Strange Plots 21

Previous.

And so, a stranger came to town.

And got an AirBnb. Yes, even Titusville has realized that “safe as houses” means vacant houses. And since the town isn’t large enough to sustain a hotel (anymore; the old inn where Abraham Lincoln definitely did not sleep is now a nifty arts center), and some people like to go to Florida for the winter, there’s both supply and demand. Mom, Dad, Grandpa, and I were able to rent an old bungalow for two nights so that we could spend Christmas in Titusville.

I did say “Mom and Dad”, and that requires some explanation. When I said that I was going to Christmas mass in Titusville, Grandpa decided that he would like to come to. And since he didn’t want to drive up early on Christmas morning, he decided that we would stay the night. When Mom saw us looking at cute lodgings, she jumped in and took over the whole process (and paid for it too, so Grandpa and I shrugged and let her do her thing). Believe it or not, I think that when we had our Thanksgiving fight and I asked her if she was jealous because I was cutting out of the Ramirez gathering, it triggered some kind of introspection. Maybe it was that she was really jealous of not having a family gathering of her own to go to. Maybe she’d always felt awkward and out of place with Dad’s big happy family. Whatever the reason — I didn’t ask; we weren’t on those kind of terms again yet — she decided that she and Dad were coming to Titusville as well to explore Grandpa’s heritage, and (though maybe she hadn’t gotten this far in her introspecting) her own.

I was okay with this. I had not talked yet with Grandpa about Vin’s speculations about the gritty past. Every time I thought about it, I choked up at the thought of an old man hearing this from his granddaughter. Better let Vin explain it, and better that Mom should be there for Grandpa, and Dad be there for Mom. And Vin be there for me.

I’ve been coming to the realization that I’m not the most sympathetic person in the world. Yeah, I know I’m brash. I’d always thought it was my best quality. I tell it like it is. I don’t believe in BS. What you see is what you get — take me or leave me, and if you leave me it’s your problem. But I’d never cared before if I was left. Now it was different. Vin was doing a fine job of driving himself away from me. I didn’t want to do anything to bump him farther along.

I was going to have a chance to practice my less-brashness. Vin’s parents had invited us all to come over to their house after Christmas mass. I considered warning my folks about the particular brand of dysfunction they were about to encounter, but then I thought, why spoil all the fun? I’d already had my initiation into weird Titus family holidays. Maybe Mom would think more kindly of the Ramirez gatherings after this year.

For as close as we’ve lived to the mountains all my life, I don’t recall us ever taking a day trip up into the forest or checking out an overlook. The route was new to everyone but me, and I drove because I knew exactly where to slow down to showcase the most dramatic views. Everyone was impressed: Grandpa deeply, Dad easily, Mom against her will. Then I cruised along the scenic route through Titusville to show off the bricks of City Hall and the gazebo in the square and the neon lights of the diner. I detoured the few blocks past downtown so I could show Grandpa the mission church of Sacred Hearts where he was baptized. Grandpa almost hung out of the window like the little boy he never got to be, consuming every detail of the compact church. I hoped his heart would hold out through the holiday.

Our bungalow was just off of the main drag, a classic little 1920s deal with a porch and a trellis. As Mom unlocked the door, I was all prepared for woodwork and a tile hearth and some built-in bookcases, all the Arts-and-Crafts magic, but what greeted us was nothing. I mean, of course there was furniture there, and a floor, but the place had been renovated by some enterprising investor. Every trace of individuality the house had ever possessed had been methodically stripped off and replaced with greige drywall and laminate flooring and open space and a statement chandelier. It looked like every mid-level hotel lobby you’ve ever seen, and even the ones you haven’t seen but it doesn’t matter because they all look alike.

When Kay and Vin showed up not long afterwards to meet my parents, Kay was befuddled.

“This used to be the Wilson house,” she said, poking her nose in all the closets. “I remember coming over here in high school sometimes. It was old and cramped and beat-up, and tacky as all get out, believe me, but it had so much character. It was alive, kind of like your great-aunt Bertha with her dentures and her one good eye and her coral lipstick. I guess someone bought it to flip and gutted it. What a shame. A lot of history, just vanished.”

“I don’t think it’s so bad,” my mom ventured. “It’s got a dedicated laundry room.”

“So it’s soulless yet sterile,” Kay retorted. I could see the gears in Mom’s head cranking the etiquette meter over to “laugh and nod”. I think she was having a hard time adjusting to being polite to an adult version of me.

When all six of us gathered at the table with our complimentary white wine and holiday cookies to talk over our family discoveries, Vin produced the photos first. He’d gone back to the Historical Society and snapped photos in defiance of the crabby docent, and now he pulled them up on a tablet and enlarged them for elderly eyes.

“Erin and I have found the common maternal ancestor,” he said. “This is Tamar McGrath Sanders, Kay’s great-grandmother and Aaron’s mother. T. on the baptismal certificate.”

“McGrath?” Kay exclaimed. “We’re McGraths now?”

“You’re the McGraths,” I said. “There’s no other McGrath line but you.”

Kay and Grandpa, heads together, pored over the portrait, while Mom looked at it on my phone.

“I can’t see any resemblance,” Mom said, skeptical. But Grandpa patted Kay’s cheek gently.

“It’s you,” he said in wonder. “I see you, honey. My mother looks like you.”

“It is me!” Kay was brimming over, like everyone else, and she and Grandpa hugged each other and laughed and hugged some more.

“The Tituses and the McGraths at peace,” I murmured to no one in particular. “Looks like dreams do come true.”

“But hasn’t this portrait hung on the wall at the Historical Society for years?” Mom protested to Kay. “How had you never seen it before?”

“I don’t spend my spare time at the Historical Society,” said Kay. "How did I know to look for it? How did any of us know to look for it? Every clue to this family tree has been hiding in plain sight.”

“And speaking of hiding in plain sight,” said Vin, swiping to the family photo in front of the mayor’s old house, “here are the fathers with Tamar. Aaron Moore and Demetrius McGrath.”

The photo had to be sent to everyone separately because everyone wanted to study different faces. Grandpa kept hovering back and forth between Aaron and Tamar, devouring the now pixelated images with 85 years’ worth of longing. Mom mostly looked at Aaron Moore, blowing up the photo until it was practically not a face anymore, and comparing it to Grandpa. But Kay, although she focused on Demetrius, needed more explanation.

“I understand Tamar and Aaron Moore because of the evidence of the baptismal certificate,” she said. “But how are you sure about Demetrius?”

“We know that you share a maternal ancestor who can’t be further back than Tamar, but is not Lavinia,” said Vin. “Demetrius is the missing link between the two.”

“DNA, whatever.” Kay dismissed science. “It’s the feud part that has me wondering. How did the Tituses and McGraths have a child together, and no one ever knew about it?”

Vin pulled up another photo on his phone, this time the sweet face and neat braids of Lavinia. He cleared his throat, and swallowed, and looked at me and looked away. “This is where it gets ugly,” he said.

You’ve heard of people wringing their hands. I was doing it now, a big raw bundle of nerves, all my anxiety back in full force as I looked at the these two wonderful people in front of me. They’d been yearning all their lives to learn the truth about their families. I couldn’t bear to see them devastated by the charbroiled bones in the family closet. Vin talked, laying out as dispassionately as he could both the facts and his wild theories. But dispassionate isn’t good enough when you’re talking about rape and revenge and illegitimate children and abandonment and murder and lynching and immolation. Grandpa and Kay were silent as they took in the pieces of the gruesome story, with a silence that was more horrible to me than wailing or gnashing of teeth or the invocation of family curses. They were wishing they’d never taken a DNA test in the first place. They were thinking that maybe it was better not to exist than to come from such a line of evil. Maybe Vin was right. Maybe our meeting — the best thing that had ever happened to me — was not worth all the pain and misery and sorrow that was going to ensue from our revealed history. And still no one but Vin said anything.

Finally I cracked under the strain.

“Oh Grandpa, I’m so sorry!” I flung my arms around him, rather awkwardly since we were sitting side by side in dining room chairs with slippery fabric covers. “Is it too awful? Do you hate us for finding out all these terrible things about your past? Do you think there’s some kind of curse on our family?”

And Grandpa, whose own thin crust of stoicism had cracked so easily over the past few weeks, broke his profound silence with no trace of despair or grief.

