Let’s face facts here—there’s some folks who just shouldn’t be allowed to raise kids.

Harsh, but true.

I’d have to include myself among them, for sure, but I reckon my father would get top billing.

Pretty much every sentence that came from my father’s mouth coulda fertilized a field.

He was one of the world’s greatest bullshitters. You could tell precisely when he was lying. His lips was moving. It was that easy.

One time he told me that in the town where he was from—some wide part in the road called Calhoun, Georgia—it got so hot that the corn would pop right there in the field. Cows would get all freaked, think it was snowing, and they’d lay down right where they’d been standing and freeze to death. “Dumbass cows,” he’d say, and laugh.

I believed him. I was six years old, and I took pretty much every word he said as gospel.

One time he told me about him and his brother. “Dirt poor?” he’d say. “We wasn’t poor enough to have any dirt. Tell you now, we used to play this trick on folks. Smartest trick you ever did see. Take a lil’ baby cat, walk around with this thing in a string bag, ask folks if they’d a pan we could borrow to cook him in. ‘Hell,’ they’d say, ‘come on in here and get yourself some of this red beans an’ rice we got. You shouldn’t be havin’ to eat no baby cat.’ I’ll tell you now, no word of a lie, it worked every damned time.”

Now I wonder whether anything he ever said was true.

His name was Ray Woodroffe, still is if he ain’t dead from drowning in his own bullshit. Hell, I know he’s still alive. I can feel it. People like Ray Woodroffe live forever, while everyone around them dies prematurely from the poison they sow in the atmosphere. He’ll still be living outside of Calhoun, Georgia, still be distributing his own special brand of bullshit, still be knocking my mother sideways and senseless at least once every couple of months, and he’ll still be telling the world that his sons weren’t worth a dime between them.

My name is Lewis Woodroffe. I am thirty-six years old. Tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, not a moment sooner or later, I am going to die in the electric chair because I killed a girl. My father won’t be there, nor will my mother. My father wouldn’t have wanted to come, and he would have told my ma that she didn’t want to come neither.

And then there’s my brother, Eugene. Eugene is however many hundreds of miles away, and that’s where he needs to stay. As far from me as he can get, and even further from our father.

We need to talk about Eugene, of course. We need to talk about a great many things, for sure, and Eugene is right there at the head of the list, but we’ll get there. We have time, not a great deal, but we do have time. I promise we’ll get there.

For now, let’s talk some more about Ray.

Most people harbor ill will to someone or other. Ray Woodroffe harbored ill will to everyone, and made it his business to share it whenever the opportunity presented itself.

He married my mother when he was twenty-two and she was seventeen. Her name was Martha and she came from Dahlonega, Georgia, in the Appalachian foothills. She was an Appalachian girl through and through, proud of her people, proud of her heritage, but she was a quiet one. Shy, folks called her. Timid perhaps. She wasn’t shy or timid—she was just waiting for the right moment to say whatever she had to say. Rest of the time she said very little at all. That was her way. Some people—my father being the best example around—feel that they have to keep making noise to prove to everyone that they’re still in the room. My mother is the opposite. Quiet and strong. She had to be strong to live every day in his shadow. Before she became a Woodroffe, she was a MacHendrie. The name was MacDonald clan. Her ancestors came from the lowland Scottish county of Roxburghshire, before that from a place called Argyle in the fourteenth century. She said her people were a wild and fierce warrior people, where every man had red hair, and every woman had killed at least one Englishman before she made her teens. “They called them Sassenachs,” she said. “And the girls had to kill at least one Sassenach with her bare hands before a man would marry her.” Or so she told me. Later, looking back, I don’t believe she ever said one word of a real lie to anyone, save to protect us or to calm her husband. Maybe what she told us were just stories, but they made us laugh, me and Eugene, and—to this day—I do not believe there was a wicked bone in her body.

My father came up to Illinois for work. It was the thirties, and things were tough. He had two small boys, a wife in tow, and I believe he regretted both the marrying and the procreation. I worked it out later. Martha MacHendrie was pregnant all of eight months when she married Ray Woodroffe. Maybe her daddy came down from the mountains with a cannon full of buckshot and told Ray Woodroffe he’d better marry this daughter of his or he’d be breathing through a great deal more holes than his mouth and nose. Ray Woodroffe can’t have married Martha MacHendrie for love. You don’t marry someone for love and then treat them like a dog.

So he packed us all up and we headed northwest through Tennessee and Kentucky and settled in Taylorville, Illinois. My father worked in factories, he worked on farms, he even dug coal. That was the best time—six months in the middle of 1935 when he was away ten days at a time, then home for two. That was when I found out what my mother was really like, and what she would have become had she not been taken in by the smooth-talking liar that was my father.

The Woodroffe house was out of the way. You only arrived there if you planned to arrive there. There was no route—coming or going—that would deliver you by accident. She schooled us at home, me and Eugene, and we helped any which way we could with chores and the like. When our father was gone, it was good. When he was home, it was walking on eggshells one day, walking on hot coals the next. Unpredictable. That was the word. Not whether he was going to be mean, but how mean.

“That boy don’t took a lick to a snake!” he’d shout when he figured me for lazy. “Goddamned useless bag of skin an’ bones, he is.”

One time mom was talking of Christmas, saying how she’d like to have a chicken or some such, maybe a little tree that she could decorate with us.

“Shit in one hand, wish in the other,” he replied. “See which one fills up first.”

His words were surely mean, but his actions were meaner. He didn’t beat her often, maybe once every couple of months, but when he beat her, he beat her good. Took days for the swelling on her face to go down, for the busted lip to heal, for the eye to finally open.

One time I fought him back. First time was also the last. Not because of him, but because of her. He took the belt to me, striped me six ways to Sunday and back to Thanksgiving. Still have those scars on my back, my hand, my legs. They’re faint, but I can see them. That was the first time he used the belt, but good. Not the last time, of course. The belt became something all its own after that.

My ma made me promise, promise, promise on her life that I would never try and help her again.

