Embracing Darkness

by Christopher D. Roe

  But Willy, like his father, was a drinker. By age twenty-four he was a full-blown alcoholic and would show up late for work or some days even miss work completely. The last straw for foreman Curtis Lowe came when Willy and his partner, Bart Farnsworth, were working both ends of a saw. Bart had told Willy to hold on while he took a swig of water from his canteen. Willy didn’t hear him and shouted from the other side of the large oak they were cutting down, “Why you stoppin’?” and thrust the blade forward. The saw’s razor-sharp teeth cut through Bart Farnsworth’s trousers and into his leg.

  Although Bart only needed a few stitches and bandaging, Mr. Lowe was through with Willy. “You’ve been messin’ up too much,” Curtis Lowe said to Willy. “Here’s a week’s pay. Now go on, get the hell outta here.”

  Willy clenched the five dollars Lowe had thrown at him in a tight fist. He knew he’d made a big mistake with Bart, but he needed this job, which paid for his room and, more importantly, his liquor. “You can’t do this, Mr. Lowe,” he pleaded. “I need this job!”

  Lowe spit a mouthful of phlegm to the side, almost landing on another worker. “You could’ve cost that boy his leg with your bullshit. You’re too much of a liability, Black, and I want you outta here now! Let me give you a little history lesson, friend. You take a good look at that five I just passed you. It’s got President Benjamin Harrison on it, right? His grandpa William Henry Harrison, another president of ours, hailed from the South, Virginia to be specific, but hauled his way to Ohio. Ben there knew Indiana to be his home because he fit in. He belonged in the North. And it don’t stop there. Consider Abraham Lincoln. He was a Southerner by birth but was raised in the North. He knew he belonged there. Son, you ain’t no Abraham Lincoln or Benjamin Harrison. You just don’t fit in here. You belong in the South with your own kind. I’ve seen and heard your hateful rants, so you can just go back down South where you belong.”

  Willy’s face went red. He turned his back on Lowe and stormed off. Making his way to a reputable bar in downtown Exeter, he began to drink away the five dollars. While on his third beer, Willy saw a lovely woman with long blond hair and a shapely body. For a split second he thought she was one of the prostitutes he’d seen while on a bender in Boston the year before. When she noticed his gaze, she quickly turned away, feeling a chill as though her blood had suddenly run cold. He was scruffy, dirty, apparently poor, and, worst of all, dangerous. Although she couldn’t exactly put her finger on why, Olivia Lindsay thought that this man looked “evil.”

  She had come into the bar in an attempt to find her father. Not finding him there, she quickly walked out. Willy got up and followed her, leaving the rest of his money on the bar. Assuming it was a tip, the bartender kept it.

  Willy caught up to the blond young lady but stayed about six feet behind her. Sensing that she was being followed, Olivia cocked her head around and saw the man who had caused her to leave the bar as quickly as she had. She panicked and with a gasp began to walk faster, not quite breaking into a run.

  Willy surveyed the environs to see whether anyone was watching. Seeing that the coast was clear, he grabbed Olivia from behind, took her behind the store they’d just passed, and threw her down on the ground. Before he began ripping off her clothes, he told her that if she screamed even once it would be enough for him to strangle her to death and make love to her corpse.

  “One way or another,” he said, “I’m going inside you. Alive or dead, bitch. It don’t matter to me one bit, but it could matter lots to you.”

  After he’d raped her, Willy added, “Now you know what I look like. What you gonna do now, whore?”

  Olivia Lindsay just lay there trembling, her clothes all in tatters. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and shook her head, crying as she did so.

  He nodded his head slowly before muttering, “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

  A minute after Willy Black pulled his trousers up and walked out of the alley, Olivia began to scream for help. It never came.

  Olivia found out that she was pregnant two and a half months later. Her father, a prominent lawyer in Exeter, was furious with her. Embarrassed to tell her parents that she’d been raped, she had lied and said that it had been one night of mutual affection and indiscretion. Her father smacked her hard across the face and told her that she’d have to marry the young man. She protested at first, saying that she didn’t know where he was, yet this wasn’t true because since the time he had raped her Olivia had seen Willy a total of six times on the street. It would only be a matter of time before she’d see him again.

