“And like you, I did go back there, but for different reasons,” she said. “I was pregnant, and Greensburg went right out the window. I denied my condition at first, but after three months there was no getting around it. I wasn’t nauseous, and wasn’t showing yet, but I hadn’t had a period so I went to the doctor and told him as little as possible about the circumstances. He confirmed my suspicions.“You can’t believe how nervous I was when it came to telling my parents. And really, the worst part wasn’t telling them that I was pregnant, but I just knew that when I told them it was by one of the old Rumbaugh twins—and I didn’t know which one—they were going to flip.
“And they did. My father was furious. After he called me a few names, he called an attorney and wanted to have them both arrested for statutory rape. But I was eighteen at the time, so I was of age and the sex was consensual. The only issue
was of paternity and child support. My attorney wanted to know which one it was. But I didn’t know for sure. And of course when the attorney confronted the Twins, they denied it. They were innocent, they claimed. Hadn’t laid a glove on me. They even submitted to a blood test, but it was inconclusive.”Well, this is going to be a hard case to win,“the attorney said to my father. “Do you want to go through with it?”
“They’re grown churchmen,” my father reasoned. “They’ll tell the truth under oath.” I didn’t think they would. When my father left the room, I pulled the attorney to one side. There is one thing, I said sheepishly. I told him about seeing the Twin’s rear end in the mirror, with the little red A scar or tattoo on his right cheek. The attorney wrote that down in a black notebook. I didn’t know it then, but country doctors always left some secret scar on identical twins so they could be told apart. Usually they put the scar where people could see it, like behind an earlobe or on an elbow, but for some reason this doctor put it on the rear end.
“Well, before a trial was called there was a probable cause hearing and the Twins were submitted to examination in the judge’s chamber. My attorney thought he had an ace up his sleeve because of the scar I had seen. But when they were examined, an A was found on each of them—both on the same side!
“I’m sure they somehow worked out a way for the one with the A to be examined twice. I remember that they had to keep the drugstore open because of all the hospital needs, and so
they were examined one at a time by the judge. And even though there was an A, both of them denied doing it, just as they did with that diuretic prescription years back. And once again that trick worked and they were found not responsible for my pregnancy because it couldn’t be proven which one it was. Well, the attorney couldn’t get any further, and my parents were so embarrassed they planned to move. I knew it would not be good to stay with them. Besides, they were on the verge of sending me to a home for unwed mothers, where you would be taken from me at birth and I would be left with an unwed mother’s reputation and no baby to love me. It was the worst situation I could imagine. I didn’t have many options, so I sat down and wrote the Twins a letter about what I had seen—not about the A—but about seeing their mother and knowing what they had done with her. I was a bit angry and desperate, so desperate I threatened to go to the police if they didn’t help me.
“Not long after I sent the letter, Mrs. Ushock showed up at my parents’ house. She had some private business to conduct, she said sternly. My parents sent me out of the room. I don’t know what lies she told them, but when I came back into the room my mother sent me to get my clothes and leave with Mrs. Ushock. ‘It will be better this way’ was all my dad said.
“Then Mrs. Ushock drove me to the Kelly Hotel, and I was escorted up to these rooms. She examined me on the kitchen table like I was some sort of farm animal. She told me that I would not be going to a doctor or a hospital and that I was to
stay in the hotel for the next few months. She told me that she would have my groceries sent up and anything else I needed, and when the time came she alone would be the midwife.
“‘That would be good,’ I said. ‘But who is going to pay for this?’
“She opened her purse and pulled out an envelope full of papers.
“‘This is a contract,’ she said. ‘The Rumbaughs will pay for your expenses and will pay for these rooms and for raising the child and all you have to do is keep the secret. I suppose the secret refers to which one of them is the father,’ she said roughly.
“I let her think that way. But I knew they didn’t care about who had done what to me. The secret was about what they had done to their mother. I read the papers. Aside from keeping the secret, they also stated that I couldn’t move from Mount Pleasant or I would forfeit custody of you. Well, of course I couldn’t afford to move, and nobody was going to take you away unless it was over my dead body.
“Once I signed the papers, a bank account was set up in my name and every month money was put into it, and it continues to be funded to this day.
“You were born just fine. Mrs. Ushock knew what to do, and afterward I stayed home with you. When you started nursery school I worked some for the Twins, but then I thought it best to move on, and since I always liked true crime I took a course in court stenography and got the courthouse job.
“I had to stay at the hotel. My parents had moved to Florida to retire and pretty much left me on my own. One died before you were born, and the other went before you were out of diapers. They didn’t leave any money to speak of, so it helped that the Twins paid a lot of the bills. Also, I wanted to raise you around your father. I know that sounds odd, but I thought that over time one of them would step forward and say he was the one. And although that didn’t happen, never in my wildest dreams did I ever think my baby would inherit the Rumbaugh curse. When Ab and Dolph and I finally worked through what I knew they had done to their mother and they told me about the family history and the curse, I thought it was too creepy and too unlikely to be real. But I also knew it wasn’t entirely a ghost story—plus you were a girl, and as far as I knew no girls had inherited it.”
“So which is my father?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“It does to me,” I replied. “It didn’t before, but after all this I want to know.”
“Either will do,” she said airily.
“What do you mean, either?”
“They’re identical twins, hon. They’re the same. Same blood. Same genes. Same freakish behavior. So either will do.”
“It’s not like picking a can of peas off a shelf,” I insisted. “Now tell me, which one is my father?”
“Well, I honestly don’t know. The only hint I can give you is that your father has a red A scar on his right rear cheek. I
know that for a fact, though neither one of them has ever owned up to which one has it.”