“Just let him work it out,” she said. “It don’t ever last long.”

I saw the light in her eyes get dimmer every time. Some folks build others up. Some folks is so bitter they just set themselves to drag you down in the hole they’re in. Ray Woodroffe was that way. A failure with delusions of grandeur. If I can’t have it, then no one should. If it ain’t my money, then it’s worthless anyway.

One time Ray Woodroffe kicked his wife so hard she landed in the hospital. She said she fell. There wasn’t nowhere that high to fall from where we lived. I used to think her brave, stoic, resilient. Now I think she was just her own kind of crazy. Maybe where she came from the men were all like Ray Woodroffe, a whole crowd of moonshiners fighting with the revenuers, everything worth saying had to result in bullets and broken bones or it wasn’t worth a damn. Me and Eugene got out of Taylorville as fast as we could, Eugene into the army for two years, me out to Chicago to escape my history and seek my fortune.

But I knew I took my father with me. Hell, we all carry the tunes our ancestors and forebears sang, but that don’t mean we have to sing ’em for our kids. Doesn’t mean we have to, but doesn’t mean we don’t.

Ray Woodroffe sang them tunes good, and he sang them over again until they was inside me real deep. Eugene didn’t hear so much of it. He was the younger one, the littler one, and me and ma did everything we could to shield him from the wrath that came down from the head of the house.

Eugene enlisted in the military in November of 1946, all of eighteen years old. The war was all done and dusted, GIs were coming home, and Eugene went in to fill up a space that was left behind. He wrote me every once in a while, even said he might be going to Germany, but he never did. After a while he stopped writing, and that was fine. Meant he was leaving his history behind, leaving his connections to that history too, and that was just fine as fine could be by me. I wanted the best for him. Just as much as his father wanted the worst, I wanted the best. Did I feel guilty about Eugene? Some. Maybe. Perhaps I could have covered his ears a little tighter, figuratively speaking. I had always tried to be a buffer between my father and my younger brother, but perhaps I could have been taller, wider, a little more solid.

But whichever way it all hung together, Eugene was out, I was out too, and though I kept on hearing those echoes of the past, I believed that Eugene was somehow free of them, and that pleased me no end.

I went straight to the big city. My ma told me to go, to get out of there. “You boys make him mad,” she said. “Everything and everyone makes him mad. I know you don’t take it personal anymore. But with less things around to make him mad he’ll be better.”

Christmas of ’47 I went back to see her. I was there two hours, and I could see he was aggrieved before I even sat down at the table. After less than an hour he walked me out to the porch with a squirrel gun and told me to leave and never come back.

“You weren’t no good as a kid,” he said, “and you’re still no better now. You think you can just come on back here any time you damn well please and eat food off of my table, drink my whiskey, talk your shit like it’s something I need to hear? Well you got it all wrong, mister. Now git.”

I snatched the barrel of the squirrel gun and wrenched it sideways. It took him by surprise. I turned that gun on him and jabbed him in the chest.

He went down on his ass. I pressed the muzzle of that rifle right between his eyes and told him not to move a damn inch. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t say a word. He just looked at me, and never have I seen such hatred in any human eyes. There was fierce fire up in there, but I saw that there weren’t nothing back of that fire. Like there was no one home. No one at all. What you saw was what you got. He was as crazy as I ever believed, and nothing I could say or do was ever going to change it.

I didn’t know what to say. Now I had the upper hand there was just nothing I could say to him.

My ma came out. She screamed. She threw herself down beside him, grabbed his shoulders, pleaded with me not to hurt him.

He brushed her aside, just continued glaring at me.

“If you’re gonna do it, then do it,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “Otherwise just turn around and keep walking . . . and you better take that rifle with you and throw it in a ditch five miles hence. I see you coming back here I’m gonna finish you good, boy.”

I turned and started walking. I did take the rifle with me, and I did throw it in a ditch way down the road. I walked for three hours, maybe four, and I knew that I would never go back. Not even for her. She had made her bed, and she was determined to lie in it. You make your choice, you pick a side, and that’s the way it is. I knew which hand had filled up first, and there wasn’t nothing I could do about it.

So I went back to the city. I got busy. Busier than a one-legged cat burying shit on a frozen pond. I took a factory job, learned to drive, started delivering early papers before the day shift even begun. Packed groceries at a store on a Saturday. There wasn’t nothing that was too much sugar for a nickel. I got some dollars in my pocket, found a place of my own. It wasn’t a great deal, but I had my own door and my own bathroom and a cheap TV set, and the food in the kitchen wasn’t no one else’s but mine. Sharing berthing ain’t so bad, but you never know who you’re gonna be sleeping next door to, and sometimes the quiet ones were more aggravating than the loud ones.

But I knew he was always there. Ray Woodroffe. The shadow was there, you see. Right there in my heart, my bones, my blood. I wondered if what he had was some kind of special crazy, and it was hereditary. And now I had it, and it was inside of me, and there wasn’t nothing I could do to get it out. Like a virus maybe. Like some kind of genetic thing.

It did come out one time. The time I killed that girl. And hell yes, I know you want to know all about that, but there’s a ways to go before we get there.

That was what was eating at me, always and forever. They say the apple don’t fall so far from the tree. Eugene was different. I knew that. When Eugene enlisted in the military he still had some of the kid inside of him. I got the kid beat out of me before I even reached my teens. Eugene still had a sense of humor. I couldn’t tell a wisecrack from a one-liner even when it was signposted three blocks away and lit up with neon. Eugene could talk nice to folk and not be watching them sideways to see what they was after. Me, I couldn’t strike up a conversation with a no one, ’cept if it was to ask for the time or buy a paper, and that wasn’t really a conversation at all. For me, regular people had always been strangers, and I believed they was gonna stay that way.

There was a bitterness in me. It was like a sediment way down in the base of everything that I was, and life didn’t seem to do nothin’ but shake me up and make that sediment more evenly spread. I knew the world didn’t think much of me, and –frankly—I didn’t care much for the world.

