Childhood Fears

by L. L. Soares

  She returned with a roll of black electrical tape, ripped off two long pieces as she knelt. The face’s pale gray complexion contrasted so much more terribly with the remnants of white greasepaint along his father’s shriveled neck. She reached out, lowered with surprising gentleness the right eyelid with one hand, laid the black tape over it with the other, pressing hard against the forehand and cheek to secure it. Repeated the process with the left eye.

  Will felt his throat tighten again, reminded himself that there was nothing left in his stomach, and she needed him. Mom needed him!

  What happened over the next few minutes returned to Will during his life in mere flashes of images, disjointed, non-linear. His mother’s commanding voice; Will’s hands painful from gripping two corners of the rug, avoiding his dead father’s bare feet; the sour whiff of the corpse below him and antiseptic odor lingering everywhere—all of it a steady mist in his nostrils, choking him. Will stepped backward down the steps while she kept a stronger grip on the other end, holding her hands close together so the rug partially obscured his father’s face and its taped, dead eyes.

  There was a moment of terror as they worked around the corner at the bottom of the stairs into the basement. The body slid along the rug and cold, pliant feet pressed into Will’s chest. No shoes, no big red shoes his father loved to wear. They never found those shoes.

  “Lay it down here, William,” his mother said when they’d fully entered the basement. He did, and they dragged the body across the concrete floor, Will hunched over and stepped backward into the room, dreading what he was approaching, of what he might fall into, because suddenly he understood the scritch noises from last night. The breaking of concrete. Shovel in dirt. He was walking backward toward an open grave.

  Mom said, “Stop.” Will froze, laid his end of the carpet gently onto the floor. His mother unceremoniously let the head drop with a muted thud. Will turned, looked at the scene under the stairway with silent consideration and confusion. There was a hole, but it wasn’t right. Too short, not the perfect rectangle he’d expected.

  One section of flooring was no longer covered in concrete. Will glanced at the pick-axe, the oversized one his father had insisted on buying but which Will had never seen him use for anything, one side of the blade tapered to a wide flat blade. She’d apparently used this and the opposite, pointed end, to break up and pry away a four-by-four section of concrete. He was surprised at how strong his mother had to be to dig this up by herself. Here, almost dead center under the stairs, she’d cleared away the broken concrete and dug a hole; three feet at its widest. Will took two steps forward and looked down, afraid of getting too close, but it didn’t matter. The basement was too dark to see the bottom, so black was the dirt both lining the wall and forming a mound at the far end. At least here the heavy smell of fresh earth and the peppery dusting of broken concrete overshadowed the medicinal, antiseptic smell from upstairs. He barely noticed that smell now, and was grateful for it.

  The grave his mother had dug was too narrow. Too small to fit…

  When he turned he suddenly understood what his mother meant to do. His lungs filled with fear, like he was sinking in quicksand, too late to be saved, his mouth and throat filling with sand. Lucy hefted the pick axe, wide blade aimed down. Will could not speak, could not move, save to raise his right arm in a slow salute. He wanted it to mean No, wait, please, Mom, no! but her face twisted in exertion and rage and the blade swung down, partially severing Jacob’s left leg at the thigh. Thick, congealed blood leaked slowly from the wound, soaking into the throw rug.

  Will choked on some unknown word trying to escape. Again the blade, up, down, whack! Bone and concrete, the leg separated completely. She dropped the axe, lifted the red and fleshy leg upright—to keep the blood inside the leg, Will remembered thinking in that moment—and carefully laid it into the hole.

  He raised his left arm, now looking like a statue of some preacher giving a benediction to his congregation, Whack! Whack! It took longer to remove the right leg, but when the bone was separated, she raised the leg in a similar, almost reverent manner and placed it beside the other in the hole.

  The remaining stumps oozed thick blood that was so dark it looked almost purple, and she was raising the pick axe again and Will found his paralysis at last broken. He ran the two steps separating them and before she could swing and grabbed hold of her forearms.

