XXV – When Jesse Got to the Real House (and Randy Prayed the Same Thing 240 Times)
No inherent magic in places and things, be they pocketknives or houses. But the stains they can leave on humans and on their stories can be a very real presence. Hence what good King Josiah did, give or take twenty-six centuries before the Henderson farmhouse sheathed its own troubles.
“And he defiled Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Molech.”
Jesse hated both himself and his father Bruce as he pulled down the gravel and dirt driveway of that farmhouse. For the first time since last Wednesday he vaguely wished he had killed himself after leaving the office that afternoon. He turned his rental car off, clenched his back teeth, and gave himself a few seconds to decide how much he really wanted to do this. And then his heart stopped as his dead father came out the old farmhouse’s front door and looked at him, square in the eyes, standing on that rotten front porch as silent and shadowed as ever.
Randy had gotten the text message around Jasper, Ohio, which was bascially a green highway sign and a whisp of houses on the north side of 32 West. Melanie, Pastor David’s daughter, sent “Can you pray for me? I’m going to meet that best friend I told you about at Mt. Airy Forest, and I really want her to repent and come back to Jesus. Bobbie Jo is her name, by the way. Thanks a lot, Randy.”
How many teenagers used correct punctuation in a text message? It jarred Randy a little. He prayed as he drove past Jasper (which took seven seconds), and wondered if there was anything else he could do to help his little sister in the faith. He decided to text Pastor David and let him know he was going to swing by the park on his way home and see how it went. He had a buzz as he hit send, feeling suddenly like everything was going to go right for the friend behind him and the friend in front of him. He turned the dial to B105.1, but he couldn’t pick it up just yet.
Give it time. And twenty more miles.
Getting out of the car was hard enough. Staying conscious and alert as he made his way to the front porch of the old farmhouse, gawking at Bruce Henderson, was almost impossible. But then finally the last piece of the jumbled mess of a moment fell into place as Jesse got to the porch and saw the faint scar above the right eye and that the hair was a good two weeks’ longer than his father’s had been the day he died.
My dad had a twin brother.
Jesse was no dummy, and he’d already put together about a fourth of what will soon become clear (or clear as fifty years of sin can be) by the time the man said, “Can I help you?” But he still felt like he was in a bad dream.
“My dad was Bruce Henderson.” He stopped there for a minute, not sure why. After all, he had the next bit down, the subsequent string of notes he wanted to play, just like he had before at the high school and the sheriff’s office. But he was stuck this time. He’d forgotten how to play the song, and the man’s eyes looking so much like his father’s and this house actually being here and having a smell of rotten wood and tall grass and cigarette smoke left him dumbstruck.
“No way,” the man said, and then smiled with the right corner of his mouth. It chilled Jesse right in the dead center of his chest to see what his brain still thought in at least one sector was his father’s face making a smile like that, a little sarcastic smirk he’d never seen from that face, could never have even imagined.
“Old Huck, huh?” He looked through Jesse for a few seconds, thinking things Jesse couldn’t guess at, and then said, “Where is he nowadays?”
“He-” Jesse had to clear his throat. “He died last week. He developed an infection at the hospital after a hip replacement.” He used the word “developed” because somehow it made him feel safer to use big words, medical chart words, in a place like this. Something was wrong here. He could feel it in the open windows on the first floor, the dirty jeans the man was wearing, the broken corner at the bottom of the front door. Somehow a word you would use in a sterile environment with labcoats and waiting rooms and an accounting department made this place feel less threatening. Surely people didn’t get murdered in a world where medical conditions “developed” and charts in clean manila folders were updated with the information.
“Hm.” He looked sad, but in a way that didn’t disarm Jesse much. “Sorry. Bruce and I were twin brothers. Not sure if you can tell.”
Jesse smiled awkwardly and gave a laugh that was just forced air, sounding more like a bike tire that had just run over a roofing nail. “Yeah. I’m his son, Jesse.” He stuck out his hand, ignoring the surreal dizziness and dread that he felt in his chest and at the back of his neck, the same feeling he’d had when he picked up his date for the senior prom.
“Dwight,” he said extending his own big hand in return. “Would you come in for a bit?”
And Jesse smiled and nodded, heading inside the house where most of it had happened.
