The Uninnocent (8 page)

Wake up, wake up, wake
up
.

Goddamn little bitch … it's not as if … it's got to be here somewhere. It never happened, that's what happened.

“Why don't we leave him be?” Jenny advised Georgia.

They had left the kitchen, carrying their sherry glasses back through the vagaries of rooms, windows shrouded in damask and undusted lace, through the staleness of deathly still air, for the deep veranda that ran the length of the front of the house. Two phoebes shot like feathery bullets from their mud nest lodged in the rafters. The dense, earthy air had begun to move. Miles out to the horizon, a black bank gusted eastward, diligently following the columns of rain that preceded it, released from its nearest edges. They could see the storm through the vined screen at the west end of the porch, out over the plumes of big-leafed oaks and cottonwoods, as it descended toward town.

“Feel how quick this heat is breaking?”

But Georgia said nothing. She watched her sister-in-law's inscrutable face—severe, childish, intent—and marveled at how few features she shared with her brother Cutts. It seemed to Georgia as if this face were wrapped in a transparent gauze, occlusive, separated from the rest of the world, its desecrations, its filth. Jenny forbore, thought Georgia. That was the right word for it.

Rocking lightly in the porch swing, Jenny finally asked her sister-in-law, “So, you have it with you, I guess?”

“Yes.”

“Go ahead and let me see it, then.”

Georgia set her glass on the wicker stand. She pulled the envelope from her blouse cuff. “Here.”

Jenny removed the folded piece of browned paper from the envelope, leveled her eyes at Georgia, who sat again in a chair that faced the swing. She unfolded it and read without any expression what was written.

What we done with Jenny was law
, it began.

With decisive, nimble movements, she then refolded the sheet and set it beside her on the swing. “What we done with Jenny was law,” she quoted, low-voiced.

Georgia could hear her own strained breathing. The answers to the questions she wanted to ask had already come through Jenny's few gestures and by the distant penciled injunction. She felt she already knew the answers, but had to pose the questions that would precede them in any case. “Jenny? What was it?”

Abruptly, disconcertingly, Jenny laughed. “It was their precinct, their holy little … well, wasn't it?”

“No, I mean what happened?”

And as abruptly the laughter stopped.

“My dear ridiculous Georgia, please. What do you want from me? It was a lifetime ago.”

“But then what are those other names?”

“Jesus,” she said, and her eyes ran the length of the rain gutter. “They all just, they all—”

Somewhere down the block two dogs began barking.

“Cutts, he?”

Jenny's lips closed into a fine, straight line.

“Desmond too?”

“No, not Desmond.”

Softly the rain began to report across the roof of the veranda, and in the grass and trees surrounding the house. Jenny watched Georgia weep, drily.

Now I always liked her, always will. Way she helped me clear Mama's medicines, useless now without a patient, gather them up into a brown grocery sack, seal it with masking tape, and bury it under other garbage in the tin can out in the alley so the neighborhood children couldn't rummage it up. Way she set to washing the dishes, which I dried, both of us dressed in our mourning blacks, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Way she had come over and held me in her arms, rocking gently, as the porch swing creaked. The way she let me take her by the hand and lead her out into the steady, light rain, around the side of the house, where the hollyhocks fell over themselves in their own abundance, into the kitchen through the back door. It was not a time to run into Cutts, was it, what with both of us in tears and him in his rage at not finding it? And the way Georgia would never ask me whether it was I who sent the letter. And also I felt assured that she would after all go back home with Cutts, because she hoped that in the passage of time I had in fact forgiven him, and how she could feel this was true because it was I who insisted I had forgiven him.

But how the matter now would never really come to rest inside her. How it would gnaw at her and in the oddest moments come up, like a nausea, outrageous, insuppressible. Cutts would never again be able to run his hands over her, push himself inside her in quite the same way as he had in times past. That was over now. And as for Georgia, I was certain she surely preferred knowing this truth about him. She will go on home to Maryland with him and they will lie down at night in their warm bed after their long journey, but it won't be Georgia asleep beside him. Not truly Georgia.