I worked hard, and I watched TV and I minded my own business. That was my life. Seems to me that the most conversation I ever did have was with the police about the girl. Seems to me the most attention I was ever paid was for what bad I done, not what good. The world has a ways of doing that to you, don’t it? All too eager to remind you when you messed up, very slow to tell you that you got it right.

That may seem cynical, sure, but cynicism is a bitter taste left behind from all the sour words you hear. It’s right there in your throat, your gullet, the pit of your gut. It resides there, and there ain’t nothin’ to do to get it out. There’s one God for the rich folks, another for the poor. Our God is forgetful most of the time. He forgets your name, forgets your prayers, forgets when you’re in trouble, forgets when rent is due or food is needed. Or maybe He just don’t listen in the first place. Maybe He figures we’re all too bitter and cynical to be worth the time of day.

Whichever way it goes, I now done got myself here. I got these four walls and a rock-solid door. I ain’t going no place ’til the preacher comes back in the morning. Father Henry. He’s a decent enough old feller, but he don’t know shit from Shinola about the real world. I let him talk to me about all of that Jesus and God Almighty stuff because he’s pretty much the only person who talks to me. I like the sound of his voice. It ain’t the voice in my head, and it ain’t the voice of my father, and that’s good enough for me.

Anyway, we’re sidetracking. Ray. Back to Ray and the pure stream of sunlight that he shone into all of our lives.

It is hard for me to think of him in specific terms and events. I can remember some, of course.

The woodshed. Being tied in there for a day or two straight, nothing more than a bucket of water to drink out of. “Man can last three weeks without food,” he said. “Three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without nourishment. You get a drink, but you get nothin’ else, you little runt. Teach you to waste good food, I will.”

Church days, when he was of a mind to get himself to church. Rare, sure, but when it happened it happened good. I don’t know what it was that prompted his sudden and unexpected flashes of religious fervor, but fervent they were. Usually it was when he came home from a trip away. Later I would figure he’d maybe fucked a hooker in the city or something, and he was now repentant for his sins and seeking forgiveness. We’d be up at five, breakfasted, dressed, shoes shined, all spit and polish, hair combed neat as paint, and we’d walk. Two miles we’d walk, to a church my father didn’t frequent more than three times a year. And if we spoke out of turn, if we said a damn word during the sermon, if we missed a beat on some hymn we’d never sung before, he would give me the look. I was responsible for Eugene. I should make sure that Eugene was something. I should make sure that Eugene was the other. I should this. I should that. On and on and forever.

Once home, he would sit me at the dinner table. He’d open up the bible in front of me.

“Read,” he’d say, and he would point.

Off I would go.

“When pride comes, then comes disgrace; but with the humble is wisdom. The integrity of the upright guides them, but the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them. Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death. The righteousness of the blameless keeps his way straight, but the wicked fails by his own wickedness. The righ . . . right—”

And then it would happen.

The slightest mispronunciation, the slightest falter, and he would grasp the back of my neck in a vice-like grip, and with all his strength he would slam my face down into that book.

“Righteousness!” he would holler. “Righteousness! You can’t say the word, can you boy? You can’t say the word because you are not righteous!”

A lot of blood was spilled on a lot of pages.

I would sit there, my nose pouring, my hands gripping the edge of the chair, my father standing over me enraged and full of hate, and I would hear my mother crying in the kitchen.

And then there was the belt.

The belt was for special occasions maybe, though when those special occasions came along there was no way of knowing or predicting.

You’d think everything was just fine, as fine as it was ever going to be with Ray Woodroffe, and then he would turn. I had failed to address him with sufficient importance. I had failed to demonstrate sufficient regard or consideration for his needs or wants. Very simply, I had disrespected him. He’d look at me, and he’d shake his head, and then he would fetch the belt. He had two belts—one for his pants, and one for me.

I watched him one time. He made me watch him. He took a nail in a pair of pliers, and he just heated that nail up some in the fire, and then he used it to punch a hole through that belt. That belt wasn’t for beating me, and it sure as hell wasn’t for holding up no pair of pants. That belt went around my neck, and he’d draw it up tight, so tight I could barely breathe, so tight I couldn’t say a single word worth hearing, but never so tight as to choke me completely.

And then he’d leave me down there in the woodshed for an hour, two hours, however long he figured was required to teach me whatever lesson I needed to learn.

And he’d always say that same thing.

“Respect someone, you earn respect for yourself. It’s that simple. And if you can’t say a good word, then you shouldn’t be speaking at all.”

It was at times like this that I vowed to kill him.

I vowed to kill him so many times it became a mantra.

I would become vengeance.

Not only for what he did to me, but for what he did to my mother, to Eugene, to anyone who walked across his path.

I would become justice.

Not only for crimes committed, but for all the crimes yet to be committed.

In his eyes I saw all the wrongs he had perpetrated, and all the wrongs he was still fixing to do.

I was a victim of circumstance, fate, history, drunkenness, promiscuity, the wanton disregard that he showed toward me. I was a victim of his creation and existence, and he had to pay.

I believed I was innocent, but perhaps I was already guilty. Maybe I was guilty of some unknown crime, and this was my penance. Perhaps some earlier life. Perhaps I killed someone in some former existence, and this was now my punishment. To be brutalized and tortured by Ray Woodroffe. I began to believe that no one was innocent. Everyone had secrets, and they did their best to hide them. If I was guilty, then I did not know of what. Regardless, this was where my desperate and pitiful existence had carried me, and this was where the imbalance of all things had to be rectified.

I would kill him matter-of-factly. I would kill him with little compunction or thought or consideration for mercy.

I promised myself this, but I never kept that promise.

Perhaps my mother was brave to stay with him, or maybe she was just too scared to run.

I could have killed him many times, but I did not. It was stupid to imagine that life would be any different while he was around.

I suffered in silence. I harbored ill will, but not to everyone. Only to him.

I left him behind, my mother, too, and I believed I had escaped his shadow.

I ensured that Eugene was away safely, and then I disappeared.

