Final Scream (5 page)

Isaac assumed his wife had become barren and Lily let him believe that she could not conceive. Their arguments were bitter and he often accused her of not being a woman, calling her a dried-up old hag. No good to him. He needed sons and lots of them to help him with the ranch. If he wasn’t a God-fearing Catholic, he would have divorced her in a minute and found a real woman, one who would bear him boys and quit staring at him with eyes that looked haunted.

But the truth of the matter was that Lily would not bring a son of Isaac’s into the world.

In a cabinet that held makeup and nail polish and other “women things,” Lily kept several vials and bottles of herbs, powders and potions that every so often she would use, mixing them to a foul-smelling concoction that she would drink. Within the day she would be sick and get her period. Sunny was never told, but she guessed much later in her life that, whatever it was her mother drank, it stopped her from having any more babies.

Isaac spent more and more time in town, drinking and whoring, coming home drunk and bragging about his conquests with women who enjoyed taking him to bed and didn’t lie against the sheets frigidly like some goddamned statue! He’d rant and rave and eventually either drag his wife into the bedroom or pass out on the couch.

The little farmhouse was tense whenever he was home, but he made the mistake of striking his daughter only once, when she was five and had inadvertently spilled a bucket of milk that was to have been separated from the cream later. The pail had been sitting on the table when Sunny, chasing her cat, had tripped and fallen against the scarred old table. Sunny tried vainly to grab the pail, but it was too late. The bucket fell to the floor and milk, like the surf of the ocean, rolled in a huge wave that splashed over the cracked linoleum and ran in every direction.

Her father was smoking a cigarette in the living room and reading some hunting magazine. He heard the crash and her gasp. Already in a mean mood as one of his cattle had died, he took one look at the spillage and swore at the mess on the floor. “You little moron! What the hell did you think you were doing?”

“I’m sorry, Papa.”

“Sorry doesn’t count! That was the butter money and the cream and oh, for Christ’s sake, clean it up,” he raged, reaching for a bottle of whiskey he kept in the cupboard over the sink. His face was a mottled red as he tossed his cigarette into the drain and poured some of the liquor into a jelly glass.

Sunny had grabbed a rag, but she was small and all she succeeded in doing was spreading the milk in wider circles.

“Damn it, girl, you’re just as bad as your ma.” He walked to the porch and found a rag mop. “Now start over,” he said, throwing the mop at her. She barely caught the long wooden handle in her small fingers. “And do it right. You cost me a bundle today, let me tell you.”

Sunny’s stomach trembled. She pushed the mop, but the strings were dry and the milk seeped everywhere, running under the table and along the old scratched baseboards.

“Don’t you know nothin’?” Isaac yelled, cursing idiot daughters.

“Papa, I’m trying.” Tears streamed down her cheeks.

“Well, try harder!” He drank from his glass, draining the amber liquid, and the look on his face was pure hatred. “I should never have married her, you know. But she was knocked up and I thought you were a boy.” His lips curled into a sneer. “Instead you were a girl, and a useless one at that. Can’t even mop a floor. Well, you’d better get used to it, Sunny, ’cause it’s all you’re ever gonna be good for. Women’s work. Squaw labor. Jesus, I was a fool to marry her!” He tossed back his drink, and Sunny bit her lip to keep tears from raining from her eyes. Never had her father spoken so roughly to her. Many times he’d cursed his wife for being so beautiful, for tricking him into marriage, for being barren when it came to having more children. Sunny had heard their arguments, how he claimed that she’d wanted it before they were married, and how she’d screamed that he’d raped her and only married her to keep her father from cutting out his heart.

The arguments were ugly and vicious. Sunny had quivered in her small bed, holding her hands over her ears, feeling as if she were the cause of all the pain in the house. Her father hadn’t wanted her, and her mother, though she loved her daughter, had been forced to live with a man she loathed.

Swallowing against the horrid lump in her throat, Sunny pushed the mop again, and her father laughed at her futile efforts, that wicked, ugly laugh he used whenever Mama tried to defy him. “You are useless,” he said, shaking his head as the cat hopped down from the windowsill and began lapping the edges of the river of milk. Isaac muttered a curse and kicked hard.

“Don’t!” Sunny yelled.

