Embracing Darkness

by Christopher D. Roe

  Phineas closed his eyes again. Within moments, he was sleeping. He dreamed of being a young boy of nearly seven. A late February storm had brought about half a foot of snow to the area. Little Phineas watched from his bedroom window as the larger than usual flakes fell to the ground below.

  The storm was over by early afternoon. Young Phineas ran to his mother, who as usual was perched on the sofa reading a back issue of Harper’s Round Table from 1892 that contained a serialized installment of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and that she had appropriated from Edith Fisher’s coffee table years earlier when Edith’s water had broken.

  Mary Margaret had kept the magazine as a memento of the most important event in her life, the birth of her son. Phineas ran into the living room and jumped onto the sofa.

  “Mamma!” he said excitedly. “It stopped snowing! Can I go out and build a snowman? Can I?”

  Unwilling to break her concentration on Tess of the D’Urbervilles, though she had read it often before, Mary Margaret said passively, “Yes, honey. That’s fine.”

  Phineas yelled, “OH BOY!” and ran back to his room. He knew he’d have to put on his heavy pants, the thick Abercrombie & Fitch sweater that his paternal grandmother had given him for his last birthday, and his galoshes. He then ran out the back door. With a satchel over his shoulder that contained two pieces of charcoal for the snowman’s eyes, a long carrot for his nose, and a handful of coffee beans for the mouth, he leaped through the snow like a frog jumping from one lily pad to another. He made it to the center of the back yard, where he now had plenty of room to start rolling the three balls that would make up his snowman.

  As he swung around to unload the satchel from his back, Phineas saw the shed where his father would always go to smoke his cigarettes. It was a ritual Robert had come to enjoy, since it got him away from Mary Margaret. With his wife glued to the couch all day, he was never bothered by her. This made his refuge all the more enticing. There he wouldn’t have to see his wife or hear her nagging Irish voice.

  In fact, Robert enjoyed his new quiet space in the shed so much that he began doing other things there too, such as fixing hinges or doorknobs. Sadly, he now wanted to escape from both his wife and son any chance he got. The shed became his oasis in a desert of indifference to his wife and disconnection from the son he’d been manipulated into having.

  As little Phineas’s eyes focused on the shed, he noticed a light coming from inside. He squatted down and crept stealthily out to the shed, which was nothing more than a makeshift series of wooden planks carelessly nailed together to resemble a small house. Robert, not the handiest of men, had installed a small glass window in the back and a large plank as a door in the front. The tiny window was the only attractive feature of the otherwise crude shack, and Robert had located the window away from a view of the house so that Mary Margaret (or anyone else) couldn’t see what he was doing inside. It would be a true sanctuary for the doctor.

  Phineas crept to the shed’s solitary window. Stepping on a small stack of logs that served as a reserve supply for the Poole’s fireplace, he pushed his nose against the glass. His plan was to rap on the window as soon as his father put a cigarette in his mouth, but something interrupted Phineas’s scheming. Someone else was there with his father. At first it was difficult for the boy to make out whether it was a man or a woman. He pulled back from the window and wiped off the mist that had collected there. With his view now clear, Phineas pressed his face again to the glass and held his breath, although not for long, because what he beheld was something that would haunt him for the next few months.

  Though stricken with terror at the sight, Phineas couldn’t look away. It was almost as if the shock had turned him into stone. Inside the shed he saw his father between the legs of a girl who was naked from the waist down. Robert Poole was poking inside what Phineas knew to be the private part of a girl’s body. Still frozen in his tracks, the boy watched this unfortunate girl of no more than fifteen weep as his father continued to hurt her. Were it not for the amount of blood, Phineas perhaps would have assumed that the two were playing some sort of inappropriate game, but the girl was sobbing, and blood was everywhere.

