Tom Blake
September, 1906
It is hard to concentrate on my dinner
tonight. I didn’t notice until I sat
down at the table that my mother has bruises all over her face. I have been in my room for most of the
evening yesterday, trying to get through my school assignments by candlelight,
since I ended up staying late at the butcher shop. I heard some noises from downstairs, but
hadn’t paid much mind at the time.
But now I can see that when my father
stumbled home from the saloon last night, he had taken out his drunken fury on
my mother’s face. She has a black eye
and her upper lip is swollen to twice its usual size. And when she gets up from the table to fetch
more bread, she winces.
I watch my father shoveling the slices of
beef into his mouth—the meat that Mr. Sullivan gave me as a supplement to my
meager wages. I hope he chokes on
it. What sort of man lays his dirty
meathooks on a woman a full head smaller than he is? He’s disgusting. When Mary and I are married,
I will never lay a finger on her in anger.
Pa glances at me and notices I’m pushing
vegetables around my plate rather than eating them. “Eat your dinner, boy,” he says. “My work puts food on your plate and I don’t
want to see it wasted.”
I glare at him.
Ma must have caught the look in my eyes,
because she chirps brightly, “George, speaking of your work, maybe you can
bring Tom with you to the shop again soon.”
“Why should I?” Pa snorts. “He has no interest. He wants to hack up meat for a living.”
“I’m sure if he gets to see more of what
you do,” Ma says, “he’d be more interested.”
She nods at me. “Isn’t
that right, Tommy?”
I can’t make myself answer. Not even for the sake of keeping the
peace. Not anymore.
The truth is that I want my father to get
angry. I want him to stand up and
threaten to whup me if I don’t comply with his wishes. I want to take him on.
I’m ready.
But my father just sits there, too
exhausted from work and the large meal to pick a fight. “He doesn’t want to go, Meg. And I don’t want
him hanging around the shop, grousing about how bored he is.”
Unfortunately, Ma doesn’t know when to
give up. “Surely he wants to follow in
his father’s footsteps though! He just
needs some encouragement.”
“His father’s footsteps! Ha!” Pa squints
at me with his beady brown eyes. “Fred
Sullivan is as much his father as I am.”
The fork I’d been toying with falls from
my hand. I look up at my mother, whose
face has gone white under the dark purple bruises.
“George, stop it…” Ma murmurs.
“Stop what?” Pa barks. “The boy’s seventeen years old. Don’t you think he’s old enough to know the
truth?”
I stare at the man who has raised me for
the last seventeen years. My heart is
thudding so loud my chest, everyone at the table can certainly hear it.
“What?” I manage.
“George, please,” Ma whispers, her
voice nearly a sob.
He stands from the table, wiping his big
hands on his slacks. “You really think I
could have fathered a lousy kid like you?
Think again.”
With those words, the man I’ve been
calling my father stormed away from the table, toppling his chair in his
wake. I just stare at the space he
recently occupied, trying to make sense of what I just heard.
“Is it true?” I finally ask my mother, a
minute after the front door slams to announce George Blake has left for the
saloon.
She doesn’t answer right away. She takes her sweet time, and when she does,
her voice is soft and shaky. “I’m sorry,
Tom. It’s true.”
I turn to look at her, wincing again at
the sight of her bruises. “How could you
not tell me?”
“It was for your own good!” She sticks
out her chin. “Everything was for
you, Tom. When I found out that I was…
expecting, I thought our lives would be over.
But then George came along and he saved us. He married me before I was showing and he
told everyone that you were his own.”
She shakes her head. “Do you know
what it would have been like if I had you out of wedlock? Do you know what our lives would have been
like?”
At least she wouldn’t be married to a man
who puts bruises on her face on a regular basis. I wouldn’t have the scar on my palm from when
he scalded me with metal from the fire.
“Who is my real father?” I ask.
Ma bites her bruised lip. “He wasn’t from around here. He was just… passing through. He was so charming and so… so very handsome.”
