Close to the Broken Hearted

by Michael Hiebert

  That’s when she stumbled on him slaughtering the hog.

  She saw the whole thing. And although she didn’t want to see it, she couldn’t look away.

  First, her pa shot it in the head. And the moment that shot rang out, all Sylvie could see in her brain was Preacher Eli’s handgun raised, and the trigger being pulled, and her little brother, Caleb, being blown apart.

  Then, taking a knife, her pa cut the hog’s throat. Blood gushed.

  The kitchen full of Caleb’s blood gushed into Sylvie’s mind.

  She stood there, ten feet away, staring. But what Sylvie didn’t know was that she was also screaming. Screaming exactly like she was that day Caleb was shot. Only, on that day, she had just screamed in her mind. Today, she was screaming out loud.

  Her pa raced over and tried desperately to calm her down. But Sylvie kept shouting, “Caleb! Caleb!” Pointing frantically, her arm trembled.

  Picking her up, Tom Carson took her inside the house. Mother raced from the bedroom. Pa gestured for her to keep quiet.

  They lay Sylvie down in her bed and put a damp cloth on her head. The screaming stopped, but she kept shaking uncontrollably. Visions of her baby brother, as fresh as the dead hog outside, continued playing around and around her mind.

  She got very little sleep that night. The next day, Sylvie’s parents called for the doctor, who gave them a prescription for sleeping pills. If her folks had known how close Sylvie came to swallowing that entire bottle, they wouldn’t have left it on her bed stand. But for some reason, she resisted.

  But she never was the same again after that.

  No longer did she leave the house to go for walks by herself. Her folks never again referred to her as “a kid who likes to spend a lot of time in her room,” even though she rarely left it.

  Now it wasn’t just Sylvie who knew she was broken, but her whole family. At first Sylvie thought it might make things easier, but it didn’t. It only seemed to affect Sylvie’s pa, who relapsed into his nightly sobbing about his dead son. Sylvie would hear Mother telling him everything was going to be okay while she waited for the sleeping pills to kick in and take her to that one place where nothing ever hurt. That place she always hated waking up from.

  Then, two years later, they lost Mother.

  Her pa found the body, but Sylvie heard when he told the police how he came upon it. They must’ve made him tell the story at least three different times.

  “I was walkin’ into the barn and there were a bunch of flies buzzin’ behind one of the horse stalls,” he said. It had been less than an hour since he found her, and he could barely speak through his tears. He was seated on the chair in the living room. Three policemen were at the house. Well, two policemen and one woman. One of the men was taking his report. The woman wasn’t wearing a uniform. She was out in the barn looking over the scene. The other man seemed to be interested in the inside of the house. Sylvie couldn’t figure out why the house would be interesting to anybody when everything had happened in the barn.

  Sylvie was sitting in the parlor just around the corner from the living room with her back to the wall so she could hear. She was crying, but not as much as she reckoned she should be, and it made her feel ashamed. Mainly, she just felt numb.

  “I ain’t never seen so many flies,” her pa continued, “ ’cept when somethin’ like a dead coon or somethin’ shows up on the property, so I looked round the stall expectin’ to see somethin’ like that.” Sylvie heard her pa break down then and start sobbing.

  “It’s okay, sir. Take your time,” one of the officers (probably the one taking the notes) said.

  When her pa spoke again, it was hard to understand him. His nose was stuffed and his voice was full of tears. “And she was lyin’ there. Covered in flies. I don’t know how long she’d been there. I’ve been in town most of the day.”

  “What were you doin’ in town?”

  Sylvie’s pa sniffled. “Buyin’ feed and tack.”

  “You have receipts? People can verify you were there?”

  There was a hesitation. Then, “What? Yeah, o’ course. I was at Arnold’s. And I talked to Pete for musta been twenty minutes. That’s Pete at the tack shop.”

  “Where was the last place you was ’fore coming home?”

  Another pause before Sylvie’s pa answered. “Jim’s,” he said. “You know. The feed store. Why? You don’t think I—”

  “We just need to ask these questions. Standard procedure.”