  Phineas might have remained there to watch had not Dr. Poole paused to get something from a shelf just under the tiny window. As he turned, he saw his son staring at him, visibly horrified. Robert gasped and called the boy by name. Phineas’s reaction was the same as his father’s: he went to move away from the window. Instead of making a run for the house, Phineas lost his balance on the stack of firewood and fell onto his back in the snow. By this time Robert had reached the back of the shed.

  He pulled Phineas up by the arm and said, just above a whisper, “What do you think you’re doing boy? What are you doing out here? Spying on me? Did your mother tell you to spy on me?”

  Phineas, still traumatized, couldn’t find words with which to respond. He wished he could disappear into the house, the one place he wanted to be just now. His dear mother would never subject him to such a terrible thing.

  “Answer me, Phineas!” Robert Poole hissed. “Why were you back here?”

  In a low voice the seven-year-old prevaricated, “I just wanted you to help me build a snowman.”

  Robert told his son to make his snowman close to the house and not go inside until it was completed. The boy did as he was told, anxious to be far away from his father. Robert, meanwhile, finished his work with the door open so as to keep an eye on Phineas. About a half hour later the doctor sent the girl on her way and tidied up the mess in the shed.

  In an attempt to entice Phineas to speak to him, Robert Poole asked his son whether Phineas might like to join him in town for a hot cocoa with as much whipped cream as the boy liked. Young Phineas continued forming the third and smallest ball of the snowman, which would soon become the head.

  Robert gave up and went inside to join his wife. To her surprise Robert didn’t leave Mary Margaret’s side for the rest of the afternoon, his motive being to intercept Phineas in case his son meant to confide in his mother. The boy, however, didn’t approach his parents while they were together.

  That first evening Robert tried talking to his son alone. He knocked on the boy’s door and asked whether they could talk. Phineas just rolled over onto his side and closed his eyes tightly. “Phinny,” said Robert from behind the bedroom door. “we’ll talk when you’re ready, but the most important thing is that you don’t say a word to your mother about this. You’ll understand why once I explain it, but until then you cannot say anything to her. She won’t understand.”

  Phineas avoided his father for the rest of the week. Every time he thought of his father he’d remember that young girl with her legs open. He couldn’t get the image or the girl’s whimpering cries out of his head. Every night that week, while he lay in bed, Phineas would see these visions over and over again. They were a torment to him, one that he couldn’t dispel no matter how hard he tried to think of other things such as the first day of spring, his impending birthday, playtime at school, or wondering what he would ask Santa Claus for next Christmas. Each time he closed his eyes he saw blood and heard weeping.

  Although Robert greatly feared that Phineas would tell Mary Margaret everything he’d seen in the shed, he couldn’t stay home from work forever to keep a paranoid vigil by Phineas’s side. It was a risk that each time he walked out the door might be the last of his seemingly normal family life, but each morning since the shed incident Robert Poole did make it to work.

  Before leaving he would muss Phineas’s hair and ask him, “How’d you sleep, champ?” to which Phineas would always reply in a monotone voice, “Good,” while keeping his eyes on his porridge. As Robert went to kiss Phineas goodbye, he’d whisper in his ear, “Remember, when you’re ready we’ll talk, but not a word to your mother. She’ll be very upset if you do say anything.”

  Finally, on a Friday
about two months after the day of the snowstorm, Robert decided to confront his son about what Phineas had seen in the shed, but he couldn’t do it while the two were at home. So Robert decided to give Mary Margaret some extra sofa time while he picked up Phineas from school. His excuse to his wife would be simple: “Why, it’s so beautiful outside, the first warm afternoon we’ve had in seven months. I’ll go pick the boy up at school. The walk will do me good.”

  As he waited for his son outside West Portsmouth Elementary School, just blocks from where they lived, Robert anxiously anticipated the long overdue and increasingly inevitable conversation he was going to have with his seven-year-old. He kept reviewing in his mind how he would bring up the matter.

