Tribulations

by Richard Thomas

  ****

  Daddy had been on the road now for weeks. Business trip, local fair, something to do with the price of our harvest and subsidies, I didn’t understand it all. I knew that the house was quiet—that we were bored to death, and I knew that the bottle of whiskey that hid above the fridge was slowly emptying as our mother sat quiet at the kitchen table.

  We siphoned off part of it, and replaced it with water, disappearing into the fields when she went to sleep. We choked it down as we lay in the darkness, waiting for something to happen. When I drifted off, his hands found my neck, his knees on my shoulders—the air in my lungs disappearing into the night. He’d found out about us, Margie and me, there was nothing else to explain it. He was stronger than I remembered, his eyes bulging in his head as he squeezed on my neck, showing no sign of letting up. I finally brought my knees up, banging him in the center of his back, throwing him off of me, as air rushed back into my lungs.

  “Damnit, Billy,” I choked. “She’s not worth it. You’re too young, anyway.”

  “Fuck you,” he murmured, looking up from the ground, the darkness swallowing our sweat and our tension.

  “She’s my girl,” Billy muttered. “Don’t touch her again.”

  “You’d choose flesh over blood?” I asked. “She’s just some stupid whore from down the road.”

  “Shut your mouth, Rodney.”

  “I’m sure I’m not the only boy she’s kissing. I told you, she’s no good.”

  Billy lay there.

  “That’s for me to decide,” he said.

  ****

  Daddy never did come back from that business trip. And that wasn’t a good thing. Billy wasn’t talking to me—a ghost that drifted about the property, chucking rocks at anything that moved. For three days we didn’t talk, until I walked past the barn and the stench of rotten meat engulfed me.

  I’d let him have the barn, somewhere to go where he didn’t have to look at my face. In the middle of the sweltering barn lay a large metal bowl of cat food, dusted with white powder, and surrounding it was a ring of dead cats. Their grey tongues protruded from their tiny still mouths, as flies buzzed my head.

  Billy.

  I yelled for him, but he didn’t answer. I headed for the cornfields as sweat pushed out of every pore.

  I found him standing over Margie, her arms tied behind her, sitting in the metal chair, buck naked and crying. Billy was holding a pocketknife in his hand, looming over her, poking her skin with the sharp blade. Her whimpers were lost on the wind, but her eyes bore into me.

  “Billy,” I said. “Enough.”

  He turned to me, his jaw clenched.

  “We’re just playing,” he said. Margie shook her head back and forth, afraid to speak, and Billy backhanded her across the face.

  “Stop it, Billy,” I said. “It’s over, let her go.”

  “She came here,” he said. “She took off her own clothes, she sat in the chair. This is what she wants,” he whined.

  “No, Billy, it isn’t. You’ve gone too far.”

  “No, this is going too far,” he said, leaning over the girl. I started running to him, but I wasn’t fast enough. He put the blade under her left nipple, her breasts hardly anything at all. Her eyes went wide as his thumb held the tiny pink protuberance, and he sliced it clean off and flung it to the ground. She gasped, unable to scream, as blood ran down her pale skin. He looked up at me, smiling, and I was on him, and we were rolling to the ground, my fists beating about his head, the tiny blade stabbing my back, my arms, until I knocked it out of his hand. I beat him until he stopped moving, and then I stood up.

  Margie was crying, snot running down her lip, blood pooling in her lap.

  “It’s all right, it’s over,” I said.

  I picked up the blade and walked to her, cutting the rope that bound her trembling flesh. I knelt down and held her as she sobbed into my shoulder. Straightening up, I held her face in my hands.

  “Margie, don’t come back here. You hear?”

  She nodded her head and quickly got dressed.

  ****

  With Daddy gone it didn’t take much for mother to drift away too. She’d picked up a job at the local diner, and we saw her less and less. Strange men came for the harvest, and we watched them descend on the farm like locust. Billy and I didn’t talk any more.

