Our Daily Bread (28 page)

The car kept moving. As it went by Tom saw a woman driving, a man next to her, and a boy in the back seat. The woman wore big sunglasses, covering half her face, and she was so fat the lenses cut into her cheeks. The little boy was fat, too, a fat white face with wide eyes and a mop of black curls. All Tom caught of the man was a glimpse, his mouth, open, lips moving.

“You said they'd stop,” said Ruby in his ear as they all watched the car disappear. Her tone was accusatory and disappointed.

“The next one will,” he said, although he felt he'd been punched in the stomach. They didn't stop? For kids?
What was wrong with people?

“Welcome to the mountain,” said Jack.

Tom stared at him. He'd heard it all his life.

It's the mountain. What can you do?

What can you do?

Nothing.

What can you expect of people who live like that?

Nothing.

People like that? Those people.

Them.

Us.

Fifteen minutes later, they heard the sirens. A police car rounded the bend, coming from the direction of the mountain; it slowed to a stop and the siren went silent. Carl Whitford and Elliott Blanders stepped out. Seeing the police, some of the children wanted to run into the woods again, and Tom and Bobby had their hands full convincing them the police were there to help. When they settled them down Carl persuaded Jill to sit with Toots in the back of the sheriff's car until the ambulance got there. Then, Carl turned to Tom.

“Glad to see you're all right. We've been up on the mountain most of the night poking around. Dorothy Carlisle, God bless the nosy old biddy, called about midnight and told me what was going on.”

“I didn't hear any sirens,” said Tom. He stood with his arm around Bobby, loathe to let the boy out of his reach ever again.

“You never want to tip off an Erskine,” said Carl. “Only makes things worse. Good thing Dorothy called, although maybe if she'd called earlier some things might have been different.”

“Meaning?” said Tom, watching the deputy hand out water to the kids.

Carl glanced at Bobby. “Albert Erskine's not with you, huh?”

“He was supposed to meet us at the marsh. He never showed up.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He'll turn up,” said Bobby. “He probably just missed us. He'll turn up.”

Tom gave the boy's shoulder a squeeze. “Of course he will.”

Carl just raised his eyebrows. “There's a whole herd of Troopers and DEA on the way. Fairly pissed off, too, since they had this big raid planned for next week.” He shrugged. “Just can't plan for what goes on up there, I guess.”

He made a call on his cell and passed the phone to Tom. “Talk to your daughter,” he said.

“Ivy? Yeah, sweetie, I'm fine, fine.” It was hard to say more. His throat was all closed up, his vision blurred. “Bobby, too. Sure. Bobby, too. Tell Mrs. Carlisle we're on our way.”

Moments later the ambulance arrived. As the medics tended to Toots, Jill and Jack hovered nearby. Jack's face held thunder, one shoulder was cocked up, and his fists were loose but boxer-ready.

“Hey,” Tom said, “it's all right, Jack. The doctors will take care of her. You go with them if you want.”

Jack glared with such dark fury that Tom's jaw dropped.

“Not Hawthorne. He can't come near her. If he comes near her, I swear to God I'll kill him myself. You hear me?”

“Clive Hawthorne? Why not Dr. Hawthorne?” said Tom.

Carl took Jack by the shoulders and looked into his face. “No, not Dr. Hawthorne. I'll see to that, all right? I say so, it's so.”

Jack considered for a moment, and then nodded. Tom's head spun, and when Carl Whitford's eyes met his he saw all the knowledge of the entire town piled up in his pale irises.

“Ah, Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.”
Ephesians 6.
We fight against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil. I'm calling on you here, today, right now, to take up the whole armour of God. We're winning, people, in this great battle. Lock and load for Jesus. We're winning now; the evil will be rooted out of our midst, once and for all. Yessir. It's a great shame on us, no doubt about it, all this peering in on us from the outside, but maybe we deserve it. Maybe it's God's judgment on us for not cutting out the cancer sooner. We've been talking about evil for a long, long time, people. And now we see the fruits. Right in our midst. I read to you from Mark 7:21–23:
“For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: All these things come from within, and defile the man.”
Defile our good town, people. But we're onto you now, Satan, and we say, be gone, in Jesus' name!

