Confession

  “How ’bout you? You need your friends right now?”

  That earned me another warm squeeze. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll tell you the truth, my dear, for all that I am considered in some circles to be something of a radical, I am also something of a traditionalist, did you know that?”

  “I may have guessed,” I teased gently.

  “I may be the first woman to be mayor of this city, and I may be the first black person to do it, too, but Hardy is also the first and only man I’ve ever known, isn’t that something in this day and age? My marriage, my family, my church, they’re my rock and my security.” She looked at me out of her deeply intelligent and expressive brown eyes. “They make everything else possible, they make the world safe for me. I don’t know what I’d do without them exactly as they are.”

  “You’ll still have them, Mary, won’t you?”

  She sighed. “Yes, of course, I will, you’re right.”

  “But if Hardy leaves the ministry …”

  “And our church.”

  “It’ll be hard for you.”

  “For all of us.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said and squeezed back. “But you know, a very wise woman once told me that wherever there are trials and perplexities, there are angels …”

  Mary’s eyes widened, and then she began to laugh softly. “… sitting on top of a treasure,” I finished.

  She let go of my hand, only to put an arm around my waist. “What a cross it is for me to bear,” Mary said with an exaggerated sigh, “to have such smart friends.”

  “Smart aleck, I think you mean,” I suggested as we walked with matching strides back out to our cars.

  Mine needed fuel, I decided, after I got in, even though the gauge was only at the halfway mark. But I didn’t know which of our cars we’d be using to drive out to the Mayer farm that evening to check out their Monday night church services. I decided that I’d better be fully gassed, just in case.

  “Thanks for sending the kid in,” Joe said to me as I paid my bill at the Amoco station.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “David, the kid, he’s working out so far.”

  “You hired David Mayer, Joe?”

  He looked up from his cash register. “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Thanks to you.”

  “Uh, when does he work?”

  “Last shift, seven to ten, weekdays, all day Sundays.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said, feeling completely at a loss.

  Joe looked surprised, then grinned. “You will? Why so?”

  “It’s just so surprising,” I stammered, “when things work out like this.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he said pleasantly. “This is the way the world works, Jenny.”

  “You’re an optimist, Joe.”

  “No, I’m not, I’m a Knight of Columbus.”

  I left his station laughing as usual and feeling a little better about things in general. Joe had a definite knack for filling his customers’ “tanks” with a kind of fuel that was richer and ran longer than mere petroleum.

  26

  THE RAIN WAS THRUMMING AGAINST THE SLATE roof above our heads and pinging against the closed windows in our bedroom as we dressed to go to “church” that night. Our invitation, issued by Ron’s father, had been for nine o’clock, but Geof wanted us to arrive a little early. This meeting would, he hoped, be a good opportunity to ask some questions about Dennis Clemmons, about their relationship to him, and about the ramp they had so nobly constructed for him—the one from which crucial bolts had been removed and supports half sawed away.

  “Who told David about the job?” he asked me as he unbuckled the trousers he’d worn to work that day and let them fall to the floor.

  “Did you mention it to anybody, Geof?”

  “No, who did you tell?”

  “Only one other person heard about it from me besides you.”

  “And that is … ?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “Jenny,” he said, sounding annoyed. “It’s been a long day, so just tell me, okay?”

  “Try to figure it out,” I suggested as I sashayed into my closet. “We’ll make a detective of you yet.”

  I heard him grunt and mutter, “Fucking touché.”

  “What, dear?” I called out sweetly.

  “Damon Montgomery!” he yelled.

  “Good thinking,” I said in my most patronizing tone as I emerged from the closet in only my underwear. “Now think about what we ought to wear to this thing.”

  “All white, like they do?”

  “A little blatant,” I said doubtfully. “They might even think we’re making fun of them. Besides, it’s already September.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Why, everybody knows you can’t wear white after Labor Day.”

  “Who makes up these stupid rules?”

  “The same ones who decreed for years that women weren’t supposed to wear blue eye shadow. The queen bees of the hive.”

  So we settled on neutral colors with a bit of white: a beautiful, light gray suit with a white dress shirt and a muted necktie for Geof; a bland beige silk fitted dress for me with low beige heels. I pulled back my hair at the nape of my neck with a big fluffy beigeish bow attached to a barrette.

  “You look … nice,” Geof observed.

  “Ah. Damned with faint praise.”

  He hadn’t actually dressed yet but stood nude in front of me, a pair of fresh undershorts in one hand.

  “You,” I said, “look awfully nice.”

  “Why, thank you,” he said, and his tired face lit up with a grin.

  I looked down from his face. “Maybe you’d better get dressed quickly, or we won’t get out of here at all.”

  He made a laughing grab for me as I left the room, but I managed to escape his clutches, unfortunately.

  There was an unreal, comfortable, almost voluptuous feeling about our drive to the Mayer farm. Because it was raining and there might be mud, we took the Jeep and drove along feeling cocooned within it. Normally, with sunset still so late in the day, our way would have been illuminated by daylight, but the clouds extended across the sky, horizon to horizon, like a black canvas cover without so much as a rip to admit some light.

  Motorists were driving with their headlights on.