“What do you want to know?”
They’d spent about fiteen minutes getting the broad lines of each other’s biographies in place, which Jesse, not being a poker player, took for simple uncle concern and small talk. But now Dwight Henderson wanted to know what was around the corner. And not for no reason.
“Why he ran away from here and never came back,” Jesse said, with the threadbare honesty and pain that a man at the end of something that’s not quite a rope as much as a cord of tissue paper. There was nowhere else to go after this kitchen table, and Dwight knew it as much as Jesse.
“What do you know so far?” He squinted just a little, and his voice went a little lower and raspier, and Jesse had the thought for two seconds that this man was very scared of something.
“Almost nothing,” he said, not totally lying but being just as cagey as his central nervous system (praise God for building that) told him to be. “After he died, I found some scraps of paper and a notebook that told me he lived here. And he’d written about some scary dreams he’d had in the notebook that made me think he must have done something really bad and then run away.” Jesse waited a second, letting the breezy simplicity with which he’d tried to guard the extent of his knowledge drop for a minute, and then said what he really thought, and let it sound as awful as it was. Because so what if Dwight was involved? Jesse didn’t care if this ended in him getting shot to cover up a murder anymore.
“Maybe he murdered somebody. Or more than one person.”
Dwight smiled a hurt smile, something that made Jesse feel both better and more confused. And then he said, “No, Bruce didn’t murder anybody. That’s never been in his blood.”
Jesse found it extraordinarily strange that Dwight would say it that way, implying he still knew anything about what had been in Bruce Henderson’s blood up until he died a week ago. He hadn’t seen Jesse’s father in more than four decades. But then everything in this old, yellowed kitchen that smelled like Pall Mall cigarettes and coffee grounds and sweat seemed strange to him. Heck, everything east of the 275 loop outside of Cincinnati had seemed strange to him. So he wrote it off.
“Our father was a dangerous man. And wicked.” Dwight spoke with obvious contempt now. Hatred that Jesse had rarely ever seen before in an actual flesh and blood person sitting across from him. His big right hand closed up into fist, and his voice sounded different, lower and more hoarse, like rocks scraped along the strings of an acoustic guitar.
“He beat us. With anything. Broke two fingers on my left hand when I was seven or eight. I had come in his bedroom while he was doing something he didn’t want me to see. I had just wanted to know when dinner was, I was hungry, but he hauls me into this kitchen by my ear. I thought my ear was going to come off in his hand, and I was screaming so loud I’m sure you could’ve heard out in them woods behind the house. Thought it would come off like clay in his hands, and there’d be blood everywhere, and then he’d have me clean it up with my face all wet and covered in it. But it didn’t.” He smiled like a sick man, a man who’s ready to die.
“He put me at the old table we used to have in this kitchen and told me to put my hand on the table and spread it out. I was crying and asked him what he was going to do, but he wouldn’t tell me, he just looked around in them drawers behind me and then came back with a hammer. He looked at me with that stupid look on his face, that look he always had, no matter whether he was happy or mad or whatever. Like he was half asleep and confused about the world. And then I knew he’d beat me to death or throw me out and lock the door if I didn’t do it, so I did and closed my eyes. He told me to stretch out my fingers, and it was hard, harder than you might think, and then I just waited. It felt like lightning had struck my hand when he smashed my fingers with that hammer, and I cried and cried. He just walked back into the bedroom and shut the door.”
Jesse didn’t know what to say, and so he just sat there, uncomfortable and confused, wondering what all this meant about who his dad was and who he was, but also wanting to try to do or say something for Dwight’s beneft. Nothing came.
Dwight’s head had gradually sunk, and now he looked tired as he slumped down and stared at the floor, looking to the left of Jesse. Jesse kept his eyes on the man, but he also felt like he was swimming in the mess that was the rest of the room. It was the kitchen of a hoarder, or a man too careless to make any effort not to look like a hoarder. Two boxes of haphazardly opened cereal on the counter, a sink filled with bowls and plates that didn’t match, a stack of old VHS tapes on the counter, a dozen newspapers on another counter, and two birdhouses on the floor in front of a cabinet. The refrigerator behind him was covered in old magnets, impossibly old magnets, yellowed from cigarette smoke and wear, and on top of it were countless boxes and papers that were in no order he could discern. It made him feel even more like he was stuck in some surreal quicksand, some family trauma that was as old and remote and unlike him and his color coded filing systems and precisely ordered life as could be in a real world.
