The Weight of Glass

by Stuart Heatherington

  I held up my right middle finger and turned it sideways so it was lip level to her mouth.

  “What the fuck is that?” She leveled her gaze.

  “Just think of it as a mustache, cause it sure ain’t the red carpet I’m rolling out. Just so you know, he beat me for ten years, and the last thing he did still scares the shit out of me when I close my eyes. So, forgive the hell out of me, when I say, just because you sleep with her, doesn’t make you part of the family.”

  “Shut up, Lee! For once in your life keep your damn mouth closed! You don’t have a right to talk to her like that. You never have,” Amy screamed, the flat of her hand slamming down next to her plate causing the table to stir. “She’s as much a part of me as you are and has been for years now. She’s there for me, which is more than I can say for you.”

  “I’m there!”

  “No, you’re not. You’re to busy picking a war with everybody at this table.” Amy got up, shaking her head. “I love you, Lee, always have, but doing this…God, it’s hard. You haven’t been a good brother in a long time. The boy I loved—knew would always be there for me—he went away. And I don’t know where.”

  My sister stood there, shoulders buried under the emotional landslide of her face. Simply falling apart before my eyes. Beneath the pain, dwelled the complexity of a hurt I knew I would never be able to understand. With each tear she shed, I carried the weight of it. First in the trembling of my heart, where her bone-crushing sobs left me breathless, then in the foundation of everything I knew, as it crumbled to the ground.

  She came around behind me, placing her arms across my neck. That was when I noticed the small black object in her hand. I stared at it until the realization dawned on me in a cold wave of shivers. Laying it on its side, she left it in front of me. It was an old model Leica 2 camera. Along the front right casing, lay a weathered scratch embedded from right to left, a jagged trail curling under the bottom. In place of the lens was a dark hole of glassy shards, a hollow black eye of memory.

  “I found this. Did you miss it?”

  I stifled the bony stem of fear gathering behind my eyes and picked it up. The camera, light in my hand, felt oddly familiar. Although I had not seen it since the last time I was a boy, it felt intimate to the touch, like we shared a hidden knowledge. On some level, I guess we did. Together, we told two stories of our own; one of shame and one of revenge.

  “When you’re ready—” Amy let my shoulder go. “I’ll be waiting.”

  I didn’t even turn to watch her walk away. In the distance I picked out the scratching roll of her lighter and knew she was dragging on a fresh cigarette. Sounds of the hammock springs gave way in unison. Carefully, I cupped the small camera in my hand, picked up my glass from the table, found the half-empty bottle of wine still left before my plate and moved toward the porch.

  When I stepped away, the weight of wine, as heavy and dark as an undertow, swelled out of the past and threatened to drag me down with it. If I wasn’t sure at the table, by the time I reached the door, I knew I was well on my way to being shit-faced drunk.

  Out in front of me, a red ember danced off the tip of a cigarette, stretched over a draped knee. Amy sat in the worn hammock, patting her hand on the corded rope next to her with the thinnest of smiles across her face. It’s like dancing with the devil—sometimes you just have to.

  Nicole brushed past me, hand clipping me in the back gently, as she high stepped over the coffee table and planted her butt in the chair beneath the window. She moved like she was grabbing a seat at a busy intersection. It wasn’t she was waiting for the crash that pissed me off; it was the fact part of her knew it was coming. She was the kid with the brick, and I was the unsuspecting windshield rounding the corner.

  I sat down next to Amy.

  “Thank you,” she whispered in a trailing voice almost too soft to hear, words swallowed by the sound of the wind feeding its way through the dunes and ingesting the piers below the house. A gray ancient moth clinked at the light from the porch ceiling and then stopped in the sudden quiet.

  I turned and sunk in misery. “For what? I haven’t done anything.” I tried not to slur, eyes blinking slowly into focus, an act that was becoming harder to do as the evening wore on. Charlie walked back onto the porch, and we held each other’s eyes as she took a seat. I felt terrible.

  “No, you already have, trust me.” There was a gentle nod as Amy’s words filled my ears with a smile. “Lee, you’re my king of hearts. One way or another…I’ve always had you to protect me.”

  I sat there realizing how remarkably different my sister looked now. For the longest time, I knew there had been a change in her, but I couldn’t put my finger on it until that moment. It was as if she were alive again—although, she was never truly dead either—more like in some sort of spiritual hibernation. She was the spring bear. Amy had learned to survive the winter of her past and the flowers were beginning to bloom, drawing her out from deep within the shelter she’d formed over herself so many years before. Self preservation brought with it a sense of artistry at keeping my sister sane. Only it had taken me years to understand that the medium didn’t matter any longer. It could be in the cave of some forgotten memory if she chose, or in her ability to put pen to paper, and on rare occasions, as I knew, with the ones we loved or couldn’t stop loving.

  Off in the distance the waves still crashed across the dark and in and out of one another, surging as a band of thieves, a constant pilfering of sand from the one that went before, until none were left with anything except a bed of deception. I understood in that clear, drunken moment of time, I was a paper king. A ruler without a heart. Inside, I was the king of emptiness, if not my sister’s king of lies.