  Then the other police officer asked, “Was anyone else home?”

  “Yeah,” Sylvie’s pa answered. “My daughter. She was probably in her room.” Because she ain’t been right since her brother died, and so that’s the only place she ever is, Sylvie thought, finishing his sentence in her head.

  “We’ll need to talk to her, too.”

  They asked Sylvie a bunch of questions she really didn’t have very good answers to. She started feeling very accused, like they thought she killed her own mother. The fact was, there was no obvious cause of death, so a case file was opened and an autopsy was performed.

  Turned out Mother had somehow ingested rat poison. After an investigation, the police arrested James Richard Cobbler, a radical member of Eli Brown’s congregation. There was no evidence linking Eli Brown to the murder. Cobbler had acted alone and was, in his own words, “Acting in God’s and Preacher Eli’s best interest.” He wound up being given the death penalty and died by electrocution.

  Sylvie’s pa never did get over it.

  Now, no longer did Tom Carson have anyone to console him at night as he cried for the death of his three-year-old son. And he sobbed for the loss of his wife, too. The weight of having lost them both turned out to be too much for him. Ironically, in the end, he wasn’t as strong as his daughter. Luckily, Sylvie hadn’t been the one to find him. While she was at school one day, he’d gone out past the cattle fields, strung a rope over the bough of one of the oaks close to the outer edge of the woods, and hanged himself.

  Once again, there was a police investigation and an autopsy. Tom Carson’s death was determined to be a suicide.

  Mother would’ve said, “God called them all early. He has plans for every one of us. You just don’t understand them.”

  Sylvie would never understand plans from God that involved taking everyone in her family away from her before she even turned fifteen years old.

  Besides, Sylvie had always wondered about the deaths of her folks. It had always nagged at her the way they both went: so close together, and so strangely. Why would her pa leave Sylvie all alone? Especially knowing she was the way she was? If Preacher Eli hadn’t been in prison, her suspicions would have gone directly to him over her pa’s “suicide.”

  Then part of her thought maybe she was the reason her pa did it. Because he couldn’t deal with her without anybody else helping him. Part of her thought maybe it was her fault.

  Sylvie not only suffered from what the doctors refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder (something Sylvie didn’t really understand), but she had been extraordinarily lonely pretty near her whole life. Foster care didn’t do anything but make her lonelier than ever. Even after meeting Orwin Thomas, she’d still felt lonely most of the time.

  She wondered if this was how most other people felt.

  All of these thoughts continued bouncing through Sylvie’s head as she lay in bed staring at her ceiling until, finally, sleep took mercy on her. She either didn’t dream or, thankfully, didn’t remember what she dreamed after she awoke the next morning.

  CHAPTER 9

  The first thing Dewey had done once I showed him the swords was pull out his notebook and start jotting down a new invention. “What is it?” I asked, looking on.

  He sketched a big circle with a smaller circle attached to the side. Then he wrote the word rope with an arrow pointing to the big circle and the words wire tie with an arrow pointing to the smaller circle. Then he said, “I’m a genius.”

  I still didn’t know what
it was. “How does this make you a genius?” His notebook was over half full of inventions. He’d been pretty busy considering summer wasn’t even half finished yet.

  He held out the pad for me to see more clearly, although I’d already seen pretty well what he’d drawn. “This will allow us to wear our swords on our hips like real knights. Like they is in, you know, scabbards.”

  I studied his diagram. “I’m assumin’ the wire tie isn’t pulled all the way tight?”

  “No, we gotta keep ’em loose so the sword hangs down a bit. The cross guard will stop it from fallin’ through.”

  So we went into my garage and started rummaging through my pa’s stuff. Sure enough, we found some nice yellow rope that was flexible and perfect for wrapping around our waists and tying at the front. I thought we were going to have a problem coming up with wire ties, but Dewey even managed to find those in all that mess, too. I realized my pa sure did have a lot of garbage in that garage.

