Flying Clean

Flying Clean Chapter 3

Chapter 3

It was the next day that I saw the hidden Susan Desmond for the first time. The south side of the well-house was completed and I had moved on to repairing the east side. Knowing somehow that I was not welcome to use the well water, I trudged through the back fields with an empty pail to draw water from the Wabash to use in my next batch of mortar. Susan was downstream about thirty yards, washing the laundry in the flowing water on an old emery board. I saw with shame that she was naked. Immediately, I turned my back to her and faked a loud coughing fit so she would know I was there. When I turned back, she had draped a dark gown over herself and she was watching me with quick, flitting glances.

I hesitantly approached her, making sure I stayed at least ten feet away and kept my eyes averted for sake of propriety.

"My name's Derrick Hardy," I said.

"I know who you are," she said quietly. "I'm not supposed to talk to you."

I stole a glance behind me, but saw no one watching us. Still, I side-stepped another ten yards away, and talked low enough that only she could hear me.

"Do you know what happened to Willy?" I asked without looking at her.

"I know," she said simply.

"How is he?" I asked.

"He is coping," she said awkwardly. "It isn't the only time. I can't talk to you, Papa will know. Please leave."

I was simultaneously insulted and completely understanding; a contradictory sensation I had never before felt, but I honored her hasty request and drew my water quickly and fled her presence before anyone could see us together.

As I crossed the field leading back to the well-house, I spotted John in the distance, his face just visible over the short corn stalks. He was over a hundred yards away to my left, but I clearly saw him shake his head in what could only be taken as a warning. Don't go near her, that gesture said. I decided to honor that singular, wary warning.

I returned to my work on the east wall of the well-house and by sundown, I had finished and moved on to the north side, which needed little repair. Sometime the next day, I would be finished with the well-house, and I wondered what I would move on to next. As it turned out, I would spend the next week re-painting the house, barns, and the three-walled chicken coup- mending the wired fence along the open side.
During that week, I became more and more aware of the violent nature of most of the Desmond children, though I didn't see another attack as brutal and ferocious as Allen's attack on little Willy. One day, as I scraped smooth the southwest corner of the main barn where I lived, I looked toward the house to see Dirk approach Willy's twin, Heather. The sweet girl was setting a jug of tea out in the sun to age and had spared a moment to wave at me. Before I could wave back, Dirk appeared around the corner of the house and wordlessly swung a fist the size of a ham into the side of Heather's head. Heather's body was thrown back five feet or more and she lay limply in a cow pie Noxie had left behind an hour ago. Dirk went inside the house and I stayed where I was, horrified, but humbled enough to know I could do little to help the girl. I think, now, that it was that moment- watching an innocent eight-year-old girl lying unconscious in a pile of sun-warmed scat- that I began working out a plan, but I wasn't completely aware of it then.

I counted the seconds as I scraped the barn wall, and eleven minutes passed before Heather awoke, wiped as much of the shit from her clothes as she could and hurriedly ran into the house, not bothering to spare the time to go to the pump to wash feces from her hair.

Another day, as I painted the trim around the windows of the same barn, I looked down from my ladder to see Louise sitting in the yard with a yowling cat in her arms, oblivious to the feverish scratches it was carving into her arms. Louise had cut the flesh from the cat's side with a filet knife, methodically laying the fur atop her own skin like an Injun trying on an enemy's scalp for show. Sickened, I climbed down from the ladder and went around the back of the barn inconspicuously to vomit. I waited a long time before returning to work, and by the time I did, the cat's dead body was discarded like an old toy which has lost its appeal. The skinned flesh was nowhere in sight- gone, presumably, where Louise went; a sick trophy to be shown off in another place, perhaps.

The day after the revolting display with the cat, I saw John returning early from the fields with something in his hands. It looked like a small box, like the kind that rich folks kept cigars in. It was covered in living soil, as if John had found it by accident while digging up rocks and had brought it back for his father. I was high up on the ladder that day, painting right near the barn's roof, but I heard John's quiet voice on the wind.

"This was in the south acre, Papa," he said. "Half buried."

Harry took the box in his big hands, and told John to go back to work. John had gone perhaps six paces before Harry turned to Dirk and Sam, who were sitting on the porch steps. "Teach him to stay in the field," he said. The boys were nodding and smiling before the words had passed their Papa's lips. Each boy drew a similar wooden crop that Allen had used on Willy and disappeared out of my line of sight. Harry turned the small box in his huge hands and disappeared into the house. I never learned what was inside.

I saw John that evening as I bathed in the river, painfully scrubbing the paint from my hands with a rough scouring pad. His face was black with swollen bruises, his lips were far too fat and there were trickles of dried blood from his ears. Three fingers on his right hand were twisted at grotesque angles. He saw me there, in the river, and approached me unselfconsciously. He uttered only one word with absolutely no tone in his voice. It was a word I have heard over and over in the years since coming to the Desmond farm; I have analyzed its meaning in my mind, turning it like a wheel to look at every angle. Did he know what was coming? Was it perhaps a plea? The word was uttered without any emphasis, but I took it as a warning, rather than a threat.

"Leave."

I couldn't say anything before he was gone, pushing his way through the thin and sickly corn stalks.

Leave.

Perhaps he had some insight to the thoughts my subconscious mind had begun spinning, or perhaps he believed my presence to be exacerbating his family's situation, or perhaps he thought that I may one day become subject to the same things. All I knew was that my heart unexpectedly overflowed with a brotherly love for the young man; a beaten boy who seemed to warn me for my own good- at possible risk to himself. It was then that I decided that there were good Desmond children, as well as bad ones. It was not a misconception of mine, but a dead-on intuition. That John, the younger twins, and possibly the elusive Susan were good children, while the others- excluding young Seymour, of whom I knew little- were for some reason prone to evil that the parents did not reprimand, but seemed to condone.

That was the moment that I realized I was plotting against the Desmond family. When John told me to leave, my first thought was that the word seemed a plea to help him leave. Today, I'm not so sure. I think John may have been resigned to live the life he was born into, but in 1937, younger and more idealistic, I thought that John was asking for my help. Though for all my brave thoughts, for all of my plotting, I knew that no rash action would save the Good Desmonds.

Tonight, as I write this, I fear that if cowardice really is a hell-worthy sin, then God will surely condemn me to hell for my inaction in the following months. I am afraid, to be honest, that God stopped loving me the day I saw Willy beaten in the well-house.