Rowan drives the sky-blue Chevy joltingly through the parking lot. So angry he doesn’t seem to know what he is doing.
Then, in silence along an adjacent road with steep drainage ditches on both sides.
By this time I have removed the black satin mask. It has fallen from my fingers onto the floor.
I am crying, and it is true, I know—my face is ugly when I cry.
Christ’s sake. Listen to you.
In disgust Rowan brakes the car to a stop.
O.K. then, Rowan says. Out.
Rowan has also removed his mask and let it drop onto the floor at his feet. Leans across me and opens the door and pushes me out—so roughly, so unexpectedly, I am not able to comprehend what is happening.
It is such a surprise, I’m on my knees at the side of the road. Scrambling to get to my feet as Rowan drives away.
The red lights of Rowan’s car, receding into the dusk!
My eyes are filled with tears of shock as well as hurt.
I am disbelieving. Rowan would not abandon me here—would he? Isn’t he my mother’s cousin—step-cousin? Isn’t he a relative of mine?
The road is a kind of service road beyond the shopping mall and seems to have no traffic. The diminishing red lights of Rowan’s car are the only lights I will see.
The sky is a dull bruise color, heavy with rain clouds. In a few minutes it will be very dark.
I am sobbing uncontrollably. In the chill rain on this desolate road there is no one to hear.
Panicked wondering how I will get home. How many miles is it to the Cattaraugus Creek Road. Vaguely, desperately my mind races—if I can find my way back to the shopping mall … If I dared hitchhike on the state highway …
But I will never do this, I know. I am too shy. I am too frightened of what might happen to me, hitching a ride on the highway busy with out-of-state trucks.
I am so sorry! I would beg Rowan for forgiveness. I would promise him that I will never make such a mistake again, if he would forgive me.
Fucked up. Ugly little mutt. Don’t deserve to live.
Rowan’s jeering voice in my ears. Never will I forget this jeering voice.
Wanting so badly for Rowan to like me again. To laugh at me, tease me. Seize my wrist between his forefinger and thumb and call me a smart girl.
I would do anything for Rowan Billiet. I think again of the girls in the parking lot of the mall with bright lipsticked mouths and how they escaped from Rowan because I was not shrewd enough to stop them.
Next time! Next time I will do better.
And so by the time Rowan returns to rescue me I am ready to beg for his forgiveness.
There come glaring headlights out of the darkness, larger and larger until they are blinding. If it is not Rowan Billiet it will be a stranger who has come to murder me….
I am crouched shivering beneath a tree near the drainage ditch that is beginning to fill with water.
It is Rowan, who throws open the passenger door of the sky-blue Chevy.
Saying in disgust, You! Jesus.
Like just the sight of me is repugnant to him.
Rowan’s face isn’t so handsome now contorted with dislike. His eyes show a rim of white above the iris like he’d really like to scream at me but is restraining himself. In a flat cold voice saying, Know what, Jill-y?—if you drowned right here, nobody’d ever know. And nobody’d give a God-damn.
But seeing how abject I am, how wet, muddy, abashed like a kicked dog, Rowan leans over to grab my wrist and haul me inside the car.
Not noticing, not caring, how rough he is, hurting my wrist.
Pleadingly I tell him, Next time I will do better, Rowan.
But Rowan snorts in derision. Presses down hard on the gas pedal without a further glance at me and turns the radio on high so there’s just loud rock-and-roll music the rest of the way home.
3.
Forgive me, Rowan. I am so sorry!
Give me another chance please….
But Rowan Billiet doesn’t pick me up after school ever again.
Rowan Billiet doesn’t drop by the house on one of his casual drives into the country to see if I’m home.
Can’t ask my mother, What do you hear of Rowan? Any news?—because that would make her suspicious.
Climbing onto the roof of my grandfather’s old barn. So that I can see into the distance past the front pasture to the creek road, and beyond.
If it’s a sunny day the tin roof heats quickly. At first the heat is pleasurable beneath my legs and buttocks, then it becomes too hot, painful.
