habeas corpus (fiction, chapter one)
Posted on February 1, 2007
Filed Under writings |
Memories of my father, his temper, his long absences, the defeated hang-dog way he drifted around the house filling ashtrays and playing Steppen Wolf albums so the windows rattled, made it hard to conjure any tears at his gravesite.
I kicked around the mound of fresh laid sod, thinking Hillside Cemetery too pretty a place for his sorry head and said, “Daddy, how you managed to talk your way out of that girl’s murder, I’ll never know.” I spit one loogie, thick with spite, onto the small headstone my mother had purchased from Ginley Funeral Home over in Franklin and trudged back to the car. It had taken us forty five minutes to get there. Mother thought Franklin an appropriate resting place for my father. He had played his last USTA match their in ’61. Made her remember a time before ashtrays and Steppen Wolf. That was the memory of Daddy she was willing to honor.
My Daddy had been capable of a lot of things. Mostly bar brawls and week long drunks in between which he was always gaining jobs and losing jobs and leaving me and Mother for weeks at a time, usually in summer. During these absences he’d fish and drink and scratch whatever manly itch needed scratching. He was at this version of fatherhood as long as I can remember and probably before then.
My mother jokes about my being an only child. She says, with no shortage of relief, “With your Daddy drinking like he was, there was just no way he could get the deed done.”
Until I was nine, I didn’t know enough to feel anything like shame about my family. I was just thankful that Daddy wasn’t the only embarrassment in town. I comforted myself by thinking; At least he’s not as bad as Jim Dings. Dings could frequently be found in the bushes along Union Street, a spreading wetness at the crotch, muttering profanities and trembling. His wife would hide his car keys when he was on a real bender. The only way he could continue his drunk was to ride his bike or walk five miles when the liquor ran out. He was one single minded SOB and kept at it until he had fallen off that bike on the way to the package store.
Northfield was a town that wasn’t trying too hard. There was no steepled church on a pretty town green surrounded by antique homes with black shutters, no boutiques and coffee shops like those sprinkled along the main streets of wealthier New England towns. There wasn’t even a proper grocery store, only a post office, a cemetery long neglected that sat beside a squat, beige brick building that was the Congregational Church, built there in the sixties as some modern manifestation of form following function and ornament as crime.
Mother says that Northfield has changed now that commuting an hour to and from the city is normal, expected even. She says the neighbors have been parceling off their land and selling to developers. There are cul-de- sacs and by laws and cable services with high speed internet access. There is a Super Stop and Shop, Dunkin Donuts and no shortage of foreign cars with halogen head lights and satellite radio.
But back then, Northfield was a small place stuck in limbo, no longer populated mostly of farmers but rather the descendants of farmers, a few academics, some people writing novels and looking for lonely. As children we had to find fun in the quiet sameness of the place and that meant picking on people that were slightly different. We loved to see Dings coming, weaving and wending his way towards town, as we rode the bus home from school. No matter if there was a biting North wind or rain or sleet, that man would be riding short sleeved and hatless. We’d all dig into our bags for leftover lunch items, empty soda cans, apple cores, whatever we could lob from the windows of the bus as we hurtled by. It wasn’t even cruel when you considered Dings was blackout drunk and operating outside of himself. I don’t think any of us would have had the courage to ridicule a grown man like that if he had not already made himself such a laughing stock.
There were a few guys like that in our town to make my Daddy’s trespasses seem minor. What’s a raised fist every now and again, some chronic unemployment, when you have people like Dings to compare yourself to?
So the truth about my familial situation didn’t begin to crystallize until one optimistic spring day, warm enough for playing outdoors and spreading a picnic blanket in the patch of sun near the Calleaux’s pool, still covered in the blue plastic liner of Winter. Jessie Calleaux and I were eating row after row of sugar wafers straight from the package as we watched the ants begin to march towards the crumbs we had scattered. Mrs. Calleaux was the kind of woman who defined herself in terms of in-ground swimming pools and trips to the Caribbean in winter and that day she went on about removing the pool cover and bringing down the table and umbrella from storage up in the garage.
