The Last Kid Left

by Rosecrans Baldwin

  So it wasn’t until months later, in the early summer, during a beautiful evening in June, with the fields and forests green and the mountains free of snow, that the valley got resolution as well as a first taste of justice in extremity, a style that became common for a time. Bronson Portis died at home, burned to death during a late-afternoon nap. Elizabeth had torched the cabin first, where he and their son were sleeping. She soaked the floors with kerosene, set them aflame, then went outside and ignited the pasture. Flames reached six feet tall, people said, in red and orange walls, before Elizabeth closed herself in the barn and burned it down as well. And from their plot, the fire began to spread, until by the following morning nearly a quarter of the valley was razed.

  Since she was a child, people had said Elizabeth O’Brien was possessed, broad enough to contain two people, one of them a monster.

  The clouds of smoke that rose that night were said to be so voluminous and tall in the moonlight, they resembled the sheets of a brigantine voyaging out to sea.

  Late Saturday evening, early Sunday morning, Granville Portis parks the sheriff’s car in front of the old family house in the dark. He knows the entire story by heart. He’s known it since his own father read it to him when he was a little boy, from the book of Portis history. Their mountainside is where the family relocated after Bronson’s shame. The house was his father’s house, his grandfather’s house, built by Granville’s great-great-grandfather. Who was the first man to die in it, following the days of fire. When, for several years of contagious turmoil after Elizabeth O’Brien’s insanity, men could be shot over nothing by their neighbors, killed for a rumor. Families spread butchered in their gardens. Years when madness was in the air, before order was enforced by law.

  He shuts off the car, notes the absence of the work truck. It prompts him to boot up the department laptop, so he can launch the tracking software.

  When he was a boy, in what was still called Whitehall County, at least a dozen families in the valley could trace their names back to the initial clearing. Most were gone by that point, erased by time or choice. People had sold their farms to the land trust, to New Yorkers, to rich folk from Boston. People for whom “country” meant “countryside.”

  Of the old names he remembered, there remained Portis, Condren, Ashburn, a few others. And Toussaint, of course.

  His grandfather had been the one to record the family history in a book, published in an edition of three, bound in pebbled red leather. The Portis Family in America. Granville had inherited it, found it to be mostly unreadable. Though the Bronson Portis story still gives him chills to this day. He’d told the story several times to Emily when she was little, to explain lessons about responsibility and loyalty. She probably won’t remember. He watches the laptop’s start-up screen. Why does it take so long to load? He stares at the barn and closes his eyes, and wonders if she remembers that the Toussaints were involved, if the irony even occurs to her.

  His own father, Emily’s grandfather, Francis Portis, had been a roofer, tinkerer, and all-around amateur. Amateur inventor. Amateur preacher. Amateur parent. Dark glasses, wrinkles, short-tempered, and violent. He once attacked one of their horses. It happened during an attempted mount for breeding. The animal got overexcited and kicked his father in the chest, knocked him straight across the barn and broke two of his ribs. Francis had gotten up, come back on shaky legs, grabbed a pitchfork off the wall, and stabbed all four tines into the flesh behind the horse’s shoulder. The animal crumpled. Its lips reared and it screamed a high-pitched sound so loud and painful that Granville had thought his ears were bleeding.

  His father was a man who lived most of his life without women. Puttering from house to barn, barn to field. He was religious but didn’t like church. He baptized the children himself. When Granville was seven, his mother ran away with a lumber salesman. I have to go. I’m sorry. Forget about me. These were the last things he remembers her saying. Occasionally she sent letters that Granville’s father wouldn’t let him read. But his dad didn’t chase and never remarried.

  Instead there was Marleen, for a brief period. Marleen was Belgian. She worked in town as a private maid. Three years after Granville’s mother left, his father hired Marleen to move in with them and keep house, which she did for the next four years, starting when Granville was ten.

  She’d been shaped like a small pear, slightly bruised. But with a round, pretty face, fine eyelashes, wavy red-brown hair, and a secretive smile. He disliked her from the start, especially for how close she and his father became and how quickly, how indispensable she presumed to seem. Marleen became devoted to his father’s interests, his inventions. She kept their household running smoothly so that he could think and work. No one had ever encouraged him so, certainly not Granville’s mother. And Marleen could talk about anything. Farming, horses, meteorology, the simple appeal of a well-made tool. Cheerful, bossy, the smooth skin of her cheek pinkish-red even in winter, but she was also quite stern and demanding with Granville and his little sister, especially if his father wasn’t around.

  Marleen had “a European manner” that his father respected, he said. “True refinement.” Granville didn’t see it. He disliked everything about her. She smoked little cigars when she thought no one was looking. If she broke a cup in the kitchen, she blamed the dog. He did appreciate her cookies, little Belgian cookies, thin as paper. They were probably the best Granville had ever tasted. Better than anything his mother ever made.

  With Marleen’s support, in 1964, Francis Portis became the inventor of a new type of machine for grinding coffee, one whose crank even the most arthritic could turn. He expected it would make them wealthy, and it nearly did, for a time. With a New York lawyer’s help, he secured a patent for the Portis Grinder. Two years later, they’d sold it to a kitchen-goods manufacturer in Pennsylvania, after efforts to establish production and sales proved too difficult, and also not very interesting. Francis Portis was an inventor, not a businessman. Besides, they were rich. Instead of involving himself any further with the grinder, Francis returned to his workbench, to invent something else.

