October, 1905
Over the past several months, I’ve had a
feeling someone is watching me.
I have not witnessed anyone actually
watching me. There have been no eyes
staring at me through the window of my bedroom, no ominous footsteps crunching
leaves behind me as I trudge the half a mile to the schoolhouse. It is a
feeling—nothing more. Yet I have never
had such an intense feeling in my life.
Sometimes I feel that prickling on the
back of my neck and I whirl around, certain I’ll catch someone only inches
behind me. But there’s never anyone
there.
When I don’t find someone, it is relief I
feel rather than disappointment. If Pa
found a man following him around town, he would surely punch the fellow square
in the nose. If I were to turn around
and find a stranger lurking in my shadows… well, I don’t know what I’d do. Run?
Yell? Going on the attack would
be far down the list. Then again, I am
only sixteen and do not have arms like tree trunks the way Pa does.
Yet my relief is always short-lived. The feeling something is behind me is so
intense, so certain, there are only two other possibilities, neither of which
are appealing.
The first possibility is I am imagining
things. Yet I am no longer a child—far too old for imaginary friends. The only people older than children with that
sort of active imagination are people like Harry Cross, who mumbles to himself
as he trudges down the road, not looking any of us in the eyes. Mr. Cross lives with his elderly mother, who
cares for him because he is unable to hold down a job. Pa says Mr. Cross lost his mind.
I do not want to consider the possibility
I am imagining things the way Harry Cross does.
But the only alternative is even more
disturbing. If I am right—if there
really is someone following me who I am unable to see with my naked eyes—then
there is only one other possibility:
Whoever is following me is something
other than human.
October, 1905
This afternoon, as I leave the
schoolhouse, the feeling that someone is following me is as strong as it has
ever been. I stand with my back to the
bushes, scanning the surrounding areas, but see only my classmates. There is
someone there. I am sure of it.
I am not crazy.
I am concentrating so deeply on the task
that I nearly jump five feet when Mary Eckley taps me on the shoulder.
“Tom?” Mary’s reddish-brown eyebrows knit
together. “Are you all right?”
I nod, shaking off the feeling of doom
that has been following me around like a shadow the last few months. I can’t allow Mary to think any less of me.
“I was just…” I force a smile. “I was looking for you.”
Mary rewards me with a smile of her
own. “Well, look at that—you’ve found
me.”
Mary Eckley is the prettiest girl in the
entire school. My friend Harry says it’s
Emma Alcock, but I know it’s Mary. Nobody else has hair so red and shimmery in
the sun. Nobody else has freckles on her
face that I could spend all day staring at till I’ve counted every last one.
“Now I have to ask,” Mary says, “why are
you looking for me?”
“Uh…” Mary’s green eyes stare straight into mine. At a time like this, I would have given
anything for my father’s dark, leathery skin that has one hue: tan. No matter how much time I spend in the sun,
my skin never tans. I am white like snow. And when all the blood rushes to my
face, I am certain Mary can see it in my cheeks.
“Are you going to walk me home?” Mary
prompts me. “Doing your duty to make
sure I arrive home safely, Mr. Blake?”
Mary lives only a few blocks away from my
own home, and there was a time when we were much younger when we used to walk
home together from school daily, chattering excitedly the whole way. I used to
capture butterflies so that she could marvel at the color of their wings before
I released them back into the sky. But that was a long time ago—before I
started noticing the way Mary filled out her faded yellow dress with the white
collar. I still walk her home about once
a week, but now I struggle to find words to say in her presence. I spend most
of the time wondering if she wishes she’d stayed behind with her girlfriends.
“If that would be all right with you,” I
manage, “I would very much like to walk you home.”
Mary nods solemnly. “It would be all right
with me.”
She waves to her girlfriends, who are
gathered in front of the schoolhouse, intently watching our interaction as they
giggle amongst themselves. I hear one of
them exclaim to another, “Tom is so handsome!”
And I have to look away from Mary so she can’t see how crimson my face
has become.