Any kind of hurt, you deserve. Ugly mutt.
I am sick with shame when I recall how Rowan Billiet is disgusted with me. It is very sad to think that Rowan has forgotten me. I am jealous that he may have found another girl-cousin to drive places in his sky-blue Chevy. (There are several girl-cousins in our family, scattered through Beechum County.)
On the roof it is natural to think such thoughts. If I had the right kind of pride I would kill myself. I would find some way to put an end to myself. I would show Rowan Billiet how sorry I am, how ashamed I am. I would show Rowan Billiet that I disgust myself, too.
And Rowan Billiet would miss me then, and feel sorry he’d said the terrible things he said.
Jill-y! For Christ’s sake I never meant it. You know better.
Know I care for you. C’mon climb in.
This time, do what I say. Exactly.
But Rowan Billiet never returns.
In two years by the time I am fourteen years old and a sophomore honors student at Strykersville High School Rowan Billiet is dead and the sky-blue Chevy is just one more vehicle tire-less and ransacked for parts in my uncle Mason Cutter’s junkyard on the Cattaraugus Creek Road.
Here is what I know of Rowan Billiet.
It is put together like a jigsaw puzzle in which some puzzle parts are missing and some parts are not exact fits but have been forced into place so that the “picture” is not quite right if you look closely.
Yet it is a “picture” that makes sense. You can recognize what it is supposed to be.
Rowan was the son of a Beechum County woman who’d died at the age of thirty-one when Rowan was two years old. The woman had been separated from her husband at the time of her death as she’d been separated from her husband at the time of Rowan’s birth. It was generally believed that her husband, who was my mother’s older (half) brother Simon, was not the father of Rowan. Instead (it was believed) Rowan’s father had been a man named Billiet about whom little was known.
Except Rowan’s mother would say of him he was the handsomest son of a bitch she’d ever seen.
At that time in the early 1950s it was shameful if a woman had a baby without being married to the father of the baby. Extreme embarrassment and disapproval accrued to “illegitimate” births and so such situations were not spoken of with any clarity or openness to children nor even to teenagers; it was a time when breast, uterine, and cervical cancer were referred to as mother’s shame and all medical problems related to women’s reproductive organs were designated with vague distastefulness as female problems.
And so there were often misunderstandings. And these misunderstandings were rarely corrected because we (who were children or young adolescents at the time) had no way of knowing that there’d been misunderstandings.
Two things were known of the Billiet who was believed to be the father of Rowan Billiet: there was no one else in Beechum County with that name; and the man with that name disappeared several months before Rowan was born.
My father did not like people to ask my mother about Rowan Billiet but even more, my father did not like my mother to speak of Rowan Billiet. It was strange to me that my father so disliked Rowan Billiet, he could not speak of him except in jeering and contemptuous terms—That little fag. It was very upsetting to my father to learn that some persons not well acquainted with our family believed that Rowan Billiet was related to him.
It has been many years s
ince Rowan Billiet died yet people who should know better still make this mistake.
That uncle of yours, what was his name—Bill-yet?
Your father’s brother, was he? Or—who?
So maddening! You can’t easily amend any misunderstanding in an individual’s memory. Which is to say in the human brain.
Once a memory gets lodged in a brain even if the memory is inaccurate and has been disproven many times it will persist like an ineradicable stain.
Until the death of that brain, that is.
Pleading with my mother. Begging.
How badly I want to go to the volunteer firemen’s picnic at Ransomville!
For I have learned that Rowan Billiet will be in charge of the bingo game. Rowan in a white shirt with a polka-dot bow tie. Sand-colored hair slicked over his forehead. His voice through the microphone slick like a radio voice. Ladies and gentlemen, I think—I think—I THINK we have a winning card!
I have not seen Rowan in a long time and this is my only opportunity and I am feeling desperate….
