Confession

  “I’ll kill them,” I promised him, nearly hissing it.

  He smiled coldly at me. “Fine with me, sweetheart.”

  When he reached our kitchen sink, he put one hand on it for support and with the other he began to try to pull off his rain parka.

  “What’s he doing?” Hardy asked me.

  “He can’t do it by himself,” I said. “Geof, stop. We’ll do it. We’ll be careful, I promise. Hardy, help me get this off of him, but for God’s sake be careful! Don’t let anything touch him if you can help it.”

  “It’s my back,” Geof told me in a low voice. “Just don’t let it touch my back, Jenny. Please.”

  “I’ll kill them! I’ll kill them!” I swore.

  “I suppose,” Hardy said as he jumped to assist me, “that one of you is eventually going to tell me what kind of emergency we have going on here. Fine thing,” he added as we slipped the last of the parka over Geof’s head, “a man comes out to drink a beer with his friends and tell them his troubles, and they go and steal his thunder by having problems of their own.”

  I smiled thinly at him. “Inconsiderate of us.”

  His return smile was a worried one. “Terribly.”

  “Stop that,” I said again to Geof, whose right hand had strayed to his shirt buttons. “I’ll do it, it’ll be faster and hurt less.” While Hardy went to lay the parka on the counter behind the sink, I undid Geof’s buttons one by one. Then Hardy turned around, and he got his first glimpse of Geof’s back.

  “Sweet Jesus,” he breathed. “What is this?”

  I finished unbuttoning, so that I could walk around and look. At the sight of Geof’s shirt, I just stood there and started to cry. Hardy put his arms around me as much to comfort himself, I think, as to offer solace to me, since neither of us dared to lay a hand on Geof.

  “It’s not that bad, is it?” Geof asked us.

  My husband’s shirt was red with blood that had soaked through from his back. And when we worked up the courage—all three of us—to gently strip the cloth from his skin, with me having to control my sobs so that my fingers wouldn’t shake so hard that they slipped and hurt him, we discovered that his back was striped by shallow, diagonal cuts. Pinstripes. There were so many of them, laid across him one by one, that his bare skin appeared pinstriped.

  It was then that Sergeant Lee Meredith walked into the kitchen. We hadn’t even heard the front door open; I couldn’t even remember if we’d closed it.

  “No problem out there, huh?” she said, pausing in the doorway. In trousers, shirt, and jacket, she looked dressed for work. “Am I taking you to a hospital, or do we call an ambulance?”

  “You stay the hell out of this, Lee,” Geof commanded her.

  The sergeant stared at him. “Stay out—?”

  “These cuts need stitches,” Hardy said.

  But Geof shook his head. “I doubt it, Hardy. They’re not that deep, are they? They’ve got flogging down to a fine science out there, so they can tend to their own wounds.”

  Reluctantly, feeling deeply hurt myself, I examined the pinstripes more closely. “He’s right. If he doesn’t get infected, I think they’ll close by themselves. But what about scarring? If you don’t get the right medicine on them?”

  “No hospital!” he snapped. “No doctors! No talking about this outside of this room.”

  “Why not, Lieutenant?” Lee sounded furious with him.

  “Geof.” I came around in front of him, touching his face lightly with my fingertips, moving my fingers to my lips, returning them to his face, unable to stop touching him, comforting him, wanting to heal him. “This is what they did to you for trespassing?”

  “No.” He looked into my eyes. “This is not the penance for trespassing. I don’t know what that would be, only a couple of whops with the belt, maybe.” He tried to laugh but failed at the effort. “This, my love, is the penance for impregnating a teenage girl out of wedlock.”

  My fingers went to my mouth again. “They knew!”

  He nodded, sighed. “They know now because I told them. They wanted me to confess to something little, like trespassing? I decided to give them something big, like Judy and me and their grandson.”

  “Lieutenant!”

  All three of us snapped our attention to the woman standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips. “What the hell was the matter with you out there? Why’d you tell us to go away, why’d you say everything was under control? They’ve assaulted a police officer, for Christ’s sake, excuse me, Reverend. We should have busted those people, right then, but we can sure as hell still do it.”

