The Hour Before Dark (5 page)

Beyond it, my Pompeii.

My Burnley.

3

“Embrace what beats you down,” my father told me after I’d had a terrible time in junior high with bullies and a particularly sadistic soccer coach. “If you fight it, it will fight back better than you ever could. You must learn to make friends with the enemy. You must learn from your enemy because there’s something of the enemy already in you, and that’s who you’re really fighting against.”

When I was growing up, I sometimes felt that the island was my enemy.

Sometimes my father, as wonderful as he could be, was my enemy as well.

He was the most wonderful person I knew.

He was the most irrational person I’d ever met.

He could beat me up with a look, or reward me with a wink and a smile.

Now that he was dead, I knew that I had never really known him. Not in the fundamental way you’re supposed to know your father.

He used to say something that cracked me up every time.

“The sun shines on a dog’s ass now and again.” He’d say it to me when I was low and felt everyone else had the good life. Always made me laugh.

I missed him.

4

I froze my ass off on the boat ride over.

Our boatman, Gary Conklin, was a guy just out of college who had no idea what to do with his life, very much like my brother. He was a little goofy, and shot what I’d call “knowing looks” at my brother when I spoke to him. I hadn’t known him from my years on the island, although I knew his oldest brother (of five), Chip. Gary looked a lot like his brother, particularly in the strong chin and lazy eyelids that seemed to run in the Conklin clan. I briefly asked about Chip. We made the kind of small talk you make on long, freezing boat rides when you don’t want to talk about the vicious murder of your father, I guess.

Somewhere in there, Gary mumbled something meant to be comforting about my father.

We could’ve been crossing over from the world of the living to the world of the unknown. Gary was our Charon, taking us over the River Styx—or in this case, the Sound.

I didn’t want to keep messing my mind into the death metaphors that came far too easily to me—but I had begun seeing mythological significance to this journey, to my father’s death, and to God. I went from watching the last of the shore with its rows of Cape houses and rocky beach and the smoke from chimneys in towns and villages along the coastline, to looking into the haze of gray and white ahead. My mother, what I remembered of her, was depressed whenever the fog rolled in on the island. And roll it did, far too often. She hated it. She had no love for the place. I guess in that respect, I was like her. The fog, the cold, the isolation from the mainland all had gotten to me.

It all seemed like a shroud. The dullish clank of ship’s bells and the intermittent cries of seagulls that had not yet gone inland. The storm fronts that were the norm for that time of year reminded me of my youth and days and nights spent out on the island. Burnley Island was beautiful and horrible, idyllic and monstrous, calm and turbulent. It was like the weather itself: unpredictable. You live on an island, you live the year from one extreme to another.

I looked out onto the unnaturally calm sea and watched the light snow come down, and for just a minute, just a hair of a minute, I saw some beauty in the world. I sipped from a mug of coffee. I closed my eyes and wished my father would be there, alive, to meet us at the harbor on the island.

It didn’t seem fair that he should miss a beautiful snowy day and a cup of coffee, and I felt a little guilty that I was alive and he was not.

Something cut through my mind like a scalpel, trying to remove memories I wished I didn’t have.

The good memories.

The memories of how loving my father could be, even at my worst times.

5

What seemed like hours later, my limbs frozen and my ears red, Bruno leaned into me. “Okay look, I’ll tell you some stuff. You’re going to find out anyway. Last night, when the storm hit, he went out to the smokehouse.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Why the hell would he go in there?”

“I don’t know,” Bruno said.

I closed my eyes. My father’s face: his off-kilter jaw that was both square and mildly dimpled. Barking out orders for us boys to never play in the smokehouse. I felt nauseated. I hated the smokehouse. It was an awful place—always freezing cold, even in summer, with that lingering smoke practically plastered into the stone walls from years before I came into the world. I’d always felt dread whenever I went into it—often, it was because my dad was going to punish me for some familial misdemeanor.