“Of course not, honey.” He patted my head just as if he were calming a riled-up pup and even scritched me behind the ears. “I’ve had 85 good, hard years. I was married to your grandmother for the best 50 of those years, and I still have the finest daughter and son-in-law and granddaughter I could wish for. Nothing I learn about my past can change that.” He swiped through the photos again, looking at each face. “All this history helps me understand where I came from, but it doesn’t taint anything for me. It’s not like any of it was my fault.”

He reached across the table for Kay’s hand, and she gave it to him willingly. “And if I hadn’t taken my test, I’d never have met my cousin. At my age, family is what matters most. I’d have endured a much more horrible history to finally be able to see and touch someone related to me.”

“Amen,” Kay murmured, squeezing him in benediction.

“So you don’t think we’re cursed?” I snuffled.

“Cursed?” Grandpa seemed genuinely confused. “Why would you think that?”

“What about what it says in the Bible about the iniquities of the fathers being visited on the third and fourth generation? Some people might call that a curse.”

Kay gave me the eagle eye. “And where did you get that pretty bit of proof texting?”

“Vin said so.” Vin rewarded my tattling by kicking me under the table.

Kay turned the eagle eye on him. “I’d hoped you’d learned a little more scripture than that on Sunday mornings, Vincent. Don’t you remember the other half of the verse, about how the Lord shows mercy to the thousandth generation to those who love him and keep his commandments?”

“No, ma’am, I’d forgotten that part,” said Vin meekly.

“You didn’t want to remember it!” I flung at him along with a good kick of my own, more vigor than impact. “And I told you that this whole history didn’t mean anything to you and me.” Kick. “I told you we could start fresh.” I would have kicked once more for good measure, but this time he trapped my feet between his ankles. “I bet even if I’d quoted scripture about mercy to the thousandth generation you couldn’t have heard me because you were so hung up on the idea of a family curse when you were really just dealing with your own insecurities.”

“I seem to recall another verse I did learn in Sunday School,” Vin remarked to Kay. “Something about better a corner of a rooftop in peace, than a fine house with a contentious woman.”

“Oho, and I’m the contentious woman in the fine house, right?” I snorted.

“I don’t know as I’d call this a fine house,” said Vin, but his ankles were still pressed against mine.


Perhaps it’s that I’ve only ever lived in the vast metropolises of the New River Valley, but I had never been to a Catholic church that had only one Christmas mass. Father Leonard had said midnight mass elsewhere on his circuit, and two earlier Christmas morning masses at two different parishes. Sacred Hearts was his last stop for the day. If he was exhausted, he hid it well as he greeted Vin like an old buddy.

“I still can't get over the idea,” I said to Vin as we shuffled into the pew, followed by Grandpa, Mom, and Dad, “that you were raised religious-ish, yet you’ve never been to church on Christmas Day. If you’re Catholic, you go to church on Christmas and Easter even if you don’t go any other day of the year.”

“Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?” he replied, and then he out-Catholicked me by putting down the kneeler and kneeling down. “Just watch — I’m picking up all the tricks.”

Father pulled out all the stops on Christmas, with incense and singing his dialogue, but Vin thwarted my attempts to explain things to him by having mastered the missalette in previous weeks, and following along in sections of the book that I didn’t even know were there. I was starting to feel superfluous, but then he was caught out by the Gloria, which he hadn’t heard in Advent, so I retained my home court advantage.

“Is this special for Christmas?” he whispered.

“No, it’s every Sunday. Except Advent. And Lent.”

“Wow.”

The first reading was about how beautiful on the mountain were the feet of him who brings good news. Was it irreverent to apply that to Vin? I wasn’t sure what the good news he brought was, exactly, but “mountains” and “beautiful” seemed a good fit. And then I felt a gentle pressure against my foot, as if someone next to me was also inspired by the scriptures. I just avoided melting by quickly scanning the other readings for prophetic passages about Vin. And I felt convicted of impiety when I noticed that unlike me, Vin actually was paying attention to the epistle and the gospel.

As we knelt before Communion, he whispered, “Is it all right if I go up, since it’s Christmas?”

“You mean take communion?” I said, scandalized. “No. It’s sacrilegious if you aren’t Catholic.”

He looked so hungrily toward the altar that I took pity on him. “Little kids who haven’t made their first communion cross their arms like this and get a blessing. You’re allowed to do that, if you want to.”

And to my surprise he did, and back in the pew he knelt instead of sitting. I couldn’t be shown up in church on Christmas by a Protestant, so I knelt up as tall as I could, and closed my eyes instead of watching people’s shoes shuffle past. I knew I should have been praying in thanksgiving or contemplating Christmas blessings, but what kept running through my mind was Vin’s verse yesterday about the contentious woman. Better a corner of a manger in peace, than a fine house with a contentious woman. O Lord, don’t let me the contentious woman. Let my feet on the mountains bring peace, and let Vin find them beautiful. Amen.

Father Leonard waited for us after greeting his various sheep. “Welcome home, Mr. Aaron Moore,” he said, catching Grandpa up in a hug both warm and solemn. “Come with me and see.”

And Grandpa did see, in black and white (now aged to brown and cream), the first record of his existence and his parents. He ran his fingers tenderly over the slight texture of the ink that linked him to A.M and T. Mom too, had to see and touch. Something about the physical reality of of the registrar broke something in her.

“It’s real,” she cried, clinging to Grandpa. “I didn’t believe it was real until now.”

“I understand you are going out to see the burned house now,” Father Leonard said, packing a kit with a stole and holy water and a prayer book. “I would like to come with you, if I may.”

Vin and Father drove before us as we went through town to the old Titus site. I wished I knew what they were talking about, but it probably wasn’t me. The joy of Grandpa seeing his name in the baptismal register was draining away, sapped by the increasingly oppressive journey to the Titus house. This trip was worse than the first time I went out with Vin. Then I hadn’t known what lay at the end of the path, so the path had felt like an adventure. It wasn’t an adventure anymore, and it wasn’t fun either.  The horror of the house so dead that even almost 100 years later it still stifled a family’s normal growth and healing poked little needles of dread all along my arms.

Maybe if I were a better actress I could have played off my moodiness for laughs, but instead it infected everyone else in the car. By the time we were rumbling down the long shadowy drive, the silence was thick and tense. Even Vin’s puns would have been better than this homesickness. Grandpa had lost his mountain-going eagerness and was hunched up in himself, and I wondered if this place would kill him.

But again, as the grim house came into view, it was Mom who was overwhelmed by the physical link to the past. You’d think Grandpa would have been overwrought, seeing the place where his mother died a fiery death, but again it was Mom who could not bear the reality of the rotting shell of the house. Father Leonard comforted her with low words that sounded like music as he put on his stole.

“Are you going to perform an exorcism?” Dad asked, suddenly a good deal more involved than he’d been all day.

“No,” said Father, “I’m going to bless this house, and the family that comes from it.”

“Can you do that?” Vin asked, hesitant to make any pronouncements about a rite not his own. “Is it appropriate to bless it if it's not really a home anymore?”

“More appropriate, I think, than,” —here Father flipped through his pages— “the ‘Blessing for a Blast Furnace.’”

We bowed our heads. He sprinkled us with holy water, and asked God to have mercy on us and wash us with hyssop so we would be whiter than snow, and invoked the angels to watch over and protect all who lived in this home. Then he made the sign of the cross over us, and even Vin blessed himself. It was short and it was simple — so simple it was almost ridiculous for Father to have ridden all this way to say a quick chilly prayer. But Father didn’t seem to feel like he had wasted his time.

“I rejoiced when they said to me, let us go to the house of the Lord,” he sang to himself, inspecting the ruins. The rest of us walked around with Grandpa, briefly because it was cold and threatened to snow. And oddly enough, the place that had seemed so full of horror and grief was now just dead — not deader than dead like before, but merely dead, ready to be consumed by nature and become part of a larger cycle of life. The Titus had gone out of the old Titus place. I’d thought that Father was only blessing the battered pile of boards that sheltered nothing, but it was more than that. He’d also blessed us, we who were the House of Titus and the House of McGrath and the House of Moore, and we were able to smile in the face of despair.

“What will your parents say when they find out you’re engaging in pagan Catholic rituals?” I asked Vin, joking.

“What, indeed?” he said, and he was not joking.

As he and Father got in his car, I stood with my heart newly thumping out of my chest. “Oh my sweet Jesus,” I murmured in adoration, “this thing is going to happen. This is really, literally, actually going to happen.”

