The Garden

It’s been a long time since I’ve been here, in the garden.  It’s not even a thirty second walk out the back door but I haven’t had the time. It’s one of life’s cruellest catch-22; you soldier forth to make a life for yourself then when you stop for the briefest of moments, you realize life has passed you by. Gardening is not just a hobby; it’s a metaphor about life, when you think about it. You have to prepare a garden, plan what you want, plant then tend to it by weeding it, watering and protecting it so that what you want in the end comes out with the richest of flavours and colour.  There was a time that the shovel’s metal would be gingerly devoured by the dirt, turning over as smooth as mixing flour and sugar to make some buns to go with the greens that you just pulled out for supper. The garden made the yard fragrant with herbal aromas, I remember just sitting back on my knees and breathing in that air after weeding with closed eyes and a big smile on my face. 

Just look at my garden now, the dirt is hard, cracked, with only the heartiest of weeds being able to withstand the uncare that it had been left so. I had asked them to take care of the garden when I went away, they said they would, but I guess like me it got lost in the day to day going-ons. Ten years is a long time to hope for someone to do anything, I suppose.  Even my Jeffery couldn’t keep his promises for ten years.

I remember in my younger days how much the neighbours were jealous of how well my garden looked; year after year I would win those “best of” prizes for whatever I planted in that soil. People would always ask me how I managed such a bounty; I would always smile and tell them that it was all in the fertilizer. That’s not a lie, that the trick to a good garden is the fertilizer, the choice you make for those seeds to rest in sets the stage for how well they will thrive when they poke themselves out of the dirt to reach for the sun. People would ask what kind of fertilizer I used, but I would never say, I would just wink and tell them it was my own personal recipe.

 There’s a lot of hard work that goes into putting the fertilizer in too, you just can’t put it on top – you lose a lot of the nutrients that the plants need.  It’s the same with when you dig up the garden and put the fertilizer in – if you put it too deep, it does nothing for the plants. Then you have to think about when you put the fertilizer in; if you put it in during the fall, it may lose all the nutrients before the spring depending on the kind of winter you have.  If you put the fertilizer in a few weeks past the time the ground is too unfrozen, then the nutrients are released too late.  I discovered that if you place the fertilizer in when the first couple of inches are soft but the next couple of feet of ground is still frozen, it gives the fertilizer a chance to enrich the top soil a couple of weeks before planting.  The condition of the fertilizer is important to; the fresher the better, the warmth for fresh fertilizer can draw those creatures that make the dirt that richer for the planting.

 The truth is that I didn’t expect my garden to blossom so, goodness no! At first I didn’t have even a hope that anything would grow, considering the fertilizer I used.  I think it was a gift from God that made the garden grow and thrive as it did.  It was His way of rewarding me for passing the cruellest tests of my faith that he had arranged for me; the betrayal of my sweet Jeffery.

I came across the winning recipe for my fertilizer quite by accident; I remember that night as clear as a bell, that end of March night that I came home and found Jeffery acting like he was a woman, down on all fours, while that filthy queer was being the man. They stopped when they saw me standing there in the doorway, Jeffery getting up and saying sorry over and over again, but I knew he didn’t mean it – he had a smirk on his face that matched the one that filthy queer had on as he didn’t even have the decency to cover himself or the pride he had in his befoulment of my Jeffery with his hard standing still swaggering.

 I think Jeffery thought that I would just sit down and cry; following me into the kitchen while he was trying to get some pants on with his empty sorrys. My Jeffery, my man, huffing and moaning like that, it was disgusting to see; how could he do that to me? He acting like that, well that was like I had been sleeping with another woman – that queer had not only tainted my Jeffery, but me. Jeffery didn’t even scream when I pulled out our butcher knife and made him be quiet.  The queer screamed and tried to run like a woman when I came for him though; he wasn’t such a big man when I got through with him.

I must have stood therein the bedroom with that filthy creature for most of the night, until the redness had sloughed off the blade of the knife, mad as a wet hen without a inkling of what to do.  I went back to the kitchen, trying to remember my Jeffery when he was a man and what he’d do with this type of garbage.  I looked out the window and as if God was showing me the way, the moonlight sparkled on the frost dirt crests of the garden. 

When work phoned for Jeffery, I told him that he had run off with another woman. The receptionist asked if I was sure it was another woman quite politely. Even when his sisters and brothers rang up and I told them the same thing, there weren’t any questions afterward other than was I sure it was another woman. I guess I had been made the fool for a lot longer than I could have imagined.

I remember how good the potatoes from the garden had tasted that year, firm and large, where the queer had been put.  The sweet peas that had fed on Jeffery didn’t fare so well, I suppose even in death Jeffery was a disappointment.  It seems funny that how terrible those queers are in life, in death they have can add such a richness to one’s goals in gardening.

There were some turns in the road, of course – there always is when you’re trying something new, but over the next three years I learned so much. Getting the fertilizer wasn’t hard.  I suppose it was the only good thing that Jeffery really left me, his little black book that I had found hidden deep in his underwear drawer, with the names and numbers of queers that he knew and an address to the queer bar. I found that just two will do a garden nicely; just like they spread their foulness to my Jeffery, they seem to spread well out in a garden as they are doing the only job they’re good for.

It is crucial to remove all the apparel – roots cannot easily puncture the material and get into the meat of the fertilizer. A sledge hammer is handy to break the rib cage; nothing spoils the thoughts of a good potato salad than having potatoes ripped up by bone if they germinate in the chest cavity. The fresher you get the fertilizer in the ground, like when their still seeping their dirty lives away, the better the seeds seem to take. Maybe it’s because of the way the fertilizer warms the ground for a couple of hours that makes all the difference, I can’t be sure about that. I made the mistake of trying to fertilize the garden when it was too fresh and it just plain old got up and ran away.

