Dear Dr. Lecter
Disclaimer: I do not own Dr. Lecter, Thomas Harris does but I would love to sit, late into the evening, in a Mississippi cotton field and watch Mr. Harris spin Dr. Lecter's web.
Hannibal Lecter opened the tall French doors inwards, inviting the smell of the warm rocks and salt air into his bedroom. He stepped onto the patio and gracefully took a seat in the sun- warmed, wrought iron patio chair. A perfectly iced, minted tea sat in a tall crystal tumbler on the table at his right elbow and a small plate of fresh fruit enticed him from the left of the place setting. A dark green spinach and pine nut salad sat in the middle. The crystal and silver sparkled in the French sunlight. The visual effect rivaled the gastronomic promise.
Ignoring the food for a moment, he slid the salad platter towards the center of the table and carefully drew an envelope from the pocket of his Italian silk shirt. The address was Clarisse Starlings home address in Virginia with the name Hannah in the upper left hand corner. The letter had been delivered to an old post office box in Nevada then had been forwarded to at least six more post offices around the world until the message in the agony column of the International Herald – Tribune last Sunday morning addressed to A. A. Aaron from Hannah had caught his eye and allowed him to intercept it before it left Cannes for a jump to China. He was mildly concerned that it was a warning of some nature and at the same time hopeful that it was a message of deliverance. She was the only one who would ever be able to deliver his soul from hell and his heart from worse.
The content proved to be two separate epistles. The first was a small, soft ivory colored card with an elegant embossed "S" on the outside. The second was two bright yellow sheets from a legal pad. The yellow sheets were covered in crude, rustic script. Hannibal opened the embossed note first. It was, as he had surmised, a note from Clarisse. It simply said that the other note was very important and how she regretted resorting to the agony column but she had promised to do all that she could to see the yellow sheets with the crude writing delivered to him. She had signed the note with an elegant "C". Dr. Lecter held the note close to his nose and inhaled. Her scent was there but it was faint and literally overpowered by the reeking smell of bacon grease that permeated the yellow sheets of paper. Annoyed, but curious Dr. Lecter spread the sheets in front of him and anchored them against the Mediterranean breeze with a solid silver butter knife. Taking up the fresh fruit, at the risk of being distracted from its vibrancy by the letter, he placed a piece of the fresh peach on his tongue and began to read.
Dear Dr. Lecter,
I'm sure you weren't expecting to hear from somebody like me. I ain't ever even been out of these hills in my life but I wanted to find some way to thank you and tell you how much you changed my life and the life of my boys. That sweet Miss Starling of the FBI saw how much this means to me and she said she would try to find some way to get this thank you letter to you.
See, I was married to Donnie Barber for just a little over six years. You might not remember him but folks say that it was you put a crossbow quarrel though that thick skull and stupid cap of his last fall. He was young and good looking when I married him. He had just joined the Air Force and was leaving to go to Colorado for his training. He was going to be a jet pilot. He promised that if I married him he would get settled and send back for me, that the Air Force liked their pilots to be married men. I was dumb and ugly, and it was really hard to believe he actually wanted to marry me but since Daddy drank a lot and liked to smack me and Momma around when we got on his nerves, I just naturally thought it would be a great thing to get hitched and move off to Colorado. I couldn't wait to see those big mountains and smell air that didn't stink of coal.
The honeymoon was awful. He took me up to Fort Royal to the Hillcrest Motel. There weren't nothing soft or loving about that night. I bled for a week after he was gone then, four weeks latter, I found out I was carrying little Donnie. I hadn't heard nothing from him since he had left and my Daddy was having a fit. Yelling that I was just a tramp that I had got myself knocked up by some piece of trash and was using Donnie's good name to try and hide my shame. I called the Air Force recruiter in Richmond, just to see if they could find him and tell me if he was o.k. I couldn't hardly wait to tell him the wonderful news. The Sergeant promised to try and find him for me.
It took a couple of more weeks before I got a phone call from him. The Air Force hadn't sent him to Colorado, he'd been sent to Florida and they were training him to fix airplane engines. He was real upset because they had told him that he wasn't hardly smart enough to fly a plane and all he had ever wanted to do was fly jet planes and blow up things. Everything I said about it made him madder. He was yelling so hard my Daddy took the phone away and started yelling back. After awhile he quit yelling and from how he was looking me I knew I had done something real bad.
When Daddy hung up the phone he took off his wide, black belt and he started beating me with it, yelling that I had no right to mess up a good, patriotic man's future by letting myself get pregnant. He was yelling that Donnie could have been a pilot if I hadn't gotten myself pregnant. I never even tried to explain as how the Air Force didn't know I was pregnant.
