One of Us Read online

  “She’s terrified of me,” he whispers proudly in my ear.

  We arrive at his truck, but before he gets in he smiles back and forth between Rafe and me.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me about Simon Husk?” he says suddenly.

  “How the hell do you know about that already?” Rafe asks.

  “Nora was on the scene right away and she called me. You know how the NONS love me.”

  “She called you here?”

  “She called Birdie and Birdie called Betty and Betty and I had run into each other earlier at the Kwik Shop and I told her I was headed out here. Told her I need a new couch. Aren’t you going to ask me if I think the Nellies murdered him for selling the gallows back to Dawes?” he says ominously.

  He has the vaguest touch of a brogue and speaks with the cadence of an Irishman, but this lilting quality to his speech doesn’t come from Ireland. It comes from growing up in a closed-off American community of Irish immigrants.

  Tommy’s never set foot in Ireland, although he’s always talked about going, and I’ve offered more than once to take him. I can’t imagine anyone more Irish than him, but I know if he ever finally made it over there he’d be an obvious American.

  It’s the same problem his ancestors faced when they first came here. They weren’t Irish anymore, but they weren’t American yet. They were neither, and they were both. They were Irishmen living inside an American skin; they were Americans living inside an Irish head.

  They were forced to carve out a new identity and a new culture for themselves here in the hills of Pennsylvania. Ireland had no place for them. America didn’t want them. The mines became their country and the Nellies became their justice system.

  “There was no murder,” Rafe assures him. “And the Nellies had nothing to do with it.”

  “Right, right,” Tommy says with a wink. “Move along, folks. There’s nothing to see here.”

  I tell Rafe I’ll take a rain check on the beer. We say our good-byes and I get into the truck with Tommy.

  I know it’s useless for me to ask him to let me drive, so I sit back and brace myself in the passenger side of his truck as he careens down the middle of steep, twisting roads, not seeming to care at all if another vehicle whips toward us from the opposite direction.

  Most people become cautious as they grow older, but age has made Tommy even more reckless. Instead of viewing the remainder of his life as something he should protect and savor, he sees it as something left over that he needs to gulp down before someone else gets their hands on it.

  “Do you mind if we go to the Bi-Lo? I don’t have anything to make for dinner tonight.”

  “It’s Bi-Lo, Tommy. Not the Bi-Lo. It’s a grocery store, not a casino.”

  He beams happily at my correction, something I’ve always loved about him. He was the only person who ever made me feel like my thirst for knowledge was a good thing and that speaking up when a mistake was made was a positive response, not an act of arrogance.

  Nothing excites Tommy more than learning something new, which is one of the reasons I can’t understand why he’s lived all these years in a town full of people who seem like they don’t even want to know the little they can’t avoid knowing. He loves books. He’s the most voracious reader I’ve ever known, a trait he credits to Fiona, who was a self-taught reader and always made sure he was surrounded by the written word.

  She raised Tommy. His own mother died in childbirth and his father, Jack, died ten years later in a roof fall in one of Walker Dawes’ mines. This string of McNab men who grew up without fathers would end when Tommy had a daughter, my mother, Arlene. She gave birth to me, a son, but my father is a Doyle, not a McNab, something Tommy has forgiven but will never let me forget.

  “Why didn’t you tell me the gallows are coming down?”

  “Must’ve slipped my mind.”

  “I don’t believe that for one minute.”

  “Why should I care?” he asks. “They should’ve been torn down over a hundred years ago. They should’ve never been put up in the first place.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “They’re a reminder,” he concedes.

  I can’t begin to understand what those morbid pieces of wood truly mean to Tommy. Even though I had an ancestor die there, they’ve never had much of an emotional impact on me. I was just one more kid who got a cheap horror-movie thrill from them, but for Tommy, they weren’t the stuff of an overactive imagination or the symbol of some distant historical event. Fiona used to take him there every Sunday afternoon. She held his hand exactly the same way she had held the hand of Jack, and they would stand in silence as if before a church altar while he’d be forced to envision what had happened there to a man who had been taken from him and had left a hole in his life. I never would have known Prosperity McNab, but he would’ve been Tommy’s grandfather.

  “Of something horrible,” I add.

  “Maybe,” he says. “But consider this. You see a person on the street with a scar on his face and you might feel pity or repulsion or admiration for surviving his ordeal, but regardless, you’re always going to be intrigued. You know he has a story to tell.”

  I smile to myself but also feel a little frustration toward the man. It’s just like Tommy to think having a story to tell is more important than removing a disfigurement that could lead to renewed self-esteem and overall better mental health.

  I’m not sure I agree. I think I’d call in the plastic surgeon. A new face might be good for this town.

  GROCERY SHOPPING HAS NEVER gone well for the two of us. We get our own baskets as soon as we enter the store and split up.

  I pick up a few things and end in produce, a section of the store Tommy regards with dubiousness and scorn. My father would never be caught in the produce section either; this is one thing he and Tommy have in common.

