I could remember the store very well. It was on Sycamore Street, and it had two large windows, which my father stuffed with anything that came to hand: hammers, saws, lengths of rope. In general, he stacked smaller items in the window to the right of the door, and larger ones, like enormous red toolboxes or shiny aluminum ladders, in the one to the left. He took no pains to make the windows attractive, or to display the goods in any particular way. He simply lumbered absently from the back of the store, his arms filled with anything he’d found in reach, and deposited it all neatly, but randomly, in the front windows. As far as I recall, the only regard he ever paid was to the seasons. From time to time he would shove a wheelbarrow into the fall window, the perfect tool for gathering leaves. In winter he would replace it with the snow blower that would remain in the window for the next four months. Beyond that, he seems to have had no theme in mind, no organizing principle.
Inside the store, the usual implements and materials hung from the walls, such things as rakes, shovels, and axes. Smaller items were gathered in wooden bins, nails, bolts, lengths of coiled wire and the like. The only thing I ever noticed in the store that seemed out of place was the single Rodger and Windsor racing bicycle which my father kept in the left rear corner of the shop, cordoned off”from everything else, as if it were only for display. It was a fancy touring bicycle, imported from England, and each time the latest model was sold, my father would replace it, tediously assembling it himself in the basement of our house, then transporting it to the store in the back of his small brown delivery van.
The Rodger and Windsor was the only kind of bike my father ever stocked. It was always red, and it never appeared to matter that he sold no more than three or four of them during the entire year. The fact is, he seemed to love it, or at least to feel for it some kind of strange devotion.
More than anything, I think now, he loved the process of putting it together. It was a difficult and painstaking labor, and he worked at it for many hours without stopping. It was strange to see him alone in the basement, stooped over a disconnected wheel, meticulously tightening each spoke, then turning the wheel, and methodically tightening each of them again. As a working style, it was completely different from his usual habit, which was hasty and sloppy and impulsive, the way he arranged the windows of the store or tossed different-sized nails into a common bin, everything done offhandedly, without a thought.
The look on his face was different, too. Normally, it was rather expressionless, but when he worked on the Rodger and Windsor, it took on a wonderful intensity and concentration, as if he found something rapturous in the process of assembly. Perhaps in this, as in everything else, it was the building rather than the completion which attracted and sustained him.
In any event, I remember seeing him at work toward the end of October. The latest bike had arrived a week before, but he’d been occupied in trying to straighten out some entanglement with the Internal Revenue Service. The woman who’d done the store’s books for several years had left a few weeks earlier, and without her, he’d been entirely at sea as he’d labored to give the IRS the information it had suddenly demanded. Normally, he would have set to work on the new Rodger and Windsor immediately, but because of the government paperwork, he’d been prevented from unpacking the bike for almost two weeks.
When he finally got to it, however, he went at it with the same persistence that he always applied to this task, working many hours at a time, always at night, with nothing but the single, naked bulb which hung above to help him make his hundreds of minute adjustments. I remember seeing him hunched over a length of bicycle chain, tapping at it with a small hammer, while his other hand caressed it with an eerie gentleness and affection. He was wearing his customary gray flannel shirt and trousers, and he had thrown the black sweater he often wore over the bike’s chrome handlebars. It hung there like a dried animal skin while my father continued at his tapping, unaware that I stood not far away, poised, as he would be three weeks later, on the third step from the bottom.
For a long time, he didn’t see me. Then, suddenly, he lifted his head and turned his eyes toward me, his gaze lingering on my face, but very dully, the way Jamie sometimes stared at his open textbook. For a time, his expression remained blank, the face of a mannequin in a shop window, colorless, with dim, unlighted eyes.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
He didn’t answer at first, but after a moment, he smiled very softly, then said in a low, broken voice, “This is
This is all I want.
Neither that evening, as I went back upstairs, nor in the years to come, did I ever give the slightest thought to what he might have meant by that. And yet, almost without my realizing it, it had always suggested to me that on that particular October night, a full three weeks before the murders, my father had already determined that we were going to die, that he was going to remove everything that stood between him and whatever it was he wanted out of life.
After that day in November, the question took on a completely different significance. After that day, he could no longer be defined by what he “did” for a living. He could no longer be reduced to the man in the hardware store on Sycamore Street. What he “did” was kill his family.
But as I’d watched Mrs. Fields walk to the kitchen door, knock, start to knock again, but grow rigid instead, then return to the car, I hadn’t realized that the strained, tortured look on her face was the same one I would see from now on when I answered the question truthfully. What did your father do? He killed my mother, my sister, and my brother, then waited in the kitchen to kill me.
It was all in Mrs. Fields’s face that afternoon, the world’s response to my father, the dread and horror his image would conjure up forever.
I could see her eyes in the rearview mirror as she wheeled the car into her own driveway, tense, darting, as if desperately trying to avoid her own terrible conjectures. Bobby was bouncing playfully on the seat beside me, the rain blowing against the car window, pounding at it with huge gray drops. Mrs. Fields opened the back door and pulled him out, almost violently, so that he squealed “Mom,” then ran into the house. I looked at her curiously, trying to determine if I’d done anything to cause the strain and alarm I could see in her face. She lifted her hand toward me, the painted red fingernails like little arrows of light in the shadowy interior of the car.
“Come out, Stevie,” she said, still offering her hand.
I took it reluctantly, let it tug me out into the rain, then bolted for the front door of the house. Bobby was waiting for me down the hall. He motioned me into his room. He didn’t bother to close the door, and so I could hear Mrs. Fields on the phone a few feet away. She was clearly distressed. She was calling for help.
For help, but not for the police. She called Mrs. Hamilton instead. I could hear her voice, hesitant, restrained, and although I can’t be sure that I gathered the words in exactly, I know the kind of call it was:
“Hello, Jane? This is Mary Fields.”
“Oh, hi, Mary.”