She is standing next to me before the sink. Her long, delicate hands are pushing the sponge around the stained circle of a plate, as she stares hard into the soapy water. A real sister, the one I never had.

All the while, the noise Cutts makes upstairs is growing more and more violent. His cursing filters down like a shower in a nightmare where the rain soaks its victim though it never actually gets him wet—however drenched in his own sweat he may be on awakening in his twisted bedclothes. Poor pathetic Cutts, the way he is going on up there, looking and looking. Let him break every stick of furniture, every memento, every bit of family history in that badly lit, hysterical attic.

Let him shout. Let him grind his teeth.

AMAZING GRACE

Whereas I was blind, now I see
.

—John 9:25

T
HE MIRACLE THAT RESTORED
my sight, one winter morning, was a miracle that led to many desperate others. Who could have foreseen the catastrophes that followed this moment I had dreamed of for over a decade? The only blessing that accompanied the sudden, unexpected reversal of my blindness was this: I was alone when it happened. My wife was away shopping; the two children were out. Myself, I was in my humble study, listening to an old recording of Sviatoslav Richter playing Schubert's Sonata in G Major. Thanks to Sarah, a fire crackled in the wood-burning stove, making my sanctum warm and dry—the room where I worked was an uninsulated extension added to the house in the months after my accident. A pot of nice fragrant cinnamon tea was on my desk, along with my braille Bible, some reference books also in braille, and my computer loaded with voice-synthesizing software I used to draft the many motivational speeches I gave touring the country. It has always struck me as ironic, although naturally I never mentioned it in my uplifting talks, that I made a far better living after the accident than when I was among the sighted. No one would have paid a plugged nickel to hear me speak before tragedy struck me down. Now I filled rented auditoriums and hotel convention halls, and my talks on surviving personal crises were well received wherever I went. Not that my philosophy about adversity management was more informed or refined than the next survivor's—not a vain bone in
this
body—it's just my story had all the necessary elements. The perfect life, the great disabling affliction, the season of despair, the awakening of hope, and the long road of spiritual renewal that rewards the steadfast pilgrim with a life far richer than what seemed so perfect before. Sarah, I must say, deftly supervised this unanticipated chautauqua career of mine, from bookings to billings, and oversaw with the help of our dedicated manager every detail of our burgeoning mission. And with seldom—no, never—a complaint. She was nothing less than a stoic saint, an altruistic martyr, with just enough savvy to hold our shattered lives together, not only keeping her eye on our spiritual needs, but making sure there was always bread on the table.

One reason I have been so successful on the circuit is that I believed every word I said, or at least most every word. To the sort of individual who attends such seminars, unwavering personal conviction on the part of the speaker is nine-tenths the victory. I have often felt that if I held up an egg in the palm of my hand and proclaimed with firm faith that it was not an egg, but a flower or a shoe, say, the right audience of seekers would cry out in agreement,
So it is!
With conviction and what might be called a winning idiosyncrasy in the presenter—in my case, the blindness—one can bring people around to anything. That I never used my powers of persuasion to ends other than kindly inspiration, positive role modeling, carrying the simple message of hope to souls willing to listen, pleases me. The temptation to deceive was always there, somehow, but it was a human weakness never acted upon. Not that I'd have known what to deceive my acolytes about, nor that I ever made the logical next step to consider the possibility that some of them entertained deceptive thoughts regarding me. No one, I convinced myself, would want to victimize this victim. Hadn't I suffered enough? The answer was, I had not even begun my real suffering.

Not born blind, indeed I had twenty-twenty vision for thirty years. A robust, confident young man, I met my Sarah at a church bazaar—we were always active members at St. Francis Episcopal—and it was love at first sight. Her thick auburn hair drifting in gentle waves down the back of her white dress, her quick blue eyes, the exquisite mole above her lip, the warm hands that shook mine when we were introduced, her smile as sunny as dawn. How many times since my world fell into shadow have I conjured up the visual memory of that day. After a succinct courtship, we married and started a family. Rebecca was born first, and then the twins, Emma and Luke. Emma survived only a few weeks, poor little bird. My grief over the loss was so great that to this day I indulge in fantasizing about her, what her interests would have been, how her voice might have sounded. I would like to think she'd have turned out a trustworthy Milton's daughter. In my mind's eye, I always pictured her as a young Sarah, pliant as a willow and sturdy as an oak, along those lines. But we all know how ingenious imagination can be, how it sometimes finds a shining berth in the rankest mound of dung.

