“There’s something about him, Father Fin,” said Jordan. “I don’t think Ziggy should be hanging around him so much. We’ve seen Ziggy following this guy around like a dog without a leash.”
With a shake of his head and slowly shoving both hands deep into his pockets, Father Fin utterly dismissed Jordan’s concerns. “Boys,” he began, “Jack White is a good man. I can tell. He’s had a hard life. His father shunned him after Jack’s brother was killed in the war. He’s suffering from some sort of identity crisis, I believe, and needs time to heal. There’s a lot of anger in him, and perhaps he feels that the whole world is against him. I for one am glad he’s found friends on the hill, even if it is only Ziggy and I. Maybe you will give him more of a chance as a start in the right direction.”
We could see then and there that we weren’t going to get anywhere with Father Fin. He was as blind to Jack White’s behavior as he was to what had been going on under the rectory between Sue Ellen and her clients. We thus decided that we were going to be Ziggy’s new guardians in Billy Norwin’s absence. The stranger would have no opportunity to hurt Ziggy if we had anything to do with it.
As we got down from the maple, we scanned the area for Jack White. We were afraid he’d come back for an encore performance of his imitations of us, but he was nowhere to be seen. All was quiet on Holly Hill until we heard a scream from the other side of the rectory.
Sue Ellen and Father Poole brought Jessie inside the rectory as we boys followed closely behind. They put her on the sofa, took the blanket off the back of the couch, and wrapped her in it. Father Poole instructed me to get a cold wet cloth for Jessie’s arm. When I returned with it, Jessie was involuntarily trembling and Father Poole snatched the rag from my hands. He briefly put it to the burn on her arm but she immediately pulled back.
“We gotta call the polithe,” said Theo, visibly shaken by his sister’s being attacked.
“No!” snapped Father Poole. “No one is calling anyone.”
We were stunned that Father Fin was planning on doing nothing.
“We’re going to keep this between us,” he added.
“Father Fin,” I began.
He swiveled his head around, his face stern and uncompromising. “NOT A WORD!” he uncharacteristically thundered. “DO YOU ALL UNDERSTAND?”
We lowered our heads and collectively responded with a faint “Yes.”
Jessie was aloof over the next few weeks. Although we’d always been told that time heals all wounds, the boys and I knew that the pain of Jessie’s burn would be gone long before any physical and psychological scars ever would. She wouldn’t speak to any of the boys, and she spent most of her time at the Hartley residence, where she and Swell kept each other company. We suspected, as we had with Swell, that something more terrible than an ordinary attack had occurred, but none of us dared say so flat out.
“Think about it,” said Jordan. “It’s all so obvious. This ass… .” He stopped, fearing that at any moment Jack White would emerge. “This guy comes here, and then in a week the only two girls on the hill get attacked.”
“Don’t forget Mrs. Keats,” said Dylan.
“The bottom line,” continued Jordan, ignoring Dylan’s juvenilely naive comment, “is that we pretty much know this guy did it. We need to watch him when he’s around Ziggy.”
“It looks like he’s only interested in hurting girls,” I said, and all the boys glanced at me. This was the closest any of us got to saying out loud that Swell and Jessie had been raped. We kept that opinion to ourselves and went on with our plan to protect Ziggy.
“Should we devise a plan to protect the girls too?” asked Dylan, sounding as if he were old enough to unite the rest of us in a plan of defense.
“The girls are always together,” I said, “but Ziggy’s often alone with that guy. If anything, I think that we should watch out for everyone, including ourselves, but give Ziggy the most attention.”
Just then we heard Ziggy laughing and turned in the direction of the Benson house, near which Jack White was walking with a large shovel balanced on his shoulder. Fast at his heels was Ziggy. The boy was undoubtedly laughing at Jack White’s singing, “LITTLE PUNY PIGGIES ALWAYS DANCIN’ ALL AROUND. WE CAN HEAR THEM LAUGH AND HOLLER. WHAT A FUNNY SOUND! COME GATHER AROUND. WE’LL SLAUGHTER THEM NOW!”