She closes her eyes for a moment before opening them again. I can see blood in the white of her right
eye. “You look just like him, Tom.”
It all suddenly makes sense. My black hair and dark eyes that nobody can
explain. The way George Blake treats me
like an intruder in his home. Even as a
child, I never felt anything resembling love for the man. Deep down, I must have known we were nothing
to each other.
“What’s his name?” I ask her.
She continues to chew on her lip.
“Stephen.”
“Stephen what?”
My mother averts her eyes. “He wouldn’t tell me. It was all very
secretive. He was staying at the boarding house—he was only there a few
months. Then he was gone.”
“Do you have a photograph of him?”
She shakes her head no.
Stephen.
His name is Stephen. That is all I will ever know about my real
father. That and he looks like me and is
charming enough to seduce a teenaged girl to do things that would permanently
destroy her reputation.
“I’m going to my room,” I say, nearly
choking on the words.
A line appears between Ma’s
eyebrows. “You’ve hardly eaten…”
“I’m not hungry.”
When I get upstairs, I’m glad I barely
ate dinner. I feel like throwing up, even though I hardly have any food in my
belly.
George Blake is not my father. Everything I ever knew or believed has been
wrong.
October, 1906
Mr. Sullivan and I are walking to a farm
in the next town. They have a steer for
sale and Mr. Sullivan has borrowed a horse and wagon to bring it back to the
butcher shop after we kill it. He dumped
our equipment into the wagon, including two knives, a 12-gauge shotgun, and a
hoist to help get the animal into and out of the wagon, since a grown cow or
steer can weigh about a ton.
We’ll do the butchering back at the shop, so all we’ve got to do is
kill the animal and get him back with us—not necessarily an easy task. Mr. Sullivan has a man who usually helps him,
and this is the first time he’s asked me to come along. “I think you’re ready for this, Tom,” he
tells me as we lead the horse down the road to the farm.
“Yes, sir,” I say.
It is early morning and quiet on the
town’s main road. Mr. Sullivan says it’s
good to do the killing early, before the flies come out. The sound of horseshoes clicking against the
pavement is like gunshots.
“You like working for me, Tom?” Mr.
Sullivan asks me.
“Yes, sir,” I say. After a moment, I add, “Very much so.”
“Good,” he replies. I thought he might say something more, but he
doesn’t.
Once we get to the farm, Mr. Sullivan haggles
with the farmer for a few minutes over the arrangement. The farmer wants to
give us a cow—a female that has at least one calf—but I know Mr. Sullivan
prefers meat from the male steer, which he says is higher quality. Finally, they shake hands, and Mr. Sullivan
grabs the shotgun, motioning for me to follow him. The farmer leads us to a pen where a smallish
steer is waiting inside. “I’ll leave you
fellows to it,” the farmer tells us.
Mr. Sullivan nudges my shoulder and holds
out the shotgun to me. “You ever shoot a
gun, Tom?”
“Yes, sir.” Several years ago, George
Blake (I can no longer think of him as my father) took me out back with his
rifle, reasoning, A boy’s got to know how to shoot. We practiced on tin cans until he felt
confident I could make a shot. “But not
in a while.”
“So here’s what you do,” Mr. Sullivan
says. “You imagine a line drawn from the
base of each ear to the opposite eye.
Where the lines cross—that’s where you aim.”
“Okay.” My legs feel rubbery. “Where should I stand?”
Mr. Sullivan squints at the steer. “About
ten feet away is good. Maybe take one
step back.”
I try to get my nerves under
control. I point the shotgun at the
steer, keeping both eyes open the way George taught me. I wait until my hands stop shaking, then I
squeeze the trigger.
It’s a perfect shot. A silver-dollar-sized hole appears in the
animal’s skull, and it drops to the ground almost instantly. Mr. Sullivan claps me on the back.
“Good job, Tom! You’re a natural.”
We approach the steer together. Mr. Sullivan puts one foot against the
animal’s forelegs and one against its head, exposing its short neck. He hands me the knife he’d been carrying.