So I was floating on cloud ten by the time we'd dropped Father back at church and gotten to Vin’s parents’ house. Not everyone had it so cushy. Vin took on the responsibility of making introductions to his mom, who was performing today in the key of chatty.

“Mrs. Ramirez, this is my mother, Heather Titus,” said Vin. “Mom, this is Linda Ramirez, Erin’s mother. She’s a professor at Tech.”

“A professor! That must be so much work. All that grading, right?” Heather playfully slapped Mom on the arm. I could see the frost forming on Mom at the point of contact. “I took a few semesters of college before Dan and I got married. I had the densest Spanish professor — you would not believe how inflexible she was. My first semester, I had this friend who was going through a crisis, dealing with some mental health issues, and I was just under a lot stress putting in the time to support her. So I’d missed some classes, and the day I showed up was the day of the midterm. And I asked her, politely, if I could reschedule mine, because I’d been so busy with my friend and I just wasn’t in the mentality to focus on Spanish. It was like I’d asked for her firstborn child. And she got snippy and said that the schedule had been posted on the syllabus, like I’d had time to read that. Professors always think their class is going to be your one priority. I mean, I cared about the material. I just needed some understanding that life happens. But I guess professors have to live in their ivory tower, right? Are you guys hungry? Come on, I’ve got appetizers laid out on the island.”

And she bustled into the kitchen and started clattering dishes around, leaving the rest of in the hall in various states of incredulity. Dan, having had more time than anyone else to become inoculated to this level of tactlessness, didn’t let us petrify.

“Hey, it’s great to see you all!” he exclaimed. “Did anyone catch the game on Monday night?”

And Dad, who had caught the game on Monday night, allowed himself to be led off to the den for some post-mortem, taking Grandpa with him. Kay entered a second later and pulled up at the sight of Mom’s shell-shocked expression.

“Oh boy, is it bad today?” she muttered to Vin.

“She looks like she’ll be on company behavior,” Vin said cautiously.

Kay was not relieved. “That’s almost more wearing than when she’s acting up because then she won’t go away.”

“Also, you never know if or when she’ll crack.”

Kay turned to Mom. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to stay past dinner, and dinner is always right away. Come on, let’s go get it over with.”

“Are there drinks?” Mom asked plaintively.

“Not in this house,” Kay scoffed. “We’ll bust out of here and I’ll bring some of the good stuff to your place.”

At the table, we sat at our place cards: Grandpa and Kay across from each other at Heather’s end, Vin and me across from each other, Mom and Dad across from each other at Dan’s end. Fortunately, we didn’t have to go around the table this time and say what we were all thankful for. Heather had other plans.

“Mr. Aaron, it’s our tradition that the senior member of the family leads us in a blessing. Would you do the honors?”

Grandpa, unaccustomed to leading public prayer, stood up and cleared his throat as if he’d been asked to address the U.N. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Bless us, O Lord…”

“…And these thy gifts…,” chimed in the Catholic contingent, from sheer muscle memory, and Vincent Titus, from very conscious memory.

“That was pretty,” said Heather uncertainly, into the awkward silence that followed the final sign of the cross. “Is that your family blessing? How did you know it, Vin?”

“Google,” said Vin. “Mr. Aaron, can I serve you some ham?”

Plates were filled and forks were plied, and conversation got going again. It was comfortable down at Dan’s end with Mom and Dad. At the other end, Heather said, “It must be a lot of work for your pastor up here to have church on Christmas. Does he mind missing out on spending time with his family?”

“I think they’re in Nigeria,” I said. “So he wouldn't see them anyway.”

“Lagos,” Vin said to me.

“What country is Lagos?” Heather inquired.

“Father Leonard told me that’s where his family lives,” said Vin.

“Oh,” said Heather, contemplating her son having a conversation with a Catholic priest. “Erin, Vin’s gone to church with you, so you ought to come with us some Sunday!”

“I’d have to see how the times line up,” I said as non-committally as I could. “I can’t miss mass.”

“Well, but turnabout is fair play,” sang Heather. “Of course we don’t do church on Christmas, so it was easy today, but maybe you could trade off next time you’re here on a Sunday. We have a great young adults group. I keep telling Vin he should try it.”

Vin indeed looked as if he’d been told that, many times.

“Or Vin could just keep coming with me. He seems to like it,” I countered, and got jabbed under the table by both Kay and Vin.

Heather blinked. “Likes going with you? To the Catholic church?”

“Gosh, seconds anyone?” Dan shouted down the table.

“Vin, have you gone to the Catholic church before?” Heather asked, innocently.

Vin was unable to tell a lie. “I’ve gone with Erin during Advent.”

“What’s Advent?”

“The four Sundays before Christmas,” I said. “Vin’s seen all the Advent candles lit.”

“But now Christmas is over,” said Heather, brightening. “And it sounds like you’ve solved your family mystery and showed everyone the Catholic baptism book.” She smiled at her clever boy sleuth and his mystery-solving prowess. “So there’s really no reason anymore to go to Catholic church instead of our church. Is there, honey?”

“It’s beautiful,” said Vin, with the brevity of one who devoutly wished a conversation to move past him.

“Religion and politics!” Kay chuckled, a tad too heartily, and jabbed me again.

“Idols can be beautiful,” Heather declared with fierce maternal conviction. “But we don’t worship them because they’re beautiful."

"Good thing we don’t worship idols at all, then,” I retorted, willing to suffer jabs for my faith. “We don’t worship anything but God.”

“We’re all brothers and sisters in the Lord!” said Dan. “Pie?”

Heather had caught me out, and she was triumphant. “You worship bread. I read about it.”

“It’s not bread!” I asserted, ready, like the martyrs, to die on this hill. “It’s God!”

“It's an idol!” Terror for her son drove Heather into battle mode. “Human words don’t make bread into a god! Vin, you tell her so!”

But Vin now wore the fixed daze of someone contemplating a flame. “‘The Word became flesh.’ That’s what the gospel meant,” he marveled. “I kept wondering about it all morning, why that was the Christmas reading instead of the traditional nativity story. It’s not an idol. It’s the Word made flesh. I knew it was something, but I didn’t know what.”

No one had expected that answer, and so no one had any reply ready, pacific or combative.

“Anyway,” I said, playing my trump. “Vin has to come to church with me because the children will have to be raised Catholic.”

No one jabbed me this time because the whole table was too busy staring, even Vin jolted from his pious reverie.

“You two are engaged?” Heather screeched.

“No,” I admitted. “But it just makes sense.” Now I was appealing directly to Vin, the ideas pouring out as fast as I could translate inspiration into words. “See how it works? We’re the end of the line. We draw the whole family together into one. And when we have a baby, he — or maybe it would be a girl — will be Titus, and McGrath, and Moore, all together. This is how we heal the family curse, if there really is one. We end the hate with love. But the children have to be Catholic. You have to promise that, or we can’t get married.”

Vin stood up from the table. “Will you excuse us?” he asked at large, coming around and taking my elbow and steering me out of the room. “Go ahead and have your pie. We won’t be back.”

He stopped us at the closet and handed me my coat and purse.

“Where are we going?”

“My place.”

“Okay.” I struggled into my sleeves. “Is it still icy?”

“I salted.”

We got in his car and drove a ways toward town in silence. Then Vin let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since we left the house.

“You are a liability, I can see that right now,” he said.

“Why?”

“You give everything away up front. Isn’t the great rule of showbiz that you’re supposed to leave them wanting more?”

“We’re not showbiz,” I protested.

“Except when we blow up Christmas dinner."

I thought I would laugh, and then I tried it and it didn’t come out quite right. My zeal had congealed in the nippy air. “Are you saying you don’t want any more?”

“No.”

The Christmas-lit houses drew closer together, and congregated along the main street. City Hall and the square were strung with white bulbs, pure and warm. We turned away from the brightness down Vin’s alleyway, where the darkness gave me some cover for speaking again.

“I’d promised myself that I’d be less abrasive so that I wouldn’t do anything to drive you away, and now I’ve had a blowout theological argument with your mother and gotten you accused of being Catholic, and you know what? I’m not even sorry.” I swallowed. “Mostly. I know it’s not civilized of me and I ought to have a stiff upper lip and communicate solely through raised eyebrows, but I’m a big hot emotional mess and I say what I think and I can’t help it.”

We parked, and he got out and opened my door and offered me a hand.