  “No, Mom, please no, just bury him don’t cut him up any more please, he’s already dead, don’t cut him up any more just bury him please don’t cut him up anymore…” and on like that for a long time, Will falling into a cadence, a mantra, repeating the words, knowing he could not stop because they were working themselves against her furrowed, angry head, not getting inside, but trying, trying, finally breaking through some frightening barrier around his mother. Holding the pick above her, she blinked, moved her eyes just enough that Will knew she recognized him, saw him again. At last. Lips moving, soundless, then, “Fine, okay. Fine. We have to hurry.”

  Chapter Eight

  Present

  Yesterday’s trip to Lexington and Concord had gone well enough. No major crowds on the historic pathways, especially since school was already in session, and it was too early for any busloads of students to crowd what spots they could find from the brochures he’d printed off the web before leaving New Jersey. Not that the two historic towns were all that exciting for Billy, but the boy tried to enjoy it. Will assumed everyone’s good mood sprang more from being together and, for himself at least, out of the house. His son’s mood perked up considerably when they left Lexington but continued farther down the Mass Pike into Boston for a visit to the Museum of Science.

  They’d come home late last night, and Billy had gone to bed without trouble. So had Will and Lisa. Everyone slept soundlessly, and dreamlessly. At least, Billy hadn’t mentioned anything this morning at breakfast. Now Billy and Lisa were gone again, a day of last minute school supply shopping, maybe that movie Billy had wanted to see. Will’s idea, to allow him time to work down here uninterrupted, ostensibly to take down his mother’s altar before Billy wandered down and saw the damned thing. Lisa agreed.

  Now, alone in the basement again, he started taking it all down. The candles were first. He placed them carefully in an empty box, the glass cups clicking against each other like castanets on his fingers. Then he stopped and looked at the statue of Mary.

  A phantom’s hand rested upon his shoulder now and Will knew it was his mother’s, pushing him down to pray as she once had. He resisted the sensation, instead grasped the statue firmly and lifted it off the table. As he touched it, possibly for the first time in his life, his mother appeared as a tear-blurred shape kneeling before the table, begging for forgiveness in front of the altar every day, sometimes several times a day, muttering her penance. He blinked the image away and put the statue down in the center of the cement floor.

  It had taken him until this moment to gather the strength to touch it. To move it.

  Will turned back to the card table, relieved to see no further ghosts. He pulled the cloth away, its once-soft texture stiff and caked with age, let it drop into the box atop the glass votives. Then the table, folding the legs one at a time. They offered a weak, neglected screech in protest, then all was silent. Will paid no heed where the table went after that. He let it fall away under the stairs and stared in fascinated terror at the metallic charm nailed into the concrete. A tarnished silver sphere, encircled three times in Saturn-like rings. Aside from this, there was no way to differentiate this section of the floor from any other after so many years. He stared at it, felt a ringing in his ears he hadn’t experienced since that final night. A pain in his teeth. He wanted to turn away.

  Instead, Will hunkered down in front of the spot where his father’s corpse had, by now, rotted away. Were there bones under there? He supposed he’d find out in a few minutes. Will unwrapped the necklace from the nail
which had long tarnished to red, felt the cold tongue of its chain along the back of his hand. He had to force himself to look at his hand while he held the thing—something about the necklace made your eyes not notice it, made you look away. Abandoned all these years yet surprisingly free of dust, perhaps protected by the table, its presence was out of place in this shadowed, gray place.

  The night he’d followed his father into those nonexistent woods he’d found himself wearing the necklace again. Had Jacob put it on him? Had his father gone to that other place so often that he no longer needed the necklace anymore to get there? Maybe he’d actually wanted to be found out. Will doubted that last thought and tossed the necklace behind him, onto the floor beside the box with the candles and cloth. He would throw it away with the other stuff later, when he was done with what he’d truly come down here to do. Right now, he was content only to be rid of its feel on his skin.