“You want to make a cut along the base of
its neck, maybe ten inches long,” he instructs me. “First expose the windpipe, but you don’t
want to cut through it.”
I do as he instructed me. Blood oozes from the animal’s neck and my
heart quickens.
“Next you want to insert the knife to one
side of the windpipe with the back of the blade against the breastbone,”
he says. “Press the point of the blade down maybe four or five inches. That will cut the blood vessels.”
This next cut results in a wave of blood
that I hadn’t quite expected. It squirts out, drenching my hands and my
clothes, which makes Mr. Sullivan laugh.
But I’m not thinking about the fact that I’ll be walking home in
blood-soaked clothing. All I can think
about is the way that pig’s blood made me feel the other day, and how I want
this so much more. I want to bury my
face in it and drink until my stomach aches.
And as I watch the blood pour from the
animal, I feel that presence behind me.
Someone watching. Someone who
knows exactly what I’m thinking. And
then I hear a voice whisper in my ear:
Drink up, Tom.
“Tom?” Mr. Sullivan’s voice sounds very far away. “You okay, Tom?”
“Uh huh,” I manage.
“You look pale.” He edges away from the steer and puts his
hand on my shoulder. “Sit down on the
ground. Puts your head between your
legs.”
“I’m okay,” I manage, but I oblige by
lowering my bottom to the ground. I
close my eyes, trying not to think about all the blood. But it is no use—I can still smell it.
After about ten minutes, the flow of
blood has stopped and I’m able to think clearly again. I don’t know what has come over me. If I had buried my face in that animal’s
neck, Mr. Sullivan never would have allowed me in his shop ever again. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I know
I’ve got to get it under control before it wrecks my life.
I help Mr. Sullivan hoist the steer up
into the wagon for the horse to pull it back to town. We cover it with a tarp, load our equipment
back into the wagon, and then we’re ready to go back to the shop.
I walk quietly next to Mr. Sullivan as we
travel back into town, ashamed by my behavior at the farm. It is only after we are halfway back that he
breaks the silence.
“You did good back there, Tom,” he says.
I look away from him. “Not really.”
“Yes, really,” he insists. “That was your first time
slaughtering a steer. Truth be told, I
got woozy myself when it was my first time.
But you made a clean shot. You killed the animal fast, and… well, I
couldn’t have done it without you.”
I venture a look at Mr. Sullivan, who is
grinning at me with his yellowed teeth. He has no idea what I’d really been
thinking. “Thank you, sir.”
“Enough of this ‘sir’ nonsense,” he barks
at me. “From now on, you call me Fred.”
“Yes, sir,” I say. “I mean… Fred.”
I can’t imagine calling him Fred. The
word feels like glue on my tongue. But I
appreciate what he is trying to do.
“Soon you’ll be done with school, won’t
you, Tom?” he asks thoughtfully.
I nod.
“So what if I hired you for full time?”
he says. “I mean, after you graduate.”
I stare at him. “Full time?”
“I’m always paying people to help me with
these animals or having to close up the shop so I can get to market,” he
says. “I need another man on board with
me. And you… I trust you.” He grins at me again. “You’ll need money if you’re going to buy a
house for that girl you’re so keen on, Mary.”
I didn’t realize that Mr. Sullivan knew
about Mary. He is right—I have saved
very little from my time working at the butcher shop. I turn over all my wages to George. Sometimes customers tip me though, and that
money I save, hiding it under my mattress.
“Are you sure?” I ask, hardly able to
believe my luck.
“Of course I’m sure!” he booms. He winks at me. “Besides, we do better business when you’re
working the front of the store. In case
you hadn’t noticed.”
I frown at him.
He laughs. “Don’t
tell me you don’t notice how all the women in town come in just to flirt with
you!”
I look at him in surprise, but I do have
some idea what he is talking about. I’m
not just off the boat. I know the way
women look at me, although it doesn’t matter.
The only woman I want is Mary.