  He never invented a single other item of value. But the sale of the Portis Grinder provided for their needs, on the side of the mountain, for almost ten years, while his father sought no extra income.

  Soon after moving in, Marleen also showed an interest in Granville. He resisted at first. She would reserve time for the two of them to do his homework in the evenings, in the empty upstairs study, after his father had gone to sleep. Granville did everything he could to aggravate her. If she commanded him to sit up straight, he’d hunch his back. He snarled at her questions, insulted her intelligence. Still, she seemed not to care. It gave her peace, she said once, their time together, he gave her peace. And so she would read, or knit, or simply hum under her breath while he did his schoolwork.

  Any man’s potential, especially a young man’s potential, Marleen said, required firm encouragement. And he did find, despite her stiff manner, that she radiated a mysterious sort of relaxing warmth. Was it what inspired his father? Gradually he did his schoolwork more diligently. He asked questions just to solicit her. She’d respond if she knew the answer, otherwise ignore him. Occasionally, if he dared a joke and she found it funny, she let out a tittering laugh that he never heard elsewhere around the house. As though only in his presence, while his father slept, could she let down her guard.

  Granville possessed, Marleen would say, so many of his father’s best characteristics, so few of those that were second-rate. For example, she loved the way he thought about people without too much judgment. The way he talked about his teachers and friends, trying to figure out why they did or said different things. These were signs of a penetrating mind, she said, where his pious father instead would be clouded by prejudice.

  “You’re probably able to read my mind right now,” she whispered one evening, giggling. Of course he didn’t have the slightest idea. But he was thrilled that she thought he might. He had c
ertainly misjudged her.

  Soon he wasn’t able to think about anything or anyone else.

  One evening, a year into Marleen’s tenure, she told Granville that he reminded her of a boy in the town where she was born, back in Belgium. Her first boyfriend, her skating partner, Julien. He’d also been her best friend, her secret friend. “You’re both so inquiring,” she said, and pulled out one of her little cigars and lit it with a match. “I bet you could be a doctor someday. That’s what Julien became.”

  Instantly Granville hated Julien, he was sick with jealousy. He focused his eyes on the floor. Marleen moved to the window to smoke. He found himself staring at her pale legs beneath her skirt, what little could be seen. Then she stepped away for a moment and paused midstep. A single turn of the rounded calf, he was in love!

  “What kind of doctor?” he asked.

  She laughed. “A brain doctor, of course.”

  Despite the sale of his grinder patent, Francis Portis was a disappointed man. Angry about the way the world rewarded cowardice, “smallness” was his word, when men like him went ignored. His success had made things worse. He had ideas, dozens, more valuable to society than a simple kitchen device. But one after another, they were spurned. The mail never rewarded him. He complained frequently, stomping around the house, about the failure of the country to honor its most productive members. Soon he blamed Marleen. There had to be a problem with the paperwork, her paperwork. They fought about it more and more. His father was a bully. Granville’s soul burned from the unfairness of it all. He was recently thirteen, he’d jump into the middle of arguments to defend her, even though Marleen demanded in their nighttime meetings that he keep quiet, that it wasn’t smart to draw attention to how they felt about each other.

  Often, if he’d been banished to his room, Marleen would sneak in late at night and bring him a snack, try to make him laugh. She’d lie in bed next to him. One night, similar to other nights, she said she needed him to see things from his father’s position. Because how could such a man, a closed-off little man so out of touch from all that was changing in the world, isolated on his mountain, how could a man like that understand his special son? A man so walled-off from love, during that era of love: look how he treated her like a slave. It made her cry spontaneously, just to remember the things he’d made her do at times. But she wouldn’t talk about it in detail, she was too overcome. It made Granville furious. He wanted to leap up and fight. She demanded he calm down. She told him to be quiet. She said she realized she’d brought him to that antagonism, but she was having none of it. If anything, he could blame her. Blame her? But then she got angry, panicky, she needed him to relax—and before he could stop it, she pressed her fingers into his chest, pushed him down against the little bed while her face contorted with pain and excitement. “Just stop it, stop it!” she’d hiss, even though he was barely doing anything. Once she even beat him around the head, she was so out of control. It was like a devil possessed her, and he hated to see her like that, when he didn’t know what he’d done. But then it passed. She’d wipe away her tears, smile, apologize over and over, kiss him over and over, then slip down and swallow his semen when it came out, she did this many times. But the most important thing to do, she’d say afterward, in a tremulous voice, was nothing. Nothing more than what they were doing. She needed Granville, needed him more than ever, to preserve the status quo and be quiet, if only for her sake. Therefore their secret must be kept, she’d say, with icy seriousness. He’d answer her with a confused nod. Because a man as ignorant and spiteful as his father, Marleen said, a man so mean, would never grasp their special relationship.