Mary is holding two schoolbooks of her
own, both worn nearly to ashes, having been passed on to her from four older
siblings. Without her asking, I take them from her, adding them to the pile of
my own books that I’m already carrying.
The books are not heavy, but walking next to Mary has made my hands grow
sweaty and it is hard to keep a hold on the texts.
“You’re so quiet, Tom,” Mary comments
finally.
I don’t know what to say to that, which
doesn’t improve the situation.
“Not in school,” she amends. “In class,
you always know the right answer. Always
raising your hand. But now, here with
me…”
I struggle to find something to say to
make it better. The capitol of
Massachusetts? Easy. The generals of the Civil War? I know them all by heart. But whenever I look at Mary, my mind goes
blank. “I like your dress,” I finally
say.
Mary bursts into laughter, throwing her
head back so that I can see all her molars.
“That’s all you can come up with?
You like this dress? It’s
older than either of us!”
Of course Mary’s dress would be another
hand-me-down. The stitching is fine, but
worn. It must have once been as yellow
as a sunflower, but now the color has nearly faded to gray.
No, I don’t particularly like the
dress. That isn’t what I meant to say.
“I like you,” I blurt out.
I can see now that Mary has the same
problem as me—pale skin that advertises all her emotions. When I get up the courage to look at her, I
can tell what I said has not displeased her.
Maybe just the opposite.
“Well,” she says, “if you like me so darn
much, why don’t you ever hold my hand?”
My heart is beating quickly in my
chest. I transfer the textbooks to my
left arm, so that my right is free. I
surreptitiously wipe it on my slacks, then take Mary’s cool, slender hand in my
own.
We walk the rest of the way home holding
hands. Holding onto four bulky textbooks
with only my left arm free is a struggle though. I do my best, not wanting to do anything to
break the spell and lose my new privilege of holding Mary Eckley’s hand, but
halfway to her house, I lose my grip and the books go spilling out all over the
pavement. Mary laughs and scoops up her own books.
“I’ll take those,” I offer, holding out
my hand to grab them from her.
“Please, Tom,” she says. “I’m hardly
helpless. I’m the daughter of the
sheriff, after all.”
William Eckley is the sheriff of Richmond
County and has been for as long as I can remember. He’s a good sheriff—lots of authority and can
be tough as nails when he needs to be, but is generally well-liked by all.
I don’t understand why it bothers me that
Sheriff Eckley is Mary’s father. I am,
above all, a law-abiding citizen of the county.
I have committed no crimes in my lifetime and have no intention to ever
do so. I come from a good family and
there’s no reason for the sheriff to disapprove when I ask for Mary’s hand.
But somehow, whenever I think of Sheriff
Eckley, a chill goes down my spine.
About a block away from Mary’s house, I
let go of her hand. Mrs. Eckley might be
hanging laundry outside the house and I don’t want her to see I have been
touching her daughter. I’ll likely have
to call on Mary formally and announce my intentions to the Eckleys, but it’s
too soon to think about that now. Mary
and I are both still in school, and I have no money to buy a house if I am to
marry her.
Sure enough, Mrs. Eckley is hanging the
wash in front of her house when we come around.
The Eckleys have nine living children, Mary being fifth oldest. I take a step away from Mary, wishing I
hadn’t relinquished her books. I don’t
want Mrs. Eckley to see me allowing her daughter to carry her own schoolbooks
home.
“Well, if it isn’t Tom Blake!” Mrs.
Eckley exclaims, rewarding me with a broad smile that reminds me of
Mary’s. Mary has clearly gotten her hair
color and freckles from her mother.
“Thank you for making sure our Mary got home safely.”
“Uh… you’re welcome, ma’am,” I say, and Mary giggles softly.
Mrs. Eckley’s eyes twinkle. “I hope you’ll come join us for dinner one
night in the near future, Tom.”
I nod.
“I… I will.”
