I Trust You
A Family Story
By
Barry Eysman
I see your power now. I wish I could have been wiser. I am alone. The house screams quiet. I have never heard a louder, more enervating sound. The nights are cooler. We move into October. And I have buried you. In doing so, I have tried to bury myself. I stand at the old manse windows and look out on Orleans. I sip wine. Too young and too unwise. Days I stay in bed, sleepless. Nights I come to look out the window on young stars; at least they seem young, compared to me in my what? year.
The croakers are in full song out there, for it is the season for them. Though I don't hear them. The gun blast too close to my ears have deafened me. I still hear your scream however. Sometimes I put my hands to my ears till I press so hard and so tight, little rivulets of blood trickle out of my ears, which are useless appendages now. As am I. I meant to kill you only a little.
I finish my wine and reach for the decanter to pour more, in this house, once grand, once the center place in the summer season of parties, for in this place of white and boards and glass and tile fireplace and flooring, there used not to be shadows that had razor sharp edges in them to cut and dismember everything but the screams of you as I put my finger on the trigger—as I put my finger on the trigger—as I—
We used to hide in the shadows in this, your father's house, and steal kisses from each other, then give them back again. Oh how we ran when we were children and how we held hands and said the words to each other that are now like knives in my stomach, peeling it apart bit by bit. And we would, late night, when your father, such a major domo, was finally asleep, half drugged with his cherry liqueur, lie on the summer grass under the canopy of anything is possible and our arms held and would never let go, and dear heart, Appomattox came and went and you were buried under the cold heartless Autumn ground, as your father had died before you, for then we were given his will.
I inherited the manse, and I became bone and grue, because those stairs were once blue and deep and full of our runnings up and down them, chasing as we played cat's catch as catch can, and we dazzled each other by touching feathers and boas and dress up and crystal vases come to the scene of the tea party and hands were touching for the feathered finger tips, there of mutual, there of lips touch lips for the first time. And we danced in the ballroom. The one that is shuttered now. The one that is filled with window glass smashed and wall paper of flowers deflowered. For love comes not like ours, for long. Love comes with shattered teeth, far too soon.
And porcelain dolls, there for the season that boys would trade their little treasures for one kiss of the girl in the world who was better than anyone else could ever be, the sprite girl, the girl of bright red hair and smooth pale ochre skin, the girl of books and words spoken in crystal bells that made holidays whenever she was around. Here she comes again, I look behind me in the candle glow and the spume of smoke and I see the shivers of her grand major domo holding her shoulders as he told me for the last time to get out. As we laughed and paid no attention, making him a fool. How was I to know that soon she would be making a fool out of me over and over, with me taking it till I thought I would go mad. Till indeed I did go mad.
In those years though. She all pleading eyes. She all pleading mouth and tears and shining hair in the lustrous sunlight steaming through the large windows in the parlour that had not seen her mother in all of these years, there too, the three of them, under the grass, and I the last of the monsters. I the depilatory agent that flensed them from this house that I meant to marry my sweet Mary Jane in someday riches of livery; in a coach drawn by finely regal horses away from here for a honeymoon in Orleans, to the street life I had from my heart recalled in those college days when the patroons were further away and the red lights were my life supporting drinks and the cozy heavy arms and the fleshy legs under the nightgowns and the sneezy rooms and the smelly beds, for this was my secret from my dear Mary Jane. To give Mary Jane a little surprise. A mystery solved. When she became a fishwife to me.
A composite of willful wild flowers. A composite of stern dialogue that would retain its option of never bending once that steel girdle is strapped on and will never be cut loose from. Here the actuality. Here the motive that would bite faster and deeper than the hardest most painful viper would. I in my tattered regalia. I in my waiting to still find in all those shadows now turned most jagged, something—something redeemed. Something that would have made me pick that old bastard's cane of gold tipped lion head and break it over his goddam skull. Put an end to the horror. But the horror was not he, too late to find out. The horror was the jaws of love.
I am drunk now. It is all I have left. Here in this cool turning to cold night. I wish to travel up the Mississippi. I wish to be Huck Finn. I wish to never have known love. I wish I had stayed with the mulatto women who tickled my fancy and who bobbed my genitalia with orchards and we had fine gilt laughs as the night closed its dark evil fist around us and protected us.
I whittled them, the master, and his daughter. I fancied once becoming a sculptor of renown who would be mobbed by ladies wearing the same scent cachet that was worn by my bird boned delicate as china wear lady love. Miss Gardenia Behind the Left Ear. Miss Red Crush Velvet dress. Miss Tender Ministrations. Miss Boa Constrictor who knew from the first as I walked into the miasma of giant oak trees and the tardy gait of slowness that is the royal crown of the Deep South. Flowing like molasses and me with the brain I had considered fast and clever. Except in the Delphic glades of her little body paths that I walked my hand and lips in and discovered always and forever-new enchantments.
