Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © The Ontario Review, Inc. 2019

Cover photograph © Getty Images

Joyce Carol Oates asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008339647

Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008339661

Version: 2019-05-04

Dedication

To my friend Elaine Showalter,

and to my husband and first reader, Charlie Gross

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

I

The Rat

The Omen: November 2, 1991

Disowned

The Happy Childhood

Best Kisses!

Obituary

“Boys Will Be Boys”

To Die For

“Accident”

Louisville Slugger

The Little Sister

The Promise

The Siege

Because …

The Rescue

The Secret I

The Secret II

Final Confession

“Dear Christ What Did Violet Do Now”

The Revelation

The Bat

Safe House

Runaway

II

“Praying for Violet”

Exile

Sleepwalker

The Iceberg

Turnip Face

Sisters

“Mr. Sandman Bring Me a Dream”

“Dirty Girl”

The Stalker: 1997

“You Are Not Wanted”

Dirty Girl

“Violet, Goodbye!”

III

The Scar

The Burrow

Valentine

Keeping Myself Alive

Off the Books

Rat, Waiting

Sorrowful Virgin

Damned Little Dog

Tongue

Uncanny

First Aid

“Maxed-Out”

The Misunderstanding

The Return

In My Mother’s Garden

Forgiveness

The Guilty Sister

Howard Street

Home

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Novels by Joyce Carol Oates

About the Publisher

I

The Rat

Go away. Go to hell—rat!

You don’t get another chance to rat on anybody.

It’s true, you will not be given another chance.

There is just the one chance, the first.

The Omen: November 2, 1991

THIS, I WOULD REMEMBER: SMELLY DARK WATER IN THE RIVER near shore, the color of rotted eggplant, we’d seen on the way to school that morning and stopped to stare at.

On the Lock Street Bridge. Crossing on the pedestrian walkway. And there, directly below, the thunderous river (a deep cobalt-blue on clear days, metallic-gray on cloudy days) seemed to have changed color near shore and was purplish-dark, smelling of something like motor oil, roiling and surging as if it was alive like snakes, giant writhing snakes, you didn’t want to look but could not look away.

My sister Katie nudged me crinkling her nose against the smell. “C’mon, Vi’let! Let’s get out of here.”

I was leaning over the railing, staring down. Trying to see—were those actually snakes? Twenty-, thirty-foot-long snakes? Their scales were a winking deep-purple sheen. The sight was so terrifying, I’d begun to shiver convulsively. The odor was making me nauseated, and dizzy.

As far as we could see upstream the oily-purple water came in surges near shore while elsewhere the river was the color of stone, choppy and thunderous—the Niagara River rushing to the Falls seven miles to the north.

We ran from the walkway. Didn’t look back to see if the giant snakes were pursuing us.

I was twelve years old. This was the morning of the last day of my childhood.

(NOT OUR IMAGINATIONS. THE OILY PURPLE WATER LIKE SNAKES in the river had been real.

Alarmed citizens in South Niagara had noticed the phenomenon and reported it. There’d been many calls to local authorities and to 911.

On the front page of that evening’s South Niagara Union Journal it was curtly explained that the excessive discharge of sludge in the river that morning had been the result of routine maintenance of the Niagara County Water Board’s wastewater sedimentation basins and no cause for concern.

What did this mean? What was sludge?

When our father read the boxed item in the Journal he laughed.

“‘Routine.’ ‘Sedimentation’—‘no cause for alarm.’ Sons of bitches are poisoning us, that’s what it means.”)

Disowned

ONCE I’D BEEN DADDY’S FAVORITE OF HIS SEVEN KIDS. BEFORE something terrible happened between us, I am trying still to make right.

This was in November 1991. I was twelve years, seven months old at the time.

Sent me into exile. Thirteen years! To an adult that is not a long time—probably; but to an adolescent, a lifetime.

Who’s Daddy’s favorite little girl?

Violet Rue. Little Violet Rue!

When I was a little girl Daddy would kiss my pug nose, and make me squeal. And Daddy would lift me in his strong arms, and pretend to toss me into the air so I was frightened but did not let on for Daddy did not like scaredy-cat little girls.

There was an intensity to this, the lifting-in-the-arms, the impassioned speech. A delicious fiery smell, Daddy’s breath, fierce and unmistakable and I had no idea why, that he’d been drinking (whiskey) but knowing this ferocity to be the very breath of the father, the breath of the male.

How’s my little girl? Not afraid of your daddy are you?

Better not, Daddy loves his little Violet Rue like crazy!

ONCE, BEFORE I WAS BORN, MY OLDEST SISTER, MIRIAM, HAD BEEN Daddy’s favorite little girl. Later, my sister Katie had been Daddy’s favorite little girl.

But now, the favorite was Violet Rue. And would remain Violet Rue.

Because the youngest, the baby of the Kerrigan family.

Last-born. Most precious.

Daddy had named me himself—Violet Rue. A name he claimed to have heard in an Irish song that had haunted him as a boy.

It was said that Violet Rue had been an accidental pregnancy—a “late” pregnancy—but to the religious-minded nothing can be truly accidental.

All human beings have a special destiny. All souls are precious to God.

The family is a special destiny. The family into which you are born and from which there can be no escape.

Your mother was thrilled! A beautiful new girl-baby to take the place of the others who were growing up and growing away from her and especially the boys she hardly dared touch any longer, their downy cheeks, their prickly cheeks, the heat of their skin, fierce flushed faces she did not mean to surprise, opening a door without knocking, unthinking—Oh. Sorry. I didn’t think anyone was … Your big brothers who’d throw off Mom’s hand if even by chance she touched them.

A baby to love. A girl-baby to adore. The innocence of being loved totally and without question another time when she’d believed there would never be another time …

Of course, Lula was thrilled.

Of course, Lula was devastated. Oh God, oh Jesus no.

Hardly had she recovered from the last pregnancy—she’d determined would be the last. Thirty-seven years old—too old. Thirty pounds overweight. High blood pressure, swollen ankles. Kidney infection. Varicose veins like inky spiderwebs in her thighs fleshy-white as raw chicken.

And the man, the tall handsome Irish American husband. Turning his eyes from her, the bloated white belly, flaccid thighs, breasts like a cow’s udders.

His fault! Though he would blame her.

In private reproach he’d blamed her for years for she’d been the one who’d wanted kids and it was futile to remind him how he’d wanted kids too, how proud he’d been, the first babies, his first sons, dazed and boasting to his male friends he was catching up with them God damn it and boastful even to his father the old sod he couldn’t abide, as the old sod could not abide him.

And she’d been a beautiful woman. Beautiful body he’d been mesmerized by. Soft skin, astonishingly soft white breasts, curve of her belly, hips. Oh, he’d been crazy for her! Like a spell upon him. Those first years.

Six pregnancies. Not wanting to acknowledge—(except to her sister Irma)—that these were, just maybe, at least two pregnancies too many. And then, the seventh …

After the first pregnancy her body began to change. After the second, third. And after the fourth it began to rebel. Cervical polyps were discovered, that (thank God) turned out to be benign and could be easily removed. Another kidney infection. Higher blood pressure, swollen ankles. The doctor advised terminating the pregnancy. But Lula would never have consented. Jerome would never have consented.

It was not something that was discussed. Not openly and not privately. They were Catholics—that was enough. You just did not speak of certain things and of many of these things there were not adequate words in any case.

As boys went unquestioningly to war, in the U.S. military. You did not question, that was not how you saw yourself.

Those weeks, months your mother spent most of each day lying down. Terrified of a miscarriage and terrified that she might die. Praying for the baby to be born healthy and praying for her own life and in this way Lula Kerrigan not only lost her good looks (she’d taken for granted) but also became permanently frightened and anxious, superstitious. Looking for “signs”—that God was trying to tell her something special about herself and the baby growing in her womb.

A “sign” could be something glimpsed out a window—the figure of a gigantic angel in the clouds. A “sign” could be a dream, a mood. A sudden premonition.

In the later stages of her pregnancy no one could induce Lula to leave the house. So big-bellied, breathless and pop-eyed she’d become. Eating ravenously until she made herself sick. Gaining more weight. Knowing that her body disgusted her husband though (of course) (like any guilty husband) Jerome denied it. Last thing Lula Kerrigan wanted to do was expose herself to the eyes of others who’d be pitiless, mocking.

My God. Is that—Lula Kerrigan? Looking like an elephant! Making a spectacle of herself parading around like that.

Scornful expressions you would hear through your childhood, girlhood—making a spectacle, parading around. The harshest sort of denunciation a woman might make of another woman.

Parading around like she owns the place.

This would be charged of women and girls who exhibited themselves: their bodies. Particularly if their bodies were imperfect in obvious ways—too fat. Appearing in public when they should be ashamed of how they looked or in any case aware of how they looked. Of how unsparing eyes would latch onto them, assessing. Never was such a charge made of men or boys.

There appeared to be no masculine equivalent for making a spectacle, parading around.

As, you’d discover, there was no masculine equivalent for bitch, slut.

The Happy Childhood

WE WERE JEROME JR., AND MIRIAM, AND LIONEL, AND LES, and Katie, and Rick, and Violet Rue—“Vi’let.”

“Christ! Looks like a platoon.”

Daddy would stare at us with a look of droll astonishment like a character in a comic strip.

But (of course) Daddy was proud of us and loved us even when he had to discipline us. (Which wasn’t often. At least not with the girls in the family.)

Yes, sometimes Daddy did get physical with us kids. A good hard shake, that made your head whip on your neck and your teeth rattle—that was about the limit with my sisters and me. My brothers, Daddy had been known to hit in a different way. Haul off and hit. (But only open-handed, never with a fist. And never with a belt or stick.) What hurt most was Daddy’s anger, fury. That look of profound disappointment, disgust. How the hell could you do such a thing. How could you expect to get away with doing such a thing. The expression in Daddy’s eyes, that made me want to crawl away and die in shame.

Disciplining children. Only what a good responsible parent did, showing love.

Of course, our father’s father had disciplined him. Nine kids in that rowdy Irish Catholic family. Had to let them know who was boss.

One by one the Kerrigan sons grew up, to challenge their father. And one by one the father dealt with them as they deserved.

Old sod. Daddy’s way of speaking of our grandfather when our grandfather wasn’t around.

So much of what Daddy said had to be interpreted. Laughing, shaking his head, or maybe not laughing, exactly. Old sod bastard. God-damned old sod.

Still, when our grandfather had nowhere else to live, Daddy brought him to live with us. Fixed up a room at the rear of the house, that had been a storage room. Insulation, new tile floor, private entrance so Granddad could avoid us if he wished. His own bathroom.

Daddy’s birth name was Jerome. This name was never shortened to “Jerry” let alone “Jerr”—even by our mother.

Our mother’s name was Lula—also “Lu”—“Lulu”—“Mommy”—“Mom.”

When speaking to us our parents referred to each other as “your father”—“your mother.” Sometimes in affectionate moments they might say “your daddy”—“your mommy”—but these moments were not often, in later years.

In early years, I would not know. I had not been born into my parents’ early, happier years.

Between our parents there was much that remained unspoken. Now that I am older I have come to see that their connection was like the densely knotted roots of trees, underground and invisible.

Frequently our father called our mother “hon”—in a neutral voice. So bland, so flat, you wouldn’t think that “hon” was derived from “honey.”

If he was irritated about something he called her “Lu-la” in a bitten-off way of reproach.

If he’d been drinking it was “Lu-laaa”—playful verging upon mocking.

At such times our mother was still, stiff, cautious. You did not want to provoke a husband who has been drinking even if, as it might seem, the man is in a mellow mood, teasing and not accusing. No.

Fact is, much of the time we saw our father, later in the day, he’d been drinking. Even when there were no obvious signs, not even the hot fierce smell of his breath.

Mom had a way of communicating to us—Don’t.

Meaning Don’t provoke your father. Not right now.

This Mom could communicate wordlessly with a sidelong roll of her eyes, a stiffening of her mouth.

Your father loves you, as I do—so much! But—don’t test that love …

A painful truth of family life: the most tender emotions can change in an instant. You think your parents love you but is it you they love, or the child who is theirs?

Like leaning too close to the front burner of the stove, as I’d done as a small child, and in an instant my flammable pajama top burst into flame—you can’t believe how swiftly.

But swiftly too as if she’d been preparing for such a calamity for all of her life as a mother, Mom grabbed me, pulled me away from the stove, hugging me, snuffing out the fierce little flames with her body, bare hands smothering the flames, before they could take hold. And trembling then, lifting me to the sink and running cold water over my arms, my hands, just to make sure the flames were gone. Almost fainting, she’d been so frightened. We won’t tell Daddy, sweetie, all right?—Daddy loves you so much he would just be upset.

Comforting to hear Mom speak of Daddy. As if in some way he was her Daddy, too.

And so when Mom called Daddy “Jerome” it was in a respectful voice. Not a playful voice and not an accusatory or critical voice but (you might say) a voice of wariness.

Oh Jerome. I think—we have to talk …

The hushed voice I would just barely hear through the furnace vent in my room in the days following Hadrian Johnson’s death.

EVEN NOW. SO MANY YEARS LATER. THAT STRONG WISH TO CRAWL away, die in shame.

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL IN THE EARLY 1980S MY FATHER WAS A tall solid-built man with dark spiky hair, hard-muscled arms and shoulders, a smell of tobacco on his breath, and (sometimes) a smell of beer, whiskey. His jaws were covered in coarse stubble except when he shaved, an effort made grudgingly once a week or so by one not willing to be a bearded man but thinking it effeminate to be close-shaven too. By trade he was a plumber and a pipe fitter and something of an amateur carpenter and electrician. In the army he’d been an amateur boxer, a heavyweight, and while we were growing up he had a punching bag and a heavy bag in the garage where he sparred with other men, and with my brothers as they came of age, who could never, not ever, quick on their young legs as they were, avoid their father’s lightning-quick right cross. It was the great dream of my oldest brother Jerome—“Jerr”—that he might someday knock Daddy down on his rear, not out but down; but that never happened.

And Lionel, Les, Rick. He’d made them all “spar” with him, laced big boxing gloves on their hands, gave them instructions, commanded them to Hit me! Try.

We watched. We laughed and applauded. Seeing one of our brothers trying not to cry, wiping bloody snot from his reddened nose, seeing our father release a rat-a-tat of short stinging right-hand blows against a bare, skinny, sweating-pale chest—why was that funny? Was that funny?

Try to catch me, li’l dude. C’mon!

