Jack Ketchum - Right to Life

But she was grateful only to the cat. To her soothing presence. To have somebody to talk to even if that somebody couldn’t talk back. Grateful that the cat didn’t mind sharing with her the thick sweltering air.

The cat seemed glad of her presence too. Brushing up against her ankles as she stood tied to the X-frame or walked either to there or to the chair so that a couple of times the cat almost tripped her. She didn’t mind.

When he wasn’t hurting her he was telling her stories or occasionally reading scripture. The readings were usually about children or husbands and wives, slaves and masters. He liked Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, Genesis.

“Now Sairai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. And she had an Egyptian maidservant whose name was Hagar.

“So Sarai said to Abram, ’See now, the Lord has restrained me from bearing children. Please, go in to my maid; perhaps I shall obtain children by her.’ And Abram heeded the voice of Sarai.

“Then Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar her maid, the Egyptian, and gave her to her husband to be his wife…”

The stories were always about the Organization.

The house, he told her, was bugged. They monitored the phone. They had known she was here from the very beginning and got daily reports on her progress.

Organization members were everywhere. The local police precinct. The legislature. The White House.

He gave her a Daily News article to read about the slave trade which said that in the Mideast, Europe and even in the U.S. the growing interest in S &M had lately given rise to a brisk profitable business in female flesh, women kidnapped for sale or barter to the rich and powerful with no rights or recourse to law. To be dealt with as each owner saw fit. To be tracked down and punished should they dare and then actually manage to run away. He told her that it was his father who had introduced him to the Organization and that as a young man he’d earned enough money to put himself through college by tracking down runaways.

He told her about one escapee who managed to elude the Organization long enough to actually write and publish an article about her experience. It took months but eventually they found her a second time and returned her to her owner. They pulled her fingers off one by one and then pulled off her toes. They cut out her tongue and blinded her with a soldering gun and used a stiletto to destroy her eardrums. They enlisted an Organization doctor to cut off her arms and legs without benefit of anaesthesia and then to cauterize the wounds. Finally they hung her, still alive, by her long braided hair on a hook above her master’s bed where she continued to live for three days. A trophy above him writhing in agony while he slept and read.

He showed her some of her father’s mail, two circulars and a phone bill, told her that they’d been brought to him by their own mailman, who was part of the Organization too, for her to see. So she’d understand just how easy it was to get to him or any time they cared to.

He showed her a roster of her students’ names and addresses.

On the eleventh day, a Sunday, he ordered her to suck his cock. It was the first time she’d refused him anything in several days. He tied her to the bolted-down chair, pulled off her blindfold and produced an over-and-under double-barrel shotgun. He ordered her to open her mouth and when she would not forced the shotgun into her mouth, the cold metal cutting her lips and grinding past her teeth. She had no way of knowing if it was loaded or not until he pulled the trigger.

Which he did.

He replaced the shotgun with his cock and this time she did as he said. She wondered if he’d have dared had Kath been in the room. Two nights later she assumed she had her answer when he rolled her blindfolded out of the Long Box, told her to lie right where she was, tied her hands behind her back and shortly thereafter a naked Kath descended upon her face. She suspected this was not Kath’s idea because she seemed reluctant at first but eventually began to buck and moan. And then she must have said something to him about Sara’s smell because she was finally allowed upstairs to take a shower, both of them standing in the bathroom looking on so she wouldn’t try to squeeze her way out the window.

In the shower as she soaped her naked belly she realized she was showing.

She wondered if they noticed.

On the twentieth day she felt the baby move inside her.

The beatings continued.

For Stephen the days passed working at his shop in town or out in the garage. Gluing down veneer, repairing legs of chairs and tables, finishing and polishing old wood. He created a pine bookshelf, a nightstand, an oak desk. He was fast and efficient and charged reasonably for his work and time. He brought each job in on schedule which was a rarity these days. He was affable, friendly, listened carefully to his clients’ needs and was good at what he did. No master craftsman but then this was not New York City either. He had no lack of customers.

Either he was working with wood or he was working on Sara.

He wasn’t sure if it was Sara or the shop or the struggle with McCann that had given him the case of tendonitis. But the elbow was swollen into a little marble at the joint and twinged constantly. He was left-handed and now his grip was considerably weakened and the elbow hurt miserably if he used the hand too much. There were mornings he’d have a hard time digging his keys out of his pocket and an even harder time locking the door behind him. He was popping two ibuprophen every four hours and one progesterone a day, the latter on Doc Richardson’s proscription. If it didn’t help in two weeks, the doctor said, if the swelling didn’t go down he’d have to inject a steroid directly into the tendon. It wasn’t a prospect he looked forward to.

Every time he used that arm to swing the whip or drive a nail it hurt him.

He began to have fleeting headaches and strange, frequent memories of his mother’s funeral.

At the service they’d set six metal folding chairs at the grave site, one for each of her chief mourners. His father, his mother’s sister June and brothers Bill and Ernie plus himself and Kath. Kath had a stomach virus that grey September day so she elected to stand behind the chairs and he to stand with her. At eighty-two, with heart disease and emphysema Uncle Bill found it easier not to sit only to have to stand again so he stood too. Which left three of the six chairs empty.

His father sat in the middle. Aunt June and Uncle Ernie sat together to the far left. There was no love lost between his father and either of them. So that one chair remained open to the left of him and two remained open to the right. The minister invited any other members of the assembly to have a seat but not a soul among the twenty-five people or so attending really wished to sit with him. The mourners were there for his mother, not for him. He realized his father had not a single real friend among them and no family of his own left and thought with some amazement that he’d never seen anyone look quite so lonely.

That his father should sit unattended wasn’t right, wasn’t even proper and disconcerted by this, embarrassed, the minister asked again.

Again there was hesitation. Why he didn’t sit with his father himself he didn’t know but instead he stayed with Kath. Finally two old women Stephen had never seen in his life took pity on him or perhaps they took pity on the minister and filled the vacant seats on either side. The sixth chair remained open throughout the ceremony as though for some departed guest.

Why this memory should come back to him now so frequently puzzled him. But it came at the strangest times. When he was going for the whip. When he was emptying her bedpan those few instances Kath wasn’t around to do it. When he manacled her to the X-frame. The time they allowed her upstairs for a shower. He would see his father sitting alone and stony in that folding chair.