I opened my eyes. My brother had been talking, but I’d managed to block most of it out. I heard the tail end of a sentence: “. . . couldn’t function. I got her dressed. But it was pulling teeth to get her to talk to the police.”

“How bad was it?” I asked.

Then he told me how bad it was. How it was more than just “Dad died” or “someone killed Dad” or “a murder.” It was one of those crimes that sounds impossible to have happened. As if another human being could not possibly physically do to a person what had been done to my father.

“There’s something else,” Bruno said. His voice dropped a bit, as if he were trying to gulp back the words. “I just... I just don’t know . . . how to say it. Out loud.”

“That’s okay. If you can’t, that’s okay,” I said.

“No, not about him. But it got me thinking last night. I tried talking to Brooke about it, but she wouldn’t listen. But, Nemo, it was like ... when ... it’s hard to even say the words.”

Something within me seemed to clutch as he fumbled with his words.

“I mean, I’m not completely stupid,” Bruno said. “But I keep thinking about it. You know how you get those things in your head and you can’t stop thinking? They keep you up all night? It’s like that. It’s something that just keeps playing in my head over and over again. Know what I’m talking about?”

6

I didn’t reply. Could not. My head felt as if the granddaddy of all headaches was coming on. I wanted to shut down.

Then I began to feel an uneasy dread. Not of returning to the island. Not of dealing with my father’s death. Not of the monstrosity of the murder.

But a dread about whatever words were about to spill out of my little brother’s mouth.

Bruno took a deep breath. “You know how when I was little, I had those nightmares? I mean, all of us did?”

The words formed in my mind, a whisper from the past: Here comes a candle to light you to bed.

When he said this, I had to catch my breath. My lungs felt frozen from the air. But now my heart froze, too. “Bruno, that was nothing ... no ... that was a long time ago.”

“All around the Brain Fart,” he said. The two words together sounded pretty funny: Brain and Fart. But they filled me with dread. We had been playing in the smokehouse, and suddenly, all three of us lost our memories for a week. We didn’t tell our dad. We didn’t tell anyone other than each other. We thought maybe we’d just woken up on Monday of the following week and perhaps nothing had happened the week before. But somehow, we doubted that. When we asked our father, he told us we’d had fevers that week that had scared him. High fevers that had him putting us in ice baths and pressing boxes of frozen Bird’s Eye peas behind our necks to bring the fever down. Had it been scarlet fever? He wasn’t sure. Equine encephalitis? That sometimes happened when the mosquitoes from the backwoods got too plentiful in early summer or early autumn and swarmed the low fields. But no, it was none of those things. He told us Dr. Connelly had come by briefly, and just told him to let us get rest and stay cool whenever the fever spiked. But it had been something more—the Brain Fart had affected us almost like a bodily injury, but we couldn’t remember what had started it.

“It’s some twisted, sick individual who did this to Dad, Bruno,” I said. “Get that other stuff out of your head.”

He looked at me with a half-cocked grin. I remembered how golden his hair was when he was a little boy. How he’d wake up singing. How he used to dance with Brooke out by the duck pond on summer nights while I chased dogs around in the mud. How I used to thank God every single day that I had a baby brother like Bruno, and that he looked up to me, and that I protected him in every way I could from the thorns and burrs of the little world we occupied. He had once been such a happy little boy.

Somehow I wanted to bring that back in him after this tragedy.

What I got from him -- his twenty-three-year-old self -- was anger.

“Don’t sit there and pretend,” he said. “I am so sick of people in this family pretending everything’s all right when it’s not. Never has been.”

I cursed under my breath, closing my eyes again. I wanted to just block out everything in the world and have a moment of private oblivion. “Okay, let’s not talk about it right now. This is going to be awful for all of us for a while, I guess.”

“It’s the Dark Game,” he said.

“No, it’s not. It is not.”

7

I had grown to hate the Dark Game as a boy.

The more you played it, the more power you felt.

And then, one time a few weeks after the Brain Fart, Brooke had decided to be the master of the Dark Game, speaking with someone else’s voice.

