Antonio turned to him, his hands covered with his own blood, his face a mask of pain. “Yes! I raped her. I’ve been with her, inside her a thousand times. Do you know what she is? Do you know who she is?”
The color drained from Truitt’s face. He stood stock still. He saw everything, in frozen detail, the tattered dress, the blood on his boy, the birds, the palms. He smelled the jasmine and the orange blossoms and he saw the dress and the blood and he understood, and he knew he was going to kill his son.
He stepped forward and picked Antonio up by the shoulders and held him in his arms, the son’s blood staining his father’s shirt-front, wetting him through to the skin.
And then Truitt’s hands moved. He fists came down on his son’s head, buckling his knees, and Antonio stood while his father beat his face and his body with his fists and he didn’t resist, he didn’t try to protect himself. It was like a dream of long ago, a memory of his boyhood. He merely thought, said to himself, this is it, this is the moment and then you can rest. If we just get through this, you can finally come home, be at home and rest.
Finally he ran. He turned from his father’s grasp, he turned from Catherine, seeing her scream but not hearing it, seeing the last look on her face as she screamed because she loved him and hated him at the same time, seeing her call his name but not hearing it, the voice he had loved, he ran from the conservatory, scattering the tiny birds, he ran and Ralph followed him, his fists still beating his son’s bleeding back.
Antonio ran into the big hallway, the hallway with the Venetian mirrors, the long corridor tilting wildly, where he could not get a footing because his shoes were wet now with his own blood, and he ran to the fireplace and picked up the iron poker, and when Ralph ran up to him, he hit Ralph in the face with the poker, drawing blood, sending his father reeling, his head cracking on the stone floor. Catherine followed into the hall, she caught at him, tried to stop him as he ran past her and out the door into the garden.
Catherine ran to Ralph. She lifted his head from the floor. She saw his eyes open wide in rage and knew that this was not hers to stop, that it would play itself out to an end she didn’t want and couldn’t have imagined. Ralph got to his feet, Catherine begging him to stop, now, to stop before it was too late, but he didn’t hear her or wouldn’t hear her, and he followed Antonio into the garden and beyond, catching and beating him. Antonio never made a sound. He stood and ran and was caught by his father and was beaten the way he had been beaten so often as a boy, except that this time he was guilty and filled with sin and horror, and they both knew it.
Down the long meadow they fought, Antonio fighting back with whatever he could find-sticks, rocks-hurting Ralph, drawing blood from his head. But Ralph wouldn’t be stopped, as he used his fists to beat back the memory of the wife who had used him, the child who had run away, the days spent in the idleness of love while his own father lay dying, the mother who had buried the needle in his palm. In his fury, all the rage of all the years came pouring out.
Catherine was standing on the broad stone terrace, afraid to go any farther, afraid to interfere, knowing that however it played out, the end was already decided. Mrs. Larsen was standing beside her now, flour in her hair. Catherine could see every detail of what was happening, every detail of the field, the Arabian standing in the short grass, its head down, then up in alarm as the two men passed, screaming and fighting.
They came to the pond, and Antonio skidded out onto the ice and stood like a bull in the ring, wounded, bleeding, tears still running down his face. There was no more fight in him. He had come to the end of his strength, the end of his hatred, the end of his regret, and he stood in the center of the pond, on the black ice, waiting to be killed. He thought of the days in heaven, he thought of his reunion with his mother, he thought of the incredible pain of dying, the physical pain the body could stand before it gave out, until the irrevocable blow was mercifully given and darkness fell.
Ralph paused at the edge of the pond. He was bleeding, too, from a cut on his head, and his hands were broken, the pain shooting up his arms. He found too that his anger had spent itself, that while the unforgivable things were still unforgivable, and the terror still terrifying, he had no more stomach for the rest. He thought of the accounts in the newspaper, the suicides, the murders, and the corpses, and he found that the living were more beautiful than the dead, that in the end, something must be saved, even if that meant it also had to be endured. Antonio would go away. Antonio would never be seen again and would die alone with his guilt and shame and memories, but there would be no corpse to carry to the graveyard, not today. There would be no white, still flesh in his house, not anymore. He would mourn his loss, but he would, in secret, still love his son and send him money, and when he died, the son would be sent for, and would stand by his father’s grave and remember this day as though it had happened to somebody else a long time ago.
Then they heard the crack. A white jagged line shot through the black ice and Antonio went down, into the icy water, under the ice. He came up under the ice, no air to breathe, his head hitting, his blood mingling with the black water.
Antonio struggled, but he couldn’t see his way out, and he floated into unconsciousness, into the peaceful cold of the black water, his body showing dimly beneath the surface of the ice.
Ralph Truitt howled in pain, and he tried to get out to his boy, but the ice gave way around him and he floundered in the frigid water. He ran to the barn where he found a pole and a rope, and he raced back to the water, trying to save him, trying to save the years and the days, not knowing or admitting that Antonio was already dead, already gone, the plumes of blood now visible under the ice, surrounding his dead body, floating, arms at his sides as though he were flying, head down as though he were looking from a great height on the small earth beneath him.
The pole and the rope were useless, and as his son lay all night under the ice, Ralph was inconsolable. He slept alone. He wouldn’t speak. He ate nothing.
Catherine couldn’t sleep. She walked the halls of the huge house, looking at the pictures, running her hands over the furniture, finally going into Antonio’s rooms and packing up his things in trunks. She stripped the sheets from his bed and smelled in them the rich scent of her old lover, and she wept until there weren’t any more tears. Then, finally, she went and lay down on the narrow bed in the perfect playroom and slept.
They had to get men to come in the morning from town and pull Antonio from the water, his pristine shirt still bravely white over his chest. He was long and narrow and light as a boy. His black hair lay back in the cart as they pulled him away, and it froze to his scalp in the morning light and the warming wind.
Ralph would have forgiven him. He would have taken his son in his arms and said, hush, hush now, it’s over now. There is no more to happen, no more that can happen. The story, the old story has come to an end. He would have put his mouth to his son’s and breathed over and over until the warm breath filled his son’s lungs, and his son’s eyes opened and looked at him and trusted him.
But there was no use. There was no point. It was just a story. It was just a story of people, of Ralph and Emilia and Antonio and Catherine and the mothers and the fathers who had died, too soon or late, of people who had hurt one another as much as people can do, who had been selfish and not wise, and had become trapped inside the bitter walls of memories they wished they had never had.
It was just a story of how the bitter cold gets into your bones and never leaves you, of how the memories get into your heart and never leave you alone, of the pain and the bitterness of what happens to you when you’re small and have no defenses but still know evil when it happens, of secrets about evil you have no one to tell, of the life you live in secret, knowing your own pain and the pain of others but helpless to do anything other than the things you do, and the end it all comes to.
It was a story of a son who felt his one true birthright was to kill his father. It was the story of a father who could not undo a single gesture of his life, no matter the sympathies of his heart. It was a story of poison, poison that causes you to weep in your sleep, that comes to you first as a taste of ecstasy. It was a story of people who don’t choose life over death until it’s too late to know the difference, people whose goodness is forgotten, left behind like a child’s toy in a dusty playroom, people who see many things and remember only a handful of them and learn from even fewer, people who hurt themselves, who wreck their own lives and then go on to wreck the lives of those around them, who cannot be helped or assuaged by love or kindness or luck or charm, who forget kindness, the feeling and practice of it, and how it can save even the worst, most misshapen life from despair.
It was just a story about despair.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The funeral was only the three of them, Truitt and Catherine and Mrs. Larsen. Truitt had dug the hole himself,
