by David Connor
“Because Miss Virginia says I should.”
We had all come skipping into the kitchen from outside that fateful day in late August. Judah’s long, dark fingers had been wrapped around mine, much paler, much cleaner, with nary a scar or scrape, as I was discouraged from playing in the gravel and the dirt. Auntie Virginia had been preparing lemonade at the counter. She always made her own food and drink, due to an aversion to certain others’ touch on her belongings. Auntie Virginia had dropped the glass pitcher at first sight of Judah and me holding hands. Her eyes had gone right there and she’d yanked me hard, and then had reached back to strike me.
“Virginia! Don’t you dare!” Georgia had snatched at me too, just as roughly, but to protect, not to punish. Celia had hurried in by then as well, and while Abee had run to hug her mother at her skirt, the younger, smaller Judah, my would-be protector, had stood stalwart between my disciplinarian and me.
“You will not harm my precious Pennsylvania,” Georgia had declared.
“Precious?” Virginia had fanned herself with the metal spoon as she’d spoken, spraying the kitchen with sweetness that would soon attract ants she would force someone else to kill. “He is pernicious, if anything. The signs are already at eye, Sister.” She’d poked the spoon at me like a dagger then, and I’d still had no idea what the wrongdoing was. “I warned you at his birth that his wickedness would show itself.” With those words, Auntie Virginia had dropped to her knees to pray.
“It’s total foolishness, your obsession with such nonsense!” Georgia had waved it all away.
“Be careful, Miss Virginia!” Celia had tried to tend to the shattered glass with her apron still tied at her waist, mopping around where Auntie Virginia had knelt and muttered words biblical.
Judah had tried to hug me.
“Cease this depravity at once, Penny Dupree!” Auntie Virginia had slapped me then, from her position on the floor, interrupting her godly conversation to do so. “Keep clear of Judah Mobley!”
I must admit, there was no way a five-year-old could recount such a scene verbatim, of course. Perhaps I was melding several conversations into one. I had heard my sisters arguing about “the curse” and what should become of me because of it dozens of times over many years.
“We will not send my Pennsylvania away!” Georgia had shouted, during one particularly boisterous row.
“Where to?” Auntie Virginia spat. “Any sort of boarding school would only encourage the perversion.”
It was yet another exchange I had heard through the ductwork.
“I will make him my life, Virginia,” Georgia had vowed. “I will continue to devote myself, as if he were my own.”
“That will solve nothing, Sister, save to satisfy you and your barren womb—your fantasies of motherhood. Perhaps it is your smothering that has made Pennsylvania as he is.”
“As he is! As he is, Virginia? You don’t even know how he is. Pennsylvania is a child. An innocent child, holding hands with—”
“That negro boy is not my problem. His mother shall deal with the improprieties of what he has done with someone above his station. Our problem is our brother, a burden thrust upon us involuntarily because of Mother’s death, one we shall be forced to carry until his, dear sister.”
“You needn’t be troubled at all. Leave him to me,” Georgia had offered.
“Your hand is not strong enough. Your will. You mark my words: that one has been afflicted. Has history not shown you the tumult this can cause? Have you forgotten mother’s misery? Have you forgotten the dire, drastic consequences, those which lead to Pennsylvania’s dumbness?”
“Pennsylvania is far more intellectually advanced than you believe,” Georgia had insisted. “The boy is almost normal.”
“To your delusions, Georgia. To your own sad, clouded devotion. He is an encumbrance.”
“No.”
“Oh, yes. I have spent every day since mother succumbed, and that boy still breathed, praying for his breaths to cease as well. Should it not come to pass before he is allowed to act on what will torment him soon enough, you will wish the same fate.”
“No wonder your husband deserted you,” Georgia had said. “You are the one who is not right.”
“I’d have smothered Pennsylvania myself were I able,” Auntie Virginia had angrily responded. “And as I stand here now, I wish I had the physicality to match my will to do it still.”
There’d been a slap.
“He has his eyes!” Auntie Virginia had cried.
