Warren Wells’ friends had heaped sympathy on the twins. People like Rayburn Jones and the family attorney, Herbert Isaacs, talked about how the sons had been so noble, coming back to the farm to help their ailing father get out a final tree crop. The funeral was held at Three Springs Baptist Church, where Warren Wells had served as a deacon in his middle age, before his fervor shifted toward hoarding treasures of the Earth rather than of the spirit. During the memorial service, Joshua had disguised his giggles as sobs. Jacob felt no emotion at all.
The day after the burial in the family cemetery, Herbert Isaacs gathered the family in the study of the Wells house and read them the will. That’s when Joshua learned he’d received the property instead of the running money he’d yearned for. Jacob received a lion’s share of the eight million dollars in other assets, some real estate holdings, and various stocks and bonds, while five more distant relatives had each received title to business properties in downtown Kingsboro. Warren Wells’ final laugh had been to place a covenant on Joshua’s bequest that prevented him from selling it, and the taxes on the hundred-and-forty-acre estate all but assured that Joshua would have to keep a job to pay them. Otherwise, the county could put a lien on the property and leave Joshua with nothing but an unprofitable patricide.
In that one desperate act, Joshua had failed to live up to a family legacy that required all dark deeds to pay dividends.
“Can’t sell it, and you can’t make a nickel on farming. Even the Christmas trees have gone to hell, nobody set out seedlings and the rest got too big and scruffy for market.”
“A million can last a long time in Tennessee, though.”
Joshua grinned, showing his uneven, opossum’s teeth. “Like I said, Kingsboro ain’t so bad if you got money.”
“Get out of my town.”
“Now, now, Jacob. We’re just now getting used to each other. Kind of brings back the early days, when we were two of a kind.”
“We were opposites.”
Transverse twins, their doctor had called them. Developing in the womb face-to-face, mirror images of each other. Joshua born left-handed, with his heart shifted to the right side of his chest, and in the mysterious properties of the brain’s hemispheres, more prone to mechanical and mathematical skills yet lacking a deep emotional pool. Jacob had been the left-brained one, the sensitive and reclusive child, easily dominated. Desperate for his parents’ love but always failing to win it, while Joshua had extracted it from them like a butcher taking hearts in a slaughterhouse.
“We’re alike,” Joshua said, then added with an ugly wink, “We want the same things.”
“You’re wrong. I’ve changed.”
“I saw how you looked at Carlita. She’s put in a few hard years, but she’s still a saucy little taco, ain’t she?”
“I’m done. Like I said, I’m going to work it out with Renee. After all the hard times, I owe it to her.”
“Sure.” Joshua flipped his spent cigarette into the grass at the fringe of the porch, and a thin thread of its smoke curled to the sky. “Come on in, sit a spell. Act like folks.”
Jacob stared at the dying, orange end of the cigarette. If Jacob burned down the house that Wells built, then Joshua would have to go home. Not this home, but to his real home, a dirty trailer across the state line, where Confederate flags flew from ATV’s and waffle houses and pawn shops filled what passed for a business district.
“You deserve this place,” Jacob heard himself saying, though in his mind, yellow fingers of flames groped their way up the wooden walls, clutched at the eaves and fascia, scratched the shingles.
Joshua grunted. “I’ll bet you got to shitbag shyster Isaacs when you found out Dad had cancer, played him like a fiddle. Got him to change the will while I was poisoning the old rat. I wonder how much he bagged out of the deal.”
“You were Dad’s favorite, remember?”
“Only when he couldn’t tell us apart.”
Jacob took another look at the barn, remembering the bloody carnage of Joshua’s chicken-slaughtering spree. Forensic psychologists said many serial killers served their internship by practicing on animals. According to the profile, many were also late bed wetters. But Jacob, not Joshua, was the one who had awakened to damp sheets at the age of seven, who sneaked out of bed and bundled up the offending linen before his twin brother woke across the room. He was never clever enough, because Mother wouldn’t let anyone else do laundry. And she always took glee in hanging his yellowed sheets out on the line, knowing the farmhands and their father would see them.
Jacob pushed past Joshua into the house. The house that should have been his.
He headed up the darkened stairs, each thump and clatter of his mother’s falling body echoing in his head. There among the shadows, in the alcove just at the end of hall, he saw a pale face. A child’s face, floating, ethereal, shaped by the distant mist of a memory. He brushed the memory away, because memories couldn’t be trusted, especially those born in this house.
Joshua shouted from below, but Jacob couldn’t make out the words. Their childhood room was just ahead. He flung the door open and burst inside. The sun poured through the open window, the curtains golden and soft. His bed was still rumpled and the ropes that Joshua had used weeks before to tie him down were still attached to the bedstead. Joshua’s bed looked as if it had been unused, and he wondered if Joshua and Carlita had taken over the master bedroom.
Jacob opened the closet. No Sock Monster, no bloodied chicken heads, no broken toys. The closet was empty, except for the upper shelf above the rod. He pulled out the broken cane with its yellowed ivory handle that was carved in the shape of an eagle head. He ran his hand over the splintered edges, feeling the grain where he had worked the knife fifteen years before. He hadn’t known it would break. He hadn’t wanted to kill his mother, no matter how much she hated him.
“Two million is a suitable bargain,” Joshua said from the doorway, all trace of his rural Southern accent gone. Joshua the actor, the pleaser, the manipulator. The one who had fooled their parents with a pretense of devotion.
“I have to know it’s going to end.”
“Guilt is a currency one borrows from the soul,” Joshua said. “And only one person can meet that debt.”
“I think Dad might have suspected something. Maybe that’s why he left me the money. As a kind of payoff.”
“He knew about Carlita, that’s why.” Joshua’s redneck accent returned, as if he were speaking in tongues. “He didn’t want no son of his shacking up with a Mexican.”
“He didn’t like Renee, either.”
“You know the Old Man. He figured out her value. Simple as that.”
“I love her.”
“Sure you do. A Wells always loves his woman until she stands in the way of what you really want.”
“I don’t want this.”
“You shoulda thought of that back when you were spying on me and Carlita.”
“I never saw nothing like that before.”
“Your accent, Jake. It’s coming back.”
“I can’t help it.” And he couldn’t. This room, the ghosts in the walls, the pasts both real and imagined, all shifted in and out of substance. The floor seemed to move beneath his feet, and he reached for the closet door to steady himself.
“Why do you think I married her, Jake?”
“So she could get her green card.”
“That didn’t matter back then. That was before they got so crazy about terrorists. Illegals could hang around a few years and sneak into the system sideways. There’s only one reason I married her.”
Jacob held onto the closet door, the one on which his childhood nightmares had been projected. His stomach fluttered, his heart pumped ground glass through his vascular system. This room, the bed that had soaked up his wet dreams and urine, the space beneath the bed where Joshua had staged his best games, the window through which the world had grown smaller and uglier. The walls closed in and he could barely breathe.