  Geof didn’t answer her but said plaintively, like a man who didn’t think he could take much more, “Can’t somebody clean me up?”

  I turned on the faucet. “Hardy, look two drawers down for clean towels. Lee, look in the bathroom upstairs for antiseptics, painkillers, gauze, anything you can find that you think will do the job.” I looked squarely at my husband as I held a clean white towel under the cool water. “This is not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. Grit your teeth, my darling.”

  “Hardy?” Geof asked, and his friend came around front so that the two men were looking at one another. “Distract me, Hardy. Talk to me about something, tell me about all your problems, better yet, preach me a sermon.”

  Hardy smiled, although his eyes looked closer to tears.

  “That’s a new one,” he said. “A Novocaine sermon. I’ve had people tell me my sermons put them to sleep, but you’re the first person to actually call them narcotics.” I touched the first damp towel to Geof’s back. His whole body contracted with the pain. “Okay,” Hardy said quickly, “okay,” and he began to pace the kitchen, drawing Geof’s attention to him, making like an evangelist preacher, talking bombastically, gesticulating, in other words, putting on a bravura performance to distract his audience of one from his agony, while the sergeant served as nurse’s aide to my ministrations to Geof’s devastated flesh.

  “You see the problem?” Hardy began, widening his eyes dramatically, pointing like a preacher at Geof’s wounds. “This is what I’ve been talking about, the problem of believing in sin! Brothers and sisters, if you believe in sin, then by definition you have to believe in vengeance, and if you believe in that, you must also believe in punishment.”

  I smiled at him over Geof’s shoulder, egging him on.

  “And that concept works backward, too! You may think yourself a modern person, you may think you laugh at the very idea of such an old-fashioned notion as sin, but if you ever punish anybody for anything, if you ever want anybody to suffer in any way for any cause, then, trust me, you do believe in sin!”

  Hardy paced the kitchen like a small stage and worked the kitchen table like a pulpit, banging on it, but gently, not wanting to arouse another and unnecessary flinch in his audience.

  He took off his suit coat to free his arms.

  “But you see, my friends, the problem with vengeance is that it’s insane, because it never ends! And that’s because it never punishes only the one who is accused of sinning. It goes on forever, like the pebble dropped in a pool, creating widening circles of pain that hurt everybody they touch. Just look at what happened in the wake of Ron and Judy’s deaths. They believed they sinned; they believed they deserved punishment, but it didn’t end with their deaths. It reached out to corrupt his brothers, their son, their neighbor … and look what it is doing to this very household!”

  Hardy paused, his attention caught by the suffering we all heard in Geof’s low moans and intermittent gasps. But then our friend pressed bravely on, making an absolute, eye-catching ministerial spectacle of himself in our kitchen. I loved Hardy very much at that moment.

  “Punishment is a voracious bastard!” he preached to us. “You can never satisfy it. It eats everything in its path, reaching out for new victims, going on and on; until, at last, somebody in the long chain of retribution stops believing in it. By that time it has left a wake of such devastation that the
original sin and its original punishment look positively puny by comparison.”

  “But what’s the answer, Hardy?” Geof whispered.

  “Mercy,” the minister said simply, and for a moment his arms fell to his sides, and he stood still, just looking at the tableau in front of him. Hardy stuck his hands in his pockets and said in a normal tone of voice, “Let us be easier on ourselves from the beginnings of our lives. How about that for a revolutionary idea? Let us begin by being merciful to the children from the moment of their births. Let us consider their little errors to be only that, mistakes to be gently corrected and then forgotten rather than sins to be punished.”

  I wiped away a bit of clotted blood, only to have the cut begin to bleed anew. Geof’s breath was coming fast and shallow, he was panting like a woman in labor. Hardy noticed that our patient’s capacity to endure the torment was reaching its outer limit, and so he picked up his preaching pace again.

