Embracing Darkness (56 page)

Billy reacted quickly. “SHHHH! Are you crazy?” he whispered. “Try not to make any more noise until we’re down.”

“I’m caught!” she said in a raspy whisper.

“Alright,” he answered. “I’m coming!”

As Billy retraced his steps back up the lattice, Jessie took in the horizon, where she could see blues and purples in the sky.

“We’re gonna miss it!” she said.

“Not a chance,” replied Billy.

As she saw the horizon, Jessie remembered what Billy had said the night before just after dinner. It was the reason why she was hanging thirteen feet above the ground shortly after 4:00 a.m. “Meet me tomorrow morning,” Billy had whispered, “just before dawn. I wanna show you something extraordinary.”

Jessie was enamored by everything about Billy Norwin. He was strong, handsome, hotheaded, protective, and mature for his age. She’d told herself after their first kiss on her birthday that she’d follow him to the ends of the earth if he wanted her to.

“Why so early?” she had asked. “What’s got you all fired up, Billy Norwin?”

“I saw something incredible as I was coming out from the crawlspace below the rectory early this morning.”

“You were with Swell so early?” she said, trying to sound as indifferent as she could.

Billy had explained to Jessie shortly after their first kiss that he would never ask her for her virginity—that is, not until she was ready to surrender it. But he also had made it clear that as a teenage boy he had desires and needs. And as long as he was paying Swell for the privilege of sex, it was nothing more than a business transaction between them.

Jessie understood Billy perfectly and didn’t disagree with him in the slightest. It was Sister Ignatius who had told her time and time again that boys, even those whom she considered her brothers, have something called lust. Although she still didn’t know exactly what lust was, it sounded awful to Jessie, and it was something she herself never wanted to have.

On one occasion Sister, after she’d seen Jessie wrestling Jordan in the grass for the last gum drop in a bag of sweets that Father Fin had brought back from town for all of us, felt the need to remind Jessie of a lesson in male sexuality. “The saying that ‘Boys will be boys’ comes from the notion that they all have innate desires and that it’s expected of them. They don’t care what trouble they get a young girl into. They do it anyway!”

Jessie had asked Sister what she meant by getting a girl into trouble.

The nun’s response was blunt. “You’re not too young to know where babies come from. You also should know that a pregnant and unmarried girl not only has to tell her parents that she’s committed a mortal sin, shaming her family, but also must carry the baby, deliver it in incredible pain, and then raise the child for the next eighteen years!”

“There are ways to get rid of it,” Jessie said innocently, not knowing the ire that this comment would arouse.

“Abortion is a sin, dear girl! What you’re talking about is murder!”

“But aren’t there exceptions, Sis?” Jessie said.

“Is a baby conceived for another reason besides love any less of a human being than you or I?” Sister growled, and left it at that, never to speak again of the subject with Jessie. Sister’s shift in doctrine regarding a woman’s right to decide when it came to her own body surely would have disappointed Nurse Ross, had she lived.

Billy climbed up the lattice about three feet until his face was flush with her ankle. He took hold of it gently with one hand and with the other grabbed the ivy that had trapped her foot. “Okay?” he asked.

“Okay,” she answered, smiling.

They made it down without further problems.

Jessie felt embarrassed to tell Billy that she’d never seen a sunrise before.
Strange
, she thought.
Here
we
are
on
top
of
the
world.
I’ve
lived
here
my
whole
life,
and
he’s
showing
me
my
first
sunrise!

“I know where we can get the best vantage point,” Billy said excitedly as they walked toward the maple. “We’ll get to see it like no one else for miles around.”

“We’ll get that anyway. We’re on a hill, you know, and I don’t want to climb just now.”

Billy’s eyes widened, and he tilted his head, as if telling her to forget her fatigue and just do it.

“Okay,” she said.

“Let’s time each other to see who can get up there the fastest. I’ll go first. Count.”

He took a running start from fifteen feet back. As Jessie waited for Billy to finish his ascent, she read the messages in the bark of the trunk that was eye-level to her. There was the heart she’d etched with the inscription JB + BN. Nearby were other messages including JONAS & JOEY WERE HERE IN ‘35 and THEO IS #1
.