My mother is astonished. Why do I want to bicycle to Ransomville to the firemen’s picnic? Usually, I hate such picnics which are mostly for people with young children who clamor to be taken on noisy rides like a makeshift merry-go-round and a dwarf Ferris wheel and fat ponies flicking horseflies off their backs with their stinging tails. There are “games of skill” like throwing a baseball at some stupid target and there is the “chicken chowder tent” and there is the biggest tent of all which is the “beer tent” where men like my father stand crowded together and drink and talk and laugh loudly with flushed faces. Since I’d been ten years old I do not ever want to attend such picnics with my family.
But there is the bingo tent, too. Mostly women here, and girls, and older couples. And Rowan Billiet with the microphone.
But my mother has work for me today. Farm work I have put off doing.
Begging her: Please, Mom.
Just for an hour or two. Please.
I am pleading, reasonably: no one has to drive me to Ransomville. I don’t expect my mother to get in the car and drive me. The distance is only about four miles, I can bicycle along the creek road.
Telling my mother in a whiny voice that my friends are all going. My friend Dina who lives in Ransomville …
My mother stares at me. My friend Dina is a girl I scarcely know, two years younger than me. Sometimes we ride together on the school bus just to avoid others. Hardly a close friend!
Also it is not like me to be so emotional. My mother is becoming suspicious.
I thought you hated these picnics. You always complain if you have to go. What’s going on, Jill?
Nothing is going on. I just want to go to the picnic, that’s all.
Why is this picnic so important?
My eyes flood with tears. I am suddenly so angry!
It is clear that in my mother’s eyes there can be nothing in my life that is so important.
My face is flushed with heat, shame. I am in dread that my mother will realize—It’s Rowan Billiet she wants to see.
And I am in dread that my mother will tell my father. That my mother will laugh, but my father will not laugh. That my father will be disgusted with me.
Billiet! That little fag.
I hope to hell he isn’t coming out here and hanging around. If you want to see him, meet him in town for Christ’s sake. If the little shit means so much to you, Jill.
I run away to hide. Run into the hay barn, and push through the rear window, to climb out onto the roof. Panting, half-sobbing. Hate hatehate you!
I wish that my mother was dead. I wish that Rowan Billiet would come to the house and murder her.
On the roof, my bare skin against the hot tin. In the distance there is farmland stretching out forever. The edge of the world looks hazy like it is melting away. I can’t see all the way to Ransomville, I can’t even see Cattaraugus Creek.
I don’t even know whether Rowan Billiet is really in charge of the bingo tent this year. I don’t know if I’d heard that somewhere, or read about it in the paper, or made it up.
After a long time I hear my mother calling from the far side of the barn—Jill? Jill?
I wonder if she feels sorry for having been so mean. I wonder if she realizes how I hate hatehate her and wish she was dead.
By now it is too late. It is almost 6 P.M. Of course she waited too long. She is spiteful, and she hates me. The time for bicycling to Ransomville (and back again) is over. Even if my mother now offers to drive me there it is too late.
And it is true as my mother has implied—nothing in my small sad stupid life is so important.
Questions never asked because the questioners from Beechum County Family and Children’s Services lack sufficient information.
For instance: they do not know about the girls at the mall on Hallowe’en eve.
They do not know how Rowan Billiet pushed me out of his car on the desolate drainage-ditch road behind the mall.
Therefore they don’t know to ask me why didn’t I think of Rowan Billiet when news came in August 1962 of the missing eleven-year-old girl from Port Alistair, twelve miles north of Strykersville.
When news came in April 1963 of the missing thirteen-year-old girl from Tintern Falls, eight miles east of Strykersville.
When news came a few weeks later of the remains discovered in a shallow grave …
Why didn’t I tell someone. My mother at least.
Why wasn’t I suspicious.
Was I suspicious?
And if so, why did I remain silent?
I could say—Because I was afraid of Rowan Billiet.
I could say—Because Rowan Billiet threatened me.
Some of this is true, I was afraid of Rowan Billiet.