  “Parents claim that we only punish our children because we love them, but that is a lie, brothers and sisters! We only punish whom we hate. And whom we hate we would kill.”

  I stopped, my hands stilled, and stared at him. “My God, Hardy—”

  We were all silent for a moment, until Geof made a sound deep in his chest, like an animal suffering.

  “And the children of people who don’t believe in sin?” I asked quickly over the sob caught in my own throat.

  “They have a chance to grow up to be merciful to one another,” Hardy said, coming closer to us, speaking eagerly, sincerely, “and to be free of the desire to punish each other and themselves.”

  “We’re finished,” I announced in another few minutes.

  “Thank you,” Geof whispered.

  “I’m going to the bathroom to wash off,” Lee said, since I was using the kitchen sink to do that for my own hands. Geof still clung to the edge of the sink, like a man stunned into immobility. His back looked pink now, raw, like a steak that a cook has lightly scored with a serrated knife; a little blood still seeped from some of the cuts, but others were closing because of swelling. It seemed to me that his whole back was puffing up. We had already given him two capsules of the strongest painkillers we had in the house, pills left over from treatment for a root canal. He closed his eyes. I decided to let him remain like that, recovering, until he was ready to speak or to move again.

  Abruptly, Hardy sat down in a kitchen chair.

  “What happened to you tonight?” I asked him.

  “Church meeting. I made those same points in my sermon on Sunday.” He smiled at me, and his own pain was there on his handsome face for me to witness. “It seems to have upset a few people, although I tried to do it gently. I guess I don’t have much practice at being a loving parent of a congregation; I’ve been a bit of a fire and brimstone man myself.”

  “No kidding,” Geof murmured dryly, barely getting the words out.

  “So tonight I had to take my punishment, too.”

  “Not impressed,” Geof whispered.

  Hardy nodded and smiled sympathetically up at him.

  “You unregenerate sinner, you,” I said to our friend fondly.

  “Hang in there,” Geof encouraged him.

  When Hardy heard that, his eyes got moist again.

  “Fine one to talk,” he said and cleared his throat.

  “If you need a job, Hardy …” I left it hanging.

  “Thank you, Jenny Lynn. I may be calling you.”

  “Okay,” I said. There was now a pile of bloody towels in the sink, and the sergeant had come back into the kitchen. “We’re putting you to bed, buster.”

  After the other two helped me to get our patient up the stairs, Geof said privately to me, “You didn’t believe any of that silly bullshit of Hardy’s, did you?”

  I had undressed him down to his skivvies and laid him on his stomach, turned off the air conditioner, turned on the heat, and pulled the sheet and summer blanket up to his waist. He lay now with his face toward the left side on his pillow, facing where I would lie, with his arms at his sides, about an inch away from his body.

  “Every word,” I told him as I leaned down to give him a kiss on his left temple. He laughed into the pillow. “Every word,” I repeated, kissing his forehead, his hair, and the side of his mouth. “Geof, I’m sorry, but I have to spray antiseptic on you.”

  No answer. And then a crisp, “Get it over with.”

  I did it, covering every inch of his raw back, feeling like a torturer the whole time, knowing how that “little sting” must be magnified a thousand times by the extent of his wounds. I hadn’t wanted to do it downstairs; I’d wanted to lay him gently down up here in our bedroom, give him privacy and the comfort of our bed for this last assault on him.

  Afterward, I sat on the floor, giving him time to recover again.

  When he took a deep breath and moved slightly, I decided it was probably okay to try to talk to him. I walked around the bed and crouched down beside the other side of the mattress, so that I could see his face. “Geof. Tell me that you don’t want to keep this a secret because you think you deserve this punishment.”

  “Christ, is that what you think?”

  “Take it easy. I want to be reassured, that’s all.”