—Reverend Kenneth Hickland,
Church of Christ Returning, 2009

“I believe it was the Austrian writer Robert Musil who said, “There is no truth which stupidity can't make use of.”

—Dorothy Carlisle, 2009

And so began gideon's year of shame.
It started with the raid up on the mountain, and a very sophisticated operation it was, too, with Drug Enforcement Officers and Hazmat and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Swat teams surrounded the compound, heavily body-armoured agents broke down doors and swarmed into every cabin like fire ants. The Erskines, drug-addled and exhausted from extended methamphetamine use, never stood a chance. Fat Felicity managed to hurl a frying pan at the first agents through the door, which earned her a black eye and a badly wrenched shoulder. Sonny came out of the woods, slouched up to one of the feds and asked if anyone had a chocolate bar. Other than those two, the entire compound was sleeping when the feds arrived, bludgeoned by exhaustion and depression from the extended methamphetamine use. Erskines were as easy to round up as smoke-tranquilized, albeit still aggressive, bees. Someone had leaked word of the raid to the media, and the seven television crews who showed up shuffled around looking disappointed there hadn't been a standoff of Waco proportions. The burned-out trailer was left to the people from Hazmat. Sonny Erskine led them to Albert Erskine's remains, which were buried in a shallow grave out in the woods. They were removed and cremated, the expenses covered by Mrs. Dorothy Carlisle, who took possession of the ashes when it was determined no one else wanted them.

Dr. Clive Hawthorne was far more trouble to arrest than the Erskines, screaming about his civil rights and his credentials and generally making an enormous spectacle of himself, the highpoint of which was when he vomited on the foot of a cameraman who got a little too close. The media crews, sniffing at the salacious details about to unfold, settled in for a long stay.

It was exciting for a while, lots of scandalous talk about child molestation and dead babies buried all over the mountainside and drug fiends and how homosexuals were probably at the root of it all. The churches were fuller than usual, and there was much beating of chests and vows to keep Satan in his pit, where he belonged. Reverend Hickland adopted the cry, “Ever vigilant, ever vigilant against the devil!” The journalists took copious notes.

When the trials began, the children were paraded one by one onto the witness stand and one by one they told their tales. Some people even said surely they must be making some of it up, for it really was too horrible, wasn't it? Children as young as twelve having babies? Babies born deformed and murdered by Dr. Hawthorne, buried in shoeboxes? Children forced to commit unspeakable acts?

Jack Erskine was the first up, being the eldest boy left alive, now that Albert was dead, and the day he took the stand the courtroom was packed, for rumour had it he was going to reveal shocking details. In fits and starts, Jack described how his mother sucked his “junior” and inserted her finger into his bum. Gloria, who weighed well over two hundred pounds, liked to lie on top of her little son, forcing him to kiss and caress her.

“She wetted her pussy—sorry—her vagina and wetted my rear end and started going back and forth with her fingers.”

When Jack was five or six, Gloria began practicing fellatio on him, trying to give him an erection sufficient to enter her. He was too small then. Later it wasn't a problem.

Why didn't he tell anyone? The prosecutor, a brightly blonde woman from the state capital asked.

“Who was I gonna tell? They were all doing it. When she wasn't at me, the uncles were.”

“The defence has questioned why you didn't try and get help for yourself and the other children,” the prosecutor said. “You could have told someone at school, couldn't you? A teacher, or guidance counsellor?”

Jack took a moment before answering. He looked around the packed courtroom, going face to face. Those who met his eyes dropped their gaze almost immediately. There was something in the look of the boy, implying he recognized them or something. But none of them had ever been to the Erskine compound; for heaven's sake, they'd never taken advantage of a child. Not a single one of them.

Finally Jack spoke. “We're mountain, right? We been mountain for—like—as long as anyone can remember. Hundreds of years, you know? Nobody gives a shit—sorry—nobody cares what happens to us.”