  When the summer ended and a cool wind started to fill the space that used to be our family farm, I went to the barn in search of Billy, ready to bury the hatchet, to move on from these transgressions, to erase from our minds what had happened out there in the fields.

  A shadow swung back and forth across the opening of the barn, the stiff bodies of the sacrificial cats long gone, but the rotten stench still remaining. I swallowed a lump in my throat and stared up at the rafters, at his still body, the rope around his neck, his purple face, and a stain of urine in the dirt below his dead body. I took a breath, exhaled, and lowered my head. It didn’t have to be this way.

  Or maybe it did.

  Divining

  If you asked me today the exact moment that I knew Heather was wrong for me, it would have to be the night her husband was banging on my apartment door, her laughter hidden under the sheets, our bodies slick with sweat. She was the kind of girl who bent over the pool table just a little too far, her top slipping down, her bra pushing up, her skin-tight jeans hugging her hips. Her eyes told you she’d never been here before, that this was new territory, eyelashes batting, a stray dark hair tucked behind her ear. She sipped at the bottle of beer as if it was an oddity—it somehow just ended up in her mouth. Sly grins and sharp white teeth devoured glossy bruised lipstick, always wet, always whispering secrets wrapped in bourbon and mint.

  It rained all week so the construction site was shut down. Hiding out at Nik’s Tavern with the rest of the crew was one option, a sea of flannel and denim, stubble and cigarettes, just waiting for something to happen. I saw her come in, but paid her no attention. I was worried about the rent, the stack of bills on my kitchen table, hoping I wouldn’t have to start selling pot again. My arms were mottled from donating blood, my sperm scattered all over the city. When I closed my eyes I saw apartments I knew, thin back doors that steel-toed boots could splinter, loose money hidden in mattresses, anything that could be hocked for a buck. It would stop raining soon, I knew that much. It had to.

  I dealt the tarot cards out onto the table, looking for an answer to my prayers. The Fool was the one card that kept turning up, a stray dog yapping at the feet of the idealist, perched on the edge of a cliff. It was my way of meditating, getting closer to my god, a way of divining my path. A crack of pool balls from the back of the bar shattered the deep grumbling of impatient men.

  “What’s that?” she asked, her legs up against the table, her left hand shoved in a front pocket, the other holding tight to a bottle of beer.

  “Tarot cards,” I said, not looking up.

  “What are they for?”

  “Lots of things,” I said. “Mostly, for telling the future.”

  “And it works?” she asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “I’m Heather,” she said. “You shoot pool?”

  ****

  Her hand resting on the small of my back, we ran the table for the rest of the night. Whatever came up, whatever was offered, we took it, and won. And then we did it again. The beer kept flowing until the shots started, dark liquid that coated my mouth with licorice. The world faded away. She told me her story and I nodded my head and pictured her naked. In time, the room became empty, nobody willing to take us on. Lips snarled and noses twitched and we knew it was time for us to leave.

  We were wet before we even got to my apartment, the cold rain soaking through our jeans, hair plastered to the side of our faces, her mascara running down her face, T-shirt clinging to her breasts. I didn’t ask any questions about what this all meant. I simply peeled off her clothes and took every part of her body in my mouth, and held onto her, my fingers pressing r
ed into her hips, her alabaster body crashing waves across my battered frame.

  In the morning she was gone.

  ****

  Money was scattered all over the floor, crumpled up fives and tens, a folded over wad that I knew was my rent money, not a single penny touched. My apartment was quiet, a chill in the air. Large raindrops beat against the glass. No work. Again.

  On the kitchen table, the tarot cards were spread out in a reading like the one I’d done the night before. Across the middle, blocking the reading, was the King of Cups—a wise presence resting on a throne, a patient and understanding soul. The outcome, the last card in a line of four, was nothing but The Tower. Lightning struck the top of a tall grey building, flames and chaos, the card a montage of ruin.

  I ran my hands down my chest, a smattering of bruises, and a solitary bite mark over my right nipple.

