Embracing Darkness

by Christopher D. Roe

  “I’m the troll of this bridge,” he said, “and you’ll have to pay me to cross it!”

  She laughed heartily and mussed the top of his hair. “Sure, kid. You’re a troll, and I’m carrying the Hope Diamond in here.” She showed Ziggy the box that bore Jessie’s birthday present.

  Ziggy paid the gift no mind. “Does your toilet go up?” he asked innocently. Sue Ellen acted as though she didn’t hear the question and walked over to the others who were busy with their stickball game.

  The stick they used was the splintered wooden pole with which Sister Ignatius beat the Bensons’ hallway rug outside on the line. She once had threatened Joey and Jonas that, if they didn’t stop using it for their stickball games, she’d take the stick to them. She never did.

  Swell came up behind Lou Conner, who was at bat. Jordan St. James yelled, “Hi, Swell!” as he pitched the ball. Lou swung the stick back and knocked the little box clear out of Swell’s hands.

  Swell gasped at the pain. “YOU IDIOT!” she cried to Lou, who was still trying to make sense of what had just happened. Jessie came running over from her position in left field near the maple.

  “Gee. S-sorry, Swell!” Lou said, racked with guilt.

  Jessie grabbed Swell’s fingers and rubbed them. “There, there,” she commented. “It can’t be that bad.”

  “Can’t be that bad?” Swell cried. “I think they’re broken!”

  “No, I don’t think so,” answered Jessie. “But I do think they’re gonna be singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ tomorrow.”

  “Just be glad it didn’t happen to you on your birthday,” replied Swell.

  We boys all decided to call it quits. The game had been tied two to two for the last three innings, and none of us had any desire to continue, especially after Swell’s accident. Billy Norwin called us over to the back of the rectory and said, “Last one up the maple’s a big girl’s blouse!”

  Swell and Jessie turned to watch Billy run well ahead of everyone else, with little Ziggy and General Lee bringing up the rear. Had it been two years earlier, the dog would have been at the front of the race, but the General was getting older now and slowing down.

  Seeing Ziggy hopping up and down at the base of the maple, Jessie felt sorry for him. She left Swell alone for a minute and ran over to the tree. Lifting Ziggy up into her arms, she kissed his neck. “Don’t you wanna stay with me and Swell?” she asked.

  The little boy pushed Jessie’s face away from his. “Yuck!” he answered.

  Ziggy laughed hysterically as Jessie held him upside down and buried her face in the back of his neck. Just then an object caught Jessie’s eye as it fell out of Ziggy’s back pocket. It was a magnifying glass with a rather large lens. Jessie let Ziggy down and retrieved the object.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “It’s a magnifying glass,” replied Ziggy, stretching his arms up as high as he could to get it back.

  “Yeah, I know what it is,” continued Jessie, “but why do you have it?” She put the glass up to her eye. “What do you do with it? Play Sherlock Holmes?”

  “We burn things,” said Ziggy innocently.

  “What sort of things?” asked Jessie in a disapproving tone.

  “All sorts of stuff. Ants, caterpillars, spiders.” Shrugging, he asked Jessie for the magnifying glass.

  “Absolutely not. This is not a toy. Where did you get it?”

  Ziggy had gotten it from me. I had lifted it from Father Fin’s desk one day when I was looking for his deck of playing cards. I didn’t volunteer the information to Jessie, and Ziggy didn’t rat me out to her. At least he didn’t have time to do so. Within a few seconds Jessie and Ziggy saw Billy climb down the tree with astonishing speed.

  “What was in that box anyway?” Jessie asked Swell, shoving the magnifying glass into her back pocket. She assumed that it belonged to Father Fin and planned to return it to his desk before he found out that it was missing.

  “THE BOX!” she screamed. “OH, MY GOD!” She ran over to the vicinity where it had fallen, and Jessie helped her to look for it.

  “LOSE SOMETHING?” I yelled from atop the maple. The boys all laughed with me. The girls were so caught up in trying to find the box that they paid us no mind.