  Within another ten minutes, both of us had our swords at our sides. Dewey’s invention worked perfectly. I thought it was a much better idea than his satellite television reception with aluminum foil.

  Me and Dewey had spent the last five days in my backyard playing with the swords me and Carry made in the garage on Monday, and I think they turned out pretty good. They didn’t look as nice as the ones at Disney World, but after a minute or two of thrusting and parrying, our imaginations took over. After that, they may as well have been the real things. It was apparent very early on that I was a much better swordsman than Dewey, although he showed signs of improvement each time we fought.

  Every day had been nice and sunny with just the odd cloud overhead to give us a slip of shade. Today there was a slight wind, which was a welcome break from the heat beaming down on us while our blades continued crashing. When they hit, they made a knocking sound like wooden blocks being banged together, but in my head I heard the clanging of solid steel forged by the finest of blacksmiths.

  “Take that!” I said, with a thrust after blocking Dewey’s slash. We were in my backyard, fighting between the two cherry trees. The sun was dancing in and out of the clouds that hung throughout the sky. Currently it was between them, beating straight down on us. I wiped sweat off my forehead with my left arm. It was getting hot.

  Dewey stepped back. “Missed me!” he said and took another step back.

  I kept coming forward, slicing as I approached.

  “Hey, watch it!” Dewey’s back came up against the narrow trunk of one of the cherries.

  “You can’t tell me to watch it,” I said. “We’re sword fighting. This is how you sword fight.” I took another jab. He tried to block it with his sword but missed. The point of my weapon slid right down the edge of his and hit him square on the knuckles.

  “Ow!” he yelled.

  He dropped his sword to the grass and stuck his knuckle in his mouth. “That’s the fourth time you’ve hit me there! Can you watch what you’re doin’?” It was hard to understand what he was saying with his knuckle in his mouth.

  “Dewey. We’re sword fightin’. Fightin’ sometimes involves gettin’ hurt. Just be happy these aren’t real swords. You wanted to use real ones, remember?”

  “I never said I wanted you to scrape my fingers.”

  “No, just cut ’em off.”

  Dewey said nothing. Just stood there with his hand in his mouth.

  “Pick up your sword,” I said.

  “No, I’m done playin’.”

  “C’mon,” I said. “Don’t be a baby. I hardly hit you.”

  “Abe, it hurt.”

  “You’re a baby.”

  “Let me hit you.”

  “Go ahead. All you gotta do is get past my expert blocking technique.”

  “No, I mean just let me hit you so you can see what it feels like.”

  I put my hands on my hips, holding my sword at my waist with its tip facing the ground. “Do I look like an idiot?”

  “Do I? Why would I keep playin’ when all you do is whack my fingers?”

  “Cuz it’s fun?” I offered.

  He just glared at me. I got the feeling it was less fun for him.

  Just then my mother called me from the back door.

  “What?” I called back.

  “We’re goin’ out. Dewey has to go home. He can come back later.”

  “Where are we goin’?”

  “Shoppin’.”

  “Where’s Carry?”

  “What does that have to do with anythin’?” she asked. The sun went behind a cloud. It was amazing how fast the temperature dropped.

  “Can’t I stay home with her?” I hated shopping. Especially the way my mother shopped. It was like she had to look at every single item in the store before making a decision about buying anything. You’d think my mother would let me stay home by myself, me being twelve and all. She sometimes did, but only on special occasions like when she didn’t have any choice. But maybe because she worked as a police officer, she worried more than other parents about me being alone. Like she just expected someone to come to the house and snatch me away or something.

  “No, she’s goin’ out,” she said. “Besides, I wanna buy you a new pair of sneakers.”

  My head fell. I hung my arms from my sides. My sword went limp. “Do we have to go today?”

  “Abe. Do as you’re told. Do we need to have a talk about listenin’?”

  I’d had enough talks with my mother about listening to last me the rest of my life. That wasn’t the problem. I knew her point of view when it came to listening. “No.”

  “Good. Let’s go. Dewey, thanks for comin’ over.”

