God, but he loved her.
“When I was eleven my family was killed: Mom, Dad, Lena -my baby sister-even the cat. They didn’t die in a car accident. They were murdered. I was convicted of killing them.”
“You were a little boy!” Polly exclaimed in disbelief.
“Yes. The papers dubbed me “Butcher Boy.” I was the youngest person ever convicted of murder in Minnesota.” Marshall couldn’t bear to look at his wife’s face, but he couldn’t look away either. He was waiting for the moment of horror that closed people off from Butcher Boy as surely as if they slammed an iron cell door and shot the bolt. Polly’s face showed nothing but concern, and he realized that she was as certain of the end of this story as she was of the last scene in Coriolanus. She knew he didn’t do it; she was just waiting to hear how the act played out.
“I love you,” he said.
“I know, sugar.”
“The tattoo, thirteen and a half, that you’ve asked about? I got it in Drummond. I was there for seven years. The staff psychiatrist, a bastard named Kowalski, set me to writing ‘homework assignments.’ He’d bring me the newspaper clipping of some horrific murder and insist I put myself in the killer’s head, think their thoughts, feel their disease on my brain, then tell him the reason I would have done killings like that. I guess he thought if he got me to go down that path enough times I’d remember killing my family. Maybe he only wanted me to say I did. The guy wanted to wring a best seller out of me one way or another.”
“Now there was a Butcher Boy all grown up,” Polly said with disgust. “Why did he have to torture a little boy to get his book?”
“Because I didn’t remember doing it; I didn’t remember killing my family. I’d had a cold, and Mom gave me medicine, and I slept like the dead. God,” he said as the word echoed in his brain.
“It’s okay, baby.” Polly touched his cheek and the pain of memory lessened.
“The bastard wanted to be the one who made me remember-or made me admit I remembered. So, the homework. By the time he’d gotten on this kick, I’d been in Drummond just long enough to get punky. Most of the stuff I wrote was just in-your-face rebellion. Since they’d dubbed me Butcher Boy, I’d be Butcher Boy. But those clippings were vicious, brutal things.”
“I know. I read them.”
Before Marshall recovered from that, Polly said, “I, too, have a long, long story, and I suspect Brother Danny wrote the script from start to finish. Your homework assignments were put in the cellar so I would find them.”
Marshall nodded. He knew he should ask for her story, should listen to her. Polly had been hurt so badly by his past. The need to tell overcame the need to listen, and he went on: “The more I read those damn things-those lists of people butchering people-and tried to get into the skins of the killers, the sicker I felt. I knew I’d done it. Enough people tell a kid he did a thing, and he believes he did it. The shrinks came up with half a dozen reasons I didn’t remember, and I believed them. Why wouldn’t I? I’m eleven, and they’re the authorities as far as I knew.
“So I knew I’d killed my mom, my dad, Lena -knew it but I never felt it. Do you know what I mean? I never felt like a killer, like some psycho. I still felt kind of like the kid who played ice hockey, the boy with the fishing pole. God, it was strange. I didn’t know it was strange then. It was like air and stone walls, just there. Most of my life I’ve walked around thinking I was a time bomb that was going to explode and kill everyone around me.
“Tippity-the dog I told you about-she didn’t jump in the freezer. She was taped up and thrown in. I figured I’d done it. The night was a blank, just like when I was a kid. I figured getting close to Elaine triggered it somehow.” Saying the words aloud, Marshall realized he’d not “figured” that. Danny had told him that, and Danny had brought them a bottle of champagne that had knocked two adults out. It was drugged. Danny. The drug dealer of Le Cure.
“He was doing it,” he rasped, his throat dry. “Danny was doing it. Danny was giving me drugs and moving things. My brother. My brother.” Marshall felt his face turning inside out.
Polly’s cool fingers and murmured endearments brought him back to himself.
“Just like he did it before?”
“Yes.” Marshall stared at the shadows he and Polly cast on the white wall of the hospital room. He was seeing two boys, Dylan and Richard. “He must have been born with something broken inside of him. It’s no easier for me to see him doing it than it was to see myself doing it.
“He was going to do it again. To you and the girls.” The cold in his soul was deep. “I don’t want to hate him,” he said quietly.
For a while, they sat without speaking. Marshall ’s breathing evened out. His thoughts slid from frantic to torpid. Polly held his hand.
“You asked if I believed you,” Polly said.
Marshall grew very still. He wanted, needed her to believe in him-to believe in him when he was unbelievable.
“It was not merely the lipstick on your brother’s shirt-though that had a comforting concreteness about it. It was partly that I did not believe Danny. I wish I could say I believed you, but, except to the writers of sonnets, love does not show one the way. When one has children, one cannot have faith where they are endangered. There are some mistakes a mother could not live with. Had I been twenty or even thirty, I might have been able to love blindly, unconditionally. No more. There are two conditions: Emma and Gracie.
“A part of me believed that I was not fooled in you. Part of me knows anyone can be fooled.” She ran her fingertips down his cheek. His sadness trailed after her touch. “I am sorry, my darling. I cannot even apologize for not believing in you utterly and without question; that kind of love-faith-must be learned young. My early childhood instruction was centered around how to keep little girls alive.”
Marshall let that soak in. The knowledge that she had entertained the thought he was a beast and a killer did not hurt him as much as he’d thought it would. He had not believed in himself. He’d believed in Danny.
“That’s best,” he said finally. “Civilized behavior is built on conditions. I love both your conditions.”
“They don’t seem to be too traumatized,” Polly said. “I hope to keep it that way.”
“There will be newspaper articles about this, about the old murders, about who I am, and what Richard did, and what Danny did,” Marshall warned. “The case was national news at the time. It might be hard to shield them through that.”
“Surely the rebuilding of New Orleans is sufficiently ubiquitous in the press that they will not have space for an old story,” Polly said with a smile. “We can hope most of our neighbors will be too occupied with their own dramas to read them.”
“I’ll read them,” Marshall said. “I’ll read them and try to figure out why, what makes a killer desire the kill, what made my brother take my family’s lives and, then, in every way he could, take mine. Homework. I’ve done it for so long, trying to find myself.”
“Well, my darling, you can quit looking. Gracie and Emma and I have found you.”
41
Richard Raines was sentenced to life without parole. Because his injury had left him unable to use the lower half of his body until the swelling around his spinal cord went down-if it went down-he was put in the maximum-security hospital ward of the U.S. penitentiary in Pollock, Louisiana.
Twice a month, Marshall made the drive to Pollock to visit his brother.
Danny showed every indication that he enjoyed these exchanges. The allotted hour was spent telling Marshall what had been done to his life. Danny used the time to talk about how he had used and used up Vondra, set her as a watchdog on Marshall’s office, related Polly’s secrets to her, and set her up as Polly’s tarot reader; he described in detail how he’d told the warden Phil Maris was a pedophile and had raped Dylan, how he’d killed Phil, Sara, and several others. Some murders he made up just for the pleasure he felt in hurting the brother to whom he had given everything and who had abandoned him.