by Bill Cameron
Stuart loved gossiping almost as much as talking about himself. The story of Ellie’s recollection spilled from his mouth into the ears of Pastor Wilburn and others at the Little Liver Creek Victory Chapel during Men’s Breakfast the following Saturday. The same afternoon the old man took it upon himself to drive out to the house to tell Ellie she should forget such nonsense.
When she heard why Wilburn was there, she refused to make coffee. They sat in the front room of Ellie and Stuart’s little house on the secondhand couch passed down from her grandparents.
“I don’t see what the big deal is.” She could hear Stuart in the kitchen, fridge door opening and closing, drawers slamming. No doubt making a mess as he eavesdropped.
“It’s dangerous to be thinking the devil’s thoughts.”
She pointed her chin at Wilburn. “It’s just a memory.”
It had been raining, and the old man’s hair was wet and slick against his scalp. “But it’s a false memory, Elizabeth. No one can remember being born.” He rubbed liver-spotted hands together. At least he didn’t call her Lizzie, the hated nickname she’d been saddled with when Myra, as a toddler, had mangled Elizabeth. “Satan is trying to lure you into his fold. He wants you to remember the caul—to desire the power it promises you.”
She almost laughed out loud, but the conviction in the old pastor’s eyes stopped her. The man watches football on a big screen television, she thought. She looked past his ear and sighed.
Wilburn suggested some Bible passages she should read. Ellie didn’t bother to tell him the house Bible was tucked under the broken back leg of the couch he was sitting on. “It’s the influence of that Jewish girl,” she heard him tell Stuart on his way out. “They’re all atheists, you know. The Jews.” After the old man left, Stuart had a few choice words for Ellie’s careless tongue and Luellen’s unwholesome influence. Ellie listened with the stoicism reserved for all complaints about her friend.
She’d read that once upon a time a birth caul had been viewed as a sign of imminent good fortune. Ellie was still waiting. She grew up a rustic, dark-haired girl in a family of honey blondes. One of Ellie’s aunts claimed the dark hair came from an Eastern European many-great grandmother—a witch who’d also been born with a caul—but Ellie didn’t much care where she had gotten it. She loved her hair. She brushed it until it shined and refused to have it cut. “It’s my clothes,” she announced another morning at breakfast—age eleven—having spent the night before poring through Bullfinch’s Mythology. All she had on were a pair of white cotton panties. Her family stared at her for a long moment, then her brother Brett started laughing. “Hey, Lizzie, I can see your nips.” Her mother smacked her with a spatula and sent her running right back up stairs to get some clothes on this second, and to put her hair up in a proper bun. The Bullfinch vanished from her room while she was at school that day. From then on her mother insisted on approving all reading material in advance.
At a church picnic the following summer, Brett drew laughs recounting the story of the hair. A group of boys sat together at a table under the birch trees at the back of the churchyard. Ellie saw them from her own place, quiet and alone among a clump of chattering girls. She could feel the boys ogling her, an experience more and more common in recent months. She went to her mother. “Tell Brett to stop talking about me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Lizzie.” Her mother was sitting with a group of other moms. From the tightness in her jaw Ellie could tell she didn’t appreciate being interrupted.
“I’m not being ridiculous. Make them stop.”
Her mother closed her eyes, then stood and walked over to the boys’ table, arms heavy at her sides. They quieted at her approach. Ellie watched as her mother spoke with them, then returned. “Stay away from those boys.”
“I wasn’t anywhere near them.”
“Then how do you know they were talking about you?”
“I just know.”
Her mother’s mouth went hard and she looked away. “That girl was born with a caul, you know.” An anonymous whisper. Ellie’s mother clenched her teeth. “Lizzie, go find a seat and finish your dinner. I don’t want to hear another word out of you.”