Hey: you’re not giving up until I say so.

Girls were exempt from such humiliations. My sisters and me. But girls were exempt from instructions too. And Daddy’s special glow of approval, when at last one of our brothers managed to land a solid blow or two, or keep himself from falling hard on his ass on the cement floor of the garage.

Not bad, kid. On your way to the Golden Gloves!

Daddy’s girls had to suppose that Daddy was proud of us in other ways, it wasn’t clear how just yet.

He wanted us to be good-looking, which might mean sexy—but not too obviously. Staring at Miriam—her mouth, lipstick—not knowing what to think, how to react: Did he approve, or disapprove?

He’d seemed to be impressed by good grades but report cards were not very real to him, school was a female thing, he’d dropped out of high school without graduating, never read a book nor even glanced inside a book so far as I knew, pushed aside our textbooks if they were in the way on a counter, no curiosity except just once that I remember, pushing aside a book I’d brought home from the public library—The Diary of Anne Frank.

What was this, he’d heard of this, vaguely—in the newspaper, or somewhere—Anne Frank. Nazis?

But Daddy’s interest was fleeting. He’d peered at the cover, the wan girl-face of the diarist, saw nothing to particularly intrigue him, dismissed the book as casually as he’d noticed it without asking me about it. For always Daddy was distracted, busy. His mind was a kaleidoscope of tasks, things to be done, each day a ladder to be climbed, nothing random admitted.

And what pride we felt, my sisters and me, seeing our father in some public place, beside other, ordinary men: taller than most men, better-looking, with a way of carrying himself that was both arrogant and dignified. No matter what Daddy wore, work clothes, work boots, leather jacket he looked good—manly.

And the expression on our mother’s face, when they were together, with others. That particular sort of female, sexual pride. There. That’s him. My husband Jerome. Mine.

To their children, parents are not identical. The mother I knew as the youngest of seven children was certainly not the mother my older siblings knew, who’d been a young wife. Especially, the father I knew was not the father my brothers knew.

For Daddy treated my brothers differently than he treated my sisters and me. To Daddy the world was harshly divided: male, female.

He loved my brothers in a way different from the way he loved my sisters and me, a fiercer love, a more demanding love, mixed with impatience, at times even derision; a hurtful love. In my brothers he saw himself and so found fault, even shame, a need to punish. But also a blindness, a refusal to detach himself from them.

His daughters, his girls, Daddy adored. You would not have said of any Kerrigan that he adored his sons.

We were thrilled to obey him, we basked in his attention, his love. It was a protective love, a wish to cherish but also a wish to control, even coerce. It was not a wish to know—to know who we were, or might be.

Yet, Daddy behaved differently with Miriam, and with Katie, than he did with me. It was a subtle difference but we knew.

He’d have claimed that he loved us all equally. In fact, he’d have been angry if anyone had suggested otherwise. That is what parents usually claim.

Until there is a day, an hour, when they cease making that claim.

TWO FACTS ABOUT DADDY: HE’D FOUGHT IN VIETNAM, AND HE’D come back alive and (mostly) undamaged.

This was about as much as Daddy would say about his years as a soldier in the U.S. Army, when Lyndon B. Johnson was president.

“I enlisted. I was nineteen. I was stupid.”

We knew from relatives that Daddy had been “cited for heroism” helping to evacuate wounded soldiers while wounded himself. He’d been awarded medals—kept in a box in the attic.

My brothers tried to get him to talk about being a soldier in the U.S. military and in the war but he never would. In a good mood after a few ales he’d concede he’d been God-damned lucky the shrapnel that got him had been in his ass, not his groin, or none of “you kids” would’ve been born; in a not-good mood he’d say only that Vietnam had been a mistake but not just his mistake, the whole country had gone bat-shit crazy.

He’d hated Nixon more than Johnson, even. That a president would lie to people who trusted him and not give a damn how many thousands of people died because of him, Daddy shook his head, speechless in indignation.

Most politicians were those blood-sucking sons of bitches. Cocksuckers. Fuckers. Even Kerrigan relatives who were involved in local, western New York State politics were untrustworthy, opportunists and crooks.

Daddy would only talk about Vietnam with other veterans. He had a scattering of friends who were veterans of Vietnam, Korea, and World War II he went out drinking with, but never invited to the house; our mother did not know their wives, and our father had no interest in introducing her. Taverns, saloons, pubs, roadhouses—these were the gathering places of men like Daddy, almost exclusively male, relaxed and companionable. In such places they watched championship boxing matches, baseball and football, on TV. They laughed uproariously. They smoked, they drank. No one chided them for drinking too much. No one waved away smoke with prissy expressions. Who’d want women in such places? Women complicated things, spoiled things, at least women who were wives.

Returning home late from an evening with these men Daddy was likely to be heavy-footed on the stairs. Often he woke us, cursing when he missed a step, or collided in the dark with something.

If one of us left something on the stairs, textbook, pair of shoes, Daddy might give it a good kick out of pure indignation.

In our beds, we might hear them. Our mother’s murmurous voice that might be startled, pleading. Our father’s voice slurred, abrasive, loud.

A sound of a door being slammed, hard. And though we listened with quick-beating hearts, often we heard nothing further.

Katie had hoped to interview our father for a seventh-grade social studies project involving “military veterans” but this did not turn out well. Calm at first telling her no, not possible but when Katie naively persisted losing his temper, furious and profane, threatening to call the teacher, to tell that woman to go fuck herself until—at last—our mother was able to persuade him not to make such a call, not to jeopardize Katie’s standing with her teacher or at the school, please just forget it, try to forget, the teacher had only meant well, Katie was in no way to blame and should not be punished.

Punished was something our father could understand. Punished unfairly, he particularly understood.

Katie would remember that incident for the rest of her life. As I will, too.

You didn’t push Daddy, and you didn’t take Daddy for granted. It was a mistake to assume anything about him. His generosity, his pride. Dignity, reputation. Not being disgraced or disrespected. Not allowing your name to be dragged through the dirt.

There were many Kerrigans scattered through the counties of western New York State. Most of these had emigrated from the west of Ireland, in and near Galway, in the 1930s, or were their offspring. Some were closely related to our father, some were distant, strangers known only by name. Some were relatives whom we saw frequently and some were estranged whom we never saw.

We would not know why, exactly. Why some Kerrigans were great guys, you’d trust with your life. Others were sons of bitches, not to be trusted.

We did notice, my sisters and me, that girl-cousins with whom we’d been friendly, and liked, would sometimes become inaccessible to us—their parents were no longer on Daddy’s good side, they’d been banished from Daddy’s circle of friends.

If we asked our mother what had happened she might say evasively, “Oh—ask your father.” She did not want to become involved in our father’s feuds because a remark of hers might get back to him and anger him. Personal questions annoyed our father and we did not want to annoy our father whom we adored and feared in about equal measure.

For instance: What happened between our father and Tommy Kerrigan, an older relative who’d been a U.S. congressman and mayor of South Niagara for several terms? Tommy Kerrigan was the most prominent of all the Kerrigans and certainly the most well-to-do. He’d been a Democrat at one time, and he’d been a Republican. He’d had a brief career as an Independent—a “reform” candidate. He’d been a liberal in some issues, and a conservative in others. He’d supported local labor unions but he’d also supported South Niagara law enforcement, which was notorious for its racist bias against African Americans; as a mayor he’d defended police killings of unarmed persons and had blatantly campaigned as a “law and order” candidate. Tommy Kerrigan was a “decorated” World War II veteran who supported American wars and military interventions, unquestioningly. He supported the Vietnam War until the U.S. withdrew troops in 1973 and it was his belief that Richard Nixon had been “hounded” out of office by his enemies. Naturally Tommy Kerrigan was critical of rallies and demonstrations against the war which he considered “traitorous”—“treasonous.” He defended the actions of the police in dealing roughly with antiwar protesters as they’d dealt roughly with civil rights marchers in an earlier era. After a scandal in the early 1980s he’d had to abruptly retire from public life, narrowly escaping (it was said) indictment for bribe taking and extortion, but he continued to live in South Niagara, in a showy Victorian mansion in the city’s most prestigious residential neighborhood, and he was still exerting political influence in circuitous ways while I was growing up. It was speculated that there’d been bad blood between Tom Kerrigan and our father’s father and so out of loyalty our father was permanently estranged from Tom Kerrigan as well. When a softball field was built in South Niagara and given the name Kerrigan Field no one in our family was invited to the dedication and the opening game; if our brothers played baseball at Kerrigan Field, they knew better than to mention the fact to our father.

Carefully Daddy would say of Tom Kerrigan that there was no love lost between our families though at other times he might shake his head and admire Tom Kerrigan as the most devious son of a bitch since Joe McCarthy.

And if anyone asked us if we were related to Tom Kerrigan, Daddy laughed and said, tell them politely No. I am not.

WE LIVED IN A TWO-STORY WOOD FRAME HOUSE AT 388 BLACK Rock Street, South Niagara, that Daddy kept in scrupulous repair: roof, gutters, windows (caulked), chimney, shingle board sides painted metallic-gray, shutters navy blue. When the front walk began to crack, Daddy poured his own cement, to replace it; when the asphalt driveway began to crack and shatter, Daddy hired a crew to replace it under his direction. He knew where to buy construction materials, how to buy at a discount, he scorned using middlemen. In the long harsh winters of heavy snowfall in South Niagara Daddy made sure our walk and driveway were shoveled properly, not carelessly as many of our neighbors’ walks and driveways were shoveled; in warmer months, Daddy made sure that our (small) front yard and our (quarter-acre) backyard were kept properly mowed. My brothers did much of this work, and sometimes my older sisters, and if Daddy wasn’t satisfied that the task had been done well, he might finish it himself, in a fury of disgust. By trade he was a plumber and a pipe fitter but he’d taught himself carpentry and he dared to undertake (minor) electrical work for he resented paying other men to do anything he might reasonably do himself. It wasn’t just saving money, though Daddy was notoriously frugal; it had to do with pride, integrity. If you were a (male) Kerrigan you were quick to take offense at the very possibility that someone might be taking advantage of you. Being made a fool of was the worst of humiliations.

As long as I lived in the house on Black Rock Street, as far back as I could remember, a project of Daddy’s was under way: replacing linoleum on the kitchen floor, replacing the sink, or the counter; repainting rooms, or the entire outside of the house; hammering shingles onto the roof, building an addition at the rear of the house where for a few difficult years, Daddy’s elderly, ailing father would live, convulsed in coughing fits that sounded like gravel being rapidly, roughly shoveled.

Daddy was a perfectionist and could not walk away from anything he believed to be half-assed.

Daddy kept a sharp eye on neighbors’ houses, properties. He did not much care that lawns at other houses were scrubby and burnt out in the summer but he did care if grass wasn’t mowed at reasonable intervals, if it grew tall enough to look unsightly, and to go to seed; he cared if trees were allowed to become diseased, and to shed their limbs on the street. He cared very much if properties on our block of Black Rock were allowed to grow shabby, derelict. Particularly, Daddy grew upset if a house was allowed to go vacant, for bad things could come of vacant properties, he knew from his own boyhood with his brothers and cousins raising hell in places not properly supervised.

Back of our house was a yard that seemed large, and deep, running into municipal-owned uncultivated acreage on the steep bank of the Niagara River. There were trees of which Daddy was proud—a tall red maple that turned fiery-red and splendid in October, an even taller oak, a row of evergreens. (But Daddy was unsentimental about cutting down the oak after it was damaged by a windstorm, and he feared it might be blown down onto the house; he’d cut it down himself with a rented chain saw.) My mother tried to cultivate beds of flowers, with varying degrees of success: wisteria, peonies, day lilies, roses assailed by Japanese beetles, slugs, black rot and mold, that often defeated her by mid-summer for Mom could not enlist her older children’s help with the property as Daddy could.

Our house was at the dead end of Black Rock Street above the river.

I cried a lot when I was sent away. Any river or stream I saw, even on TV or in a photograph, tears would be triggered. You have to get hold of yourself, Violet. You will make yourself sick. You can’t—just— keep—crying … My aunt Irma pleaded with me.

The poor woman, I was not nice to her. She could not bear a broken heart in a child impossible to heal by any effort of her own.

No matter how far away I came to live from the Niagara River, it has gotten into my dreams. For it is not like most other rivers—relatively short (thirty-six miles), and relatively narrow (at its widest, eighty-five hundred feet), and exceptionally fast-moving and turbulent. As you approach the river calls to you—whispers that become ever louder, deafening. The river is turbulent like a living thing shivering inside its skin. Miles from the thunderous falls like a nightmare that calls—Come! Come here. Strife and suffering are absolved here.

That morning in December when you wake to see that the river has frozen all the way across, or nearly; corrugated black ice with a fine light dusting of snow over it, the eye registers as beauty.

But I had a happy childhood in that house. No one can take that from me.

Best Kisses!

A GAME. A HAPPY GAME. THE WAY MOM WOULD STOOP OVER to kiss me, suddenly.

When I was a little girl. Best kisses come by surprise!

Lacing her (strong) fingers through my (smaller) fingers. Securing my fingers with hers. Preparing to cross a busy street. Ready. Set. Go!

A long time ago when Mommy loved me as much as Daddy did. When I knew (without needing to be told) that Mommy would take care of me and keep me from harm even if this harm was Daddy.

“IT’S EASY TO LOVE THEM WHEN THEY’RE LITTLE”—MOM LAUGHED, talking with a friend. “Later, not so easy.”

Obituary

THIS CLIPPING FROM THE SOUTH NIAGARA UNION JOURNAL I saved until it became so dry it fell into pieces in my fingers. An obituary beneath a photograph of a shyly smiling black boy with a gap between two prominent front teeth. Seventeen when he’d died but in the photo he looks as if he could be fifteen, even fourteen.

Hadrien Johnson, 17. Resident of 29 Howard Street, South Niagara. Varsity softball and basketball at South Niagara High School. Honor roll 1, 2, 3. Youth Choir, African Methodist Episcopal Church. Died in South Niagara General Hospital, November 11, 1991, of severe head wounds following an attack in the late evening of November 2 by yet-unidentified assailants as he was bicycling to his home. Survived by his mother, Ethel, his sisters, Louise and Ida, and his brothers, Tyrone, Medrick, and Herman. Services Monday at African Methodist Episcopal Church.

People would ask if I’d known Hadrian Johnson. (The name was misspelled in the newspaper obituary but corrected in subsequent articles.) No! I had not known him—he was a junior at the high school, I was in seventh grade. His sister Louise was a year older than me, at the middle school, but I did not know Louise either.