  Robert was willing to do anything to remedy his son’s estrangement from him. He was grateful, though, for at least one thing: Mary Margaret remained completely unaware of the tension between father and son. Since the two had never been close, it was easy to mistake avoidance for indifference. Another thing that still worried Robert was how he was going to get his son to understand what it was that he had been doing. He had to think of some way to allay, if not exorcise, Phineas’s fear.

  Phineas, along with the other boys and girls, raced out the front doors of West Portsmouth Elementary School at 3:05 that Friday afternoon in April. Phineas searched around nervously for his mother. He saw a hand waving over the heads of all the other parents and matched it with a voice that called out his name.

  Phineas frowned upon seeing his father breaking through the crowd and smiling widely. “Where’s mommy?” he asked.

  “Oh, I thought I’d give her a little bit of a break and let her sleep.”

  “It’s way past lunchtime, but dinner’s still a ways off,” Phineas said.

  “Yes, well, you know your mommy. She loves that sofa! Come on, son. Let’s go for a walk, just us men.”

  They passed by Dodson’s General Store where Phineas saw that annoying advertisement, “GRUBER’S TOILET SOAP! THE SOAP OF CHOICE FOR HOUSEWIVES ALL ACROSS NEW ENGLAND! AVAILABLE NOW AT YOUR LOCAL GENERAL STORE!” The words “AT YOUR LOCAL GENERAL STORE” had been crossed out and replaced with the word “HERE.”

  “Hey Phin!” Robert said in an elated tone. “You wanna go down to Wallis Sands State Park and fly a kite? They got ’em in Dodson’s. One of them is real nice, bright green with a yellow ribbon. Would you like me to buy it for you? Then we can go fly it. It’s a great day for kiting! What do you say, champ? I’ll flag down a carriage, and we’ll go.”

  Phineas just shrugged. “I suppose,” he replied.

  The truth of the matter was that Phineas didn’t wish to be around his father at all. Instead, he just wanted to go home and be with his mother, someone who’d always looked out for him and had never made him feel the way his father had these last two months.

  “Come on, boy! It’s almost May! And you know how fun things get when the warm weather arrives.”

  Dr. Poole ran into Dodson’s like a child running into a candy store. Within moments he emerged with a huge blue kite with a ridiculous-looking pink tail. “They sold the green one yesterday,” Robert said mournfully, ignoring Phineas’s indifferent expression.

  As promised, Robert flagged down a carriage. Within seconds the taxi, powered by a single white horse, transported them to Wallis Sands State Park. While alone in the carriage, away from the ears of others, Robert posed his long-delayed question.

  “What especially bothered you about what you saw in the shed, Phin?”

  Phineas felt as though he’d just been punched in the belly. “Would you ever do that to me?” the boy asked in a trembling voice.

  “Oh Phinny,” Robert said, putting his arm around the boy. “I would never in a million years hurt you. You have to believe that. And I wasn’t hurting that girl. I was helping her.”

  Now Phineas felt as confused as ever. “But you were hurting her,” he replied, alarm now in his voice. “She was crying, and she was bleeding all over.”

  Robert sighed and brought his face down to his son’s. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. “No, son. I wasn’t hurting her. I told you. I was helping her.”

  When they arrived at the park a few minutes later, Phineas jumped out of the carriage while Robert collected the kite and Phineas’s books. He paid the driver and tipped him twenty-five cents. The driver thanked him warmly, but Robert saw it as a good omen. If he showed kindness, appreciation, and generosity toward others, then perhaps, if there were a God, He would grant the same to Robert. He might grant the greatest gift he could ask for—namely, that Phineas would understand his father’s actions and forgive him. For an atheist far removed from organized religion or belief, this was a leap of faith.

  As they flew the blue kite with pink tail, Robert and Phineas remained quiet as strangers. Robert wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. He thought he would again repeat that he had been helping the young girl, no matter what Phineas had seen. Just as Robert was about to speak, his son beat him to it.

  “How can hurting someone be the same as helping them? When I got a spanking last summer for jumping in the water with my shoes on after you told me not to, was that helping me? When I hurt so bad that I cried, was that helping me?”