Until the girl. Until that happened. And then I knew that however far I ran from my roots, they were still seeded within me.

After that Christmas, the Christmas when I knew I could never kill him, I returned to Chicago half the man who’d left.

I felt weakened, adrift, uncertain.

Perhaps I imagined that in killing him I would be killing something of myself. Perhaps I believed that he was such an inherent and intrinsic part of me that his death would result in my own.

Perhaps I had to kill someone, and in failing to kill him I had to find someone else to inflict my vengeance upon.

The girl.

Maybe even she was paying some penalty for sins in some former life.

But that was later. Much later.

I sought solace in more work, and then more again, but I could not work that desperate feeling out of me. I was dumb enough to believe that money would change my life for the better.

I could not deal with women. I was twenty-four years old. I had never even touched a girl. I ached for their company, but they terrified me. I had heard that they had a way of asking questions that could never be answered. How much do you love me? Questions like that.

I saw myself dead at fifty, perhaps sixty, and I was close to halfway there. I wondered why it took so much of your life to see how much of your life you’d wasted.

I thought about going back to school. I thought about learning a trade. I thought about being a plumber, an electrician, a builder, a painter, a carpenter.

I thought about my mother, and I wondered if her husband had killed her yet.

I thought about so many things, but most of all I thought about how to rid myself of the ghost of my father.

He was over my shoulder, behind me, around each corner, seated quietly in the kitchen when I returned from work, there when I rose, there when I closed my eyes to sleep. He was inside, outside, every which way I looked.

Sometimes he talked to me. Sometimes I had no choice but to listen.

Sometimes he shouted. But when he whispered it was worse. Oftentimes the best way to get yourself heard is to speak real low, and then folks have got to lean in close to hear you. He knew that. And so he’d whisper.

You ain’t no more use than a one-wheeled bicycle.

If you was twice as smart, you’d still be dumber than a fencepost.

Are you always this much of a screw-up, or do you do it special for me?

Sometimes I’d drink, and he’d leave me alone. Sometimes I’d drink, and he wouldn’t. Sometimes I would turn up the wireless real loud, and still I would hear him through the music.

And then that day came.

I met her unexpectedly. It was unplanned, a chance, a happenstance. I was on the way to work, stopped briefly, and there she was.

She talked to me like I was an equal. She asked my name, told me hers, shook my hand gently and laughed. But not in a mean way. She laughed in a shy way perhaps, and it was charming and sweet and kind. I looked at women and they seemed to possess some slant, some angle, some cool facet of deception that could be employed at any moment to remind you of your place. Not so this girl. Not so at all. We talked that morning as if we had known one another for years. As if we had always been friends. It felt right, it felt normal, and even as I talked I could hear my own voice and I sounded different. I sounded like Lewis, not Lewis in the shadow of Ray. Just Lewis. Just myself.

I said something and she laughed so much she nearly spilled her coffee. She touched my arm. She touched my hand.

Electricity was there in the tips of her fingers, and I felt myself jump.

Everything around her seemed to blur away and become unimportant. She listened to what I had to say as if it was something worth hearing. I heard every word that passed from her lips as if each one was the most important word that had ever been spoken. Not just to me, not just then, but to anyone, ever.

She asked if I was going to work. I told her I could go to work, or not go to work.

She asked if I wanted to spend some time with her. We could go somewhere, talk, not talk, walk, not walk, perhaps catch a movie later, get lunch, dinner, a drink at a nice bar somewhere downtown. Anything I liked.

“What would you like to do?” I asked.

“I had plans,” she replied. “But they could as easily be plans for two. You could come with me, or we could go elsewhere, I don’t mind.”

“Let’s do what you planned to do today,” I said, “and I’ll tag along beside you.”

So we did. We went where she had planned to go, and I went with her, and we spoke with people and we did not hurry, and later we had lunch in a diner, and then we walked some more, and we talked some more, and then we went to a bar and had a drink.

The world was a different place.

The world was not the same, and never would be.

My father was not in that world, and he would never gain entry.

And hours had never seemed so long, minutes even, stretched out ahead of me as if they would never come to an end.

I knew I was dreaming, and then I knew I was not. And then I knew I was dreaming again.

Whatever was happening was not from the same life as Calhoun, Georgia. It was not from the same world as Ray and Martha Woodroffe. Here I was neither as dumb as a fencepost nor as useful as an absent wheel. Here I was just Lewis Woodroffe, a good guy, the kind of guy that could be liked, the kind of guy a nice girl would wish to spend the day with.

And she was a nice girl. She was more than nice. It sounds corny, but she was so bright she illuminated things in me I believed had long since died. She made me feel worthwhile. She made me feel wanted.

Later she kissed me. I kissed her and she kissed me back. She had her hands on my face, and I could feel that electricity through her fingers, and my emotions were all afire, and I could feel things that I had never felt before, and they all felt so right and perfect and necessary, and I knew that now I would discover what life was really all about, that here was someone I could love, someone who could love me, and we would be together forever and I would be happy, and she would be happy, and everything in the world that had never made sense seemed so breathtakingly simple and easy to understand, and now that we had found this there would never be any other place I would ever want to be, and she would always and forever want to be by my side, and this was love . . .

And then she said No.

Looking back, it was evident what would happen.

I was drunk. I was anxious. I was desperate, perhaps.

I heard my father, right there in my year.

See, even she doesn’t want you. I told you, boy. I told you no one would ever care for you. I told you that everyone hates you.

Someone like you will never earn respect.

You see that, don’t you?

Somewhere I lost the thread. I was tied to this new world by a thread, and that thread snapped, or it slipped through my fingers, and I never should have kissed her, I never should have stepped inside the doorway with her. I should have wished her goodbye at the end of dinner, and we should not have gone to that bar and drank more, but we did, and then we were kissing one another, and then she let me undo her clothes, and I touched her skin so gently, and I felt as if some chasm had opened up before me, and then she said No, and I fell headlong into that chasm, and there was such depth and darkness, and things clawing at me as I tumbled, like cold, damp fingers against my skin, and my heart was in my mouth, and I could taste my own blood, just as I had on Sundays when I read from The Bible and disgrace follows pride, and the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them, and the wicked fails by his own wickedness . . .