That Major Domo did not approve, that Major Domo, forefend indeed, her little friend from coming over and playing dress-up—he and I were defilers of the first order, though he never figured it out, he with his white goatee and his whiskers and thick gray hair, all with his bound to be a cultured gentleman clothing, as though the weal of whiskey baron would detain our dancing and the surprises of us, for while he lay in bed dying, we made the ghost sounds, through the rafters of this old house. We made the floor creaks. We made the succor that was his dead wife trying to find him, between the laughter we squelched with our hands to mouths.
Our own and each other's. He knew it was a game, I thought, as I lit another cheroot with my—no—his—gold light, as I breathed in smoke so deeply that none came out of my lungs. He knew his daughter was betraying him in this mockery. Gone over to the devil's side. Hi. The thing that killed him was his daughter, the thing I killed was his daughter, after we both killed him, and now both are killing me by inches, for I am deaf and cannot hear the ghostly voices of them both, though perhaps there are three, which does not sustain me, the not being able to hear. For I see their carbuncle shadows chase along the corridors, playing in pitch, night horrors—you have not lived till you've seen shadows of nothing, moving on their own- that defy me to leave, to find a maroon hand to take my genitalia in its grasp and remind me that beyond the trickery and the mottled molded mothed clothing I am still a man, lost in the years, decades?, lost in timeliness and timelessness. Cut to a flavor of peach brandy that the old man served with his fat worm pale hands to the both of us when she and I were children and he found us amusing pets, and amusing toys.
As he spoke to us so condescendingly. As he spoke that night, years later, in private to me, little knowing I had opened your doorway first time only hours before.
"Do you know," he said, leaning back in his stuffed leather chair at his desk, me on the opposite side of it, feeling deliciously wicked and undeliciously scared, "why she always keeps the toy Panda with her?" And then he used the spittoon, the activity of which, I shall have to hand it to the old fellow; he did, as he did everything else, with grace. I could only shake my head no. He was a large man and I was not. He scared me. But I loved his daughter and knew he was about to tell me, now that she and I were of marrying age, now that he knew he could only put us closer in each other's arms by trying to separate us and make our lives all but immobile on an eternal love or love made impossible seat. So…
We called him when he was on his deathbed, coughing out his lungs, the stench of spotted yellow dying spread through the mansion, thus starting the roots of the decay it has more than come to now. We called in high pitched voices, guessing how his dead wife might sound come back to find him, to kill him, to rattle her chains till he thought he would go mad with fright, as he twisted and turned in his wet swamp sheets and cried out to the God above in which he implacably did not believe. And we were having the times of our lives, as I remembered what the old buzzard said to me that night when he asked about his daughter's stuffed toy.
We had given him not one ounce of peace in our ghostly nights and days. We flitted voices like carved nails aimed at his flesh outside his rococo doorway and we were so sublime. Sometimes we were sweet and all is forgiven my love, sometimes we were you poisoned my peach brandy my love and I shall show you my skeleton rotting in the ground that will soon be rotting in your bed as you toss and turn as you sweat and urinate as you feel the bones of the woman who gave up everything for you. It was of course, for Mary Jane, all wild guessing. For she had died years before and he would not even tell his daughter of her, destroyed every tintype of her, destroyed every letter she had ever written him. But in his state of delirium he needed not facts, not specificities, but the feeling deep in his guilty gut that he had indeed killed her. That he had or had not, they both took to the grave with them. Mary Jane knows. And I know the three of them whisper to me. Well, old man, did your wife kill you as well?
I hear the shadows of their grave clothed voices gray and torn and smelling of earth deep down round me as the shadows are so razor sharp sometimes I spend the night turning and ducking and dodging best I can, from them so they won't cut all the blood alcohol out of me, as I look now at the carved dolls of father and daughter. As I hold the wood in my hands. I dare not hold them for long or touch their edges, for as I put them down on the hand carved mahogany table beside my straight wood black chair, as I put my hand to my cravat, in an unconscious attempt to loosen it or take it off, and remind myself I cannot. For I have to dress formally for the spirits that will take me out of this large seedy moldy moody beyond words prison. I smell the Union Jack wherever I turn and spread my gun to my hands sometimes as I wait by the broken chopped wood front door for the soldiers to return, for the War to start over again.
"The Panda," Major Domo, did he have a real name? Was he actually a Major? No memories. Except oh how he howled when we ghosts two tormented him in one. "The Panda was a gift from Mary Jane's mother to her daughter on Mary's second Christmas."