I fibbed; my Jeffery did leave me another gift: a concrete mixer.   That nasty prosecutor called my gardening murder at first, but after they didn’t find the used up fertilizer in my garden, they called it attempted manslaughter. None of those gentlemen had been gardeners, or they would have known that you take out all the rocks and hard stuff from the soil so it doesn’t harm the roots the next year.  I thought is was justice that when those queers use had been used up, that I could show them that they were still beneath me as I walked on the sidewalk path to the garden. Still, they took me away from my home.

 How I’ve missed gardening so.

A Stalk in the Park

The grey sinewy tendrils of winter’s claws scratched through the late October billowing blue sky causing goose bumps atop Leanne’s exposed legs and along the plunging neckline of her cotton blouse.  Others who passed through the small tree lined park in the middle of the bustling city were bundled warmly, tucking their faces into their upturned collars.  Leanne steadfast refused to succumb to the chill; she wore light clothing that draped her body rather than blanket it. Leanne could have dressed for the cooler breezes of autumn, but Leanne felt overly claustrophobic being tightly bound within the fabric.  Twelve years of judicial confinement had left her loathe of being restricted in even the smallest of distinction. It was for this reason that she had chose to eat her lunch in the openness of the park across from the office building she worked in over the warmth of the lunchroom, that the whispers that burned through the protective layer of long dull blonde hair that covered her ears of those who tried to place where they had seen her before; it would not be long until she would change jobs when too many of those whispers of uncertainty became adamant in the identification.  No matter how often she could point to her service representative pin with the name “Tracy” on it, Leanne would be discovered.

She would never admit it but Leanne relished in gradual awakening of the public’s consciousness of her notoriety. She could have altered her looks to but a shade of what had been splashed over the media all those years ago. A dye job, coloured contact lenses, a frumpier clothing style and there had been offers of cosmetic surgery, and most of all discarding the locket with her real name inscribed on the back of it.  There had to be thousands of images in the news archives with that silver locket that still hung around her lithe neckline to nestle in her cleavage. Leanne just could not do it: it had been a gift from her sister that had been four years her junior.  It was not an expensive cameo locket, in the thin flower etches of the oval border Leanne could see the silver paint flaking on the day she had gotten it.  Leanne remembered her sister’s face scrunching up as she carefully picked and cut her picture to fit inside its shallow innards.

It was not as if it was much of a hassle to her when the embers of her past would flare from the ashes, it was the justice department that paid for the change of all the legal documents and identification. Such a benevolent court had it been, twelve years in minimum security to point her finger at her husband for the drugging, rape and murder of three girls, plus protection when she was released.  All the court required was for her to play the battered spouse card; that she had no choice but aid and abet her psychopathic husband lest it would have been her that ended up under the loose dirt.

Leanne had not been aware that she had clasped her hand around the locket, warming its cold shell.  She let it go to fall back onto her cleavage, the warmth of her palm pulsated from the area of skin to form an oasis of smoothness over the desert of goose bumps.  Her mediation on the locket’s warmth was broken as the sound of shrilly giggling rushed past.  Leanne looked up just as a girl, perhaps twelve, Leanne thought, breezed past her.

“Mandy!” a young woman, around her late teens yelled half running, half walking.  

Leanne smiled.

The woman noticed Leanne watching her.  “Ugh, little sisters can be such pains.”

“For sure,” Leanne said. “From one big sister to another, take a load off and let some of the breeze leave her sails.”

The teen shrugged and sat down beside Leanne. The two sat in silence watching the twelve year old run around the trees close by erratically, occasionally stopping to catch her breath and taunt her sister to get off the bench.  Leanne remembered similar silly confrontations with her sister.  The last confrontation they had just over thirteen years ago had been anything but silly; it had shown Leanne the true nature of little sisters.

Mom would have a shit fit if she found out about this, Leanne giggled to herself as she finished off the last bottle of her six pack of beer, Her eyes dancing along her husband’s strong sweat bathed form through the brown glass, but damn is he ever fucking hot. It memorizing for her to watch his shoulder blades move rhythmically, her hands matching his tempo as her hands plunged in her wetness as he in another.   Leanne watched as her husband’s motions became more hurried and erratic and she matched it; when his back arched and locked, his buttocks dimpling with deep release Leanne could feel her own warming the skin past her wrist.  The satisfied chuckle that Ken gave as he withdrew took Leanne back to the first time she had seen the man who would become her husband.

It had been a warm spring night four years ago, half drunk stumbling home from a high school party Leanne had opted to cut through the small trail that ran along the river bank that paralleled the windy road.  The spruce trees that lined either side of the trail looked thin in the light of day yet in the backdrop of the night did not permit the street lights revealing bulbs to permeate the moss covered rocks.  She heard noises ahead of her, branches snapping, grunts.  Leanne slowed her stumble as the noises grew, quietly moving herself behind one of the spruce’s when she could make out the moonlight outlines of two people, a man and a woman just ahead of her in one of the many grassy knolls that polka dotted the river bank side of the trail. At first Leanne had thought she had almost gotten herself in the middle of a lover’s quarrel, but she quickly realized as the man took out a knife and held it to the woman’s throat it was something far more sinister.