April, 1907
Ma took a train up north three days ago to visit her sister, so it
is supposed to be just me and George for about a week until she comes
back. Today’s Sunday, so I go to church
with Mary and her family in the morning.
George goes to church when my mother makes him, but when she’s not
around, he won’t go. “I don’t believe in that nonsense,” he always says.
I never liked going to church as a child.
I found it boring, and I don’t like the itchy suit Ma makes me wear. I always tried to avoid it, but Ma said I’d
go to hell if I didn’t go. So I went.
I still don’t like going to church. But lately, I’ve been thinking more and more
about hell. The thoughts I’ve been
having when I’m around the freshly killed animals in the butcher shop really
scare me. Mr. Sullivan trusts me now,
but I don’t know what he’d think if he knew the blood I siphon from the animals
whenever I can, and gulp down quickly before I can be caught. I know I need to stop doing this. I must stop.
And that’s why I’m going to church this
morning.
Mary walks beside me, behind the rest of
the family. We don’t hold hands because
her parents are just ahead of us, but I’m itching to touch her. She has on a worn pink dress with frayed
sleeves that looks like it will unravel if I pulled on a single loose thread. When she’s my wife, I’ll be sure to buy her
enough fabric to make herself two brand new dresses right away. I’ll work seven days a week at Sullivan’s to
pay for it if I have to.
“I loved the essay you read in class on
Friday,” Mary says. Her shoulder brushes
against mine just enough to make my heart speed up.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Papa says he thinks they need to ban all
liquor,” she adds. “But I agree with
what you said on Friday. This is America and people should be allowed to drink
what they want. And anyway, if people
want it badly enough, like you said, they’ll find a way to get it, won’t they?”
“If someone wants something bad enough,”
I say, “there’s always a way to get it.”
Mary smiles at me. “I have to confess I’ve never had a drink
before. Papa doesn’t have any liquor in
the house.”
“Me either,” I admit.
“Really?” She looks surprised. “Your father is… well, he drinks quite a bit,
doesn’t he? He must have loads of it
stashed away in your home.”
I shrug.
“I don’t have any interest in trying it.”
That is true. George keeps many bottles of liquor in the
house, stashed in a cabinet in our parlor, but I never touch them. Partially
because he would have whupped me with his belt till I bled if ever caught me,
but also because I just never had any interest.
There is something else I crave much more strongly.
“Your essay got everyone so steamed up,”
Mary says. She sets her bright green
eyes on me. “You’re such a powerful
speaker, Tom. I’m telling you—you could
do great things. President Thomas
Blake.”
Tonight at dinner, Mary’s voice is
running through my head as George and I eat together. We are eating the cold meat and vegetables
that Ma has left behind for us, and George keeps his head down, staring at the
table, shoveling bites into his mouth without even looking at me. He already smells like whiskey, and I’m sure
that when he finishes his food, he’ll head over to the saloon for the rest of
the night.
“We need more meat, boy,” George grumbles
as he stuffs the last of it into his mouth.
“You still working for Sullivan?”
“Yes,” I say. “In fact, he actually… he offered me full
time work next year, after I finish school.”
George looks me over with his beady
little eyes. “You’ll pay me rent then to live here.”
“Actually,” I say, “I’m thinking I’ll get
a place of my own. With… with Mary
Eckley. She and I will be married.”
He snorts. “You really going to marry Bill Eckley’s
pug-ugly redheaded daughter? I hope he’s
going to pay you to take that one off his hands.”
I stare at him, my cheeks growing hot.
“You’re nothing great yourself, but you
can do a hell of a lot better than her,” he goes on. “Real ugly and too smart. Worst combination there is. You got to get one that’s pretty and dumb. Like your mama. She’s a real dilly.”
My right hand balls into a fist so tight
that it hurts. He has to see how angry
he’s getting me, but he doesn’t care.
“’Course,” George says, “I had to train
ol’ Meg. Even she mouthed off sometimes
at first, but now I got her trained real good.
Now she knows what will happen to her if she does something I don’t
like.” He grins at me with his rotted
yellow teeth. “And you know too, don’t
you, boy? Still got that scar on your
hand?”