  Olivia’s father, Eric Lindsay was successful in the field of law and owned his own firm. His daughter had always feared that, if she didn’t do as her father wished, she’d be cut off from the inheritance he had been planning to leave her. She was still living at home, and he was her only source of financial support.

  Her mother Agnes said, “Olivia, dearest, it’s for the best. If we find the young gentleman, then…,” and smiled at her daughter, as if believing that Olivia already knew what she was going to say. “Your father and I only want what’s best for you. What would people think if they knew you had sexual relations with a man before you were ever married? Why, your father’s career would be over. He’d no longer be able to practice law in this town.”

  Olivia spent the next day searching for the man who had raped her. After devoting the better part of the morning to walking her feet off, she decided to take a different approach, sitting in a coffee shop whose window overlooked the main street. She had reached her sixth cup of coffee, her head buzzing from the caffeine overload and her heart beating as if someone had sneaked up behind her and scared her out of her skin, before she saw Willy walk by. His wretched exterior was even more repugnant than when he’d attacked her. She hastily got up, dropped a few coins on the table for the coffee, and ran out the door. On the street she waited until she was abreast of Willy before jumping in front him.

  “Do you remember me?” she asked nervously.

  Willy stepped back. Before he was about to speak, he realized who she was. He took a step back, expecting the police to pounce on him at any moment, yet the people around them were all going about their business, and there was not a policeman in sight.

  “Yeah, I remember you,” he said, cold and unapologetic. “Came to try and put me in the slammer, did ya?” he replied, and began to laugh.

  “Please, mister. If I wanted you in jail, you’d have been there for the last two months or so. My father is an important lawyer in town.” Willy Black remained calm. As long as there were no cops around to arrest him for rape, he didn’t care whether her father was God Himself.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  Willy’s mouth opened, as if he knew what she was going to say next.

  “The child is yours.”

  Willy’s jaw dropped.

  “I never told anyone what you did. I never told anyone I was… .”

  She couldn’t finish her thought and so continued without saying the dirty word that she couldn’t bear to say. “I told my father it was just one night of reckless behavior with some boy. He’s now making me marry him… That is, you.”

  Willy couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He was speechless, his mouth so wide open that Olivia could see his tonsils.

  “My father will set us up financially in the next town. He will support us very well, financially speaking. We won’t ever have to worry about money.”

  Willy interrupted her. “Just hold on here, missy. You sayin’ you wanna marry me?”

  Olivia, visibly revolted, answered, “Absolutely not, but I can’t lose my inheritance, and that’s what he’s threatening to take away from me. I can’t tell my parents why I’m pregnant.”

  Willy smiled and started to move toward her. When she stepped back, he stopped but nodded slowly.

  “Just how much money we talkin’, m
issy?”

  “Just over eighty-six thousand dollars.”

  He whistled as his eyes widened. “Damn, sister!” he exclaimed, loud enough for a few passersby to take notice of the two of them and wonder what someone like her was doing with the likes of him.

  “But if we do this,” Olivia said, “you’ll never touch me. Understand? Or else I’ll come clean about what you did, and you’ll spend the rest of your miserable life in prison.”

  “Or I can just as easily say you was askin’ for it, miss high and mighty!” he spat back at her.

  “No one would believe you,” she replied angrily, although she didn’t believe what she was saying. That was part of the reason why she felt compelled to marry the man who had raped her. She was afraid of what people would think.

  She paused, unable to believe that she was proposing to marry her rapist and live under the same roof with him. She continued, “We’ll live in the same house but sleep in different rooms. Do you agree?”

  For Willy there was nothing to think over. He had lost his job a few months before and was doing odd jobs around town, making very little and barely able to keep his room while paying for his drinking. Now, suddenly, he was eighty-six thousand dollars richer.