The blonde prosecutor, her back as straight as a brick wall, asked the boy, “What did your grandfather say would happen if you did tell someone what was going on?”

Jack's voice was coolly matter-of-fact. “Said they'd kill us. I figure that's what they tried to do when Albert brought Bobby Evans up. Set fire to the cabin, thinking we was in there. Tried to kill us all. Killed Albert, didn't they?”

At which point the defence made an objection.

Many people thought the devil was surely loose on North Mountain and the testimony of Harold Erskine seemed only to confirm this. The old man sat proudly on the stand and boasted how he had screwed all the kids, male or female, whatever their age. “Up their bums or in their cunts, it didn't matter to me.” Several women left and chose not to return after that.

When Tom Evans took the stand, one day in late autumn when the trees were bare and the wind was wet and chill and people were thinking about Thanksgiving just a couple of weeks away, the crowd overflowed onto the steps. Tom Evans! Saving those children—who could have anticipated that? No one had seen much of Tom Evans in the months preceding the trial and some were surprised at how drawn he was, how sombre. While he testified, he held on to a silver Boy Scout whistle he wore on a thick string around his neck.

Dorothy Carlisle sat in the front row for every day of the trial, and when Tom Evans testified, she sat with his children, Bobby and Ivy. Tom's voice was low and several times he had to be asked to speak up. A rim of sweat dampened his upper lip and dark stains spread under his arms.

Toots Erskine's testimony was given in a closed courtroom.

In the end the Erskines—Harold, Felicity, Carrie, Gloria, Sybil, Ray, Lloyd, Dan and Meg, as well as Dr. Hawthorne and several other adults who were not Erskines but were part of the extended, impossible to untangle, skein of compound dwellers—were sentenced to prison terms on a variety of charges ranging from gross indecency to rape of a minor. The sentences ranged from two years to eight years. The drug trials, held separately, would keep many of them in jail for considerably longer periods.

The county prosecutor was still trying to determine what precise charges would be laid against whom in the matter of Albert Erskine's death. The good doctor's wife, Francine Hawthorne, moved away—no forwarding address.

Everyone was exhausted when it was over and happy to see the back end of the journalists, who complained they couldn't get decent coffee and wanted high speed Internet WiFi in the bed-and-breakfasts. They talked as if nobody could hear them, and seemed to be of the opinion something was intrinsically wrong with Gideon, that what happened there couldn't happen anywhere else.

It was a relief, although no one admitted it, that the Erskine children were fostered out of the county. It was best all round, wasn't it? The children wouldn't want to be reminded, surely, and well, now it was all over, better to put it in the past. Dorothy Carlisle petitioned the court to be allowed to act as a foster mother, but was refused on the grounds of her age (which made her go very red in the face indeed), and because she had no experience with even normal children, let alone these psychologically damaged little people. It was odd, Mrs. Carlisle wanting to be so involved with the Erskine children, but then she was always a little off, wasn't she? Apparently, she'd gone to New England somewhere, or at least that was all anyone could get out of Tom Evans.

Shortly thereafter a pastor in Michigan was arrested for keeping four underage Korean girls in cages in his basement. Sex slaves, apparently. The devil was everywhere, and luckily for Gideon, he had a roaming eye.

By the time people sat around their Thanksgiving turkeys, they saw no reason to keep going on about it. There was no reason to keep rehashing it. It was all around them. Guilt settled over the town like a fog, in which was heard the whispers of children.

It is the middle of a rainy December now and at the Evanses' house, Bobby and Ivy are in the kitchen, doing the dinner dishes. Tom lets Rascal out. The street is slick and shiny. A car sits parked in front of the house and at first, Tom thinks nothing of it. Rascal barks four times. Rabbits, maybe. When he lets Rascal back in the dog shakes off a spray of icy water and Tom, warding off the water with his hands, glances up at the car again. Rascal runs into the kitchen to be with the children. The light over the car's front seat is on. Odd, Tom thinks and he wonders if it's some goddamn journalist wanting one last statement. Only as he closes the front door does he realize who is in the car. He stares down at his hand, gripping the handle so tightly his knuckles whiten. His heart thuds against his ribs and his mouth is sawdust. He turns the handle, and then lets go of the door knob.