I glance over at Mary, who is shifting
her books in her arms. The binding slipped
on one of her textbooks and I can see it is close to splitting in two. I look down at my own books, still gleaming
and new. I don’t have eight siblings
like Mary does. In my home, there’s only
me.
“Listen,” I murmur to Mary. I
held out my books to her. “Let’s trade.”
Her eyes widen. “Tom!
I can’t take your books.”
“I want you to have them,” I say firmly,
thrusting them toward her chest. “You
never get to have new things.”
“Well,” Mary says quietly, her green eyes
meeting mine, “maybe someday you could buy me new things.”
I swallow hard. “Yes,” I agree, my voice
low enough that Mrs. Eckley can’t hear.
“Someday I will.”
My fingers brush against hers one last
time as we exchange books. I’ll have to be careful not to allow my father to
see the used textbooks. If he discovers
what I’ve done, he’ll be fit to be tied. And if he finds out after a night at
the saloon, he’ll surely get out his belt and rip up my backside. He’s done it more times than I can
count. It never hurts any less, but I
don’t cry anymore the way I did when I was six or seven.
Instead of continuing home after dropping
Mary off, I make a detour. Ma gave me
money in the morning to stop at Sullivan’s, the butcher shop, and pick up some
meat. I would never have suggested Mary
accompany me there, so I have to turn around and go back the way I came.
Our local butcher shop is run by a man
named Fred Sullivan. Mr. Sullivan is
tall, rotund, and bald-headed, with arms as beefy as a side of cattle. In all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never
seen him without that white apron, stained with splotches of crimson.
Sullivan’s has meat everywhere you look. Mr. Sullivan always positions himself behind
the large wooden counter with its giant scale, but to either side of him hangs
large, dried sides of beef, many of them as tall as I am and possibly
heavier. The smaller animals hang behind
him. The poultry is plucked and cured
with salt, hanging by their legs, several with the heads still intact. Today he has three whole pigs hanging behind
him, legs spread and tied separately.
I inhale deeply as I walk into the store,
my nostrils filling with the scent of salt and smoke and… something else.
“Hi, Tom!” Mr. Sullivan says
cheerfully. “What can I get for you
today?”
I inhale one more time. “Do you have fresh meat today?”
Only about once a month, Mr. Sullivan has
fresh meat. He buys animals at the
market in the next town over to butcher, but the majority of the meat is cured
for preservation. He has a small cooler
that can keep meat fresh for a few days, although he can only get ice for it
during the colder months. There’s no
chance of fresh meat in July.
Mr. Sullivan gives me a quick sideways
glance before his face breaks into a smile.
“You’re in luck, boy. We most
certainly do.”
I nod.
“I’ll take five pounds of sirloin please, if you have it.”
Ma will cook up the steak for dinner
tonight on our gas stove. Pa and I like
our steak the same way—bloody, barely kissed by the cast iron skillet. It is one of the few things we agree upon.
“Coming right up,” Mr. Sullivan says.
He goes into the back, where he keeps the
cooler. I can tell when he’d thrown it
open by the smell. The “something else”
I’d detected has grown exponentially stronger.
My stomach clenches as I wait for Mr. Sullivan to return.
When he comes back, the five pounds of
beef are on a piece of paper, dripping with fresh blood. Mr. Sullivan lays it down on the table and
wraps it up for me.
“How come you always know, Tom?” he asks
me.
I shift Mary’s schoolbooks from one arm
to the other. “What do you mean?”
“Whenever I have fresh meat, you always
come in here and ask for it,” he says.
“But when I don’t have it, you never ask.”
I shrug.
“Well, I smell it.”
Mr. Sullivan raises his dark, bushy
eyebrows at me. I wonder how a man with
no hair on his head could have such thick eyebrows. “You can smell the fresh meat from here? All the way in the cooler in the back?”
My mouth feels dry. The amazement is plain on the butcher’s face—he is surprised I can smell
the meat from here. This is a revelation
to me. I had no idea everyone isn’t able
to smell a fresh carcass the way I can.