There were no African American classmates I knew well. All of my friends were white like me and all of them lived within a few blocks of our house on Black Rock Street.

It was only after his death that I came to know Hadrian Johnson. It was only after his death that we came to be associated in people’s minds. Hadrian Johnson. Violet Rue Kerrigan.

Not that it did any good for Hadrian Johnson, who was dead. And it was the worst thing that could have happened to Violet Rue Kerrigan.

“Boys Will Be Boys”

W AS IT WONDERFUL TO HAVE BROTHERS WHEN YOU WERE growing up? Older brothers? Who could look out for you?

Girls lacking older brothers would ask me. How wistful they were! Having to fend on their own.

I didn’t just adore my brothers, I was proud of them. Just the fact—My big brothers! Mine.

For girls are keenly sensitive of needing to be looked after. In certain circumstances, like school. Not to be alone, exposed, unprotected. Vulnerable.

Not measurable but very real—the power of older brothers to forestall teasing, bullying, harassment, threats from other boys made against girls. The protective power of older brothers by their mere existence.

The sexual threat of boys is greatly diminished, by the (mere) existence of a girl’s brothers.

Unless of course the girl’s brothers are themselves the (sexual) threat.

Parents have not a clue. Cannot guess. The (secret) lives of children, adolescents. Thinking that, because we are quiet, or docile (seeming), because we smile on cue and seem happy, because we are no trouble, that our inner lives are placid, and not churning and choppy and terrifying as the Niagara River as it gathers momentum rushing to the Falls.

Did you adore your brothers, Vi’let?

Sure, you had to!

IT’S TRUE. I ADORED MY BROTHERS.

Not so much Rick, the youngest, who resembled me temperamentally, and who was a reasonably good student, as I was, and sweet-natured, but the other, older boys—Jerr, Lionel, Les.

They were quick-tempered and loud and impatient and bossy. Out of the earshot of adults they were profane, even obscene. They were funny—crass and crude. And loud—did I say loud? Voices, footsteps. On the stairs. Opening and shutting doors. Colliding with me if I didn’t get out of their way.

Ignoring me, usually. Of course, why’d my brothers take note of me?

They were not so polite to Mom, sometimes. Mouthy, she’d call them. But in our father’s presence, they were watchful, wary. They behaved.

If Daddy became annoyed with one of them he had ways of disciplining: sometimes a sharp, level look; sometimes an uplifted hand, the flat of the hand, a fist.

Flick of Devil-Daddy tongue which the boys could not miss. Hot red, sharp-pointed tongue like a blade slicing their hearts. But in the next instant, gone.

Even so, outside the house the older Kerrigan boys sometimes got into trouble.

Almost there was a hushed reverent air to the phrase—into trouble.

The first time I was too young to know what had happened. Nor did Katie know. And if Miriam knew, she wouldn’t tell us.

On the phone with relatives our mother spoke derisively: “It’s nothing. It’s a stupid rumor. Those liars.”

Though sometimes her voice quavered: “It’s her word against theirs! That’s what everybody says, and that’s a legal fact.”

Near-inaudibly Mom would speak into the phone, in the kitchen. Seated, hunched over, pressing the avocado-plastic receiver against her ear as if trying to keep the words inside from spilling out.

If Katie asked what was going on Mom said, scolding: “Never mind! It’s no business of you girls.”

You girls. Often we’d hear from Mom’s mouth.

Her gaze avoiding us, skittering away across the linoleum floor.

We were mystified but we knew better than to persist in questions. We knew better than to ask our brothers who were the ones in trouble. (And if we asked Rick he’d shrug us off—Don’t ask me, ask them.) No possibility of asking our father who was the custodian of all secrets and didn’t take kindly to being questioned about anything. And eventually we learned what had happened, or some version of what had happened, as we learned most things not meant for us to know, piecing together fragments of stories as our mother sometimes, with a curious sort of self-punishing patience, fitted together broken crockery to mend with glue.

The girl whose word was against theirs was a fourteen-year-old special-needs student at the middle school where Lionel was in ninth grade. Jerr was sixteen, a junior at the high school.

Liza Deaver was the name. Liza Lizard she was called for her face was splotched like a turtle’s shell.

At fourteen she had the body of a mature woman, fattish, slow-moving, with thick plastic-rimmed glasses and lenses that magnified her eyes. She wore slacks with elastic waistbands and plaid shirts that billowed loose over her big soft breasts and belly. We’d overheard our brothers imitating her speech which was slow and stammering and whining like the speech of a young child.

Liza’s mental age was said to be nine or ten. And it would remain that age through her life.

Liza was physically clumsy, poorly coordinated, and often made her way swaying and lurching with one eye shut, as if seeing with both eyes confused her. Oddly, unpredictably, Liza sometimes burst out in anger and tears and had to be sent home from school by the special-needs teacher.

We’d heard that, in the special-needs classroom at the school, Liza had some talent for drawing. Except her drawings were of people with large round balloon-faces on small stick legs—just faces, legs.

Retards, they were called. Special-needs was the adult term, retards what others kids called them.

Liza Lizard was a cruel name. Yet sometimes it seemed, if boys called this name after her, Liza misheard it, and thought it might be something else, and turned to them with a peculiar squinting smile, a childish sort of hope.

I did not—ever—utter aloud the name Liza Lizard. But like other girls I may have sniggered when I heard it.

It is shameful now to recall—Liza Lizard. You did not—ever—want the attention of the crude coarse cruel boys to turn upon you and so possibly, yes—you did snigger when you heard it.

No news item about the incident in Patriot Park would appear in the South Niagara Union Journal. Only minors were involved, and the (alleged) victim so unreliable.

Sometimes in Liza Deaver’s confused telling there were just five or six boys involved. Sometimes, many more—ten, twelve.

Sometimes Liza Deaver remembered a few names. Sometimes, just one or two.

What would come to be generally known was that a loose group of boys between the approximate ages of fourteen and seventeen, not a gang, not even friends had cajoled Liza into coming with them to Patriot Park after school. One of the older boys, not a Kerrigan, had been friendly with Liza, or rather had pretended to be friendly with Liza, so Liza would boast that he was my boyfriend.

The Kerrigan brothers Jerome Jr. and Lionel were not the ringleaders in the assault—if there was an “assault.” This was much-reiterated by my brothers. All they’d done (they would claim) was follow other boys tramping through muddy playing fields and past skeletal trellises in the municipal rose garden to the swimming pool, to the weatherworn stucco building where refreshments were sold in summer and where there were foul-smelling restrooms and changing rooms. In the off-season the building was deserted, dead leaves blew about the cement walk. But the restrooms were kept unlocked through the year.

The boy who was Liza Deaver’s “boyfriend” led Liza into the men’s room saying they had “nice surprises” for her.

It was so, Liza Deaver liked “surprises.” Usually candy bars, snacks in cellophane wrappers from a corner store, cans of sugary soda pop. Sometimes these were given to her by kindly persons who knew her and her family and sometimes by others who were not so kindly.

Questioned afterward by parents, school authorities, Family Court officers the boys would claim that Liza had “wanted” to come with them. Going to the park had been “her idea.” Into the men’s restroom, her idea. She’d told them that she had done such things with her brothers and other boys and sometimes they gave her “surprises,” and sometimes they didn’t.

Liza Deaver denied this. Liza’s parents denied it, adamantly.

Liza Deaver had not been injured enough to require hospitalization but she’d been examined in an emergency room and treated for cuts, bruises, bloodied nose and teeth, “chafings” in the vaginal and anal areas. Clumps of hair had been pulled from her head and (it was whispered) the boys had “grabbed and pulled out” pubic hairs of which (it was whispered) Liza had many.

Still the boys insisted that it had been Liza’s idea. They’d been “nice” to her, they said. These gifts they’d given her: a Mars bar with just a small bite missing, a plastic bead necklace found in the trash, a small stuffed puppy with button eyes, a perfumy deodorant. (Liza Deaver was notorious for her strong, horsey odor.) It was not clear how long Liza remained in the restroom with the boys for Liza lacked a firm grasp of the passage of time but the boys insisted that it had been for “only a few minutes”—“definitely no more than a half hour.” It was 5:40 P.M. by the time Liza limped home, a distance of about a mile; it was estimated that the boys had led Liza away from school at 3:30 P.M., though accounts differed about who exactly had been with Liza from the first, and who had joined later. The fact that Liza had brought home with her the “gifts” the boys had given her seemed to suggest that she’d been happy to receive them, for otherwise—wouldn’t she have thrown them away, in disgust?

If she’d been victimized by the boys, and not a willing companion, wouldn’t she have called for help as soon as they’d released her, and she was able to run out into the street?

(Though it wasn’t clear that the boys had kept Liza in the restroom against her will. She hadn’t been a captive, they said; she’d wanted to stay, and only left because it was suppertime, and she suddenly remembered that her parents would be angry with her if she was late.)

Eventually, it was established that there were at least seven boys involved in the incident. These included Jerome Kerrigan Jr. and his brother Lionel but not (it seemed) Les. (Certainly not Rick.) No doubt there were more boys but the seven who were named refused to provide the names of other boys—they were not rats.

Poor Liza! Questioning left her confused about the boys’ names but she could (more or less) identify them by other means, descriptive means and by studying pictures.

Yes she’d gone into the park and into the restroom with them willingly but when she’d wanted to leave they had not let her leave. Yes she’d been held captive by them, in the restroom. No she had not wanted to do the “nasty” things they did to her.

Yes she had told them she wanted to go home. Yes she had started to cry but they just laughed at her. No no no she had not told them that her brothers had done these nasty things to her, and other boys and men beside. She had not.

It was not clear if Liza had intended to tell her parents that “something bad” had happened to her. After they’d released her she’d slipped into her house by a rear door and was discovered by her mother in a flushed and disheveled state, clothes soiled and torn and misbuttoned, and her face smeared with blood. At once, confronted by her frightened mother, Liza burst into tears and began stammering and sobbing.

It was the “worst day” of their lives, Mrs. Deaver said. They would “never, not ever” recover from what had been done to their daughter whose fault was she was “too friendly” to people who were not her friends.

The Deavers lived in a ramshackle house on Carvendale Road, at the edge of the school district. On one side of the road was the township of South Niagara, on the other side an unincorporated region of scrubby farmland, overgrown pastures and derelict dwellings.

The Deavers were a large family but not as the Kerrigans were a large family. For the Deavers were a welfare family whose father could not provide for his wife and many children—nine? Ten? And of these, what a pity, what a shame, unless it was a crime, as people said, several were not right in the head—what the kids called retards.

Mr. Deaver, when he was employed, worked at the railroad yard. Mrs. Deaver worked part-time at a local mall. Several of their children were out of school and only intermittently employed and the youngest had not yet begun school.

At Family Court, Liza initially sat mute and frightened as others spoke on her behalf. Her deep-shadowed eyes were swimmingly magnified behind the thick lenses of her glasses. After a while she began to answer questions in a hushed, hoarse voice. Eventually she began to speak louder. And then she began to cry, to sob, to stammer, to stutter and to choke. Her splotched-turtle face was flushed and puffy, saliva glistened at her lips. Family Court officials who tried to make transcripts of her not-very-coherent and contradictory accounts would insist afterward that they felt sorry for the “poor, mentally disabled girl”—and for the Deavers, who accompanied Liza and never let her out of their sight—(Mrs. Deaver went with Liza several times to the restroom during the course of the session)—were nonetheless unconvinced that Liza was telling the truth or even that with her impaired cognition she had a clear conception what truth might be.

It was generally conceded—Boys will be boys. And—These boys’ lives might be ruined … How much worse the situation might have turned out for the boys, if the girl had been seriously hurt!

There were extensive interviews with the accused boys by Family Court officers, with the boys’ fathers and their attorney present. (The fathers of the accused boys hired a single lawyer to represent their sons, a local lawyer with connections to the Kerrigan family.) In this way a public hearing in juvenile court was avoided. There were no arrests. No formal charges were made against the boys who were suspended from school for one week.

Liza Deaver was placed on suspension for the remainder of the school year for it was believed that her presence would be “distracting” and “hazardous,” in the words of the school principal; Liza herself was known to have a raging temper, and to strike out furiously, in frustration, at younger and smaller children when she believed they didn’t respect her. (Liza was usually intimidated by individuals older than herself.) As it happened Liza Deaver never returned to school but was allowed to drop out for “medical reasons.”

All this my sister Katie and I would learn, much later. At the time, we knew little.

No one in the family talked about Liza Deaver, so far as we knew.

No one talked about the trouble. For weeks Jerr and Lionel were subdued around our mother and wary of our father, like kicked dogs. But cunning kicked dogs. They had 9:00 P.M. curfews. Jerr wasn’t allowed to drive for six weeks. Both boys had extra chores around the house. On the phone my mother said, incensed, “It was all that girl’s fault! She did it deliberately! Those Deavers better get her fixed! Before it’s too late.”

When my mother hung up I asked what “fixed” meant. I wondered if whatever the boys had done to her, Liza might need fixing like a broken clock.

Disdainfully my mother said, “Like a cat, spayed. So it can’t have kittens people have to drown.”

To Die For

GROWING UP, WE KERRIGAN KIDS KNEW THAT OUR DADDY would die for us. No one had to tell us, we knew. Of course, the concept “to die for” was not in our vocabularies. Still, we knew.

In our father’s big Irish Catholic family in Niagara Falls he’d been raised with the conviction that families stuck together. Irish immigrants had had a hell of a hard time coming to America, hadn’t even been considered “white” in some quarters, like Italians, Greeks, and Jews, until even the 1950s. And so, the Irish stuck together, in theory at least.

Not in theory, but in reality, and crucially, a family had to protect its own. You might quarrel with relatives, a brother or a sister, you might quarrel with your parents but essentially you stuck together, you never deserted or betrayed one another. You never went outside the family—that was unforgivable.

Inside the family you never lied when it really mattered, and you never cheated.

Siding with your brother against your cousin, but with brother and cousin against the stranger.

You would die for your family and you would (maybe) die for your (close) friends the way soldiers would die for their (close) buddies.

Something like this, Jerome Kerrigan had truly seemed to feel for his immediate family, if not all of the Kerrigans. And for the guys in his platoon in Vietnam, he dared not recall without his eyes welling with tears and his mouth working to keep still.