No, he thinks. Nope. Uh-uh.

He goes to the dark living room and stands at the window. He closes his eyes. He will not look, not yet. She can see him, if she's looking. He opens his eyes and there she is, standing by the passenger side, wearing a beige coat. She is smoking. He wonders if someone else waits in the car, but no, she is alone. Even though it is dark, he sees her quite clearly in the light from the street lamp. Her skin looks blotchy and older, the lines running from nose to mouth deep and shadowed. She has circles under her eyes and her hair is pulled back. For the first time, he sees her not as she was that day so long ago in New York City—a young girl with an air of erotic mysticism about her—but as a tired woman, disenchanted and frightened by the future. A part of him wishes he loved her less for this lack of enchantment, this failure of glamour. Tom's heart trembles, cracks, becomes as transparent as a soap bubble and as fractured and sharp as the inside of a prism. Forgiveness is hard, perhaps impossible. The desire for revenge is effervescent. The desire to feel her in his arms is molten.

He won't go to her. She has to take the walk. She has to come in the door without any help from him. He will not make it easy on her. He watches her. But she does not move. Why could she never, not even now, take responsibility for what she wants? She tosses the cigarette onto the ground, and annoyance flashes through him. She was always careless. She grinds it under her booted heel.

Tom goes back to the front door. He can do that much. She's come this far, after all. He opens the door and stands, backlit. Her hands go to her mouth, as though she is stopping herself from speaking, or from begging, perhaps, or from screaming. Tom does not want her to beg or scream. He wants her to stand in that unforgiving light and say whatever is true. Could it be so complicated, just the truth of where her home is and where it is not? But perhaps, like some bird confused by the sharp and sparkling lies of skyscraper lights, she has become confused.

They stand like that. And then she walks round the car, gets in and starts the engine. As the car moves away, he wonders if he is going to run after her and is slightly surprised when he goes no farther. Within seconds, she is nothing but red taillights on a rain-sparkled street. He goes back in the house and closes the door. He leans his head against the cold wood. There is a clatter and shriek in the kitchen and then Ivy laughs.

“Bobby, you're splashing me! Stop it! Dad! Ooh, I'm gonna get you! Dad! Help!”

Bobby dashes past him, thundering upstairs, and Ivy runs after him, a wet sponge in her hands. Rascal scampers up the stairs, barking. Ivy and Bobby are laughing. Tom inhales, holds it and exhales. He turns the brass switch on the door, locking it.

“Watch out, you two, I'm gonna get you!” he says, and runs up the stairs after them.

Nantucket suits Dorothy. She lives in a grey shingle bungalow in Cliff, where it is an easy walk to the Hinkley Lane Beach. She has a rose garden. The inside walls are white. There is a view of the sea from the kitchen, her bedroom and the living room. Her furniture is blue and white. She has a fireplace and a radio, but no television. The many shelves are filled with many books. She chose Nantucket because of the sea, and the idea of freshness, and the fact it is a small island, and she thinks it would be hard to lose anyone there. She has made a few friends, among them the fabulously named James Coffin Starbuck, a sixty-five-year-old Nantucket native from an old whaling family. He has just the sort of leathery, bleach-eyed face you would expect from someone with that name and history. James owns a whale-watching boat for tourists, but today Dorothy is his only passenger. She carries with her a bronze urn of ashes. The air is rich with salt and sea and the breeze is icy and clean on her face. When the time comes, she uncaps the urn and shakes it, releasing Albert's ashes to the wind. They ascend and twirl, spinning as if confused, unsure of where they are, and then the wind catches them and flings them into the salty, sun-sparkling air as though it were all so easy, as though flying away takes no effort at all.