I remember closing my eyes.

I remember stepping back.

“I want you to leave now,” she said.

I looked at her.

“I want you to leave now,” she repeated, as if I was deaf and stupid, as if I didn’t hear her the first time, and I felt so ashamed, so utterly ashamed, and I knew that there was no going back from this, and my father was right, I would never find anyone who cared for me as I was, and I was foolish and ignorant and naïve and pathetic, and why had God even permitted me to be born when I would never serve any worthwhile purpose on this earth?

She looked at me, and in her eyes I saw bitterness. I saw the hidden deception there. The one that all women carry. The ability to turn. The ability to be one thing, and then be something else, and pretend to themselves and the world that they never were that first thing, they were only ever the second thing, and shame on you for even thinking that they were capable of being that first thing that they really were, and you knew the truth, and they knew the truth, and they lied to you right in your face and yet made you feel like you were the one who could not be trusted.

“Leave!” she said, and she raised her voice.

I was scared.

What could she do?

I wanted to be with her, I wanted her to like me, to love me. What had happened? What had gone wrong? Oh, what had I done?

“Please,” she said, her voice now cold and hard and tough. “You have to get out of here now. I don’t want you to be here anymore . . .”

My father had shown me what to do.

The belt slipped from its loops, and was in my hands without a thought. I don’t think she even saw me do that.

“Enough,” I said. “Enough now.”

I had the belt around her throat.

Her eyes were wide—disbelieving, shocked.

I tightened.

“Let go of me!” she gasped, and her voice was still loud, and all I could hear was my father’s voice, Ray’s voice, and that voice cut right through me like a hot knife through butter, and if I’d had a knife I would have cut her throat, but I did not have a knife, and there was no way in the world that she was going to threaten me and talk to me like that and raise her voice to me and make me feel like this . . .

There was no way she was going to disrespect me.

And she had to be quiet now, and she had to be silent, and then everything would be okay . . . everything would be okay . . .

The crookedness of the treacherous destroys them.

If you can’t say a good word, then you shouldn’t be speaking at all.

She went limp then. Quiet first, and then limp, and there were scratches on my hands where she had clawed at me, and only then did I see them and realize that I should have felt something, but I had felt nothing at all, and I lowered her down to the ground and looked at her, and she was silent and still like a rag doll and she wasn’t moving at all, not an inch, not a breath, and I knew I had killed her and she was dead . . .

Dead forever.

I stood there for a long time, and then I breathed out.

I felt dizzy.

I walked around her body and I looked at her for a long time, and then I kneeled down and I extended my right hand and touched her cheek with the tips of my fingers, and I knew she wouldn’t move, but somehow I half-expected her to.

And then I got up, and I looked at her some more, and then I put my belt back on, and then I washed my hands.

I can see her now. I can see her face. I can see her eyes wide open staring at the ceiling—not at me, but at the ceiling—and I wondered if there was a human spirit and the spirit that she was had now left her body, and she was up at the ceiling, looking down at her own dead eyes looking up at her, and if she was cursing me for killing her . . .

She was so young.

She was nineteen, and I was twenty-five, and her name was Caroline McCready, and I killed her at about eight o’clock in the evening on Tuesday, May 10, 1949, and when I left her house I hoped that I would not see her parents because they were at the theater and were due back anytime now.

I wanted to tell someone, but there was no one to tell.

Eugene had been out of the army for about six months, but he was somewhere outside of Chicago, and I did not want to tell him anyway.

Eugene would not have understood, and could never have understood, because Eugene did not have the poison of my father’s blood in his veins.

Not like me.

I walked away from that house, and I never heard another word about Caroline McCready.

Not even in the newspapers or on the wireless.

No one came asking for me.

No one, it seemed, had seen us together.

No one ever challenged me in the street.

No one even spoke to me about this terrible thing that had happened just four blocks from where I lived and worked.

The perfect murder, but a murder that was never meant to happen.

I killed that girl, and I had to bear the burden of guilt for killing that girl, but my father told me where to put my hands, and he told me how hard to squeeze her neck until she was silent.

And so I did.

And that was all that happened.

For a long time I tried not to think about her. I fought it, resisted it, pretended that I had made some small progress in forgetting what had happened.

After a year I understood that only by embracing and accepting what had happened would I ever overcome it.

I allowed Caroline McCready back into my life, and she moved in without a word.

We shared everything. Every meal, every waking hour, every dream, every thought and hope and fear and frustration.

She asked me why I killed her—more than any other question she asked—but I had no answer for her.

“Because of my father,” I said once.

“Your father?”

“Yes, because of my father,” I repeated.

“That’s no answer,” she said. “That’s no answer at all. Answer the question properly. Why did you kill me, Lewis Woodroffe?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know why I killed you.”

And I would see her looking at me, patient but disappointed.

“I can wait for you to figure it out,” she said. “I have more time that you can even imagine.”

One time she explained eternity to me.

“There is a bird,” she said, “and the bird flies to a beach somewhere in the world, and that bird collects one grain of sand, and he flies and flies and flies until he reaches the moon, and then he leaves that one grain of sand right there on the moon. And he rests for a little while, and then he comes back. And you know what he does when he reaches that beach again? I’ll tell you what he does, Mr. Lewis Woodroffe. He takes another grain of sand and he flies right back to the moon. And then he takes a little rest, and then he returns once more, and he keeps flying back and forth and back forth from the earth to the moon, and he takes just one grain of sand at a time, and after he has carried every single grain of sand from every single beach in the world and put it right there on the moon, well mister . . . only then has eternity begun.”

And then she smiled.

“And that is how long you have to answer my question and come to terms with what you did.”

She would get snippy like that, and I wouldn’t regret choking the life out of her. Sometimes she’d get real mean and I’d imagine choking her again, but it was like she could see inside my head, and she would scold me for my thoughts and make me feel ashamed.