“Don’t talk about my mother that way,” I say through my teeth. “And don’t you ever talk about Mary
Eckley that way.”
He bursts into loud laughter like I just
said the funniest thing he’d ever hear.
“Get used to it, boy. You’re
going to hear a lot meaner stuff about that girl if you go and marry her.”
I stand up so abruptly that it knocks
over my chair, my right fist now raised in the air. George stands up too, turning to face me head
on. He has at least three inches on me
and a good fifty pounds. But I don’t
flinch. I’m not afraid of him.
“You haven’t had a proper beating in a
long time,” he muses. “Too long, looks like.”
“We’ll see.”
His eyes fill with amusement. “You think you can get the better of me? You sure think a lot of yourself—just like
your old man. You look like him
too. Spitting image.”
His words weaken my resolve. “You… you knew my father?”
“Of course!” he barks. “We all knew Stephen. Came into town, charmed all the ladies, told
them lies to get them to sneak off with him.”
He shakes his head. “But he liked
your mama best because she was the prettiest.
I warned her. Told her he was no good. Then she came crying to me when he got her in
trouble and took off.”
I stare at him, trying to imagine how my
mother allowed herself to get in that situation. Despite what he said about her, my mother is
a smart woman. My father must have
really been something.
“It could have been worse though,” he
says. “Stephen did worse things to other
girls. Well, nobody could prove it. But we all knew.”
My stomach sinks. “What kinds of things?”
But George doesn’t answer my
question. He’s on a roll. “Your mama would have been branded a whore if
I hadn’t married her. I saved
her. And what do I get? She couldn’t seem to have any more children
and I’m stuck with you. Her bastard.”
I watch as he undoes the buckle on his
belt. I know what’s coming, what he
plans to do. But I’m too old for
that. He isn’t going to lay a finger on
me. Not one finger on me or my mother
ever again.
I grab the knife I’d been using to cut
the meat from the table. I grip it in my
right hand so George can see it plainly.
He knows I’m not going to just take a whupping. Not anymore.
But he just laughs, unperturbed. “What are you going to do with that, boy?”
I don’t reply. “You’re never going to hit my mother
again. You hear me?”
“You go and get yourself a shotgun,” he
says. “Then maybe you’d be a match for
me. Maybe.”
Mr. Sullivan taught me how to sharpen
knives. After church today, I sharpened
the dull blades on all the knives in our kitchen. At the time, I was doing it because I had a
few extra hours on my hands. But maybe I
knew this moment was coming.
“You think you’re going to cut me, boy?”
George raises his eyebrows at me. “Well,
go and do it.”
I lunge with the knife, but George is
ready for me. He makes a grab for my right
wrist, but I overpower him easily. I can see the surprise on his face when he
realizes that I’m now stronger than he is. I topple an end table and the vase
resting on it crashes to the floor as I shove my stepfather backwards. He is bigger than me and heavier than me, but
his efforts to overpower me feel flimsy.
Within seconds, I have restrained him against the wall, the sharp blade
of our kitchen knife as his throat.
“Tom,” he gasps. His face is almost purple and his brown eyes
are full of fear. “What are you doing?”
I let the edge of the knife dig into his
throat, just enough that blood oozes out.
“I’m your father,” he manages. “Without me, you’d have nothing. You’d be nothing.”
I close my eyes for a moment, conjuring
up the image of my mother’s battered face.
“You are nothing, George.”
He stands there, gasping for air. This is what I have wanted for a very long
time—to watch this man squirm. Now I
have him right where I want him. He
knows if he beats my mother, he will have me to deal with. I can let him go now.
Except then I hear that voice, the one
haunting me for almost a year now. I
hear it as loud as ever before, a whisper directly in my ear:
Cut his throat, Tom.
In one moment, I’m letting him go. In the
next, my hand is digging the blade into his neck, slitting his throat from ear
to ear. I see a split-second shock on
his face before he drops to the ground, gushing blood all over our wooden
floorboards. He makes one last gasp for
air and bubbles of blood spurt from his lips.