“Father’s?”
“And also the devil’s, Sister! Black as coal, with evil behind his stare.”
“You don’t know,” Georgia had practically wailed.
“Oh, but I do,” Auntie Virginia had sworn. “All too well. The signs of the unnatural have come early. True evil swells beneath the surface in our brother. If the heavens have not heeded my requests to lay him to rest, at least we’ve been amply forewarned of what’s to come. You want responsibility for Pennsylvania, you take it. You’ve already set your lot in life as guardian over relatives not quite right in the head. To you I surrender it. I surrender another, oh-so-grateful to do it.”
As I grew from boy to adolescent, so the slow process of my imprisonment began. Perhaps Georgia thought the condemnation true, after all. By age eight, I had been banned from the kitchen when Celia and her children were present. After a decade with the family, Celia was let go when I was ten. Around that same time, I was banished from the woods, where I had in fact met Judah once or twice, for play and holding hands. A fence was erected when I turned thirteen. The gate at the front and back were both locked, and somehow it had to do with the appearance of hair on my body. I’d failed to see the connection then, of course. Though later, I’d completely understood.
I had climbed that blasted ugly, wooden fence and shared my first kiss with Judah at fifteen and several more afterward. My escapes were sporadic, to say the least. Yet every time I went to the woods, my Judah was waiting. Was he there every night? Did he come for me always, only to be disappointed far more often than not? The thought that he may have continued made me sad. Often we kissed, sometimes tenderly, sometimes quite erotically, though we had always stopped before continuing on with what my body, and also assuredly his, tempted us to do, the sorts of things the Bible and Auntie Virginia always said teenage boys should never do. There was one occasion I recalled quite clearly, a night when I had simply offered Judah comfort, as he pained so over his sister. Abee had suffered a rather serious accident. She had been cleaning second-floor windows on a ladder, a job with her mother after Celia left our employ. Abee had slipped near the top rung, the soles of her shoes and the ladder both wet from the slosh of the bucket. She’d fallen and hit her head. It was very bad, Judah had said. He’d told me Abee would never be right again.
Judah’s hands had found their way into my underthings upon a later rendezvous. Something unfamiliar had happened: I’d been reluctant and worried, yet also quite eager to relive ever since. I had been caught the night of it, however, upon my return to the house. Georgia had scolded me. And though her dressing-downs were far less vitriolic that Auntie Virginia’s, though she never raised a hand to me, they hurt just as much, because she always seemed so sad and disappointed.
I found myself confined to the house thereafter. A locksmith came, and my chamber door now needed a key to exit, which Georgia kept nestled in her bosom on a string. She would trot me out for daily air, like a pet on a leash or a child too large for his pram. We would sit beneath the oak tree, amongst the sweet scent of wisteria, the fragrance of which sometimes roused me in embarrassing ways that showed in my trousers and left marks and secretions in my breeches, just like those that occurred that one time with Judah, amongst the shadows and sounds of the forest, surrounded by the knowing, watching creatures of the night. All of this seemed to bring Georgia great concern.
As my sixteenth birthday came, also came more hair, wanton urges more intense, and new explorations o
f my body beyond those already self-discovered. Like Victorian times or fairy tale stories, it was deemed I’d be sequestered a virgin evermore.
“It is important you retain your purity,” Georgia told me. “You are my entire heart, and I shall be yours.”
She never did mention why my chastity was of such grand importance. If I was to be her “entire heart,” I supposed that meant I was never to take a wife. Even though my yearnings had thus far been directed only at Judah, somewhere in my mind, I had definitely considered becoming a husband and father. It was the first time that was foretold never to be. Perhaps it was due to my fits. Maybe it had been determined when the affliction first showed that it was best that I not pass these on to any offspring. I’d lose consciousness when they came on—these spells—and awaken in a state of confusion. I’d been told I would become violent, throw things, and act out savagely before falling into a deep, still sleep. Evidence backed this up; broken knickknacks, displaced draperies, and sometimes a crust of blood on my nose and upper lip. I remembered none of it afterward, except sometimes the dreams that occurred while I dozed.