“But that ain’t the heart of it all. He made us do things. That was the ugliest piece. That’s why Bruce run away. There’s a place out there in them woods,” he gestured with his right hand at the field and woods beyond behind the house. “He took us out there, one at a time. Your dad never told you about that? About what he was made to do?”
Dwight looked up at Jesse, now, tired, but also more scared than ever. His eyes focused on his nephew like there was something behind him or under him or somewhere in this house that made him feel cornered. Trapped. Jesse shared that fear for a second, but then that same tattered feeling overtook him again, and he decided he didn’t care enough about making this thing end safely to hesitate or leave or stop looking under whatever rocks the uncle he never knew he had would lift up.
“No.”
Dwight grunted, nodded, and looked back down at the floor. Something happened with his mouth, but Jesse couldn’t quite tell. Maybe he mumbled something, but then he said clearly, “That’s where the Hell happened. Out there. ‘Special things,’ he called them.”
Jesse’s spine and skin felt like he’d put his fingers in a wall outlet for a few seconds.
Don’t tell her about the special things under the house.
He closed his eyes, pictured the words on the paper. Tried to imagine his father writing them. When he opened them his heart stopped for a second. Dwight was fully awake now, staring at him dead in the face, his arms on the table with his hands together like he was prepared to do something, to negotiate something or propose something or play the best hand of poker he’d ever been dealt.
“Ever heard that? ‘Special things?'”
“He wrote something about it in that notebook. He wrote ‘Don’t tell her about the special things under the house,’ talking about the aunt he lived with for a couple of years before joining the army. That’s all. Did things happen down there, too?”
Dwight shook his head and looked away. “No, nothing down in that crawlspace but dirt and dark and cold air. Maybe a snake or two.” He shook his head again, as though he had thought about the fact that there might be a different answer, but had decided not to say it. “No, nothing under this house. Out there in the woods was where he always done it. There’s an old church out there, near the old road that cuts them woods in half. Place has been empty since before I was born. That’s where he done it. To both me and Huck. Always one at a time, though.”
“Huck?”
Bruce smiled that sick smile again. “He didn’t go by that no more?” Dwight gave the first honest chuckle Jesse had heard. “That’s what we always called him. Me and our mom, before she left. ‘Huck.’ She liked that old book Huckleberry Finn. I never read it, but you know how it goes.”
Jesse didn’t know how it goes, and he didn’t have the strength to pretend like he did, so he just looked down at the table again and wondered now about his grandmother.
“When did she leave?”
Bruce looked at Jesse with something like fire, hurt fire, in his eyes. “We don’t talk about her around here.”
Jesse was a little surprised at himself that he didn’t push further, but there he was, sitting there cold and tired and shocked and wondering what to do next, not saying anything.
“What do you want, son?”
“I just wanted to know who he was.”
Dwight nodded, and his old face, looking a little less like his twin brother’s now, gave a look that said he understood, but thought that it was ridiculous. “I don’t reckon you’ll ever know that, boy. But if you’re serious about it, you need to go look out there in that church out in them woods. You need to see what he saw.”
Jesse squinted, confused.
“What do you mean? What’s out there?”
“It don’t do no good to talk about it, son. And I couldn’t even if I wanted to. When the old man died I said I’d never speak of it again. And I’m dying myself, now. Cancer in my pancreas, cirrhosis in my liver. I want to die out here in my house without any fuss. I don’t need no one coming out here with the law and digging things up and making me swear statements and whatever else would come. But you’re family, and I trust you. And if you want to know who Bruce was and what he seen, what we both seen, you go look yourself. It’s a quarter mile into them woods, walking south. That old church is sitting fifty yards from the old road, trees and weeds and tall grass all covering up what was the drive leading up to it. No one ever goes in there. And you’ll understand once you seen it yourself.”
Jesse looked at his uncle with despair and exhaustion. “Would you come out there with me?”
