and it left a semicircular scorch mark. She would have little seizures of agony every time she looked at it, for years. No one ever admitted doing it. In any case. Two things happened in some order or other. I was accused by my mother of using too much heavy duty aluminum foil when I wrapped leftovers up to store in the refrigerator. We were really kitchen slaves. I got good at it, or rather I got fast at it, so I could get out of there. She had just opened a new box of this foil and she discovered that some untoward amount of it was gone, so since I was the one who put things away most of the time I must be the guilty party. I said I was innocent, but no, I was slapdash, I rushed through things, I was guilty. I had to be. Now shortly after this, something strange was going on in Rex’s room. I was hearing sounds of strange typing. Very slow typing, you know, hunt and peck. Late at night, this was. And the typing had a banging quality, tinny.
“I figured there had to be a connection between the typing and the missing foil. I decided to find out what Rex was up to, and, to make a long story short, I went up on the roof when he was away and hung over the edge so I could look in his window, albeit upside down, and see what there was to see. And this was what he was doing. We had this old Remington that he’d appropriated and he had set the thing to stencil mode and he was typing out some imperishable text, obviously that was the point, on some of the aluminum foil he’d pinched. I couldn’t read it. But I did notice one other thing before my head filled up with blood, and that was a long, metal, screwtop canister photographers use, I guess about eighteen inches long. It was on his bed. Don’t ask me how I knew, but I knew it went with the imperishable text and that he was making a time capsule.
“So I was in possession of an interesting piece of information. What did I do with it?
“In my defense, remember that I was ticked off over the missing aluminum foil business.
“I decided I had to know what the subject of his document was.
“I couldn’t get into his room. Also I was bound by a certain protocol toward him that he had bullied the family into generating. I was never to touch him. Never ever to lay a hand on him for any reason. There had been some physical conflict between us, provoked by him, and of course I was in the wrong, being the older and bigger and wiser party, so we had all agreed I was never to touch him. Of course in a less well-regulated family I could have taken him by the throat and made him tell me what he was doing.”
Iris said, “You mean you were so certain that what he was doing was injurious to you or so nefarious in some way that you had to find out what it was. You couldn’t just let him go on with it, do whatever he was going to do with it, and forget about it. You couldn’t.”
“I don’t know why I couldn’t. I was convinced it was threatening.”
“This is vintage you. You become immovable. You’re still like that when you’re convinced for no reason that you’re right. The other night when I nudged you when you were snoring and…”
“I wasn’t, though.”
“May I finish? You
“Iris, you won’t like to hear this but it is logically possible it happened that way. It
“Oh, good point.”
“Look, you agree I ended that period of snoring.”
“Well, until then, you had. But all right, you ridiculous person.”
“I’m losing the thread. Okay. Lalala. Okay, so I had to find out what in hell this thing he was creating was.
“First I asked him. I wouldn’t say I menaced him, but I caught him on the stairs and blocked his way down. I was going to make him tell me. He got enraged. I didn’t tell him I’d actually peered into his room. I said I’d figured it out purely by the sounds coming from his room that he was typing something unusual and that he’d better tell me. Something for school, he said. I told him he was lying when he couldn’t say what, exactly, his school project was. It got extremely tense.
“He was murderous but he was in a forked stick because I wasn’t touching him and because he obviously didn’t want my mother drawn into this, if he could avoid it. Then I pretended to lose interest. I acted disgusted and made as if to get out of there, leave him alone. He shot upstairs to his room then, clearly with the idea of securing his time capsule and keeping it out of my hands by any means necessary. He was clearly terrified I would get hold of it.
“I spun around and as soon as I heard him get his door unlocked I shot up there with the idea of forcing my way in after him and seeing what I could see before he started screaming for help. I was in the grip of the moment. I don’t justify any of this. It was craziness.
“I did it. I pushed my way in just as he was practically falling across the typewriter to protect it and at the same time rolling this sheet of text down so that I couldn’t read it. He began screaming immediately. But I saw the title, all in caps, on the handwritten draft he was working from, which was CRIMES BY THIS FAMILY OF FINCH, and then our address and the date.
“Instantaneously my mother was there. It was clear I had violated the rules and was in his room against his wishes, so that was all she needed to know. I was ordered to go and sit in my father’s den until he got home. She wasn’t interested in any explanations from me. She liked to hit, I was afraid of her. She’d caught me in his room and that was sufficient. It was so stupid of her.”
“Why?”
“Because as soon as I was in Coventry he was free to bury his time capsule and cover his tracks. He did exactly what I would have done. At first, later, he claimed he’d thrown everything out, down a storm drain, destroyed it, when my father got around to questioning him. Hours later. Then, I don’t know what it was, but he didn’t stick to that position. Maybe it was just some instinct of defiance he couldn’t control, but he said that in fact he’d buried the thing on the property, or hidden it on the property, rather. I think he implied he’d buried it. You understand that when my father came home and questioned me I told him everything.
“And Rex was astounding. He realized how upset everyone was about it, but he was like a prisoner of war refusing to supply anything but his name, rank, and serial number. He would only confirm what we already knew. He acknowledged the title of the thing he’d written, but he refused to say what he meant by it and he refused to reveal what the document said. My mother was pathetic. She was trying to get him to say that it was a story he’d written. And that was the only other substantive thing he would say… that, no, everything was true that he’d written. It was all true.
“I was pretty dumbfounded myself. I couldn’t really imagine what this document was about. I thought maybe it was primarily calumnies against me, coming out of our terrible sibling situation. Or maybe it was a compilation of all Rex’s grievances against everybody in the family. The situation was a Rorschach for everybody, I guess. Something about it drove my father particularly insane. I couldn’t figure out, I still can’t, if the original idea had been for Rex to privately express his paranoid feelings and then to bury them and then get rid of them that way, without intending any of it to come to the attention of anybody in the family… that is, perform a totally private therapeutic act in the form of a childish plot to get the satisfaction of somebody far in the future finding this account and thinking badly about the Finches, Rex excluded. I couldn’t fathom it.
“It led to hell.
“I could feel it developing into hell that first evening. My father was in some way deeply wounded and maddened by this thing happening. My mother was frightened. I was horrified at what I’d wrought by bringing the whole thing to light in the first place. And Rex was becoming more obdurate by the minute. He had been given a role that was perfect for him. He was somehow able to play it as a free speech matter and take the position that what he had done was his private business. I had broken into his room. We were the ones who were acting insane, was Rex’s message. I think he even seemed to get smaller, more compact. He was afraid of what kind of punishment he might get. But inside he was overjoyed, I know.
“My father kept shouting out new scenarios of what Rex was damn well going to do and what was going to happen to him if he didn’t. He gave one deadline and then another deadline and so on. You have to look at it from his standpoint. Here he has an absolutely uncontrollable eleven- or twelve-year-old kid who has concocted some kind of slanderous document and secreted it someplace on the property. But he was also working himself up. There