Time passed, our young family thrived. My job at the utilities company was going well enough; the benefits were good and hours such that I could spend quality time with my children. I worked the graveyard shift at the local power plant as a maintenance technician troubleshooting outages, servicing customer emergencies, getting people back on line when an ice storm or high wind brought down wires or blew out a transformer. In the Northeast, where we live just a mile from my own childhood home, our crew had more to do during the night than one might imagine. Always something going wrong, always some problem to remedy. I very much enjoyed the challenge, as I've told my rapt audiences, and learned a lot meeting people from all walks of life under trying circumstances. So long as I live, I will never forget the courage of the little girl—her name was Belinda, if I'm not mistaken—who, during a severe nor'easter that crippled not just Gloucester but the whole corridor from the Carolinas up to Maine, offered her mommy her teddy bear to feed to the flames in the fireplace that heated their home while our crew worked through the night to restore power. A bunch of us later pooled some cash together to buy her a new bear, bigger and fuzzier than the one she sacrificed. Duress brings out the best in us—so I often advised my Ramada listeners. In a file somewhere there is a newspaper clipping with a photograph of Belinda surrounded by her benefactors and our stuffed bear. Sarah had it up on the refrigerator for months. She thought it was a flattering shot. I must have looked pleased with myself, because in those days I was. Life was a river awash with proverbial milk and honey.

A stifling, muggy midsummer night changed all that. I wasn't even supposed to work the shift, but a massive brownout across our regional grid forced the company to call upon every available hand. My memory of that night is selective at best. I whispered good-bye to Sarah, kissed the children where they lay asleep in their bedrooms. The streets were eerily dim. Thick, steamy amber haze hung in the wilted trees. Cicadas had burrowed up from the earth to mate that year—dogday locusts, we called them—and were lustily clicking and buzzing away outside the open windows of our utility van, their boisterous droning sounding like bandsaws underwater. We were hard at work on a central routing transformer, using the headlights of the van to see, when I must have made the simplest error, crossing two clusters of wire in such a way that I sparked a high-voltage explosion. Knocked unconscious, I have no recollection of what happened in the hours that followed. My first perceptions had only to do with a searing, bludgeoning pain in my neck and around the base of my hot skull. My face was burned and my eyes felt as if they were molten.

Recuperation swallowed up days and weeks of time, all of which remains vague even now. What stands out from the miasma of my lengthy recovery was the ophthalmologist's concern that the many lesions on the corneas of both eyes were healing, as he'd expected them to, but my vision still hadn't returned. Yet one should have resulted in the other. I could make out uneasy shapes at a distance of a foot or so in front of me, but had no strong sense of day or night, of whether the lights were on or off. The doctors performed tests to determine ocular blood flow, ran an MRI against the possibility of brain damage, but found nothing that would explain the blindness. My twenty-twenty vision was now twenty-four hundred at best and when I was released from the hospital my condition was not only unimproved, but worsening. They continued to chart my progress but there wasn't much more that could be done medically.

Summer faded into fall. The once-steady stream of colleagues and friends who dropped in to visit, read me the Bible, listen to music with me dwindled. I couldn't in fairness expect otherwise. Sarah's considerate idea of building an extension onto the house, thus to spare me the trouble and danger of walking up and down stairs I couldn't see, kept me busy for a while. Not that I was able to help. But my wife and the contractor did consult with me about construction specs. Ever the clever one in our family, Sarah suggested we might save money by forgoing windows in my modest wing—they could be added later, when and if my sight returned—and used the balance of the home improvement loan to carpet the whole house. I thought it an extravagance, but she insisted it would cushion any falls I happened to take. Although my equilibrium hadn't been a problem, I commended her ingenuity.