  In town, the streetlamps were already on, but we passed through them and out of reach of their glow as we drove on to the other side where the country began again.

  We played a cassette tape, a soft flute and guitar accompaniment to our quiet, steady conversation about this and that and the other. I would have been happy for Geof to just keep driving on through the state, for us to stop someplace late that night and get a motel room, to sleep for a few hours, and then get up and drive through the rain some more. When we slowed down beside the fence with the For Sale sign on it, the time was still only eight-thirty, a half hour before our invitation, and I felt reluctant to disembark so soon.

  They’d left the gate open for us.

  Geof turned his headlights off.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  He drove the Jeep into the darkness under the trees beyond the gate.

  “Being careful,” he said without explaining further. It seemed to me that far from increasing our safety, driving without lights considerably boosted our chances of going into a ditch or hitting a tree.

  I clutched the front edge of my seat and said, “Why?”

  There were several pickup trucks and a couple of cars parked near the house. The draperies in the house were pulled tightly shut so that we could not see in nor could anyone in there see us.

  There was no one about in the yard.

  Geof backed up, then pulled off to the side among the trees and parked. I hadn’t been particularly nervous up until the moment he turned the headlights out; it had all sounded so straightforward when we talked about it at home: just walk up to their door and ask to sing their hymns. Now that it was turning
into a prowl in the dark, I was already beyond jittery and clear into scared. This seemed to me to be an excellent way to get shot at by big men in pickup trucks, who would hear rustling in the wet grass on their property and confuse us with prowlers.

  “What do we think we’re doing?” I repeated.

  “I’ve got rain gear back here,” Geof said as if that were an answer. He tossed a blue Gor-Tex jacket at me, his size, which meant it would cover most of my beigey silkness. I gazed sadly down at my shoes, which were about to be ruined, and thought, Well, the hell with it, this is what happens to women who dare to scorn the rules of fashion. “You can stay here,” he told me as he slipped a black parka over his own head and settled it down over his shoulders. “In fact, I wish you would. I just want to look around and see what’s going on before we go in there.”

  “If you think I should stay here, why give me this?”

  I indicated the blue pile of water-repellent material in my lap.

  “Because I don’t think you’ll do it,” he said with a slight smile for me. “Will you?”

  “No, I’d rather go with you, okay?”

  “I gave you the rain gear, didn’t I?”

  “But Geof, why, exactly, are we doing it this way?”

  “Because we’d like to know what’s really going on in there as opposed to what they want us to observe.”

  Okay, that made sense to me.

  He reached under the driver’s seat and came up with a gun—a .45, I think—and then he reached over me to open his glove compartment, came out with a couple of small flashlights, and held them both out to me. I said prissily, “I believe I’ll have the blue this time,” leaving the red one for him. I grasped his hand before he could get out of the Jeep, and I looked seriously into his eyes. “Do we have to do this? Couldn’t we just have regular foreplay next time?”

  “No,” he said, smiling in the dark, “the danger excites me.”

  Too true, I thought as I climbed down from the car. My own heart was palpitating rather rapidly, too.

  We slogged through the rain, over the muddy grass, without speaking for the quarter mile or so up to the one-story house. It appeared to float in darkness, giving off a cozy golden aura because of the light seeping around and glowing through its closed draperies. There were no other lights on the property, nothing to spotlight our presence outside in the storm. Nor did the storm itself betray us: It was a quiet, gray, and steady rain and had been now for the last couple of hours, the lightning and thunder having moved on past us. Geof and I moved easily under natural cover, as it were, shielded by the rain and by the sheer blackness of countryside at night.

  I followed Geof right up to the house, where he evidently hoped to be able to get a look inside by locating an open seam, a crack, in the drapes, but they were well and tightly closed, admitting no Peeping Toms or Tomasinas, for that matter.

  Geof grasped my left wrist and led me around back, looking for other windows to spy through, and we finally found a small one, a quarter pane of glass in the rear door that was not entirely protected by the curtain pulled over it. He peeked through first, then gently shoved me forward for a look.

  I nearly drew back in alarm, because there was someone so close to the door, just on the other side of it. Then she moved, clearing the way for me to view the length of the house from the back of it. It was like looking down a lighted tunnel. Right on the other side of the door was a small kitchen, where a woman was working at a table, pulling cellophane wrapping off the tops of various desserts; I couldn’t tell what each of them was, but I definitely identified a meringue pie of some sort. My mouth watered, thinking of lemon. Past the kitchen was the long living room Geof and I had seen the first time we had come out, but now it was filled with people, big men, women, lots of children, a few older people, and every single one of them dressed entirely in white from their shoes to the tops of their heads. The women more mantillas or scarves or even what looked like white doilies pinned to their hair; the men wore white skullcaps, although a couple of them had white baseball-type caps on. The children’s attire mimicked their elders in every detail. All the chairs and sofas around the room were taken by the grown-ups; the kids, even the older ones, teenagers, sat or played on the floor at the feet of the adults.