If Daddy was suspicious of strangers he was almost naively trusting of relatives and friends. Often he did household repairs for no payment, wouldn’t hear of being paid except in drinks, hospitality, reciprocal favors. That was friendship—loyalty, paying back what you owed. Being generous.

He lent money to people who, he had reason to know, probably wouldn’t be able to repay him; he lent money without interest, knowing that this was a disadvantage, for those to whom he’d lent money would repay the lenders who’d demanded interest, and not him. Yet, Daddy could not bring himself to lend money with interest—that was not how he saw himself.

And so, Daddy lent money to his heavy-drinking brothers. He provided bail bond for Kerrigans who found themselves on the wrong side of the law—business fraud, bad checks, failure to pay alimony, embezzlement. He did favors for guys in the plumbers’ union, for guys he’d gone to school with who’d had bad luck. He respected bad luck—it could happen to anyone.

The more kids you have, the more possibilities for bad luck. That was a grim fact.

The most extravagant thing Daddy did, that I remember from my childhood, was helping one of his younger sisters buy a house in Buffalo, so that she and her husband could live near her husband’s family, who would help her nurse her husband afflicted with some terrible wasting disease like multiple sclerosis. Our mother had not liked this arrangement, she’d sighed and fretted and all but wept over the phone, for a large amount of money was involved, but in Daddy’s presence she did not dare complain for, as Daddy would’ve pointed out to her, he was the one with a salary.

At the same time, you did not wish to cross Jerome Kerrigan.

You did not wish to find yourself on his shit list. For there were many on this list who were, in Daddy’s eyes, fucked.

Forgiving was rare. Forgetting, rarer.

And the closest you were to Daddy, the harder for Daddy to forgive.

He liked to quote an Italian adage—Revenge is a dish best served cold.

Another remark he favored from the boxing world was What goes around comes around. Which was more hopeful for it seemed to mean not just bad but good, too. The good you do will be returned to you. Eventually.

“Accident”

IN NOVEMBER 1991 WHEN HADRIAN JOHNSON WAS BEATEN UNCONSCIOUS and left to die on the shoulder of Delahunt Road, and the lawyer who’d defended Jerome Jr. and Lionel Kerrigan at the time of Liza Deaver pleaded their case to prosecutors, the defense of boys will be boys didn’t work so well for them, or for my cousin Walt Lemire and a neighborhood friend named Don Brinkhaus who was also involved in the beating.

At this time Jerome Jr. was nineteen and no longer living at home. He’d managed to graduate from South Niagara High with a vocational arts major and, through Daddy’s intervention, was an apprentice plumber with the contractor for whom Daddy also worked, the largest and best-known plumbing contractor in the city; he had not yet been accepted into the plumbers’ union but there was no doubt that he would be as soon as he completed his probationary period. (No African Americans belonged to the local plumbers’ union. This would be emphasized, unfairly some thought, in the media coverage of the case; unfairly because there were no African Americans in the local police officers’ union, the firefighters’ union, the electricians’ and the carpenters’ unions, among others. The only local union in which black men were welcomed was the sanitation workers’ union which was predominantly black and Latino.) Lionel was sixteen, a sophomore at the high school, big for his age, coarse-skinned, easily bored. Even in vocational arts Lionel’s grades were poor, he cut classes often, our mother didn’t dare report him to our father for fear of a terrible scene. But Lionel was in awe of his independent older brother who lived by himself now in a place near the railroad yard and owned a car, Daddy’s old 1984 Chevrolet he’d passed on to Jerr since it was all but worthless as a trade-in. Weekends the two hung out together drinking beer with Jerr’s friends, cruising in Jerr’s car. Jerr had hated school but now he was hating full-time employment even more, being overseen, assessed and judged. Worse, he hated being a plumber’s assistant, actually having to clear toilets of shit, every kind of crap, came close to puking every time he went out.

What their father called fucking real-life. Didn’t know how the hell long he could take this fucking real-life.

At the house Jerr had grown sick of Mom snooping into his life. Overhearing him on the phone. Giving him unwanted advice. Stripping his bed of soiled sheets, picking up his filth-stiffened socks and underwear from the floor to be laundered. Preparing food he was bored with, he’d grown out of eating years ago, had come to hate. Fast-food restaurants were good enough for him, greasy cheeseburgers, heavily salted french fries. Anything that came in a cellophane wrapper strung up in colorful displays at the 7-Eleven, he’d tear open with his teeth in a pretense of rapacity.

When he’d broken up with his girlfriend boasting how he’d left her stranded at a tavern, exactly what the bitch deserved for disrespecting him, there was Mom shocked and demanding to know why he’d do such a thing, she had met Abbie and Abbie seemed like a nice girl, and Jerr came back at her, “Fuck ‘Abbie is a nice girl.’ You don’t know shit about ‘Abbie,’ Mom. So mind your own fucking business. There’s no ‘nice girls’ just different kinds of pigs.”

Mom was so shocked by Jerr speaking to her in such a way, not just the disrespect, the insolence, but also the meaning of his words, the loathing for her, she could not reply but stumbled away to another room.

No nice girls just different kinds of pigs.

AGAIN AND AGAIN, WHY.

But it was like nice girls, pigs—there was no why.

You would say, the Kerrigan boys had not been brought up that way, and that would be true. And yet.

Going back to a time when our father had attended South Niagara High there’d been incidents involving white boys and darker-skinned boys, especially following Friday night sports events, but these were usually squabbles or altercations between sports teams, rival schools. Rivalry with Niagara Falls High, Tonawanda High, South Buffalo. Some of these teams were predominantly white, and others were predominantly black. South Niagara had integrated teams, our coaches liked to boast. Boys’ teams, girls’ teams. Football, basketball, softball. Swim team.

Cheerleaders? That was another story.

No incident had involved Hadrian Johnson, who was on both the varsity basketball and softball teams in his junior year.

The previous year, when Jerome Kerrigan Jr. had been a senior, he’d known Hadrian Johnson slightly, as he’d known a scattering of African American boys at the school, but there’d been no animosity between them—none at all. So Jerome Jr. insisted, and so it seemed to be true.

Lionel would deny “animosity” too. Any “race prejudice”—not him.

They would insist, they admired black athletes—Mike Tyson, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan. Jerry Rice, Barry Sanders. And many others.

They’d been aware of Hadrian Johnson on the high school sports teams for who had not been aware of Hadrian Johnson? Not that Hadrian was a brilliant player, usually he was just very good, very reliable, the kind coaches can depend upon.

Yes it was true, the better black athletes at South Niagara were generally showy, spectacular. They modeled themselves after the great national black athletes whom Americans watched avidly on TV. These were the insolent blacks whom white boys feared, disliked, envied. If these black athletes were not demonstrably superior to the very best white players they were likely not to be chosen for varsity teams for there was much pressure from (white) fathers, that their sons be chosen for teams, and there was (as coaches tried to explain) limited space on the teams; but, granted this fact, in the face of such competition still Hadrian Johnson was chosen for two varsity teams, a favorite of coaches and of teammates.

A black kid, yes. But not, you know—one of them.

South Niagara wasn’t a large school: fewer than five hundred students distributed among three grades. In some way everyone knew everyone else.

But white students and darker-skinned students didn’t mix much. On sports teams and in the school band and chorus, service clubs, but not socially.

Nor was there “mixed” dating. Just about never.

It was ironic, Hadrian Johnson had been an outstanding player on the South Niagara Jaycee boys’ softball team, which was comprised of boys from several city schools. Photographs of Hadrian in his Jaycee uniform, to be published in newspapers and on TV, had been taken at Kerrigan Field.

Questioned by South Niagara prosecutors whether they’d had any special reason to stalk and harass Hadrian Johnson, the boys insisted no.

They had not “stalked” him—that was wrong. They’d meant just to scare him. And they had not known it was him—they hadn’t seen his face, not at first.

But had they forced Hadrian Johnson off the road, because he was black?

Vehemently they denied this. Repeatedly, they denied this.

Four white boys driving a vehicle, a solitary black boy on a bicycle, late Saturday night—but no, they were not racists.

It would be bitterly debated, whether the attack had been a hate crime, or an assault that had gotten out of control in which race wasn’t an issue. If a hate crime the assailants were likely to be sentenced to longer prison sentences, if they were found guilty; but there was the possibility, if they insisted upon a jury trial, that they might be acquitted by a sympathetic (i.e., white) jury. If he could devise a way in which such a defense would not backfire and make things worse, in the media for instance, their lawyer was considering the boys might claim self-defense.

The boys had been drinking for most of the evening. Two of them were underage which involved the others, for having supplied them with alcohol; the 7-Eleven storekeeper who’d sold them the six-packs was in trouble as well. They’d been driving around, at the mall, returned from the mall, drinking and tossing beer cans. Stopped at Friday’s, where there was a crowded bar scene, later at Cristo’s (which was taking a chance, our father sometimes dropped by Cristo’s on Friday night). Past Kerrigan Field. Past Patriot Park. Kirkland Avenue, Depot Street, Delahunt. Saw this guy in a hoodie riding a bicycle on Delahunt looking kind of suspicious to us like he didn’t belong in the neighborhood. Something in the bicycle basket looked like could be stolen goods. We did not see his face—we did not know who it was … If they’d shouted after him it was just a way of talking, scaring someone who (maybe) didn’t belong in the place he was in. If Jerr aimed the car at the bicyclist it was just to scare him not to run him down at the side of the road.

And the way he tried to escape crawling away, yelling to leave him alone. Like what a guilty person would do.

Like cops, they were. Neighborhood “vigilantes.” Keeping strangers from breaking into houses, stealing cars.

Their lawyers were suggesting this possibility. “Vigilantes”?—“fighting crime”? Like the possibility of self-defense.

Problem was, the boys weren’t in their own neighborhood. Hadrian Johnson happened to be in his neighborhood.

Yes but they hadn’t known. Like they hadn’t gotten a look at their victim’s face until—later.

Delahunt was a darkened road at this time of night. Strip mall, fast-food taco place, gas station. At Seventh Street there was a small trailer court with a string of unlit lights, from the previous Christmas. Beyond that a potholed street of small wood frame bungalows lacking a sidewalk, called Howard.

Following the bicyclist along Delahunt. For the hell of it.

Well—who rides a bicycle at night? Looked like a tall dude, not a kid. Not a young kid. And what was in the basket?

Reflectors on the back of the bike and the bike looked (they could see, squinting in headlights) like it might be pretty expensive. Stolen merchandise?

The bicyclist was acting guilty, they thought. Bumping along on the shoulder of the road. Knew they were there, and coming close to him. Maybe he thought they were cops. So he tried to pedal faster, fast as he could, intending to turn into a dirt lane opening ahead in a field, looking to escape. For whoever was in the car was coming close to him, honking his horn like machine-gun fire. Guys yelling out the windows.

It would turn out that Hadrian Johnson had spent the evening at his grandmother’s house on Amsterdam Street a mile away. Sometimes when Hadrian spent time with his grandmother who suffered from diabetes he stayed the night but this night, he did not. Bicycling home to Howard Street along a stretch of Delahunt where if there was traffic it was likely to be fast but there was relatively little traffic at that hour of the night, he’d been ten minutes from his mother’s house when a vehicle had come up swiftly behind him swamping him with its bright lights, deafening horn, derisive shouts, curses.

Thud of the front right fender striking the bicycle, a high-pitched scream, the fallen boy amid the twisted bicycle trying to free himself and crawl away …

What happened next was confused.

Hard to remember. Like something smashed and broken, you are trying to reassemble.

Still it was an accident. The boys would claim. Had to be, for what happened hadn’t been premeditated.

Striking the bicyclist, could see by this time that it was a kid, (maybe) a black kid, but (still, yet) no one they recognized, so Jerr braked the car to a stop, had to check the bicyclist to see if he was all right …

True Jerr did stop the car. True they did exit the car.

True they did approach the (injured?) boy who was trying to crawl away from them at the side of the road …

(Was it true, all four boys had exited the Chevrolet? Or had Walt remained inside, as Walt would never cease to claim?)

Here is a fact: nothing of what happened was what Jerome, Lionel, Walt, Don had meant to happen. Which wasn’t to say that they remembered clearly what had happened.

Just that they’d been drinking. The older guys had gotten the beer for the younger guys. Saturday night. Deserving more from fucking Saturday night. Not ready to go fucking home just yet.

But only seconds, they’d stopped on Delahunt. Not even a minute—they were sure. Vaguely aware of traffic on the road, a vehicle passing. Someone slowing to call out the window What’s going on? and Jerr yelling back We called 911, it’s OK.

And then panicked and back in the Chevrolet. Driving away with squealing tires like a TV cop show. And even then they would (afterward) claim they’d scarcely been aware that the badly injured bicyclist was dark-skinned, still less his identity: seventeen-year-old Hadrian Johnson from their own school.

SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT OF NOVEMBER 2, 1991, AN ANONYMOUS call was placed to 911 reporting a badly beaten young man lying unconscious and unresponsive at the side of Delahunt Road, South Niagara, a bicycle twisted beside him. An emergency medical team from South Niagara General Hospital was immediately dispatched and the stricken young man brought back, by ambulance, still unconscious and unresponsive, to the ER.

The victim would never regain consciousness but would die, of severe brain damage and other traumatic injuries, nine days later.

No other calls to 911 had been reported that night. But the following morning when news of the beating began to spread through South Niagara an anonymous caller reported to police that he’d been driving on Delahunt Road the night before, around 11:40 P.M., when he’d seen a vehicle parked at the side of the road, where someone, it appeared to be a young black man, was lying on the ground bleeding from a head wound as four or five “young white guys” stood around him. It had looked, the caller said, as if there’d been a fight. He’d slowed his pickup then accelerated when the white guys saw him for they were looking “threatening”—“drunk and scared”—and he’d thought he saw one of them with a rifle.

Maybe not a rifle. A tire iron? Baseball bat?

He’d gotten out of there, fast. Hoping to hell they wouldn’t get in their car and follow him.

The caller went on to identify the car as a mid-1980s model Chevy, dull bronze, pretty battered, rusted, and dented—“Especially, you could see that the front right fender was bent all in from where they’d hit the kid. You couldn’t miss that.”

He hadn’t gotten a good look at the boys. Just “white kids”—“maybe high school age, or a little older”—but he’d tried to memorize the license plate number: “first three digits—KR4—something like that.”

Louisville Slugger

IF THE FUCKING BAT HADN’T BEEN THERE.

Because none of it had been premeditated. Because it had just happened—the way fire just happens.