“I hope Jerry laid enough bait up there this winter to discourage their eating holes in the lounge cushions,” she said to us, nine years old and more concerned with cookies crumbs and squashing ants with the bottom of our juice cups. “We had to buy all new pool furniture last spring. Destroyed by rats.” She offered this fact as warning about what could happen to even the best families if diligence about rodent control was disregarded.
Jessie’s Dad was one of the few men in town working somewhere far from Northfield, making the commute in somber gray suits with a plastic clip hanging from the breast pocket that said Jerry Calleaux, Management Services. He spent weekends in colorful polo shirts and did Dad-like things about the house and yard like lay rat poison, clean the pool and prepare square patches of soil in the sunny part of the yard for Mrs. Calleaux to grow zinnias and tomatoes and rosemary.
“My Mom uses Ex-Lax,” I offered. “For the rats I mean. She swears it makes them shit their guts out.”
Mrs. Calleaux sucked in her breath sharply. Her sudden intake said, “Such words from a little girl” without actually uttering it aloud. Her disapproval was palpable. And I knew we were somehow strange and hopeless for my Mom’s being in charge of things like Ex-Lax for rats and my knowing how to use curse words in a way that could make a grown woman uncomfortable.
* * * *
By the time Daddy had committed slow suicide by alcohol, it had been almost 20 years since I’d last seen him. But still, before mother called to say he’d died in some motel out in Wichita, I kept fretting that he might show up like that day back in August of ‘79. For a time Daddy got good at stretching out his weeks on the road by stopping in Grafton on his way through.
He would pull up to the double wide I rented high on the North Hollow Road where the wind could blow steady enough to knock a grown man over, his Holiday Rambler needing gas and his pockets bare empty.
“Well if it isn’t Claire Bear and her big dog Goliath,” he’d shout stepping down from the motor home he had bought himself for their wedding anniversary, instead of flowers or a necklace for Mother. He’d spent every dime of my mother’s savings, small change and dollar bills squirreled away here and there. Cash she’d had been scraping together for two and half decades of answering phones and filing and menial tasks for which she was over qualified. With its three burner stove, queen sized island bed, oak cabinetry and decorative valances, that Rambler was my Daddy’s prize.
“Isn’t she a beauty,” he would declare coming up the front steps quick and slamming through the door of the double wide to get clear of Goliath who had a good read on people and was hell bent on tearing the ass out of Daddy’s khaki’s.
“I’ve got to piss like a race horse, Claire Bear. Where’s the john?” As far as I know my mother never stepped foot in that Rambler.
He spent a few hours telling me all about his latest fishing spot on the Connecticut River where he said he spent days hauling in White Perch the size of house cats. I expected that he watched a few skilled fishermen do the hauling while he attended to the forty of Evan Williams he had brought along. But I didn’t say anything to stop him and he kept on like that until he got himself good and thirsty. Then he wrangled a few dollars from me and went down street to Tyler’s to finish telling his fishing tales to someone else for the rest of the night. Maybe that someone was Lacey Robinson before she walked home along Rte. 100 and wound up dead.
At the time, I was just thankful that two twenty dollar bills was all that was required to get rid of him for a few hours. I called Mother to tell her he’d arrived. She worried about him even though she would never admit to such a thing.
She sighed and said, “I’m sorry you’ve got to put up with this, but he’ll be pushing on in a few days. You’re Daddy thinks he’s fulfilling some fatherly duty. Plus he’s probably out of cash.” My mother could see his motives clearly; one “I do” in a fit of bad judgment and nineteen years’ of marriage later.
Don’t ask me why I ever thought Grafton was the answer to any of life’s questions. But I’d moved there in a hurry when a boy called Gabs suggested I go with him for the summer. It seemed the only way out of boring that I could fathom at the time. I couldn’t know that countrified Vermont was, in a lot of ways, worse than suburban Massachusetts. It felt like a romantic adventure, one that would surely help decide the rest of my life but maybe not in the way I had hoped.
Gabs, whose non-locker room name was Jason, had been hired as a guide for one of those wilderness programs for at risk youth. He spent the summer running delinquents through four week stints in the Green Mountain National Forest, building temporary shelters and splitting wood for evening fires. He was the kind of boy that could be considered a jock - shortstop, running back, King Phillip High’s record holder in the 100 meters, good looking enough in a gangly way, a way that a person’s willing to overlook at eighteen.