  “You’re welcome, Miss Leah.” He stood there, his hand still in his mouth. His words came out half mumbled.

  Slowly, I wandered toward the back door. “What’s wrong with his hand?” my mother asked.

  “Abe tried to cut off my fingers with his sword,” Dewey said, his mouth continuing to make the words near on impossible to understand.

  “Abe,” my mother said as I walked by her into the house, “do I need to take your new swords away?”

  I stopped and looked up at her. “I barely scraped the edge of his hand. He’s just being a baby. Look at this.” I held up my sword, displaying both sides of it. “Carry even dulled the edges. I doubt I could kill a beetle with it.”

  “Just be more careful,”

  “Thanks, Miss Leah,” Dewey said. He was still standing in the backyard with his back against the cherry tree.

  “Dewey?” my mother said. “Take your sword and go home now. I think your hand’s gonna be fine.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He picked up his sword with the hand not in his mouth and headed around the house to the front where his bicycle was waiting.

  “I’m not gonna get a call from his ma, am I?” my mother asked me.

  “No,” I said. “I barely touched him. Honest.”

  “Okay, cuz if I do, I’m tellin’ her I had nothin’ to do with it, and you were the mastermind behind the whole thing.”

  I searched her eyes to see what she meant by that and saw a sparkle there. She was kidding around. She knew Dewey was just as big a baby as I did.

  Next thing I knew, me and my mother were in the car and going through town. About fifteen minutes into the drive, I realized we weren’t headed anywhere we might be able to buy me a pair of sneakers. We were rumbling up Hunter Road, toward Blackberry Springs—away from downtown or anything even closely resembling a store of any sort. “Where are we goin’?” I asked. “There’s nowhere to buy sneakers up here.”

  “I have an errand to run before we go shoppin’.”

  I had no idea what we could be doing going up in this part of town. There was nothing here except lonely houses spaced very far apart and a lot of forest. It was actually a rather pretty part of Alvin, with densely packed elm, hickory, oak, maple, and other trees lining the edges of the road. If you went up far enough, you came to the springs that ran between Cornflower L
ake and Willet Lake. I had heard the springs were popular with teenagers who liked to drive up and park along the side of Hunter Road with their girlfriends.

  Thinking of that brought back memories of me and my mother sneaking up on Carry and her boyfriend. That was last year when they were in his red car on the outskirts of town parked at the side of one of the old ranch roads. My mother actually pulled her gun on Carry’s boyfriend and threatened to shoot him in his private parts. That memory brought a smile to my face. “What sort of errand is we goin’ on?”

  “I need to talk to someone. It won’t take long.”

  I had no recollection of anyone we knew living up near Willet Lake. “Who do you need to talk to?” I narrowed my eyes. “Is this police work?” My mother had developed a habit of taking me with her on police-related matters.

  She looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “Yes, it’s police work. Why is it important to you who I need to talk to?”

  I shrugged. “Just askin’. Since I’m comin’, figured I should know.”

  A minute went by while it seemed like she was considering whether to tell me any more about it. Finally, she did. “I’m goin’ to talk with Eli Brown. I promised Miss Sylvie I’d pay him a visit.”

  “Preacher Eli?” I asked, astonished. “Isn’t he in jail?”

  My mother took a deep breath. “He’s done his prison time.”

  “And he’s back here?” I asked. “In Alvin?” I found this exceptionally discomforting that a killer lived in my town.

  “Yes, Abe. He’s done his time. He’s no longer a felon. He’s a free man. He can live wherever he chooses.”

  “But he’s a killer, Mom. He killed a kid!”

  She sighed. It sounded like it came out through gritted teeth. “You don’t understand the legal system, Abe. He killed a boy by accident. Eli Brown was committed to prison for doin’ it and did all the time he was supposed to do. From the law’s point of view, he’s no longer a criminal.”

  “But he did kill Sylvie’s brother.”

  She paused. “He did. But that was a long time ago. Time has forgiven him of his sin. So should you, Abe.”