  “Actually it is,” answered Robert, “but that’s a different kind of helping and a subject for another time.” Robert turned to face Phineas, who in turn focused more intently on the kite. “I was helping her in another way, Phin. She was in trouble.”

  “But you made her bleed. Couldn’t you have been nicer?”

  “You don’t understand, Phineas. You’re too young to understand complicated issues right now.”

  “What’s an issue?”

  “Issues are things that are hard for a boy your age to understand. I don’t think I can explain what I was doing, Phin, because if I told you it would make you see the world differently. I don’t want to spoil your delusions about life. Everything would change. It would make you grow up too fast. You’ll find out the truth about the real world in due time.”

  “What’s a delusion?” asked Phineas. While he waited for his father to reply, Robert knew that his son had listened to nothing he had said after the word “delusion.” Amid the ensuing silence Phineas withdrew back to his kite.

  Robert inhaled deeply, trying to reorganize his thoughts. He then knelt down and touched Phineas’s chin. “Son, she was already hurt. She came to me for help because someone had hurt her. If I didn’t help her, she’d be in a lot more pain later on. So you see, Phin, I had to hurt her a little more in order to make it all better.”

  Phineas’s attention was restored. His eyes met his father’s, and at that moment he dropped the string, immediately causing the kite to crash into the ground.

  Robert ran his fingers through his hair and was close to giving up. He knew that he wouldn’t get anywhere by speaking like a doctor to a seven-year-old, but it was hard for him to bring a topic of this nature down to a level that Phineas could understand. He then came up with an analogy.

  “Phin,” said his father. “Do you remember when you fell on the concrete while we were downtown last August? Do you remember how you skinned your knee?”

  “Yes,” replied Phineas.

  “Well, do you remember what I had to do to make it better?”

  “You put something on it.”

  Robert smiled again, knowing he was going to get his point across. “That’s right. And that made you cry, remember? You cried when I put the iodine on your knee. It stung, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah, a lot.”

  “But it took out the bad germs that were inside, and your knee was all better in a day. Well, it’s the same thing, the same principle. I had to hurt you a little more so that you would hurt less. That’s what happens sometimes.”

  “So you helped her?”

 
“Yes, Phin.”

  “But how did she get hurt?”

  “I can’t tell you that at your age now.”

  Phineas didn’t pursue the matter. He was feeling better simply by knowing that his father had explained why he had done what he’d done. The boy needed time to digest this new lesson in helping people: Sometimes you have to help people who are hurt by hurting them a little more so they can feel better. Unfortunately, Phineas later would confuse this lesson with another precept: Sometimes you have to help people so they can feel better, even if it means hurting others.

  Robert, meanwhile, was still worried that Phineas would some day tell his mother what he’d seen his father doing in the shed.

  “Daddy?” said Phineas.

  “Yes?”

  “What’s ‘principle’?”

  “A principle is something in which you believe.”

  “What do I believe in?”

  “You believe that it’s right to help people who are in trouble.”

  “Then I want to help people too.”

  Robert patted his son on the head. “I’m sure you do, Phin, and you will. You have your whole life to help people.”

  Father and son left the kite where it had fallen and made their way out of the park toward town.

  “Let’s go for ice cream, daddy,” said Phineas, sounding like his old self again.

  “Sounds good!” replied Robert, happy that things were seemingly back to normal, at least for now.

  As the two left Blendinger’s Malt Shop, Robert had a nagging feeling that he had something to worry about. All of a sudden, as an automobile passed by on the street, Phineas exclaimed, “Look! Look at that!” For a moment Robert’s heart sank as he imagined his son, holding Mary Margaret’s hand, running into the shed and screaming, “LOOK! LOOK AT THAT!”

  When Robert’s paranoia subsided, he realized what had excited his son. The sight of an automobile was rare, and, although Phineas had seen one before, it was still a novelty.