Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“What happened? What ended all that?”

Wheaton’s body freezes like a tape being stopped. His jaw moves, but no sound emerges. Then, slowly, his right hand extends the paintbrush to the canvas. “When I was thirteen, I became… curious about certain things. Many of the pictures in Mother’s book were nudes, and I wanted to paint like that. She understood the necessity, but we had to be careful. Sometimes my father took work at the mill in the town. My brothers would do his trapping then. That’s when she posed nude for me.”

Though the bathwater is cold, my face feels hot. I sense that we’re heading into the unmapped territory of incest.

“Did you become… intimate?”

“Intimate?” His voice is an echo from a cave. “We were like the same person.”

“I meant-”

“You meant sex.” He lifts his brush, his face showing disgust. “It wasn’t like that. I touched her sometimes, of course. To pose her. And she told me things. About the way love was supposed to be, how somewhere in the world she hoped it really was. But mostly we made plans. She said I had a gift that would make me famous one day. I swore a thousand times that if I ever got away, I would succeed and come back for her.”

A frightening vision comes to me. “Did someone catch you with her like that?”

Wheaton closes his eyes. “One spring afternoon, instead of trapping, my brothers spied on us. They watched until Mother disrobed. Then they ran all the way to town and got my father. When he burst into the barn and saw her naked, he went crazy. Screaming gibberish about harlots and God-knows-what-else from the Bible. My mother shrieked at him to get out, but he had murder in his eyes. He told my brothers to hold me down, and he – he started to beat her. But instead of taking it, as she usually did, she fought back. She clawed his face, drew blood. When he saw that, he picked up an old scythe handle…”

Wheaton squints as though staring at a distant object. “I can still hear the whistle it made. And the impact, like the sound of an eggshell. The way she fell. She was dead before she hit the floor.”

His voice sounds the way mine does when I speak of my father’s “death” – higher in pitch, tremulous. “Why isn’t there any record of this?”

“There was no one around for miles. She had no family left.”

“Did your father bury her?”

“No.”

No? “What happened?”

Wheaton looks at the floor, and his voice drops to a barely audible whisper. “He came over to where my brothers were holding me down and leaned over my face. He told me to bury her and go home. His breath stank. He said if I told anyone what had happened, he and my brothers would swear they’d caught me raping her in the barn, after she was dead. I’d never even heard of such a thing. It paralyzed me with fear. No one would believe me, he said. I’d be sent to a reform school in the city, where boys would beat me every day and sodomize me in the night. Then they left me with her.”

“I’m so sorry,” I murmur, but Wheaton doesn’t hear me.

“I couldn’t bury her.” His voice is almost a whine. “I couldn’t even look at her. The side of her head was broken. Her skin was like blue marble. I cried until my eyes were like sandpaper. Then I dragged her down to the stream. I fetched her gown and washed her from head to toe, cleaning away the blood and straightening her hair as best I could. The way I knew she’d want it. I knew they might come back at any moment, but I didn’t care. I’d realized something. Her agony was finally over. All her life was pain, and now it had ended. She was better off dead.” Wheaton lays down his brush and drives his fingers through his tangled hair. “I wasn’t better off. I couldn’t even imagine life without her. But she was. You see?”

I do. I see how a shattered child made the mental journey to a state that allows him to kill women and believe he is doing a good thing.

“I went back to the barn and painted over what I’d been doing. Then, in the dying light of the clearing, I painted Mother in her peace. It was the first time I’d seen her face completely relaxed. It was an epiphany for me. My birth as an artist. When I was finished, I took a shovel from the barn and buried her beside the stream. I didn’t mark the spot. I didn’t want them to know where she was. Only I knew.”

“What happened when you went home?”

My question seems to suck the humanity out of Wheaton’s face. “For four years, I lived like an animal. My father told the few people who asked that my mother had run away to New York. Then he began poking into her past. He became convinced that I was illegitimate. He talked to her doctor, studied the records at the courthouse. He was right, but he couldn’t prove it. He just knew. There was nothing in me of him – nothing – and I thank God for it. But after that, they did things to Roger that you simply can’t imagine. They starved him. Beat him. Worked him like a slave. The father gave the older brothers permission to do as they liked with him. They burned him. Cut him. Shoved things inside him. The father used him sexually, to punish him.” Wheaton shakes his head dismissively. “If it weren’t for me, he’d never have survived.”

Severe sexual or physical abuse during childhood, Dr. Lenz told us. The kind of radical psychological break I’m talking about… “How did you protect Roger?”

“I listened. I watched. My hearing grew frighteningly acute. I could hear them breathing in their sleep. If their breathing changed, I knew it. If they got out of bed, I knew Roger was in danger. I told him when to hide, when to run. When to hoard food. When to give in, and when to resist. After a while, it got where I could hear them thinking. I saw the morbid desire in their minds, pictures forming into intent, intent traveling from their brains down their sluggish nerves, moving their heavy limbs to action. That’s how Roger survived.”

“Did you tell him to run away to New York?”

Wheaton resumes painting, the brush moving quickly again. “Yes. But the city wasn’t how I thought it would be. Roger tried to paint, but he couldn’t make a go of it. People offered help, but they didn’t want to help him. They were helping themselves. They gave him food, a place to sleep, space to paint. But in exchange they wanted their pound of flesh. They wanted him. And he gave himself to them. What did it matter? They were so much gentler than his father and brothers. For four years he moved among them – soft, greedy, gray old men – painting derivative work, doing anything they asked of him. Things had to change.”

An almost cruel smile touches Wheaton’s lips. “One day, walking down the street, I saw my opening. I darted into a recruiting office and joined the marine corps. One quick irrevocable act. There was nothing he could do. The war in Vietnam was heating up, and almost before Roger knew what had happened, he was on his way there.”

Pride flashes like diamonds in the artist’s eyes. “That’s where I came into my own. Vietnam. He couldn’t make it without me. During the days he would poke along, joking and cursing and slapping backs, trying to fit in. But at night he made room for me. On patrol. On point. I could smell things he couldn’t even see. I could hear bare feet bending grass at fifty meters. I kept him alive. The others, too. They gave me medals for it.”

“What about after?” I ask, a fraction of my mind still wondering how far John and Baxter and Lenz have come down the investigative trail to this house.

“I went back to New York, didn’t I? I was a different man. I took my GI Bill money, went to NYU, and painted for four years. When I got out, I did portraits to keep myself in groceries. I was searching for my destiny. And it found me. My surviving brother died in the merchant marine, and the farm went up for sale. I decided to buy it. I thought of burning the place down, but I didn’t. Every day was a sweet revenge. Those rooms had witnessed all Mother’s pain, and Roger filled them with color and light. It was then that he began to paint the Clearing.”