Ellie still had a pile of Jello salad and a chicken leg. Most folks were done eating and sat talking, or had started to peel off for home. Half the tables were empty. Ellie dragged a folding chair off to the far side of the lawn, as far from the boys as she could go without getting yelled at, and sat down, back to the picnic, face to the sun. She spooned salad into her mouth without tasting it. Something to do. Around her she could hear conversation and laughter: her uncle complaining about the signal on his satellite dish; who was gonna apply at Jeld-Wen; endless discussions about irrigation and prospects for new water certificates. After a little while, she felt them gather behind her and to either side. The boys. Brett’s friends. They smelled like sweat and grape Kool-Aid.
“What the hell’s your problem?” Brett always came looking for a fight.
“Leave me alone or I’ll tell Mom you’re swearing.”
“Whatever, bitch. I’ll tell her you’re a liar.”
They both knew how that would work out. “Just go away.”
“Hey, Lizzie.” One of the boys pressed against her from behind. “Show me your tits.”
She swallowed Jello and tried to imagine she was alone.
“Come on, you showed Brett.”
“Yeah, Jesus, your own brother.” Laughter. “You gotta show everyone now. Ain’t that right, Brett?”
Brett moved around to face her and grinned, his eyes black points. “It’s only fair, Lizzie. Unless you want me to tell Ma you was swearing.”
She looked down at the soggy paper plate in her lap, the chicken leg and half-eaten Jello, remnants of baked beans and potato salad. The sight turned her stomach.
“How’d you know Brett was even talking about you anyway?”
“Yeah, you some kind of freak?”
“Leave me alone.” Teeth together.
The boys snickered behind her. She saw movement at the edge of her vision, boys crowding in around her. A wall of backs to the adults lingering over coffee. “God fucking damn, Brett, even if she is your sister you gotta admit she’s got some nice toots.”
“You can tell right through her shirt.”
“They’re bigger than my sister’s and she’s going to college.”
“Hot.”
Ellie’s cheeks burned, and her vision swam. She gripped the spoon so tight her knuckles turned white.
“No wonder she wanted to show them off. Take four hands to manage all that pudding.”
As if that were some kind of signal, a hand snaked in from behind and gripped her breast. For an instant she didn’t move, stunned by the unexpected contact. Then the hand squeezed and Ellie surged to her feet. Her plate fell onto the grass. A second hand clawed at her other breast, accompanied by hoots and laughter. Ellie heard a sound like an insect buzzing and her vision went dark. Her mother later claimed she started howling as she threw herself at the boy, that she’d become some kind of animal, possessed, clawing and shrieking. When her father got to her, dragged her off the screaming kid, she had a bloody clump of his hair in one hand and the spoon in the other. Two knuckles of his right middle finger in her mouth. She spit the finger out, stumbled away from her father’s grip. She saw red crescent bruises on the boy’s cheeks, evidence of her attempt to scoop out his eyes. Only then did she even recognize him, George Quinn, Brett’s best friend. A well-liked boy. But to Ellie, in that moment, he was little more than eyes and fingers. Eyes that stare, fingers that grab. All around her, white faces gaped. George sobbed on the grass, his Vacation Bible School t-shirt smeared with blood and Jello salad.
Her sister, Myra, two years younger, came up. “Are you a witch, Lizzie?”
Ellie fled, ignoring her mother’s shouts for her to stop. She ran across the fields behind the church and through stony pastureland to her house, four miles distant, where there was
a place she knew no one would find her. A giant honeysuckle bush behind the equipment barn with a hollow inside, a smooth spot in the dirt where she could sit. Filtered sunlight dappled through the leaves. She still had the spoon. The distorted reflection she saw in its curved surface could only be the face of a girl with big toots and a dark soul. All that pudding. She dug a hole and buried the spoon between the honeysuckle roots.
After a while, she heard the pickup come up the driveway, and then her father walking through the yard. “Ellie, come on, honey. We can fix this. Just come out.” He went into the equipment barn, then across to the tack shed, calling over and over. She wanted to go to him, but she knew her mother would be somewhere behind. Waiting. He might try to comfort her, to fix this, but her mother would have her own ideas. So she waited him out in silence, biting her lip to keep from making a sound. Finally he returned the way he came.