Leanne thought that maybe she should back track to one of the entrances to the trail to the road, to tell someone what was going on behind the tree line – just as she had been taught to by her parents, teachers and community safety announcements – but her seventeen year old eyes could not take her eyes off the scene before her.  She let a whispered moan escape; she had not been aware that her hand had slipped down the front of her jeans as she watched the man violate the woman.  She knew she had fallen in love the moment the moonlight cast a shadow that outlined the buttock dimples of excitement released.  Leanne watched the man pull his pants back up, give one final warning to the sobbing half naked girl on the grass then walk briskly toward her hiding spot.  She followed him, she found where he lived and proceeded over the next few days to find out as much information about the man as possible.  Ken was a year senior in her school and for two months afterward Leanne would hide in the shadows during the weekend following his every move, and another rape, before she arranged to bump into Ken in the school cafeteria.  They had dated for almost a year and a half that Leanne would inform Ken that she knew about his little hobby.  She told him that if wanted their relationship to be serious then he had better start taking his perversion serious; he was far too careless and spontaneous, he would be caught sooner than later.  They had married the same year Leanne graduated from high school and enrolled in a collage course for animal sciences that quickly changed to pharmaceutical assistant when the concession Ken had made of having sex with a willing in front of her lacked the excitement both he and Leanne craved.  The night that Leanne received her certificate was the first night that she joined Ken in the hunt.  It would not be long before long that her passive action of observing Ken’s sex plays with the drugged – her drugged victims – would not be enough.  She made it clear to Ken that she would have first dibs on their human toys.

Leanne had made an exception for this young girl; she had let Ken have her first, after all, she reasoned this was his anniversary present from her.  Leanne had experienced powerful orgasms watching Ken have his with the girls they had grabbed off the streets, but this time the waves of electricity sending waves of pleasure to her mind were more intense, more personal – Ken was in the process of consuming Dawn’s, her little sister, virginity.  Ken had mentioned a couple of times how Leanne’s little sister had started to show the woman she would be then joking that wasn’t it one of those sisterly things to share?

Leanne had sent Ken out to the grocery store just before the time she had asked Dawn to come over to help prepare a special dinner for Ken. To show how appreciative she was that her little sister had been willing to assist in her wifely duties, Leanne pour a large glass of wine to drink while she cut vegetables for a salad that would later turn brown, forgotten on the kitchen table.  Leanne had laced the wine with a generous dose of diazepam so she was easily able to manoeuvre the stumbling girl towards the bedroom and undress the barely conscious girl before Ken arrived back. 

Leanne leaned against the kitchen table wearing only a thin lacy apron with a tipped bottle opener and cold beer in her hand.  She popped the cap off the beer and handed it to her husband.

“Happy anniversary, babe, I hope you’re hungry because I have a delicious treat for you,” Leanne said.

Ken smiled as he took the beer and with the tips of his fingers brushed back the apron hem.

“Uh uh,” Leanne said, grabbing the remainder of the six pack on the table.  She motioned for Ken to follow her to the bedroom. The look on Ken’s face had made the effort worth it for Leanne, the look of love, the glare of lust as he looked on the bed to find Dawn’s nude body with the exception for the Dollar Store bow sitting atop the thin curls of her blossoming womanhood.  Leanne beamed as she popped the cap off one of the beers and sat on the edge of the bed as Dawn began to whimper in her sleep from the weight of Ken’s body atop of her. It would not be until Ken’s second time mounting Dawn that the girl would regain consciousness and began to resist.  Leanne, who had moved from the edge of the bed to the padded chair just off center of the bed so that she could enjoy her husband in action, opened another beer as her sister cried out for her to help her.

“C’mon Dawn, you know this is what you want, baby, you know it,” Ken said after he removed himself from the girl.  He looked over at the dresser, frowning for a second as he saw that Leanne had drunk the last beer.  Leanne shrugged her shoulders and stuck her tongue out playfully at her husband. If there had been a beer Ken perhaps would not have heard, or cared, when through thick sobs Dawn gave a counter statement of her desires than he had just smugly assured the girl.

Ken’s blue eyes had turned to steel; he grabbed the bottle opener that had been sitting on the dresser.   He bounced on the sobbing and coughing girl, puncturing the thin flesh of her cheek with the bottle opener’s sharp tip.  Leanne slammed her hands against her ears hard to shield herself from becoming deaf from the piercing scream that hurricaned from her sister’s vocal chords. With his other arm bracing the head from moving, Ken forced the can opener to slice through the tender skin, carving a crude quarter sized heart.  The meaty cheek flesh fell into Dawn’s mouth to the base of throat, causing the shrill cries to become choked gasps for air.

Ken jammed his fingers into the gaping hole, tearing the outline he had done to unrecognizable shreds of meat and pulled out the pinkish-red cheek heart.  He stood up, commanding the girl to look at him with a callous bunt of her chin with his foot.

“Listen closely, bitch, real close,” Ken hissed from clenched teeth.  “See this? This is a piece of you - and wouldn’t you fucking know it, it’s a heart – your fucking heart, got it!?!” 

Ken tossed the piece of flesh onto the floor beside the bed then grabbed Dawn by the hair and flung her off the covers to the floor.

“Now give me your heart,” Ken bade in a soft voice, “Give me your heart.”

Leanne had taken her hands from her ears and observed with keen interest at the gaping wound in her sister’s face; there was something hypnotic about how the whiteness of the teeth would disappear for a moment in a deluge of blood only to reappear as the motions of her sobbing sister’s tongue would force a miniature geyser of red spittle from the wound.

“Give your heart,” Ken demanded impatiently.

Dawn pulled herself into a foetal position and began to rock back and forth, sobbing.

“BITCH” Ken screamed at the woman on the floor before stomping into the adjoining washroom, slamming the door behind him. He came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, washed and smelling heavily of cologne and began getting dressed.  Leanne stood up and walked over to him.

