The Butcher's Daughter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  The car is just one of the logistics she’s been trying to think through. There are others. Cyril will have it all sorted out, or it’ll sort itself out.

  Had he been watching her, or the hospital? Or did the plan come later? Had he gotten wind of Rodney Lee’s visit somehow, and realized they couldn’t take any chances with their precious daughter?

  He couldn’t risk being seen at the hospital, and he certainly couldn’t pose as a nurse himself. And his mother . . .

  As much as Melody looks forward to hugging that woman and thanking her for the bold risk she’d taken, there’s a part of her that bears resentment.

  Toward her, and toward Cyril.

  How could he, why would he, have put Melody, and her family, too, through such trauma?

  Every time she feels that awful ache, she reminds herself that this was the only way. He’d spared her the agony of planning, of having to cover their tracks with lies.

  Couldn’t his mother have whispered something to Melody at the hospital, though, to let her know who she was and what she was up to? Let her in on the plan?

  But no, of course she couldn’t do that. What mother immediately, instinctively trusts a stranger to carry her newborn child out of her life? If Melody had cried out or protested or tried to stop her, there would have been an uproar.

  “Don’t you worry none. I promise I’ll take good care of her.”

  Whenever Melody recalls those words now, she’s grateful for the heartfelt message, likely at her son’s behest.

  Cyril would never hurt you if he had a choice.

  She’s reached his house. His car is parked out front.

  She pulls up behind it and jumps out of the Camaro. The flats she’d wedged onto her feet this morning sink into the mud.

  Inside the house, Otis starts barking wildly.

  He doesn’t know it’s me.

  She hurries toward the porch, splashing through puddles without a care.

  The front door opens.

  “Cyr—”

  The two young boys from the bridge stare out at her. Twins, she realizes. Not identical, but close. One has shy eyes and stands a step behind his brother, whose sturdier arms hold Otis back as he barks and snarls at Melody.

  “It’s okay, Otis! You know me,” she says, and the dog goes still at the sound of his name or her voice, or maybe her scent reaching his twitching nostrils.

  The boy releases Otis from his grasp. Melody expects him to trot toward her, but he sinks onto the porch floor with his nose on his paws, sorrowful eyes fixed on her.

  She just stands there in the pouring rain as the boys look at the red Camaro, exchange a glance, and then shift their attention back to her, wary. No, afraid. Terrified.

  “I’m . . . a friend of Cyril’s. Is he here?”

  They look at each other and shake their heads.

  Otis whimpers. The sound chills her.

  “He’s not here? Is he at work?”

  Again, they shake their heads.

  “Oh, right . . . it’s Sunday,” she says, as if that’s it. As if nothing is wrong here. As if her voice doesn’t sound high-pitched and unnatural to her own ears, and she’s steady on her feet, and nothing terrible is going to happen, or . . .

  Has already happened.

  She glances again at Otis. His gaze is mournful, and a dark truth takes hold somewhere deep in her soul.

  She snaps her head back to the boys and delivers questions, rapid fire to keep them from answering. “Do you know where Cyril is, then? Maybe at his mother’s place? She lives right down the road, doesn’t she? On the other side of the old plantation house? The one that’s boarded up?”

  She’s run out of things to ask, other than the thing that’s nudging its way to her consciousness.

  The boy who’d held Otis steps forward. “Ma’am.”

  She swallows, tilts her face to the gray sky, raindrops dripping on her cheeks like tears, like blood.

  “Ma’am?”

  She whispers, “Yes.”

  “I’m right sorry to tell you, but they’s both . . .” He breaks off and looks back at his brother.

  “Gone,” the other boy says, and his brother nods.

  “Yeah. Gone.”

  “For how long?”

  “Couple’a weeks now. First Cyril, our daddy said, and they came back to get his mama a few days later, and we’s just been takin’ care o’ things here, tryin’ to figure out what to do ’bout their places and Otis here, ’cause our mama says we can’t ’ford another mouth to feed even if it’s just a dog, and . . .”