Jessie was still waiting for Billy to finish climbing so that she could respond with her own tree-mounting skills. She had forgotten to count, being distracted by hers and Billy’s initials within the heart, so she came up with a reasonable number and started counting from there. She then walked around the thick trunk, dragging her fingertips across the bumpy surface.

Something was carved on the back of maple, the side that faced south. It was another heart. This one read PP + EF. Jessie wondered whether PP referred to Father Poole, but she couldn’t figure out who EF was. She didn’t have much time to think about it anyway, as Billy called to her anxiously, adding that if she didn’t hurry she was going to miss the sunrise.

They sat about halfway up the maple atop one of the thick branches and wrapped their feet around another limb just below. By the time they’d gotten settled in the maple, it was 4:34 in the morning. The sun was finally coming up over the horizon, and different colors danced their way into the sky. The two said nothing throughout the entire chromatic display. It was the most beautiful thing Jessie had ever seen.

Jessie was awakened by a bright light. Squinting as her eyes struggled to open, she found herself leaning tightly into Billy’s body and tucked into his arms. He kissed her nose. She giggled and broke free.

“How long was I asleep?” she asked as she stretched.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’d say it’s about 6:45 or so.”

“I need to get back,” she replied. “Sis will be up soon, and she’ll throw a fit if she finds out I sneaked out of the house to come up here with you.”

Just as Jessie was getting ready to climb down, she noticed movement at the back of the rectory. Billy told her to wait.

They watched a tall figure emerge from the corner of the building. He was bare-chested, carrying his shirt in his right hand, and an apple and a switchblade knife in his left. He whistled an unfamiliar tune as he walked over to a hose and took a long drink of cold water. When he turned back around to face the maple, it became clear to Billy and Jessie that it was the man they’d come to know as Jack White.

He now was singing a song with which neither Billy nor Jessie was familiar. Its grotesque lyrics went as follows:

Here they come, the big fat piggies to the slaughterhouse. You can see the fear in one. He’s as timid as a mouse. Take him by the tail; hurl him at the cows!

Here they are, the big fat piggies, eating shit for lunch. Hear them sloppin’, chompin’, munchin’, making sounds that crunch while pissin’ on themselves, they start their brunchin’!

Tuxedos and queer moustaches, we still need to chop all them up. Rich pig, poor pig, middle income, they’ll all die once they see me come!

There you are dear, feast on this here, pig ribs, feet and thighs. After you’re done, there’ll be pig ears with its tongue and eyes! Eat the heart and brain. You’ll hear no more cries!

The lyrics were bad enough, but Billy also noticed something else. The man sang with a strong southern accent. The more he saw of the stranger, and the more he’d heard of the things he was doing, the more Billy despised him. Within exactly one week since the man known as Jack White had come to St. Andrew’s, he’d managed to stir up trouble.

On only his second day at the rectory, for example, he’d been involved in a spat with Mrs. Keats when he’d taken an entire loaf of her hot-out-of-the-oven, homemade bread for himself. She had chased after him with a kitchen knife. At first he let her chase him, finding it amusing to watch an old fat lady try to run, but he became angry when she threw the cleaver at him. Jack White seized her by the shoulders and screamed, “WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM? DO YOU HEAR ME, BITCH? WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM?” before knocking her down.

Later that day Father Poole hollered from the bathroom just outside his office. The toilet had backed up and begun to overflow into the hallway. He called Jack White to shut off the valve, unclog the pipes, and clean up the mess.

Little Ziggy, who had an obsession with toilets and even sleepwalked almost every night to the bathroom just to flush it, approached the stranger as he was sopping up the unpleasant mess.

“Does our toilet go up now?” asked Ziggy innocently.

The stranger stared the little boy down without saying a word. When Ziggy returned his glance, Zachary Black became enraged. He hated people looking at him, regardless of their age or size. Grabbing Ziggy’s shirt collar, he yanked the boy toward him, pulled down Ziggy’s pants, and forced him to sit down on the floor. As the child began to cry, Black’s crooked smile formed once again.