“I don’t want you to help it,” he said, and instantly I was a different and much more thrilling kind of hot emotional mess.

“Why not?”

“Because you wear everything on your sleeve. I always know what I’m getting with you, and I find that refreshing. Like the reading this morning.” He put his arm around me in case the salt hadn’t made the stairs perfectly safe. “How beautiful on the apartment stairs are the feet of her, announcing peace.”

“Me, bringing peace. That’s new,” I said, just to keep conversation going, soaking up everything he’d said about me.

“Do you want to know what’s not peaceful?” he said, angry, but not at me. “Living with someone who never speaks her mind. Living with someone who forces everyone else to try and adapt to her moods and whims without ever coming out and just saying what she wants. You want to know what’s a family curse? That’s a family curse.”

“You are obsessed with the family curse.” I rolled my eyes, even though he couldn't see it in the dark. “You’re going to drive yourself insane.”

 He put his key into the lock. “Nonsense. Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. I want to try something different from my parents, and I expect a better result.”

I could have sworn there was no way to be pedantic and arousing at the same time, but Vin seemed to be a devotee of the school of stupidly logical seduction.

“Oh, have we decided we’re going to get results now?” I demanded in the doorway, not following him inside. “Why are you so cool and collected? Is this how it’s always going to be? I’ve basically told you that I love you, and you take it in your stride with witty repartee and don’t even have the decency to be honored, or insulted, or even flustered in any way, shape, or form…”

I might have gone on pounding my head against that particular wall for any amount of time, but I couldn’t because I couldn’t talk any more, because he pulled me in and was kissing me against the closed door, and he was flustered indeed, and then I was even more flustered. We clutched and stroked and knocked our teeth together once or twice like fools, and everything was more ridiculous and breath-taking than I’d imagined it would be.

“This,” he whispered in my ear once we came up for air, “is how it’s always going to be.”

“Only if you promise to raise the children Catholic.”

“I promise,” he said, holding onto the fourth finger of my left hand, “that I’ll make my first communion before any of the kids do.”

And that’s what happened when a stranger came to town: the ending of one story, and the beginning of another.

The End.

A Roma Update

Thank you all so much for your generous prayers and support! Believe me, I feel them and am swept away with gratitude. Here's an update on Roma from my sister-in-law:



"Crazy update and request for immediate prayers! Roma has been out of the hospital for a couple weeks now, with weekly scans and checkups on the blood clot surrounding the cavernoma in her brain. Her latest scan was Friday, and her latest checkup was yesterday (which began at the exact same time that I was ambushed on live radio by Ryan Lopez and John Matthew Swaim with a GoFundMe for Roma – I can’t even tell you how humbled we are and so amazed at the generosity of so many people…wow... but that's a future post!). The checkup was “normal” in that they didn’t see any changes in the scan, and so we continued on with the day. A few hours later, though, a neurosurgery NP called me to say that the doctor met with the radiologist, and actually a LOT has changed. Roma’s clot has “liquefied,” and so the doctor is ready to operate… on THURSDAY! This is happening about five weeks sooner than anticipated. Honestly, I feel like Bl. Chiara is pulling through for us, that there is a miracle in the works, so please pray!

An interesting side story: I was talking with my family last night about the phone call with the NP, and I noted that they had never used the word “liquefied” before – they had always talked about the blood clot needing to be “reabsorbed.” Now, I recognize that the liquefying is probably implied when it comes to a blood clot being reabsorbed by the brain, but still, it was the first I’d heard them use that term. And that point led me, ever the Catholic nerd, to start talking about St Januarius (San Gennaro), whose dry blood relic can miraculously liquefy. There are three days each year that it will happen – I looked it up – September 19th, the Saturday before the first Sunday in May… and December 16th!

What this tells me is that the saints in heaven have heard our prayers for Roma, and they are praying to the Lord for her, too. I’m still ready to see her miraculously healed prior to surgery, but I will also be grateful just for a successful surgery, and for my little girl to get back to her old self. Lord, Thy will be done!

We don't know the exact time of surgery on Thursday, but we've got to be there at 5:30am for pre-op stuff. So please just start praying now!

Bl. Chiara Luce Badano, ora pro nobis! Mater Dolorosa, ora pro nobis!"

Nixon Isn't A Good Model for the Trump Impeachment

As congress debates impeachment, this 538 piece on the development of support for the impeachment push against Nixon is interesting reading. TLDR: While right before his resignation the push to impeach Nixon was bipartisan, that was a very, very late development with most Republicans supporting him till the last minute.

However, I think there's a key difference in the nature of the scandals that led to that change to a bipartisan push to get Nixon out.

In Watergate, it was known from early on that a crime (breaking and entering, illegal wiretaps, various other election "dirty tricks") had occurred and that it had been done on behalf of Nixon. However, Nixon insisted that he had not known about or protected those who did the crime. What finally caused Nixon to lose the support of his own party was when it became clear via the tapes that he had known about the crimes from the planning stage on, had approved the crimes, and had helped to cover them up afterwards. That Nixon was revealed to have participated in what he and the public had labeled crimes was key to his fall. (Even so, a lot of Nixon voters continued to support him and held that the Watergate crimes were run-of-the-mill politics, which arguably in the JFK and LBJ era was true.)

The Ukraine scandal seems fundamentally different in that the facts of what happened have been pretty much agreed on from the beginning. Trump supporters mostly agree that Trump used his control over military aid to Ukraine as a negotiating tool to ask them to investigate the Bidens. Indeed, far from being contrary to Trump's image in the way that Nixon's involvement in the Watergate break-in was, what Trump is accused of is very much in keeping with his "tough negotiator" image. This his behavior comports with what his supporters were expecting when they supported him to "drain the swamp". It also comports with what Trump opponents feared his presidency would mean: that he would play fast and loose with our international commitments while seeking "deals" that might well stem from ideas he got from unreliable sources.

In this sense, I don't think that there's much likelihood of a Watergate style shift to a bipartisan consensus that this scandal means Trump needs to go. Trump supporters have already expected this kind of behavior and indeed to some extent selected him because of it.

Roma on my Brain

Friends, I am writing as dedicatedly as I can to finish Strange Plots for you, but first I would like to tell you what's been on our hearts recently.

My sweet five-year old niece Roma, my brother Will's daughter, spent ten days in the hospital in November, including Thanksgiving, while doctors worked on diagnosing the source of bleeding on her brain. The upshot of it is that she's going to have brain surgery, perhaps as soon as Thursday, to remove a cavernoma, an abnormal clump of blood vessels in the brain. So it's not cancer, thank God, and the surgery should permanently resolve this problem. But it's scary to have a five-year-old undergoing brain surgery.

And it is expensive, vastly expensive.

Perhaps you, like me, figure that there would never be any point in asking for money from friends, because if you're already better off than most of the world. But, "Ask and you shall receive," as someone very wise and loving once said. So if you're considering donating five or ten dollars here or there over the holiday season, please think about helping out Roma. And please know that whatever amount is raised here, it will still be a drop in the bucket to the actual costs the family will face.

And thank you, thank you, my dearest friends.

Elite Moderation

In the aftermath of last week's UK election (in which the Tories won a significant victory, winning a number of seats with Labour voting records stretching back to the 1920s) a couple people were sharing around this old Jonathan Haidt piece from the Guardian on "Why working-class people vote conservative". I think it's right as far as it goes in describing how people with more conservative leanings don't necessarily see themselves as "voting against their interests" when prioritizing cultural issues.

One reason the left has such difficulty forging a lasting connection with voters is that the right has a built-in advantage – conservatives have a broader moral palate than the liberals (as we call leftists in the US). Think about it this way: our tongues have taste buds that are responsive to five classes of chemicals, which we perceive as sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savoury. Sweetness is generally the most appealing of the five tastes, but when it comes to a serious meal, most people want more than that.

In the same way, you can think of the moral mind as being like a tongue that is sensitive to a variety of moral flavours. In my research with colleagues at YourMorals.org, we have identified six moral concerns as the best candidates for being the innate "taste buds" of the moral sense: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Across many kinds of surveys, in the UK as well as in the USA, we find that people who self-identify as being on the left score higher on questions about care/harm. For example, how much would someone have to pay you to kick a dog in the head? Nobody wants to do this, but liberals say they would require more money than conservatives to cause harm to an innocent creature.