“Oh my God.” I let the knife clatter to
the floor. I cover my mouth, backing away from his body. “Oh my God…”
“What are you doing?” The voice I heard before is no longer a
whisper. It is now loud and clear. “After all this time, you’re just going to let
him bleed all over the floor? You’re
wasting it, you know.”
I whirl around, expecting to see the same
nothing I’ve been seeing for the last year.
But instead, I see a man. An
ordinary-looking man—handsome, yes, but still very much a man. He appears in his mid-twenties, and he has a
shock of black hair and dark, penetrating eyes that make it hard to see his
pupils. It’s like looking into a mirror
ten years in the future.
“Who are you?” I demand to know.
“Never mind that,” the man says
irritably. “Drink the blood now, before
you have to lick it off the floorboards or else go back to drinking from a
pig.”
My eyes widen. He knows about the pigs? “How do you…?”
Before I can get out the sentence, the
man all but shoves me in the direction of George Blake’s body. “Drink!” he snaps at me.
In the end, he nearly has to hold me
down. He pushes me to my knees and
presses his hand against the back of my head until my lips are flush with
George’s throat. I would never have done
it on my own, but when I’m inches away, the urge is overpowering.
For the first time, I realize how poor a
substitute animal blood is for what I really want. If pig’s blood makes me feel like I can run,
this makes me feel like I can fly. I have never been certain if I believed in God,
but drinking this makes me feel like I am God.
I don’t know how long I drink. I lose all track of time, my face buried in
my stepfather’s neck. But when the flow
ebbs, I finally realize what I’m doing.
The euphoria of drinking fades and I’m left with an increasingly ill
feeling.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I tell
the man standing over me.
I retch, but nothing comes out. He shakes his head at me. “I know it’s your first time but try not to
vomit. It’s such a waste.”
I manage to sit up on the floor,
clutching my head in my hands. I can’t
believe what has just happened. It feels
like some sort of horrible dream. I did
not just kill George Blake. I did not
slit his throat. I did not just drink
the blood gushing from his neck. In five
minutes, I will wake up and all will be well.
Except I don’t seem to be waking up.
I look up at the man standing over
me. I can see now that he is wearing a
cloak buttoned around his neck that is as dark as his hair. He is frowning at me, a crease between his eyebrows.
“Better?” he asks.
I nod weakly.
The man crouches down beside George’s
body. He places a pale hand on my
stepfather’s chest. “His heart has stopped.”
I clutch my knees with my palms. “Who are
you?”
The man smiles at me. He does not appear evil, in spite of what he
just told me to do. Despite everything,
I feel that this is a person I can trust.
“My name is Charles,” he says. “You can call me Chas.”
“And why are you in my house?”
Chas smiles wider. “Don’t
you see the family resemblance, Tom?”
I stare at him.
“I’m your brother,” he says.
***
I’m still trying to wrap my head around
the whole thing. This man who does
admittedly look very much like me is in my house and is saying that he’s my
brother (well, half-brother) and he’s here to help me make “the
transition.” He’s all business, fetching
towels to mop up the blood and saying how much easier this will be than usual,
because of the luxury of the indoor water pump we have.
“Of course,” Chas says, “there would be a
lot less mess to clean up if you hadn’t let him bleed all over the floor. I hope you’ll know not to make that mistake
again next time.”
“Next time?” I say numbly.
What does he think? That I’m going to go around town, slitting
everyone’s throats?
Chas tosses me one of Ma’s towels. “Clean up what you can from the floor. I’ll get rid of the body.”
I stare at him. “Get rid of the
body? What are you talking about?”
He sighs.
“Fine, Tom. We’ll just leave him here with his
throat slit, and you can explain to your sweetheart Mary’s daddy exactly what
happened. How do you think that will
go?”
He has a point.
“What are you going to do with the body?”
I ask.
“Let me worry about that.”