  Certain people find my father charming in small doses. Owen Doyle is the epitome of the tragic Irishman reeking of booze and splendid self-pity, capable of wit and good humor, but only as a precursor to throwing punches and recriminations. He wholeheartedly embraces the fatalism of our ancestors—a race of islanders damned with lousy weather and cliff faces instead of sultry sea breezes and soft sandy beaches—and used to have quite a few followers who listened to him preach from his favorite bar stool at the Red Rabbit every night about the futility of effort.

  I was a disappointment to my father and his feet, who did their best to raise me right in his mind. A mother’s love is unconditional, but a father’s has to be constantly earned, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never please him. I eventually stopped trying when I began to realize the kind of man he wanted me to be was the kind of man I feared becoming.

  I’m grateful when I see Tommy limping toward me after his foray throughout the rest of the store, his basket containing a bag of Blazin’ Buffalo and Ranch Doritos, a bag of Fritos corn chips, eight pork chops, four Delmonico steaks, and two dozen chicken legs.

  He glares at the bag of salad greens in my hand.

  “Do I look like a rabbit to you?”

  “It’s for me. Don’t worry,” I say, tossing it into my own basket holding a quart of low-fat milk, three apples, two yogurts, and a half dozen minicupcakes from the bakery frosted in pastels and covered with rainbow sprinkles.

  He notices the childish treats. He knows they must be for my mother.

  “I’m going to go see her tomorrow,” I say. “Do you want to come along?”

  He shakes his head wearily.

  “It’s good for you to have time alone. I’ll see her next week.”

  I nod my agreement and we let the topic of my mother and his daughter drop without any satisfaction or resolution as we’ve been doing all our lives.

  He suddenly grabs my face roughly in his big hands.

  “It’s good to see you, Danny,” he says.

 
My dejection lifts as I realize wanting to lay eyes on him again isn’t the only reason I needed to come home.

  “It’s good to be seen,” I say back to him.

  six

  THERE’S NOTHING TO SEE, nothing to hear, no one to run from or run to. I open my eyes and find utter black: an absence of light so impenetrable and inescapable, it has its own weight.

  My breath comes in shallow gasps. The air is dense and filled with a metallic grit. I try to move but I can barely raise up on all fours. Sharp rocks dig into my back, my knees, and the palms of my hands, and a chilly dampness soaks through my clothes. I inch forward and hit a wall then turn and hit another. Each time I pick up one of my hands, I don’t want to put it back down again for fear of what I might touch.

  I don’t know how much time I spend crouched, barely moving, suffocating and shivering before I spot something that looks like a glimmer of light. I reach for it, thinking it’s next to me, only to discover it’s far in the distance at the end of a tunnel. I creep toward it helplessly, not with any feeling of relief or hope, but with dread and revulsion. I realize I’m not seeing light at all but a kind of phosphorescence, the same sickly yellow glow I’ve seen on mushrooms in the woods late at night.

  I keep moving toward it until I finally understand what I’m seeing and by then it’s too late to turn around, and besides, I have nowhere to go except back into the black. The waxy clumps splattered against the rock walls are the remains of a person. I can make out part of a foot, an eye socket, an elbow, a pair of lips. Even though the man is in pieces, it’s obvious he hasn’t been dismembered. He looks as if he’s been dissolved. I begin to make out more and more pieces of more and more men. Suddenly I know what’s happened to me: I’m in the bowels of a stone beast, and these men are being digested.

  One of the puddled faces tries to speak to me, but his words are strangled in the thick, shiny ropes of tar that come spewing out of his cracked black lips. He tries again and this time I can make out his words. He tells me to get him a beer. The voice belongs to my dad.

  I wake screaming, and I’m a child again waiting for Tommy to come rushing into the room where my mother used to sleep, scaring me almost as much as my dream, a haunted scarecrow of pale, skinny limbs in faded oversize boxer shorts, white hair sticking up like straw, and a grimace of toothless terror stretched across his face, brandishing whatever weapon was at hand: an empty whiskey bottle, a flyswatter, a bathroom plunger.

  He’d stumble to the bed, clutching his chest, his eyes bulging, his cheeks caved in since he didn’t have time to grab his dentures, and I’d be distracted from my own fear by having to calm his. We never talked about the content of my nightmares. We both knew I had good reason to have them, although in some strange twist of mental self-preservation, they were never about my mother and sister. I let him believe they were because I could never reveal to him what they were really about. They were shameful. I was afraid of the mines.

  The moment passes and I sense the grown man’s body I inhabit now. I know I’m not a child, but the rest of my disorientation continues. I don’t know where I am. I can’t see anything.

  I flail around in a blind panic until I realize my head is buried beneath several throw pillows and Tommy’s afghan. I sense Fiona staring at me from across the room. I close my eyes again while waiting for my heart to stop thudding and my hands to stop trembling. My chest is slick with sweat.

  I used to have this dream all the time but my father has never been in it before.

  Tommy limps into the room, the tap of his cane heralding his approach. He apparently didn’t hear my screams because he says nothing. He’s dressed to go outside in his coat, cap, and wellies.

  “For someone who only eats rabbit food you look damned terrible.”

  “I fell asleep on the couch,” I offer as an explanation. “Where are you off to?”