Sometimes the only thing to do was stay in bed and drink all day. Turn the TV up loud and drink cheap bourbon and hum tunes in my head to drown her out.

But it didn’t work. She was there all the time. She wasn’t going anywhere. One time I tried to work out the bird thing. The bird going to the moon with a grain of sand. I figured that it would take a lifetime just to make one trip.

And then I felt sorry for what I’d done. It took a while—a couple of years, maybe three—but I was sorry. I mean, I was always sorry, sure, and I wished a thousand times that I could go back to that day and wish her well as we left the restaurant, and tell her that it had been a good day, and it had been a pleasure to spend time with her, and perhaps we could do it again, and then wave to her from the corner and see her disappear toward the bus, and then go home and sleep and wake up the next morning and not be a killer. But I had killed her, and I was a killer, and I would always and forever be nothing more nor less than a killer, and when I realized that this was now my life, then I was really sorry. Sorry in the real sense. Desperately sorry. I told her so.

She smiled, like a smartass schoolteacher who’s trying to make you get it wrong by asking you some tricky question that don’t have a real answer, and she said, “Well, it’s taken some time, Lewis Woodroffe, but don’t think that saying sorry and meaning it will have any effect on me at all. You can’t ever forget that I am dead, see? I am dead because you killed me. I had a life. I had parents and friends and a job and people who cared about me, and you ended all of that because I wouldn’t fuck you.”

I told her not to talk smutty. She was not a smutty kind of girl.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you, Lewis Woodroffe,” she said, and laughed cruelly.

Seriously, if she hadn’t have already been dead, I would’ve choked her again, regardless of her admonitions.

Over time we came to an understanding, me and Caroline McCready. I went to work, she stayed home for the main part. I guess she didn’t care much for folks seeing me and her having our words, you know? Sometimes I would just tell her to shut the hell up, and she would laugh at me and tell me I was crazy.

“You do understand you’re talking to yourself, don’t you?” she’d say.

“I ain’t dumb,” I’d reply.

“Maybe you aren’t dumb, but I think you’re crazy nevertheless. Crazy people talk to themselves.”

“I ain’t crazy.”

“Are too. Crazy enough to kill someone.”

“You made me mad.”

“I made you mad. Seems to me, mister, that you were pretty mad already.”

I would never win. She was right. I was crazy before I killed her, crazier afterwards.

I spent more time away from home. I worked and worked and worked. I got Sunday hours in a meatpacking factory. I had three jobs. I had more money than I knew what to do with, and I was lonely as hell and drinking myself to sleep, and I knew that sooner or later I would have to turn myself in or shoot myself in the head or take a dive off a high building someplace.

Just so that voice in my head would stop.

Seemed that Caroline McCready had silenced the voice of my father, and then just stepped up to take his place.

I knew I was a bad ’un. I knew I’d never be anything more nor less than a bad ’un. I was broken before I even got started, and maybe that was all down to my father, or maybe I was a mess before he got his hand in, but I wasn’t coming back anytime soon from what I’d done.

Christmas of 1955 I tried to kill myself. I drank a whole bottle of bourbon and I took a whole bunch of pills, but I collapsed face down and vomited everything up and I didn’t get anyplace but real sick for a few days, and to make it worse I was still alive.

I was waiting for Caroline McCready to make some wisecrack about how I was so useless I couldn’t even kill myself, but she didn’t say a word. Then I figured that she didn’t want me to die. If I died, then she wouldn’t have no one to talk to. Simple as that.

In the early part of 1956 things changed. I couldn’t kill myself. I knew that. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Maybe I was weak, or maybe I was too strong. I thought about how suicide was a mortal sin in the eyes of the church, and that would get me two hallway passes into Hell.

I was desperate. Really desperate. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to think or feel or say or believe. I was getting on for thirty-two years of age and I should have been settled with a wife and a couple of kids and moving forward toward some kind of security and future. I should’ve had good things to look forward to, but I didn’t have nothing.

I even started to pray. Had never been much of a religious-minded kind of person, but then I pretty much had my father to thank for that as well. My experiences with the Bible hadn’t been so uplifting, if you know what I mean. But I started to pray, and for some reason I felt like I was actually talking to someone up there, and I didn’t know if it was God or Jesus or just some other part of my fevered imagination, but things started to ease down a little, and Caroline McCready showed up in my thoughts less and less, and by the time Eugene phoned me with an answer to my prayers, well she had pretty much left me alone for some weeks.

It was four o’clock in the morning, and Eugene was all the way over in Milwaukee, and he was ready to kill himself.

He was sobbing and crying, and he said how he was done for, and his life was all over, and it took me five minutes to get him to calm down enough to even tell me what the damn hell was going on.

I couldn’t believe it.

If you’d asked me to sit down and make up a list of the most unlikely things to ever happen in this world or the next, then what I heard Eugene say would have been numero uno.

“I done killed a girl, Lewis.”

“You done what?”

“I killed a girl. I was fooling around with this girl, and she got mad at me, and then she said she was gonna go get her neighbor, and he was gonna knock me all to hell, and I just wanted her to stop saying things, and I put my hands around her neck—”

I knew then that my father had made his way right through me and gotten into Eugene too.

How else was it possible for two brothers to kill two girls the same way?

I got him to stop talking. I asked him what happened, just exactly what happened. He told me the when and the where and all that stuff, and then I told him to get back on that bus and come right home to Chicago, and I would take care of everything.

Eugene said that there were some things that just couldn’t be taken care of, and I said well that may well be the case, but this here thing wasn’t one of them. This could be taken care of, and I was the man to do it.

He said he didn’t understand what I could do to fix this. A girl was dead. He had killed a girl and she was dead on the floor of her kitchen, and the only way something that broke could be mended was if she was to come back alive again, or maybe if there was a way to turn back time and go and start the day over again and not kill her at all. And I told him it wasn’t his job right now to understand how I was gonna fix anything. Only job he had now was to get right on the bus like I told him already and come on back here to Chicago.