  “Wait, wait, I’m sorry, I’m just trying to . . . Who came? For Cyril and his mother?”

  “Buckruh.”

  “You mean . . . the police? They arrested them?”

  The boys look at each other and shake their heads.

  “No, ma’am, it ain’t like that. Bad buckruh. Cyril and his mama—they dead.”

  Beneath the black umbrella, Oran walks briskly through the rain toward the subway, mulling what had happened upstairs.

  It’s natural, he supposes, that a girl Gypsy’s age would be thinking about her mother on Mother’s Day, but . . .

  Any other girl, with any other mother.

  Not his Gypsy. She’d always seen her mother for what she was. He’d allowed the wretched waste case to drift in and out of their lives. He didn’t want Gypsy tempted to go searching for Linda one day as Oran had his own father, who’d turned out to be even more pathetic than his mother and stepfather.

  Reaching the subway stairs, Oran lowers the umbrella and enters, brushing raindrops from the trench coat he’d snatched from the Costello house the other night. It fits him pretty well, though Joe had a larger build.

  Oran had thought of Eddie as he’d plunged the knife into the man, though he bore no resemblance to his stepfather. By the time Oran was finished with them, Joe Costello and his family didn’t resemble human beings.

  He drops a token into the slot, pushes through the turnstile, and heads for the platform. The station is quiet. It’s early.

  Waiting for the downtown D train, he thinks about Linda.

  About her last visit.

  She’d been toying with the idea of going back to Nebraska to see her parents. They were getting older. Didn’t they deserve to know their daughter was alive? That she had a child?

  No, Oran told her. They did not. He didn’t need strangers—narrow-minded squares—showing up to rescue their granddaughter from her bohemian father.

  Linda wouldn’t listen to reason.

  That night was the first time he’d ever given his daughter sedative-laced chocolates. When she was asleep, he came up behind Linda with a butcher knife as she stood in the kitchen running a bath. He quietly slit her throat and she slumped into the tub, tinting the bathtub water pink as she bled out. Gypsy had slept peacefully through that, and through Oran’s soft grunts as he rolled Linda in the rug.

  He dragged it down the stairs and along the street to the new site for the Bruckner Expressway.

  “Hey, you done with that, man? Give it here,” a strung out vagrant told him.

  “Sorry, man, I just found it.”

  “Right on.” He flashed the peace sign and rolled over on his filthy blanket.

  Oran dumped Linda in a bulldozed construction pit, kicking enough dirt to cover her. He dragged the rug a few more blocks and left it by an underpass populated by junkies who’d never notice the bloodstains.

  Then, to be on the safe side, he’d circled back over to the vagrant, who never even opened his eyes when Oran leaned over and strangled him.

  Things had been different that night than they are now. The families in Brooklyn hadn’t gone quietly. The daughters hadn’t submitted.

  The train pulls in. He boards, and settles in for the long ride to the end of the line, where he’ll visit Margaret Costello in Coney Island Hospital.

  She’ll never even know he was there. Like the others, Tara and Christina, she’ll be heavily medicated and reco
vering from cuts and bruises she’d received in the struggle with her rapist. But he wants to see her, has to see her, because she belongs to him now, and so does the child he’d planted inside her.

  Gypsy walks quickly toward the police station, keeping an eye and ear out for Oran, though she can hear nothing but traffic and the sirens that are now pervasive in the city. If he’s preaching nearby and sees her before she sees him, she’ll make up a story. She can tell him she had to run to the supermarket.

  At this hour on a Sunday?

  Well, she’ll say she’s meeting a friend.

  You have friends?

  She thinks of Greg. Why, in all of this, is his betrayal as hard to accept as her father’s?

  Because it’s impossible. How can an innocent person simultaneously lose the only two men—the only two people—she’s ever loved and trusted?

  Maybe she was wrong . . .

  The gold watch weighs heavy in her pocket. She wasn’t wrong about Oran.

  But maybe somehow, Greg . . .

  If she makes a right at the next corner, she can walk down the street where he lives.