There were plenty of girls prettier, smarter, better company than me in our graduating class. And it didn’t occur to me until years later that he selected me because I was the only one desperate enough to go with him. There was Abigail Graf with her ballet dancer poise and spotless GPA and Erin McLaughlin with the class spirit and the cheerleader’s smile, even Stacy Malloy with her black t-shirts and wild eyed brooding (she was Goth before Goth was a thing to be). But then, they all had futures beyond a boy named Gabs and he must have seen that clearly.
Mother was not keen on my summer plans and tried to talk me out of going in her half hearted, I’m-too-tired-to fight-you-on-this, kind of way. She had three things working against her in this argument. One was a general absence of conviction. I could sense by her lazy stabs at debate that she had given up the fight before it even began. Two was the lack of a better plan. She couldn’t offer me any bright ideas for jobs or recreational pursuits that I couldn’t find elsewhere. She could see Northfield clearly - too tiny, too far away from anyplace more hopeful. Three was her disregard for her own parents’ wishes at seventeen when she had moved out of their three-story, antique home with its coastal views and terraced gardens and moved in with Daddy. He had been the tennis pro at the yacht club that summer and admired her long legs and her short skirt and, I’m guessing, screwed her regularly in the men’s locker room on most weeknights. With his easy, wide grin and courtside tan, it had been easy to talk her into doing something she would, for the rest of her life, regret.
Mother will talk about that hopeful beginning only reluctantly when she’s defending the place she’s made for herself in the world. As she tells it, Daddy, with his quick charm and wicked drop shot, had all kinds of potential. He was offered a full-time pro position at the Junior College just outside of Northfield just two weeks before the Fall semester. She claims there wasn’t long to think it through. I suppose she hadn’t yet learned about the drinking but she sure must have guessed at his knack for bedding the women he coached. If only he’d been coaching the men’s team.
Daddy did not keep that job for long. And mother talks vaguely about restraining orders and a sad girl named Melissa in the way a person hints at something shameful. She’ll say in self defense, What’s a person to do, with a baby on the way and hastily acquired marriage certificate? Their town hall wedding was witnessed by my mother’s hairdresser and Daddy’s only friend from the tennis circuit that had not yet given up on his total lack of discipline and his tendency to show up to matches horrifically hung-over. By the time I was born he had quit tennis all together. I never saw him hold a racket.
Mother’s parents passed sometime ago, but not before ignoring their only daughter for several decades. They must have been some hard, uncompromising people to hold Daddy against her for so long. There’s one thing for sure, the day mother left with Daddy was the day she gave up the life of clanking halyards, lobster rolls and crisp, pressed tennis whites. She didn’t receive a penny from her parents’ estate which, according to her, was considerable.
Mother could sometimes be caught feeling remorse about this parental void but only occasionally, like when she had me dressed up for Christmas Eve in a tartan plaid dress and shiny Mary Janes.
“If only your Grandmother could see my pretty girl,” she’d say. “Her loss though, right Claire Bear?” And I never knew how to respond so I said nothing, thinking they weren’t missing anything special.
There was nothing conventional about Mother and Daddy’s eloping back then. It was an act of defiance before its time. The summer of love was still eight years off when Mother looked past money, status and a stable future for the sake of some romantic notion. As far as I know, when Daddy began to spin off on his very own version of the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test but with whiskey and cheap beer, Mother was already anchored in the stuff of convention: motherhood, work, survival. Haight-Ashbury, the Beatles, Ken Kesey, had no resonance with her.
Despite mother’s half hearted attempts to talk me out of the same mistake she had made at my age, I went to Grafton with her reluctant blessing. She had spent too much time pondering the concept of forgiveness not apply it to our relationship. But Gabs and I were quickly a failure, just as she’d predicted.
I never suspected that the covert fucking we had done in the back of Gabs’ Nova was the pinnacle of our relationship. The smell of the vinyl seats, the steam that collected on the windows, the way I let Gabs buck and rock on top of me was some sort of toll I paid for his attention, my never having felt worthy of this popular, good looking boy. But once it was sanctioned rather than illicit, I felt only disappointment in our coupling that took place on the lumpy mattress that served as a bed. There was no thrill in it now that we weren’t hiding it from anyone. And the way he left dark pubic hairs on the soap began to gnaw at me. Before there had been no time or space for conjuring the mood and I hadn’t known that Gabs’ version of foreplay was his referring to our anatomical parts as titty witties and Mr. Wiggle, everything all cutesy and spoken in hushed tones like Mr. Rogers with libido.
