Jincy Willett - Winner of the National Book Award

“Everyone did,” I said. “You mustn’t let it make you sentimental. Abigail can take care of herself. She’ll be all right, Frank. I don’t know how yet, but she’s going to get out of this without a scratch.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I was her first lover.” He shivered.

I laughed without knowing I was going to, shocking and hurting him. “Frank, someone was her first lover. Maybe it was you. You ought to know, though, that my sister has always had a love-hate relationship with the truth, and an eccentric sense of humor.”

“I know what I’m talking about. I was there .”

There’s no arguing with people who cite experience. He was becoming agitated, and his face was transformed by genuine emotion, his skin slack and dry, and I could see the skull beneath, the old man’s face.

“I’m going to tell you something, Dorcas, something I’ve never told another living soul.”

Why? “Frank, please don’t. If you’ve never told another living soul, chances are there’s an excellent reason. You’ll just regret it. I regret it already, and you haven’t even done it.”

He closed his eyes. “Dorcas, your sister was…your sister was…when she was fourteen…”

“I know,” I murmured. “I know.”

“…gang-raped by the football team, and I was the first.” He spoke with his eyes closed and held his breath afterwards. I couldn’t speak because he had taken me by surprise. First, I had forgotten he was on the team; and second, I had forgotten That Night, having shoved it viciously so far back in my mind that his saying this acted on me like those phony revelation scenes in psychiatry movies. And third, I had never considered rape, or imagined my sister as a victim. Gang rape.

“We were all out on the ice and drunk as skunks. She had her coat off and she was laughing. We were all so snockered that we weren’t cold at all, although it was below freezing that night, and my fingertips were still numb the next morning. She was laughing and she took off her hat, one of those wool stocking caps, and her hair tumbled down to her shoulders.

“We had just been carousing, you know, whooping it up and full of…well, booze, obviously, but also joy. Real joy. I was never that happy again. And your sister stayed with us, like a mascot. She was fun. It was fun to get her drunk and she was a good audience. She laughed at our jokes. We were easy with her at first. It was like she’d always been with the team. And then, I don’t know, we were horsing around on the ice, and then she was standing there, and we are all standing around her, in a circle, watching.

“She wasn’t afraid then. She was laughing so hard, she lost control. Even when she saw we weren’t laughing anymore she kept it up, forcing it. It was like she loved the sound of it. It was like a song, or a chant. She whirled around and around, looking into our faces, laughing. Not afraid.

“Your sister wasn’t stupid, you know.”

“I know.”

“She wasn’t some bimbo, some retarded girl. We weren’t that bad. Or maybe we were worse. She said, ‘What happens now?’ Her voice wasn’t scared. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t know! She said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ And somebody said, ‘Take off your sweater.’ I said it. And she did. And someone else told her what to take off next, and so on. Every time she took something off she got bigger. She kept smiling and we could hear her breathing. We didn’t look at each other, or move.

“She stood there naked on the ice, under the moon, with just her shoes on, and then she took them off, although nobody told her to. We weren’t that cruel.” Frank laughed, an awful, barking laugh. I don’t often pity people. I pitied Frank. “I think she took them off because she knew they looked wrong. Halloran, lineman, laid down his jacket for her to stand on.

“She danced.

“She didn’t dance like a stripper or a whore. She didn’t move her hips around. She raised up her arms and turned, around and around, with her head thrown back and her legs apart, but not being obscene, just showing us. I have never in my life seen anyone as happy as she was then.

“All the guys threw their jackets down. She thought they were giving her a bigger dance floor. She thought that this was what we wanted. To watch her dance.”

“No,” I said. “Abigail was born knowing everything.”

“You’re wrong about that, Dorcas. I know what you mean, but this time you’re wrong. She may have known the, you know, about the birds and the bees. But she didn’t understand that she couldn’t stop it. She was frightened when I touched her, and when I entered her, I’m sorry, Dorcas, she cried, and I hurt her. She was just a kid. I didn’t hit her. I didn’t need to. She could see how it was. And by the time I was through, she was talking back to me, complaining even, ‘Where you going, Frank? What’s your hurry, Frank?’ I can still hear her voice in my ear. And after me came Lawson, and Siniscalchi, and Halloran—”

“This is not necessary,” I said.

“And she stopped crying, and, I swear, got into it. She wasn’t in shock or anything, I’m sure of it. And finally came the place-kicker. McAdoo. Henry McAdoo. Runty little redheaded guy, died at the Yalu. We were all zipped up again by then, and turned away. We left them on the coats, on the ice, and walked away to wait for McAdoo to finish. We weren’t watching, except when McAdoo started yelling ‘Stop it! Let go of me!’ and we looked over and he was trying to push himself off her and she wouldn’t let him go. He was pushed up on his straight arms and you could tell he was really trying—which was funny-looking, and we started razzing him—because she had both hands on his butt like claws, clamping him on top of her; and anyway, even if his head wanted to go, his dick wanted to stay, I’m sorry, Dorcas. He was still humping away, which is why he looked so funny, like two different men joined at the waist.

“So we couldn’t figure it out, why he was acting like this, and then he started shouting to us for help, really sounding terrified. He was maybe fifty yards out, but you could hear him clearly, Jesus! Jesus! McAdoo was hysterical, and we were razzing him from the shore, and then I heard it, the slow cracking of the ice, like branches snapping, only electrical, and you could just see under the surface blue bolts like lightning shooting out from them in every direction. It was like a meteor was landing in slow motion exactly where they were.

“It looked like they’d both had it. It looked final. I suppose we were…disposed to think along those lines, considering what we’d been doing. Somebody would pay for what we’d done.” He was lost for a moment; disappointed, maybe, about the failure of divine retribution. “McAdoo died within the year.”

“You see a connection?”

“No,” he said immediately, surprising me, “of course not. I tried to imagine a connection at the time. You know.”

“I know.”

“We were yelling across the ice at them to get the hell off. We didn’t have to tell McAdoo. He could hear the ice break. She couldn’t or didn’t care. She was crazy. When she finally let him go—when she was through with him—the ice wasn’t solid anymore, although it still held together. It wobbled like Jell-O, especially around the two of them. We were all frozen on the shore. I kept thinking that any minute I’d get brave and go out there. I was so sure I was going to do it that the shock hit me only much later.” The shock of his own cowardice.

“McAdoo slithered away from her on his stomach, which of course you had to do. He didn’t even get up on his hands and knees. He swam across the ice, and made it. She didn’t move. She stayed on her back, with her arms out and her knees up, and when we yelled at her to move, she laughed. She sounded so strange when she laughed that I was afraid she was going to do something nuts, like stand up and dance, or something worse. She was wild. Somebody had to go out and get her, and every guy there was terrified. Of her. She had the power to ruin us all, literally. She could stay out there and die and we’d go to jail for life, and then to hell. She could take any of us down with her to the bottom of the lake if we tried to rescue her.