I don’t think I have a particularly keen sense of smell—I barely notice
the smell of the fresh flowers that Ma keeps in a vase in our living room at
all times.
I decide not to mention to Mr. Sullivan
that I could smell the meat all the way out on the street.
“I was joking,” I say. “I heard you went to the market, of course.”
“Ah!” The smile returns to his face. “Well, you’ve gotten nearly the last of it
till next month.”
The thought that there will be no more
fresh meat for another month fills me with… well, it’s hard to describe. A sense of disappointment going down to my
very core. Funny how such an
insignificant thing should make me feel that way.
Mr. Sullivan wraps the meat up in paper
for me. I watch his thick fingers,
always stained with cow’s blood. Surely
there is animal blood permanently etched into the creases of his hands. Before I can stop myself, I blurt out, “Do
you need any help here, Mr. Sullivan?”
The butcher looks up at me in
surprise. “Help?”
Now that the words are out, I don’t
regret them. I’ve been thinking about
working here ever since my mother took me here as a small boy. “You don’t have anyone else who works here,”
I point out. “I could come help
you. After school. And during the summer.”
He looks me up and down, appraising
me. He has no wife and no children of
his own—nobody to become his apprentice.
I have been coming here since I was a child and he knows my family well. I’m young and healthy, with a strong
back. And I’ll take whatever he can pay
me.
“What about your father?” he finally
says. “Doesn’t he want your help at the
shop?”
I cringe.
Pa works as a blacksmith, as did his father before him. He’s good at what he does, which is why we
can afford fresh meat and have an indoor water pump, unlike many other families
in our town. There’s always been a
general expectation that as his only son, I would take over for him someday,
but the truth of it is that neither of us seems eager for that day to arrive.
He seems to want me with him at the shop even less than I want to go there.
“He won’t mind,” I say.
Mr. Sullivan gives me a skeptical look.
“I’ll talk to him about it,” I promise.
“If George Blake says it’s okay,” he says
thoughtfully, “well, you seem like a good boy, Tom. I would take you on if that’s what you want.”
He adds with a grin, “As long as you’re willing to work hard for not much pay.”
“Whatever you want to pay me is fine,” I
tell him. And it is true. After all, any money I earn will have to be
turned over to my father.
I tell Mr. Sullivan I’ll return within
the next few days to let him know what my father has decided. I leave the butcher shop clutching five
pounds of fresh steak and feeling even better than I did when Mary let me hold
her hand.
But then the second I leave the store, it
happens again. That feeling.
Someone is watching me.
October, 1905
It takes me two days to work up the
nerve, but today I finally speak to Pa about my job at the butcher shop.
I wait until his stomach is full from
dinner and he isn’t too drunk—a combination that does not occur as frequently
as I wish it would. Pa works late at the
shop most nights. He is the only
blacksmith for miles and he brags that he makes most of the tools used in the
town. He used to take me with him to the
shop some days when I was a young boy.
He showed me how he holds the piece of iron under the fire until it
changes color from blackened silver to red-orange. When iron is very hot, it
becomes pliable, but only for seconds.
He has to make the most of those seconds to quickly hammer the metal
into the shape he wanted, whether it be bending it to give it a curve, drawing
it to make it longer and thinner, or upsetting it to make it shorter and
fatter.
“I need to speak to you, sir,” I say to
my father as he stuffs the last chunk of potato into his mouth.
Pa frowns at me, as if already displeased
by what I have to say. When my father is
home, he is nearly always frowning. He’s
a large man with sparse light brown hair and blurry features on his face—thick
lips, a bulbous nose, and beady brown eyes that are always squinting. When my
father is not around, my mother will sometimes joke, “You are lucky you get
your looks from me, Tom.”
My mother is one of the most beautiful
women in town, even now that she is getting on in years. But I don’t look like her. She has hair the color of corn silk and pale
blue eyes. I may share her fair
complexion, but my eyes are so dark that you can barely discern my pupils and I
have a shock of black hair. Ma swears
she has an uncle with dark hair like mine, but I never met this uncle or saw
photographs of him. She was vague when I
asked her his name.