But we had been children then. And we’d broken one of the rules of the game: We let it go beyond twilight.

We’d spent hours in the smokehouse, playing the game, all of us with blindfolds on, rags torn from old clothes.

We had overactive imaginations. Perhaps this was the reason our father eventually locked it up.

We had imagined that the smokehouse had become a red room, and that someone lay at the center of the room, between the three of us. That someone lay there, and spoke to us—
Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clemens.

In the Dark Game. Not in the real world.

You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martins.

The real world changed when we played it. It had different rules.

When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey.

Dark had come too fast, and we’d kept playing, as if we couldn’t stop it.

When I am rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.

The problem with the Dark Game: It had always seemed to have been there waiting for us.

When we closed our eyes.

When will that be? say the bells of Stepney.

When we were together.

I do not know, says the great bell of Bowe.

In the hour before dark.

It had become an addiction when we were children.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed—

And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

1

Bruno drew back from me in the boat.

He reached for the coffee thermos. “More?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Look, it was just a game.”

“I know,” he said. “But it was like that. It’s going to be all over the papers—the details—pretty soon. One of the local news crews from the Cape came out, so it’ll be on TV tonight. They talked to Minnie Wooten. She told ‘em that we were all no good.” We both laughed a little at the mention of the name, despite the gruesomeness of the crime. Minnie was nearly a hundred years old and as weathered as the gray, bowed planks on her front porch. She had been known as one of the Women That God Forgot—there were four of them on Burnley Island, each more ancient than the other. Somehow, despite the nasty winters and the isolation, some people seemed to grow old well on Burnley.

“I bet Minnie’s famous all over now. She’ll probably get her own talk show,” I said, managing to laugh, even when something in my mind had begun to shut down. I tried not to imagine my father or what had happened the night before.

I didn’t know that we would become famous on the island for all the wrong reasons from that moment on.

2

The Raglans had a spotty history of both the good and the bad.

I had been a bad kid in the way that kids who aren’t quite demonic are bad, and if you were to ask me, I could not tell you what drove me to badness. I suspect that being born in New England, being Catholic, and being a Raglan, I was triply blessed with a sense of Sin with a capital S, GUILT with all capital letters, and atonement, expiation, and possibly redemption all following thereafter. I was bad in the only ways I knew how: I did the things I ought not have done. Harry and I snuck into the movie theater when we were broke at the age of ten. At eleven, we kidnapped the Croder’s Maine Coon cat (at Pola Croder’s request, I might add, although she denied this later). We took Monster (as we called him, for he attacked and scratched up many a kid—the demon cat’s real name was Scooby) to St. Bartholomew’s to baptize him in the name of the Holy Ghost because we were sure that animal would go to Hell one day or another. We brought the cat back, but it was soaked and furious, and its talons were wrapped in bits of white sheet so it wouldn’t scratch Harry or me when we dipped it into the baptismal font. Mrs. Croder called the local cop on us and we had a stem talking to and a half hour in the holding cell behind the police station.

Then my misdemeanors increased: borrowed my dad’s truck to drive my friends out to Palmerton one night and go skinny dipping with the Evangelical Christian kids, all of whom taught us a thing or two, at fourteen, about human anatomy. Harry and I, altar boys, drank the wine reserved for communion at fifteen, and that was the worst of my church-related crimes. Luckily, the wine had not been blessed, and while my father took me home to be punished, the worst of it was throwing up in the back of the truck on the way home.

I didn’t hurt anyone. At least, not directly. I wasn’t a bully. I just tended to be in trouble with whatever trouble could be had. If there was a store to be broken into on a weekday night for no reason other than to have someplace to go, I was part of the crew. We never stole anything, nor did we break locks or windows (in the fall, winter, and spring, nobody on Burnley locked doors). If there was a car to be borrowed from Harry’s uncle without him knowing about it, you can be sure Harry and I were probably doing the borrowing. If the horses from the stables in The Oaks had been let out to run wild on a soft, summer night, somehow my name was linked to the deed.