  Below the tree Ziggy was still doing the little dance he always did when he wanted one of us to come down and take him up. By this time Billy was almost to the bottom. “I gotcha, little man,” Billy said as he hopped to the ground. He swung little Ziggy onto his back and joined the child’s hands around his neck, as if he were wearing Ziggy as a necklace with the clasp in front. Soon they were halfway up to where the rest of us were perched.

  “Why don’t we build a tree house up here?” Charlie Ryder asked.

  “Because Father Fin said we couldn’t,” I said. “Besides, he said that the maple would never let any of us fall, so we don’t need one.”

  “Still,” said Lou, “it’d be more comfortable. We could sit on a floor instead of balancing on a branch.”

  “Get it outta your heads,” I told Lou and Charlie. “It’s not gonna happen.”

  “Yeah,” Gabe Sparks added. “Father Fin told us that once, while he was teaching a kid to climb up, the kid slipped or lost his grip or something. And he almost fell all the way down but got saved by a branch. I think the tree was looking out for him.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Jordan said. “There ain’t no such thing as thinking trees. Trees can’t think, and they can’t feel love or hate or anything like that.”

  “There are too thinking trees,” Gabe snapped.

  “What’s this all about?” Billy asked authoritatively.

  “These dandies are tryin’ to tell me that this tree’s alive,” Jordan said.

  “It is alive,” Billy said.

  Jordan realized that he had spoken prematurely. “You know what I mean, Billy. I mean alive like we are, alive like being able to think. The tree’s a plant, a vegetable. Who ever heard of potatoes thinking anyway? This tree’s no more alive than the shoes I’m wearing or the stitching in my bloomers!”

  “Potatoes have eyes,” Charlie offered, “so they must have brains too. And if a potato had brains, oughtn’t a tree?”

  “Oh, bullshit, you guys,” Jordan replied, visibly fed up with all of us.

  Just then a branch swung forward and whacked Jordan square in the face. He fell backwards, landing on the next branch below, about two feet down from where he’d been sitting.

  None of us said a word. He glanced up at us, perplexed and visibly shaken.

  Jordan never did say another negative thing about the maple, and none of us confessed to him that it was I who had pulled the branch back, letting it go to whack Jordan in the face.

  A few minutes later the tension among us in the maple was still there. Jordan was holding his mouth and rocking back and forth. Someone had to break the spell, and I guessed I was as good a person to do it as anyone.

  “Hey, you guys,” I said. “I wrote another story.”

  “You gonna tell us what it’s about?” asked Lou.

  “Nah, man,” protested Theo. “I wanna hear the thtory. Can you tell it to uth?”

  I didn’t want to at first and just lowered my head. I needed to take everyone’s mind off Jordan. That’s what my announcement of a new story was really about, just something to change the atmosphere.

  I had begun writing a few years before this time. Perhaps it all started when my mother’s live-in lover started beating me. On one occasion he clamped my hands to the hot concrete in the middle of August after I’d accidentally knocked over his half-consumed bottle of gin. On another occasion he took a lit cigarette and came at my eye with it. I closed it in time so that only my eyelid was burned. I wrote about all this and more in the back pages of my school notepad, and I began to g
et pretty good at writing for long stretches of time.

  I eventually was writing stories that went on for pages and pages. My ideas poured out thick and plentiful, like molasses from a jar. My pencil was constantly moving. At one point I had to make sure that I had enough change in my bottom dresser drawer for buying more pencils. I went through at least five a week, and after my penny fund expired I had to deceive my mother. “A boy at school keeps taking my pencils,” I lied. “I need to buy new ones.”

  Neither she nor her new husband ever knew of my budding talent, and I never wanted them to know. My writing, after all, was an escape from them. I therefore kept silent and secretive about it—that is, until I came to the Benson Home for Abused and Abandoned Boys. I confided in Billy once when we were first getting to know one another. He’d asked me whether I had any interests. To this day I don’t know why I did so, but I blurted out that I loved to write.