But on matters relating to group loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity (treating things as sacred and untouchable, not only in the context of religion), it sometimes seems that liberals lack the moral taste buds, or at least, their moral "cuisine" makes less use of them. For example, according to our data, if you want to hire someone to criticise your nation on a radio show in another nation (loyalty), give the finger to his boss (authority), or sign a piece of paper stating one's willingness to sell his soul (sanctity), you can save a lot of money by posting a sign: "Conservatives need not apply."

In America, it is these three moral foundations that underlie most of the "cultural" issues that, according to duping theorists, are used to distract voters from their self-interest. But are voters really voting against their self-interest when they vote for candidates who share their values? Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism. As marriage rates plummet, and globalisation and rising diversity erodes the sense of common heritage within each nation, a lot of voters in many western nations find themselves hungering for conservative moral cuisine.

I think this certainly covers a significant portion of what motivates non-elites in voting for right wing politics. However, I think often a certain amount of right wing economics is as much an attraction as the right wing cultural politics. This seems counter-intuitive to a left wing which seems convinced that anyone who is not a millionaire would benefit from supporting their economic policies.

For instance, lowering taxes and simplifying taxes are both fairly popular ideas with the rank-and-file right. Sure, it may be that more actual dollars from a tax cut go to the rich (the rich already pay the majority of the federal taxes, so a broad tax cut naturally helps them most) but a lower tax rate is a lower tax rate. Indeed, seeing your income tax drop by $2,000 may mean a lot more to someone making $50k a year than seeing it drop by five times that much would for someone making five times as much. Tax complexity is also particularly frustrating for less affluent conservatives. If your total tax refund is going to be $500, having to spend $100 of that on getting help to file complicated forms is all the more frustrating. You just paid a 20% tax on your refund due to tax complexity. Whereas for those whose lives are already complex when it comes to finances, having to deal with a tax accountant may seem perfectly natural. So even though a flat tax would be a massive windfall for the rich, the idea that you could fill out your taxes on a form the size of postcard and just be done is massively attractive to the lower earning kind of conservative.

I think also, however, that it can at times be easier to have a right wing approach to actual benefit programs when one is comparatively low income. Perhaps I'm over-extrapolating from personal experience, but I know that back when I was trying to pay rent in California while we lived off a $14/hr income, I was far, far less sympathetic towards benefit programs. I didn't want to be given what I saw as a handout. I wanted to have enough money left to cover our monthly expenses. Earning a raise or promotion at work seemed like it was a validation that I was working hard and doing work better than others could. I valued those things tremendously. By comparison, getting a raise as part of a "raise the minimum wage" effort would have simply emphasized how close to the bottom I was and made me feel like I was getting paid just for showing up, not because I was doing work well. Union-based approaches to work also frustrated me, because the union environments I'd encountered were very focused on how much breaktime you got and only doing precisely the work you were supposed to do -- by contrast I was always convinced I could make myself stand out from the pack (and thus eventually make more money) by showing that I could work longer, learn faster, and do more types of work than others.

From where I sit now, it's a lot easier to sign on to the basic guilt pitch (not everyone is as fortunate as you, and you need to make sure that there are benefits for those who aren't) and also for the elite pitch (some people simply aren't going to excel in their jobs, and we need to make sure those people make a good living wage too.) As a result, I'm more moderate on economic issues than I was fifteen years ago, and I think that's pretty directly as a result of making more money. Indeed, I'd go further and say that these kind of elitism-based arguments are one of the things that tends to push many elites into the moderate-to-center-left political camp. Sure, maybe elites would be a bit better off under a more right-leaning kind of tax-and-spend policy, but the upper middle class easily lets itself slide into a self perception as the tribunes of the working people standing up to protect them against the real elites in the top 1%.

I wouldn't have drifted towards the center if I didn't think I was right to change, but I try also to temper my current political commitments by imagining what my younger self would think of my current self. No one likes to be looked down on, and I think it's pretty common on the middle class right to swat away elite offers of "let us help you, because you'll never be like us" with the scorn such condescending sentiments deserve. One of the essentially right wing insights that I aim not to let go of is that people expect the basic dignity of being given the room to make their own livings, not to have it handed to them by their self appointed social betters.

Strange Plots 20

Previous.

Strange plots of dire revenge.
Titus Andronicus, 5.ii

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.

This call and response pounded in Andrew Titus’s head day and night. The Lord giveth. The Lord had certainly given to Titus: given him the election and the ordination to be a minister of His wrath. And the day of His wrath was coming, burning like sinners in the lake of fire. But Our Lord had also said be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves. Titus was being harmless, oh so harmless. To the world he was weak, while he waited for the day when the wisdom of the serpent would spring loose and make the wicked fall into their own nets.

The Lord taketh away. When he had first seen his Lavinia lying broken and bloody on the floor of the barn, her face a pulp, the soul within him had cracked. When he saw the blood between her twisted legs and found her undergarments askew, inside out, the horror running in his veins turned to fire. No one must know. No one must see her like this. Scooping her up, he rushed her to the car and laid her in the back seat. She must go to Roanoke, to the hospital, to the best doctors. Titus tore down the mountain, every curve, every jolt, a spur to more speed. Haste. He must make haste.

Yes, he must confess: in his haste, he had erred. The doctors were somber as they spoke to him. Lavinia should not have been moved. Her spine… Well, they were doing all they could. And there was serious concern for the brain. The gynaecologist, too, was reticient. It was too early to tell.

It was quickly established that Titus had been in Roanoke that afternoon, during the time Lavinia had been attacked in Titusville. That, along the realization that she would not die, was enough for the city police. Let the local authorities take up mountain crime.  Her clothes were released to Titus, and he was encouraged to get some rest.

Sitting on a bench in the hospital lobby, he clutched her dress, the very one he’d bought her in Roanoke months earlier. How sweet she had looked in it at church. But why had Lavinia worn her nice dress for a day at home? Had she gone into town? He examined the garment, forcing himself to study the smeared blood. He passed it through his hands, feeling the fine gauzy fabric, the elegant stitching, the stiffness in the pocket. He put his hand in the pocket and pulled out an index card. On it, scribbled in pencil in Lavinia’s precise hand, was a recipe for “Mrs. Sanders’s Meat Pie.”

He must not be hasty. He must think. He must wait. “For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the LORD, they shall inherit the earth,” he murmured. “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”

Months passed, but he waited. He gave it out that Lavinia had fallen, that she was paralyzed, that she could remember very little of her accident. He was careful never to suggest that anyone else had been to his farm, that Lavinia’s accident had been anything but an accident. He must suffer the tares to grow among the wheat until the harvest was ready. He had nine months until he knew which shade of McGrath must die: red or black.

Nine months to observe the wages of sin. Aaron Moore had the sleek oily look of a man who had feasted on stolen bread. It was no part of Titus’s business to hand, so he said nothing, but the mayor ought to look to his household and his own wife. At the other extreme, Demetrius seemed to live the life of a hermit. He sat rigid in church, eyes straight ahead, his attention fixed on the Word of God. His sin was ever before him, and he trembled for the judgment to come.

Titus could wait, and he could pray, and he did pray night and day: “Thine hand shall find out all thine enemies: thy right hand shall find out those that hate thee. Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger: the LORD shall swallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shall devour them. Their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth, and their seed from among the children of men.”

He would destroy the seed, and he would root out the evil from the land. The misbegotten child of wickedness must reveal its father, and then it must die.

And one summer day the call came summoning Titus to Roanoke, neutrally worded so as not to alert anyone who might be listening on the party line, and he drove into the city to receive the word of judgment. At the hospital, he was ushered into a room. Lavinia had been carefully propped up in her bed, and the nurse, standing beside her, had moved her arms into position to cradle a tiny child, swaddled and bonneted.

“Look, Daddy,” she said in her slow new voice, but it was a voice of wonder, “This is my baby girl. I named her Helen.”

Titus’s hands trembled as he took the little creature. As he looked down at her, her new face wrinkled and fell. She tossed her head in minute rage, disarranging her bonnet, revealing a shock of red hair.

For a moment he saw, not the seed of wickedness, nor an innocent baby, but red-haired Allan McGrath extending his hand in peace across the gate, a moment before he was shot. Before Titus shot him.