  “Yeah, I agree. Hell, there ain’t nuthin’ to think over! Come here, darlin’!”

  He went for her, attempting to put his arm around her waist, but she pushed him away with the heels of her hands. She then took him to Lieberman’s Men’s Store and had old man Isador Lieberman fit Willy into a new suit. After that she guided him to Mangiacavallo’s Barber Shop, where Luigi Mangiacavallo gave Willy a proper haircut and shave befitting a gentleman of that time.

  Mr. and Mrs. Eric Lindsay were dressed to the nines on the Sunday afternoon when Willy Black came to meet them for the first time. They knew how prudent their daughter was when it came to the men whom she allowed to court her. They assumed that the baby’s father would meet that standard.

  Mrs. Lindsay carried in her arms an expensive tea service on a silver tray. It rattled a little at first, an obvious reaction to the nervousness she felt at meeting her daughter’s fiancé. Mr. Lindsay had one cigar locked tightly between his teeth with another in his hand, which he’d planned to offer his future son-in-law.

  Upon seeing Willy for the first time, Mr. and Mrs. Lindsay couldn’t believe their eyes. They stood like marble statues before the young couple, completely flabbergasted. It was an understatement to say that it was hard for the Lindsays to pretend to be happy with what they saw before them. The tea service rattled even more now.

  Although he seemed well-to-do, wearing an expensive suit and being neatly groomed, their daughter’s fiancé was unprepossessing. He had poor posture and swayed his upper body from side to side when he walked. What’s more, his grammar was atrocious, worse even than of their servants, many of whom came from desperately poor parts of the state. And this man also spoke with a heavy Southern drawl, which caused Mrs. Lindsay to drop the entire tea set she’d been carrying. Their daughter was marrying a rebel.

  Willy Black and Olivia Lindsay were married the following week and left that night for Holly. A nice house, already fully paid for by Eric Lindsay, awaited them there.

  Zachary Black, born in early 1915, was Willy Black and Olivia Lindsay Black’s only child. What can be said about Zachary as an infant is easily summarized. He was an unhappy baby, preferring to spend most of his time in his crib, and he hated it when anyone picked him up. Two years later, as a toddler, his melancholy continued. Olivia tried a few times to take him to the park, but he only cried and threw tantrums when she put him in a swing or the sandbox. Being at home in his room was where Zachary wanted to be and preferred to stay.

  By the time he was five, it became evident that Zachary Black was his father’s son. He was showing signs of taking pleasure in destruction, thrashing bushes with a stick to knock off as many leaves as he could. As brutal as he was becoming, however, Zachary feared only one person, and that was his father. He was indifferent to his mother, basically because she was the same way to him. His parents had no real friends in town, and Zachary had no playmates. His parents were thus the only people he’d ever known, and between them one ignored him while the other beat him.

  From as far back as the boy could remember, his father physically abused him. Whether he was drunk or sober, Willy’s fist always found itself in the boy’s face. Zachary often got black eyes and bloody noses, although up to this point he had never had his nose broken. All of the boy’s baby teeth were knocked out, instead of being allowed to come out on their own. It started when Zachary found his first loose tooth at almost six years old. When Willy punched him in the mouth, Zachary cried as he spit the tooth out along with a mouthful of blood. Olivia didn’t even flinch. She just shouted, “WILLY! NOT AT THE TABLE!”

  By age eight Zachary had turned his cruelty from plants to animals, ironically reversing the pattern of his father who had started with torturing small animals and going on to kill trees. After he had become a “family man,” Willy’s brutality against animals ceased. You could argue that it was because after coming into money he’d given up the life of a serial rodent killer. He now had the wherewithal to drink as much as he wanted, gamble to his heart’s content, and pay for countless whores to satisfy his manhood. Yet Zachary would become something much worse than his father.

  A contrast between Willy and Zachary is that Zachary had a father who was always around, a father who would beat him every chance he got while his mother did nothing to stop it since she had never cared about Zachary because of what he represented—a terrible act of cruelty and a merciless crime. And her rape-engendered offspring reminded his mother of all the things she couldn’t be, the wife and mother of a loving family. Zachary was the brick wall that kept her from all the things she could never have: a close relationship with her parents, family, and friends, the life she had known as a child.

