Chris Bohjalian - Secrets of Eden

Anyway, she never went to court when she had the chance.

JUST AS THERE were times when my dad wasn’t a total jerk to my mom, I have memories of him trying to be a pretty good dad with me. (Sometimes he even succeeded.) I used to love to visit him at his stores or that restaurant of his when I was younger. He seemed extremely important, and so that made me feel important. His employees treated me like a princess. He used to do a lot of paperwork for the restaurant at a table near the door to the kitchen, because when it was quiet, he could get work done and when it was crazy busy (which sometimes it was), he could see the whole dining room and get a sense of what worked in the restaurant and what didn’t. He could see how his servers moved in and around the tables. (And, just maybe, he knew that they knew he was watching, and he liked that idea. I mean, if he liked controlling Mom, why wouldn’t he like controlling his employees?) I remember a couple of times doing homework there when I was in the fifth grade, and it made math and geography a lot more fun. The work wasn’t hard, and I ate tons of cornbread with butter and dirty rice. And more than that, Dad seemed to be in a good mood on those occasions, and that always boded well for my mom and for a quiet evening at the house when we got home.

My dad never drank at work, at least on those times when I visited him. Even as a kid I had figured out the connection between the beer and the beatings. That doesn’t excuse it, of course, but my mom used to insist that Dad loved her and things would be fine if it weren’t for the alcohol. I don’t believe that, personally. I know there were times when he was horrible to her when he was completely sober. He may have been worse when he’d had a couple of beers, but there was always the chance he’d be a bastard regardless of whether he’d been drinking.

I MAY HAVE been a little wild that autumn, but in late September I also got coaxed back into the church Youth Group. I liked the older man who was the interim pastor, and I liked the young woman the church had brought in as a special youth pastor. Sometimes I think they brought her in just for me. She had a stud in her nose, too, and she thought my tattoo was beautiful. Her name was Julie. She wouldn’t be around long, because soon she would move on to a much bigger church in Burlington. But she was only, like, twenty-two or twenty-three, and we talked a lot. I remember the third Sunday in October really well. She convinced me to spend the afternoon helping to chaperone the little kids in Haverill who were carving pumpkins. It was the two of us and Tina and a couple of deacons in this big hay field near the center of the village. A few of the parents stayed, but most of them dropped off their kids and ran. And while a lot of the children were in the fourth and fifth grades and were helping their younger brothers and sisters, many of the kids came up to my waist and shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near knives the lengths of their forearms. And there must have been eighty children there.

A fellow in the church named Mr. Humphrey had donated the pumpkins, and he was one of the grown-ups who stayed. He was a little older than my parents had been, and his real business was this beautiful bed-and-breakfast that he and his wife owned. There seemed to be weddings there all the time. They had things like a pumpkin patch and strawberry fields and blueberry bushes, but they were mostly so the guests would feel they were staying on this working farm.

Anyway, the plan that Sunday was that each kid would carve a pumpkin and then Mr. Humphrey was going to stand up on this hay wagon and name them. He did this every year, and he was really pretty funny. Sometimes he’d give the jack-o’-lanterns names that a five-year-old would think were hysterical: Oogly-Boogly if it had massive eyes or Bobby Booger if its most obvious feature was its nose. And sometimes he would name the pumpkin after someone who had been in the news a lot that autumn, and so election years were always easier for him than other years. I mean, he wasn’t Jon Stewart, but he was pretty fast on his feet. And all of the children would howl with laughter no matter what, because they were tanked up on cookies and brownies the Women’s Circle had baked, and no matter what they were going to get a coupon worth a dollar at the Haverill General Store as a prize.

Counting the parents who hung around and Mr. Humphrey, who was mostly just surveying the scene like a rock star, there were about ten adults or young adults looking out for those eighty elementary-school kids. That’s not a bad ratio if the ten adults are schoolteachers who know what they’re doing and the young adults aren’t that young. But it’s not terrific if two of the chaperones are teenagers like Tina and me and two are deacons somewhere between the ages of seventy-five and death.

And then, of course, one of those two teenagers would lose it. That would be me. For about twenty-five minutes, Julie and one of the few moms who stuck around had to care for me off to the side of the field and watch me sit in the mown grass sobbing and sipping apple cider from a paper cup. One minute I would be howling like a kindergartner who was left behind on the school bus, and the next I would be unable to breathe. It was like I had forgotten how. And sobbing without breathing is no easy trick. At one point, Tina told me later, I was braying sort of like a donkey.

What set me off? It was this carving knife that a girl named Alicia was using. Alicia was, I think, five. And the knife had this brown wooden handle with rivets and this long row of ovals along the blade. The ovals didn’t get smaller as the blade narrowed, they simply took up more of the blade. And for a few seconds I watched her struggle to poke the knife through the thick rind of her pumpkin, twisting it sometimes and stabbing it others. (See what I mean about what a disaster just waiting to happen that whole day was? It’s a miracle that none of the kids gouged out one of their own eyes or took off one of their own tiny fingers.) She was bringing her little arm up and down, up and down, but she wasn’t very strong and so the tip never punctured the pumpkin. It kept bouncing off the gourd like it was Super Pumpkin.

And that’s when I had this weird image, which I realized was actually a weird memory. When I was five, I had done something sort of like that with a knife that looked exactly like the one Alicia was using. It had the same rivets on the handle and it had those same ovals along the blade. In my memory I was on the tile floor of our apartment in Bennington, a place I remembered in some ways only because of the pictures in the photo albums and a couple of old videos my mom had transferred onto a disc. And I was trying to puncture something with the knife. A basketball. I was trying to pop my dad’s basketball. When we lived in Bennington and he was younger, he played pretty often with some friends at a school playground with a couple of hoops not far from our apartment. And then there was this memory: I was trying to destroy my dad’s basketball with that knife, because the night before I had seen him threatening my mom. And the knife he’d been using was the very same kind Alicia was using now. It was dark out, and I’d heard a commotion in the kitchen. I came out of the bedroom, and there was my mom in her nightgown pressed up against the cabinet that held the broom and the vacuum and the cleaning stuff (all of which had these labels Mom had put on them that said something like “Mr. Yuck,” so I wouldn’t start guzzling the toilet-bowl cleaner), and my dad had one hand around her neck and was practically lifting her off the floor. In his other hand was the knife, and he was holding it near her cheek. He was talking in such a low voice that I couldn’t hear a word he was saying, but I could tell by the tone it was pretty darn menacing. Looking back, I don’t imagine he was threatening to kill her. When I think about where he was holding the point of the knife, I guess he was only threatening to disfigure her. Scar forever that pretty face.