He said and did what was appropriate, but he was shaken to the core, seized with doubt. This baby was innocent, as innocent as Allan McGrath had been. Titus had already killed a blameless man once, and it must not happen again. The innocent must not suffer, as Lavinia suffered, as Allan McGrath had suffered. There must be no more murder, for the sake of this tiny Helen. She must not bear more sorrow than had already been inflicted on her, before she was born.

It was not until he was driving home that he was able to think clearly. He had indeed shot Allan McGrath. Executed him. Titus had executed Allan McGrath as an indictment on the whole McGrath clan for the death of his son Quintin. And if he could shoot point-blank a McGrath who was personally innocent, did he not have the courage to wreak vengeance on the McGrath who had personally violated and maimed his daughter? For the Lord was a zealous god, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.

But perhaps if Titus killed the iniquitous father and removed his evil from the earth, his sin would not affect the third or fourth generation. Lavinia’s daughter would have a fresh new start. Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out. Helen would be a Titus, not a McGrath.

At home, Titus sequestered himself in his house and devoted himself to prayer and fasting. Show me, O Lord, your will. If I am to work your vengeance on the McGraths, give me a sign. For a week he prayed, paying no attention to news from town that the Mayor’s wife had given birth, that her child had been deformed, that it had died. God be praised. One less McGrath in the world.

And then, the sign came, clear as the knock on his door late at night. Opening it, he found Mayor Sanders and Demetrius McGrath on his doorstep in the sweltering darkness, the Mayor twitching, jittery with adrenaline, the boy streaked with summer sweat.

“I don’t know who to turn to but you, Titus,” rasped the Mayor, “but I think you’ll be willing to help me, when you know.”

In the back seat of his car was Aaron Moore, bleeding, bound, and gagged, eyes glittering in the light of the Mayor’s flashlight.

“I caught him breaking into my house,” Sanders explained. “I didn’t feel that I could take him to the police station, or they might ask why he’s bleeding. But I didn’t think I could just release him.” His politician’s smile was a mere rictus. “And so I’m asking you to hold him here for me, in your barn.”

“You thought that the police would question why you struck a colored man breaking into your home?” Titus refused to be moved by Sanders’s obvious distress. “And why is it that you turn to me, Clayton Sanders?”

The Mayor was too destroyed to hem and haw. “You’re a man who demands strict justice, above the demands of the law and the courts. If I take him to the police, they’ll question him.”

“And what will they learn?”

The reek of desperation was strong on the Mayor as he clutched at Titus. “I dug up the grave in the backyard. I needed to see my child, do you understand? But it wasn’t there. There was no body. Aaron Moore stole the baby and hid it somewhere.”

“Why would he do that?” Titus asked, impassive.

“Because it was his.” Demetrius spoke for the first time, pale but resolute. “If Aaron Moore goes to the police, everyone will know about my mother’s disgrace.”

“Oho.” Andrew Titus was very still, but a fire seemed to be flickering at the edges of his aloofness. He turned deliberately to Demetrius and looked at him for the first time. “And you, boy, do you disapprove of this wantonness of your mother’s? Do you renounce the sins of the flesh?”

“I do, sir,” said Demetrius, afflicted with conviction. “I believe that God will punish the evildoers.”

Andrew Titus clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re right, boy. And you shall be a minister of his vengeance.” He turned to the mayor, his former sleepiness suddenly transformed into action. “I will help you, Clayton Sanders. What do you want done with this adulterer?”

The mayor was wild-eyed. “He must disappear. He must be silenced. No one must know.”

“And so he shall,” Titus decreed. Then he drew himself up and declared the word of the Lord upon Aaron Moore. “They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried; but they shall be as dung upon the face of the earth: and they shall be consumed by the sword, and by famine; and their carcasses shall be meat for the fowls of heaven, and for the beasts of the earth.”

The weight of the wrath of the Lord hung heavy upon the farmyard, bowing the heads of the men. Then Titus strode toward the barn, all business.

“We’d best go in my truck,” he said. “It has more room for supplies.”

***
Deep in a cornfield, in the midst of the midnight rustling, Titus crouched beside the figure bound to a pole and buried up to his chest, and pulled the dirty gag from his mouth.

“Make a sound and you’ll regret it,” he said, softly, deadly.

Aaron started on a stream of choice profanity, but Titus clamped his jaw shut with sweaty fingers.

“The LORD shall cut off all flattering lips, and the tongue that speaketh proud things,” said Titus. “I am a man of infinite patience, Aaron Moore, but the Mayor and Demetrius may start to wonder why I’m not coming back to the truck just yet. If you cooperate with me, I may come back tomorrow and let you go.” He released Aaron’s mouth.

“Free me now, Andrew Titus,” croaked Aaron through cracked lips, “and I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Otherwise, you’ll get nothing from me.”

Titus extracted a bone-handled knife from his pocket and drew it lazily over the tip of his finger.“I believe you’ll tell me what I want to know regardless,” he said, wiping the blood on his other palm.

Aaron blinked fiercely against the sweat dripping in his eyes. “I’m not afraid of pain.”

“You will be.” Titus held the knife under Aaron’s chin. “But I think you’ll tell me because what I want to know will cause me pain. What happened to my Lavinia?”

Aaron’s face glowed with a sheen of malice. As he spoke, low and venomous, Titus listened stoically in the dark .

“You did what I asked, so I will grant you this,” he said. “I’ll wait to cut out your tongue until after you’re dead.”

***
Back at Titus’s farm, once out of the truck, Demetrius fell to his hands and knees and was sick on the ground.

“Leave him here tonight to clean up,” said Titus to the Mayor. “Go home to your wife. Tomorrow night, here, she and I will talk peace terms between the McGraths and Tituses.”

“But she just had a baby a week ago,” the Mayor protested, his hysteria bubbling closer and closer to the surface. “Is she even allowed out of bed? She could still be bleeding.”

“Women aren’t that fragile,” said Titus. “She’ll come.” He placed a hand on Demetrius’s shoulder, almost affectionately. “Demetrius will help me make the place comfortable for her, won’t you, son?”

As the mayor rumbled down the driveway, Titus steered Demetrius toward the black house.

“Come, boy,” he said. “Come on inside and I’ll show you what I have in mind for tomorrow.”

But Demetrius pulled away, though at great cost, and faced Titus squarely. The only thing visible was his white face, mask-like in the dim light of the moon.

“Andrew Titus, I must confess to you.” His agony drove him to his knees. “If I die in my sin, the Evil One will drag me straight to hell.”

Titus laid a hand on Demetrius’s head and gently forced it back so that Demetrius was looking up at him. “Yes, my boy,” he soothed, drawing a bone-handled knife out of his pocket. “I know.”

***
The next day, Titus worked feverishly. He fumbled through the unaccustomed task of mixing pie dough, consulting a battered book of recipes. For the filling, he followed the recipe for “Mrs. Sanders’s Meat Pie”, which he had painstakingly transcribed from the card found in Lavinia’s clothes. The original he had stored with her things in Roanoke. He could not bear to look at her handwriting while he minced and mixed.

By evening, anticipation had tuned Titus’s taut nerves to a jangling sharpness. He stood at quivering attention on his porch to welcome Tamar as she set careful heavy foot out of the Mayor’s car.

“You have never been to my home, ma’am,” he said, offering her his arm with eager care, “but I pray that this will visit will mean the end of conflict between our families.”

Tamar did not accept his arm. She clung to the car door and swept surveillance over the farmyard, the porch, the front windows. “Where is my son?”

Titus, humble Titus, was quick to assure. “He’s inside, ma’am, and a valuable lad he is.  I could not have made ready without him. A fine boy, you ought to be proud of him.”

She lumbered past the hands extended to help her, creaking up the front stairs without the assistance of either man, husband or foe. “I want to see Demetrius.”

Titus rushed to open his front door to her.  He bustled about the farmhouse chamber which served as both living room and dining room, offering Tamar the cushioned chair at the head of the table, trimming oil lamps and setting them about the room, straightening the pretty knickknacks that Lavinia had made to cheer the house.

Tamar clutched the arms of the chair and lowered herself gingerly onto the seat. “Come to the point, Titus,” she said, sitting bolt upright through sheer force of will. “I am too old to play games with you. Where is my son?”

Titus stood across from her at the other end of the table, his little speech prepared and rehearsed. “We have overseen much fighting, you and I. And who has suffered most for our pride? Our children. Let us end this, once and for all.” He fetched from the sideboard a rustic pie and set it before her with twitching hands. “A peace offering, ma’am, while we talk.”