“I’m going to go get some more beer – want anything?” he said gruffly.

“Uhm.....let me think,” Leanne said with a predatory gleam in her glazed eyes as she put her arms around his neck and ground her pelvis into his.  Ken pushed her away.  Leanne scowled for a moment then put on her widest smile.  “I guess a Big Mac would be nice.”  Ken grunted with a nod, told Leanne to clean her sister up and walked out of the bedroom, leaving Leanne standing in the spot that he had pushed her to.  She stood there staring at the doorway until she had heard the door of the condo unit open and close. 

Did he just reject her? 

Leanne turned her head at her shivering and moaning sister on the floor. 

For her?

Leanne began to think back, the innocent talks she and Dawn had when Leanne had just started dating Ken, the shy admission by her little sister that she really liked her man.  She thought of how Dawn was always so willing to come over and help out around the house – all those times that Leanne had foolishly thought that Dawn was doing it for her...but it was for him.  The little bitch was trying to show that Ken that she was far more useful than Leanne, that she could...that fucking manipulative little bitch – she planned all of this.  She was going to take Ken away from her, and dumb ol Leanne had been her dull accomplice! To think that she was going to show Dawn how much Leanne loved her in the most intimate way that only lover’s could...

  Leanne walked over to the where Dawn and the mutilated piece of her flesh lay. Leanne grabbed the bloodied piece of cheek from the floor, opened the snap on her locket and squished it against Dawn’s picture, closing the locket with the making of a fist. 

“Your heart should belong to me, you filthy slut,” she said through tears, “Isn’t that what being sisters is about?” Leanne pushed Dawn onto her back with her foot and straddled the girl, her hands pushing against Dawn’s shoulders.  “Well, guess what, BITCH? YOU AIN’T GONNA TAKE MY MAN!!!” 

Leanne stretched her bottom downward until her own womanly curls could have been woven like a pubic blanket into Dawn’s.

“YOU CAN’T HAVE ANY OF MY MAN, GOT THAT, BITCH,” Leanne hissed as she began to grind her pelvis roughly against the other woman’s. Leanne could feel Ken’s stickiness, still warm, coating her sexual plumpness.  “NONE...” Leanne growled when she thought she could feel the last of her husband’s seminal tracings being absorbed then moved herself and brought her knee up forcibly between Dawn’s legs, causing the girl’s eye’s to roll as the pain arced from her pelvis up her spinal cord, “...OF HIM!!”  Four more times Leanne would grind herself into Dawn. Four more times she would bring her knee to Dawn’s sexual center, each time increasing the amount of pressure she exerted.  She would not have stopped even then if the blood spurting from her sister’s coughs through her mouth, nose and the savagely shredded cheek began to drip from Leanne’s hair as if she had been caught in a cloud burst.  She had to look good for her man. 

Leanne got off her sister, walked over to the dresser, took out a pair of handcuffs, attaching one cuff to Dawn’s wrist and the other to the bed post. She then went to the washroom to shower, brusquely tossing a wet towel at Dawn, ordering her to clean herself up, she was a disgrace. Leanne let Ken have one last moment with Dawn, but as he lay beside her sister napping, Leanne slipped Dawn enough diazepam that after that night, the only thing slipping anything into her would be worms and maggots. Leanne was brought back to park by the woman shouting.

“Mandy! Stick close, you little shit!”  She then lowered her voice and said conspiratorially to Leanne, “You can’t let them see that you actually love them, can you?”

“Oh, I think it’s never a bad thing to show them love,” Leanne answered which was rewarded by the teenager rolling her eyes with her cheeks momentarily turning a tinge of rose.

This poor girl, Leanne thought to herself, she really does love her sister. The newspapers had called Leanne and Ken’s story “The Beauty and the Beast”.  The shy pretty girl with the purest of hearts had gotten mixed up with a monster. It had not been until the papers of her plea bargain had been inked and set in judicial stone that investigators would realize in this version of Beauty and the Beast, perhaps it had not been Beauty that they had made the deal with. The damning video tapes that the public would never see taken by her husband as Leanne talked to the camera about the drugs she used on the unconscious girls that she sat on bed with, naked, undressing the girls, taking draughts of the forced passion before taking the camera away to film Ken having his turn after she had been sated. It amused Leanne that considering she had used her knowledge of pharmaceuticals in the commissions of the crimes that sent her husband to prison until the day he would die that the jobs the courts would arrange, while low level entry positions, still gave her access to those same drugs.   Leanne’s interment had changed her though; she had seen the error in abusing her knowledge for her own means. As the police observations of her activities had dwindled she came to realize that it was within her power to save others who could be hurt by their younger siblings. She had the strength to handle the onus of crushing disappointment that haunts a person for the span of their lifetime so that others would not have to.

Leanne knew that she had to save this girl. She slipped her hand into the beige carry-all that sat on the ground beside the park bench, pulling out the small syringe that she kept primed for just these kinds of emergencies.  She leaned over, putting her hand on the teenager’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry, honey, I used to have a little sister to,” she told the teenager as the syringe plunged through the teenager’s jacket and shirt just underneath the rib cage.

“You’re welcome,” whispered Leanne as she looked into the teenager’s eyes as she gripped her shoulder to ensure the teenager could not squirm too quickly away before the plunger had exhausted the contents of the vial.

There was not the slightest hint of the sudden cessation of life; the little curls of warm exhale that slightly shadowed in the autumn air simply dissipated.  Leanne propped the slumping teenager so that her head rested on the edge of back of the bench, the bench’s metal arm against the girl’s side resisted gravity’s insistence that the earth should reclaim the basic molecular components immediately.

