and tormented Kojak with the scent. Or she would pelt Baretta with small, sharp rocks until Kojak's barking woke Jasper. Then the girl would run away.
Naturally the pit-bulls came to hate her, to hate the sight and the scent of her. But then most animals were agitated by Connie Sara's presence. She paid them back with contempt and cruelty whenever possible. The only animals she liked enough not to injure were the screech owls that swooped down from the night sky and snatched their prey out of the tall grass.
By the summer before she started first grade she had developed an interest that worried her parents at first. When she killed a bird or a rodent with her slingshot, she would bring it home and ask Burt to skin it. He did so reluctantly. After watching Burt use the techniques his father had taught him for cleaning his kill, Connie Sara announced that she wanted to skin and stuff the animals she hunted.
When Burt's buddies heard about this, they chuckled and told Burt he was raising himself a little Skillute native, for sure. Their amusement made Burt think he had overreacted. After assurances from his friends that their sons were practiced hunters by the age of eight or ten, and at least one other child his daughter's age had taken up taxidermy and showed a talent for it, he decided it wasn't such a strange request. This was just a part of the life he and Ethel had chosen by staying on in their hometown. If Burt couldn't be the hunter and fisherman his friends and neighbors were, at least his child would fit in.
Soon the girl could clean a carcass without help. She kept stray bones and beaks, talons and claws in her room. Occasionally she took these items to school as show-and-tell projects.
Once she trapped and killed a fox. She brought the pelt to class, and told everyone she was going to sew it to the collar of a winter coat. She would have, if Ethel had not thrown the pelt away in disgust. When she turned it over in her rubber-gloved hands and bundled it into a plastic bag, she wondered how the child had gotten out of the house with it, without letting anyone know what she was up to. She checked inside the girl's backpack, and when she
found spiky red hairs stuck in the zipper she threw the backpack away, as well. She said nothing to Burt. He always found a way to excuse or defend the girl, and this had caused enough arguments between them.
Connie Sara was six and a half years old the day Ethel stepped outside to hang sheets on the laundry line and discovered all the blooms from her fuchsia had been shredded and scattered on the ground around the bush. Among the torn flowers she discovered the bodies of hummingbirds that been returning to the bush for some time. All had been crushed and left to die. A few had struggled from beneath the flowers and perished in the grass.
When Burt got home, Ethel was crying. Try as she might, she couldn't describe what had occurred. She only begged him to go outside and see for himself.
Without another word Burt raked up all of the refuse and carried it to the trash. Later he asked Ethel if he ought to punish the girl, but he also told her he didn't believe Connie Sara was responsible. Ethel could only shake her head and say:
"No, please, no. If you do, something worse will happen."
Beverly
However Ethel wanted to put it, "adventurous" or "just a tomboy," the girl was vicious. She had a smug, mean smile. She bossed her parents around, especially Ethel. It was embarrassing, Beverly felt, and it was the reason Ethel and Burt's friends had drifted away.
If the Sanders family invited anyone over for a barbecue their guests had to eat whatever Connie Sara wanted that day. Nobody was allowed to do otherwise or the girl would throw a tantrum and ruin things. If people came over to watch a ball game or a TV show they were subject to the whims of Connie Sara, who might decide at any moment to change the channel, and that was that.
The sickening thing was that Burt and Ethel went along with these demands. Not with the indulgent smile of proud parents but with an embarrassed shrug, as if they were afraid to do otherwise, as if to say:
"We don't mean to treat our friends this way, but what can we do?"
Beverly knew what she would have done, if that girl belonged to her. She had seen parents who took charge and parents who didn't, and she had seen the consequences. What kids needed and wanted, even if they didn't realize it, was a firm hand. They needed to know what time to get out of bed in the morning, and when to be home.
More often than she could recall Beverly had glanced out the kitchen window to see Miss Smart Mouth prancing around at the edge of her lawn, playing outdoors more than a mile from home, even after dark. The first time it happened, Beverly called Burt and told him to come pick the girl up. He claimed she was sound asleep in her room.
"Burt Sanders," Beverly had told him. "I was looking out my window ten seconds ago."
By the time she said this and turned to look again, the girl was gone. Beverly figured she must have run home as soon as she knew she'd been spotted.
On certain nights even now Beverly looked up and caught a glimpse of Connie Sara messing around near the tulip beds, or chasing a kitten, or gathering sticks and stones. Beverly shouted at her to get home. She didn't bother calling Burt and Ethel any more because they always said she was wrong: their little girl was in their back yard, or sleeping, or watching TV. Then there were the times when they didn't answer the phone at all.
They never punished the girl for a single thing. All they did was make excuses. They said she didn't fit in because she was so much brighter than the other children. That was a hoot! Or they said she was naturally over-aggressive. It was a purely physical fact and what could they do?
That excuse was almost confirmed by the principal at her elementary school. First he recommended home schooling. Then he insisted on it. When Burt and Ethel procrastinated the principal expelled Connie Sara. He didn't call it a special problem, or say she couldn't fit in with children who weren't as gifted as she was. He called it a safety issue.