  She had a primitive horror of exposure, if Granville even hinted about making their love public. When his feelings were so deep and true! She made him promise to preserve their secret. To press the matter, she’d remind him, as if to embarrass him, that even she had needed convincing at first, to witness his erection the first time she touched him, to bear out the aptness of her touch. So he promised.

  In the end, it didn’t make a difference. He turned fourteen in the summer. One afternoon his father returned home early when an appointment was canceled. He found them naked in the living room, performing intercourse on the floor. Marleen left for town that evening. His father didn’t lay a finger on her before she left, he saved that for his son, with the phone book. The pain passed through him like electric shocks. Only when Granville’s little sister came running did he stop.

  He got away from Claymore as fast as possible. It was because of Marleen that he went to college. He lasted two years, finished later through night school. Ultimately, school wasn’t for him, and by that time he’d found his bride, Emily’s mother. After his father died, they decided to move to the mountain, drive back to Claymore, back to the land, with a desire to be completely self-sufficient, apart from the modern messes.

  But even Emily’s mother never knew why he’d gone to school in the first place, to honor the debt he owed Marleen for her belief in his potential.

  Finally the computer loads. He opens the program and waits for his daughter’s beacon to appear, the small green dot. He’d long ago attached a GPS device to the chassis of the work truck. Only thirty bucks online. He’d even stuck one on the Toussaint boy’s Explorer. And there she is, on the screen, the small blip, geo-pinpointed to the house in front of him. He laughs at his worry. She must’ve parked her truck behind the barn. He strains to look. All he can see is the basketball hoop.

  For a period, fifth and sixth grade, Emily loved basketball. He’d coached her team. Then they quit together midseason, after she told him that playing at home was much preferable, she hated playing on a team with boys.

  He halts the memory by an act of will.

  And remembers again that the girl he raised was all but gone. Like a piece of paper in water, all his efforts had dissolved. The memories they shared, it almost brings him to tears. Everything he’s done, volumes over the years, his life’s work, essentially, to produce a reasonably smart child, a girl unlike the skanks he runs into every day on the street, his efforts had been so quickly undone by her adolescence.

  Look at the boy she spends her time with, the family name she prefers to spend her time with. Look at the person she’s become. Inheritor of her mother’s sick blood.

  He unclips his hat from the roof. Rubs his eyes, red and burning, and kicks open the door but doesn’t climb out. His head pounds from headache. Chest burns from heartache. He pops the laptop out of the car mount, switches from the satellite connection to his own Wi-Fi network. The bars pop up. He launches the browser. Lingers before typing in an address.

  A bird’s voice floats out from the woods with urgency, like an ambulance.

  He feels spied upon, he changes his mind and claps the laptop shut. And with a sigh he propels himself into motion, out of the car. He looks up at the house. Wonders what it would take to burn it down. The answer: not much. Even though keeping that household running had required every ounce of strength he had for the past sixteen years.

  The truth that no one tells you is that kids destroy your life.

  Granville Portis struggles to climb the drive, toward the house of his fathers.

  * * *

  The boy tells Brenner he wants to see the New Jersey cop. Brenner relays the message. Martin parks at the courthouse and bangs upstairs.

  Nick says, as soon as they’re alone, “I need something.” Then the kid leans in, beckoning, puts his lips to Martin’s ear. “Get my mom out of town. Somewhere safe. As soon as possible.”

  Martin leans back.

  “What’s going on?”

  The kid looks furious.

  Martin says, “Does she know about this?”

  “You work for me, don’t you?” His voice curls at the edges. “That’s what I want.”

  “You want me to do what? Kidnap her?”

  It feels like the last straw. What is he, the kid’s puppet?

  “You do this,” Nick says, “and I
’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  Martin stares at him. Stares at him some more. He glances over, the guard’s laughing at something on his phone.

  “So it’s a deal?”

  “Sure.” Martin stands. “Hey, I brought you the newspaper.”

  “So what?”

  “Check out the Red Sox game. Page five.”

  The night at the Purple Panther, the strip club, Martin had gone straight back to his hotel room afterward, dug out his bag, picked up the picture frame with Lillian’s photograph, and junked it in the garbage. He’d been emptying the trash into a larger can in the hallway when he saw a note on his door, a Post-it note. Phone call from Emily Portis. Contact her tomorrow at Georgia’s Fabrics & Sewing —Demeke.

  The next morning, he’d stood next to the cash register just after opening. Emily Portis wore a T-shirt, blue jeans, sneakers. Every inch a teenager, but with a woman’s eyes, a woman’s face to support her effort to appear brave, even officious.

  “I have some questions about Nick’s bail application,” she’d said in a serious tone, hands on the counter. And it wasn’t an act. She wanted to know anything he could tell her about the latest news. “Please don’t leave a single thing out. Thank you.” A worried forty-year-old in a teenager’s body.

  So he gave her what he could share. There wasn’t much she didn’t already know. Still, he didn’t pull punches, and she stayed rock-solid throughout. He was impressed.

  “Look, it’s the confession,” he’d said. “If you can get him to change it somehow.”

  “Nick doesn’t lie,” the girl said. “He doesn’t need to lie.”

  “Well, it’s that or we should believe he’s a murderer.”