He did as I said for him to do, and he showed up somewhere around half past seven that morning, and the first thing I did was give him some of the tranquilizer pills I tried to kill myself with. He settled some after a while, and then I told him to explain everything that happened, minute by minute, hour by hour, and I listened to him explain how he’d met this girl in a diner, and he’d gotten talking to her, and how he hadn’t gone to work and they had spent the day together in the Field Museum, and then this restaurant for lunch, and then later they’d had dinner at a place I knew called Hannigan’s, which was just down a few blocks, and then they’d gone to The Blue Parrot.

I told him to go over it again, everyone he spoke to, every name he could remember. Who was the waitress there? What was the name of the guy at the museum? How long were you there? Where did you get your bus ticket? How much did it cost? And then what? And what happened in Milwaukee? You had hot-dogs? How many hot-dogs? Where did you buy them?

And he answered all my questions, and then I told him to give me the keys to his apartment, and after he’d handed them over he asked me why I wanted to know these details over and over again.

“Because I’m going to fix this,” I replied. “Just like I said I would.”

Eugene—my dear sweet kid brother, the kid brother who should never have been subjected to my father, the kid brother I failed to protect, the kid brother that my father somehow managed to poison despite all my best efforts—just looked at me, dumb as milk, a frown knitting his brows together.

“I am gonna walk right in to the police precinct and tell them that I live right here in this apartment. And then I am going to tell them that I killed this Carole Shaw. I am going to confess for you, Eugene, and my mind is made up and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. I have saved up a whole bunch of money, damn near a thousand bucks, and I’m gonna give you that money and you are going to leave Illinois and never come back.”

And Eugene went right on looking at me, dumber than milk, and he didn’t have a word to say.

“This is what big brothers are for,” I said. “This is what big brothers do for kid brothers when kid brothers screw up.”

He cried then. I don’t know if it was shame or relief or just plain grief, but he cried a whole bunch, and then when I thought he was done crying he went on and cried a good deal more.

He thought I was saving him. I wasn’t. I was saving myself.

Eugene should have been happy and contented. He should have been the one who escaped clear and certain. He did his army term, and then he got a job, and he worked hard and he was a decent feller, and this thing that happened with the girl was just some throwback from my father, and I knew that Eugene didn’t have a mean bone in his body.

Accidents happen. People make mistakes. The difference between me and Eugene was that Eugene had one accident and made one mistake, whereas I was an accident and a mistake.

I didn’t tell him anything about why I was doing this.

I didn’t tell him about Caroline McCready. I knew I would get the chair or hang for this Carole Shaw murder, and I didn’t want him to look back and remember me for anything but the big brother that I was. I didn’t want him to remember me as being anything like our father.

I was going to confess to killing Carole Shaw, but really I would be confessing to the murder of Caroline McCready, and it even made sense that their names were damned near the same all but two letters.

And Eugene could have fought me on it, but he didn’t.

He was young and he didn’t want to die, and he was still kind of dopey from the tranquilizers I’d given him, and after all the talking and answering questions he was tired and he lay down and went to sleep.

I sat there for a long time and listened to him breathing.

He was my kid brother. What was I going to do?

“You did the right thing,” Caroline McCready said.

I could hear her voice as if she was stood right there over my shoulder, looking down at Eugene just exactly as I was.

“You did the right thing, Mr. Woodroffe. I have to hand it to you. You have surprised me a little. You are braver than I thought.”

“Thank you, Caroline.”

“I came back to tell you that, and to tell you that I was leaving. This is where you and I part company.”

I felt her hand on my shoulder, and then I didn’t feel her hand, and I knew she was gone.

Just like that.

Later, Eugene woke, and it was as if he was waking from a nightmare, and there was a momentary relief on his face, but he saw me sitting there and he remembered why he was in my apartment, and he looked all afraid again.

“It is done,” I told him.

I gave him all the money, and then I showed him a bag of clothes I had packed for him, and I told him he had to leave Chicago and Illinois right now and never come back.

“No matter what you hear, no matter what you might read in the newspapers about this, you can never come back to Chicago.”

He hugged me, and he cried some more, and then he started talking about how many times we’d spoken of leaving Taylorville, and how we used to call this place Chicagoland, and how everything would be better once we got away from our father.

“You go on and live your life like none of this ever happened,” I told Eugene. “You need to do that for yourself, and you need to do it for me and your ma, but most of all you need to do it to prove to that old bastard that he didn’t beat us both down. You’re a good kid, and you did this thing, but it don’t matter now because in an hour or so it will all be taken care of. Just go to the bus station, and get on whatever bus is leaving first, and I don’t want to know where you wind up.” And then I hugged him again, and said to him just like Caroline McCready had said to me.

“This is where you and I part company.”

I put my coat on, and I walked him down to the corner, and I sent him in the direction of the bus stop, and then I turned back the other way and kept on walking until I found a police precinct. I walked right on in there, and I went to the desk sergeant, and I said, “I killed a girl. I strangled her with my own hands, and I left her dead in her house,” and then I held up my hands just to show him that these were the hands that did it, and he nodded gravely, and he said, “Is that so?”, and I said, “Yes, it is so, and I am here to accept the consequences of this terrible thing, and whatever penalty the law sees is fit.”

They locked me up for a while. They had people come down and talk with me. I told them precisely what had happened, just as Eugene had told me, and then the following day this other detective called Maguire came over and told me that I had confessed in the wrong precinct and he was going to take me to the right precinct, and there they would finish all the paperwork and I would appear before the judge.

Maguire seemed to know what he was doing, and he had a kind manner, and even though he said I had done a terrible, terrible thing, there was still something about him that made me feel that he cared about people, however bad they were.

He didn’t get mad with me, and he didn’t threaten me, and he asked his questions and listened to the answers, and then he had me write everything down and sign it, and then we were done.

I was arraigned, I was held over pending trial, and then I was tried and sentenced, and I was meant to go on down to death row at Pontiac, but that didn’t never happen for one reason or another.