It worked for awhile because he was gone most of the summer. But once he’d returned from mountaineering, I could only endure two months of playing house before I asked him to move out. He found a short term vacancy in town and only a few weeks later came by the Peavine Diner to tell me he had enlisted. He was still sporting the summer’s patchy facial hair and unkempt pony tail. Those army recruiters must have had vision to imagine him buzz cut and shaved clean.
Gabs was gone from Grafton by November and I was still working there at that tiny diner on the west side of town when Daddy came through nearly a year later. Ten months and the only changes I’d made was to get myself a mean dog and call the landlord about fixing the doublewide’s rusted-out siding. Carl was the kind of pot smoking, good for nothing that had no business being anyone’s landlord but I didn’t complain when his solution to the problem was tacking on more corrugated metal sheets. It didn’t occur to me that these would rust too. The neighbors littered in their own yards and put tires on their roofs in order to prevent its blowing off in powerful weather. What’s a little rusted metal in a setting like that?
Goliath was my answer to loneliness and he started off a nice dog that got a little meaner as time went on. The Rutland shelter said he’d make a fine pet as long as he could be outside in mild weather. I secured a chain to the tree just west of the front door. It was an ancient Silver Maple, the last tree in Grafton to lose its leaves in autumn. When the whole valley finished flushing out in all manner of brilliance that tree would be holding on to every last leaf, curled and brittle, waiting for the last shudder of November before they’d come down in great drifts. All at once, like rain they’d fall. Goliath dug a deep depression at the base of that tree where he would lay his Mastiff body down once a day. He could only be provoked by a deer or wild turkey or Daddy. And then there was 165 pounds of snarling dog to deal with.
* * * *
The night that Daddy went to Tyler’s with his fishing stories was a notoriously bad night for Grafton. It was hotter than Hades and people were drinking at their discomfort with the abandon of the desperate and the sweaty. Driven out of sweltering homes to spend hour after air conditioned hour in a handful of pubs and taverns that littered the trucking route through the Green Mountain pass. There was drunk in the air and the sheriff’s department had no end to trouble.
I’m not saying that Daddy was part of that trouble much before 3 a.m. but I do think he was the key player in how things ended for Lacey Robinson. Later he told the police he had been down Rte. 100 late that night but only on his way out of town. Said he couldn’t be sure what time it had been.
But I knew Daddy didn’t leave town that night like he told the police, but rather came home at the break of dawn to do some auto repair in the yard. Goliath took up baying and growling at just past five when Daddy and the Holiday Rambler pulled in. The dog didn’t quit barking while Daddy stayed out there nearly an hour, sweating through his thin white t-shirt, attending to his passenger side rear view mirror. He removed the whole thing, tossing it in the camper. At the time I thought it was strange, his taking it with him when there was a dumpster 25 feet away.
The worst I imagined was he’d side swept a parked car or a telephone pole. But then I wasn’t used to worrying after Daddy too much. I’d learned that once you started it was hard to stop. I had ceases paying him much mind a long time before.
It took the papers a full day to get the story. Lacy Robinson was found in the middle of Rte. 100 some time just before 3 a.m. on Tuesday morning. The Green Mountain Ledger led with the story on Wednesday. By that time Lacy had died of her wounds after being airlifted to Rutland Regional Hospital. The article described the way a woman driving home along the dark and empty road found her, face up, arms by her side, almost peaceful, like she had laid down to rest and forgotten to get up. The paper recorded what she was wearing, a striped cotton polo shirt, green and pink with a white collar, scuffed up sneakers, a denim mini. I don’t know why this level of detail mattered but with no one to blame the reporters had to talk about something.
I didn’t know Lacy even though we were nearly the same age. But after her death, I listened to people in town talk about her as if she were the second coming. I didn’t think the photographs on the evening news and in the papers revealed anything particularly special about Lacy Robinson. But she was attractive enough, had admirably grief stricken parents and a slough of friends from high school who turned out for her funeral.