  It’s too late for second chances, even if he hadn’t lied to her. But maybe she’ll catch one last glimpse of him before she goes to the police. When they arrest Oran, social services will take her away and her life will be destroyed.

  She tries to focus on all the other lives she’ll save in not saving her father’s, and her own. She tries to ignore Oran’s oft-spoken words echoing in her head.

  “No one else matters.”

  She’d believed that, hadn’t she? Until she’d discovered that innocent people are suffering, dying at his hands. Husbands and wives, children and grandmothers . . .

  But not the daughters. The daughters are living. He wants them to live. To become Gypsy’s sisters, and to bear his children.

  No. No.

  She walks along Greg’s street, wondering which of the identical brick buildings is his, and what he’s doing right now. Sleeping, most likely. He’d mentioned that his mother works a double overnight shift most weekends.

  When she’s off, she insists that he accompany her to early mass.

  He isn’t among the pedestrians Gypsy can see—someone walking a dog, a man in coveralls with a lunch box, a family in Sunday clothes waiting at the busy intersection ahead.

  A young woman emerges from a building. Her legs are bare beneath the hem of her short coat. She’s wearing white go-go boots and pulling a daffodil-colored scarf over her short blond hair. She ties it under her chin and cups her hand to a deep yawn.

  “A slumber party for two at Greg’s.”

  Gypsy follows her toward the avenue. Carol-Ann’s pace is unhurried. She seems languid and preoccupied.

  A voice whispers in Gypsy’s head, louder, somehow, than the sirens screaming on the avenue.

  “Ye are of your father the devil . . .”

  Oran’s voice.

  Carol-Ann arrives at the intersection and stops, yawning again, staring almost trancelike at the traffic passing full speed, just inches from the curb—cars, cabs, a bus.

  She seems unaware of Gypsy behind her, just inches from her back. Close enough to touch her.

  They’re the only two people waiting to cross.

  “Ye are of your father the devil . . .”

  She’s alone in the world from here on in. She has to take care of herself now.

  An ambulance wails toward the intersection, chased by a fire truck, and the whisper explodes into a scream. Not in Oran’s voice, but in her own.

  Do it! Do it now!

  Her arms move.

  Her hands land on Carol-Ann’s back.

  One push and the girl falls forward, into the streaming gutter, right in front of the fire truck.

  Gypsy sees it hit her like a speeding train. Blood stains the yellow scarf. Brakes squeal.

  She turns and runs as fast as she can, away from Carol-Ann’s broken body, away from the police station, away from the terrible thing she just did and the far worse thing she was about to do.

  It’s going to be okay. It is. Because she is her father’s daughter, and he’s crooning in her ear.

  You and me, we’re the chosen ones, Gypsy, baby. No one else matters . . .

  Driving back to the mainland, Melody notices a splintered wooden rail halfway across the bridge.

  She clenches the steering wheel.

  If she jerks it hard in that direction, what’s left of the rail will snap like a toothpick. The Camaro will sail over the edge into the air, into the water. It will float for a bit, won’t it? Like a boat, bobbing along. But then it’ll start to sink, slowly spinning toward the bottom.

  She’ll drown.

  Maybe that’s supposed to happen, like in the nightmare that had turned into that beautiful dream about floating on the sea with Cyril and Martina after he’d saved her.

  If she drives off the bridge, will he be there waiting for her?

  Maybe one day, she’ll be brave enough, or coward enough, to fly over the edge. One day, when she’s alone in the car.

  “Don’t worry,” she says, glancing over her shoulder. “Not today.”

  She keeps on driving, past the splintered rail, onto the mainland, toward the place she’d thought she’d left behind forever just a couple of hours ago. Instead, it’s Barrow that’s disappearing for the last time in the rearview mirror. She’ll never return, never have a reason or the heart to.

  She’d collapsed onto Cyril’s front steps when she realized what the boys were trying to tell her. One of them had run into the house and returned with a glass of water, as his brother, the one with the shy eyes, sat quietly beside her. Otis came and rested his head on her lap, and she stroked his fur as the boys shared the tragic tale they’d heard secondhand.

