They shared more whiskey-laced tea, and before the night was over Rose found herself sitting next to Jonas on the sofa, holding his hand while he told her his family’s story. How his grandfather had owned the button factory during the war, how his father had killed himself twenty years ago by placing a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. How his mother had worked her fingers to the bones taking care of everything: the house, Jonas, his father’s bloody mess in the bathroom. “I found him,” Jonas said. “I was ten. On the mirror in the bathroom. There was blood all over it. He was lying in a pool of blood on the floor. Mama scrubbed and scrubbed, but it wouldn’t come out. Not until she asked the house to help her.”
He paused, gulping the story down again. Rose watched the way the column of his throat moved as he swallowed. She wanted to kiss him right there, where the Adam’s apple wriggled under the skin. Instead she asked, “What did the house do?”
He looked at her, his eyes full of fear. “She told me to leave the bathroom. So I left, closing the door behind me. I waited outside with my ear against the door, but I couldn’t hear anything. After a few minutes passed, I knocked. Then a few more minutes passed. I was going to knock again, but before my knuckles hit, the door swung open, and there was Mama, wringing her hands in a damp rag. There was no blood on her, not even a speck. And when I looked behind her, the carpet was as clean as ever, as if no dead body had bled to death on it.”
“The house loves you,” Rose said.
Jonas looked at her curiously. “What do you mean?”
“It loves you. Can’t you feel it? It’s trying to tell you something.”
“If it’s trying to communicate,” said Jonas. “It has a sad idea of conversation.”
She held those words close as soon as he said them, she pressed them to her chest like a bouquet. This was why she had been brought there, she realized. In this instant, she knew she would translate for him. She would bring back all that he had lost. She’d be his mother, she’d be his father, she’d be his wife, she’d have his children. A family, she thought. With a family, he’d never be alone.
She leaned into him, still holding his hand, and kissed him. Without moving back again, she looked up through her eyelashes and said, “I have everything you need.”
A child bride
The story of the Oliver family is a sad one. No, let us revise that statement: It is not sad, it is disturbing. We don’t like to talk about it around town anymore. We are all glad that —— House took the Olivers, for they were a bad lot, given to drinking and gambling, as well as other unwholesome activities.
The Olivers moved into —— House just past the turn of the century, after Mrs. Blank died. Our grandparents found Mrs. Blank several weeks after her passing, due to the smell that began to spread down Buckeye Street. It was one of the only times they’d gone into —— House, and we remember it to this day: the hardwood floors, the chintz furniture, the stone mantel over the fireplace, the stairs that creaked as you stepped up into the long hallway of the second floor, the second floor itself, the lower half of the hall paneled with dark polished wood. And the bathroom, of course, where all of the trouble eventually focused its energy. It was a fine house, really, with wide windows to let light in, though even with all of that light the house held too many shadows. Our grandparents did not linger. They took Mrs. Blank’s body to the county coroner’s office in Warren and left the doctor to his business.
Less than a year later, Mr. and Mrs. Oliver came to —— House with their three children: two boys, one nearly a man, one still muddling through adolescence, and a girl about to bloom. At first our grandparents didn’t think badly of the Olivers. It takes a certain amount of time for a family to reveal its secrets. So for the first few years, they welcomed the Olivers as if they had always lived among us. The Olivers began attending the Methodist church on Fisher-Corinth Road. They sent the younger boy and girl to school with our children. The oldest boy worked as a field hand for local farmers. His work was good, according to Miles Willard, who paid the boy to clear fields those first few years, before all of the madness started to happen again.
How to tell about that madness. We suppose we might as well start with Mrs. Oliver’s murder. Two of our children found her body in Sugar Creek. They had been going to catch crayfish, but found Mrs. Oliver’s body tangled in the roots of a tree that grew out of the bank instead. She had been severely beaten: her face covered in yellow-brown bruises, her skull cracked on the crown. Dark fingerprints lingered on her throat, so we knew she had been strangled. We still do not forgive her murderer for leaving her for us to find. People should take care of their own dirty work.
Since they had a murder on their hands, our grandparents called on the sheriff to deal with the matter. They marched him right up to —— House expecting trouble. But what they found was the front door open and, inside, Mr. Oliver’s body spread out on the dining room table, a butcher knife sticking straight up out of his throat. The sheriff asked several of our grandfathers to back him up as he explored the rest of the house. And so they did, each carrying a rifle as they descended into the basement, then up to the second floor, finding nothing suspicious. It was when the ceiling creaked above them that they knew someone was in the attic.
They tried opening the attic door, but it had been locked from the inside. So they busted it down, only to be met with a blast from the rifle of Mr. and Mrs. Oliver’s middle child. The sheriff took the shot in his shoulder. He fell backwards, but our grandfathers caught him. Several of them returned fired at the boy. He left a smear of blood on the wall as he collapsed against it.