The bone handle of the knife he cut with was so discolored that Mayor Sanders  privately resolved to cut his own piece separately. Titus set a large slice on a plate before Tamar, savory juices oozing from under the thick paste. The hunger of the new mother was on her. Reluctant to eat under Titus’s roof, she still could not resist taking a bite. Then she stiffened.

“This is my meat pie,” she hissed. “You stole my recipe, Andrew Titus.”

“I borrowed it from my daughter,” said Titus. “She had the recipe in her pocket when she had her fall. I thought it too generous of you to let her have it, and since you hold it so closely, I felt myself honor-bound to say nothing. Won’t you tell me how I did?”

It was hard for Tamar to recover from the shock of her own recipe. She took another taste.

“Your flavors are off,” she said.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Titus with obsequious glee. “Perhaps I’ll get it right with practice. Here!” he said sharply to the mayor, who was about to serve himself a slice. “This is entirely for the new mother. She must eat to keep up her strength. You see, ma’am,” he continued to Tamar, who was now eating greedily despite herself, “I’ve heard all about your baby.”

“Have you,” mumbled Tamar around a mouthful of pie. “I doubt it.”

“Yes, your child with Aaron Moore. Come, come, we’re all adults here,” he said, as Tamar choked and tried to rise. “There’s no need to play the innocent. Aren’t we here to make peace? In fact, I want to congratulate you on your double accomplishment. There are not many women who become a mother and a grandmother in the same week.”

Only Tamar’s eyes moved, tracking Titus’s every gesture as he roamed about the room.

“Yes, a grandmother!” he beamed. “I see I’m the first to give you this happy news. Your grandchild was born in Roanoke. I’ve seen her and held her. A little girl.”

“See here!” the Mayor objected nervously. “What are you talking about?”

Titus and Tamar, locked in their private war, paid him no heed.

“You see, Lavinia gave birth too,” Titus said, his voice growing ever gentler and more menacing. “Such a striking child, with that red hair.”

“Where is Demetrius?” Tamar’s stillness was no longer shock, but the tensing of an animal at bay.

“Such an honest boy.” Titus leered at the memory. “He was good enough to tell me all about how you and Aaron Moore encouraged him to pay attention to my daughter. Such loving attention. God in his mercy has seen to it that she remembers nothing, but now I know.” He loomed over Tamar now. “Yes, I know.”

“How dare you, Titus!” squeaked the mayor, frightened out of his depth. “My wife and I are going home.” But again, he was unheeded.

“Where is my son?” Tamar moaned. “Where is Aaron?”

“Haven’t you guessed? They’re with you now.” The light from the oil lamp flickered madly in Titus’s eyes. “They’re inside you, as close as your heart. Did you like your meat pie? Did you enjoy my little additions? Just for you, I added a new ingredient — tongue.”

Tamar rocked in her chair, keening and crooning to herself.

“Would you like to see your Demetrius?” Titus roared. “Come hold him!” He yanked open a closet door, and a red-haired body tumbled out and flopped on the floor. Its gory face stared blankly at its wailing mother, the throat gaping in a hideous smeared grin.

“Aaron Moore regrets he can’t be here in person,” Titus crowed over Tamar’s clamor, and the retching of the mayor, “but now you’ll always carry a bit of him with you too, now that you’ve eaten him. See that knife? It’s the one I used on both of them. And I’m going to use it on you.”

For a moment, Tamar clutched her stomach in agony. Then she rose from her chair like a banshee and screamed to fill the house, an unearthly wail of horror and grief. Titus roared with triumph at the sound.

Tamar seized an oil lamp and threw it at his face. “Burn!” she shrieked as the lamp exploded and flames dripped down his face and chest onto the floor. “Die!”

Titus, screeching like a stuck pig, did not beat the flames off his body. Hands ablaze, he seized Tamar and wrestled her to the table. Inch by struggling, fiery inch he forced her head down and ground her face into the pie. Fire flowed across both of them as they struggled, setting the tablecloth and the carpet alight. Suddenly Titus gave an inhuman bray and dropped Tamar to the floor as he arched in new pain. From his back protruded a bone handle. The Mayor, shaking with his single burst of bravery, sobbed and fainted.

Titus staggered through the smoke toward the door, but stumbled and fell as fingers trapped his leg. Tamar, her red hair now singing and crisping around her flaming face, hauled herself up his writhing body. Their screams rose and blended in weird overtones as she grasped the knife and wrenched it from his body. Blood spurted from the wound and sprayed over her, doing nothing to douse the flames.

With a horrific effort, Titus rolled himself over. Tamar had managed to pull herself to almost standing, still holding the knife. Maternal blood was dripping down her legs.

“Kill me!” Titus howled from cooked throat.

Tamar raised her blazing arm and hurled the knife. End over end it rotated, striking and shattering a windowpane. The pane shattered and then imploded as the rush of fresh oxygen created a backdraft that blew the room into a consuming inferno. The rage of the fire finally drowned out all other cries.

***
Luke Titus and the sheriff stood looking down at the four charred bodies that had been pulled from the remains of the house. Luke fingered the sooty knife he’d picked up. The sheriff contemplated the state of the house, the state of the bodies, and the Mayor’s automobile in the yard.

“I’d say accidental death,” he murmured.

“Accidental death,” Luke Titus agreed, burying deep in his mind the memory of his father shooting Allan McGrath.

**
Luke Titus stood looking down at the bed where his scarred immobile sister lay sleeping. He looked down at the child in the bassinet, her red hair beginning to curl in wisps against her creamy forehead.

“We tried contacting your father,” the nurse explained. “This institution is not equipped to care for infants. The child cannot stay here anymore. It must go to a home. Where is her father?”

“Dead,” said Luke, burying deep in his mind the memory of the smoking ashes of Demetrius McGrath.

***
Luke Titus knocked on the door of a dreary farmhouse outside of town. A haggard man opened it and stared at the bundle Luke held.

“How’s she doing today?” Luke asked.

“Poorly,” said the man, stepping aside to let Luke in.

In a rocking chair by a window, a woman was bent almost double, clutching her aching breasts. Luke knelt by her and held out the baby.

“I brought you something, Maud,” he said.

Maud looked at the child, then away. “It’s not my baby.”

“No, but she needs to eat. Her name is Helen.”

Maud took the whimpering infant and unfastened her dress, and for a moment both woman and child shrieked, one in pain, the other in confusion.

“She’s had a bottle. She can’t nurse,” Maud said through gritted teeth.

“She’ll learn,” said Luke, standing.

“Where’d you get her?”

Luke hesitated. “Lavinia’s.”

A gleam of life flickered in the woman’s eyes. “You don’t say. Miss Priss herself. No wonder Daddy sent her away so fast.” She tried to coax the infant back on to her bursting breast.

At the door, the man said, “But Lavinia’s alive?”

“She can’t care for the child.” A rustle of money, changing hands. “I’ll be back to see her now and then. Treat her as your own. You’re all the family she has now.”

As he drove away, he buried deep in his mind the memory of the existence and damnation of Tamar McGrath.

Next.

Darwiniana

I promise that I am writing as much as I can to finish Strange Plots for you all. It is simply that this past week, "as much as I can" has been not very much because our Christmas show goes up today: The Bing Crosby Christmas Special, an old-timey TV variety hour featuring musical guests such as Karen Carpenter, John Denver, Peggy Lee, and the Lennon Sisters. The girls and I are the Lennon sisters, singing Snow from White Christmas, and The Christmas Song (second selection here):



One thing you'll notice about the lovely Lennons is their ability to blend, with their equal tones and equal physiques. We've had to work hard on our tight harmony and seamless unison, and are doing fine there, but it's not quite as easy to disguise the fact that we are three nubile teenagers and a newly-minted 41-year-old who's had seven children. Fortunately, our early-70's setting serves us well: we have floor length dresses with sleeves that cover the telling part of the arm. Stage makeup, too, can work wonders, as can squeezy shapewear.