Suddenly Jack White stopped and turned toward our direction. “Sing it, Ziggy!” he said with a malevolent smile, his southern drawl more prominent than ever.
“I think that the nighttime is when we need to be most vigilant,” Jordan began, unable to take his eyes off Jack White until he and Ziggy disappeared behind the rectory. “Ziggy sleepwalks. We all know that. White’s room is only down the hall. We have to take turns staying up to watch Ziggy to make sure he’s okay when he gets up.”
“I’ll take the firtht shift,” volunteered Theo.
“Fine,” said Jordan. “I’ll take the second.”
As Theo, Jordan, Lou, and I divided up our hours of standing guard, Charlie and Dylan winked at one another. Gabe also made his relief apparent exhaling loudly.
It was nearing the end of August. Swell, suffering from debilitating insomnia, was preoccupied with having soon to return to school, and Jessie wouldn’t sleep in the Benson house by herself anymore. Because the rectory was all full of males, she and General Lee found comfort and peace of mind in sleeping at the Hartley house. Jessie stayed in Sue Ellen’s room on the floor but was having regular nightmares about her assault.
In one such dream she awoke to find herself impaled on a horizontal spit, rotating slowly over a searing fire. Suddenly the turning ceased with the right side of her body still suspended above the flames. She felt severe heat all over, yet her right ear seemed to tickle despite the torture. Suddenly she heard footsteps on gravel. The sound seemed to be getting louder with every stride. She looked up. At her head stood a tall man wearing the mask depicting a deformed pig, its eyes, nose and mouth dripping with blood. She could hear the man say just above a whisper, “You know you want it, sow! And now you’re going to get it.” Then he yanked out the spit from her body and she plunged face-first into the fire.
Jessie awakened from that particular nightmare to find General Lee licking her ear.
At the rectory Charlie and Dylan slept in the bed they shared, their snoring making them sound like sleeping dragons. Gabe hogged the middle of the bed now that Lou, with whom he shared his bed, was with the older boys taking turns watching Ziggy. For his part Ziggy got up the first few nights and sleepwalked into some other area than the downstairs bathroom. On the fourth night he made his way into our bathroom. Ziggy pulled the toilet chain slowly and flushed the toilet.
With Theo watching over Ziggy from nine to midnight, Jordan from midnight to three, me from three to six, and Lou from six to eight, we were certain that Ziggy would be safe at night. Our greatest fear, however, was that he might sleepwalk into Jack White’s room.
It was during my shift on the sixth night that something happened, an event for the occurrence of which I find it impossible to forgive myself. To this day I haven’t been able to tell the others about it, but they’ll find out if and when they read this narrative.
When Ziggy got up at around 3:30 one morning on my shift, I followed him to the bathroom, where he immediately flushed the toilet with his eyes closed. He stood there and swayed back and forth slightly in order to keep his balance. As I stood behind him, patiently waiting for Ziggy to sleepwalk back to bed, I wandered out into the hall, staying close enough to the bathroom to watch Ziggy, but my eyes were getting heavy, and I needed to find more of a diversion than watching a sleepwalking child stand in front of a toilet bowl.
I examined the portrait of Pope Leo XIII, the same one that Father Poole had seen hanging upstairs on his floor years earlier. He’d grown to hate the painting so much because of the Pontiff’s cynical and di
sapproving look that Father Poole donated it to our floor. I hated the portrait too and, quickly turning on my heel, returned to the bathroom to stay with Ziggy. I remembered having been warned not to awaken him, so I put my arm on his shoulder and whispered, “Good boy, Ziggy. You keep flushin’ your toilet. I’m just gonna go sit over there and take a load off.”
I figured I could either go back into the hall, where it was a bit cooler, or collapse onto the bathroom floor and sit there for a while. The more I thought of it, the better it sounded. After all, I’d have to stay in the bathroom until Ziggy was ready to go back to bed, and who knew when that was going to be?
