by Robert Price
Chapter Thirty-One
Other than to refill their plastic cups with whiskey at the bar, the elderly Hubbard brothers, Peter and Alley, had remained in the same spot, under the large window in the living room, throughout the entire memorial reception.
“Tony!” Peter Hubbard called out to his nephew from his chair. “Tooooony!”
Busy acting interested in a conversation with Ted Dorsey, Tony ignored his annoying uncle. His attention, however, remained fixed on the sudden lack of activity in the reception room. He had heard from Jeannine Quinn about the commotion his aunt caused over a little boy. Now he was positive that his cousin Elizabeth and her husband Jon were in there, too, with his aunt, discussing what had happened—and they were doing so without him. He was being kept out of the family loop. On top of that, since he had started talking with Ted Dorsey, the blonde boy’s mother had come out, retrieved her son from the black man he’d just met, Ezekiel, and Neil Bingham and then returned to the small room. His curiosity piqued, yet he would have to wait to find out more details.
“Tony,” Peter Hubbard repeated. “Goddamnit, boy, I know you can hear me!”
“Those highfalutin’ Griffins,” Ally Hubbard grumbled, calling Tony by his last name. “Never see our part of the family go around ignoring one another.”
“Hey, Tony, you remember your Uncle Edward, our brother?” Peter Hubbard asked, words stumbling over the whiskey he’d been drinking all afternoon and the pipe that hung from the corner of his mouth.
“What?” Tony finally barked over his shoulder, fed up. “What the hell do you two want?”
“We was just talking … me and Peter here,” Alley Hubbard said, rolling the ends of his mustache. “Well, we wanted to know if you remember when us and your dad and our brother Edward and you and Tom used to take the guns and go out looking for deer, just out back here.” Alley pointed in the direction of the new neighborhood that had been built on the Hubbard’s old acreage.
“Jesus,” Tony muttered and then tempered himself enough to civilly turn sideways to face them. This position provided a better angle to both observe the goings-on in the reception room as well as include Ted Dorsey in the reluctant conversation now beginning with his uncles. “Actually, you know, I had completely forgotten about those hunting expeditions. I must have been only six or seven.”
“No older than that boy over there,” Peter Hubbard pointed to little Teddy Dorsey who stood by the parlor doorway watching his mother struggle with the zipper on his sister’s coat. Ted Dorsey shrugged his shoulders, excused himself from the conversation and went to assist his wife.
“That’s right,” Peter Hubbard continued. “We’d let you and Tom carry the shotgun shells, and you’d drop them as we went, leaving a trail.”
“That’s right, so if we ever got lost, we’d just follow the trail of buckshot,” Alley Hubbard laughed and coughed and crossed his legs at the knee.
“Sure, I remember Uncle Edward,” Tony said, referring to Tom’s father. “God, he was easily ticked off; he could get mad at nothing at all. One time—I haven’t thought of this in years—one time it was real cold out, in the teens—freezing, but Tom still took his jacket off and made it into a sack to carry all the shells.”
Tony cradled his arms as if carrying the sack of shotgun shells.
“Tom couldn’t have been more than nine or ten. And he had to, well, he had to ‘go’ bad—I mean real bad …” Tony changed his tone, as if setting up a familiar joke.
The Hubbard brothers smiled and settled in to hear the rest of the story.
“And afraid his father would get mad, he wouldn’t trust me to hold the shells—I was too small. He said I’d drop them. So he held onto them, in his jacket, with both hands, as he squatted there in the icy woods.” Tony forced a laugh. “But then he slipped and fell on this briar patch and scratched up and bruised up his ass—” Tony stopped.
Disgust washed over him.
“Wait a minute,” he thought out loud. “That’s not what happened.”
“Tell it, Tony. Finish it up. It’s a real funny story,” Peter blurted out, laughing just thinking about it.
“Wait a minute. No,” Tony said quietly. “That’s not how it happened, Uncle Peter.” Tony stepped back from the brothers remembering for the first time since he was a kid what had really happened in the woods beyond the haying fields that winter’s day. There had been no need to “go,” no slip on the ice and no fall in the briar patch.