Leanne stood up, straightening her skirt, looking at the girl kicking at the rumpled piles of leaves that littered the park under its trees.  She strode over to the girl and introduced herself, telling the girl that her sister had asked her to take the girl home so she could go hang out with some friends and held out her hand.  The little girl was confused for a moment, hesitant, but after peeking at her sister sitting on the bench and saw no movement to stop or hinder the woman, chose to accept the outstretched hand.  After all, what kind of person would let anything bad happen to their little sister?

 It would be hours before day would turn to night when in the crispness the trickle of urine that had vacated the teenager’s bladder would freeze the bottom of her thighs to the wooden slats of the park bench.  Hours more when a street social worker would gently shake the corpse thinking it was another unfortunate soul who had become a victim of today’s economy and ended up without a warm place to lay their head. It would take over half a day before the police would be called, identifying who the woman and notifying her family.  It would be over half a day before the question would be asked where the woman’s little sister was. It would be over half a day that “Tracy” would suddenly become ill and call the office up to tell them that she was going home.  It would be over half a day that Leanne would have a little sister. It would be two days before the blackened shrivelled heart within the locket would be replaced by another heart once more being pink and vibrant in tribute to the betrayal of a sister.

A Matter of Duty

The wind tousled the ten years old boy’s shoulder length hair as he sat on the front steps of Father Broussard’s rectory. The cloudiness matched the autumn chill in the air, but the boy didn’t move but continued to sit. He was still dressed in the good black suit and pants that he had worn an hour earlier at the funeral, he had wished he had changed back into his comfy t-shirt and jeans before coming but in another hour he expected that he’d be sitting in the back of his grand parent’s red Skylark on the six hour trip back home; he wouldn’t have time to change and see the Father. He had been sitting there for almost ten whole minutes, eight minutes longer than he could comfortable sit anywhere without beginning to fidget. He resisted the urge to get up and run – he had a promise to keep, a duty to fulfill.

The boy thought back to earlier that afternoon at the funeral internment and what led him to sitting on the stoop waiting for Father Broussard. It had been real easy to get here, he supposed, considering how hard it had been to convince his friend to help him get the Father alone on such a busy afternoon such as this was. The two argued over it, the boy’s friend insisting that meeting the Father on the day he was burying his father wasn’t right; and he had resisted the boy’s requests until the whisper in the ear of the phrase, “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth”, then the understanding of what the boy meant to do became clear and delectable to the grieving ear of the friend.

It was then that the boy’s friend and he began to near Father Broussard after the interment ceremony as everyone waited for the workers to ready the coffin for lowering into the ground. For five minutes they would close in on the minister then they would back off slightly as some other grown up would come up to talk to the Father. They were beginning to think that two ten year old boys wouldn’t be able to get the Father’s attention…in public.

Father Broussard finally did notice the two boys behind him. He turned and put his hand on the darker skinned of the two. “Sorry about your father,” Broussard said kindly, “He was a good man. I knew him very well…very well.” The boys couldn’t help but notice that the good Father’s smile became almost sickly as the Father spoke.

“Thank you, Father,” the dead man’s son said. He remembered his manners and introduced the other boy as his friend that had come to the funeral with his grandparents.

Father Broussard nodded, “Oh yes,” he said, “You’re the one who was with him when the angels called him home. The lord certainly was looking after you, after all, not even a night in the hospital.”

The heavier of the two boys spoke, “I wouldn’t rightly call it a callin’ – more like a demandin’.” Father Broussard frowned and the boy hastily added, “T’ain’t nuthin’ but a hurtin’, sir, and Madame says that a little spit an’ shinin’ will heal me alright, but I ain’t too up on the Lord’s ways.” The boy inhaled deeply after speaking, the after effect of the soreness of his shoulder seemed to test his vocal chords when he was trying to control the tone of voice he was using towards the Father; a man that he knew to be the cause of the funeral in the first place but wasn’t about to let that fact slip out.

“It’s never a bad time to learn the ways of God,” the Father told both boys though he kept his eyes locked on the heavier boy, as if to evaluate what reason his God would guide the bullet away from its lethal destination of the boy’s head to merely graze the shoulder, allowing the majority of the damage to be done by the boy spinning and meeting the less fatal of wooden door frame splinters to pierce his upper chest. What the Father hadn’t heard though was the half hour the boy laid on the floor covered in the shooter’s own brain matter, skull fragments and blood when the shooter had turned the gun on himself. “Perhaps one day you should have a talk with your local minister about these matters.”

The other boy gave a large smile and said, “Father, you couldn’t talk to him today, could you?” Father Broussard looked taken aback at the notion of talking with the boy at a time such as this, but the other boy pushed on. “After all, you’re family, and he’s family – learnin’ about the Lord’s way from family is better than a stranger, ain’t that what you said to me?”

The Father was quiet for a moment and then said, “Why don’t you come to see me when the internment is complete and I have said thank you to everyone.” He looked at his watch, “We can have a chat before the reception starts, would that be alright?” He looked straight into the boy’s hazel eyes with his own light blue ones.

The boy said nothing but stared back. His friend gave him an elbow in the ribs…his sore ones, no less, and answered for him, “That sounds like an idea, don’t it?” The boy nodded his head at his friend while he held his throbbing side. Father Broussard didn’t notice, but looked at the two boys and smiled.

“Well, then I shall see you at my residence soon, then,” he said softly. “I have some things to do here, and then we shall…talk.”