Just then I heard a slow creak behind me. At first I thought that it was the floorboards and that someone was standing right behind me. Jerking my body around, I looked into the shadows. I faintly saw something move in the darkness. It was near the end of the hallway, which wasn’t more than two doors down from the bathroom. I stood motionless and waited; then, after many seconds, the other door slowly closed.
I went into the bathroom where Ziggy was still standing, now flushing the toilet for a third time. Locking the door behind me, I turned on the lights and squatted with the small of my back against the wall. I watched Ziggy and the doorknob; I listened intently for any creaking sound. My fear subsided around 4:30 a.m., just as my eyes were beginning to grow heavy.
It was light outside when I was awakened by Lou Conner. “Wake up! Wake up!” he said, sounding as though he’d been crying. Still groggy, I stumbled to my feet, as Lou silently pointed at the toilet.
It was Ziggy. He was kneeling in front of the toilet with his head submerged in the bowl. He was dead.
When Father Poole called Mrs. Patch to tell her what had happened to her son, Theo, Jordan, Lou, and I eavesdropped. He told her that apparently Ziggy had sleepwalked last night, wandered into the bathroom, collapsed somehow, and drowned in the toilet bowl. Even standing outside Father Poole’s office with the door closed, we could hear the woman sobbing on the other end of the line. Before he got off the phone, he pleaded with her to keep the location of the boy’s death a secret. He couldn’t risk Ransom’s finding out that a little boy had died on the hill not long after the Hartley girl’s assault.
“You have to tell the police, Father Fin,” said Jordan as we prepared to take Ziggy’s body down the hill.
“They can’t know he died up here,” replied the priest.
“And no one could ever know what happened to Jessie?” I said, raising my voice. “Why do we have to keep pretending that bad things don’t happen?”
“I HAVE MY REASONS!” shouted Father Poole, as he finished tying the white sheet that served as Ziggy’s shroud.
Theo, Lou, Jordan, and I all sensed that Father Poole had changed. Nothing important mattered to him anymore, and we didn’t know why. He now seemed more concerned with the hill’s image than with doing the right thing.
We took the body down the hill by foot, carrying Ziggy on our shoulders. Jessie came with us. She kept her tears for Ziggy to herself, since she was still not ready to open up to anyone and kept her hand over her scarred arm.
We walked down slowly with our heads bowed in shame for not having been able to save Ziggy. None of us spoke, not even Father Fin, who once had told us that he never liked the sound of silence because it meant that people had nothing special to share with one another.
Father Poole had carefully mapped out a route to Parson’s that would take us through a section of town where we’d encounter a minimal number of passersby. I remembered seeing only one older gentleman take notice of us as we approached Dale Street. By then we’d turned Ziggy vertically and surrounded the shroud to fully conceal him. A short while later we arrived at undertaker Mortimer Parson’s establishment.
On our way back up the hill Father Poole tried opening up to us. He said that it was better to let Charlie, Gabe, and Dylan think that Ziggy’s parents had come to take him back home. We didn’t argue the point. “It’s the best thing for all concerned,” he claimed. “Why cause more sadness than there already is? Let it just be this way.” As Father Poole said these words, I noticed that his eyes were gleaming with tears. I walked closer to his side and hugged him.
The boys and I, along with Jessie, deliberated up in the tree the next day. I felt the guiltiest because I had been alone with Ziggy in the bathroom with the door locked. To my relief no one accused me of being responsible for Ziggy’s dying during my shift, yet they all knew in their hearts that it was I who had dropped the ball. It could have been no one else’s fault but mine alone. I had been the one to fail Ziggy and cause more misery for my brothers and sister than they needed or deserved. Lou mentioned that the door was open when he found Ziggy and that I was asleep on the floor next to the body.
“The door was open?” I asked Jordan privately after our meeting. I hadn’t thought of that detail before. Amid all the confusion when I woke up, I’d assumed that Lou had opened the door.
“Did you see anything at all strange that night?” asked Jordan.