  He looked back down at the floor where it had rested for so long. There was a discolored section of the cement, after all, marking his father’s final resting place. He hadn’t noticed this before, tried not to make a connection with the discarded sphere next to the box. Child’s fantasy. Mother’s guilt.

  Even so, he could almost hear a beating below the concrete, like the heart in that Edgar Allan Poe story.

  Chapter Nine

  Past

  Lucy did not heave the blade into Will’s father again. Instead she lowered it to her side, let the handle clatter away, all the while staring at the man she had killed so quickly and efficiently.

  They dragged the maroon-stained carpet toward the hole. Will guided the damp, bloody end as his mother lifted. The remnants of Jacob Pallasso slid into the grave beside his legs.

  The body faced the wall. All the better, Will thought, but it was too high above the floor. Parts of him were still sticking out of the grave. When he saw his mother eyeing the axe again, Will scurried to the hole, forcing the petrified skin and muscles down, bending the body sideways. Even though rigor mortis had set in, he struggled, hearing cracks and crunches as he got the body to bend and twist and without further mutilation from the axe. Not that his father would have minded, not that he could feel anything at that point even if she’d chopped him into a hundred pieces.

  He wasn’t there anymore. He was in Hell, for his terrible sins.

  His mother spoke but Will couldn’t hear. He pulled a load of freshly dug dirt with both hands into the hole, worked it around and into the cracks and fissures made by the bent and twisted body. He must have been doing it right because Mom never stopped him. Sometimes he would get confused, perceptions skewed, seeing legs where they did not belong. He convinced himself that they weren’t legs any longer, just parts. It was funny and he almost laughed. But, before it came, the crying found freedom first. He pulled the dirt, stuffed it under the silky costume adorning his father’s arms and crotch, trying not to touch anything. Everything blurred through tears, snot dripping into his mouth. He licked it away and continued to pack the dirt, pressing his father’s corpse down into the ground under his house.

  At some point Will had found himself sitting on the landing at the bottom of the steps, head back against the wall and staring up toward the kitchen, daylight so bright and elusive above him. He didn’t know how he got here. His mother’s voice, from somewhere close by, said over and over, Come back, wake up, oh, William, come back, I need you.

  He whispered her name, and she laughed and cried simultaneously in a short, gasping burst of emotion.

  He sat for a long time, hungry, his need to urinate slowly taking prominence but he dared not move, dared not leave his mother alone. It was stupid, but he thought that if he went upstairs, when he came back down they would both be gone, lost in the basement forever. The thought was so vivid that he simply let the piss come, soaking through his pajama pants, running down his thigh—in right about the same spot where his father’s leg was cut away, he thought, in that lonely moment of relief. It scurried in yellow rivulets down the last step to the concrete floor.

  His mother would later fuss and muss over the whole deal, but the scolding was more reflexive. By then she was beyond exhausted, having covered the body with the bloodied rug, then the rest of the dirt that would fit. She pulled one of the bags of concrete out, hidden in the far end of the room where one of Jacob Pallasso’s ilk would never bother to question its existence—how long she’d had the bags downstairs, and whether she’d intended them for this eventual use would strike Will later in life, but they were questions he chose never to ask—mixing batches and slowly, carefully, patching up the square. At one point she stopped and ran upstairs, not yet noticing Will had wet himself, and called the school to tell them her son was sick and had to stay home. As she returned to the basement in heavy, jagged steps, she’d muttered that he could stay home from school.

  That was one memory, crystal clear in all the years that followed. The sheer absurdity, the normalcy, of her words. He could stay home from school. It was monstrous in its displacement from everything happening that morning, in its implications that he would, in fact, be going to school tomorrow. That things could actually go back to normal.

  The funny thing was, they did. The next day, Will Pallasso only shrugged to his friends when they asked how he was feeling, gave everyone the line his mother made him rehearse again and again until they both passed out with exhaustion on the living room couch at four o’clock in the afternoon.