  “Really?” he said, his voice going an octave higher. From then on I knew that I’d have to be utterly candid about it if I ever wanted to be a part of the group of boys on the hill.

  I thus hesitantly started reading my stories to my brothers and sister. For the most part they were a receptive audience. Some of my fiction involved ghost stories or funny spins on Grimm’s Fairy Tales. My favorite was a sequel to Rapunzel that the boys and Jessie loved. The story I mentioned to them while up in the maple was my longest to date. It had taken me almost a week to write and God knows how many sheets of paper.

  “So why did you tell us you wrote a new story if you won’t even read it to us?” asked Gabe with animosity in his voice.

  “I dunno,” I lied. I now wished that I hadn’t said anything in the first place.

  “I wanna hear your story too,” said Ziggy.

  “Yeah, come on, man,” added Billy.

  I sighed, then took from my pocket a wad of folded paper. Opening it, I said, “I’ll read it to you guys on one condition.”

  “Sure,” replied Dylan. “Anything.”

  “I don’t want you to criticize one single word.”

  “What’s ‘criticize’?” asked Charlie.

  “I mean, don’t tell me what I should have written or ask me to change anything. It’s my story. Just remember that. I’ll admit that I got some help from Sis and Father Fin, words and spelling mostly, but it’s my story all the same. Got it?”

  They all nodded eagerly.

  The story I read to my friends that day was an early version of the one that exists today.

  Years later, as an adult, I rewrote it, changing none of the events but improving the story’s language and flow. Here is the version as published in The Boston Bentley’s January 1974 edition. I earned forty dollars for it.

  The Unfortunate Case of Cornelius S. Russo

  by

  Oliver Mitchell

  It was during the town’s annual spelling bee that the tiny man came up with the idea. The town was Twin Oaks, Iowa, and the man was Cornelius Russo. He sat three rows back from the stage where the five finalists were standing, stationary as poles, waiting for their respective turns. Half the ladies in the audience carried fans, and as the next word (curmudgeon) was called, Cornelius noticed just how many fans were fluttering among the audience. As two beads of sweat dripped simultaneously down both of his temples, he was disappointed at having been stuck between two men, neither of whom had fans to winnow the air.

  His idea first came to him during the spelling of the previous word (impostor). Cornelius Russo thought it a huge coincidence that the host pronounced this word the instant he laid eyes on one of his coworkers, Henrietta Townsend. An impostor was what she represented, according to Cornelius, and he hated her for it.

  Henrietta Townsend and Cornelius Russo worked together in the town’s one and only real-estate office. Cornelius had been there for nearly eight months, fresh out of the high school he’d attended in Naskunk, Missouri, before Henrietta, a college graduate, gained employment at the Willoughby Real Estate Agency in 1940. Their boss, Graham Willoughby, had hired Henrietta because she was beautiful and because he was a dirty old man approaching the age of 56.

  Henrietta’s interview had taken place just two desks away from Cornelius’s own. He knew immediately that he was in trouble. She began by enumerating her accolades at Harvard: head of the Dean’s List all four years, president of her class, editor of the yearbook, and class valedictorian. Apologizing that she hadn’t brought her diploma or awards with her, she went on and on. Although he hated to admit it, Cornelius was impressed.

  Henrietta’s spell on Cornelius was brief. He realized after the third minute of her carrying on about how she was the first female in her family to go to college and how she was a descendant of John Adams on her mother’s side and Henry Clay on her father’s that Henrietta Townsend was a bullshitter. Since Graham Willoughby had all but given Henrietta a job after she’d told him Graham was the finest-looking man she’d ever met, Cornelius knew that he was in for a heap of trouble.

  The end of the interview came with the protocol of filling out some paperwork. As Graham got up to go fetch the forms, Cornelius found himself staring at the young woman, who just didn’t seem right to him. Perhaps it was his Missouri common sense that told him she was all wrong.

  Henrietta Townsend immediately turned to him, sensing that she was being watched, and Cornelius Russo jerked his head around and pretended to be busy. He waited about a minute and then looked back over at Henrietta. She had taken a compact mirror from her handbag, opened it, and brought it close to her face. He could no longer see her eyes.