With a shrieking meow the tabby went flying, sailing over the table to thud against the wall. Hissing and growling, it slid to safety behind the wheezing refrigerator.

Isaac turned back to his daughter, who had dropped the mop to run after her pet. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Kitty—”

He grabbed at the collar of her dress. “It’ll be fine,” he growled, his breath hot with whiskey and smoke. “Now you just do what you’re told and clean this mess, or I’ll have to take a strap to you, ya hear?”

“No!” she cried and his smile twisted even more.

Sunny tried to scramble away, but her bare feet slipped on the wet linoleum. Her father didn’t let go. Still holding her by the collar with one fist, he began to slowly unbuckle his belt.

“No! Papa, no!” Sunny cried.

“It’s time you learned your place around here. Turn around!”

She shivered and tears filled her eyes. “Please, don’t—”

“Believe me, girl, this will hurt me more than it does you.” He slid the belt through his pants and Sunny noticed his eyes, dark and burning with an unholy light, spittle collected beneath his ragged moustache, and then…in a sudden vision, she saw him falling to the ground and clutching at his chest, his eyes rolling up in his head, his skin turning blue, and her mother standing over him, never bothering to reach for the phone, though he was gasping for breath and cursing her and telling her to call an ambulance. The vision was so clear that she forgot where she was until she felt the first bite of the belt slap hard against her rump. She screamed loudly as the vision faded in a ripple of pain. Her knees gave out, but he jerked her to her feet.

“Don’t hit me!”

The belt bit through her shorts again. Pain ripped through her buttocks. “Papa, don’t!” she screamed and sobbed and begged, but still he held her.

“Now you seem to be gettin’ it!”

He raised up his right hand again, but stopped in midair when the screen door opened and banged hard against the wall. Lily, carrying a bucket of beans from the garden in one hand, a butcher knife in the other, glowered at him. Rage burned in her cheeks. Fury glowed in her dark eyes.

“Let her go,” Lily ordered, her lips barely moving, her nostrils quivering in repressed violence.

He snorted. “You don’t scare me!”

“Let her go.” Lily’s lips flattened and she glared at him with a hatred so intense that Sunny inwardly shrank away from both her parents though her father still held her so tightly she could barely breathe.

“She defied me. I’m just teaching her to obey.”

“And I’m going to teach you not to hurt her ever again.”

He laughed and his grip eased a little. Sunny squirmed, her feet gaining purchase. She twisted away from her father but slipped, falling facedown into the sticky mess.

Isaac’s anger centered on his wife. “You’re gonna pay for this!”

“What you do to me has nothing to do with her.” Lily’s pail slid to the floor, rolling and spilling long beans onto the already dirty floor, but the tanned fingers surrounding the knife never loosened their deathlike grip.

“I’ll kill you.” His lips curved into an evil smile “Then what will she do, eh?” He hooked a thumb at his daughter. “She’ll have to take over for you, won’t she? Do the squaw work around here. I’ll marry myself a nice white woman, a young one who’ll do what I say and give me sons, and your kid, she’ll be our little slave.”

Lily placed her other hand around the knife, curling her long fingers over the bone handle, and a blank look came over her face. She began saying things—over and over—chanting words that Sunny didn’t understand, and the smirk on Isaac’s face faded. He stepped backward, dropping his belt as the strange litany continued. The buckle banged against the floor.

Sunny’s hand snaked forward and she grabbed the horrid strap of old leather.

“Don’t you put no curse on me,” he sputtered, backing away from his wife and stumbling against a chair.

The chanting continued, soft and low, but endless, rolling like thunder over the far hills.

“For the love of Mary! Woman, what are you doing to me?” As if struck by a force that couldn’t be seen, Isaac jerked backward. His legs wobbled. With a horrid gasp, he clutched at his chest. “Oh, God,” he whispered. “Sweet Jesus, she’s crazy. Save me.” His knees buckled and he fell to the milky floor, his face turning blue, his hand over his heart. “Call an ambulance!” he sputtered, but the chanting continued and Lily stepped forward, through the spilled milk, crushing the beans with her bare feet, the knife still held aloft, the intonation rhythmic and endless.

“Sunny—help me!” her father cried. “Damn you, help me!”