  Buckruh came in the night, they said, and took Cyril from his bed. The next day, Cyril’s mama sent the boys’ daddy and uncle out into the swamp to look for his body.

  “Did they . . . did they find him?” she’d managed to ask.

  The shy brother looked away, staring in silence at the ground as his brother said, “Enough to know, Daddy told us.”

  She shuddered, and Otis whimpered. She hugged the dog close, buried her face in his soft fur as the boy went on, “Miz Marceline disappeared just the same way a few days later. They ain’t found her yet, but they know the buckruh dunnit, too. They been comin’ around here in that fancy car for a while now.”

  “Fancy car?” She looked up at the Camaro.

  “Not like yours. This one is blue.”

  “It ain’t, either,” the shy brother spoke up. “It’s green-blue, same as that there dress.”

  Turquoise.

  Rodney Lee.

  The rain lets up as she drives into town. She rolls down the window, taking deep breaths of fresh air.

  So much of it makes sense now.

  So much does not.

  Why hadn’t Cyril’s grief-stricken mother told Melody what had happened to him, and that she feared Martina was in danger?

  “If Marceline LeBlanc sets her mind to something, she doesn’t let anything get in her way . . .”

  Maybe she hadn’t trusted Melody to protect her baby. Given her condition at the time, is it any wonder?

  Or maybe she didn’t think the buckruh would come looking for the baby out on Barrow.

  Maybe they wouldn’t have, if Melody hadn’t told Duke and Scotty about the Negro nurse who’d taken Martina.

  And so, Rodney Lee had returned to Barrow to destroy the child he believed would destroy Travis. He’d found her with her grandmother, and he’d killed them both.

  What did he have to lose? He’d been drafted. He was leaving town. He knew Scotty would cover his tracks, although . . .

  Melody had been so certain those police officers believed she was the guilty party, and were protecting her—well, protecting Travis.

  In the end, that’s exactly what they’d done, though, isn’t it? Protected Travis. Punished her. De
stroyed her; murdered the man she loved, and her only child, and the woman who’d lost her own life trying to save her.

  Cyril had tried to warn her. He’d seen firsthand what deep-seated hatred can do.

  She pulls up in front of her parents’ house beneath a glistening pink and green magnolia canopy. The door bangs open. She’s only been gone a few hours, but that had been more than enough time to send Honeybee Beauregard Abernathy into a tailspin.

  “Oh, thank heavens! John, she’s here!” Arms outstretched, her mother descends the porch steps as Melody opens the car door. “Where have you been? We’ve been so worried!”

  “I went to find a friend.”

  “A friend!”

  She flinches as her mother reaches to hug her.

  Honeybee stops, almost close enough to touch Melody but not quite, keeping her at arm’s length.

  “A friend? But . . . you weren’t feeling well.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother, I . . .”

  “You’ve been crying.”

  Has she? She touches her face. Her cheeks feel tacky and her eyes burn as if she’d rubbed them with wet sand.

  “So have you,” she says, noticing Honeybee’s smudged eye makeup and reddened skin. “You’ve been crying—oh, Mother, you’re crying.”

  “Because I thought . . . I wasn’t sure that you’d . . .” She wipes at her eyes. “But of course you’d come home. Where else would you go? That’s what I said to Daddy, didn’t I, John?”

  She looks toward the porch, and Melody sees her father standing there in his Sunday suit.

  “You did say that, Honeybee. And I told you that Poppet would never leave without telling us where she was going if she wasn’t coming back soon.”

  “No, I know she wouldn’t. You wouldn’t.” Her mother forces a smile. “Especially on Mother’s Day.”

  Melody can’t find words to tell her parents that they’re right, or that they’re wrong. Or that she’d been forced to choose whether to be a mother or a daughter because she couldn’t be both, and now . . .

  And now, there is no choice.

  “All right, then . . . let’s go inside,” Honeybee says.

  “Mother? It’s just . . . I . . . I didn’t come home alone, is all.”