When the sun began to set and it started to get cold, she crept out of her hiding place and never went back. She imagined the spoon there in the dirt, slowly corroding, and she decided that was where she would leave her self, buried in the ground to rot. Skin shed, a new Ellie emerged. Her mother dragged her to church to say prayers for weeks afterward, made her read her Bible every day and stand up in front of the congregation on Sunday morning to confess. Show repentance and beg forgiveness, particularly of George Quinn. “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry.” Ellie heard, but only she would know she had not prayed at all during that time, hadn’t given a damn about forgiveness, particularly Pudding Boy’s. She was glad they hadn’t been able to reattach his finger. But she also knew that she could never win against her mother. Shortly afterward, at school, Ellie asked Luellen to cut her hair off. That seemed to provide her mother at least some measure of satisfaction.
Afterward, Ellie did what was expected of her. She took down her posters of rainbows and unicorns, smiled when her brothers made idiot jokes around the supper table, looked after her brat sister without complaint. She went to church, to school, to the relatives for family gatherings. But only because she had to. She became known as a quiet, solitary girl; but pretty in her strange, dark way. Maybe a little dangerous. Later, when Stuart took an interest in Ellie, her mother didn’t even try to hide her relief. A Spaneker. They owned half the valley. She believed Ellie would find a grounding in Stuart, and a chance to make a good home. Ellie was more inclined to agree with her father, who called Stuart a champion beer drinker but a barely competent farmer. She told Luellen, the only person in whom she could confide, that as far as she was concerned, Stuart was a blockheaded pig fucker with more brains between his legs than above his shoulders. Luellen collapsed into giggles. She had dark hair as well, but her family was notably dark, not farmers but professional types, insurance agents and bankers and software developers. Ellie believed she had originally been attracted to Luellen because she hadn’t been of a farming family, though later the friendship ran deeper than that. Ellie’s mother complained that she was involving herself too much with material folk, with Jews, not the kind of people a Christian girl should associate with. Ellie didn’t bother to tell her mother Luellen’s family wasn’t Jewish but Lutheran, mostly German with a little Eastern European like Ellie’s infamous great-great grandmother. Her mother believed what she wanted to believe. A dark-haired doctor or lawyer was a Jew, and that was that. So when confronted about her friendship, Ellie observed there was a little good in everyone. Didn’t the Lord command us to reach out to those not in His sight?
Her mother let it stand at that—so long as Ellie stayed out of trouble she was allowed to continue associating with the Jew. But years later, when one of Luellen’s cousins, a credit union officer, initiated foreclosure on Brett’s farm, Stuart forbade her to see Luellen again. He told her to make friends among the church women—as if he gave a damn about the life of the Little Liver Creek Victory Chapel. Ellie didn’t argue with him. She’d learned long before to hide the things important to her.
Three Years, Three Months Before
He Was a Cop
The responding officer reported two bodies at the scene. It was clear at a glance at least one of them was dead. A bullet had entered the young woman’s head through the nasal cavity and tore through her right frontal and parietal lobes before exiting above the occipital bone. She lay at the edge of the summit drive at the top of Mount Tabor, her feet pointing toward the Harvey Scott statue. The second body was in the road, a figure who ran headlong into the patrol car, then collapsed. When the officer, fellow named Michael Masliah, put his hand on the figure’s shoulder to check for signs of life, it unwound with a jerk and cried out, “He was a cop!” A boy, twelve or thirteen, and a mess: drenched, muddy, and slick with vomit, lower lip split and left eye socket swollen and dark. Hair buzzing atop his head like he’d stuck his tongue in a light socket. He’d been in the thick of some shit. Masliah bent down. “Damn, kid, are you all right?” The boy looked up into Masliah’s eyes, then down at his badge. “Aww, fuck.” He didn’t speak again for the duration of his time in custody.
