“Objection!”
“Invited error, Your Honor,” the DA shouted back.
“You opened the door, counsel,” the judge told the Beast’s lawyer, barely able to keep the smile off his face.
I was grateful the jury couldn’t read my thoughts then. I didn’t even know a half-man like me could have a battle cry, but I could hear it ring out inside my mind: Yeah, you opened that door, Beast. And I just rolled right on through it, didn’t I? Now what?
I felt powerful enough to knock that lawyer out without ever leaving my chair, but I didn’t let it show on my face. It didn’t matter what that man said, it didn’t matter what tricks he tried, the jury never took its eyes off me. And they all listened like I was sanctified.
ven with all that, the Beast still might have gotten off with only a few years. The DA about threw a fit over it, but the judge told the jury they could consider lesser charges. He read a whole list of them: manslaughter, involuntary homicide … even felonious assault, which sounded like nothing more serious than a slap on the face.
If the Beast had admitted he’d just plain shot Rory-Anne, it might have come out differently. If he’d said he was so drunk he hardly remembered that whole night, the jury might well have believed him.
It’s not that anyone liked him, but, in their eyes, there would have been a lot of truth being told in any story the Beast could make up. The men knew what kind of temper he had, especially when he was drunk. And the women, well, they knew all about Rory-Anne.
The Beast knew I wasn’t ever going to tell anyone about what he’d been doing to Rory-Anne for all those years. How could I? If he had told some sad story about how his wife had run off and left him to raise Rory-Anne all on his own, and she had just gone wild after that, he knew I wouldn’t call him a liar.
He knew if I disputed his story it would be just the same as telling the whole town the truth about me and Tory-boy. Folks may have suspicioned, but I’d never allow them to turn that suspicion into truth out of my own mouth.
Maybe the Beast was scared they’d finally start looking for his wife’s body. Or … Well, I’ll never know why, but he got right up on the stand and insisted he was stone-cold sober the night it happened.
He still swore he’d just been trying to stop Rory-Anne from killing me with that butcher knife. He told the whole courtroom that all he’d done was try to protect his crippled son from that crazy, drunken whore.
But all the while he was telling that pack of lies, he never stopped glaring at me. The whole courtroom could see those vile threats flash, as if someone was striking his flinty eyes with a piece of steel.
he State always has to go first, so the Beast had already heard Tory-boy and me tell the jury a different account entirely. But he stayed stuck to his story, as if he couldn’t get that seed I had planted out of his head.
Just like I could never get the seed he planted in Rory-Anne out of my body.
ith Rory-Anne dead, I was in charge. Before, even though me and Tory-boy each got Disability checks, they came to her—that’s how they do it with children. But Rory-Anne touched those checks just long enough to sign them over to the Beast.
Probably another reason he’d never killed us.
Or maybe he thought Rory-Anne would do it for him. She’d thrown knives at me more than once—it really drove her crazy whenever I would try to keep her off Tory-boy.
But even though the government considered me disabled, there wasn’t a soul in town who thought there was anything wrong with my mind. So, with the Beast and Rory-Anne gone, both checks came to me directly.
Maybe they bent a law a little bit to do that; I’m not exactly sure. I know they made me what they call an “emancipated minor” before the Beast was even put on trial. But they didn’t stop there; they made me Tory-boy’s legal guardian as well.
The judge said that was only right, seeing as I was the only family he had, what with my mother gone, my sister dead, and my father sure to be in prison for life … if he got lucky.
“The whole town knows you raised that child since he was born, Esau,” he said. Talking to me direct, not even glancing at that “Rural Services” lawyer who was supposed to be helping me. She was an outsider. We didn’t need any such people telling us how to take care of our own business.
“We’re all proud of the job you’ve done. Tory’s never been a bit of trouble to anyone. And, you know, some of those … slower ones, they can fall in with the wrong crowd. But this court is satisfied that if there’s one person he minds it’s you.”
That was true. Nobody ever did deny that. Not even the Beast.
knew the first thing we had to do was get some money. Magic be damned, that shack would always hold memories Tory-boy might not be able to deal with.
Getting money turned out to be easier than I thought. Once I started really concentrating on doing it, that is.
Every night, after Tory-boy fell asleep, I went back to science. Spina bifida isn’t so rare as you might think. Not everyone who’s born with it has to be in a wheelchair. It depends on what type you have.
Turns out, I had drawn the shortest straw. When the vertebrae don’t form correctly, a little sac filled with fluid extends through an opening in the spine. That’s called “myelomeningocele.” It can hit just about anywhere along your spine, so I guess it was lucky for me that it happened at the lowest point—because anything below that point is never going to work the way it should.
If Rory-Anne hadn’t been convinced they’d give her all kinds of drugs, I probably wouldn’t have been born in a hospital. That’s all that saved me. They even had to put a shunt in my head to drain the fluid buildup. I still have the scar from that, but that’s the only sign I carry. Above the waist, I mean.
I know they’d told Rory-Anne I was what they call an “at-risk” baby, but she never once brought me back to the hospital until that time she burned me and got scared.
Every time I came across something that said aftercare was critical for babies born with spina bifida, I wondered why the County had never sent anyone around to check. But then I remembered the Beast. If those social workers wanted to come and have a look at me, they’d need to bring the cops with them. I guess it wasn’t worth all that trouble. Not for someone like me, anyway.
So I grew up not being able to really use any part of my body from the end of my spine on down. I accepted that. Just like I accepted the jolts of pain that shot the length of my left leg all the way into my central nervous system.
I say “accepted,” but that came slow. The first time, I was about nine years old, and that pain blast filled me with terror. I thought I was dying. Worse, I thought of what would happen to Tory-boy without me to protect him.
But then it stopped. Snap! Just like that. As if the very thought of Tory-boy being hurt drove the Devil of that pain right back down to Hell, where it belonged.
It wasn’t until I started looking for ways to get more money for me and Tory-boy to be safe that I read about how some folks with the exact same disease I had could actually feel something below the waist, too.
That comforted me considerably. It confirmed what I knew in my own mind—what I had felt wasn’t this “phantom pain” thing some of the books talked about. It was as real as the disease itself.
I was thankful for that knowledge. I understood how things were always going to be. I knew if I couldn’t control my own mind, I’d never be able to control anything at all.