  ****

  No number, no last name, she disappeared into the night. For weeks I didn’t see her, the rain finally stopping, sending us back to work. Long days stretched out to make up for the weather—mud and rebar and the cold.

  Every night I would stop by Nik’s on the way home, and wait to see if she showed. She didn’t. I put my money in the bank and told myself it was better this way. I didn’t need her. I didn’t want her.

  She haunted my dreams.

  ****

  The pounding on the door was not her husband, the first time. It was Heather. I was out of bed before the bedside light filled the room, because I knew she had come back. She stood in the hallway, dripping wet again, her eyes swollen and bruised. There was blood on her lower lip and a gash across her forehead.

  “He found out” was all she said.

  I let her in. And she stayed.

  Weeks went by.

  When I was with her the world didn’t matter. We hid out under the blankets, smoked cigarettes and drank. We ate Chinese food and rented movies and hid ourselves from each other. It was pathetic.

  ****

  The phone bill showed dozens of calls to a number in Indiana. When I called it a gruff male voice answered. Once, he mumbled her name. It was only a matter of time before he showed up on my doorstep. It was gasoline to her fire. Fists and broken glass and I dialed three digits to get us some peace and they dragged him away with a warning. Down at the station Heather filled out the paperwork, and we hoped it would do us some good.

  The joint checking account was my idea. Or that’s what I tell myself now. She pawned her wedding ring in order to get her stash, netting us a couple hundred bucks. I should have seen the rest coming.

  The first sunny day in a week and I head to the job site filled with sunshine and daydreams. And when I come home the apartment is silent. My checking and savings have been predictably drained. There are boot prints in the hallway and laughter in my ears and I know that if I dial that number in Indiana she will answer the phone, laughter and cigarette smoke filling the air, her man sitting behind her drinking a cold beer, admiring her backside as she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.

  On the kitchen table the tarot cards sit in a pile.

  The Culling

  Danielle stands at the long mirror brushing her dirty blonde hair, tears running down her cheeks, as the rest of us sit at the table, the howling in the distance, my reassurances falling on deaf ears.

  “Sweetheart, you have nothing to worry about,” I say, sitting at the scarred and beaten table. The wind batters the walls of our homestead, my wife supping her porridge as the boy looks on in wonder.

  “Easy for you to say, Daddy, you’re not up for recognition.”

  Her long dress twists back and forth, dingy and torn, the same pattern over the windows, over the step stool—yellow flowers on a light blue fabric. I place the wooden spoon back in the bowl, the oats getting cold, and take a breath.

  “We’ve been over this, honey, you have nothing to worry about. You’ve been a good girl, Danielle, I’m sure your slips will be very few in number. Tell her, Isabelle, tell her the truth.”

  My wife sets down her spoon, her eyes dark and liquid, a stuttering intake of breath. She has feared this day since our daughter was born. She has raised her right, knowing the ways the slips are placed in the locked box, the ways the neighbors look at our daughter—envious, angry and scared.

  “Your father is right, Danielle. You have nothing to worry about. The Jenkins boys, those two alone should alleviate your fears. How many slips have they garnered? Ten, twenty? Each? For the fire, the cattle, the girl they left for dead in the creek. Those two are certainly sleepless these past few nights.”

  Danielle brushes at her hair, tears continuing to run dirty rivulets down her cheeks. The fire flickers in the stone hearth, and the boy, David, chews on his spoon, all of this conversation lost on his wondering eyes. It will be years before his own culling, many moons from now.

  “Jacob is a booger eater,” David says, his face covered in oats. He’s speaking of the Jenkins boy, the oldest. They are dirty, violent boys, who have embraced their futures with reckless aplomb. They cannot both be taken, so they roll the dice and wait.

  A cracking sound outside is followed by the deep thud of branches falling to the ground and our heads turn toward it. When the winter pushes across the river, it moves with a speed that is dangerous and true. The trees are covered in ice, crystal sculptures, that shatter and disintegrate in the escalating winds.

  “It’s time,” I say, standing up, rubbing my hands together, the walls rattling, dust and hay falling to the wooden floor, and my wife breaks out in guttural sobs.