As my incarceration continued, frustration bubbled in my gut and certain organs connected to it. On the verge of adulthood, on the eve of becoming a man, one old enough for battle, this forced me out of my detention. My window had been painted shut, purposely sealed against possible escape. “Do not go out it again,” I had been warned. And for quite some time I had obeyed. I had compelled my common sense and a determination toward pleasing Georgia to overrule all other desires for as long as I could do so. When the pull became too strong, I convinced myself fleeing would not only benefit me, but also my unfairly-obligated keeper.
I waited until Georgia was in bed one night, the night before I turned eighteen years of age. My door had been locked from the hallway side, as was usual. I was safe. She was safe, safe from me, or so she thought. I picked up the straight razor with which I tended to my sparse but still undesirable whiskers daily. Even as I worked the sharp edge against the line of dried white paint that kept me from freedom, it was not solely sexual urges which prompted me to consider running off for good. Georgia seemed so vexed, so sullen much of the time. Without me, I figured, she would then be free as well.
It was warm outside that night in late springtime. A layer of clouds with a full moon hiding behind gave the night a silvery glow. I had wrapped what I could carry in a bed sheet days earlier in ready for my escape—some clothing, my writing supplies, and a watch that had once belonged to my father, given to me on a previous birthday by Georgia. I hadn’t planned on where I might go. Perhaps I would have enlisted in the military. Perhaps I would have joined a monastery, or maybe stowed away on a barge, had I been able to make it to water. Wherever I’d been headed, my channel started through the woods. As much as I loved the woods when with Judah, I was always anxious there alone. Why wouldn’t I be, raised on anxiety, with all the freedom of a caged bird, my outings infrequent, always covert. The sounds of nighttime were chilling, but because of the darkness within me, what “swelled beneath the surface,” I was as frightened of myself as I was of nocturnal creatures, be they wild in nature or the kind from fantastical, scary tales. Locked up like a criminal or a show beast one could visit for their amusement hardly mine, I’d had far too much time to do nothing but think and recount Auntie Virginia’s condemnations, as well as the tales she used to read about monsters that roamed after dusk. I was convinced I was one of them—troubled, if not purely wicked. I was engaged in a yet another one-way conversation, an argument as to which I truly was, when an actual voice interrupted the one inside my head.
“Penn? Penn? Is that you?”
Suddenly, the most frightening being who could possibly appear before me was the one who actually did: the one I could not resist.
“Judah?” I had not seen him in years—more than two. Hardly could I believe he still looked for me. I had hoped that he might, but at the same time, for his sake, I had wished for him to move on.
“Yes, Penn. Good God, yes! It’s me!” Judah had said. He’d thrown his manly arms around me and he’d pulled me close and tight.
I left my head at that moment, stepping from the past, from the joy that turned tragic. I looked out the window to see if I could still see Ewan Parish’s car in the distance, but it was too far gone.
I sipped my breakfast tea and tried to erase what little memory there was of what happened next between Judah and myself. The pain was too intense to allow it to take over, even with so much time between it and the present. I had put much of the story of my life onto paper without even realizing I’d been doing it, and so I continued, as if I’d done it purposefully for Ewan Parish’s eyes.
My head suddenly aches, Mr. Parish—Ewan, if I might. I feel a spell coming on. Just like the one I’d had that night, there with Judah in the woods. I’d had fewer and fewer as I’d grown in age, until the point where I could not recall when the last one was when I’d finally have another. Though not gone altogether, they had become quite rare as I’d entered my twenties. Now, here comes one again, I believe. Perhaps I should not have spoken of my disorder, one of several, I’m afraid. Superstition…do you believe in such? I shall put away my pen, and hope that any dreams that occur afterward are a reliving of the sweetness of Judah Mobley against my lips, and not of what he may have looked like when found the morning after. I still do not know be he dead or alive. I still do not recall hurting him and only know what I’ve heard; that I savagely tore into him, like some crazed, wild beast; that I left him to suffer and die.