“Then I’ll find out,” I said.
“What will you do? Just ask them to pull down their pants?”
“That would be a good start,” I replied.
“I already tried that once and it didn’t work.”
“Then I’ll think of something,” I said. “Now that you’ve told me this much, I have to know.”
“More important than knowing,” she said, “is this. You have to get out of here. Leave this town. Had I gone to Greensburg as I planned, none of this would have happened. Don’t get me wrong, I couldn’t live without you and you’ve meant everything to me, but I don’t want you to become a victim of this Rumbaugh curse.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I’m not going to do to you what they did to their mother.”
“Cross your heart?”
I crossed my heart, but as I did so I could feel a chamber in my heart pumping Rumbaugh blood through me with a crossed purpose. I adored my mother, and if I was lying to her, I reasoned I was doing so for her own good.
And then to get away from all this talk Mom pulled a little box out of her purse. She placed it in my hands.
“Happy birthday,” she said. “Open it. This is how you should remember me—the old-fashioned way.”
I untied the ribbon, lifted the lid, and parted the tissue paper.
Inside was a gold heart-shaped locket on a gold chain. She held the box and I opened the locket. It was a picture of her smiling out at me. I put it around my neck, and she fastened the clasp. I turned and smiled and could see that she was happy and convinced that her nurturing was stronger than my nature.
“I have something for you, too,” I said. “It’s an odd present because it’s something that is yours but you can’t own it.” I unbuttoned my blouse and pulled back the left side, then with my thumb tugged my bra down across my breast. Against my white skin was a solid red tattoo of a heart. A scroll across the top read: MOTHER. A scroll below read: ETERNAL LOVE.
She was shocked. “When did you get that?” she asked, as if it were something I had stolen.
“Last week,” I said quietly, feeling a bit dejected by her reaction. “I went up to the tattoo parlor and got it for you. I had no idea it was the same as on the tombstone.”
“Ivy,” she said, shaken, “if I had told you this story about your background years ago, do you think it would have made a difference about how you are now? I mean, with your interest in taxidermy and the pharmacy and now this?” She pointed at my chest.
“You don’t mean the tattoo,” I said. “You mean me. How I feel about you.”
“Yes,” she said.
“First, I don’t think that loving you is a curse,” I said. “I love you and I will always love you desperately and there is
nothing wrong with that. You can say it’s in my blood, and I’d have to agree with you because it is a daughter’s destiny to love her mother. And I love you with all my heart.” These words came out without my having to think of them because they were always in me. They were part of my nature.
Far above us, another nature was also being itself. While we were in the cemetery the weather had shifted. In the middle of the gray sky a black cloud gathered, and below it the ground became strangely dark. I stared up at its jagged underside which was as carved out and rugged as the bottom of an iceberg. Suddenly the wind dropped straight down against my face and a cold rain began to fall. Flecks of ice followed and stung like tiny needles. In an instant the cloud began to descend directly upon us, and we ran for the caretaker’s shed at the edge of the property. The trapped wind pressed down on my head and shoulders with the force of a heavy hand. I could barely lift my feet to run. The flecks of ice turned into beads of hail, then larger, and then they hurt. We struggled forward, pulling ourselves along gravestone by gravestone until we made it to the shed door.
“Stay away from the windows!” my mother ordered as we dashed inside. We stood in the middle of the shed and held on to each other as the building roared from the pummeling of the hail against the tin roof.
“Is it a tornado?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Just a sudden storm, a microburst, where the cold air drops straight down. It’s rare, but it happens.”
“I’m afraid,” I said, and held her tightly.
“I’m more afraid of something else,” she said. “Promise me you will leave here and go to school like I should have done and get away from the Twins. Their mother thought she put an end to this curse, but she didn’t. Once she died, they did what was in them to do. But I’ll put an end to it. You leave. You’ll go to college—to Seton Hill for religious training. Sister Nancy says you have a calling for it. Promise me. Until then, never let them lay a hand on you,” my mother said desperately. “They are driven to keep the curse alive, and I don’t want them thinking you are a link in their genetic chain.”
It was a curse that I loved my mother so much I had to obey her. “Yes, I promise,” I said without sensing any lie. “I’ll go away.”
Then the roaring stopped. Some stray hail ticked across the roof. Then it was all clear. We let go of each other. The shed smelled of gasoline and cut grass. I opened the door, and the fresh air reached in like a cool hand.
“Oh, it’s awful,” my mother said, looking out at the cemetery and the misty white sea of hail. Shattered apple tree branches were strewn about like the limbs of soldiers that Hermann Rumbaugh must have witnessed after a battle. I bent down and dug out a split apple and could imagine Hermann and his crew of body pickers searching across the vast carnage of a battlefield, uncurling fingers for rings they could cut off in order to read the names stamped inside the bands.
I looked over at my mother, who was pointing toward Ab
and Dolph’s car. It looked like a madman had obsessively attacked it with a hammer. Every inch was dented like the dimpled surface of a golf ball. The windshield was cratered like a glass moon.
“Good Lord,” she said, laughing. “For once Mother Nature has given them a beating.” And she continued to laugh too hard and too loud until it was obvious that she was not laughing at the car. It was a deeper laugh, as if unburdening herself of her past had caused a microburst of relief. She laughed until she bent over, crooked and stiff with her hands on her knees.
I stared down at her, and from that moment on I thought of my mother as the child and myself as the adult. I felt not older but only that it was I who had to protect her and not the other way around. This was the line I crossed when I left my childhood to become an adult.
I rubbed her back and helped straighten her up, and we silently struggled arm in arm across the ice, then stood by the side of the road until a farmer’s wife gave us a ride into town.