She couldn’t stand there and watch him die. She ran to the phone and dialed for help. “My pa’s dying,” she screamed into the phone. “Please! Help us!” She was sobbing, her words garbled. “My pa’s dying.”

Lily didn’t move to stop her, nor aid her, just watched as her husband struggled for his life.

“You did this,” he cried. “You cursed me!”

By the time the volunteers from the fire department arrived in the red ambulance with its shrieking siren and flashing lights, Isaac was dead. No one could bring him back to life.

“He knew he had a weak heart,” Lily said calmly, not even pretending grief as she held Sunny tightly, “but he was very upset today, he lost a cow and calf. When he came into the house, he became angry with Sunny for spilling a pail of milk—I was out in the garden at the time, picking beans, and he had the attack. We called immediately, but there was no way to revive him.”

“Is that what happened?” a tall, thin man smoking a cigarette asked Sunny. Still crying, Sunny nodded, knowing that she was lying, knowing that God would probably strike her dead or make it so she couldn’t talk ever again, but lying because she knew the men would send her mother to jail and she’d be all alone.

Lily’s story never changed, and Isaac Roshak was laid to rest in the family plot three days later. But Sunny had never forgotten how powerful her mother had been, and from that point forward she’d held new respect for her visions, for the vials of powder in her mother’s closet, and for her own Cherokee and Gypsy heritage. Because she knew, without a doubt, that her mother had killed her father—as surely as if she’d plunged that wicked knife through his failing heart.

Now, some forty-odd years later, as she stood in the sweltering trailer with only a small fan to move the hot air, she gazed through the windows to the heat shimmering against the trees.

Her heart pumped a little faster, her blood circulating to pound near her temples. She reached for the back of a chair to steady herself, and the vision she hadn’t been able to see for Belva came clear to her.

But it wasn’t a glimpse of Belva’s daughter or failing crops; it was much more personal. And chilling.

The image before Sunny’s eyes was of her own sons, naked as the day they were born. Their skin shimmered in the heat as they stood on a ledge of sheer granite cliffs, the path at their bare feet much too narrow to walk upon.

Yet they moved. Slowly. Rocks and stones falling into the dark, bottomless abyss below them. They constantly tried to find higher ground, to scale the rocky precipice, their fingers clawing, their hands and feet bloody, their bodies covered in dirt and sweat as they strained, helping each other, inching upward to a darkness they couldn’t see, a danger that lurked…waiting.

Sunny’s heart froze.

“Don’t!” she tried to cry, but her voice was silent, her warning a whisper that they couldn’t hear. Ever upward they moved, trying to scale the treacherous precipice, and the clouds above them turned dark and stormy, swirling with malevolence.

The ledge became mere inches and still they strained, reaching up, hands nearly reaching the crest.

The earth shuddered. Violently.

The darkness swirled angrily above them. Growing near, a faceless shadow that was death itself.

Sunny’s heart stopped.

She saw herself, on the other side of the crevice, trying to call to them, to warn them, but her voice was silent. Impotent.

Fear screamed through her; her heart pounded in dread.
Be careful! Climb down!
But her voice was stilled, and she could only watch in mounting horror as their fingers scrabbled against the sheer cliff and their bloody toes tried to grip, slid, knocking away dirt and sand as they tried desperately—vainly—to gain purchase.

No, oh, God, no!

Muscles strained. They shouted to each other. Ignored her and the blackness that blocked the sun.

Help them. Please, please keep them safe
, she silently prayed to whatever deity would listen.

The earth moved, the cliff shattered, the nightlike darkness became a whirling vortex of smoke. Coughing, she watched in horror as her boys fell, tumbling and screaming, arms and legs flailing as the darkness splintered into a blistering burst of flames.

Screams reverberated through her mind, and her sons, dark silhouettes against a backdrop of hot, hungry fire, disappeared before her.

“No!” her own voice echoed around her. She blinked and the vision disappeared, scattering away from the hot little trailer, but the sweat and fear still lingered. Her insides seemed to melt and she fell, gasping, into a kitchen chair. She couldn’t shake the image that her children—her precious sons—would soon meet their ruin.

It wasn’t the first time she’d seen this same terrifying image; the premonition had started appearing two weeks ago, creeping into her sleep, breaking out of her subconscious.