They found the oldest boy and the girl bound and gagged in the attic. They were wild with fear. Their brother had killed their parents and was going to kill them, too, they said. This was all over a fight the boy had had with his parents about a debt he’d run up over in Meadville, playing poker with older men who knew how to outwit him. He wanted his parents to pay his debt, but they wouldn’t. They insisted he work to pay for his debts and his drinking, just as their oldest son did. After he killed his parents, he wasn’t sure what to do with his siblings, so he tied them up, and there they still were, alive and none the worse for wear, and we thought perhaps we had salvaged something from that house’s evil.
The oldest Oliver boy and his sister stayed on at —— House. They had nowhere to go, no people. Just each other. The boy kept working as a field hand, the girl continued her schooling. But soon her attendance dropped off, and then she stopped coming altogether. She started working to help with the keeping of the house and the paying of her brother’s debts. She took in wash if people gave it to her. She mended stockings. She raised chickens, selling eggs at the general store to make extra money. Anything she could get her hands on she turned into cash.
At first she seemed awfully hard-working and a good girl, but we soon discovered not only was she working to pay off her brother’s debts, but to prepare for the child growing inside her. When her stomach began to round out the fronts of her dresses, we knew what was going on up at —— House. This was something our grandparents could not abide, so they stopped giving the girl work. They stopped buying her eggs, and the farmers released her brother from his duties. In no time at all, the brother and the child bride packed up their things and left. Without the aid of our grandparents, they could not live among us. This is the way all of the families that lived in —— House should have been dealt with all these years, maybe. Without mercy. But Lord knows we are a merciful lot.
Word came several months after the siblings left that they had been seen in Cleveland, living together, posing as a married couple.
The baby’s room
Here it is, in the same condition as when the baby was living. The crib with the mobile of brass stars still spinning in space above it, the rocking chair near the eastern window, where sunlight falls in the morning, the walls painted to look like the apple orchard in summer, the ceiling sky blue, as if the baby girl had lived outdoors forev
er, never inside the confines of —— House.
We know the room is still like this because Mary Kay Billings has seen it. Twice since the baby died, she has gone to visit her daughter, and both times the baby’s room was as it was during her last visit. Two years after the child’s death, it begins to seem a bit odd, really. She suggested changing it into a sewing room maybe, but Rose shook her head. “No, Mother,” she said. “That’s not allowed to happen.”
Mary Kay Billings has no patience with her daughter. We all understand this. If our daughters had married into a family that lived in —— House without our permission, we’d have no patience either. Poor Mary Kay is one of the pillars of our community. She is one of our trustees, she sings in the church choir. At the elementary school, she volunteers her time three days a week, three hours each of those days, to aid in the tutoring of our children. Mary Kay Billings has raised her daughter, has lived through the death of her husband, God rest his soul (for he would roll in his grave to know what happened to his child), and yet Mary Kay still gives to others for the good of her community. This is the way a town works, not how Rose would have it. We all think Rose is a bit selfish, really, leaving her mother to struggle alone, leaving Hettie without any warning (we liked her flower arrangements better than Hettie’s and better than the replacement girl’s, so it’s even more selfish of her to have done this). Leaving the community altogether, to go live in that place.
We must mention that not all of us think she is selfish, but only has the appearance of selfishness. Some of us (the minority) believe Rose is noble. A bit too noble, but noble nonetheless. Who else but a self-sacrificing person would take on —— House and its curse? We say a crazy person, but some of us say Rose is doing us a favor. If it weren’t Rose, who would the house have brought to its front door when it needed another soul to torment?
But the baby’s room is a bit too much really. We asked Mary Kay Billings what the rest of the house was like and she said, “Buttons! Buttons everywhere, I tell you! I said to Rose, ‘Rose! What’s the matter with you? Why are all these buttons lying about?’ and she says to me, ‘Mother, I can’t keep up with them. I try, but they keep coming.’ And in the baby’s room, too, I noticed. Right in the crib! I said to Rose, ‘Rose! In the crib even?’ and she says to me, can you believe this, she says to me, her own mother, ‘Mother, I think it’s best if you go.’”
“And Jonas?” we asked, leaning in closer. Mary Kay narrowed her eyes and sucked her teeth. “Drunk,” she told us. “Drunk, as usual.”
Life during wartime
In the nineteen-forties, most of our men had been taken overseas to fight against the devil, and our women stayed behind, keeping things about town running smoothly. All over America, women came out of their houses and went into men’s workplaces. We still argue about who was made for what sort of work, but in the end we know it’s all a made up sort of decision. Nothing fell apart, nothing broke while the men were off fighting. In fact, things maybe went a bit smoother (this of course being an opinion of a certain sector of our population and must be qualified). In any case, the factories were full of women, and in Pittsburgh, just across the state border, James Addleson, the grandfather of our own Jonas, had his ladies making buttons for the uniforms of soldiers.
The Addlesons had bought —— House several years before the war had broken out, but we rarely saw them. They were a Pennsylvania family and only spent part of their summers with us. Occasionally we’d see them in autumn for the apple festival. The Addlesons had money, and —— House was one of their luxuries. They had passed through our town during their travels and Mrs. Addleson had seen the house and wanted it immediately. James Addleson didn’t argue with her. Why on Earth she would want to buy a house in the country, no matter how stately and beautiful, was beyond him. But he had gotten used to giving the woman what she wanted. It was easier. And it soothed any guilt he might have felt for other, less attractive activities in which he participated. Especially later, after the war started.
