Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

  On the porch Phil kicks himself free and scrambles to go back inside, but the young cop and a fireman run up to them. “You dipshits!” the fireman shouts.

  “We went in to haul him out,” Daniel says.

  “You trying to murder your whole family?” the cop barks at Phil.

  Blood runs from his lip. “I’ll do as I please on my own property.”

  The cop twists Phil’s arm behind his back and marches him to the patrol car, shoves him in the door, and slams it shut.

  Daniel and Cole straggle across the backyard coughing up phlegm. Cole’s about to tell his son he should never have come back inside the house, but instead he says, “Thanks for the help.” Nearly to the chicken coop, they turn around. It’s clear now there’s no hope of saving the house, flames creeping up hidden spaces around the chimney right up to the attic and the cedar roof. He rubs the back of his hand, still smarting from the punch, as they sit by the old swing set. In the firelight he watches his father through the black metal mesh between the cruiser’s front and rear seats. Daniel leans back on his elbow in the grass.

  “It’s true,” Cole tells him. “What your grandfather said.”

  “I know. I’ve heard Mom tell the story before. But you were just trying to protect your mother.” He sticks a blade of grass between his teeth. “It’s hard to imagine Phil being so violent. With LK the truth is I wasn’t really surprised. But Phil seems so gentle.”

  “I never protected her. Not like you did with that girl tonight.”

  “You tried, though.”

  “Not like you think I did. I went after him in anger, to hurt him. Not to protect your grandmother. She was already dead.”

  Daniel sits up. “That’s definitely not how I heard it.”

  “But it’s the truth,” Cole says. “Those other stories started when your grandfather was still lying there on the floor with his face…” He stops there: a fifteen-year-old boy needs to hear only so much. Fifteen, the same age as he was that night.

  They’re silent for a time until Cole slaps his son’s thigh, squeezes his knee. “What a fucking mess,” he says. “What are we doing here?”

  “Dude, it’s like you went down the rabbit hole. This isn’t our life.”

  Our life. He likes the sound of that. “When we get back, can you try to quit committing class-A misdemeanors?”

  “I can sure be smarter about it.”

  “Can’t you just stop—”

  “Doing the right thing?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You thought you were doing the right thing staying here, and look at this disaster. If you’d just left with that wood and gone home, he’d be living right now in a nonburning old colonial.” He employs the DAR emphasis of the grandmother he never met.

  “And you’d be in jail in Portland.”

  Daniel sweeps his arm toward the flaming house, the fire trucks, and the tremendous arcs of gushing water. “So you did this all for me?”

  “That’s not what I mean. Look, there’s got to be some way to honor your principles without breaking the law all the time.”

  “Don’t get me started on laws.”

  In the back of the police car his father reaches to one door, then the other, trying without success to get out.

  Daniel’s watching the fire—everyone’s watching the fire except for Phil, who tries the doors again, confusion and a growing panic on his face behind the metal grille.

  “Just a sec,” he says, and heads to ask the cop, who’s talking with a fireman in the driveway, if he’ll let his father loose, but suddenly the window beside the piano blows out, and as the splintering pieces start flying, something inside him blows too and tears come streaming down his face, so he detours under the pear trees and squats down against a trunk while his breath catches in his throat and he erupts into sobs. He cries for the girl waking up in the hospital right now and being told what’s been done to her. He cries for the house itself. “Antiques,” his mother said. “This candlestick”— or “blanket chest” or “sampler”—“has passed from life to life, hand to hand, for two hundred years, and it’s your responsibility to usher it through the short time it’s in your possession.” Isn’t it the same with our children—we usher them safely through the few years they’re with us? And isn’t it one of the many things a husband owes his wife? He cries for his broken marriage, for the family he’s lost, for the isolated sufferings and joys of his sister and brother. A floor inside the house collapses, the thunderous boom shaking the ground, and he cries for his mother. The last thing she saw before an excruciating death was her husband’s face disfigured by rage. Thirty years ago to the day. Did he look into her eyes as he choked her? One hand clapped over her mouth and the other squeezing her throat while she struggled to breathe, pounding at his shoulders?