“What do you want, boy?” Pa barks at
me.
Ma is clearing the table and her eyes are
beseeching me to keep my mouth shut.
Most days, I would have obliged.
The last thing I want is to anger my father and put my mother in danger. But today I persist.
“Sir,” I say, “Mr. Sullivan has offered me an after school job.”
My father’s eyes widen. “The butcher?”
“Yes, sir.”
I glance over at my mother and see that
her already pale skin has gone white.
She turns away from us and crosses herself.
“What do you want to do that kind of
dirty work for?” Pa barks at me. “If you
want to work, you can come to the shop with me!”
There is no good answer to that
question. I can’t remind my father of
the last time I was at the shop with him, how he took a piece of metal still
glowing from heat and poked the tip against my bare palm. I screamed with pain that took days to
disappear and the molten iron left behind a scar that remains to this day.
I only wanted to show him what would
happen if he wasn’t careful, he explained to my mother as she rubbed salve
over my injured flesh. I just touched
him with the tip. I don’t know why he
won’t stop crying.
I was six years old.
Instead, I say, “He’ll pay me wages. You can have them.”
I don’t want to turn over my wages to my
father—I want to save them for when I might ask for Mary for her hand. But it is clear that it is the only way to
get him to agree.
“That’s really the sort of work you want
to do?” Pa sneers at me.
“Yes, sir.”
If he’d had a drink in him, he might have
hit me. My hand balls into a fist around
the scar on my palm that still aches sometimes.
The last time he hit me, I took the blow—he has several inches and quite
a bit of weight on me, and my chances of getting even one punch in are
minimal. But one of these days, I’ll be
able to punch him hard enough that he’ll know he’s got a real fight on his
hands.
That will be my last day living in this
house.
But it’s not today. Today Pa throws down his fork and shrugs his
big shoulders. “You want to go work for
the butcher like a fool, go do it. But
every cent you make is mine.”
I nod. “Yes, sir.”
It is fair—the best I could have hoped
for. My father acts like he is doing me
a great favor, but I know the truth—he doesn’t want me working in his shop any
more than I want to be there.
If you want to keep reading this side story, PLEASE COMMENT. If there aren't many people reading, I'm not going to keep posting this because it isn't vital to the other story. But if you like it and want to hear more of Tom's story, let me know!
Yikes! Yes, keep posting. Can't wait to see where this is going.
ReplyDeleteLove your writing!
thanks! I may post every other week...
DeleteYes, please.
ReplyDelete:)
DeleteMore, please!!! I loved it, your narrative is excellent and the whole scene really comes to mind, please continue with this story ... Will it be part of the book? Greetings from Mexico
ReplyDeleteYes, it will be interwoven with Brooke’s story in the book.
DeleteOh, definitely keep on posting the back history, PLEASE ! This is wonderful, intricate writing, at its best. I truly enjoyed reading this and would love to continue to see the past timeline. Please don't stop. That would be such a shame. And Thank you, for this treat.
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear it!
DeleteI love this change of pace! Thank you for writing
ReplyDeleteThanks!
DeleteSo glad that you decided to publish the back story as well, thank you!
ReplyDeleteWhen I read The Girl I Didn't Kill For then the lack of backstory didn't disturb me much. When the whole book was published, I read it from the beginning to the end in one go despite the fact that I had read most of it on the blog already.
However, when reading My Perfect Ex-Boyfriend it didn't work so well. This time I was hunting for additional information, overlooked the chapters I had read on the blog but constantly worrying about having missed something important!
Sorry about this long babble but I hope this illustrated me being happy about getting the back story as well! Thank you!
Yes, sometimes I leave out scenes because I’m trying to get to the more devvy parts. In this case, the story speaks for itself without this backstory, but it’s actually sort of my favorite part of the whole book, so that’s why I wanted to find a way to include it.
DeleteLove it
ReplyDelete