The boy nodded and the walked backwards away from the good Father as he turned his attention to several of the older women of the community that had come up to him. The boys forced smiles disappeared. The boy looked at his friend and nodded – the first stage of the mission was complete. The Father hadn’t caught on that the boy knew exactly how well the Father had known his friend’s father, his shooter. In fact, the boy knew that the minister wore a shallow kindly façade; that behind the smile lurked a monster that had systematically gone through his friend’s family from his father and mother down to his six year old sister to gain intimate knowledge of each one.

The boy winced from the pain of the wounds he had received less than a week before. He wondered if Father Broussard would have been so avid in inviting another prepubescent child into his private residence as he had done hundreds of times in the thirty years he had been stationed as the town’s moral compass if he had known that it had not been just an attempted murder and successful suicide. That the shooter had been hallucinating that the boy was his boy and that as a good father he couldn’t let the evil taint him as deep as it had him; he wondered if Father Broussard perhaps knew that his defiling of an entire family to satisfy his own petty lusts was the reason for that day’s funeral. The boy decided that even if the minister knew, he probably didn’t care....

************

A hand came to rest on the boy’s head jolting him away from his thoughts. The Father’s voice seemed to come from inside a hollow tube as he told the boy to come in. The boy nodded and followed the minister in, watching from the corner of his eye as the minister looked around the outside as he held the door for the boy. The boy walked a little past the Father, waiting as the Father closed and locked the door.

“Just so we aren’t disturbed,” Father Broussard said with a wink to the boy and then motioned for the boy to go into the windowless study just off to the left of the front hallway. The boy briefly thought about changing his mind on his course of action as he watched the man go behind his large oaken desk covered with papers, a well worn bible and nine ceramic Jesus’ that the Sunday school had painted and presented to him.

The boy figured that Father Broussard fit the image of what a man of the cloth looked like; taller than his grandfather though slimmer. There was a sternness of demeanor that was etched into the Father’s fifty-ish long gaunt face, thin lips that seemed to curl inwards toward his mouth hiding the minister’s teeth even when he smiled. Even the way the man stood seemed to exude a forbidding aura though Father Broussard was stooped down in a shallow leather chair to show concern and understanding. The boy patted his left suit pocket to reassure himself that everything was going to be alright, the familiar feeling of the slim bump of the present his grandfather had given him for his sixth birthday resting there reaffirmed his resolve.

“Well, my son,” Father Broussard stated in an inviting tone, “I’m happy that I get a chance to talk to you about the ways of our Heavenly Father and his Son. What can I help enlighten you on so that you can walk in His light along with your friend?”

The boy thought for a moment and said, “I try to do good things but deeds don’t seem to account for much.”

Father Broussard nodded and replied, “Good comes in many forms, that you try without moral righteous guidance just means that your intentions may not be seen as good but self serving. In the Bible there are many examples of where Evil masks itself with good deeds in order to weave its way into a person’s trust.”

The boy looked at the Father blankly.

The Father gave a broad smile and paraphrased for the boy, “Being good means to serve God, if you aren’t seen as being the Lord’s servant, it can be seen as serving only yourself.”

The boy nodded. “So since I don’t go to Church, I’m evil? Cuz my mamma says I’m evil all the time and God don’t want me there – how I am gonna be good if I ain’t even allowed in the Church?”

Father Broussard chuckled, “By taking Christ, our Lord, into your heart, one cannot help but be good – his love frees us from our sins and makes us see that all are our brothers and sisters. That feeling of family is what binds us and makes us as one showered in God’s love.” Father Broussard leaned forward in his chair, “But is that what brings you here to me today? To see if I can cleanse your soul so that you can serve the light?”

The boy crinkled his nose and answered, “Everbody tells me that I ain’t clean cuz I don’t go to church.” The boy paused for a moment, curling his nose up even further as if the action would organize his thoughts better, “But I think I’m cleaner than most everybody…mostly.”

Father Broussard got out of his chair and came to sit on the edge of the desk in front of the boy. “Now what makes you say ‘mostly’? Is there something you need to get off your mind?” he asked gently.

The boy took a deep breath and said, “Evil likes to disguise itself, right? It hides its true form until it’s too late, right?”

Father Broussard paused momentarily looking at the boy from top to bottom; the boy didn’t like that but kept his eyes squarely focused on the white square on the Father’s collar. “What makes you ask that question?” Father Broussard asked, putting his hands together and rested them between his legs.

“My friend says that what I’ve got is a sign of evil,” the boy lied, but he figured that a little white lie could be excused.

Father Broussard’s eye brows went up slightly as he asked, “A sign of evil?”

“My friend tells me that you’ve dealt with this kinda evil…that you can take the devil out of me just like you done did to him” the boy answered. “I figure ya must have done it good cuz his don’t hide – like its been purified, I want you to purify me too so I can be a good boy an’ maybe my mama will love me.”

Father Broussard’s hands left his lap and now set themselves on either side of his body on the desk, as if bracing himself against the weight of the boy’s answers. “What doesn’t hide?”

The boy’s face reddened as he stood up. The Father and he were only a couple of feet apart but at that moment the boy felt as if the Father was in his skin from the way the man’s eyes looked at him. The boy undid his pants and let them drop; the Father gave a sharp intake of breath – though the boy thought it wasn’t from disgust but from something other. The boy pushed his underwear down to join his pants at his ankles and stood there looking at Father Broussard. The Father licked his lips, and the boy noticed that the man’s hands trembled slight as they moved from the desk back to between the minister’s legs.

Without taking his eyes of the Father the boy grabbed his uncircumcised penis and began to stroke it slowly. His hand moved all the way up, pulling the foreskin taut, then bringing the foreskin all the way back down until it disappeared into the quickly hardening fleshy member. The corners of the Father’s mouth began to twitch.