Because it had been rattling in the back of the car, for months. Why’d he carry the bat loose in the car he’d liked to say For protection.

Sort of, he meant it. But it was a kind of joke too.

Because most things, fucking things in his fucking life, were jokes. Which included the bat.

Just his old baseball bat. The label worn off, he’d had for years. Couldn’t remember when he’d played baseball last. But the bat was his—his brothers had to have their own damn bats if they had a bat at all.

Never thought about it. Not much.

Rattling in the back of the car along with some empty beer cans and other shit, he’d stopped hearing.

Except that night, one of the (drunk) guys in the back snatched it up. And outside, in the confusion, he grabbed it away from whoever it was, maybe Don Brinkhaus, excited and aroused and swinging the bat because the bat was his and the bat was fucking wonderful, the solid grip, the weight of it, soiled old black tape he’d wound around the handle how many years ago. He’d never been a great batter, but he was OK. Easily embarrassed and discouraged and fucking disgusted, missing easy pitches, striking the ball not hard enough so it popped up like a little kid might pop it, fell straight down, rolled at the first baseman’s feet … Wanting to murder any asshole who laughed at him.

But now, no. Fucking bat wasn’t missing its target now.

Black kid sprawled on the ground pleading with them to let him go, please let him go, bleeding from his nose and mouth not so hot-shit now. Flat on his back and begging. And the guys jeering, laughing. Swatting at him, kicking.

Like he’d provoked them to run into him. Dented the fender of the fucking car, because of him.

Natural in Jerr’s hands for the bat to rouse itself to life, and get away from him. Furious, fast. Like chopping wood.

The crack! of the bat. Or was it the crack! of the skull.

But without the bat, maybe not. No.

Wouldn’t have cracked the skull. And all the blood.

Without the fucking bat would’ve kicked the black kid a few more times then let him go. Seeing he wasn’t fighting back, had gone limp. Probably not able to identify them, his eyes are swollen shut. Blood all over his face. What the fuck. Nobody wanted to kill anybody, that was a fact.

That was a fact. They’d swear on the Bible.

Came to him they’d (maybe) mixed this kid up with another black kid, a bigger kid, heavier, older by a year or two. Football player—“tight end.” With the bleached-blond white girlfriend. Hanging out across the street from school. That motherfucker, they’d have meant to stomp, wipe the smirk off his fat face.

Except for the bat. Fucking bat. None of it would have happened. Or in the way it happened. You could argue it was mitigating circumstances. How the bat came to be in Jerr’s hands at just that minute.

Because it hadn’t been premeditated, bringing the bat. Just in the back of the car where it had been rolling around for months. And so, like an accident. Christ sake it was an accident.

And maybe also, could they argue they’d been drinking, and their judgment was off. Buying six-packs and nobody asking them who it was for, how old. None of it would’ve happened except for that. Which wasn’t their fault—there were adults to blame. And the car, his father had given him. Christ! He hadn’t even asked for it, he’d known better than to ask his father would’ve made him crawl, if he had. Surprising the hell out of him, just giving him the car which would have been worth something at least, a few hundred at least, on a trade-in. But he’d given Jerr the car, which put Jerr in his debt big-time. And made Jerr anxious, taking care of it. Every time he came to the house the old man would go out into the driveway and inspect the car and if he didn’t say anything that could be worse than if he did for at least, if he did, you’d know what he was thinking. And Jerome Kerrigan was always fucking thinking.

Which led to Jerr swerving the damned car off the road. Like wanting to get rid of it. A few beers, you started thinking that way. Hitting the black kid was just collateral damage. You could argue that was an accident, nobody’d known the kid was even there until they saw him. He’d been meaning just to scare the kid, make the guys laugh, impress his brother who thought he was a cool dude but the front wheels hit gravel and swerved, right front fender struck the kid and lifted him, and the God-damned bicycle leaving a dent in the fender him and Lionel would have to try to even out with their bare hands, panting and struggling to unbend it but still the dent is there. Fucking rust on their fingers.

And blood from the bat, they’d have to scrub like hell.

Chain of circumstances, accidents. Could happen to anyone.

None of it premeditated. That’s the crucial point.

Realizing then, his father had given him the fucking baseball bat. Sure. That’s who it was, had to be, making a big deal of it, bringing him to the store downtown to pick it out for his birthday: Louisville Slugger. The best.

Now you got to live up to it, kid.

The Little Sister

WAKENED BY—SOMETHING …

Not a flash of headlights on the wall of the darkened room. Not the expansion of headlights on two walls of our room, if a vehicle turned into our driveway.

So that I would think, but only later—They cut the headlights. Not wanting to wake anyone.

Still less would I think, at the age of twelve—This part of it would be premeditated. Leaving nothing to chance.

And so I saw the time: 12:25 A.M. Someone had entered the kitchen downstairs, from the rear of the house, through the garage. I did not yet know that it was Jerr and Lionel.

Though Jerr had his own place to live now often he turned up at our house. He’d brought Lionel home, but wasn’t leaving immediately. He’d dropped the others, our cousin Walt, and Don Brinkhaus, at their houses.

At this time they had not known, they would claim they’d had no idea, that Hadrian Johnson had been beaten so badly he would never regain consciousness.

Though bleeding badly from head wounds, from the blows of Jerr’s baseball bat, they would claim that, when they’d left him, Hadrian Johnson had looked as if he was all right.

This I would learn later. In time I would memorize much. Like lifting small stones, pebbles. Lifting, contemplating. Setting down again taking care to put its pebble in its precise and rightful place.

In the small room at the top of the stairs shared with my sister I lay very still hearing voices that seemed to me lowered and urgent. At first I thought one of the voices was my father’s—but the other voice was not Mom’s.

I went to the door and opened it, just slightly. Eagerly I listened. It was thrilling to me, that Katie remained asleep. That everyone else was asleep—our parents, our older sister, our brothers Les and Rick.

When Daddy was out, or my brothers, I would remain awake waiting for them, if I could keep my eyes from closing. They had no idea how I waited for them. Patiently watching for headlights to flash onto the bedroom wall. That night waiting for Jerr to bring Lionel home and hoping that they’d hang around a while in the kitchen having a beer or two as they often did.

Quietly I left my room and descended the stairs, barefoot. In my pajamas. But no one was in the kitchen.

They’d entered the kitchen, I had thought. There was a draft of cold in the air, a smell of cold, wet leaves. But then they’d gone back out into the garage, leaving the door ajar.

This door was rarely locked. Most doors of our house were rarely locked.

A few inches from the doorway I hesitated, listening. Until now I was not altogether certain that it was Jerr and Lionel who’d come into the house but now I heard their voices which were lowered, urgent. Often I overheard my brothers talking together, their speech was fascinating to me. Yet more, my father’s speech was fascinating to me. The language of men and boys— rarely was it directed toward me, I could be only an eavesdropper. While there was never any ambiguity about whether my mother was addressing me.

My brothers were aroused, excited. I could hear only isolated words. Fuck, shit. Keep it down!

My brothers never caught me eavesdropping, so little notice did they take of me.

Then, I heard the outdoor faucet being turned on. Were my brothers doing something with the hose?—washing the car?

Through the crack in the doorway I saw them squatting close together just outside the garage where the water from the hose would soak into the soil, not accumulate on the garage floor. There was a light—an overhead light in the garage—a bare bulb, harsh and coated in grime—so that I could see, just barely, that they were washing something: a baseball bat.

Had to be Jerr’s bat he carried in his car “for protection.” He and Lionel had rolled up their sleeves to wash the bat, and to wash their hands and forearms, vigorously.

They’d brought out soap from the house. Bar of strong-smelling soap on the kitchen sink that mostly just our father used, wiping his hands on wads of paper towels.

My brothers were laughing, nervously. There was something very wrong but I felt an impulse to laugh too. They were only about ten feet away, for I was seeing them at an angle. Thinking They won’t like this. Being spied on. No.

Still, I remained where I was. Staring. (Maybe) memorizing. Not for a long time would I learn that my brothers were deliberating what to do with the bloodstained bat during these minutes. The murder weapon it would be called one day.

They were sober now, they’d have said. Stone-cold sober.

Fucking totally sober.

Not really thinking clearly but they knew they had to get rid of the bat, fast. Considered throwing it into the river—but what if it floated? Even weighed down, a wooden bat might somehow work loose and the river would be the first place South Niagara cops would look for a weapon. Nor could they burn it—(would a bat burn? The smoke would be detected). Not a great idea to hide it in the trash, even somebody else’s trash can on the street and so finally they decided to bury it on the riverbank, in the underbrush. A few hundred yards from the house. There was litter on the riverbank, some of this was compost from Mom’s garden. This was a better idea, they thought, than driving somewhere. They’d had enough of the car, for the night.

They’d managed to lessen the dents in the fender. Struggling, with bare hands. Panting, cursing. Next day, in daylight, on the curb by his rented place Jerr would take a hammer and un-bend it more, if he remembered.

In fact, the dents and scratches and (even) blood-smears on the front of the Chevrolet still registered in the name of Jerome Kerrigan would be evident when it was closely examined by police investigators. Like the clothes, socks, shoes my brothers would try to launder that night.

Like the bat, that could not be scrubbed clean by my brothers for its minute cracks and indentations would harbor traces of Hadrian Johnson’s blood, unmistakably.

Burying the bat in the underbrush, near Mom’s compost—that seemed like a practical idea. I saw my brothers wrap the wetted bat in a piece of burlap and I saw them leave the garage but I could not observe them after this, only to understand that they weren’t going far, into our backyard it seemed, or a little farther, on foot.

I was mystified. I had no idea what they were doing. I guessed they might be drunk. Maybe it was some kind of joke.

I went upstairs, back to bed. But I couldn’t sleep.

AND THEN ABOUT A HALF HOUR LATER I HEARD THEM RE-ENTER the house. The kitchen. Heard the refrigerator door being (quietly) opened and shut. The sound of beer cans being opened.

Almost, I could hear voices. Soft laughter.

Jes-sus.

Fucking Chri-ist!

I was sleepless, and I was curious. I was thinking—Nothing is different tonight.

Left my room to join them. Their tomboy kid-sister, they favored over Katie and (prissy, bossy) Miriam.

It was so, I adored my big brothers and basked in the glow of even their careless attention. And they loved me, I believed. I’d always believed.

Taking note of me, sometimes. Tousling my hair as you might tousle the hair of a dog. Hey kid. How’re you doing, Vi’let Rue?

In a family there are allies, and there are adversaries. It seemed to me that my brothers and I were on our daddy’s side, and my sisters were on my mother’s side.

Wanting to think this. In my naivete.

Because, really I wasn’t a female just yet. Lean-hipped as a guy, flat-chested, hard little muscles in legs, arms, shoulders—my brothers had to be impressed, I could run as fast as most boys my age, rarely cried or complained, wasn’t fussy or squeamish like other girls. If a spider darted across a wall, or a garter snake slithered across pavement, I didn’t shriek and run like another girl.

Why was I proud of this? I was.

Walking into the kitchen as if I’d only now been wakened. Daringly said, “Hey guys! Where’ve you been so late?”

They stared at me in my pajamas as if for a shivery moment they didn’t know who the hell I was. As if they didn’t know what to do about me.

Both my brothers were drinking beer from cans, thirstily. Breathing through their mouths as if they’d been running. I felt their excitement, I saw the fatigue in their faces and yet something raw, aroused. Unzipped, their jackets were wet in front. They’d been vigorously washing, scrubbing. Their shoes were wet, dark-stained. The cuffs of their trousers. Lionel’s big-jawed face looked puffy; a small cut gleamed beneath his right eye. Jerr was rubbing the knuckles of his right hand as if in pain, but a pleasurable pain. He’d taken time to splash water on his flushed face, dampen his long, lank, sand-colored hair and sweep it back from his forehead. Like Lionel’s skin Jerr’s skin was blemished but he had a brutal handsome face. He had Daddy’s young face.

With a tight smile Jerr said, “Over at the Falls. We ran into some sons of bitches. But we’re okay, see? Don’t tell Mom.”

Lionel said, “Yeah, Vi’let. Don’t tell Mom, or—him.”

Him. We knew what him meant.

No need to warn me against telling Daddy. None of us would ever have ratted on one another to our father. Even if we were furious at one another, or disgusted, we wouldn’t. That would be a betrayal so profound and so cruel as to be unforgivable for Daddy’s punishment would be swift and pitiless and for a certain space of time Daddy would withhold his love from the one he’d punished.

I asked who it was they’d been fighting. How badly I wanted to know their secrets. To be like a brother to them, and not just a sister.

Though I knew it was futile. They would shrug as they always did when I asked pushy questions. Jerr said, lowering his voice, “You got to promise you won’t say anything, Vi’let. Okay?”

I shrugged and laughed. I was feeling wild! Asking, could I have a taste of their beer?

They looked surprised. Had I surprised them?

Lionel handed me his can, which was still cold. It turned out not to be beer but Daddy’s favorite, Dark Horse Black Ale. The taste was repulsive to me, even the smell, but I was determined to persevere in trying to like it, to see why my brothers and my father liked the dark ale so much, until one day (I was sure) I would like it just fine. I swallowed a mouthful. I was choking, liquid stung in my nose, the guys laughed at me, but not meanly. I managed to say, “I promise.”

The Promise

BY MONDAY NEWS OF THE “SAVAGE BEATING” OF HADRIAN Johnson spread through South Niagara. Even in middle school no one was talking about much else. I heard, and I knew.

An African American boy, basketball player and honors student at the high school. Beaten and left unconscious at a roadside. In critical condition in intensive care at South Niagara General Hospital …

Our teachers were looking grim, cautious. You could see them speaking together urgently, in the halls. But not to us.

Better to say nothing. Until all the facts are known.

I was frightened for my brothers, I was in dread of their being arrested. I would tell no one what I knew.

But already South Niagara police were making inquiries about my brothers, my cousin Walt, and Don Brinkhaus who was, like Jerr, no longer in school. Someone had provided them with the first three digits of the Chevrolet’s license plate and a partial description of the car which was traced to our father.

No possible way that Jerome Kerrigan could deny that he’d given the car to his oldest son Jerome Jr., since any number of people knew this; but there was the off chance, Daddy probably told himself, and the police, that the Chevrolet had been stolen and whatever had happened, his sons were not to blame … For police officers had allowed Daddy to think initially that the situation was just an accident, a hit-and-run.

Damn kids lost it and panicked.

