“Whatever thoughts Christopher has and whatever he does with his sister are not his fault, even though the situation isn’t the same. I mean, he knows she’s his sister, but it’s as if they’re on a desert island or something, just when things are happening to them, to their bodies.”
“I’m not blaming them for anything, Kane,” I said. He was acting as if he thought condemnation was on the tip of my tongue. “It’s too soon to be judgmental.”
“Right,” he said, nodding.
Look how important it is for him to defend Christopher, I thought. I wanted to smile, but something kept me from introducing even an iota of amusement into it.
“If there’s anyone to blame for anything, it’s Corrine and, despite her high-and-mighty moral attitude, Grandmother Olivia. Right?”
“You don’t have to convince me, Kane,” I said.
“Yeah, well . . . yeah,” he replied, and put his wig on.
Momma had been gone more than two months now. Every time the door opened, all of us would stop whatever we were doing and shift our eyes quickly to see if it was finally Momma, but it was always our grandmother, silent, looking like she was tiptoeing through a field of snakes, eager to get in and get out. Neither Cathy nor I had the courage to ask her where our mother was. Besides a tirade of threats and horrible predictions for us, she might add the one thing I think both of us feared to hear: “Your mother has run off. She realized what evil she brought into the world.”
Cathy would look away quickly, and when she looked to me, I would turn away and focus on something I was doing, as if our disappointment didn’t matter, but oh, how it did. The little ball of anger rolling around inside me night and day was like a rock gathering moss. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night, the rage inside me so hot and strong my teeth were clenched and my jaw ached.
Cathy talked endlessly about escaping. Our swimming adventure had crystallized the possibilities for her. I wouldn’t deny that I still savored every second of that time at the lake, that wonderful sense of freedom we had walking hand in hand through the darkness, seeing the stars, and feeling the cool night breeze. It was as if we had come back to life again.
Every afternoon, I would go to the window, sometimes twice a day, to see the train pass by, the same train that had brought us here years ago. Sometimes it sounded mournful, like a train carrying a famous dead person, like Lincoln’s train, and sometimes it was more like it was calling me directly, telling me it was there. It would be there for us to take us away from all this. It bounced back and forth from being a train that reminded me of our situation, growing more horrid every day, every week, to being the sound of hope, the call to a new future, a new life, and a place where we would all grow naturally again.
Cathy could sense this mix of feelings inside me. The longer Momma was away, the more stridently she pleaded for our escape. “You’re always watching for that train,” she said. “You know you want to be on it, want all of us to be on it.”
Her constant prodding and nagging were wearing down what resistance I had left in me. Why would we wait for a mother who had neglected us so long? Why would we wait for an old man to die if it hadn’t happened in all this time? How would we know if he had without Momma being here? Would our grandmother come rushing up, happy to unlock the door and bring us into the bosom of her home? Would she say, “Now you can be my grandchildren, and you can forget all the terrible things I had to do to you”?
Hardly, I thought. I had no good answers for her. Maybe it was cruel to do it, but I fanned her dreams, her hope.
“Where would you go if we did get out of here?” I asked.
She talked about going farther south, being on beaches, soaking up the sunshine like someone who had been dying of thirst and crossing a desert. I let myself daydream aloud, too, and talked about things I’d like to be doing out there, the fun I’d like to be having. Those were weak moments for me. Cathy pounced on them. “Why are we staying? You hate it as much as I do.”
Of course I did. I hated every moment, actually, but I reminded her how important money was in this world and how the old man had to die soon. It was just logical. He was sick. We saw him in the wheelchair. He couldn’t live much longer, he just couldn’t, and then we’d have the money. I reminded her how important it was for me to become a doctor and how expensive that education would be. “Without money, I’ll never be anything. What job could I do to keep us alive out there? Who’d even give me a job? Whatever I could manage wouldn’t pay enough to keep the four of us alive.”
Of course, Cathy promised to take any job to help. We were going back and forth about it. The train was coming again. And then our grandmother appeared and told me to get away from the window. I tried to defy her. When she called me “boy,” I told her to call me by my name.
“Call me Christopher, or don’t call me at all.”
I thought she would rant and deliver another punishment, maybe starve us again for a week, but she smiled coldly at me instead and went into what I could only call her rationalization for how she was treating us, how she had treated our mother. She hated my name because of what she said our father had done to her and her husband. She claimed she was the one who got her husband to take in his half brother when he had no one, and how did he repay them? He ran off with our mother to get married. He had the nerve to come back, as if they could ignore that he had married his own niece. When our grandfather threw them out, he had his first heart attack, so his terrible health was their fault, my mother’s fault. She did this to her own father. She was so passionate about the story she seemed to lose her breath.
Both Cathy and I were shocked at the outburst. I thought, okay, they did that to you, but why take it out on us? I told her we weren’t to blame.
Then she went into how sinful we were in this small room.
I challenged her and blamed anything that had happened or would happen on her, on her locking us away. How could she think of herself as good and pious if she would starve little children? I didn’t know where the strength for my rant came from, but it came, and I let it all out with as much venom as she directed at us.
Cathy kept pleading with me to stop, but it was too late. Our grandmother ran out. I thought, okay, she’d find a way to punish us, but maybe it was worth it.
To my surprise, she came back instantly, with a green willow switch in her hand. She had it so fast I knew she always kept one nearby. She ordered me to strip down and said that if I didn’t, she would starve us again, starve the twins. I had to submit to her whipping me in the bathroom.
Afterward, because Cathy was screaming and crying, she did the same to her, only she went wild, breaking the switch on Cathy’s naked body. I could hear Cathy’s defiance, which I knew would only drive the old lady to be crueler. She pounded her so hard with a hairbrush that she finally knocked her unconscious.
She left her there on the floor and came out, her bosom lifting and falling, her face still red with rage. I was in great pain, but I didn’t cry.
“God sees everything you do,” she said. She had said that before.
It was on the tip of my tongue to reply, “Then you will surely go to hell,” but I said nothing. I looked down. I was terrified now for the twins. Would she turn on their small bodies? She did look at them, clinging to each other.
“The devil’s spawn,” she muttered, and walked out.