  8

  1972 - I didn’t remember the year as clearly as I once had, yet I know it shaped a restless period of my life. My best friend was named Kelby Moorehouse, a feckless boy my own age with a bottle mouth and a spindly face that catered to whistle, sharp features. He had a crooked back most of the other kids ridiculed him for. But I saw past the physical deformities. For me, there was a simple pleasure in having him at my side. As country boys, growing up in a small town near the middle of Alabama, we were glued to one another when hunting season began, something Kelby excelled at with his eyes closed, handicapped or not. Together we traipsed across Bascomb County, forging an unspoken love, shared between brothers, I had never obtained with Paul. Maybe that’s why it pained me so hard to carry him out of the woods.

  “Let me see your hands, Lee.” Mother resided at the spot on my bed where Dad used to tell his stories from. A wispy apron crossed her lap and draped below her knees with checkered whites and reds.

  “They’re fine.”

  “Do what I’m telling you. Now put them out here on my lap. The doctor said if they get infected you’d be in a world of regret.”

  I placed them out for her to unwrap and she did so gently, with the precision and care of a nurse. Then she stared at what was the mess of my hands. “They seem to be doing better. Do they still hurt badly?”

  Miserable pain had kept me up much of the night. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Is the ointment working? Dr. Gage said apply it three times a day and rewrap it to keep out infection.”

  “Yeah, I know, Mom. You’ve told me every time you’ve put it on.”

  She grabbed my wrist in her hand. “I’m just doing what he said, Lee. You don’t have to be Captain Smarty Pants with me.”

  “Easy.” I jerked back, but she held me tight. “I’m not upset at you.”

  “You have a strange way of acting like you are. And I don’t like the tone of your voice. Heaven knows, if your daddy were—”

  I cut her off before she even got started. “What, that we wouldn’t even be here in the first place? Why don’t you admit it, Mom? That’s what you should say.”

  “I love your stepfather, Lee. Try protesting something that’s wrong for a change. He does everything in his power to do the
work of the Lord. Maybe that upsets you, but it shouldn’t,” she said, a fire in her eyes that I knew to be trouble. “Maybe you want him to spend more time with you, the way your father did, I don’t know, but he’s a man with a very busy schedule. God keeps him working hard in his church, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing! And I won’t have it in this house.” She looked directly at me, and then dipped her head. “Right now, as we speak, he’s preparing Kelby’s eulogy, and before we leave for the funeral he’ll drive over to the Moorehouse’s and lead them in a small prayer, then take them to the church.”

  “Fine, Mother.”

  “Fine is right, young man. You need to remember exactly what the Lord has done for this house. There’s food on the table and clothes on your back, and, by the grace of God, you’re alive when it just as easily could have been you pinned under that terrible tree.”

  “Don’t start with that again.”

  “I’ll start wherever I see fit.” Tears stretched across her face. She dabbed at them with an apron. “You don’t think about things like that.”

  But she was wrong, of course. I thought about plenty of things. Things like running away, because I knew if I stayed long enough something bad would happen to me. Those types of ideas circled through my head like a swirling drain without a plug, leaving me cold inside. I didn’t know how to stop them.

  I ripped my arm away and nearly pulled her with it. “I think about ’em plenty. What do you reckon I’ve been doing while I’m lying in this bed? Didn’t think I might have a thing or two going through my mind? Who do you think cut him out with that axe?” I held up my mutilated hands in front of her face. “Who carried him back to his grandfathers? That was me, remember? I did think about it. I thought about it to death.”

  “You certainly don’t act it. Because God listens if you let Him. Have you prayed at all?”

  Like God has any answers for me. “What’s He going to tell me, Mom, huh?”

  “Don’t say huh. It isn’t proper.”

  “Think God cares if I say huh? He hears how many languages a day?” I said bitterly. “You really think huh is gonna throw him for one? That He’ll have to close down shop and hang up His out for lunch sign? Sorry, folks, no more prayers; I’m sorting out the meaning of huh.”

  “Don’t get smart with me. It doesn’t become you.”

  “What do you know about what becomes me?”

  “Because I’m your mother!” Her eyes were clearly planted on me. “That should be answer enough.”

  You’re damn right. And you should be protecting me, I wanted to scream until my lungs collapsed. But knew I couldn’t, because of the constant shape of fear that sharpened my instincts.

  We sat in silence as she scooped out ointment on her fingertips and massaged the opened blisters on my hands. When she finished, she recapped the jar and wiped the excess on a towel sitting by my bed stand, then took down the scissors and a roll of thin gauze. Rolling out the gauze, she stretched it across the length of the bed, doubled it over, then cut it in half.

  “You know things don’t have to be as tough as you make them.”

  I didn’t reply. Tired of the argument, I just nodded my head and looked off at the foot of the bed. I found I liked arguing with my mother some time ago, and I disliked what it brought out in me. Beating her up with words didn’t help anything.

  “There, how does that feel? Better I hope.”