  “How come you stayed home, Will?”

  A shrug, eyes downcast to conceal the lie. “My Dad ran away.”

  “No way! For how long?”

  “Forever, I think. Packed his stuff while I was sleeping and Mom was at the hospital. No note. Nothin’…”

  Repeated, with slight variations as he warmed to the story (so much more palatable than the truth) throughout the day. Gratefully spoken to only one teacher who had apparently spread the tale to the rest of the adults, an occasional hand alighted on his shoulder as he bustled down the hall, always looking down at the cracked tile floor. Sad-faced, poor little Will. William to his mother. Billy to his father.

  Poor little Will. Helped to kill his father.

  He laughed in Mrs. Dejasu’s class when he thought this, not from humor but the sheer surprise of having thought it in the first place. Mrs. Dejasu, always ready for a scolding and writing your name in her “book, which I will gladly share with the principle,” though most of them suspected she never did, let it slide. This, more than anything else that day, gave him hope that things might be okay.

  He got home to find his mother had not returned to work as she’d promised. Instead, she had finished her work in the basement, filling the cracks and missed spots her tired eyes had missed the day before. She’d bagged all of his father’s clothes and driven them an hour and a half away, into Boston, and left them in a Goodwill box behind a restaurant. The energy she’d had to get all these things done to cover up their crime, amazed him. Her exhaustion was painfully obvious when he saw her.

  Even so, Will’s hope that their life might be fine, maybe better than it had been, grew a little more each day, like the bean plants in science class.

  It wilted, then died, the afternoon she showed him the altar.

  Chapter Ten

  Present

  He’d bought the pick and sledgehammer at Cushman’s Hardware, a local shop still clinging to life in the shadow of the newest home goods chain which had opened a few years back. He had no idea how difficult the work would be, whether he could extricate his father’s bones before the others came home, but the need to get everything out of this house was a desperation he knew would only get worse if he waited. He had nothing elaborate planned for disposing of the body: bury it out in the woods behind the house, burn what remained of it in a bonfire. It didn’t matter. He just could not leave this house again, physically or mentally, knowing his father’s was still here, faded and dead as
he might be, waiting to be discovered.

  The pick was heavy. The first swing sent its pointed end deep into the concrete, cracking the surface in spider webs. Shards of cement scurried away in every direction. Will raised it a second time and brought it down in a different spot, each time working along the edge of the discolored section, not wanting to shatter the bones too much as he extricated them. More cracks, more shards. Still, this was going to take awhile. He tried not to think of how his mother had done this very thing that night, working to break apart the old concrete. How had she done it, stayed up all night digging the grave of the man she’d murdered? Her husband? Where had that strength come from?

  She’d seemed so fragile to him, and never more so than after that night.

  It took a while before he was able to see any dirt beneath the cement.

  The more he worked, the more frightened Will became. Eventually, he split a loose section of concrete in two. They folded like hands imploring him to stop. (You should never disturb the dead.) But Will closed his eyes and remembered why he was doing this. He raised the pick again.

  “Daddy?”

  Will whirled around, stumbling backward from the pick’s momentum over his shoulder. He hadn’t heard anyone descend the stairs. No one was supposed to be home. But there was Billy, on the bottom step, watching.

  “Daddy, what are you doing? Are you digging something up?”

  “What are you doing home?”

  “The movie’s not playing until suppertime,” the boy said. “Me and Mommy came home. Maybe we could all go back tonight?” His smile, rather than be the contagious grin it had always been, set Will’s teeth to grind.

  Will didn’t say anything at first. He had been caught doing something his son shouldn’t see, but his brain refused to work on an excuse. He’d had one, but what had it been? He took in a breath, set the pick down and leaned on the wooden handle like a cane. The gesture helped him regain some composure. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, in truth. Not now. Not today.