  When he can finally let that image go, when Cole himself can breathe again, he walks over to the police car and peers through the glass. Phil, sitting calmly in the middle of the seat, turns to look at him, his face blank and passionless, his eyes milky. The blood on his lip and in his whiskers has dried, his hair matted to the side of his head. His shirt is filthy. He needs a shower.

  Now the cop is nowhere in sight, but Cole approaches three firemen gathered in the driveway around the tailgate of a pickup laid out with sandwiches. “Help yourself,” says one of them, who Cole realizes is the fire chief, before adding, “This was arson.”

  Cole nods. “That seems right.”

  “Did the old guy set it?” another one ventures to ask.

  “He loved this house.”

  And at that point the cop walks over and joins them, saying, “Thanks, Captain,” into his cell phone before slipping it into his pocket.

  How’s he supposed to move on, Cole would ask Liz if she were here, when once again his father’s in police custody and he’s about to accuse Kirk? After Tilly’s stroke, after the prosecutors and social workers and the certainty that they’d be leaving both the house and the town, Cole was seized with panic that he couldn’t protect Liz from her brother; worse, he’d never protected her. He told a cop then the same thing he tells this one now: “Kirk Schaler likes to set fires.”

  The cop smiles. “You got it partly right,” he says. “Kirk’s sister called the station worried out of her mind. That’s when I came rushing over, but I was just a little too late. According to the sister this here’s a father-son deal.”

  The chief sighs. “Kirk’s always been an asshole.”

  “Well, he’ll be out of our hair for a few years. They got him at the station already.”

  “How about the son?” Cole asks.

  “He’s a slippery little shit. Jumped out a bedroom window and shot off on his motorbike. He can’t be far, though. I doubt that kid can even think beyond the town line. Same as his dad.”

  The firemen get back to work, and Cole stands beside the cop watching them, the truck at their backs, its surging pumps as loud as a factory. Flames are shooting through the roof despite the drenching. The tanker truck comes screaming back from town and stops beside a folding pool they’ve set up on the road, and when the valve opens, water gushes out to be sucked up by the pumper. A dozen men are shouting over the racket.

  “My father, he’s not all with it,” Cole says. “Dementia. But he’s settled down now. Do you think you could let him out?”

  The cop looks dumbfounded. “Isn’t he the Old Newgate Strangler?”

  Cole nods. “He was.”

  “So this is the house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re one of the kids?” he asks.

  Cole nods again. He flexes his sore hand. “Could you let him out if I keep close tabs on him?”

  Cole follows him to the cruiser, where he opens the door. “Step outside, Mr. Callahan.” His father looks suspicious and tired. “Turn around and
face the car.” Phil knows the routine, reaching his left hand behind his back even before the cop asks. He clicks a handcuff around his wrist, and another when Phil reaches the other hand back, and then walks him over to the swing set. “You put other people’s lives in jeopardy with a stunt like that.” Phil doesn’t respond. “Sit here on the grass.” The cop helps him to the ground, uncuffs one wrist, and locks him to a rusty crossbar.

  Daniel comes strolling across the grass, eating a sandwich. “Want one?”

  “What kind?” Phil asks.

  “I don’t really know,” Daniel says. “Meat, I guess.”

  “But you don’t eat meat,” Cole says.

  Daniel chews. “I know.”

  “What kind?” his grandfather asks again.

  Daniel opens up the sandwich and tears off a piece of boloney, wiggles it in front of them.

  “Boloney,” Phil says.

  Daniel slurps up the scrap of meat and says, “I never heard of it.”

  Phil asks for one, and when Daniel comes back from the truck he’s carrying food on a stack of blankets and pillows. He kneels down and unloads the sandwiches, cans of soda, and Fig Newtons. They all chow down, Phil using his free hand. Eventually, one by one, they lie back on the blankets, looking up at the stars, and when the wind shifts, gray smoke moves in front of the twinkling light.

