Matt Cowper - The Clerk

“Yes!” Dan exclaimed. “A toast! We aren’t holding any glasses, but who cares?”

They clinked imaginary glasses together, then downed their imaginary drinks.

But when Thomas looked over at his mother, she was sniffling, and quickly wiped tears from her eyes.

“This is where your grandfather committed suicide,” Frank said, pointing at the house needlessly.

Thomas looked over at the old home. It was a two-story clapboard building painted off-white, with bright red shutters. It had two end chimneys and a small portico with unassuming white columns. The pothole-free gravel driveway looked like it had just been poured on, and the yard was tidy, the centerpiece being the noble magnolia tree, its thick, twisting branches begging to be climbed, even though Thomas was now forty, and well past the scamper-up-trees stage.

His father had always called the home he grew up in a “decaying country manor,” but there was no decay evident on this property. The place looked fresh and inviting, right down to the birdbath sitting a few feet from the magnolia. Thomas had no doubt that the interior would look similar, and that the owners would be cheerful and hospitable, if he ever met them — which was doubtful. His father would peel away down the highway if anyone walked out to see just who was staring at their home.

Thomas, of course, knew the history of the old home, specifically as it related to his family: his father had grown up there; his grandfather had sank into depression after losing an election for clerk of court; times were tough; his father had strived to better himself, moving out after high school and working doggedly at McAllister’s Furniture in the hope of one day opening his own business; his grandfather had killed himself when his father was twenty years old. It was a tragic story, yes, but Thomas would be very surprised if ghosts sometimes wafted through the corridors of the house, waking up sleepers with plaintive wails, as his father seemed to believe. The house didn’t look haunted, and its miseries had likely been forgotten by the current owners, if they’d ever known about them at all.

His father, of course, had not forgotten, and if he were to step foot into his old home again, or even spend the night, Thomas felt sure he’d be tortured by bogeymen, hobgoblins, and all manner of vile spirits, including Wallace Copeland’s shotgun-deformed ghost. This amused Thomas more than it should have.

They were parked on the shoulder of Highway 101, or more specifically they were halfway in the ditch, since the road didn’t really have much of a shoulder. Traffic roared by, each passing vehicle causing the Traverse to shake slightly. Thomas kept glancing behind them, convinced that some clueless text-messaging girl would drill into them, or that a sleepy trucker would let his big rig slide a few feet to the right and reduce them to scrap metal and pulpy, scattered body parts.

“Why are we parked here?” Thomas asked. “They have a driveway, you know.”

“I don’t want to park in their driveway,” Frank replied stubbornly. “It’s their property. They wouldn’t want someone on their land bothering them.”

“So instead we park an inch from the highway on one side, an inch from a ditch on the other. And they can still see us, if they look out here. They’ll know we’re staring at their house. What difference does it make if we park here or pull into their driveway?”

“Son,” Frank Copeland said, gripping the steering wheel tightly, “I’m trying to tell you something, so please stop nagging me about inconsequential matters.”

“If it’s so inconsequential, then…”

“Thomas!”

The sharpness with which his father shouted his name caused Thomas to jump. His father hadn’t used that angry, scolding voice on him since he was in high school; nonetheless, it still had the power to reduce him to a helpless child while contradictorily enraging him.

He wasn’t going to put up with it. He was forty goddamn years old, not a callow teenager who had to do what his father said. He shifted in his seat and met his father’s stern gaze.

“If you bark at me like that again, I’ll get out of this car and hitchhike back to Morehead City.”

“I… I’m sorry,” Frank said, the words seeming to scald his lips and tongue as he uttered them. “I’m worked up. With all that your sister and Dan have done…”

“Yeah, well, you don’t get to take out your frustration on me.”

“I said I’m sorry,” Frank said, and again the words burned, though he was technically not saying he was sorry again , just emphasizing that he’d already said he was sorry. “Will you please let me say what I need to say?”

“Alright,” Thomas said, sighing and shaking his head. “Go ahead.” He’d heard all this many times before; he knew his grandfather’s depression and suicide had shaped his father into the man he was today. Why did they need to review this?

“As I said: this is where your grandfather shot himself,” Frank Copeland said. “He used a shotgun. He sat down in his recliner, where he spent nearly every waking hour, and shot himself with buckshot.”

It had happened on April 10, 1970, an otherwise fine spring day. Frank had not been present when it happened, but his mother had been in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. The blast was deafening inside the house, like a cannon shot; Carol Copeland started, slicing herself with the potato peeler. She grabbed a towel, wrapped it around her finger, and ran into the living room.

Her husband’s head was nothing more than a blood-covered flap of plastic. Gore had spattered everywhere, even onto the ceiling. The shotgun was still in his lap, and it looked absurdly innocent, as if it had nothing to do with what had just happened. The radio squawked out a weather bulletin: “Clear skies for the next few days, then showers developing on…” She turned it off.

Carol Copeland wondered if the sight would make her throw up or faint, but nothing stirred within her bowels, nor did she feel woozy.

She next wondered if grief and shock would hit her very much like the killing shell had hit her husband. She waited for several minutes, but nothing happened. She had, after all, expected this. No one else in the family had, because they were fools who pushed disagreeable things as far away as possible, like everyone else in the community. But Carol was no fool. She had expected that Wallace would sit there until his mind was eroded to a single grain of consciousness, and then, realizing he would soon cease to exist, he’d decide to go ahead and finish the job.

But then again, her own conduct was far from unimpeachable. She could ridicule others, but she’d tip-toed around him like everyone else, because you didn’t talk about these things, and a woman was only supposed to have so much power over her husband. She let her husband sit there all those years, when she should have grabbed him by the lapels and jerked him out of his recliner and his funk. But she shook away these thoughts with an animated fury that would’ve seemed inappropriate given the situation, if anyone had been watching. Wallace had shot himself; no one else had a hand in it. She’d suffered enough because of him. She wasn’t going to suffer anymore.

She called the sheriff’s office, and waited. She would call Frank soon, as he was the only one of her children who’d stayed in the area — the girls had all married and moved away, even Sarah, the rebellious one who swore she’d never walk down the aisle — but first she wanted the body out of the house. No point in her son gawking at it.

At McAllister’s Furniture several hours later, Mr. McAllister pulled Frank aside, saying he had a phone call.