forehead. The Sheriff, or whoever he was, stood up straight as a ramrod. And the scoutmaster explained that there had been some trouble, that Billy was an orphan now, that both of his parents were dead.
Of course he couldn’t take it in. He was numb with shock. How could they be dead? He found out gradually, with no one eager to tell him too much too soon. They were shot, he learned, his mother three times, twice in the chest and once in the face, his father once, the bullet entering his open mouth and exiting through the back of his skull. Death for both was virtually instantaneous. They didn’t suffer, he was told.
And finally he was told who had done it. His father had come home drunk, and evidently there had been an argument. (He nodded as he took this in, nodded unconsciously, because this was something he already knew. But he wasn’t supposed to know it, because who could have told him? He’d been at the camp the whole time.)
The person who told him made nothing of the nod. Maybe it only indicated that this was nothing uncommon, that his father often came home drunk, that his parents often argued.
But this argument had an atypical ending, because Billy’s father had concluded it by taking a handgun from his desk drawer and putting three bullets into Billy’s mother and, in remorse or anger or God knows what, blowing out his own brains.
The boy knew whose fault it was. It was his, his and his sister’s. While they were crossing the last barrier, their father was murdering their mother, then sinning against the Holy Ghost by taking his own life.
As he remembered it, the ensuing days and weeks passed in a blur. While the authorities tried to find a relative who could take them in, Billy and Carolyn went on living in the house where their parents had died. No agreeable relative emerged, and the two were of an inconvenient age, too young to be on their own, too old to be placed in foster care. The officials shuffled papers and forgot about them, and they stayed where they were. Carolyn did the shopping and prepared the meals, Billy cut the grass and raked the lawn and shoveled the walk.
A week after the tragedy, they resumed sleeping together.
“ All we’ve got is each other,” she told him. “What happened’s not our fault. I’ll tell you something, it was going to happen sooner or later, and if we’d been home that night we’d have wound up dead, too. The way he drank, the way he got when he drank? And the way she provoked him? ‘Man Kills Wife and Self.’ If we had been home, it would have been ‘Man Kills Wife, Two Children, and Self.’ That’s the only difference.”
He knew she was right.
All they had was each other, and they loved each other. Socially, they withdrew further into themselves. For a year or two, this was unremarkable, a natural consequence of the family tragedy they had endured. Then, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, she announced that a boy had asked her on a date and she had agreed to go with him.
“ People get suspicious. ‘What’s wrong with her that she never goes out with anybody?’ They think I’m pretty, I ought to be interested in boys.”
“ Let them think you’re a lesbian.”
“ Believe me, some of them already think that. I’ve had some long looks from a couple members of the sisterhood, and one of them asked me if I’d like to come over and watch the last round of the LPGA at her house. Why would anyone want to watch golf, whether it was men or women playing? And why would I want to go over to her house anyway?”
“ I wish you didn’t have to go out with some guy,” he said.
“ You’re jealous?”
“ I guess so.”
“ I’m not going to let him do anything, Billy. But I think it makes sense to go out with him. And you’re going to have to start going out with girls.”
“ Or they’ll think I’m a fag?”
“ Or a retard.”
“ I don’t care what they think,” he said, but of course he did. Later he told her he wished they could be where nobody knew anything about them.
“ I’ve been thinking about that,” she said.
They put the house on the market and sold it, rented an apartment in a college town a few hundred miles away. She’d been given her mother’s maiden name as a middle name, and now she dropped her surname, and they lived together as William Thompson and Carolyn Peyton. She built up a collection of identification in that name, and enrolled at the college, and a year later so did he. The money from the house, supplemented by their earnings from part-time jobs, covered their tuition and expenses, and they had both always been good students. He took an accelerated program and they graduated together, four years after they’d sold the house.
Neither had made a single close friend during those four years. Neither had gone out on a date, or shown any interest in a member of the opposite sex. All they wanted was to be together, and they were confident their feelings were not going to change.
They got married. “We could just say we were married,” she told him. “When does anyone ask to see a marriage license? And I already feel married to you. More than married to you. But I want to do it all the same.”
“ And have kids?”
“ A baby with two heads,” she said. “That’s what you get if you sleep with your brother. Remember how kids used to think that? I’ve done some research, and it doesn’t necessarily work out that way. There’s a chance, though, that there might be something abnormal about the child.”
“ I don’t really want kids, anyway.”
“ Neither do I,” she said, “but that might change, for one or both of us. If it does-“
“ We could take our chances,” he said. “Or adopt.”
“ But for now,” she said, “all I want is you.”
And so they got married, and Carolyn Peyton legally changed her name again, back to Carolyn Peyton Thompson. And, as man and wife, they moved to the city where I came to know them. They went into business together, made a success of it, bought a house, and, well, lived happily ever after. They postponed the decision about children until they realized it had resolved itself; they were a complete unit now, they had been a complete unit from that first kissing lesson, and a child would be an unwelcome extra presence in their home.
Legally married, they came to feel less as though they had something to hide. So they were more inclined to make friends, more prepared to play an active role in the life of the community. They were, in everybody’s eyes, a decent and charming couple, attractive and personable and very much in love. And you could see at a glance that they belonged together. Why, they even looked alike. If you didn’t know better, you’d take them for brother and sister.
“And that’s it?” said the soldier.
The priest nodded. “More or less,” he said.
“ More or less,” echoed the doctor. “Is it more or is it less? Never mind. Lust, eh? Well, I suppose it was lust that got them started, but it sounds to me more like a love story than one of unbridled sexual passion. It’s not lust that keeps two people together for-what did you say? A decade and a half? No, that’s how long they were married. He was thirteen when she gave him his first kissing lesson and thirty-six or so when he told you about it, so that’s twenty-three years. If there’s some kind of lust that lasts for twenty-three years, I’d like a case of it sent to my quarters.”
“ And I’m not sure where the sin comes in,” the soldier said. “Unless the incest itself is the sin, and I suppose your church might call it that, but I don’t know that I would. Whom did they harm? And where’s the dissolute life to which sin’s presumed to lead? They became model citizens, from the sound of things. They had a secret, but what couple doesn’t have a few secrets, and who’s to say they do them any harm?”
A snore came from the old man seated by the fire.
“ My sentiments exactly,” said the doctor. “What I can’t figure out is why the fellow had that conversation with you. Incidentally, is it all right for you to recount it to us? You told him you’d consider yourself bound by the seal of the confessional.”
“ As you three don’t know the people involved,” the priest said, “and as I’ve changed their names, I don’t feel I’ve violated a confidence. The Church might see it differently, but I’ve long since ceased to be bound by what the Church thinks. My own conscience is clear on this subject, if on few others.” He turned to the policeman. “You haven’t said anything,” he said.