  I didn’t answer her for the longest time as she finished wrapping my hands.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, Lee.”

  “Do you still love us?”

  “Why would you ask such a silly question?”

  “Not sure. I guess just so I can hear it.”

  She smiled, eyes fixing on mine. “Of course I do. I love you with all my heart. You’re my child—I gave birth to you and your brother and sisters—I will always love you.” She stroked the side of my face. “Nothing could ever take that away from you or replace that in me. When you have children of your own one day you’ll understand that. Now the real question is do you still love your old Mother?”

  “Yeah, Mom. I love you,” I said, going through the motions.

  “Then we’ll always share that, won’t we?”

  I nodded, but I didn’t know what we shared anymore. Not really.

  “You better get dressed. We’ll be leaving in an hour or so. And don’t worry about your tie. I’ll take care of that.” She disappeared out the door, leaving me alone in my room.

  A fresh pressed shirt hung on its hanger from above the door casing. I removed it using my fingers and closed off the hall outside. Most of my effort was centered on getting the damn pants buttoned and it took several attempts to fasten them. Sitting on the side of the bed, I pulled my shirtsleeves over my arms and, with a groan, managed to twist the buttons through one at a time, losing speed the lower I went. Next were the socks. Collapsing on the bed, I rolled them up onto my feet and left the elastic straggling at the ankles like loose folds of skin. Soreness touched every bone along the shoulders and back. They burned in contempt; there were muscles that screamed in my body, taking my breath away. Lifting my arms became a painful chore I didn’t wish for.

  The restless sound of door hinges caught my attention. I half expected Amy to barge in, offering to help me out. Or worse, Marcus looking to lay hands on me, something which he had already done twice, both times stirring me out of a restless sleep. But whoever was there chose not to enter. I could make out a black shadow running along the crease, something other than the gloomy wall outside my door. Up near the top of the framing, I glimpsed a movement. Shivers washed over my skin. It was a single eye, floating in its darkened, watery socket. The flashing of its single, heavy lid caught my attention, like a bulging fish unable to breathe out of the ocean.

  The Good Shepherd stood watch outside my door, staring in on me for nearly half a minute or more before he finally cracked it open and stepped in, careful to close the door behind him securely. His long legs crossed the wooden floors of my room in slow, lumbering movements. In his left hand was a thick Bible bound over in brown leather and embossed with strands of flaking gold. It was cracked and worn from its regimented use; cloudy tape ran up the binding and acted to hold its pages in place. An index finger was tucked tightly up into the book of Psalms.

  Warren took a seat in my desk chair and slid up close to me, crossing one knee over the other as he did when he sat in the large chair behind the church pulpit, waiting to begin his sermon. “How are you doing?” He glanced at my hands, his thin lips tightening effortlessly into a smile.

  “Any better and I’d think I was in heaven, Reverend.” I used the term I had taken to calling him to his face, the one I knew he disliked coming from me. But I would never give him the satisfaction of anything else; I hated him, purely and simply, with all my heart.

  He continued to stare at me in his breathless way, eyes blinking lazily, the right one batting into its rutty hatch a fraction of a second before the left. Dark pupils widened in the shadows of my room, his pale lifeless face an apparition.

  “I hoped you’d recover from your ordeal soon enough.” He chuckled deeply, almost pleasantly, a Santa’s laugh in some dimly lit storefront window. It disturbed me to hear it, because I knew his true nature. “The Lord works in mysterious ways. Always has.” He turned his head out the window. “Anyway, it’s good you feel you’re getting your strength back. I have a whole cord of wood needs chopping by next week. You’ll see to get it done, won’t you?”

  “Be right on that,” I said without an ounce of sincerity.

  “Make sure you are, sinner.”

  “You know what’s funny? How I’m beat up in here and my hands look like somebody flayed them on a butcher’s table, and yet Marcus is spared from lifting his nose out of Revelations. What you got him doing this week, huh? Dusting the study as usual? Why not, instead of him laying hands on me, he laid hands on a rake or a broom for a change?”

  “It’s
not for you to decide the work of the Lord.” He spread open a Bible on his leg. “You remember that.”

  A fuel of words filled my head and my mouth. Something I was losing control of as I grew older. “And who has that privilege, you?”

  “I should think that falls in my hands, yes.” He crooked his head slightly as if I should have known there was no other answer to my question. “Certainly you don’t think a boy, such as yourself, can have that responsibility? Should hope you’re not that ignorant. Tell me you’re not that ignorant, sinner.”

  “I’ll tell you what ignorance is,” I said, words coming in a furious slur. “Ignorance is bliss, particularly when dealing with your hypocritical lies.”

  “That so?”

  “More than anyone kno—” He backhanded me. I reeled head first into the bed post before I knew what hit me. When I regained my balance, he was still sitting calmly in the chair with his Bible open to Psalms. The sting on my face moved up the jaw and settled in around the bone of the left eye. Skin around my temple was dimpled from the leather. It wouldn’t leave a mark. Struck with it before, I knew its aftereffects.