After a little while Momma put on her thick coat so that the belt wouldn't hurt so bad and scooted me out the back door and down the holler to Granny White's house. It was the one place Daddy wouldn't come, fur it was haunted and Granny White kept a double barrel shot-gun by her side all the time. She and Momma talked awhile and they decided that I would stay with her until the baby was born. Momma promised that she would come fetch me when Donnie called back or bring me a letter if he wrote, but he did neither.
I stayed with Granny the whole time. I never heard another word from Donnie; it was like nothing had ever happened. I used to think I had just dreamed it all up but then Little Donnie would move around or turn over and I knew that it had happened but I had no idea what was going to happen.
Well, it didn't take long to figure that one out when my water broke in the middle of the night. Granny called Sheriff Dumas but his boys were out chasing some truck thief so he sent that nice Game Warden Mr. Wilburn Moody, to take me to the hospital. We almost made it but the little one was in a hurry so poor Mr. Moody had to deliver him in the back of the Game Wardens pick up, fourteen miles from the hospital. You got to believe that I have had plenty of opportunities over the years to regret that misfortune.
Little Donnie had a hole in his heart that wouldn't close right off so I called the Sergeant in Richmond one more time to tell him that the baby was here but that it was sick and the Doctors thought it might die. Donnie sent a money order for fifty dollars to open the grave and a note that said to name the baby Donnie Leo Barber Jr. and that he'd call soon.
Little Donnie got better and Donnie never called. By the time the baby was two years old we were calling him JR, you know like on that "Who shot JR?" TV show. He grew like a weed. Seems like everyday he was longer, then taller. He never crawled or walked; he just stood up one day and started running. I use to love to watch him run across the pasture. He had a head of sandy blonde curls and they would just roll and sway in the wind like ropes of ripe wheat. He had bright blue eyes and dimples so deep you could take a bath in them. He would play in the rain as long as I would let him. He would hold his head back and let the rain roll down his face. Every once in awhile a rain drop would roll down his collar and tickle his neck. He would scrunch his neck down into the collar of his shirt and just laugh out loud. He was the most loving child I had ever seen. He wouldn't go near my Daddy and one day Daddy said it was because I had made a girl out of him with his long hair and his silly games. Daddy said that if'n I wasn't careful it wouldn't be long before the other boys started using him like a girl. I'm very sorry to say that that was the only day in my life that I actually disrespected my parents but I swung as hard as I could and I broke my own Daddy's nose. I really don't know which of us was more surprised but Momma had us out the door and down the holler between heartbeats.
Daddy purt near beat the life out of her for that. She didn't ever see good out of her right eye after that night.
JR was four and a half when Donnie came walking back up the road to Daddy's house. Donnie had been discharged from the Air Force for almost a year. He had traveled down to some island called Haiti and stayed there with some friends for almost the whole time, to do some business he said. Daddy told him I was dead and the boy had been sent to the orphanage but Momma thought it would be better if he knew the truth so she snuck out to the side of the house and told Donnie where I was. Donnie's happy homecoming was paid for with my Momma's blood. Daddy said she fell down the well and drowned. That he had drank a little much celebrating the fact that an American hero had come home and that he had never heard her holler or splash or anything. The Doctor tried to tell the Sheriff that there was bruises around Mommas neck that looked like hand prints but Donnie told everybody that Daddy had been with him almost all night, to well after dawn and they figured Momma must have died about eight o'clock that evening. Nobody wanted to call him a liar, he was a solider just back from service and soldiers had a Code of Honor that wouldn't let them lie. Sheriff Dumas never believed my Daddy but there was nothing he could do but hunker down and wait.
Donnie didn't think much of JR. We left him with Granny for a second honeymoon up in
Fort Royal. That was awful. It didn't hurt as much the second time but that just made Donnie mad. He said I must'a been sleeping with ever man in Summitt county to be all stretched out like that. I tried to explain that JR hadn't been born in the hospital that Warden Moody had had to deliver him in the back of the truck, on the side of the road. Donnie just went wild that some other fella had seen my privates and he started hitting me with his fist until I was bleeding from my nose and ears. My bottom lip was busted plum in two. Poor old thing never healed up right so my whole mouth kinda puckers over to the right side now. After a little while he got all worked up again and started kissin and rubbin on me. That's when I understood that it was no good for him unless it hurt me. I started to whimper a little about my lip and he caught it up and bit it. He called it a love bite. After that I began to whimper and plead that he was hurting me. It didn't take him long, he got so worked up that he was finished in five minutes. I went to sleep.