  “That was a good thing you did tonight at Kirk’s,” Cole says. “Not an easy thing.”

  “It was very easy,” Daniel counters. “You see rape, you stop it and call the police. Pretty basic.”

  “I mean, it took guts to stand up to him like that.”

  “I didn’t give it a second thought.”

  “Jesus. Will you just let me be proud of you?”

  “You would’ve done the same thing,” Daniel insists, and hearing this from his son makes Cole tear up again, and he closes his eyes, at peace with the knowledge that his son believes in him.

  When a section of roof caves in, Cole lifts his head: explosions of sparks whirl skyward but then are sucked back down into the house, as if to keep the fire blazing. And drifting into sleep he hears a low ping, and another, and another. It sounds like laser guns from a space movie—ping! pang! zong! But it’s the piano, burning now, the high-tension strings snapping free with one last note.

  * * *

  —

  The needle claws around and around the dead zone at the end of the record, until he finally lifts it. Yes, he knows why their bedroom door’s ajar. He knows with certainty what’s happening. Knows he’s failed to stop it. Down in the kitchen, reaching deep into the ice bin, he hears a familiar sniveling animal noise, so he reaches for the poker as he steps across the keeping-room hearth, looking for the glow of possum eyes in the dark.

  And then he jumps. Off in the corner his father’s sitting on the floor, his arms crossed over his knees, his head on his arms.

  And there—a smear of moonlight glinting off a bare white leg. He bends low to see under the table: her bunched-up nightgown, the inside of her wrist. He rushes to her and drops to his knees where she’s slumped against the end of the upright piano, and he shakes her. She’s warm, but her head drops forward. “Wake up!” he pleads. He puts his face to her mouth—no breath—and his ear to her chest—still nothing—and then jumps back to his feet, looming over his father whimpering pathetically there on the floor. Nothing in any of their lives will ever be the same. He squeezes the poker in both fists as if he could crush the iron with his hands. “Jesus Christ,” he yells, raising it over his head. A shadow of his body, twisted and ready to strike, hurtles across the ceiling in this frozen light.

  But then a gurgle rises from his mother’s throat. The poker thuds onto the floorboards. He grabs her under the arms and drags her beneath the windows and lays her out flat, pinches her nose and holds her chin in his fingertips, then fills his lungs and presses his mouth on hers and blows, his breath vanishing into a void, so he blows harder, blood rushing to his face, and he rests his hand on her chest, feeling it rise, then lifts his mouth from hers and pushes down on her lungs, his breath, mixed with the smell of his mother, rises through her teeth and lips. He spreads her mouth open wider, and then his own, and blows a surge of hot air from deep in his belly, and what comes back when he pushes is the sour air that seeps beneath the iron door of a dungeon, the smell of fear. Again he blows and now it comes back warmer and smelling more like her, his mother, the scent of her scalp when he hugs her, the smell of her tears and knotted-up anguish when he puts an ice bag on her cheek, the smell of their kitchen and her body powder and lotions. He tastes her blood on his lips, and at that moment she chokes, two quick spasms in her chest, and he holds an ear to her breast and feels his father’s hand desperately clutching his shoulder, his voice telling him, “Keep doing the mouth-to-mouth.” Cole rears back until the tips of their noses touch, his father’s face red and slick, and then he uncoils: he lunges from his knees, thrusting out his arms to shove him off, meaning to scream “Get away!” but it emerges only as a long, crazed grunt as his father, lifted off his feet, flies into a pedestal table, the candlestick clattering to the floor, and stumbles over a Windsor chair before crashing through the door into the parlor and falling on his back, a final thunk when his head hits the floor.

  Cole lowers his face to his mother’s mouth—still no breath—so he presses his lips to hers again and blows.