“Don’t move from that spot, Piggy, or I’ll have to squash you like the parasite you are.”

“My name’s Ziggy,” the boy said, sobbing softly. “Not Piggy.”

“But you’re nothing but a little piggy to me,” Zachary replied.

Ziggy reported all this to Billy, Jordan, Theo, and me as we helped him change out of his clothes a while later.

“I’ll kill him,” Billy said, pulling off Ziggy’s soaked trousers.

“No,” Jordan cautioned. “Let’s just tell Father Fin.”

“That won’t do any good,” said Theo. “He didn’t do anything thith morning when Mithter White attacked Mitheth Keatth. He told Father Fin that she fell and never even athked any of uth if we’d theen anything.”

“Let Father Fin find out for himself,” I urged. “Otherwise that guy will get even with us. I think he’s dangerous. I mean, we can all see it. Father Fin will see it soon enough.”

So Billy kept his mouth shut, realizing how much Father Poole had been duped by the stranger. Billy was eager for Sister Ignatius to meet Jack White because he knew that she would see right through the stranger immediately. No one could ever pull the wool over her eyes. If you lied to her when she asked whether you had eaten cookies before dinner, she’d check the corners of your mouth for crumbs and even squeeze your nose until you opened your mouth wide open.

Regrettably, however, Sister Ignatius never did set eyes on the stranger. As she got weaker and weaker, getting up less often from her bed, she hadn’t been able to make it out of the Benson house since shortly before Jack White arrived. Her only companionship was Father Poole and Jessie. We boys weren’t allowed to see her because Father Fin figured that we were too loud and rowdy and that we might put her in a “fractious state.” When Father Fin and Jessie weren’t there, they’d leave General Lee in the bedroom with her. Sister liked his company. Passing hours at a time with an animal that couldn’t carry on a conversation suited her fine, since lately she hadn’t felt much like talking. Whatever was draining her energy increased bit by bit and day by day.

The stranger had some free time on his hands the first Wednesday he was with us. It wasn’t too hard to believe he was idle since we boys had done the lion’s share of the work around the grounds before his arrival. Our chores became his job description, and what took four of us an entire day to do he finished in three hours. His strength was remarkable, and sometimes we’d watch him work from up in the maple so that he wouldn’t see us.

We marveled at the ease with which he’d carry armfuls of lumber from one end of the summit to the other or how fast he’d chop wood for Mrs. Keats’s stove and the rectory’s fireplaces, splitting each block clear down the middle on the first try with machine-like accuracy. We also were astonished at his balance on the rectory roof as he walked along its edge without so much as a wobble. To us, whether or not we admitted it, this stranger was god-like.

Once he slammed a hammer down on his thumb. The blow was hard enough to have smashed every bone in his finger, yet he only flinched and dismissed the pain with a couple of shakes of his wrist. We all studied his thumb covertly later on at supper. It stayed erect the entire time he was eating, as if he’d had an invisible splint attached to it. The thumb was bruised to the darkest blue, almost black, but he didn’t grimace once during dinner. As he always did, the stranger kept his eyes down at his food and never spoke a word to anyone, unless it were in response to a question posed to him by Father Poole.

Jack White never did care for any of us one way or the other. The only time he’d ever pay us any mind was when he would tease and torment the little ones. It was obvious that he enjoyed admiring at the girls whenever they walked by, especially Sue Ellen who tended to flaunt herself in his vicinity. He’d pay more attention to their bodies than their faces, but the girls never noticed it as did we boys.

The interloper stayed clear of Billy, perhaps because he knew that Billy was a challenge. The rest of us were nervous around White, but Billy always kept his chin up and his chest extended, as if he were forever taking a deep breath. Billy was foolish enough to boast, sometimes loud enough for the stranger to hear, that he wasn’t afraid of anything or anyone, yet no one doubted Jack White’s superior strength. He was about five inches taller than Billy and outweighed him by about thirty pounds. Unknown to us at the time, though, was that the stranger needed to keep a low profile. He could only afford little instances of torment, such as his assault on Mrs. Keats and Ziggy.