She was dangerous, that's all. She couldn't play with other children for long before they got hurt. Nobody would say it quite that way, but it was true. They could call it a safety issue to be polite, but the girl was a danger to everyone she met.
"They'll pay the price," Beverly told Marietta over a lunch of tuna casserole and iced tea.
Marietta didn't have to ask, "Who's that?" They talked about the girl so often.
"Burt and Ethel are raising a criminal. Mark my word."
It was Sunday afternoon. They were eating in Beverly's kitchen with its shiny counters and checkerboard linoleum floor. Marietta had her back to the window and Beverly sat opposite so she could enjoy the view. Sometimes a breeze swept across her front yard and set the miniature windmills spinning.
"I think they're paying the price already," Marietta said.
"Well, that's their own fault," Beverly told her. "They made their bed. But that's no reason for the rest of us to suffer. If they had any respect for my state of mind, at least that would be something."
In conversation Beverly routinely found moments to remind people that she was a widow. Since she was also a sensitive woman, she pointed out, it was more than a hardship for her to cope with problems and childish pranks. Ever since Ethel was forced to home school her daughter, the girl had become a real nuisance.
First there had been the piles of weeds, clusters of dandelion and grass on Beverly's doorstep. Then the lock on the shed where she put the day's trash had been broken, and garbage spilled out onto the ground. Beverly had to get one of the Dempsey cousins to come down the hill and fire a shotgun to scare off a coyote that wandered into the yard, attracted by the scent.
Then there was the tulip bed. Beverly had long since banned Connie Sara from setting foot on her property. Of course, the girl still made frequent nighttime appearances in the forest along the edge of the yard, and Beverly was considering sharing her grievances with the sheriff.
The breaking point had come this very morning. The sky was smoke-gray and the ground was still damp from the overnight rain. Beverly was pouring herself a cup of coffee. She was thinking of the times when she and Rex used to drink their coffee and eat Sunday breakfast in bed.
They had married for love, she told her friends, and because she was broadminded enough to overlook his family. She sent cards to the cousins every Christmas and attended a few baptisms. Other than that she had as little to do with the Dempsey family as possible, socially. They were the kind of people she hired to do repairs around the house.
For their part the Dempseys minded their own business. They lived in rundown trailers and cabins up in the hills and ridges behind Beverly's home, and in the woods along the road that led to Burt and Ethel's house. It had crossed Beverly's mind that one of the Dempsey kids was also playing pranks on her. But she felt deeply, no, she knew in her gut that it was Connie Sara, all of it.
Marietta was the only person she knew who never contradicted the assumption. In fact Marietta believed everything Beverly told her about the girl, and this was one reason they had grown closer in recent years.
That Sunday, early in the morning, Beverly had taken a sip of coffee and gazed out the kitchen window. At first the tulip bed nearest to the house seemed larger than it had been the day before. A closer look revealed the edges spreading out over the grass on all sides. The earth had been dug up again.
"That little bitch!" Beverly said. In the next second she slammed her coffee cup down on the table and went striding outside in her nightgown and robe.
The closer she got the more of a mess she saw. Tulips and dirt were thrown in all directions. This was worse than vandalism; worse than pulling up weeds and leaving them on her doorstep; worse than knocking over the garbage; this was a hateful disregard for all that was beautiful and alive.
Beverly was livid. She would call the sheriff, and report that girl. She would tell him the local gossip that no one had informed him about. She might even go with him to Ethel's house, to confront her and get the truth. She was turning these possibilities over in her mind when she saw something protruding from the ground where the tulip bed had been.
She picked up a st
ick and pushed at the dirt. Where it separated she could see a wide, flat tongue and the jawbone of a small animal. It appeared to be broken sideways. She thought maybe it belonged to a raccoon but even torn and bloodied it clearly wasn't the right shape.
Looking more closely she realized it was a puppy, Jim Jasper's pit-bull puppy, Baretta. It was still sticky with blood. Bits of fur remained, but most of the skin had been torn back from the skull.
She remembered the memento she had stashed in her purse all those years ago, after she met Oliver in the woods. The small jawbone with its row of childlike teeth, charred black from fire or some chemical reaction, lay wrapped in a silk handkerchief in the bottom drawer of her dresser. Once in a while she took it out and looked at it. These were the only times when she remembered her child, her lost child. Sometimes, holding the little jaw in her hand, she would sit on the edge of her bed and weep.
Recently she had hired a private detective to locate her daughter. There was no one else she wanted to mention in her will. Someday she would leave a few things to friends, but she wanted her daughter to have whatever would be left of her savings. The house would be hers to sell or claim. Putting her affairs in order would bring Beverly peace of mind, she had decided. She didn't want to worry about these things. She wanted to take care of it and then forget about it forever.
She had been thinking of this only the day before. She had held the delicate memento in both hands and looked out the front window at the rain spattering her tulips.
In a sickening flash Beverly had decided not to call the sheriff after all. This latest prank was beyond his limited abilities. How could he help? This was rank, worse than criminal. And how could she let the sheriff break the news? Better to let Jim Jasper think the puppy had run off. It would break his heart, wondering if the animal had suffered. Of course it had. Why else would the girl have done it the way she had? She liked causing pain. She must.
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