  “What’s happening?” Hysterical, already in tears, Ian comes weaving into the room as if he’s balanced on a scrap of debris barely afloat in a roiling ocean.

  Cole doesn’t throw him a line. He offers nothing at all. Just turns back to his mother and exhales deeply into her, feeling neither desperation nor hope. They knew this night would come, they all knew it. What he feels is resentment, disgust. Toward Kelly, stubbornly awake up in her room; toward Ian for his weakness; toward his mother for never divorcing, for ever marrying him at all; and for his father, whose simmering anger and flashes of rage have defined each of them and defined their family. But his most profound disgust is reserved for himself. For retreating into ecstasy with Liz instead of trying to put their family right; for not coaxing Kelly back into the fold; for not working harder on the house to help bring them harmony. For not standing up to his father. For not saving her. Kneeling over his mother’s already cooling body, he puts his lips to hers and sucks in the dead air.

  Kelly screams, rushing up and palming their mother’s cheeks. “No!” she cries. “No, no, no!” She puts her ear to her mother’s chest, frozen there for a moment before collapsing against the wall. Cole continues breathing into her body, his fingers pinching her nose. Those deep breaths are meditative, the only thing he can hear, all that any of them hears. And he goes on like this for some time because there’s nothing else he can try to put everything back the way it should be. He’s suddenly disgusted with himself for thinking that if he doesn’t bring her back to life, their family’s secret will be out.

  But finally Kelly touches his cheek, and when Cole looks up at her she’s shaking her head, so he stops. And when he does he can hear the rocker squeaking. His father got off the floor and is sitting in it, and now he turns to see what it means that all the loud breathing has stopped, and once he figures this out his animal moans resume. When Cole snaps “Shut up!” he falls quiet. And never has Cole known such silence, with his hand on his mother’s chest, resting on her stillness. Her face is contorted, her jaw out of line. But her lips, wet from his own mouth, are glistening pink.

  Kelly rises up from the floor, standing tall and straight. He thinks she’s going to comfort Ian, but she walks to the phone in the kitchen and dials. “Yes,” she says. “We’ll need the police.” Her voice is measured, dignified. “We’ll also need an ambulance. Ninety-three Old Newgate Road. There’s a post lamp in front. The big white old colonial.” She sounds like Tilly.

  Ian hasn’t moved from the spot where he
stopped, although he’s now crumpled on the floor, sitting on one ankle, his arms pulling a leg to his chest, tapping his forehead on his knee. He looks as if someone has broken his body into pieces and then arranged them in a neat pile.

  “If she just would’ve…just stopped!” His father is mumbling, jabbering.

  Cole touches her face. Cool as porcelain.

  “If she would’ve just shut up.”

  “I told you to shut up!” Cole bellows, and he can’t even be sure he actually shouted this except that his face heats up from the explosive effort and he feels the scrape in his throat.

  “She goes after me and after me. All night long.”

  Cole’s heart starts pounding and somehow he’s thinking about going camping with Liz. About waking up with her in the tent as the sun slips up over the horizon, cooking breakfast on a fire. He thinks of the food and mess kit and hatchet piled on the spare bed—

  “Won’t just drop it!”

  —and that if not for all the gear his father would be in that bed right now beside him, his mother alive, everyone asleep.

  When he stands up her fingers pull at his ankle, hooked around his foot, so he lifts her wrist and rests her arm by her side. Then he backs away. A corpse, he thinks. Laid out. So he squats by her head and gets a grip under her arms and—in an impulse he’ll never fully understand, as if to put everything back as it was, as if he’ll be blamed—he drags her over to where she was, heavier now, and sets her upright, leaning into the angle where the side of the piano meets the wall. Then he goes to his brother, his forehead banging on his knee with the rhythm of a beating heart, and touches him lightly on the nape, and Ian snarls so fiercely he snaps his hand away.

  “Never,” their father growls. “She never lets anything go.”

  Cole charges across the room. “I told you to shut up!” He’s never spoken to him like this, but everything has changed.