Susan and I took the call-out, our second in two days. The first involved a Franklin High basketball player who had been showing off for his teammates by shooting an arrow straight up into the air with a hunting bow and then trying to catch it on the way down again. After a series of failed attempts he finally succeeded—with his forehead. Dead on the thirty-five-yard line of the Franklin football field. The high school and attached park is near my place, and I sometimes walk down there on summer evenings to watch recreational leaguesoftball or soccer. If I’d been down there that day I might have saved his life, something his friends seemed to have only a passing concern with. “I told him he was an idiot, but he did it anyway.” A typical response. No doubt the fence around the football field would get covered in ephemeral memorial objects over the coming days, photos and handmade, WE MISS YOU signs. “I told him he was an idiot,” would be the real epitaph. Death-bymisadventure ruled an understaffed DA’s office with no interest in filing charges. So we ended up back at the top of the call-out list just in time to catch this kid and a homicide cop’s nemesis, Jane Doe.
The crime scene was a disaster. Pouring rain had obliterated most of the physical evidence. Susan and I left it to the crime scene team, but we didn’t expect much. We counted ourselves lucky they found the .357 round in the mud downslope from where the girl lay. Otherwise, the kid was all we had. After the EMTs checked him out and declared him bruised but otherwise unhurt, we took him to the Justice Center. I set him up at Susan’s desk with a mug of Swiss Miss and a towel, figuring an interview room would be too much for him. He stared at me, ignoring his cocoa, and I guessed I was too much for him too. I was born with a red patch of skin on my neck the shape and color of a mound of ground meat, and my face is none too pretty either. I left it to Susan to do the talking.
He wouldn’t provide his name or the name of someone to call—mom, dad, anybody. Too young for a driver’s license, but he’d written E. GILLESPIE in black permanent marker on the white rubber toes of his Chucky Ts. Armed with that it didn’t take us too long to learn he was registered at Mount Tabor Middle School, an incoming eighth grader. E for Edgar. He had a juvie record, nothing serious. Shoplifting, some panhandling scams, chronic truancy. He lived with his mother and two sisters in a duplex on Southeast 53rd—not too far from my own place. We left him in the care of a case worker from Child Protective Services and went by the house.
No one was home, but we found a neighbor who told us the mother, Charm Gillespie, worked as a marketing associate for a commercial real estate firm in the Wells-Fargo building downtown. According to the neighbor, Mom called the kid Little Eddie, but everyone else called him Eager. His sisters—Gem and Jewel—were nowhere to be found. Word from the neighbor was the three kids ran wild all day while their mother worked; the girls could be anywhere. No other known family in the area. School records didn’t mention the father.
Back at the Just
ice Center, we tried talking to the kid again.
“Eager? Is that your name?”
No response.
“Was someone there with you and the girl?”
Nothing.
“Did you see the gun? Do you know what happened to it?”
Silence.
“What’s her name, Eager? Do you at least know her name?”
I’d interrogated career bangers who couldn’t shut up. Not Eager Gillespie. The kid was a rock. When the CASA advocate arrived, called by the case worker, she shut down our feckless attempts to mine him, at least until we could find Eager’s mother and get consent for further questioning. Turned out she was in Eugene for the day with her broker and wouldn’t return to Portland until evening. She wasn’t answering her cell phone, which didn’t surprise her coworkers. Without prodding, the receptionist at the real estate firm, a catty slip of a thing with hair the color of buttermilk, volunteered that everyone knew Charm was screwing her broker. They’d probably pulled over for some afternoon delight after their sales presentation. We left messages on her voice mail and a patrol car at her house, and finally Charm Gillespie swept in like a storm front.
“Who are you people? Why are you harassing us? When can I take my kid and get the hell out of here?” There was more along those lines. She was hard to keep up with, waving her hands as she spoke and refusing to make eye contact with anyone. Tall and thickset, not unattractive under a dense clot of metallic hair and heavy, exaggerated make-up. Agitated and uncommunicative, suggesting she had something to hide.
Which it turned out she did. The night before she’d made a 9-11 call, someone trying to get into her house, her ex-husband. Now she didn’t want to talk about it. I couldn’t tell if she was scared or naturally belligerent. Maybe a little of both.