Little Emmitt was borned a little over a year after Donnie came back. He moved us into an old, run down trailer up at Cameron. It was in a trailer park called the Trail's End trailer park. There were lots of nights I was pretty sure it was going to be the end of my Trail. The night I came home from having Emmitt Donnie needed some lovin. Tore out every one of the stitches then told the Doctor in the emergency room that I had taken Spanish Fly and done it to myself with the straight shift on his Camero. Nobody believed that stupid old lie but there wasn't a whole lot I could do. If I opened my mouth he'd have killed me and my boys would have been left to deal with him by themselves. Sheriff Dumas was called in and I heard him tell Donnie that he knew what he was doing and that it was just a matter of time until the law caught up with him. Donnie just laughed right in his face and told him it would take a smarter man than him to catch him at anything.
Donnie went to drinking pretty hard and pretty regular. He'd work at a job for one or two days then he'd call in sick for five or six days until they fired him then I'd have to listen about how wrong he'd been done and how sorry it was to fire a sick man. I worked as much as I could but he didn't like me waiting tables because all the men played with my backside or looked at me like they wanted to eat me. I couldn't work as a cahier because he would come in and take money out of my cash drawer to buy his beer. After my tray would come up short and I would be fired I'd have to listen to how nobody trusted me because I was such a slut I tried to have sex with the Game Warden in the back of his official pick-up on the way to the hospital to have JR and that was why he had a hole in his heart.
The very saddest part of Donnie coming home was what it did to JR. From the very first Donnie would wrestle with him until he drew blood, or put a big old bruise on the boy. He claimed that that was how Daddy's turned their sissy boys into real men. I hated it, I hated every minute of it but I thought that one day JR would fight back and Donnie would leave him alone. Boy was I wrong. Emmitt was almost a year old the night Donnie won the deer lease over at old 's place. The Game Warden had caught him poaching a couple of years before and he had lost his hunting license. The joke of all of this was that Donnie hated venison. He had a deal with some fancy restaurant up in Richmond that would pay him a couple of hundred dollars for the tenderloins. Donnie didn't eat the meat he just liked to see things hurt and killed. He told me one time that a deer will grunt just like a man that had been stabbed when you shoot them with an arrow. He would spend hours rubbing those awful arrows then drag me off to the bedroom and lock the door. I learned real quick to grunt like a deer that had been shot with an arrow when he was in that mood.
The morning before he left to set up his stand Donnie had laid all of his arrows out on the coffee table to wipe them down one last time before he put them in their case. JR came by and picked one up so that he could see the razors that ran cross wise of them. Quick as a rattlesnake Donnie snatched the arrow and rammed the head of it through JR's hand. He snatched it back out just as quick and it made a dead sucking noise. He leaned down real close to JR's poor little ole face and told him to never touch anything that was his again. JR nodded a little and Donnie screamed at him to answer him. JR managed a weak little yes sir when Emmitt snuck up behind him and clamped down on the inside of Donnie's left thigh. I don't know if his little baby teeth even broke skin but he managed to make Donnie as crazy as I've ever seen him. He snatched Emmitt up by the galluses of his overalls and slung him against the wall. I heard something pop and saw Emmitt's left arm go limp. I ran between them in time to take Donnie's boot in my left ribs. If I hadn't made it in time them steel toed boots would have got Emmitt right in his little head. Donnie snatched me up by a hand full of hair and held me against the wall by one of them big old hand around my neck. It didn't matter that I couldn't catch my breath, my hearing was almost gone and I could feel myself floating away. I tried to struggle but he just pushed harder. I could feel my face swelling up and turning color.
Then he just dropped me, told me I wasn't good enough to kill, and gathered his stuff to leave for the woods. You don't know how hard I prayed that he wouldn't come back. I prayed that the Game Warden would catch him and put him in jail or make him leave or something...anything as long as he was gone.
Well, he was gone, just a little while later. Gone to never come back or hurt us again. JR's hand is well. There was damage done for permanent but turn's out as he's left handed he don't pay much attention to it. I watched him teach Emmitt how to stand in the rain and play with the rain drops the other day. It was the first time I've heard his sweet laugh in a long time. It was Emmitt's collar bone that broke that day but he's fit as a fiddle now, runs everywhere after his big brother. Them two is thick as thieves. Mr. Moody helped me find a better place to live and a real good job at the paper mill. My boys won't be rich but because of you they won't have to suffer any more. I can go to sleep at night knowing that there are people out there that can and do make things right for the rest of us.
Thank you Dr. Lecter,
Tracy Lou Barber
P.S. Miss Starling sure is a nice lady and I really do think she may like you a little bit.
Dr. Lecter set the neglected fruit plate to one side. He thought for just a second, calling up the memory of the repugnant young man at the Mid-Atlantic Gun and Knife Show and smiled faintly.
"Glad to be of service my dear" he whispered into the breeze. Next time he visited Clarisse he would have to see how Tracy Lou Barber's father was getting along.