“Nope,” he said plainly. “I will not. And I won’t blame you if you don’t go. But if you love Huck, and it sounds like you do, that’s where you’ll know him. That’s where you’ll know both of us, and all the things we saw and felt and what he run from. I’m sorry, boy. I won’t do it ever again. I made that promise, and I meant it.”
Jesse didn’t really know what was happening with his legs as he stood up and walked to the back door of the kitchen, hearing the floors squeak underneath him the way his nice new house in Cincinnati never did, but the way he imagined all haunted houses had to. It was in the literature. That’s the way the world worked.
He stepped out onto the back porch, small and with two steps broken and rotten.
“Son?” his uncle called to him from inside the kitchen.
Jesse turned and looked back at him.
“You was born into this. Nothing to be done but own it.”
Jesse felt sadder as he stepped out into the back yard where he breathed deep and looked at dusk just beginning to settle in. A lazy firefly made himself known just ahead of him, where the grass was beginning to seed and then stopped altogether at the edge of the field. He began his walk out to the woods, looking farther now that he knew he was all alone and making the long walk by himself, out in country he didn’t know.
For the first time he could ever remember, even through all the hospital visits at the end, he felt sorry for his father. That was a new experience, and it was disorienting.
Which is probably why he didn’t notice that just as he stepped into the woods, a man came out of the fields and began to follow him.
Randy saw Melanie’s car and parked next to it. He felt weird, knowing that she might not need a pseudo-uncle to show up and give her a fist bump and offer to buy her and her dad a milk shake (that was his plan, and he’d already texted Pastor David as much a few minutes ago), but he had that unmistakable hum in his heart and behind his eyes whose lingering presence had, for the past few years, always spoken to him that he was doing the right thing, the thing the Father wanted him to do. He didn’t ignore those hums, even though obeying them often involved him feeling foolish. So he opened up his flip phone again to make sure he hadn’t missed a response and smiled and decided it was just right and that was all there was to it. The phone died as he saw he had no new text messages. He rolled his eyes and put it in his pocket.
He walked down to the path that began to the left of the parking lot. That was when he first wondered why Melanie was still there at all. There were no other cars in the parking lot next to the trail, which meant Bobbie Jo wasn’t there anymore. She couldn’t have been this late, it had probably been an hour since she was supposed to meet Melanie. So she had to have left. But if she was already gone, why was Melanie still here?
He worried about it now. He wondered if Melanie was just sitting out there on a park bench breaking down. He could picture this girl Bobbie Jo telling her off and then leaving in a huff (Randy was no dummy, either, by the way), and he was suddenly angry for his little sister in the faith and quickened his pace as he thought about her crying or just sitting there alone and silent and devastated.
It took him eight minutes and thirteen seconds to get to a rise where he could see Melanie just where she had collapsed. It wasn’t at the park bench. She’d made it about ten yards further down the trail before she lost consciousness and fell, her face landing in the grass and her legs stretched out behind her onto the dirt trail that stretched miles into the woods behind her. Randy ran to her, feeling his chest burn and his back along with it, and he felt everything tighten up in his upper body as he knelt down and put his hand under her head and lifted her up into his arms.
“Melanie, Melanie, sweetie. Hey, what happened?”
But she didn’t wake up, and he remembered, the way we all remember when we know someone with a particularly shaped thorn in her particularly shaped flesh, that Melanie had severe asthma, as images of her using that inhaler at morning meetings and around the church building sprung up in his mind. He carried her back to the bench in his arms as he looked anywhere for that inhaler or her purse or a backpack or anything that might have that thing in it. There was nothing but late summer grass that was losing its green and an empty Pepsi can next to the garbage receptacle across the path and down just a few yards.
“Melanie, honey, please wake up.” She didn’t, and she wouldn’t, and he knew it as he carried her as fast as he could down the path to the parking lot.
Hospital? Or her car to look for the inhaler there?
He couldn’t decide, and then what was worse, much worse, was that that pain was hitting him harder, now. It was killing him to walk this fast carrying her, and he felt tears starting to come down both cheeks as he prayed the same six words, over and over.
Eight minutes and thirteen seconds it had taken Randy to get to her. It was a long way to get out of these woods.
He kept praying them, never stopping, never meaning any less than exactly what he said, and pleading with His Father to answer mercifully.
“Help her breathe, help me walk.”