He sighed a huge sigh. His cobalt hard as ice eyes softened a bit as he looked to the tunnel of the past. "This was a house of gaiety," he told me, or told himself, for as far as he was concerned, I did not exist, I was merely eavesdropping, secretly, as in reverse to the ghost of his future death. "This was a house of parties and merriment." He almost thought about smiling, but then let it go.
"When Ruth died, something in me withered on the vine," he coughed then and was silent for a time as he lit another cheroot. Then he leaned over and took something from his silver and gray vest pocket and tossed it on the desk to me. I picked it up. A tiny toy spade. My fingers toyed with it, then pushed it back to him. And then he began. She, younger. He, already in his fifties when they married. She, eager to experience "life." He eager to retire and have a warm beautiful young woman of a wife to greet with him the receptions of the landed gentry at the summer cotillion. She, eager for—
And she left him. Now he showed me the one picture of her, not knowing, not guessing, and the devil in me was stilled, was ashamed, was cowed, at the same moment I became the devil in part, the one he had thought wrongly I always was, and I loved Mary Jane all the more, I wanted my arms round her, but the tiny little salamander was planted in my heart—which made itself known the first time to me as the understanding, the undermining entered into what would hurt me forever more, for Mary Jane turned to me after we had ghosted her father enough and said toss it in.
I looked at her. She nodded her eyes bright with mad do what I say as the confining Southern Belle girdle was at its tightest, at its strongest, as its most malevolent, so I rushed open the old man's bedroom door, to the sound of his hacking and pleading for his ghost wife to leave him o please God alone, and to the sound of my thudding fearful heart, I tossed in the little carving of a woman, any woman, no need to try to guess what she had looked like, his wife, and he screamed and screamed.
As I slammed shut the door and knew sweatily I had made a direct hit. When however you look at it another way, she killed us all. The lady of the house, forever absent. When I was still so innocent, you see, my old man, my—be polite—my father in our own less than splendid digs on the very far wrong side of the tracks, came home drunk as usual to our tar paper sharecropper's shack and grabbed my by the arm, saying it's time for you young son to experience the joys of the female variety. And dragged me, most unwilling, for all I could think of then, before he injected me with the vice I was to become so very much accustomed, to the Silver Spade. A supper club. Droll. And thence up the stairs of the old antebellum house to the room of Major Domo's wife. And thus I was initiated. And thus I picked up a certain—virulent—disease. The lady in the picture the old bastard showed me had given me a disease I knew. There had been no one else.
Funny, all those years, she had been a lady of sport in Orleans, five miles hence from this manse. Oh Mary Jane instructed me in how to be her slave, her toy, from the interior make up of her oh so sainted mother, Our Lady of Lourdes, in the girl's eyes—the Madonna in other words. While I like to think I gave to Mary Jane that first night of intercourse the disease her mother had given me. While I like to think Good Lady Miss God's Mother had one last rendezvous with her husband and gifted him as well. I could not help but notice the lesions on his hands and on his neck. The same ones I had.
I have skin peeling off me now. I am almost blind. I am deaf. I am old for ever more. I have sickness that invades my bowels. When I use the chamber pot, more blood comes out than anything else. So I gave it to whores all those years as well. I can walk only with great pain. My scrotum is useless. My member is rotting. I use the Major's cane with its gold lion's head, when I move about. I am asweat constantly. I have fevers on fevers.
I killed Mary Jane with the shotgun after the old tyrant was laid away hopefully in part by me having laid away with his smelly and gummed haired wife of the soft doughy breasts and the body hair I try not to think of. I wanted to see Mary Jane of the quick tongue that had grown out of her soft jasmine scented girl's voice that had bewitched me, start breaking out in the lesions grow like clumps of sickly grotesque cotton that my old man and I planted and picked in back breaking labor.
And the Panda? Gold inside, as I had thought. He had hollowed the childhood toy of his daughter and put gold bars inside. The ones on the table with the little woodcarvings of father and child. I lived and lived some more. I put the carving of the wife whore in the fireplace and stoked it out of existence after the father and daughter had died. After I had blown her very head off and into bloody mush that final night of her shrew mouth and her orders, always orders, just like her father she had turned into. I can't live much longer. The cankers are getting worse in my mouth. My tongue has begun swelling up and hurts terribly. I suppose it will swell so much, should I live longer, that I won't be able to either eat, or especially drink, and then what will I do?
I push myself deeper in the chair. I wait for morning. I smile though it hurts my face at the last words Mary Jane heard before I murdered her, the very last words before she left this planet and echoing for her hopefully in Hell for eternity. I presume I will soon know that for a fact if my hearing is restored there.
The words were:
"Your strumpet mother gave me the disease. And I, my magnolia behind the left ear loveliness, have given it to you. Consider this a mercy killing."
Her mouth was in the shocked middle of making an O of horror, when head was blown apart, and the bottom jaw fell on the floor at my feet before it could complete its part of the endeavour.