  Except for the littlest children and the woman right in front of me in the kitchen, the attention of every person was focused—no, riveted—toward the other end of the living room. There I saw what we had thought, in the videotapes we had seen, was a wide doorway leading to a white room. Now I could see that it wasn’t a doorway so much as it was a frame of sorts made of woodwork, painted white, arcing over the floor and over the woman seated under it in a yellow kitchen chair.

  She had her hands folded calmly in her lap, and she was talking.

  David’s Uncle Matthew was standing just in front and to the side of her, taping her “performance” with a hand-held camera, and she was talking directly toward him.

  The woman in the kitchen suddenly turned toward our window.

  I jerked back, landing softly against Geof’s chest.

  We waited a silent count of ten, then backed away from the door. Geof took hold of one of my wrists again, and this time he led me toward the outbuildings.

  First the garage, but it was open and full of unmysterious farm equipment. And then, the shed.

  27

  THIS TIME, THE SHED DOOR WAS UNLOCKED, the padlock that had fastened it was now hanging open, its clasp only loosely attaching the door to the structure.

  “They’re not very security conscious,” I whispered.

  “Maybe they should be,” Geof whispered back. “You never know who’ll take advantage of an unlocked door.” With which remark, he slid out the padlock, looped it over the door handle, and opened the shed to let us into it.

  “Welcome to Hollywood,” Geof breathed in my ear.

  Even in the darkness, we could see that the shed was a videotape library. Tape box upon dark tape box lined the inside walls on shelving that was floor to ceiling in a couple of places and various other heights in others. There was also room against the walls for a small built-in desk, on which a small television sat, and an alcove for videotaping equipment, including a camera case and a tripod. Although the shed was only about eight by ten feet in size, there was still room enough for the two of us to step in and to move around. Geof silently closed the door behind us. Then both of us wordlessly perused the labels on the shelved videotapes by the light of our pocket flashlights.

  A lot of it looked totally innocuous, typical American family stuff: Matthew and Dinah’s Wedding, Bryan’s First Birthday Party, Mom & Dad’s 40th Anniversary, that kind of thing. But besides the birthday parties and Christmas dinners, there was also Uncle Raymond’s Visitation, Uncle Raymond’s Funeral, Uncle Raymond’s Graveside Service, all of which sat on a long shelf with other tapes all similarly labeled with other people’s names, of course. And there was another short row given over apparently to tapes of the births of babies in the family.

  “These people tape everything!” I whispered. “I suppose what we saw tonight in the house will wind up in here, too. The woman who was sitting in that chair must be one of the wives … I wonder what she was confessing to?”

  “Look at this, Jen.”

  I turned, put my hands on Geof’s shoulders, and peered around him to see what row of tapes he was looking at. His flashlight played on the title: Mark, Confessions, 89, and the next one after that, Mark, Confessions, 90, and then he showed me how Mark’s confessions were recorded year after year and also those of every other member of the Mayer family, including Grandma and Grandpa and all the kids.

  “Find Ron and Judy and David,” I suggested.

  And he did, all together on a top shelf near the roof of the shed. As he ran the light down David’s row, we counted seven tapes, starting from when the boy was two years old and ending when he was nine, which might have been just before he left with his mother to go live with Dennis Clemmo
ns.

  “What does a two-year-old have to confess?” I asked.

  “That he was born into a family of goddamn voyeurs and sadists,” Geof retorted, his voice strained and angry. “Bastards! Look at this, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Shh,” I warned, glancing at the door, “take it easy, get mad later.”

  But I was plenty incensed myself at what we’d seen thus far, and then especially at the new shelf Geof’s light revealed, for it was row after row of tapes with labels, like Ryan, Penances, 86.

  Before Geof could object, I took that one off the shelf, opened it, and stuck it into the open maw of the VCR that sat beside the little TV on the desk, but I left it to Geof to turn it on.

  There was a flash of startling light in the dark shed, and the tape began to roll, but silently, because Geof had found and hit a mute button on the controls.

  We watched, holding hands with my fingernails digging into his palm as on the television a man struck a very small boy ten times on the boy’s palms, which he held out like tender little gifts to the man. The child’s mouth was trembling with the first slap, and with every subsequent slap, it opened a little more, until we could imagine the cry coming out of it.

  As he hit the child, the man gazed lovingly into the boy’s face. At the end, the man grabbed the child in an embrace.

  “No more,” I said and reached for the controls to find the off button, but Geof beat me to it.

  “Find an adult penance tape,” he whispered.

  After watching that child being punished, my hands were shaking as I did as he asked. Behind me, he with his calmer hands that were more accustomed to unpleasant tasks rewound the tape, folded it back into its plastic carton, and replaced it on its shelf.

  “Here.” I had picked a more recent one labeled Luke, Confessions, 93.

  That tape amounted to recordings of a grown man being beaten across his bare back with a device that looked downright medieval: There was a long handle to which thin leather straps were attached. They came down across the man’s back as if to flay him alive. The device was wielded by the same man who’d slapped the little boy’s hands. Midway into the beating, the man’s back began to bleed. Geof fastforwarded to another penance segment in which the same man—evidently the brother named Luke—was being whipped again. Now we noticed that his back was heavily scarred from previous punishments. But when Geof started to turn that off, too, I stopped him.