  Willy respected the wishes of his wife and never once attempted her during their marriage. Instead, he would go out every night, get drunk at “The Watering Hole,” and stay that way the rest of the night. He’d sometimes find women whom he didn’t have to pay to sleep with him, and when he did he’d always take them out to the back alley. He once said to such a woman, “Let’s go out behind the bar. It’s where I do my best work.”

  Eric and Agnes Lindsay grew to despise Willy for his drunkenness and his cruelty toward their daughter. They thus visited less and less, then eventually stopped coming at all. However the bank drafts didn’t stop. As promised, Olivia and Willy would be supported financially for life.

  By the time he was fourteen in 1929, Zachary was exactly as his father had been at that age—vicious, spiteful, and sadistic. Because Eric and Agnes Lindsay hadn’t visited since the boy was three, they didn’t know what their grandson was becoming. He always refused to come to the phone on the few occasions they called, and when they’d ask Olivia how Zachary was, she’d say he was out playing with his friends or in his room studying.

  The year before Mr. and Mrs. Lindsay gave their grandson a puppy for his thirteenth birthday, which he promptly tortured and garroted in his bedroom closet. Zachary left the animal’s body there for a whole day, and when it started to smell he took it outside, poured some kerosene, and set the carcass on fire.

  The following day Olivia walked into Zachary’s room. Finding her son reading one of his father’s dirty magazines, she asked, “Where’s that dog of yours got to?” By now Olivia was even talking like Willy Black. The boy replied, “He ran away,” continuing to bury his nose in his magazine.

  Zachary Black inherited everything from his father: his appearance, his behavior, his cruelty, his aloofness. There could never be any doubt that Willy and Zachary Black were father and son. Like his progenitor Zachary was tall and skinny. He had narrow eyes whose color was such a light brown that they actually looked yellow. Th
e boy’s nose was long and pointy, and he had a small mouth. Many people said that he resembled a rat.

  The Blacks attempted to send their son to Wheelwright Academy when he turned twelve. Until then he’d been home-schooled by his reluctant mother. Both Willy and Olivia were well aware of Zachary’s poor social skills with children his own age.

  His first assault came at five years old when he was sitting in his front yard tearing grass from the lawn. A neighbor, young Bobby Criss, walked up to the white picket fence and asked Zachary what he was doing. Zachary ignored him.

  Bobby then asked, “Why ya doin’ that for?”

  Zachary gave a nasty scowl. “You mind your business,” he replied, “and don’t be fussin’ ’bout what I’m doin.”

  In the interest of making a new friend, Bobby Criss was driven to pursue the matter, unwittingly fueling Zachary’s anger even more. “You know,” said Bobby, “I think pulling grass out like that is bad for the lawn.”

  “Really?” replied Zachary, softly as he slowly stood up. “Maybe I’ll just pull out somethin’ else instead.” Zachary approached the white picket fence. Staying on his side, he was now face to face with his neighbor. Smiling deviously, he reached up to Bobby Criss’s face, seized the boy’s left eyebrow, and ripped it off. Bobby immediately covered his forehead with both hands, as blood trickled between his fingers, and ran away screaming for his mother.

  Zachary then dispassionately examined the intact eyebrow, along with its flange of skin, and began picking the little hairs off one by one, saying to himself “He hates me; he hates me not. He hates me; he hates me not.”

  Zachary Black was mean to anyone whom he’d encounter. He was particularly fond of mocking people. On his first and last day at Wheelwright Academy he noticed Sarah Gordon, a student in his class. Zachary couldn’t help but notice that she had as flat a chest as he did. This was too much of a temptation to resist. He went up to her and said, “Hey! You know my Adam’s apple protrudes more than your chest!” Although Sarah didn’t know what the word “protrudes” meant, she knew that Zachary was making fun of her, and she ran to report him to the principal.