Both my brothers were picked up by police officers and brought to headquarters for questioning. Jerr, just as he was arriving late to work, groggy and distracted, in the Chevrolet with the dented front fender; Lionel at school, disheveled and anxious and determined to behave as if nothing was wrong. We would learn later that Daddy met Jerr and Lionel at the police precinct in the company of the very lawyer who’d so successfully defended the boys against charges of assault against Liza Deaver.

At home our mother was preoccupied, nervous. Several times she hurried to answer the phone, taking it into a room where she could speak privately. By suppertime when Lionel and Daddy weren’t back I thought it would be expected of me to ask where they were? Was something wrong?—but my mother turned away as if she hadn’t heard.

Where was Daddy, and where was Lionel?—my sisters, my brothers Les and Rick seemed not to know.

In silence we sat with our mother to watch the local 6:00 P.M. news. The lead story was of a deadly attack on a local teenager by yet-unidentified assailants.

The victim was Hadrian Johnson, seventeen. Popular basketball player and honors student, South Niagara High. Beaten, critical injuries, witness driving along Delahunt Road has allegedly reported “four or five white boys …”

A likeness of Hadrian Johnson filled the screen, the photo that would be published with his obituary: young-looking, boyish, sweet smile, gat-teeth.

Our mother was moaning softly to herself. She’d been in an agitated state since we’d come home from school and even now the telephone was ringing, she didn’t seem to hear.

My sisters Miriam and Katie, my brothers Les and Rick, remained staring numbly at the TV screen though an advertisement had come on. They were quieter than I had ever seen them. Les said he knew Hadrian Johnson—sort of. Katie said she knew his sister Louise. Miriam, who never dared smoke at home, fumbled for cigarettes in a pocket, lit one with trembling hands and our staring blinking benumbed mother paid not the slightest heed.

How much they all knew, or had guessed, I did not know.

I did not understand how this terrible news could be related to my brothers. There was something I was forgetting—the baseball bat? In my confusion it seemed to me that Hadrian Johnson must have been beaten by the same persons who’d fought with my brothers—sons of bitches at the Falls.

Niagara Falls was seven miles away. This beating had been here in South Niagara, on Delahunt Road.

There were long-standing rivalries between the high school sports teams. Sometimes these spilled over into acts of vandalism, threats, fights. Beatings.

That must have been it, I thought. Guys from Niagara Falls, invading South Niagara. Often there were attacks of graffiti on the South Niagara high school walls, obscene words and drawings after a weekend.

From what my brothers had told me it sounded as if they’d been at the Falls and had been fighting there. Was it possible, I’d heard wrong?

I won’t tell Dad. I won’t tell anyone. I promise!

In the aftermath of the TV news our mother stood slowly, pushing herself up from the couch. With the stiff dignity of one in great pain who is resolved not to show it she made her way out of the room. We saw her lips moving wordlessly as if she were praying or arguing with someone. Her eyes had become glazed, as if she were staring at something pressing too close to her face, she could not get into focus.

She would hide away in the house, in this benumbed state. She would hide like a wounded creature. As after what she called the trouble with the Deaver girl for weeks she’d been reluctant to leave the house knowing that she had to encounter friends, acquaintances, neighbors eager to commiserate with her about the terrible injustice to which the Kerrigan boys had been subjected …

For it was not always clear, our mother knew: the distinction between commiseration and gloating.

Eventually, the Deaver girl was forgotten. Or people ceased speaking of her to Lula Kerrigan.

From that time onward, we noticed that Mom was becoming more religious. If that’s what it was—“religious.”

At church she sat stiffly at attention. You would think that her mind was elsewhere, her expression was so vacant. Yet, she would suddenly cover her face with her hands as if overcome with emotion. As the mass was celebrated by slow painstaking degrees, as the priest lifted the small pale wafer in his hands to bless it, to transform it into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the ringing of the little silver bell seemed to prompt our mother to such behavior, mortifying to those of us who had to crowd into the pew with her—in recent years just the younger children, and Miriam.

It was rare that Daddy came to mass with Mom. Rarer still that Jerr or Lionel came. But Les, sometimes. And Katie, and Rick. And Violet Rue who was usually squeezed between Katie and Mom, a fidgety child, easily bored.

Violet Rue hated church. Oh but she feared church—the sharp-eyed God who dwelt inside the church, and who knew her innermost heart.

Sometimes, when Mom lowered her hands from her face her eyes were brimming with tears.

Tears of hurt, or fear?—triumph? Vindication? You could not say, you dared not look at the shining face.

Making her way to the communion rail then, swaying like a drunken woman, oblivious of her children. She was in the presence of God, she had nothing to do with them at this moment.

A mother’s public behavior can be a source of great mortification to her children, especially her daughters. (As our father’s never was.) (Maybe because we saw Mom much more frequently in public places than we saw Dad.) The red-lipstick mouth that stood out like a cutout mouth in her pale, fleshy face, the thin-plucked eyebrows that would never grow back, white vein-raddled bare legs in summer and spreading hips, hair beginning to grow gray in swatches—all these were shameful to sharp pitiless eyes. And the exasperating precision with which Mom parked her car, which required numerous attempts. The muffled exclamations, choked-back sobs.

Oh, God. Help me!

I adored my mother but also, I guess I hated her. More and more, as I grew older and Mom seemed never to change except to become more exasperatingly herself.

After the TV news we went away stunned. It was as if a fire were burning somewhere in the house, no one knew where. I could hear Katie’s bewildered voice and Miriam telling her sharply just be still, not to bother Mom.

I wanted to tell them: I knew much more than they did. Our brothers had entrusted me with a secret as they had not entrusted them.

For seven hours my father remained with Jerr and Lionel at police headquarters as they were being interviewed. (Not “interrogated,” since they had not—yet—been arrested.)

Initially, my brothers denied any involvement with Hadrian Johnson, at any time.

Then, Jerr conceded that just possibly he’d struck something, or someone, driving on Delahunt Road on Saturday night. And he’d been drinking—a few beers. And maybe speeding, a few miles over the forty-five-mile-an-hour limit.

Definitely, he’d heard a thud. He and Lionel both. Looked in the rearview mirror but didn’t see anything, guessed it might’ve been a deer, or a bicycle abandoned at the side of the road.

Had anyone else been with them?—my brothers were asked.

At first, reluctant to give the names of the other boys. For they were not the kind of guys to rat on their friends.

At first, shaking their heads no.

Though soon, after repeated questions, and Daddy’s increasing impatience, they acknowledged yes—there were two other guys with them, in the backseat of the car.

And so, my brothers did “rat” on their friends after all. (Would this be held against them?—it did not seem so.)

I would wonder when our father was told by police officers about Hadrian Johnson—what had been done to him, what condition he was in; when this had happened, and what a witness had reported.

When Daddy had no choice but to realize that the trouble his sons were in wasn’t just a hit-and-run accident.

After seven hours Daddy was allowed to bring my brothers back to the house. They had not (yet) been arrested. They had been warned, and had agreed, not to leave South Niagara but to be available for further questioning as soon as the next day.

It was after 9:00 P.M. They were exhausted, and they were starving. In the kitchen they ate the supper Mom had prepared for them, kept warm in the oven. No one else was welcome in the room though we were all told—by Daddy, for Mom could not bear to speak—that there’d been a “misunderstanding” by the South Niagara police—a “misidentification”—that would be straightened out in the morning, with the lawyer’s help.

Rick asked if it had anything to do with Hadrian Johnson getting beaten and Daddy said angrily no it did not.

What we could see of our older brothers, they were looking fatigued, grim. Their jaws were dark with stubble and their eyes were rimmed with shadow. Lionel didn’t smirk as he usually did if someone was looking at him more intently than he liked and Jerr ignored us altogether.

Katie and I went to bed, later than our usual hour. And in our beds we lay unable to sleep. Katie said, “I guess Jerr and Lionel are in some kind of trouble from the other night. With Jerr’s car? You think—they were drinking?”

Of Hadrian Johnson she did not speak, as if she’d forgotten him.

And I’d forgotten him, too. And the baseball bat.

Strange to be lying beneath a warm comforter, in flannel pajamas, shivering. So hard, my teeth were chattering.

And my head was aching, as it sometimes did when I lay down, my head on a single pillow; too much blood rushed into it. Badly I wanted to just lie there in the dark, not having to see another person, not having to hear another person speak and not having to speak myself. Not having to think about anything that was upsetting, frightening.

What is it? Why?

AT FIRST I THOUGHT IT WAS WIND SCRAPING BRANCHES AGAINST the roof of the house then I understood it was Daddy speaking with my brothers in the kitchen below. His voice was low and urgent, their voices were murmurs. At times it sounded as if he was giving them instructions, and at times it sounded as if he was pleading with them. And then his voice was abrupt, as if he was interrupting them. I could not hear words distinctly, for the pounding of my heart.

I was sick with the knowledge of what Jerome and Lionel had done even as I could not quite understand what they had done for still I was thinking of Niagara Falls … I had no wish to eavesdrop now. Never would I eavesdrop on anyone again.

It was frightening to me, I did not think that I could lie, if I was questioned about my brothers. If police officers questioned me.

I could not lie very convincingly to my brothers and sisters, and I could not lie at all to any adult. I would have to tell the truth. As, in confession, I made an effort to list the “sins” I’d committed, which included sins of omission. If the priest asked me—What are you not telling me, my dear? What is your secret? If one of my teachers asked me—What is it, Violet?—that you should be telling police?

Through the long day at school I’d been thinking of Hadrian Johnson. Hearing his name spoken, seeing his picture. His face on the front page of the South Niagara Union Journal. Your first thought is he’s an athlete, he has brought some sort of acclaim to South Niagara, a championship, a scholarship. But then you see the headline.

LOCAL YOUTH, 17, SAVAGELY BEATEN

Attack on Delahunt Rd., Police Search for Assailants

Jerr had stayed the night, in his old room he’d shared with Lionel. I wondered if the two were awake as I was awake and if they spoke together or had lapsed into silence, exhausted. I wondered what they were thinking. If they were thinking.

Though I knew better I wondered if somehow it was true—true in some way—that there’d been a “misunderstanding”—a “misidentification.”

Already my brothers had a lawyer. So quickly, Daddy had known to, as he’d say sardonically of others, lawyer up.

In Daddy’s world, to lawyer up was to admit guilt. Usually.

But you needed a lawyer, if you were accused of anything. Under the law you were innocent until proven guilty and only a lawyer could guide you through the process of such proof.

As the lawyer had protected my brothers and the other boys from serious consequences, at the time of Liza Deaver.

In a paralysis of dread I lay with my hands pressed over my ears as my father continued to question my brothers almost directly below my bed. I wondered if in my parents’ bedroom at the end of the hall my mother too was lying awake, unable to sleep, listening for sounds—footsteps on the stairs, a softly closing door—that the ordeal was over, for the night.

Whatever Daddy was asking my brothers, they were giving him answers that were not satisfactory. This, I seemed to know.

Daddy must have been humiliated by the ordeal in the police precinct. He knew South Niagara police officers, and they knew him. He’d gone to school with some of them. Possibly, they were embarrassed for him.

Of the four boys brought in for questioning, Jerr, the oldest, would have seemed the most convincing as he was (seemingly) the most intelligent; Walt, a cousin, the son of one of Daddy’s younger brothers, would have seemed the most innocent, and the most easily led. Lionel, uneasy in his body, grown inches within the past year, with the red cut beneath his eye like a lurid wink, would have seemed the least trustworthy. And there was Don Brinkhaus with his Marine-style haircut and broad heifer-face who’d been on the varsity football team at the high school until he’d been expelled from the team for fighting two or three years ago.

Had the guys been driving on Delahunt Road, and had Jerr (unknowingly) struck something or someone on the shoulder of the road?—this was the issue. Lionel wanted to insist that nothing had happened at all. Aggrieving, whining to Daddy—We didn’t do it. We didn’t even see him. They just want to arrest somebody white.

I wondered: Did Daddy believe them?

AND I WONDERED: DID MOM BELIEVE THEM?

On the phone we heard her breathless and disbelieving: “It’s a trap. They aren’t even looking for anyone else. They think it was Jerr’s car—the one Jerome gave him. They think. But Jerr has said if he’d hit something that night, he thinks it was a deer. He’d washed off the bloodstains, he said. He’d thought it was a deer, that was what you would do, if—if it was a deer you’d hit … And they are saying, this Johnson boy, this black boy, he’d been involved in drugs. They all are … I mean, so many of them are, right in the high school. In the middle school. The dealers are in the Falls, black drug dealers in the Falls and in Buffalo, with ties to New York City. They drive expensive cars—sports cars. They wear fur coats, gold chains, diamond fillings in their teeth. They murder one another all the time and nobody cares, the police look the other way because they are on the take. It comes up from Colombia in South America, the drug—heroin, I think it is. Opium.”

And: “It was a personal connection, this ‘Hadrian Johnson’ was killed by a boyfriend of his own mother … He was beaten to death with a tire iron. They left him to die by the side of the road. The police say, the ‘murder weapon’ was thrown in the river. And this isn’t the first time, there have been other times nobody even knew about, that never got in the papers because white boys were not accused. The media has it out for white boys—you know … It’s the way it is. But we have a very good lawyer. He says, the murderer is probably Hadrian Johnson’s own mother’s boyfriend and a major drug dealer, lives in the Falls and the police never touch him, he has gotten away with murder a dozen times.”

And, later: “We just heard—it was a Hells Angels attack. ‘White racists.’ A motorcycle gang, in the Falls. They rode to South Niagara the other night, looking for blacks to kill. You see them sometimes in the daytime in military formation—roaring on their Harley-Davidsons. It could have been anyone they killed. That poor boy—‘Hadrian Johnson.’ Only in high school, and Les says he was a quiet boy, and a good basketball player, everybody liked him. People who have trouble with black kids say they’d never had trouble with him.”

A swirl of rumors, like rotted leaves in the wind. A plague of rumors and a stink of rumors and yet, nothing came of them. After several days our mother’s voice on the phone grew frantic: “… no one is supposed to know, our lawyer says it has to be kept confidential, Hadrian Johnson had gotten in a fight with another black basketball player that weekend, over a girl, and ‘sliced’ him with a knife, and the other boy threatened to kill him, and …”

Jerome Jr. and Lionel were summoned back to the police station. Walt Lemire, Don Brinkhaus were summoned. Now there were three lawyers: one for the Kerrigan brothers, one for Walt Lemire and one for Don Brinkhaus.

Yet, the boys were not arrested. So long as they were not arrested, their names would not appear in local media.