And I’ve been here all this time—four years and five months and a couple of weeks, right here in Cook County Jail, and I look out through the peephole in my door and I can just see the clock on the wall, and it’s an hour until I die, and I still know that I’ve done the right thing.

I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life.

In an hour it all ends. Whatever virus spread from my father to me, and whatever got around me and touched my brother, is gone. The line stops here.

I can honestly say that I had never felt so calm in my life, and when Father Henry came on down to talk to me in the last forty minutes of my life, I could only listen to him and wonder how someone could believe so hard in something they had never seen.

“So next step is Hell,” I said.

He smiled, shook his head. “Purgatory, my son. Purgatory is the destination for those who die in a state of grace and there they will await their Final Judgment.”

“Does He weigh the good against the bad?”

“Yes, He does.”

“And is there anything I can do now . . . you know, that will help swing the decision in my favor.”

“You can pray, my son. You can kneel with me now and pray to the Almighty Father, and he will hear you in your hour of need and give you the strength to suffer the torment that awaits you.”

And so I knelt with the Father, and I prayed with him, and even though I didn’t believe I needed any further strength, even though I believed I had rid myself of all fear, I was wrong.

I do not know where those last minutes went, but I heard the door at the end of the hallway, and the sound of a key in a lock, and then there were footsteps, and the cell door was opened, and the warden was there with two guards and he looked down at me on my knees beside Father Henry, and he said, “It’s time.”

Father Henry stood up, but I felt incapable of standing.

The warden nodded, and the guards came forward, and they helped me to my feet. I expected them to get mean and tell me I was a coward, that I should face this like a man, but they didn’t say a word between them and they walked me to the door, and then they put handcuffs on me, and they shackled my ankles together, and we started down that corridor, a grim procession, and I knew that my death was right through the door at the other end.

I could see my mother’s face.

She was crying.

My father was nowhere to be seen. Did that mean something? Was he dead? Had he died and I knew nothing about it? Were we all finally free of him?

I did not dare wish such a thing in case a denial of my wishes was part of my Final Judgment. I hid that thought deep down inside of me, and I tried real hard not to think of it again.

And then we were passing through the door, and I saw the light, so bright, so fierce, and there was a window to the right, and I could see movement behind it, and I knew there would be journalists and maybe Maguire would be there with his partner, and maybe the girl’s sister would be there, the one I saw in court, and I closed my eyes as they led me to the chair, and when I sat down I knew there was nothing more I could do. Even the time for praying had been exhausted.

I just thought of Eugene, and I wondered where he was, and the fact that he was nowhere near any of this gave me a feeling of strength inside. I felt the straps over my chest and my arms and my legs, and I knew that soon they would put that thing on my head and I was ready to let it all go forever, and then someone asked me a question.

“Do you have anything to say?”

I opened my eyes.

I thought of the truth. I thought of Caroline McCready and Carole Shaw, and how one man was going to die for two murders, and only myself and Eugene knew the truth, and I thought of the minute that would elapse from the moment they put that cap on my head to the moment they threw the switch, and I prayed one last time that no phone call would come, that there would be no reprieve, that there would be no sudden change of heart.

I had to die for what I had done.

I had to die to save my brother.

I had to die in order to put an end—finally and forever—to the terrible curse that my father had laid upon both of us.

I saw Caroline’s face. I thought of all the years I had lived with that burden of conscience. I thought of the girl that Eugene had killed, and I wondered whether she too would be in Purgatory awaiting her Final Judgment.

I looked through that window.

I looked as hard as I could. I could sense the sister out there. I could feel her presence.

Could I see her there, to the right? Was that her? Perhaps, perhaps not, but I directed my words to her, and—though I knew she would never know the truth—I wanted her to understand that my words were genuine.

“In the eyes of God, I am innocent of this thing . . . but in my heart I am guilty. I am sorry . . . so truly, deeply sorry . . .”

And I was sorry.

For all of it.

For Caroline McCready, for Carole Shaw, for the legacy of my father that had seen two girls die at the hands of his sons, and I was sorry for failing to protect my mother, for not having the guts to pull the trigger of the squirrel gun that afternoon on the porch, and for my brother, Eugene, a thousand miles away and free from all of this.

They came with a black shroud, and as they put it over my head I caught a glimpse of something to my left.

I looked, and I saw him.

Eugene.

No, it could not be Eugene.

Eugene?

I wanted to say his name. I wanted to ask if that was my brother. Was he here? Had he come to see this? How long had he been in Chicago? Was that really him? Oh my God, oh my God no, it can’t be—

And then the shroud covered my eyes, my face, and I felt the leather cap on top of my head, and the strap beneath my chin, and then they were screwing that cap down tight, and I pressed my back against the chair with every ounce of strength I could muster, but my strength ran out in seconds, and I sat there and tried to convince myself that I had not seen Eugene, that I had created some indistinct image out of the depths of my imagination.

And then I do not want to know.

I try to count off the seconds.

Sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven, and I keep on counting just to have some way of filling my mind, and I am down to forty-five, and I can feel my whole body slick with sweat, and inside I am screaming, and I don’t want to go to Hell, please Lord no, don’t send me to Hell, and thirty-nine, thirty-eight, and it wasn’t all my fault, it was my father, and please do not punish my brother because he is righteous and kind and caring, and he deserves all the happiness he can find, because he was denied so much happiness as a child, and thirty-one, thirty, twenty-nine, and please let me die now, let me die now, I can’t bear this anymore, please Lord, twenty-three, twenty-two, let it all be over and done with, and can I hear movement? Is someone moving? Please God, let there be no phone call. Would I have heard a phone? Where do they have the phone? We must have reached nineteen, eighteen, and it has to be done now, surely a minute has gone, surely this is more than a minute, and Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, thirteen, twelve, and the integrity of the upright guides them, but the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them, and riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death, and the righteousness of the blameless keeps his way straight, but the wicked fails by his own wickedness—

And then I heard something for sure.

Like the slam of a car door.

For a second there was a brilliant light, and then it was black.