  He quickly came up with a scheme to see just how honest Miss Henrietta Townsend was. Taking a five-dollar bill from his wallet, Cornelius crumpled it slightly and threw it under her chair. If she were an honest and trustworthy person, Henrietta would find the bill and give it to Mr. Willoughby. On the other hand, if she kept it, she was dishonest and didn’t deserve to get the job.

  Willoughby came back just then, and Henrietta put away her mirror. Before he sat down again, Willoughby snapped his fingers and said that he’d taken a Social Security W-2 Form by mistake. During the interview, you see, Miss Townsend had asked whether Mr. Willoughby could forego all the unnecessary paperwork and pay her off the books, citing that it would be in both their interests. They’d both save considerable money, she on deductions and he on holiday pay, benefits, and monthly employment taxes.

  After Graham Willoughby left once again, Henrietta went for her compact mirror. Cornelius knew that he somehow needed to draw her attention to the floor. He looked behind him and saw under his own desk a yard stick that he used when showing properties. He slowly grabbed the stick and began to inch it closer to Henrietta’s foot. He then raised it up and ever so gently stroked her left leg with it. When she jerked, Cornelius pulled the yard stick away. As he waited for her to spot the five dollars, however, he noticed that the money was no longer there.

  “She must have swiped it when I went for the yard stick,” he said to himself.

  Just then Henrietta shifted from one buttock to the other and, as she did so, opened her legs. She pulled up her dress, stuck her hand inside, and again shifted between buttocks. It was at that precise moment that Cornelius Russo learned just how much of a bullshit artist Henrietta Townsend was.

  When he heard the clapping of the audience, Cornelius’s attention was brought back to the spelling bee. Four contestants remained on stage, and the word now was “soliloquy.” Cornelius’s mind immediately went back to that desk in the Willoughby Real Estate office just weeks before when he had seen something he wished he hadn’t, but once he did it had become clear to him what he must do. He had to expose Henrietta Townsend for what she was . . . and for what she wasn’t.

  Cornelius Russo had seen the business between Henrietta’s legs. She had all the wrong plumbing. She had what Cornelius had, and that made
him sick to his stomach, so much so that he wanted to throw up.

  The boys all began reacting to this part of my story, all except Ziggy, who didn’t understand what I was talking about and who had been only half listening to the story in the first place. Sitting on Billy Norwin’s lap, he had the side of his head pressed against Billy’s chest. The others let out moans and made gagging sounds as they began to visualize Cornelius Russo’s discovery.

  “That’s friggin’ gross!” said Jordan.

  “Keep going!” urged Gabe, sounding as excited as I’d ever heard him.

  “So what did Cornelius do?” asked Lou.

  “I’m gettin’ to all that,” I said, and resumed my reading.

  Cornelius Russo peered above the desk just in time to see Henrietta Townsend remove one of her “breasts.” It was a small red balloon blown up maybe halfway. Henrietta stuck her free hand down to her chest and stroked the area where the balloon had been. Just after she had put the balloon back in place, Willoughby emerged from the back room, announcing “Here we are!”

  The spelling bee’s audience gave a collective “Awwwww” as ten-year-old Mabel Irving was disqualified for misspelling the word “capricious”. The host, Cleveland Elementary School Principal Sammy Eldridge, sighed along with the audience and said, “I’m sorry, Mabel. That’s incorrect. Please have a seat beside your mommy and daddy.”

  Cornelius Russo had his reasons for wanting to expose Henrietta Townsend as an impostor. In the few months of her employment Henrietta had stolen more than sixteen sales from Cornelius, beginning with an old house that a Mr. Casper Bundy wanted to turn into a restaurant. She often pulled such chicanery by intercepting Cornelius’s telephone calls while he was away from his desk or by imposing on his clients. Before long Mr. Willoughby announced that Henrietta Townsend was the company’s leading agent for that month, and he put her picture up on the bulletin board along with a list of the sales she had closed.