Clyde Bowen was a serious man who raised the prettiest, doe-eyed, velvet black cows and slaughtered them each spring. He made a good living, selling his organic beef in family packs, cut to order. Bowen came into the Peavine every morning for two eggs over-easy and butterless toast. This practical, stoic man with manure on his shoes had begun to remember Lacy Robinson as angelic.
“She was the kind of kid who was really going places, Claire,” he said pushing his coffee cup towards me for a refill. I knew then it was going to take the people of Grafton a good long time to settle into the reality of having lost one of their own
The Ledger ran the forensic pathologists’ summation of the injuries a week later. According to that report, Lacy Robinson had one five inch laceration on her forehead and a similar one on the right side of her head. The pathologist declared these injuries consistent with wounds sustained by being struck by a rearview mirror. That’s when I began to have dreams about Lacy walking home late after leaving the party at Anna Cawley’s on Horse Farm Lane. Daddy roaring down Rte. 100 after a long night of drinking. Possibly he had gone to Anna’s too, after the pub had closed. He never liked to see the end of a good party.
He would have driven right by Lacy, too close on the passenger side, catching her forehead, spinning her body out into the two lane highway where she began the long process of bleeding to death. A young girl’s blood pouring out the back of her blond head and onto the pavement still warm from the hottest day Grafton had seen in one hundred years.
The more I dreamt about the accident, the more I knew that Daddy had done it. The only thing left to question was whether or not it had been deliberate, Daddy feeling slighted after she’d brushed him off earlier in the night. I honestly don’t know if Daddy was capable of such cruelty. At the time I sure thought it possible, having seen a lot of shameful behavior from him in my eighteen years.
A week after Lacy had died and Daddy had left Grafton for parts unknown, I called Mother.
And she said, “Claire Phillips, you will not tell another soul what you just told me and that’s the end of it.”
There had been a time, when they were first married, that Daddy would joke with her, “You make the money, I’ll play the tennis.” And she’d laugh. It was an arrangement she’d grown used to, her being the serious one and his playing games. I guess she couldn’t see her way out of it anymore and would be god damned if she was going to fail at it now.
“He deserves his daughter’s discretion, Claire,” she said. And as much as I hated to quarrel with her, I couldn’t help it.
“He doesn’t deserve a damn thing from either one of us,” I said and hung up.
The following day I called the police station in town and was transferred over to Mark Foley of the Rutland Sheriff’s Department, the lead detective on the case. Foley and Detective Bryan came out to the trailer the following afternoon. I watched them from the front window, knocking on all four trailer doors before they got to mine, as if they were hoping it wasn’t the one with the mad dog tied up out front. It had cooled off significantly since the night of Lacy’s death. A late August chill was hinting at autumn and crabapples and elaborate spider webs in the meadow. I was wearing an old King Phillip High sweatshirt of Gabs that must have made me seem small and young and unbelievable. In hindsight, I should have gone down to the police station myself, dressed in my only non-denim pants, black with the fancy rayon drape. Perhaps then they would have taken a young girl seriously. But as it was, I had no way to get down street without Mrs. Cleary or Mike Maynard giving me a lift, as they did every day before work. I just did not feel that these good people needed to get mixed up this unpleasantness.
Detective Foley had indicated it was no trouble for them to come to me.
“It’s up past Middle Hollow on the top of North Hollow Road,” I’d said.
And he’d said, “I know exactly,” as if my neighborhood was talked about in town in hushed whispers of disapproval, “What are we going to do about the four trailers up past the bend?”
Truth is Carl Woekel and family had been sitting on this prime piece of real estate overlooking the entire valley and beyond far before Foley or Bryan had been a gleam in their mother’s eye. There was not a damn thing the selectman of Grafton could do about Woekel’s trailers looking down on all of them from up on North Hollow Road and that riled people, made them ornery that people like us should enjoy the panorama that was the sun going down over the tops of rolling hills each evening, the cheerful carpet of dandelions that blanketed the slopes in May, the riot of leaves gone crimson and gold and fiery orange in October.
But I wasn’t thinking about the history of real estate in Grafton when I’d decided to tell them about Daddy. I was too queasy, shaking with the sheer drama of unloading that knowledge, to be strategic about it.
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