  ****

  The town hall is filled and overflowing. We have walked the mile from our home at the edge of the forest, following the cart path, every bit of clothing we own worn in layers from head to toe. Danielle has refused to wear anything but her favorite dress—her only dress. These are her terms now, and I honor them.

  We sit at the back of the room, heads turning back and forth, eyes running over every teenager, every unmarried boy and girl that is eligible for nomination. The wind marries with the howls of the great grey beasts that will lumber down from the mountains at daybreak, taking our offering as their own. It is a sacrifice, one that has been witnessed and accepted for as long as I have lived. We do not question it. It is our own way of thinning the herd, punishing the sinners, a cautionary tale for the rest.

  Outside the bonfire has been built, a singular pole standing in the center of split wood, waiting for our nomination to be called.

  “Get in there, and shut your mouth,” comes a voice from the door.

  All heads turn to witness Jedediah Jenkins as he corrals his boys, Jacob the booger-eater, and James, his younger accomplice, pushing them into the room. Both are dirty, spitting tobacco on the floor as they stare daggers at their pappy, blood ringing the broken nose of the oldest, the younger boy holding his right arm in pain. They have not come easily, though their bravado this past week has been unending. I forget that they are still boys, not yet men.

  There are others up for nomination this year, but the Jenkins boys are the favorites to get called. Mixed in with the filth and fear are tiny groups of smiling parents, aglow with newly found wedded bliss. They have followed the rules, archaic as they may be, and have married off their daughters at the ripe old age of thirteen, to whatever boy (or man) will have them—an angry, vengeful child better than one ripped to shreds on the pike.

  Andrew Pallard takes the stage, the heavy metal box sitting in front of him on a long table, the rusty lock holding it shut, a great brass key in his hand. His puffy face is flush with heat, the stress of these proceedings taking on an extra layer, as his own boy is up for nomination as well. His long coat billows around his thick frame and he turns to face the crowd.

  “All eligible children please take the stage.”

  The room grows cold and quiet for a moment, then fills with boots shuffling, the sudden outbreak of sobbing and moaning, as parents hug their children to them, preparing for the worst.
>
  And I see Danielle for a moment, truly see her, the beauty and fear in her blue eyes. The boy clings to my leg, and I hold my daughter to me, kiss her face, and then hand her to her mother.

  “It will be okay,” I tell her. “I promise.”

  She lets go of us and walks to the stage, standing next to the dozen or so boys and girls that now tremble, cough, and swallow their fears. Andrew turns the great wire framed drum that holds a collection of some seventy-five tiny stones. These are the callers, not the children. These are the ones that will read the slip. The bin turns around and around, the rocks beating the metal and coming to a rest, I inhale and hold my breath. When he calls my name, I exhale with relief.

  I am handed the key, which I insert into the lock, springing the box open, the slips of paper filling it, every child’s name listed at least one time, the great sin of being born into this wretched, fragile world. Their eyes are on me, and they are muttering names, a babbling brook of Jenkins, Jenkins barely audible over the pounding of my heart. Andrew nods his head and steps back from the table, allowing me my moment. I reach into the box and pull out a slip and hold it up to my eyes.

  Danielle Tobin.

  I take a deep breath, my eyes stinging, my stomach in knots.

  “Jacob Jenkins,” I shout, placing the slip back into the box, as the room erupts in relief.

  Wicker Park Pause

  It’s the relentless scratching at the back door that wakes me—a cat maybe, trying to get in.

  “Mom?” I whisper.

  Even though I’ve started high school now, a big girl, I don’t like being alone now that Dad is gone. I get out of bed wearing an old T-shirt of his, extra-large—it hangs all the way down to my knees. The dark gray material is worn and soft, and still smells a bit like him—cigars and sweat and despair.

  Our bungalow is small but cozy. In the darkness, a sliver of moonlight slices through the skylight. I can see into my mother’s room, the blanket pulled back, the pillow still holding the shape of her head.