The boy began to talk though he didn’t know if the Father was even listening, “Now, see this here’s the confusin’ part. See how it looks? Like that hooded fella, what’s his name? The Grim Reaper…yeah, that’s it, an’ he’s evil, ain’t he?” The boy watched as the Father’s blue eyes seemed to turn an icy gray as he studied the boy’s hand. “But watch when I do this…the cowl just plumb ol’ disappears, like it didn’t even exist…but then it appears again. So that means I’ve got the evil in me, right?”

Father Broussard didn’t answer for what it seemed like an hour to the boy as he pulled his foreskin back and forth as the man watched. “Father?”

“Hmmm? Yes?” Father Broussard said not taking his eyes off the boy’s bald groin. The man moved each of his hands to the side; the boy could see a bulge in the pants. “Yes, Evil does hide in the most…” Father Broussard paused, “…in the most tempting of places.” He stood up and came close to the boy.

The boy didn’t move but took his hand off his penis, leaving it sticking out by its own hardness. The boy didn’t even flinch when Father Broussard’s sinewy right hand wrapped around the penis and roughly pulled back and forth on it.

Father Broussard smiled at the boy and commented softly, “It is fortunate that you have such a good friend who wants you to find salvation.”

“Yes he is a good friend, Father,” the boy answered, he winced as the father pulled the foreskin to its limits with an increasingly rougher tugging.

“I shall have to remember to thank him for his efforts to save your soul,” Father Broussard purred. He released the boy’s penis; the boy innerly sighed from the release of the pain the Father had been administering.

Father Broussard stepped back a footstep and told the boy to kneel before him so that the Father could start the cleansing ceremony. The boy went to pull his pants up, but the Father told him not to – they would have to be down to complete the holy blessing. The boy went to his knees; his face was just a little lower than Father Broussard’s pants bulge.

The minister looked up to the ceiling and said, “Oh great Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing this lost soul to me so that I may show him the path to your glory.” As he said this, the Father’s hand unzipped his pants and pulled out his own penis out; it was less than six inches away from the boy’s face.

The boy fought the two urges than ran through his mind. The first was to run away from the Father and his thin circumcised five inch penis, the other was to laugh and tell the Father that his was bigger. He did neither but looked at the splotched skin along its length.

“Now,” Father Broussard said in a harsher tone, “To begin the road to your salvation. Take into you me and the more that you give of yourself, the easier and less…painful it will be for you as I sanctify the most inner parts of you.”

“Father?” The boy said not understanding.

The minister’s smile became more lurid and a predatory gleam entered the eyes as he clarified matters for the boy, “You are going to take my penis into your mouth and suck on it. Make sure you cover me with a lot of your spit.”

The boy played dumb at what the Father was intending to do and asked again, “Father?”

Father Broussard put his hand on the boy’s head and pushed him toward his penis as he spoke, “My son, I have to absolve and purify your sins from the inside out. We’ll pray and then my holy seed will infuse goodness unto you…through your bottom.”

“Yes Father,” the boy responded. The boy grabbed Father Broussard’s penis in his right hand, just below the man’s tip. As he inched his mouth closer to the tip of the penis, he could feel the Father’s eyes burning into his scalp; the penis throbbed from anticipation. The boy could smell something pungent from the minister’s member, something not right and fought down the bile that threatened to escape from the back of his throat. The boy’s hand slipped into the left pocket of his jacket.

“That’s right, my son,” the Father intoned, “Let the love of God fill your mouth.”

The boy could feel the heat emanating from the penis as he opened his mouth as wide as he good so that the fleshy tip wouldn’t touch his lips.

In the pocket, his hand gripped his grandfather’s present and hit a release button on it.

The boy tightened his right hand’s grip.

Father Broussard moaned.

The boy counted one…two…three. Then he bit down hard on the penis tip that had entered his mouth while his left hand came swiftly out of his pocket. In his hand was a jackknife with a three inch serrated edge. The knife his grandfather had given him for skinning the tails off of gophers to take into the town office for ten cents a tail, extra money for movies and books, now pierced the Father’s penis between the boy’s right hand and the Father’s scrotum, slicing easily into the thick flesh.

Father Broussard seemed frozen for a second but then pushed himself from the boy, the boy resisted the pressure from the Father’s hands to keep his head straight, making the boy’s teeth leave deep gouges in the tip of the penis as it was forced from the boy’s mouth. The boy released his right hand and put it on top of his left hand to steady the knife as it ripped forward through the penis as the Father went backwards. A sickening stench of acrid urine and blood hit the boy’s nose as liquid pour out from behind the blade as it sawed its way up the remaining three inches of the Father’s penis, sliding out easily as it just slicing through the middle of the tip.

As Father Broussard hit the desk, the boy fell onto his back from the unfettering of the blade in flesh. The boy still had both hands melded to the handle of the jackknife. It felt like the world had gone into a slow motion mode for the boy; the Father screaming and holding his divided penis in his hands, the Father’s knees slowly unlocking and dropping him down to the floor.

The boy felt no horror but only satisfaction. As he slowly stood to his feet, his pants still down at his ankles he said with disgust, “You know, for big holy man, you sure squeal like a piglet bein’ stomped on by it’s daddy – ain’t the pure of heart supposed to suffer in silence? Guess this means that you ain’t meant to be wearin’ that white collar around your neck, now don’t it?” The words had no effect on Father Broussard the boy knew, he doubted the Father even heard them; it was more for the boy – to stop the urge to throw up and cry.

The boy looked at the Father as he tried to stand without letting go of his profusely bleeding crotch; the Father had made it to one knee; the boy walked quickly to the desk and picked up a ceramic Jesus and brought it to the Father’s temple’s left temple. Shards of hardened clay stuck into the minister’s hairline as the boy watched with satisfaction as the Father curled back into a ball on the floor, rolling back and forth.