Now, Mrs. Addleson was a beautiful woman. She had a smooth complexion, high cheekbones, and a smile that knocked men over like a high wind had hit them. She wore fire engine red lipstick, which we must say is a bit racy but something to look at. Occasionally she’d come to town without Mr. Addleson. She’d bring their children, a girl in her teens and the little boy who would later grow up to be Jonas Addleson’s father. During the war, we started seeing her and the kids more often. We’d find her shopping in the grocery store, or coming to church on Sundays, sitting in the last pew as if she didn’t want to intrude on our services. Eventually we got used to her being around, and some of the women even got to be something like friends with her.
Mr. Addleson often stayed in Pittsburgh to look after his factory. We felt bad for the Addlesons. Even though James Addleson didn’t go to war since he had a business to manage, his family suffered like anyone’s. Whenever we asked Mrs. Addleson how her husband fared, she’d say, “Buttons! Buttons everywhere!” and throw her hands in the air. She was a strange lady, now that we think about it. Never had a straight answer for anyone.
For a while we thought perhaps —— House had settled into a restful sleep, or that even the spirit that inhabited the place had moved on to better climates. We hoped, we prayed, and during the war, it seemed our prayers had been answered. Finally a family lived in —— House without murdering one another or disappearing altogether. We thought perhaps we’d been foolish all those years to think the house haunted. We shook our heads, laughing a little, thinking ourselves to be exactly what everyone who makes their homes in cities considers us: backwoods, superstitious, ignorant.
But then our peaceful period of welcome embarrassment broke. Like a cloud that’s been gathering a storm, holding inside the rain and lightning and thunder until it bursts forth, flooding the lives of those who live below it, so —— House released its evil upon our town once more.
This time, though, we realized its hand reached further than we had previously thought possible. This time we knew something was wrong when detectives from Pittsburgh began to appear on our doorsteps, asking questions about the Addlesons. How long had they been living in our town? How often did we see them? Did they go to church? Did they send their children to school with our children? What were they like? What did we know about their doings? In the end, we realized we knew little about the Addlesons. As we have said already, it takes time for families to reveal their secrets.
They found the first body in the basement, the second in the attic, the third buried in the orchard, and the fourth stuffed in a defunct well on the property. All women. All girls from Pittsburgh, the detectives told us. All pregnant with James Addleson’s babies.
We were disgusted. Oh, but we were disgusted. Never had the house erupted with such evil before. Never! We thought the Oliver family massacre and the decline of its surviving children to be the worst, the worst possible manipulation the house could imagine. And here we were faced with something even more despicable. While Mrs. Addleson raised her children in the quiet of our country town, James Addleson had been manipulating his women workers into sleeping with him. At first we assumed the women were a bad sort, and possibly their lust had gotten them into this trouble (as any of the great sins will surely do) but then we heard the news that seven other girls in the button factory had come forward. He had threatened to take their jobs away from them, they said, if they wouldn’t give him what he wanted. They had been lucky, they said. They hadn’t gotten pregnant. “It could have been us,” one of the girls said in an anonymous interview. “It could have been any one of us.”
It took the police a week to find the bodies of all four girls. The one in the well was the hardest to locate. We all prayed for their poor families back in Pittsburgh, for their poor husbands at war, off fighting that devil while another devil pursued their wives at home.
We had a notion to burn down —— House then, and were going to do that. We were gathering, the old and the young and th
e women left behind by their husbands. We were gathering to destroy the place when word came that Mrs. Addleson would not be leaving. She was going to stay and raise her children here among us. Her husband’s factory would be closing; he’d be going to prison. She needed a place for her children. The children, we thought, oh what sacrifices we make for our children! This we understood all too well.
So we left the house alone, and her in it. And even after her daughter grew up to be a fine, respectable woman, graduating from our very own high school, and went off to college to marry a doctor, even after Mrs. Addleson died and left her son, the heir of James Addleson, alone in —— House, we allowed him to live there without any interference as well.
He was smart enough not to court our daughters. He went to college like his sister and came back a married man, his wife already expecting. This was in the nineteen-seventies, mind you, and such things happened among our children, it seemed, without them thinking much about it. We said nothing. We scolded ourselves and told ourselves it was not our business, and to stop caring.
But if it is not the business of one’s community, whose business is it?
If we’d have intervened, if we’d have tried to get the Addlesons some other living arrangement, perhaps poor Jonas would not have walked into the bathroom at the age of ten to find his father’s dead body, the blood spilling out of his shattered skull.
Why did the son of James Addleson kill himself? You are probably wondering. The answer is simple. It was those girls his daddy murdered. We have seen and heard them ourselves on occasion, wandering through the orchards, climbing out of the well, beating on the windows of the cellar and attic. We have seen and heard them, and continued on our way, ignoring them.
James Addleson’s son was not so lucky. He lived with them. He heard them day and night, talking about his father’s evil. In the end, they convinced him to join them.
Lightspeed Magazine - September 2016 Page 13
