Jeff Abbott: Promises of Home

“Get out!” Cayla rediscovered her voice. “Get out of my house right… this… minute.”

I pushed her away from me and knelt by Davis’s side. He flinched away from my touch, burying his face in the crook of his arm.

“Get my boy out of here. Take Bradley and go,” he muttered into his arm, his voice barely audible. “Please. I don’t want him to see me this way.”

“She’s crazy, Uncle Jordy!” Mark hollered. Bradley wrestled free from him and crawled to his father’s side. I blinked up at Cayla; she didn’t look at any of us except for her son. She tried to take him by the arm, gently, but he squirmed away from her, holding his father’s hand. Bradley’s face was contorted with tears, his lips curling in anguish. Oh, God, what had this boy seen in this house?

“You stay away, Mom,” Bradley cried. “Stay away.”

Cayla straightened up and, without a word, turned and stumbled out of the kitchen.

“I saw it all,” Mark gasped, squatting by me. “She was whaling on him with that broomstick and also tried to hit him with a skillet. You want me to call the cops?”

“No! No police!” Davis seized my arm, pressing hard. “Promise me, no police.”

“Davis. You have to tell me what’s happened here.”

“I told you, Uncle Jordy-”

“Mark, please! Let Davis talk.”

Davis couldn’t look into my eyes. He ran fingers across his head and left a trickle of blood in the thinning blond hair. “Um, nothing really, it was just an argument-”

“For God’s sake, Davis, she was about to beat you unconscious. Now, what did you argue about? What did you do to her?”

“Nothing. I wouldn’t hurt her. Please, just take Bradley and go. Please.”

I took Bradley’s frown-locked face in my hands. “Bradley. Listen to me. What happened here?”

Bradley blinked back more tears. His breath came in ragged, aching gasps. His chin wobbled against my fingers, spittle smearing my hand. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. Finally he found his voice and whispered, “Ain’t supposed to tell. Mom said never tell. Never tell, never tell, never tell!”

“You can tell me, Bradley. You know you can.” I kept my voice low and soothing. If violence held sway in this house, God only knew what this poor kid had witnessed.

Bradley fixed his eyes on the floor, the unspeakable secret weighing hard on his heart. After a long minute he spoke, his fingers drawing nervous patterns on the tiles. “Mom. She gets mad. She hits Daddy. She hits him, and she hits him again.” He raised his face again, anguish painting his features. “I ain’t supposed to tell!” He collapsed against Mark, who looked at me with an accusing glare.

“Mark. Take Bradley back to our house,” I said.

“Won’t go! Daddy-” Bradley protested.

“Son. Do as Jordan says.” Davis still wouldn’t look at me. Slowly, Mark got Bradley to his feet and led him out of the kitchen. Bradley was bent with walking, his feet shuffling like a prisoner fettered at the ankles.

I felt thoroughly sick. “Davis. Look at me. How long has this been going on?”

He, like his son, stared at the floor. He rubbed at a spot of his own blood that had dripped from his nose to the tile. More blood leaked between his teeth. I seized his jaw and turned his face toward mine, hot with anger toward him.

“Davis, damn you, answer me! How long has she been battering you?”

He closed his eyes, shamefaced. “Since we found out Bradley was retarded. I guess about thirteen years.”

“ What? ”

“She can’t help it. You know what a temper she’s always had. She just gets upset when Bradley messes up and she, well, she can take it out on me,” His voice sounded soft, reasoning, the tone of long justification of terrible wrong.

“For God’s sake! Takes it out on you? She was going to beat you to a pulp, Davis!”

“Well, she couldn’t hit Bradley, could she?” Davis said.

I closed my eyes in nausea. “But Mark saw bruises on Bradley’s arm-”

“She got upset with me last night. Bradley tried to stop her and she hurt him. She hurt him for the first time.” He finally looked at me. His blue eyes were streaked with bloodshot sorrow. “I couldn’t believe she hurt him. So I figured, it can’t go on, I can’t let her hurt my boy. So I went to go see Steven Teague, I thought he’d know what to do, what I could do to make her better.”

“Oh, Davis, Jesus. You can’t fix what’s wrong with Cayla. She has to do that.”

“We got back and Bradley told her he’d seen Mark. Cayla wanted to know where’d we been. I told her I went to Teague’s office and she went crazy.” He made a horrible snuffling sound of sickness and sadness long buried.

“Davis. Why didn’t you leave her?”

“I can’t. I love her.”

“I don’t understand you at all.” My own voice sounded near the breaking point. “Why didn’t you defend yourself, fight back? Why’d you let her do this to you?” I was so mad, so frustrated, I wanted to shake him myself.

“Good God. You don’t hit girls, Jordan. I could never hit Cayla.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t let anyone know. Hell, you don’t think I see how you look at me right now? A man that lets a woman beat him. It’s wives that get beaten, not husbands. What kind of man do you think people would say I was?”

If this was his reasoning and logic, he was a far sorrier lawyer than I ever suspected. “I would have respected you for getting out of this hell, Davis.”

He buried his face in his hands. “I’m so ashamed. So ashamed. My boy-”

“Listen to me. We’ll get you and Bradley out of here. You can stay with us, as long as you need. We’ll see if we can get Cayla to go to counseling. No one has to know what’s happened.”

Davis Foradory turned away from me. “No. People will know. They’ll find out. Like Clevey and your sister.”

“Sister? She knows about this?” I managed to keep my jaw off the blood-specked tile, but it wasn’t easy.

“She came over-the morning Trey was shot. We had been having breakfast and Bradley spilled his milk all over the table, all over the paper. Cayla got upset with me about it. She was hitting me, telling me that Bradley’s clumsiness was my fault, I shouldn’t have put so much milk in his glass-and Arlene walked in. She tried to stop Cayla, and Cayla belted her. Gave her that shiner. I’m awful sorry about that. So’s Cayla.”

Oh, God have mercy. “Your wife hit my sister?”

“Yeah. Knocked her to the floor. Cayla got upset and ran upstairs, so I took care of Arlene. She was so surprised she could hardly say much.”

Although I could imagine Sister being shocked, I could hardly picture her at a loss for words. “She told me she’d fallen down some steps and blackened her eye.”

“I begged her not to tell. I said Cayla didn’t mean it, she just had been awful upset. She was hankering to go wallop Cayla, but I talked her out of it. For Bradley’s sake.”

“I don’t understand why my sister was here.”

Davis sniffed. “She wanted me to be her attorney. Get a restraining order against Trey, keep him from Mark.” He wiped his dripping nose with the back of his sleeve, the carefully cultured lawyer gone. “I told her if she didn’t tell about Cayla, I’d represent her for free.”

I sat back down on the floor. Free legal services for her silence. And she’d done it, knowing that a boy was in an abusive household. Suddenly I wasn’t real happy with my sister.

He saw it in my face, “Oh, she don’t know the whole story, Jordan. Don’t be mad at Arlene. Please, I made her promise. I told her it was the only time that Cayla hit me.”

“And Clevey? He knew, didn’t he? You said so.”