My favorite part of the house is the narrow, spiral staircase that connects the two levels. It’s the only incompetent piece of carpentry in the house, rickety and uneven and somewhat dangerous to negotiate if you’ve had more than your share of red wine on a cold winter night. All the upstairs furniture had to be lifted through the windows from the outside because none of it would fit up the staircase. But my great-grandfather built it like that on purpose. He was an exquisite craftsman and could easily have come up with something elegant and functional, but for some inscrutable reason he chose to build an eyesore instead. And what’s really funny is that in his will he stipulated that no one was to alter the staircase in the slightest, save for replacing boards if the old ones rotted out.
He never told his son or his wife why he did it that way and no one in the family since has had any clue. Maybe he wanted to restrict access to the upstairs; maybe he thought it was funny to have something ugly and out of place in an otherwise handsome home. Personally, I think he left it that way to piss off his wife. But whatever the reason, whenever I look at it, I wish I’d known the contrary old son of a bitch. The staircase screams attitude, and the only people in the world worth knowing are people with attitude.
There’s a note on the front door of the cottage when I get home. It’s from the “chairman” of Walcott’s Historical Society, Cheri Tipton, politely reminding me that we had an appointment earlier that afternoon, and she was sorry to have missed me, and could I please call her at my earliest convenience to reschedule.
Shit. I forgot all about it. She called last week and asked if she could come over and take a walk with me through the cornfield, because she said she came across some historic papers that seemed to suggest that an old Indian village—predating European settlement by several centuries—may once have stood on my land. I told her I’d never found so much as an arrowhead out there but she insisted on stopping by anyway. I’m not surprised I forgot to be here. I have a bad habit of forgetting to show up for anything I don’t want to do.
I crumple up the paper and stand outside the door for a minute, wondering who else is going to invade my house this week. Jesus. Maybe I should just open a Holiday Inn and put up a neon sign advertising multiple vacancies.
I make no apologies for being a hermit. My choice to live alone has been deliberate and entirely voluntary. As a general rule, people piss me off and I’m a much happier man when I’m by myself. I should mine the front yard and buy a couple of dobermans and then maybe I could finally get some privacy.
I take a deep breath. There are two big bushes on either side of the door with cantaloupe-sized white flowers that smell faintly of cat urine. I have no idea what kind of bushes they are, but they’ve been there my whole life. I could ask Tommy, I suppose, but who cares? I don’t need flowers by my door; I need a state-of-the-art security system.
My father was a mean-spirited, petty old man, and a complete waste of human DNA. Aside from that, though, we got along fine.
It’s impossible to talk about my dad without getting mad. Tommy says I should get over it and move on, but Tommy has never understood the healthful benefits of loathing someone with your whole heart. He thinks my bitterness is self-destructive and difficult to maintain, but, truly, it’s no effort at all. It comes naturally to me, like breathing, or taking a crap.
I’m being flip because I know Tommy’s right. My resentment of my father eats at me like cancer. And I should get counseling or a lobotomy or something and maybe eventually learn how to deal with everything he did to us as kids and adults—all the endless cruelties, large and small, he so liberally bestowed on us—except there’s one thing I know I can never get past or dismiss so I won’t even bother to try.
He loved us.
What a bastard.
Yeah, I know how fucked up that sounds, but there it is. If he’d hated Tommy and me, I think I could maybe forgive him for how he treated us. But he didn’t hate us. He loved us, and still he went out of his way to hurt us, time and again, and he never apologized for anything.
His name was Vernon Michael Bishop, and he had a glorious tenor voice. He sang for local weddings and funerals, and people always said it was like listening to an angel. He ran the local paper, the Walcott Gazette, for a number of years, and I’ve been told—ad infinitum—how he generously allowed charities and “good causes” to advertise for free. He was interim mayor for two years when Cloris Adams suddenly died in her office and the town needed a replacement until the next election, and he organized the annual food drive for the Lion’s Club every Christmas. He was a big, hearty man who looked you right in the eye and did his best to make you laugh. He was a pillar of the community. So goodness gracious, what’s my problem? The man was a saint, right?
Oh, did I neglect to mention that Vernon Michael Bishop liked to beat up little kids? Not all little kids, of course. Just two very special little boys. His sons.
The worst time—though certainly not the first—was when he found Tommy in bed with Jacob Roberts. Jacob had spent the night (he was the last overnight guest we were ever allowed to have, incidentally), so I had given up my bed and slept in the living room on a cot. When Dad got up in the morning and came down to boil water for tea, he decided to poke his head in and see if Tommy and Jacob were awake.
They were nine years old, and they were naked, and apparently Tommy had his fist wrapped around Jacob’s puny penis when Dad walked in on them. I was just waking up and came running into the kitchen just in time to see dear old Dad drag Tommy out of the bedroom and begin slamming his head on the counter by the sink. Jacob was scrambling into his clothes in the bedroom and wailing like a cat in heat. I tried to get Dad to stop but I was only eleven, and when I grabbed his arm and begged him to let go of Tommy, he backhanded me hard enough to break my nose and send me flying into the dish cabinet. I still have scars on my neck and shoulders from plunging through the glass.
Tommy told me later that Dad apparently came to his senses when he looked over and saw me crumpled on the floor in a puddle of blood. He let go of Tommy—who was only marginally better off than me—and calmly told Jacob to stop crying and go home. Dad called an ambulance for us and was soon arrested by the police, but because of his sterling reputation in town and the heinousness of Tommy’s actions (discussed, no doubt, in the strictest confidence), the charges were dismissed after a stern warning from the sergeant on duty, who then graciously offered Dad a ride home and probably gave him a cheerful clap on the back as he was getting out of the car.
Dad gave his word that he’d never hit his children again, and, being a man who followed his own peculiar code of honor, he never did. But with physical violence no longer available to him, he was forced to come up with alternative strategies to continue waging war on his children. And that was when he began his long, inspired campaign of verbal and emotional abuse that continued until the day he died.
In retrospect, I wish he’d kept hitting us.
There’s a full moon tonight. I like to sit on the porch behind the house at night and look at the stars, but the moon is too bright this evening, blotting out everything else in the sky. The mosquitoes are out in force but I’ve smeared myself with citronella and vanilla extract so they’re mostly leaving me alone. I’ll have to check myself later for ticks, though, because nothing discourages those evil little vampires and Connecticut is rife with Lyme disease.
In the