But it is not true, I think, that Rowan Billiet threatened me.
In fact it is likely, Rowan Billiet would never have hurt me.
And why is this?—because Rowan Billiet liked to speak of himself as my uncle, and sometimes my dad.
Even when Rowan was furious with me, and disgusted with me, still he was fond of me.
This I know. It is a (secret) memory I cherish.
In the papers and on TV Rowan Billiet was described as Local Strykersville Man, 27.
Which was strange to me, that Rowan Billiet was considered to be a man; and that he had an actual age, twenty-seven.
Rowan Billiet did not seem any age at all. To some of us who knew him he did not ever seem that old.
When you are thirteen years old, or even fourteen or fifteen, twenty-seven is old.
Almost we wanted to think that was a mistake. My girl friends who’d seen Rowan Billiet and thought he was real good-looking, handsome like Elvis.
If you’d asked us we would’ve guessed Rowan was—what? Twenty-one years old, maybe.
Another wrong thing, Rowan Billiet did not live in Strykersville exactly. It was known that he lived in different places in Beechum County and never the same place for long. Once (my mother recalled) with some “hippie” people on the Canal Road in an old falling-down farmhouse. (My mother disapproved.) Another time with relatives in the Rapids and later, in the last several months of his life, with the older man (who did live in Strykersville, in one of the big brick houses on Ridge Avenue) who was called the Colonel (a mishearing of the name Cornel).
In Cornel Steadman’s house on Ridge Avenue, in the room that was Rowan Billiet’s room, there would be discovered a “cache” of incriminating evidence—articles of clothing belonging to the murdered / dismembered girls, dozens of snapshots taken with Rowan Billiet’s Kodak camera and neatly pasted into a photo album.
These snapshots the police would confiscate as evidence that would help to incriminate Rowan Billiet posthumously.
Posthumously meaning that by this time, Rowan Billiet was himself dead, murdered and “dismembered.”
(Though there were some who believed that Cornel Steadman placed the incriminating snapshots in Rowan’s room af
ter he’d murdered Rowan.)
(Why did Cornel Steadman murder and dismember Rowan Billiet?—this was not clear. A theory was that Steadman was jealous of Rowan who’d threatened to leave him.)
Police used these snapshots to determine that the thirteen-year-old girl missing for eight months from Tintern Falls had been buried in a region of the Chautauqua Mountains where a certain species of ash tree is predominant, which led to their discovering her (dismembered) remains there.
All of Rowan Billiet’s possessions they would confiscate. All of Cornel Steadman’s possessions. In fact Cornel Steadman’s entire house was declared a crime scene.
Later, the house was sold at auction. The mortgage had been foreclosed by a Strykersville bank where one of my mother’s old, close friends from high school was a teller.
You can drive by it today—838 Ridge Avenue.
Someone lives in the old three-story redbrick house with the steep slate roof but it looks as if often they are not home. Blinds are drawn on windows upstairs and down. The front lawn has gone to seed. Newspapers and flyers have accumulated on the front walk. One of the big old elms in the side yard was devastated in a windstorm and has split in two.
My mother would never drive by the house she says with a shudder is a haunted house. My father has said disgustedly Somebody should burn that place down.
4.
Here is what I know, that I have been told. Or that I have heard without being told.
In Port Oriskany they’d met, at the Niagara Inn, Rowan Billiet and Cornel Steadman—the Colonel.
The Colonel would be forty-nine years old at the time of his arrest by the Beechum County police. In his pictures he was stern-looking with a stark bald head and dark dyed-looking hair above his ears, heavy eyebrows and fat fleshy lips. The Colonel looked like somebody you have seen on TV, his face is that kind of face.
For eight months or so, Rowan Billiet was the Colonel’s chauffeur.
Rowan Billiet lived in the Colonel’s house on Ridge Avenue, which the Colonel had purchased in order to move away from Port Oriskany where the Colonel complained of having enemies.
The men began to travel together. To “take trips together.”