  “The reason I want this kept quiet, Jenny, is that they threatened David. They told me that if I report this, they’ll get him. Their words. Get him. Sometime, somewhere, some one of them will make him pay my penance for turning them in. They’re patient, Jenny, they’re patient and they’re deadly. It’s not just a matter of putting the men in jail even if we could manage to lock them all up. There are the women to consider, and I don’t know how violent they are; and someday, the men would get out of prison if I even managed to get them convicted of something. Look how long they waited to pay Clemmons back for hurting Judy. They’ll wait. And then they’ll get David, some time or some place that I can’t help him.”

  “We have to let them get away with this?”

  “Until I think of a better idea.”

  Or I do, I thought but didn’t say.

  I kissed him good night again, hiding from him the rage that felt like a time bomb in my heart.

  29

  “GET HIM INTO BED ALL RIGHT?” LEE ASKED, back in the kitchen.

  I blinked, then rubbed my eyes. The lights seemed too bright after the dark stairway. “Yes. I knocked him out with a billy club, and that put him right to sleep. I hoped it might bash some sense into him, too, but don’t count on it. Where’s Hardy?”

  “Home. Said he heard his wife calling to him.”

  “He’s a love, isn’t he?”

  “Um.” She was seated in one of our kitchen chairs, and now she pulled out a second one for me. She’d put her jacket back on, and I realized it was still cool in the house; the central heating hadn’t kicked in quite enough to take the chill out of the storm yet. I could see the gun at Lee’s waist, where her jacket fell back. She looked tense, unhappy, explosive. “Sit down. Why have you come downstairs looking as if you want to kill somebody? What’s going on with your love?”

  “He’s lost his mind over this kid, Lee.” I sat, put my palms together, pressed them between my thighs for warmth. “You want some coffee?”

  “No.”

  “Me either. I’m already on hyperalert. I can’t thank you enough for all the help you tried to give him tonight, even if he wouldn’t take it.”

  “How could this happen?” she burst out. “Geof let himself get whipped? They had to have held guns on him. I know him. He’d never let anyone do this to him, not without a hell of a fight—”

  I had to stop Lee from pursuing her anger and her very logical questions. Geof wanted to protect David.

  David …

  And then I had it: a tiny hint of a plan. “Lee, can you wait here for a couple of hours? No, never mind, that’s asking way too much, how about this: You go on home, and I’ll come by your house—”

  “Why do you want me to wait here?”

>   “I think I know where the kid is. I could try to talk to him.”

  “What will that accomplish?”

  “I don’t know,” I said in utter truth. “But it’s the only thing I can think of at the moment, and I’m about ready to try anything.”

  She thought about that and then said, as I’d hoped she would, “I’d better wait here. In case he wakes up, I can help him. If he asks for you, I’ll tell him I’m letting you sleep for a few hours.”

  “Perfect. I’ll try to be back within a couple of hours.”

  “Where is the kid, Jen?”

  I looked at the clock over the refrigerator. Eleven-thirty. David would have already left his new job at the filling station, since his shift ended at ten. “I think he might be staying at the next-door neighbors’ house, remember them?”

  “A mother and her son, right? Montgomery, Damon, Sheila.”

  “Very good, Sergeant.” I tried to grin at her. I felt guilty, knowing she would never be so sanguine about waving me off on my own to find David if she knew everything: about the animal corpses, the graffiti, the confession tapes. I should have been ashamed of myself for fooling her into thinking she was sticking around just for the sake of being a good friend, when all I really wanted her there for was her gun and her badge to protect the man upstairs in case he needed it and for her authority in case I returned with a reason to use it.

  “Don’t let that man out of this house,” I warned her.

  Lee patted the very item at her hip that was endearing her to me at that moment. “If he moves, I’ll shoot him,” she promised me.

  “Just not any vital organs, please.”

  As I exited through the back door, she called out, “What do you consider ‘vital’?”

  I barely registered the drive back into town.

  It had stopped raining, but I didn’t know that until I got out of the car again; I hadn’t even noticed that driving was easier, safer. All the way in, I was formulating what I wanted to ask David, all the things we needed to know.

  I walked up to a completely dark house and rang the bell several times without hesitation. Damn all these secretive people. Somebody was going to tell me something on this night, in this house.