I was about to mention Jack White’s door but then thought the gang would surely blame me for Ziggy’s death if there were a possibility that Jack White had something to do with it. What’s more, I didn’t want fingers pointed at Jack White. We were well aware that there was no proof either of his involvement or of a crime’s having been committed. And we all knew that Jack White was insane enough to come after us if we even mentioned that he could have been involved. I thus kept quiet. Still, I didn’t like the thought of that door’s being open when Lou found Ziggy, since to my knowledge only Father Fin and Sister Ignatius had keys to all the doors in the rectory.
In the end we decided that, as much as we wanted Jack White to pay for what had happened to Ziggy, it appeared to be nothing more than a tragic accident.
Jessie got down from the tree and went inside the rectory. She wasn’t feeling up to spending an extended amount of time with us. This was understandable because we knew that she was still uneasy about boys and men. As she closed the front door to the rectory, Jessie observed the small hallway along which lay Father Poole’s office.
She thought for a brief moment that she should go back into Father Fin’s office and tell him what had happened to her in her own words. For a minute she felt strong again, but she knew that Father Fin seemed disconnected from her misery, and she couldn’t understand why he seemed unwilling to hear about its cause.
I’m not his little girl anymore, thought Jessie as she avoided the office.
Walking toward the staircase, she put her foot on the first step and gripped both railings. “Billy,” she said, beginning to weep. “Oh Billy, where are you?” Just then Jessie was startled by a poking on her behind. At first she assumed the worst and believed it to be her attacker. She fell forward onto the stairs and screamed while turning around. To Jessie’s relief the perpetrator was her dog.
“General!” she said, relieved. “Come here.” Jessie put her hands out, and he came to her dutifully, as he always had, although now with an arthritic limp. She hugged him, kissed his nose, and let him lick her face. “Oh baby,” Jessie whispered, “you’re the only guy who’d never hurt me, aren’t you?”
Jumping up from the stairs, she said in her cheeriest voice in weeks, “Let’s play Hide and Seek!” She saw one of the General’s play toys, which was nothing more than an old doll of Jessie’s that had lost a button eye and left arm. She threw it into the dining room, and the dog limped after it as fast as he could. This was Jessie’s cue to hide. She ran into the common room and hid on the side of the couch opposite the entranceway. Within seconds General Lee came running in with the doll in his mouth to where Jessie was hiding and dropped the doll onto the floor.
“NO FAIR!” Jessie screamed playfully. “YOU KNOW THIS HIDING SPOT TOO WELL!”
She grabbed the doll and ran out of the room, with General Lee struggli
ng to keep up with her but not allowing the pain to slow him down. He doubled his efforts to catch up.
They went about the same routine several times. Jessie hid under the dining-room table, in the first-floor bathroom, on the far side of the piano, and even once behind the dining-room curtains. On the sixth round she again threw the doll into the dining room. While General Lee went for it, she decided to give him a challenge by hiding in the closet with the door slightly ajar. She waited, laughing under her breath and holding her hand over her mouth so the dog wouldn’t hear her. After about a minute Jessie began to think that perhaps the closet was too difficult a place for General Lee to find her.
“GENERAL!” she shouted, but he didn’t come. “GENERAL, COME!” she shouted even louder.
Jessie walked into the dining room and around the table where, lying next to the doll, was General Lee with his eyes closed as though asleep. “General?” Jessie whispered. He didn’t move. A tear ran down her cheek as she realized that the dog she’d loved for the last six years had played his last game.
Father Poole helped Jessie to bury her dog behind the Benson house. The two didn’t speak during the whole affair, and again Father Poole felt uneasy about Jessie’s silence. When General Lee’s remains were completely covered, the priest asked Jessie whether she’d like him to say a prayer. She quickly protested, asking what good would come of it because her dog would still be dead tomorrow and the next day. She even made reference to Ziggy, asserting that no prayer had made him come back. And had prayer helped her, she asked, when she was being attacked? Where then was God?
After placing a rose from the Benson garden on top of her dog’s grave, Jessie closed her eyes, bowed her head, and abruptly turned to leave.
Embracing Darkness Page 51