Everyone talked of them: the Kerrigans, especially. Somehow it began to be known, or to be suspected, that Jerome Kerrigan Jr. had struck Hadrian Johnson in a hit-and-run accident.

Not on purpose. Accident.

Blaming the kid more than he deserves, because he is WHITE.

Daddy insisted that Jerr move back into his old room; there’d been “racist” threats against him, and he wasn’t safe in his place downtown, Daddy believed. Lionel was informed by the high school principal that he should stay home for a while, feelings were running high between “whites” and “blacks” at South Niagara High and Lionel’s presence was “distracting.” Mom wanted to keep me home from school too but I was so upset, she relented. I could not bear to miss school—I loved school! And I was sure, I wanted to believe, school loved me.

The thought of being kept home with my mother and my brothers day after day panicked me. Trapped in the house where everyone was waiting for—what? What would save them? For someone else to be arrested for the crime?

As Mom said, “Whoever did this terrible thing. The guilty people.”

There was the hope, too, that the evidence police were assembling was only circumstantial, not enough to present to a grand jury. Especially, a jury comprised of white people. This was what the boys’ lawyers insisted.

Relatives, neighbors, friends of Daddy’s dropped by our house to show support. Fellow Vietnam veterans. At least, this was the pretext for their visit.

A call came from Tommy Kerrigan’s office, for Daddy. Not clear whether Tommy Kerrigan himself spoke to Daddy or one of his assistants.

Sometimes Mom refused to see visitors but hid away upstairs when the doorbell rang and told us not to answer it. At other times she was excited, insisting that visitors stay for meals. Female relatives helped in the kitchen. Beer, ale was consumed. There was an air of festivity. The subject of all conversation was the boys—how badly they were being treated by the police, how unfair, unjust the investigation was.

Because they are WHITE. No other reason!

The name “Hadrian Johnson” was never uttered. There was reference to the “black boy.” That was all.

Jerr and Lionel didn’t speak of Hadrian at all. It was as if the South Niagara police were to blame for their troubles, or rather the chief of police, who’d been an appointment of Tommy Kerrigan’s when Tommy Kerrigan had been mayor of South Niagara—Rat bastard. You’d think he’d be more grateful.

There may have been friends, relatives, acquaintances who believed that Jerr and Lionel were guilty of what they’d been accused of doing but these people did not visit us. Or if they did, they were circumspect in their emotional support for beleaguered Lula and Jerome.

Terrible thing. Such a tragedy. Try to hope for the best …

There was much speculation on the identity of the “anonymous witness” who’d provided the first several letters of the Chevrolet license plate. How could police be certain that he was telling the truth? Wasn’t it possible he’d deliberately misinformed them? Giving them the first few digits of Jerr’s car, to implicate Jerome Kerrigan’s son? And daring to specify Hadrian Johnson’s assailants as “white boys.”

(In the dark, how could a witness be so certain of the color of the boys’ skin? He couldn’t have had more than a glimpse of the boys at the side of the road. By his own account he’d slowed down for only a few seconds then sped up and drove away.)

(Very possibly, this “anonymous witness” was a black man himself. Involved in the beating himself …)

The phone rang repeatedly. Often Mom stood a few feet away squinting at it. She was fearful of answering blindly—not since Liza Deaver did she dare pick up a receiver without knowing exactly who was calling. If I was nearby she asked me to answer for her as she stood transfixed while I lifted the receiver and said Sorry nobody is here right now to speak with you. Please do not call again thank you!—quickly hanging up before the voice on the other end could express surprise or scold me.

One day I was alone in the kitchen after school. Staring at the phone as it began to ring. And there was Lionel beside me. Looming over me. “Don’t answer that,” he said. He spoke tersely, tightly as a knot might speak. Giving me no time to react, to move away from the phone, but rudely knocking me aside though I’d made no move to answer it.

Lionel’s mouth was twisted into a slash of a smile. He’d stayed home from school, he’d barely spoken to anyone in the family for days except our father and only then in private. Much of the time he was playing video games in his room. The cut beneath his eye had not healed, he must have been picking at the scab. His jaws were unshaven. The neck of his T-shirt was stretched, and soiled. I smelled something sharp, rank as an animal’s smell lifting from him. I laughed nervously, edging away.

Lionel said, in a jeering singsong voice: “Hey there, ‘Vi-let Rue’! Where’re you going, you!”

I eased away. I fled.

Wanting to assure my angry brother—I won’t tell Dad. Or anyone. I told you—I promised.

The Siege

WITHOUT REGAINING CONSCIOUSNESS, HADRIAN JOHNSON died in the hospital on November 11.

NOW THE KERRIGAN HOUSEHOLD WAS TRULY UNDER SIEGE. LIKE A boat, buffeted by ferocious winds.

We Kerrigans huddled inside, clutching at one another. Daddy would protect us, we knew.

Jerr returned to work, where his employer and most of his fellow workers were inclined to be sympathetic toward him. Lionel was suspended indefinitely from school.

Fewer people dropped by the house. But Kerrigan relatives were loyal. Staying late into the night in the basement room Daddy had remodeled into a TV room, drinking, talking loudly, vehemently.

Just adults in the basement with Daddy. No kids including Jerr and Lionel.

With so many people in the house it wasn’t hard for me to avoid my brothers. At meals they ignored me, as they ignored their younger brothers and sisters, sitting next to Daddy, eating with their heads lowered and addressing one another in terse exchanges. Their lawyer’s last name was O’Hagan—you could hear their remarks peppered with these syllables—O’Hagan—but not what they were saying.

Since he’d shoved me in the kitchen Lionel rarely looked in my direction. I had come to think that he’d forgotten me, for he had much else to think about. Jerr’s pebble-colored eyes drifted over me, restless, brooding. Within a week or so my oldest brother had lost weight, his face was gaunt, his manner edgy, distracted. While Lionel ate hungrily Jerr pushed food about on his plate and preferred to drink beer from a can. Often he lifted the can so carelessly to his mouth, rivulets of liquid ran glistening down his chin. One evening Daddy told him no more, he’d had enough, and Jerr rose indignantly from the table unsteady on his feet murmuring what sounded like Fuck.

Or maybe, judging from Daddy’s reaction—Fuck you.

In an instant Daddy was on his feet too. Gripping Jerr by the scruff of the neck and shaking him as you might shake an annoying dog. Shoving him back against the wall so that the breath was knocked out of him. Glasses, silverware fell from the table onto the floor. There were cries of alarm, screams. Jerr scrambled to his feet ashen-faced but knew better than to protest.

No one dared leave the table except Jerr who retreated like a kicked dog. Daddy was flush-faced, furious. We sat very still waiting for the fury to pass.

In silence we finished the meal. In silence, my sisters and I cleared the table for our mother who was trembling badly. It was frightening and yet thrilling, to witness our father so swiftly disciplining one of us who had disrespected him.

That is the sick, melancholy secret of the family—you shrink in terror from a parent’s blows and yet, if you are not the object of the blows, you swell with a kind of debased pride.

My brother, and not me. Him, therefore not me.

OUR MOTHER BEGAN TO SAY, MANY TIMES IN THOSE WEEKS—Those people are killing us.

On the phone she complained in a faltering, hurt voice. To her children, who had no choice but to listen. She’d been talking to our parish priest Father Greavy who’d confirmed her suspicion, she reported back to us, that those people were our enemies

We wondered who those people were. Police? African Americans? Newspaper and TV reporters who never failed to mention that an anonymous witness had described “white boys” at the scene of the beating—“as yet unidentified.”

Those people could be other white people of course. Traitors to their race who defended blacks just for the sake of defending blacks. Hippie-types, social-worker types, politicians making speeches to stir trouble for the sake of votes.

Taking the side of blacks. Automatically. You can hear it in their voices on TV …

No one in our family had any idea that I knew about what had happened that night. What might have happened.

That I knew about the bat. That there was a bat.

In articles about the beating there seemed to be no mention made of a “murder weapon”—so far as most people might surmise there wasn’t one. (Had police actually mentioned a tire iron? I had not heard this from anyone except my mother reporting one of many rumors.) A boy had been beaten savagely, his skull (somehow) fractured. That was all.

I wondered if Jerr and Lionel talked about me. Our secret.

They knew only that I knew they’d been fighting that night. They had no reason to suspect that I knew about the bat. Surely they thought that I believed their story of having been in Niagara Falls and not in South Niagara.

She wouldn’t tell. Not Vi’let Rue.

You sure? She’s just a kid.

Anyway, what does she know? None of them know shit.

Because …

BECAUSE THEY COULD NOT HAVE DONE THAT, SUCH A TERRIBLE thing there came to be They did not do that terrible thing.

Because It can’t be possible there came to be It is not possible. Was not possible.

Because They wouldn’t lie to us there came to be They did not lie to us. Our sons.

Through the floorboards you heard. Through the furnace vent you heard. Amid the rattling of the ventilator. Through shut doors you heard, and through those walls in the house that for some reason were not so solid as others, stuffed with a cottony sort of insulation that, glimpsed just once, as a wall was being repaired, shocked you looking so like a human lung, upright, vertical.

Like a TV in another room, volume turned low. Daddy’s voice dominant. Mom’s voice much fainter. A pleading voice, a whining voice, a fearful voice, for Daddy hated whining, whiners. Your brothers knew better than to piss and whine. Shouting, cursing one another, shoving one another down the stairs, overturning a table in the hall, sending crockery shattering onto the kitchen floor—such behavior was preferable to despicable whining which Daddy associated with women, girls. Babies.

And so, your mother did not dare speak at length. Whatever she said, or did not say, your father would talk over, his voice restless and careening like a bulldozer out of control. Was he rehearsing with her—You could say they were home early that night. By ten o’clock. You remember because …

They would choose a TV program. Something your brothers might’ve watched. Better yet: sports. Maybe there’d been a football game broadcast that night … On HBO, a boxing match.

Jerome I don’t think that I—don’t think that I can …

Look. They aren’t lying to us—I’m sure. But it might look like they are lying, to other people. Sons of bitches in this town they’d like nothing better than to fuck up decent white kids.

Don’t make me, Jerome … I don’t think that I, I can …

You can! God damn it, they might’ve been home—might’ve watched the fucking TV. Or you might remember it that way and even if you were wrong it could help them.

None of this you heard. None of this you remember.

The Rescue

BY CHANCE YOU SAW.

So much had become chance in your life.

Headlights turning into the driveway, in the dark. Your father’s car braking in front of the garage.

By chance you were walking in the upstairs hall. Cast your eyes down, through the filmy curtains seeing the car turn in from the street. Already it was late. He’d missed supper. Past 9:00 P.M. No one asked any longer—Where’s Daddy?

In the hall beside the window you paused. Your heart was not yet beating unpleasantly hard. You were (merely) waiting for the car lights to be switched off below. Waiting for the motor to be switched off. Waiting for the familiar sound of a car door slammed shut which would mean that your father had gotten out of the car and was approaching the house to enter by the rear door to signal Nothing has changed. We are as we were.

But this did not seem to be happening. Your father remained in the (darkened) car.

Still the motor was running. Pale smoke lifted from the tailpipe. You were beginning to smell the exhaust, and to feel faintly nauseated.

In the hall by the window you stood. Staring down at the driveway, the idling car. Waiting.

He is not running carbon monoxide into the car. The car is not inside the garage, there is no danger that he will poison himself.

Yet, gray smoke continued to lift from the rear of the car. Stink of exhaust borne on the cold wet air like ash.

He is sitting in the car. He is smoking in the car.

Waiting to get sober. Inside the car.

That is where he is: in the car.

He is safe. No one can harm him. You can see—he is in the car.

You could not actually see your father from where you stood. But there was no doubt in your mind, he was in the car.

Had Daddy been drinking, was that why he was late returning home, you would not inquire. Each time Daddy entered the house in the evening unsteady on his feet, frowning, his handsome face coarse and flushed, you would want to think it was the first time and it was a surprise and unexpected. You would not want to think—Please no. Not again.

You would want to retreat quickly before his gaze was flung out, like a grappling hook, to hook his favorite daughter Vi’let Rue.

It was one of those days in the aftermath of the death of Hadrian Johnson when nothing seemed to have happened. And yet—always there was the expectation that something will happen.

Your brothers had not been summoned, with O’Hagan, to police headquarters that day. So far as anyone knew, the others—Walt, Don—had not been summoned either.

No arrests had (yet) been made but your brothers were captive animals. Everyone in the Kerrigan house was a captive animal.

They’d ceased reading the South Niagara Union Journal. Someone, might’ve been Daddy, tossed the paper quickly away into the recycling bin as soon as it arrived in the early morning,

For articles about the savage beating, murder of Hadrian Johnson continued to appear on the front page. The photograph of Hadrian Johnson continued to appear. Gat-toothed black boy smiling and gazing upward as if searching for a friendly face.

You saw the newspaper, in secret. Not each day but some days.

These people are killing us. Possibly, your mother meant the newspaper people. The TV people.

You are beginning to feel uneasy, at the window. You are beginning to wonder if indeed your father is actually in the car. And it is wrong of you to spy upon your father as it is wrong to spy upon your mother. Faces sagging like wetted tissue when they believe that no one is watching. Oh, you love them!

In the car Daddy is (probably) smoking. Maybe he brought a can of ale with him from the tavern. Maybe a bottle.

The bottles are more serious than the cans. The bottles—whiskey, bourbon—are more recent than the cans.

In the plastic recycling bin, glass bottles chiming against one another.

Daddy is not supposed to smoke. Daddy has been warned.

A spot on his lung two years before but a benign spot. High blood pressure.

More than once Daddy has declared that he has quit smoking—for the final time.

When Daddy smokes he coughs badly. In the early morning you are wakened hearing him. So painful, lacerating as if someone is scraping a knife against the inside of his throat.

Years ago when you were a little girl Daddy would come bounding into the house—Hey! I’m home.

Calling for you—Hey Vi’let Rue! Daddy is home.

Where’s Daddy’s best girl? Vi’let RUE!

That happy time. You might have thought it would last forever. Like a TV cartoon now, exaggerated and unbelievable.

Now Daddy is showing no inclination to come into the house. (Maybe he has fallen asleep, behind the wheel? A bottle in his hand, that is beginning to tip over and spill its contents …) He has turned off the motor, at least. You are relieved, the poison-pale smoke has ceased to lift from the tailpipe.

He’s coming inside now. Soon.

There is a meal for Daddy, in the oven. Covered in aluminum foil.

