The morning after they murdered his father, Will had woken peacefully, staring about his room, the same which his own son, twenty-two years later, would sleep in and suffer his own nightmares. In those first few moments of rising from sleep to wakefulness the world was clean, without worry. These moments came often, still did now, but always fleeting as he came awake, the brain incomplete during its transition between the two worlds. Soon enough, Will came fully awake with the memory of the night. No deception that it had only been a dream. The memory was too sharp, too harsh. As was the smell, the heavy odor of antiseptic that filled the house. To cover the scent of the decay which had already begun. He had not considered this at first, never experiencing death so closely before, only from a distance, like a child watching a murder through the trees.
He stepped in his bare feet and long-sleeved blue pajamas into the hall. The master bedroom was empty, his father gone. Will’s own vomit had been cleaned up, a bucket of dirty water with a mop in the corner. The antiseptic smell was especially strong here. Overpowering mixture of Pine Sol and Lysol. He covered his face with one hand and continued into the living room, forsaking his usual morning routine of going first into the bathroom to pee. Rounding the china cabinet on his left, then the kitchen entrance and the open cellar door, the smell was an ocean wave rising over him, threatening to knock him down.
Over the years Will remembered this moment in his life, a day that outshined any imagined horror he could muster until that dream in his college dorm room. It wasn’t the odor itself that was so overwhelming as he stood with one hand over his mouth in the kitchen, but that he stared into the yellow-gray face of his dead father. Jacob lay unmoving on the rug in the middle of the floor, birthday candle syringe still poking from the puckered gray lips.
The years that followed offered a slow dawning of what the smell of that morning represented. The decomposing of a body, and the desire to cover it up. His father’s eyes were open, staring up to the ceiling, a little to the left, perhaps at the light fixture over the table. Will stared back and waited with growing certainty for the hair to begin growing, graying as it did, for the nails to yellow and curl out from shriveled fingers like worms.
When this image did not come to life, Will dropped his hand and shouted, “Mom, his eyes are open!” Nearly screaming as he repeated, “His eyes are open!”
“Hush.” A hand touched his shoulder. Will jumped back. She’d come up behind him from the basement, still wearing her robe, all of it covered in gray dust and black dirt, as were her feet and ankles. The hand which pulled him back slowly—so tired in every motion—was spotted and stained, though she’d obviously tried to wash them at one point judging by how much more filthy were her wrists. She ignored his reaction and stepped over her husband’s face. The body did not react. Will’s heart slammed against his ribs. He’s alive, he’s alive, and he’s going to kill us like that boy in the woods.
She returned with a roll of black electrical tape, ripped off two long pieces as she knelt. The face’s pale gray complexion contrasted so much more terribly with the remnants of white greasepaint along his father’s shriveled neck. She reached out, lowered with surprising gentleness the right eyelid with one hand, laid the black tape over it with the other, pressing hard against the forehand and cheek to secure it. Repeated the process with the left eye.
Will felt his throat tighten again, reminded himself that there was nothing left in his stomach, and she needed him. Mom needed him!
What happened over the next few minutes returned to Will during his life in mere flashes of images, disjointed, non-linear. His mother’s commanding voice; Will’s hands painful from gripping two corners of the rug, avoiding his dead father’s bare feet; the sour whiff of the corpse below him and antiseptic odor lingering everywhere—all of it a steady mist in his nostrils, choking him. Will stepped backward down the steps while she kept a stronger grip on the other end, holding her hands close together so the rug partially obscured his father’s face and its taped, dead eyes.
There was a moment of terror as they worked around the corner at the bottom of the stairs into the basement. The body slid along the rug and cold, pliant feet pressed into Will’s chest. No shoes, no big red shoes his father loved to wear. They never found those shoes.
“Lay it down here, William,” his mother said when they’d fully entered the basement. He did, and they dragged the body across the concrete floor, Will hunched over and stepped backward into the room, dreading what he was approaching, of what he might fall into, because suddenly he understood the scritch noises from last night. The breaking of concrete. Shovel in dirt. He was walking backward toward an open grave.
Mom said, “Stop.” Will froze, laid his end of the carpet gently onto the floor. His mother unceremoniously let the head drop with a muted thud. Will turned, looked at the scene under the stairway with silent consideration and confusion. There was a hole, but it wasn’t right. Too short, not the perfect rectangle he’d expected.
One section of flooring was no longer covered in concrete. Will glanced at the pick-axe, the oversized one his father had insisted on buying but which Will had never seen him use for anything, one side of the blade tapered to a wide flat blade. She’d apparently used this and the opposite, pointed end, to break up and pry away a four-by-four section of concrete. He was surprised at how strong his mother had to be to dig this up by herself. Here, almost dead center under the stairs, she’d cleared away the broken concrete and dug a hole; three feet at its widest. Will took two steps forward and looked down, afraid of getting too close, but it didn’t matter. The basement was too dark to see the bottom, so black was the dirt both lining the wall and forming a mound at the far end. At least here the heavy smell of fresh earth and the peppery dusting of broken concrete overshadowed the medicinal, antiseptic smell from upstairs. He barely noticed that smell now, and was grateful for it.
The grave his mother had dug was too narrow. Too small to fit…
When he turned he suddenly understood what his mother meant to do. His lungs filled with fear, like he was sinking in quicksand, too late to be saved, his mouth and throat filling with sand. Lucy hefted the pick axe, wide blade aimed down. Will could not speak, could not move, save to raise his right arm in a slow salute. He wanted it to mean No, wait, please, Mom, no! but her face twisted in exertion and rage and the blade swung down, partially severing Jacob’s left leg at the thigh. Thick, congealed blood leaked slowly from the wound, soaking into the throw rug.
Will choked on some unknown word trying to escape. Again the blade, up, down, whack! Bone and concrete, the leg separated completely. She dropped the axe, lifted the red and fleshy leg upright—to keep the blood inside the leg, Will remembered thinking in that moment—and carefully laid it into the hole.
He raised his left arm, now looking like a statue of some preacher giving a benediction to his congregation, Whack! Whack! It took longer to remove the right leg, but when the bone was separated, she raised the leg in a similar, almost reverent manner and placed it beside the other in the hole.
The remaining stumps oozed thick blood that was so dark it looked almost purple, and she was raising the pick axe again and Will found his paralysis at last broken. He ran the two steps separating them and before she could swing and grabbed hold of her forearms.
“No, Mom, please no, just bury him don’t cut him up any more please, he’s already dead, don’t cut him up any more just bury him please don’t cut him up anymore…” and on like that for a long time, Will falling into a cadence, a mantra, repeating the words, knowing he could not stop because they were working themselves against her furrowed, angry head, not getting inside, but trying, trying, finally breaking through some frightening barrier around his mother. Holding the pick above her, she blinked, moved her eyes just enough that Will knew she recognized him, saw him again. At last. Lips moving, soundless, then, “Fine, okay. Fine. We have to hurry.”