I am dumb. You were correct, Mr. Parish. At age twenty-five, sequestered from the world for all of my life, more so the past nine years, how can I not be a boy in a man’s body? There is another “D” word you could have inquired about, however, one that surely applies. Just as Auntie Virginia has claimed since I can recall, as my dear Georgia had no choice but to acknowledge after the night of my eighteenth birthday, the night I escaped and caused such harm to those I loved, I am also surely a demon.
Chapter 2
Pennsylvania
Ewan was down on his knees outside the house the next morning, his rear end aimed at my tiny window up high. That side of the house had only one and I wondered if he knew it was mine, if he realized that that was where I lived. I wondered if he cared. He seemed to be checking the ground for something. Reaching forward, like a cat stretching after her nap, his position caused his pants to pull tightly across the roundness of his bottom. The cream-colored fabric clung due to sweat and left little to the imagination, save for the hue of his flesh, which I presumed, from seeing that exposed, to be not much darker. Ewan pulled his trousers from the crevice several times. He was doing it again when Georgia stepped up behind him.
“Mr. Parish!”
Ewan jumped to his feet, obviously startled. He yanked at his crotch and then at his backside one more time. His act and a noise that escaped from Georgia’s pursed lips was the perfect symbiosis of cause and effect.
“Sorry, lass,” Ewan said. Then he affected a lowbrow, Southern twang to deliver, “I mean, ma’am.”
“What on Earth are you doing beside the house?” Georgia folded her arms between her bounteous bosom and her generous belly. “We had agreed that it is most important that you would keep your distance.”
“For Pennsylvania’s sake?” Ewan rolled his eyes.
“Yes, Mr. Parish.” Georgia uncrossed her arms and moved them to her hips. “For Pennsylvania’s sake.”
I had slept away much of yesterday after my spell and awoke before dawn feeling randy and faint. I stood away from the glass, once again motionless, except for my heaving chest. I made myself flush against the faded brocade wallpaper between the highboy and my bed as not to be seen by either Ewan or my sister. They were bickering now. Though some words were unintelligible, raised voices came through the outside walls and others found their way in quite clearly. Just as I still listened to now-rare conversations in the kitchen and salon through
the conduits for heat, I could easily eavesdrop on the pair of them through some other access, were I not too frightened to do so.
To say I only had a single view outside was a bit of a fib. I did have a second window of sorts, not just the transom near the ceiling, but a reestablished breach through the wall that had replaced my larger casement after painting it shut had proven ineffective. Until very recently, the opening left after the glazier had removed the panes and their framing had been entirely filled in with bricks, then covered with plaster and wall covering on my side. My window was supposed to be a wall now, transformed to remove all temptation several days after “the final incident.”
That was how Auntie Virginia had referred to the events of my birthday’s eve when she and Georgia had argued over me one last time the day of. While I ate cake in my room after blowing out the candles on my side of the pass-through, they fought worse than ever before. Just afterward, Auntie Virginia disappeared from our lives forever. I later assumed she and her offspring left town because of me, because of the shame. Georgia rarely spoke of Auntie Virginia once she’d gone, and as far as I could ever recollect, she had never mentioned Virginia’s child at all. I’d wondered throughout the years if it had been male or female, or ever born at all. I had certainly never met my niece or nephew. Perhaps Auntie Virginia kept the precious one away, for fear whatever I had might be somehow contagious. It didn’t make sense that I would never ask about this family member, who would have been, by this time, an adult, as was I. Perhaps Georgia skirted the subject for some reason, or maybe I never inquired as I was simply relieved to have Auntie Virginia gone.
“I can no longer keep up with you,” Georgia had said the day the wall was reconstructed.
I’d been secured in another room as the bricklayers and wallpaper hangers took away my only access to the outdoors, literal or simply visual.
“You brought this on yourself, Pennsylvania,” I’d told me. “And it is for your own good.”