The boy spat into the minister’s eye. “Madame also told me that hurtin’ has many layers,” the boy said over the moans of the semi conscious man. “Spit an’ polish works for the ones that ain’t on purpose,” he continued, “But there’s kinds of hurtin’ that are so deep that they ain’t that easy to heal. You caused a lot of deep hurtin’.”

Father Broussard stopped his roll and squinted up at the boy. Through gritted teeth he stated in harsh expulsions of air, “I loved them all…there was no pain, just a release of love.”

The boy laughed as he unbuttoned his shirt, his chest splotched and welted with sixteen puncture marks of various sizes and depth scabbing over; where it took the doctor three hours to pull out all the wooden splinters that the door frame that the bullet had shattered instead of entering the boy’s cranium.

“This is what your love caused,” the boy replied through his own gritted teeth. “Don’t say this ain’t pain.”

Father Broussard went to open his mouth to respond but a stream of urine drowned out his words and made him choke instead. He looked at the boy who was finally pulling up his pants and buttoning his shirt back up. The father’s eyes became unfocused; beginning to more quickly as if to force his eyelids to close as the boy finished buttoning up the last button on his shirt.

The boy bent down and with the same blade that he had administered his sentence to the good Father he took a large tuft of the Father’s hair and put it in his pants pocket along with the knife. In twenty minutes the boy would lay the tuft of hair on the pillow of his friend’s grandmother’s bed, but for now the boy was content in watching the Father’s eyes roll back and face loose all rigidity to the onslaught of unconsciousness. The boy knew the minister wouldn’t die, just as he knew the priest would never face the charges that he should for what he had done for almost three decades, that’s why the boy was here: He recalled what his friend’s grandmother had said to him the night before the funeral after she had pulled him aside at the family and friend’s gathering.

The boy was nervous talking alone with the old woman; she had hardly spoken to him more than a few sentences all his life, more watching him with a severe look than anything else, he wasn’t sure he liked the new interest the old woman had in him at all.

She didn’t glare at him that night, her eyes seemed to burn intense but he could tell that it had nothing to do with him.

“Tomorrow,” the old woman spat out in broken English, “Is the beginning of your duty.”

The boy had expected the old woman to say something in regards to the suicide of her son in law, ask if he had said anything in the final moments – but at the same time the woman’s deep brown eyes told him that she already knew. He responded, “Ma’am?”

The old woman’s face seemed to soften as she continued. “Your momma’s right that you have something in you. You’ve got a spirit about you; it ain’t the devil like she thinks, but something more.”

The boy started to feel his stomach churn; he hated being reminded of his mother and what she always said about him. He wanted to walk away from his friend’s grandmother and hide in between his grandparents, but he couldn’t get his legs to move. He said nothing.

The old woman seemed to take no notice of the boy’s fear or confusion. “You are a destroyer, to be sure,” she said. “But you are only destructive to amend what the spirits see as wrong. Tomorrow you take your first step into who you and the spirit are – for my family.”

“Ma’am?”

“A man who gets away with evil actions will always be evil – but if you give him a reminder of the evil, he can begin to see the evil and repeal it.” The old woman whispered as she grabbed the boy’s arm and brought his ear close to her mouth. In an even quieter voice she hissed, “Remove the evil but make sure he’s around to remember the evil, boy – make sure he’ll be around to remember it.”

The boy had asked what the old woman meant, but she just gave him a smile and had told him that he was a bright boy, he would figure it out. He had spent last night thinking about it, and that morning he had come up with the solution he felt worked best to meet the condition his friend’s grandmother gave him as well as ensuring that Father Broussard never hurt another person again, plus satisfy the boy’s own sense of irony. He knew what the word celibacy meant, obviously the Father had forgotten – perhaps by having to squat to take a squirt would remind him of the misuse and the lack of adherence to the code of conduct he had sworn for his beliefs was an apt form of justice.

The boy walked out of the study and down the hallway. He unlocked the door and peered cautiously out the door; there were several people standing around, his friend’s cousins. They looked at him sternly as he stepped out into the chilly air and towards them. One of the older boys came up and roughly pushed him into the large mud puddle on the side of the road, soaking him; he would have to change as soon as he got to his friend’s house and of course there would be a certain chiding from the elders that would end in with the chuckling admission of ‘boys will be boys’. There would be the insistence that the clothes would be laundered immediately, they would send down the clothes clean.

A week later the clothes would arrive at the boy’s house along with a note about the latest scandal to hit the Northern town: The minister was attacked on the very day of the funeral – witnesses would claim to have seen a man break into the church to steal the donation box. Father Broussard would surprise the robber and would suffer deep wounds. The thief escaped and the good Father managed to drag himself to his study in the rectory before passing out. A suspiciously wide open door would lead a good samaritan to investigate and find the man of the cloth unconscious on the floor. The police would have no leads and the diocese would decide to move Father Broussard but would never ask for an investigation into the incident. Father Broussard would spend the remainder of his days with a catheter attached to replace his amputated penis to siphon his bladder waste and the police would never have any new leads to who the attacker was and would shelve the case under “Unsolved”.

But for now, the boy picked himself out of the puddle. There was no eye contact from the boy to anyone, and nothing was said. He was drenched, thickly covered in the mud that had a distinct slimy feel. He began to walk down the street to his friend’s grandmother’s house but as the cold wind slashed through the sodden clothes attempting to penetrate to his very bones he felt nothing, no cold, no anger, no glee, after all, it was a matter of duty…