Chas heaves George’s body onto his back
with surprising strength. George has to
weigh at least two-hundred pounds, but Chas lifts him like he’s lighter than
air. He stands there for a moment,
surveying the room.
“Pick up the pieces of the vase too,” he
says. “Put it in a paper sack along with the towels you use to clean up. And
that bloody shirt you’re wearing. I’ll be back to get rid of it for you.”
“My mother will notice the vase is gone,”
I point out.
“Your mother is the least of our
problems.”
I watch as Chas trots off through the
back door, leaving me with a shattered vase and a pool of blood to clean
up. It’s the last thing I want to do
right now—I’m still not entirely sure I won’t be sick—but I have no
choice. I don’t want the sheriff taking
me away for murdering George Blake. Ma
needs me.
And the truth is, George deserved to die.
I already know from my time at Sullivan’s
that blood is difficult to scrub from wood.
At the butcher shop, a few blood stains on the floor are not a big deal,
and in fact are expected. But it will
not do to have any sign that a man died in this room.
As I perform this mindless task, I think
about George. I know now that I never
loved the man, and I might have even hated him. But I hadn’t meant to kill
him. Every time I think about what I
have done, my hands start to shake and I have to take a break from
scrubbing. When I held that blade to his
neck, I had every intention of letting him go, but then…
What happened after is even more
upsetting. That man, Charles, in my
home, ordering me to drink the blood spilling out of George’s neck. Even worse, I did what he asked. And while I was drinking, it felt like the
most natural thing in the world. It felt
like what I was meant to be doing all along—that up until now, I’d been holding
myself back.
But it is wrong. There is no denying that what I did tonight
was deeply and terribly wrong.
There is something deeply and terribly
wrong with me.
I stop scrubbing and sit down on the
floor. I thought doing what Chas told me
to do was the right thing—I can’t let myself be taken to prison and leave my
mother to fend for herself. Yet… someone
who did what I did tonight deserves to be locked up. I have to face the music.
After all, I hadn’t intended to kill
George. What if I do it again?
What if I hurt my mother?
“You did a good job.” Chas’s voice
interrupts my thoughts. He has entered
the house again without my hearing him.
How does he move so silently? “I can’t see the blood at all. Well done, brother. You’re a natural.”
I look up at his face—God, he looks so
much like me. “I have to turn myself in,
Chas.”
Chas’s dark eyes widen. “You’re crazy as a bedbug, Tom! Why would you
do something like that?”
“Because I killed a man!” I rub my face, probably smearing blood on it,
but I don’t care anymore. “I’m scared
I’ll do it again. I… I should be locked
up.”
“Of course you’ll do it again,” Chas
snorts. “That’s your nature. But you’re not an animal. You won’t go around killing people at
random. That would be madness!”
“I didn’t want to kill him.”
“Didn’t you?” He raises his
eyebrows. “It looks to me that you did. It looks to me that he was an evil man who
deserved to die. And that your dear
mother will be much better off without him.
At least, she will be unless her only son gets hanged for murder.”
I don’t know what to say. He does make an excellent point.
“And once you’re gone,” Chas whispers,
his eyes growing darker, “your poor, beautiful mother will be left all
alone. Nobody will be around to protect
her. She’ll be at the mercy of whatever
dark creatures are lurking around.”
I stare at him. “Are you… threatening
me?”
He smiles benignly and his eyes lighten
again. It is then I realize he has a
natural charm he can easily turn on and off at will. “Of course not. I’m warning you, Tom. Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone. Nothing good will come of it.”
He takes the bloody towels from me as
well as the pieces of the vase. I pull my blood-stained shirt over my head and
hand that to him as well. And then he is gone.
I’m not sure if he’ll ever return.
I hope he won’t, but I know that is unlikely. He’s been following me around for this
long—why would he stop now?
After he leaves, I fill a bucket of water
to clean the blood from my hands. It is
the last piece of evidence that I have murdered my stepfather. As I let the cold water cleanse my palms, I see
for the first time that the scar George gave me has completely disappeared.