He and Tom had been walking along the path, picking up the empty shotgun shells that the men had discharged from their guns. And, as usual, Tom was frightened of his father’s wrath, which could bubble-up at anytime for no apparent reason. So Tom, overly cautious, had wrapped the empty shells in his jacket so as not to drop any. Shivering in just his shirtsleeves, carrying the shotgun shells, Tom ran down the path to catch up with the men. Tony, so much younger, smaller, followed as best he could, but stopped a few yards away when Tom reached the older men. Tony remembered the furious expression on Uncle Edward’s face when he turned from the other men and looked at his son.
“He’s dumber than the whore he’s come from,” Tom’s father had snapped. And then, as punishment for the mishandling of the empty shotgun shells, he demanded Tom undo his pants and drop to his hands and knees. Tony remembered climbing behind a stonewall for protection, while Tom, barebacked, was whipped by his father with a switch from a nearby Aspen tree. The other men, including Tony’s own father, did nothing to stop Uncle Edward.
Whipped until his bottom was bloody and crisscrossed with red stripes, Tom was frozen, feverish and practically delirious by the time they returned to the Hubbard farmhouse.
On the walk back across the haying fields, Tony’s father and the Hubbard brothers bore down on little Tony. They threatened him with a similar punishment unless he adopted a more humorous tale about his cousin’s mishap while hunting with his father and uncles. And later that day, when his mother and aunt questioned Tony about the incident, he began to craft the story that he would faithfully repeat again and again, when asked about what had happened to Tom that day.
And that evening, when things had quieted down, when he was still trying to make sense of the day, he asked his older sister, Melanie, what a whore was. She slapped him, and from then on he knew for sure—the new story was the only story of what had happened that day.
Now, thirty years later, Tony could clearly see that afternoon in his mind. He saw a frail, naked ten-year-old boy, his skin turning a pale blue as he knelt, crying and bleeding, humiliated in the center of a circle of men.
Tony looked at the old Hubbard brothers and felt ashamed. They, along with his own father, had scared him into keeping the actual events of that day so perfectly hidden in his memory that even today, decades later, he was ready to lie on cue as they reminisced about their hunting expeditions.
The Hubbard brothers watched Tony’s facial expressions dance with changing emotions as they waited for the humorous conclusion of the story, the one that featured Tom slipping into the thorny winter bramble as he tried to hold the shotgun shells in a jacket while he squatting to defecate at the edge of the haying fields.
“Come on, get on with it,” Peter Hubbard demanded. “Finish the damn story. It’s funny!”
Tony remained silent. The thought of that day now sickened him.
“Told-ya he wouldn’t remember the story,” Alley Hubbard chided.
“What? You set me up, you bastards!” Tony said, furious with them and with his own actions; lying to cover for their weaknesses—I’m no better than them.
“What you talking about, boy?” Alley Hubbard spit out his words.
“You wanted me to repeat that bullshit lie about the day that Tom’s father whipped the shit out of him in the woods while you piss-heads stood around, watching, practically cheering Uncle Edward on. I can’t fucking believe it. I bought your shit. Christ! And even when Tom told our mothers what really happened—as if I hadn’t seen
it with my own eyes—I lied for you assholes. You stood there watching it all. That’s what I remember. He was just a kid and you did nothing, nothing!”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Peter Hubbard said coolly.
“I know exactly what I’m talking about,” Tony’s anger had peaked and now he felt weak.
“You think you’re such a goddamn hot shot, Mr. Know-It-All-Griffin. Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe our brother had his suspicions about that boy’s mother—about her actions. The point needed to be made and he made it—properly and with witnesses.”
Peter Hubbard slid back in the chair and returned the pipe to the corner of his mouth, satisfied he had set Tony straight.
Alley Hubbard folded his hands over his belt buckle. “You see, boy, not everything’s the way it seems.” Then he pushed back and nodded to his brother with approval.
Resigned, Tony looked at the floor. “You’re fucking sick. You’re both fucking sick, you know that?” But his insides ached because he knew what they were referring to. When little, he had heard his parents argue about the same thing. And when he asked his mother about it, she hit him saying it was a lie: “That silly talk ends here. Tom’s father is Tom’s father, no matter what your daddy says.”
Angry with himself, Tony moved away from the Hubbard brothers. I was just a frightened boy, he silently told himself. Through the doorway of the reception room he could see Aunt Casey’s silhouette move about. He hadn’t thought of any of this in years, not the abuse and not the doubts about who really was Tom’s father. It had all seemed like a terribly foggy dream left over from boyhood, a nightmare from the past that had been forcibly rewritten as a comedy soon after it happened.