Even when your mother must know that Daddy won’t be eating the supper she has prepared for him there is a meal in the oven which, next day, midday when no one is around, Mom will devour alone in the kitchen rarely troubling to heat it in the microwave. (You have seen her with a fork picking, picking, picking at the cold coagulated meat, mashed potatoes. You have seen your mother eating without appetite, swiftly picking at tasteless food.)

It is unnerving to you, the possibility that no one is in the car.

In the driveway, in the dark. Dim reflected light from a streetlight in the wet pavement.

No, there’s no one there!

Somehow, your father has slipped past you. You have failed to see him.

Or, your father has slumped over behind the wheel, unconscious. He has found an ingenious way to divert the carbon monoxide into the car while no one noticed …

The father of a classmate at school has died, a few weeks ago. Shocking, but mysterious. What do you say?

You say nothing. Nothing to say. Avoid the girl, not a friend of yours anyway.

As, at school, your friends have begun to avoid you.

Pretending not to notice. Not to care. Hiding in a toilet stall dabbing wetted tissues against your face. Why are your eyelids so red? So swollen?

But now you have begun to be frightened. You wonder if you should seek out your mother. Mom? Daddy is still in the car, he has been out there a long time … But the thought of uttering such words, allowing your parents to know that you are spying on them, is not possible.

And then, this happens: you see someone leave the house almost directly below, and cross to the car in the driveway.

Is it—your mother?

She, too, must have been standing at a window, downstairs. She’d seen the headlights turning into the driveway. She’d been waiting, too.

Slipping her arms into the sleeves of someone’s jacket, too large for her. Bare-headed in light-falling snow that melts as soon as it touches the pavement, and her hair.

It is brave of Mom to be approaching Daddy, you think. You hold your breath wondering what will happen.

For you, your sisters, and your brothers have seen, numerous times, your father throwing off your mother’s hand, if she touches him in a way that is insulting or annoying to him. You have seen your father stare at your mother with such hatred, your instinct is to run away in terror.

In terror that that face of wrath will be turned onto you.

You are watching anxiously as, at the car, on the farther side of the car where you can’t see her clearly, your mother stoops to open the door. Tugging at the door, unassisted by anyone inside.

And now, what is your mother doing? Helping your father out of the car?

You have never seen your mother helping your father in any way, like this. You are certain.

At first, it isn’t clear that Daddy is getting out of the car. That Daddy is able to get out of the car.

It has become late, on Black Rock Street. A working-class neighborhood in which houses begin to darken by 10:00 P.M.

In early winter, houses begin to lighten before dawn.

Up and down the street, in winter, when the sun is slow to appear, windows of kitchens are warmly lit in the hour before dawn. You will remember this, in your exile.

Well—Daddy is on his feet, in the driveway. He has climbed out of the car with Mom’s assistance, and he does not appear to be angry at her. His shoulders are slumped, his legs move leadenly. The lightness in his body you remember from a time when you were a little girl, the rough joy with which he’d danced about in the garage, teaching your brothers to box, has passed from him. His youth has passed from him. The years of his young fatherhood when his sons and daughters had been beautiful to him, when he’d stared at them with love and felt a fatherly pride in them, have passed.

Transfixed at the window you watch. For the danger is not past yet.

You steel yourself: your father will fling your mother from him with a sweep of his arm, he will curse her …

But no, astonishingly that doesn’t seem to be happening. Instead, your father has allowed your mother to slip her arm around his waist. He steadies himself against her, leaning heavily on her.

Awkwardly, cautiously they make their way toward the house. Taking care not to slip on the driveway where ice is beginning to form, thin as a membrane.

What words have they exchanged? What has your mother said to your father, that has blunted his rage?

You have drawn away from the window. You have let the curtain fall back into place. You do not want either of your parents to glance up, to see you at the window, watching.

It is a remarkable fact, your father leaning heavily upon your mother, who is several inches shorter than he, and must weigh seventy pounds less than he does. Yet she holds him up without staggering, your mother is stronger than you would have imagined.

Together your parents approach the house, walking cautiously, like much older people, in this way you’ve never seen. They pass out of your sight, below. You stand very still waiting for them to enter the house, waiting to hear the door open below, and close, so you can think, calmly—They are both safe now. For now.

The Secret I

THERE IS A SECRET BETWEEN MY MOTHER AND ME. ALL THESE years in exile, I have told no one.

In fact, there are secrets. Which one shall I reveal first?

In sixth grade I’d become friendly with a girl named Geraldine Pyne. Several times she invited me to her house after school, on Highgate Avenue. Her father was a doctor in a specialty that made me shiver—gastroenterology. She lived in a large white brick house with a portico and columns like a temple. When I first saw Geraldine’s house I felt a twinge of dread for I understood that my mother would not like me to visit there and would be unhappy if she knew.

I understood too that my father would disapprove, for my father spoke resentfully of “money people.” But my father would not ever know about Geraldine Pyne, and it was possible that my mother would.

On days when Geraldine invited me to her house for dinner Mrs. Pyne usually picked us up after school, and either Mrs. Pyne or her housekeeper drove me home afterward; there was no suggestion that my mother might come to pick me up.

Mrs. Pyne’s station wagon was not a very special vehicle, like the long, shiny black Lincoln Dr. Pyne drove. So if my mother happened to glance out the window, and saw me getting out of it, she would not have been unduly alarmed or suspicious.

And Geraldine too, if Mom happened to see her, did not look like a special girl. You would not have guessed from her unassuming appearance (pink plastic glasses, glittering braces, shy smile) that she was the daughter of well-to-do parents, or even that she was a popular girl (with other girls and with our teacher, at least) and an honors student.

Geraldine was an only child. This seemed magical to me. As my sisters and brothers, all older than me, seemed magical to her.

“You would never have to be alone,” Geraldine said wistfully.

I tried not to laugh. For this was not true, and why would anyone want it to be true? An only child could have no idea of the commotion of the Kerrigan household.

It was embarrassing to me that Geraldine should confide in me that her parents had hoped for another child, but God had not sent one. In the Kerrigan family no one spoke of such intimate matters casually. I could not imagine my mother or father sharing such information with me.

I was grateful not to be an only child. My parents would have only me, and I would have only them, to love; it would be like squinting into a blinding light that never went out.

I did not feel comfortable inviting Geraldine to our house for I believed she would be embarrassed for me. Especially, she would see my mother’s weedy flower beds, that were always being overwhelmed by thistles and brambles, and coarse wildflowers like goldenrod, so different from the beautiful elegant roses in her mother’s gardens, with their particular names Geraldine once proudly enunciated for me, like poetry—Damask, Sunsprite, Rosa Peace, American Beauty, Ayrshire. Geraldine would see how ordinary our house was, though my father took great pride in it, a foolish pride it seemed to me, compared to the Pynes’ house: as if it mattered that a wood frame house on Black Rock Street was neatly painted, and its roof properly shingled, drainpipes and gutters cleared of leaves, front walk and asphalt driveway in decent condition though beginning (you could see, if you looked closely) to crack into a thousand pieces like a crude jigsaw puzzle. Especially Geraldine would wince to hear my older brothers’ heavy footsteps on the stairs like hooves and their loud careening voices like nothing in her experience, in the house on Highgate Avenue. And there was the possibility of my elderly grandfather emerging from his hovel of a room at the rear of the house, disheveled, unsteady on his feet and bemused at the sight of a strange young girl in the house —Hey there! Who’in hell are you?

But then, my mother discovered that my friend Geraldine’s father was a doctor—Dr. Morris Pyne. She was shocked, intrigued. She insisted that I show her where the Pynes lived and drove me to Highgate Avenue to point out the house to her. This was a request so utterly unlike my mother, who rarely left the house except to go shopping and to church, and who rarely evinced any interest in her children’s school friends, I’d thought at first that she could not be serious.

“Oh, Mom. Why d’you want to know? It’s not that special.”

“Isn’t it! Highgate Avenue. We’ll see.”

No one would know about this drive. Just Lula and Violet Rue, seeking out the residence of Dr. Morris Pyne and his family at 11 Highgate Avenue.

It was as I’d dreaded, the sight of the large spotlessly-white brick house with portico and columns, in a large wooded lot, was offensive to my mother. “So big! Why’d anyone need such a big house! Show-offy like the White House.” Mom’s voice was hurt, embittered, sneering.

Beside her I shrank in the passenger’s seat. In horror that, unlikely as it was, Mrs. Pyne might drive up beside us to turn into the blacktop driveway, that looped elegantly in front of the house, and recognize one of her daughter’s school friends in the passenger seat of our car.

I tried to explain to my mother that Geraldine Pyne was one of the nicest girls in sixth grade. She was not a spoiled girl, and you would never guess that she was a “rich” girl. A very thoughtful girl, a quiet girl, who seemed for some reason (God knows why) to like me.

“She thinks I’m funny. She laughs at things I say, that other people don’t even get. And Mrs. Pyne is—”

Rudely my mother interrupted: “They look down their noses at us. People like that. Don’t tell me.”

I had never seen my mother’s face so creased, contorted. At first I thought she must be joking …

“Oh, Mom. They’re nothing like that. You’re wrong.”

“And what do you know? ‘You’re wrong’—like hell I am.”

Driving on, furious. I could not think of a thing to say—my mother whose chatter was usually affable and inconsequential, like a kind of background radio noise, was frightening me.

As we drove in a jerky, circuitous route back home my mother recounted for me in a harsh, hard voice how as a girl she’d cleaned “the God-damned” houses in this neighborhood. Rich people’s houses. She’d had to quit school at sixteen, her family had needed the income. At first she’d cleaned houses with a cousin, who did the negotiating, then it turned out the cousin was cheating her, so she’d worked on her own. Five years. She’d worked six days a week for five years until she met my father and got married and started having babies and taking care of a house of her own, seven days a week. Her voice rose and fell in an angry singsong—

quit school, sixteen, got married, started having babies. Seven days a week.

There was a particular sort of bitterness here directed at me. For I was one of the babies. And I’d betrayed her with my careless, insulting friendship among the enemy.

“In those houses I had to get down on my knees and scrub. Kitchen floors, bathroom floors. I had to clean their filthy tubs and toilets with Dutch cleanser. Toilet brushes, Brillo pads. I had to strip their smelly beds and wash the sheets, towels, underwear and socks. I had to drag their trash containers out to the curb, that were so heavy my arms ached. Sometimes the kids would come home from school before I was finished, and they’d get their bathrooms dirty again, and I would have to clean them again. Sinks I had scrubbed clean, mirrors I had polished, I would have to do again. Piss splattered on the floor. They laughed at me—the boys. God-damned brats. If they even saw me at all.”

Distracted by these memories my mother was driving erratically. Her eyes brimmed with tears of hurt. None of us—her children—had ever known of this hurt, I was sure—I was sure she’d never told anyone, for by now I would have known.

“Oh, they thought they were so generous! Sometimes they gave me food to take home, leftovers in the refrigerator they didn’t want, spoiled things, rancid things, garbage—‘Here, take this home please try to remember to return the Tupperware bowl next week.’ I wasn’t supposed to spend more than twenty minutes on lunch. I wasn’t supposed to sit down—they never like to see a cleaning-woman sitting down, that’s offensive to them. Or using one of their God-damned bathrooms. If you have to wash your hands, use a paper towel. Not one of their God-damned towels. Some of the big houses, I’d work all morning, so hungry my head ached. That house! I worked in that house—I remember …”

I tried to protest: the Pynes had not been living in the white brick house so long ago. They had only moved in a few years ago. It had to be other people she was thinking of. Mrs. Pyne was a polite, kind, wonderful woman, not a snob, not cruel—

Bitterly my mother interrupted: “You! Stupid child! What do you know? You know nothing.”

I had never heard my mother speak in such a way. It was as if another woman were in her place, savage and inconsolable.

We were slowing now in front of another, even grander house, at 38 Highgate—a Victorian mansion behind a six-foot wrought iron fence with a warning sign at the gate—PRIVATE. DELIVERIES TO THE REAR.

“And this house—I’ve been in this house, too. And your father has not.”

Not sure what this meant I said nothing.

“D’you know who lives here?”

Yes, I did. I thought that I did. But I played dumb, I said no. I did not want to incur any more of my mother’s wrath.

“Your father never knew. I never told him. That I was a house maid on Highgate Avenue. That my parents forced me to work. Forced me to quit school. And one of the houses I cleaned was ‘Tommy’ Kerrigan’s—this house. Maybe ‘Tommy’ doesn’t live here any longer—maybe he’s retired and living in Florida. Maybe he’s dead—the bastard! When he was mayor of South Niagara, and married to a woman named Eileen—his second wife, or his third. She was the one who hired me and paid me but ‘Tommy’ was on the scene sometimes in the morning when I came to work. Just getting out of the bathroom, getting dressed—filthy pig. Once, he dared to ask me if I would clip his toenails! Saw the look in my face and laughed. ‘It’s all right, Lula, my feet are clean. Come look.’ Mrs. Kerrigan never knew how her husband behaved with the help—the female help. If she knew, she pretended she didn’t. All of those rich men’s wives learn how to pretend. Or they’re out on their asses like the female help. She paid me below the minimum wage. She paid me in dollar bills. I had to polish the God-damned silver—the Kerrigans were always having dinner parties. Had to breathe in stinking pink silver polish that made me sick to my stomach. Terrible bleach I had to use, that almost made me faint. And ‘Tommy’s’ side of the bed—shit stains. I’d hoped to God he had not done it on purpose. But I was grateful for work, I was just too young to know better. The black maids would work for less money than we could so after a while, there weren’t any white girls working on Highgate. I doubt there’s any ‘white help’ in South Niagara today. Your father never knew any of this. He lived in his own cloud of—whatever it was—wanting to believe what he wanted to believe. Most men are like that. Jerome doesn’t know to this day that I ever set eyes on Tommy Kerrigan up close. He doesn’t know that I was on my knees in this God-damned house, or in any of these houses. He’d seemed to think that I had no life before I met him—he never asked about it. He’d never have wanted to touch me—if he knew …”

We were out of the neighborhood now. My mother was driving less erratically. Her fury was abating, her voice quavered with something like shame. I could think of nothing to say, my brain had gone blank and it would be difficult for me to remember afterward what my mother had said, and why she had said it; what humiliating truths she’d uttered as I sat stiff beside her in the passenger’s seat of the car not daring to look at her.

It was the most intense time between my mother and me. Yet, I would remember imperfectly.

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