  “A lot of talk flying around about Simon Husk. I thought I’d go contribute to it.”

  “What kind of talk? Don’t tell me you’re going to encourage the avenging zombie coal miner theory?”

  He gives me one of his winks, which are as much a part of his mode of communication as his words.

  “I’m keeping an open mind.”

  I close my eyes again and listen to his departure. I’m still shaken by my dream, but I can’t allow myself to dwell on it. I’m about to go see my mother and I need to put all my energy into mustering the courage I need to face a completely different kind of nightmare, one I can’t wake up from.

  SINCE HER RELEASE FROM prison almost twenty years ago, my mom has lived off and on with Tommy, but he can’t make her stay with him and I can’t make her stay with me either and I wouldn’t want to attempt it. The thought of my nomadic, delusional, kleptomaniac, bipolar mother being anywhere near a city is a terrifying prospect.

  She’s been in and out of civil psychiatric hospitals over the years, but the doctors can’t force her to stay there either. Like many people who have been diagnosed with a mental illness, she believes she’s perfectly sane, and those who think she’s crazy are the crazy ones. Even more than that, they are her enemies.

  She’s sick but not sick enough in the eyes of the law and the medical community to allow her family to commit her. She would have to physically harm someone or herself in order for that to happen, and she has never hurt anyone in her life, except for killing my sister, for which she spent twenty years in prison.

  Each time she’s been admitted to a hospital—usually after disappearing for weeks at a time, showing up in a random town where she’s been arrested for some petty theft or act of vandalism, and then being found incompetent to stand trial—she becomes a model patient and is released. She’s cooperative and quiet and spends all her time reading and crocheting hats for orphans. The notes from various doctors in her records describe her as “smart,” “friendly,” and “pleasant.” It’s only when the subject of her illness comes up that she becomes “difficult,” attacking not only the “ignorance” of their claims against her but the “stupidity” of their entire profession including her own son, who she never fails to mention is a psychologist, too, even though she wanted him to be an astronaut (something I never knew until I read it in her file).

  Tommy went to court once to try and become her legal guardian with the authority to force her to take medication. At the hearing, Mom was demure and charming and told the judge she was not mentally ill, that all her life people have been calling her crazy just because she has a lot of energy. As proof of her sanity she showed him her social security card, named the first eight United States presidents, and explained the difference between skydiving and skywriting. She also complimented his eyes and told him he looked too young to be a man of the cloth.

  He didn’t grant the petition, claiming the court cannot deprive an individual of her legal rights just because she seems somewhat confused and has an unusual personality. He didn’t see her on a bad day.

  The J. M. White Hospital admits people who have been sent from jail or who pose a danger to themselves or others. Mom ended up here two years ago after stealing a bicycle in Hellersburg and riding into the middle of moving traffic causing a three-car fender bender where fortunately no one was seriously injured including herself. She told the police she purposely ran into one of the cars because the driver was a child molester.

  The criminal charges were dropped but she was committed to White, a temporary relief for both Tommy and me. As psychiatric facilities go, it’s not a bad place and it’s only an hour’s drive from Lost Creek.

  I find Mom alone in her room. She’s had three roommates since she came here. I’ve never met any of them. The first one she felt sorry for, the second one was a spy, and the current one is reputedly a close friend of Oprah’s and puts on airs because of it.

  The roommate’s dresser top is covered with junk, but Mom’s is clean except for the pile of her hand-crocheted
hats. Each one is a different color that corresponds to a positive personality trait she has stitched across the front: blue is “compassion,” green is “forgiveness,” purple is “tolerance.”

  She doesn’t believe in accumulating possessions. She says they weigh her down. But the few things she does have, she guards fanatically.

  She’s sitting in a chair with a book in her lap wearing the Christmas bathrobe Tommy picked out for her years ago. It’s bright green and covered in prancing reindeer. She still wears her reddish-blond hair long and straight. It’s streaked with silver like she’s just finished combing sugar through it. She’s small, almost waiflike, and has a child’s round face, button nose, and freckled cheeks.

  Each time I see her I’m struck again by how young she looks on the outside. I’ve seen many older people whose faces have been ravaged by time, but the eyes peering out from behind their masks of wrinkles are bright and youthful. Mom is the reverse. She’s done her aging on the inside. Her face seems relatively untouched, but her once lively green eyes have faded into a dull gray the color of pond ice.

  The only time there’s any vitality in them is when she’s having a manic episode, and then they blaze with a black intensity that I imagine must fill her head with the same kind of burning ache that comes when frozen fingers regain their feeling in a heated room. I know she is seeing something not of this world.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t look at me.

  I walk over, give her limp body a hug, and hold out the cupcakes to her. My heart sinks as I remember how she used to take to her bed leaving my dad and me to fend for ourselves for days at a time. Her condition was so eerily complete and alien, she even spooked my dad into acceptance. The shouting I expected to hear never came. He’d come out of their bedroom, silent and uneasy. Sometimes he wouldn’t check on her at all, content to take my word for it that she was “sad,” and he’d sleep on the couch. I think he was afraid she might be contagious.