Another bar to my word count is my 2-year-old. 'Nuff said, I know, but allow me to expand. This guy is nuts. He's taken to climbing, as in, someone found him standing on the stove the other day. (The stove was not on, FORTUNATELY.) He drags chairs or stepladders to where he wants to be. Recently I found him on top of the toy shelf. He'd climbed up the sides, throwing toys on the floor as he went, and was perched happily on the denuded fifth shelf, six feet up. Right now, before 8:00 on a Saturday, he is sitting on my lap, banging on my keys. Yesterday I heard a banging, and turned from the computer to find him banging on the arm of a chair with the uber-sharp knife which he'd climbed up into the fridge to take from the birthday cake platter. So I took it from him and put it away, and when I came back he was stabbing the chair with an alcohol marker. He's so bad during the day, and at night when he's finally asleep, I'm exhausted. And that's assuming that I don't fall asleep trying to put him down, because I was too old to train him up to sleep in a crib at 6 months like I did for everyone else, and now he's still in my bed kicking me and flinging an arm across my face all night.

Good thing he's cute.

Strange Plots 19

Two more installments left. Thanks again to M.L and brother Bill for the medical assist, and do believe that all errors are my own.

***

Previous.

I don’t know how you’d feel if, after 85 years, you learned your true birthday. Grandpa cried like the day he was born, zooming in again and again on the photo of the baptismal register to see the date, his name, and his parents, A.M and T. And to my teary astonishment, Mom cried too, rocking with him and laughing and blowing her nose loudly.

“It’s too late to change it on my birth certificate,” Grandpa declared. “I’m just going to have two birthdays from now on. Two parties, two cakes.” He sniffled. “Two parents.”

“I hope you aren’t going to need another daughter to round out the pairs,” said Mom, and they cackled together as if the joke had even been funny.

My mother and I had reached a sort of truce, which meant that we didn’t talk so that we didn’t fight. I could live with it, I guess. Being ignored, as I’ve said before, irks the living daylights out of me, but not fighting did have its upside. For one thing, I started seeing more of Dad. He’d often been tucked away in his office when he was home, but one night he sat and watched Christmas movies with me and mom, even though he had no stomach for that kind of sap. It was as if he liked being with us when we weren’t tearing it up.

I hadn’t gotten fired from my job yet, which was a good thing because I needed the gas money. The route to Titusville had become a strange sort of pilgrimage for me. I was climbing the mountain to go to the holy temple — Sacred Hearts. Vin wanted to go sit at Mass again, and I wanted to go sit with him. And God. Of course. I wanted to sit with God. But I didn’t seem to pray all that well myself, so it was interesting to watch Vin. I mean, I probably would have watched Vin anyway, because I’m an irreverent heathen. But I was captivated by his natural ability to focus and be silent and get the significance of things that whizzed right by me. And when he shook hands with Father Leonard after mass, he asked him questions about the words of the long prayers that I’d heard all my life but not not marked, and the actions that I’d seen all my life without noting.

Vin and Father Leonard seemed like they were becoming best pals too, and it took an effort on my part not to be jealous because they went to the diner during the week and talked about life, the universe, and everything.

“I’m going to mass on Christmas,” Vin told me as we drove out of town after mass. “I was hoping you’d come up here with me.”

I was flabbergasted. “Oh my gosh, Vin. Your mom is already always on the edge about tradition. What are she going to say if you skip going to her church on Christmas Day itself to go see the Catholics?”

“What do you mean?” he asked. It seemed to be our constant refrain in any sort of religious discussion. “We’ve never gone to church on Christmas day.”

“Never?” I wasn’t sure I was hearing him right. “Are you even Christians?”

“Of course we are, but church on Christmas isn’t really our thing. Even ministers like to be with their families on Christmas day.”

“With their families at church,” I said. “I’ve never heard of anything so insane. You mean it’s Jesus’s birthday, and to honor it you skip church because it’s too much fuss?”

“Well, and so where do you think I’ll be going to church this Christmas?” Vin asked. “Sacred Hearts. With you, I hope.”

After that, I couldn’t really say no.

We were driving out of town because we were going to see a ruin. Not too far down the main road was a gate I’d passed every time I came to Titusville, a sagging mess of wire and rails blocking a rutted drive. We turned into the drive, and Vin got out to wrestle with the rusty latch.

“Aren’t we trespassing?” I asked, for once the good law-abiding citizen.

“Technically.” Vin maneuvered through the narrow opening and got out to push the gate to again. “But it’s abandoned. I don’t even know who owns it now. Kids come out here sometimes on Halloween to creep each other out.”

Frozen grass and mud and gravel squelched under the wheels as we crawled down the overgrown drive. Perhaps once the path had been broader, more spacious, but  now shrubby, twiggy brush almost scraped the sides of the car. It felt like we were driving in a tunnel. I resolutely pushed away any thoughts of claustrophobia.

“How long has it been since anyone lived here?”

“I think it’s been abandoned since it burned.”

The drive opened up into a clearing of sorts, once a farmyard. A stark, blackened shell of a house was shrouded in vines. In some places the walls were no more than charred framing, in others, window sashes remained. Several chimney stacks teetered unsupported. Roofless, eyeless, the house was deader than dead.

My curiosity was blunted by my desire to stay in the warm protection of the car, but Vin refused to be oppressed. He ushered me from the car and swept a grand gesture of invitation that took in the whole desolation. “Welcome to my ancestral home, where family feuds come to die.”

“Hm. A bit of a fixer-upper.”

It was hard to get too close to the house because of the defensive thicket, but the front porch was still barely walkable. In the most useless precaution ever, the door was boarded up.

“What’s the point?” I asked. “There are huge holes in the walls.”

“Want to go in?” Vin asked, not moving. “I’m sure the bodies are long gone.”

I pulled my jacket tighter around me. “Not surprised this place was left to rot. It feels unhealthy.”

We picked our way around the back, trying to avoid icy puddles or patches of slick leaves. There stood, or used to stand, a barn. Unburned but unwell, the whole structure had collapsed to the side. Here too, nature was reclaiming its own. The effect was not comforting.

“I’m trying to compose the real estate listing,” I said. “So far, I have ‘American Gothic.’”

“Well, it probably didn’t always look this bombed out.”

“I wonder what it looked like before the fire? Was it ever a happy home?”

“We might be able to find out. The Historical Society has a lot of photos of Titusville going way back. Andrew Titus must have been important enough to have been caught on film at some point.”

“And your grandma has a picture of Lavinia, so they must have had cameras up here.”

Vin laughed. “It was the 1930s, not the 1830s. Even the mountain yokels had Kodaks.”

I started back toward the car. “If I had to pick between Titus farm and the corn maze on Halloween, I’d definitely go with the corn maze.”

Vin caught up with me. “So what you’re saying is that I shouldn’t have bought this place for our honeymoon cottage?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” I said, willing him to be at least a bit idiotic. “You couldn’t afford something this glamorous.”

“Oh, it wasn’t much.” Vin opened my door. “I got it at a fire sale.”

I buckled up, and he started maneuvering the car to get back out of the driveway. We were halfway up the driveway when I shouted. “Fire sale? No, you did not just say that. Get out.”

“I’m already burning up the road.”

“Stop.”

“Don’t pour cold water on my puns.”

“I hate you.”

He smirked. “No you don’t.”


Around the side of City Hall, an unobtrusive door proclaimed itself the entrance to the Titusville Museum and Historical Society, open Sundays from 1-4. An elderly docent, scrolling on her tablet, waved us in.

“Your tax dollars at work,” I said. “Have you ever been here?”

“Maybe?” he said. “It’s the sort of place you go on a grade school field trip. But field trips are wasted on the young. When I had to go to a museum or a play back then, it was just a chance to get out of the classroom. I didn’t learn anything. Now I’m old and I wish I had back the time I spent not learning when I had the chance.”

“Here’s your opportunity, Gramps,” I said. “Let’s reform your fourth grade shiftlessness.”

There were a few early Indian artifacts, some antique documents and deeds, a pencil sketch or two of the first settlements, even a preserved dress, shawl, and boots. Vin wanted to lean in and read all the labels, but I wandered over to an aerial photo of downtown from the 1930s.

“What’d they take it from, a hot air balloon?” I wanted to know. “Look, here’s Sacred Hearts. It’s tiny, isn’t it? All the businesses are noted, and even some of the houses.”

“‘Mayor Sanders’,” read Vin. “He had the biggest house in town. I know where this is. I’ll take you by sometime. It’s pretty.”

“Let’s buy that for our honeymoon cottage,” I said. “We can kick the mayor out. He can go live with the little people.”

“The current mayor lives in a McMansion he built on his own property,” said Vin. “I doubt he’d live downtown if you paid him…”

“You do pay him.”

“… because the water pressure is terrible here.”

The docent glanced up from her electronic babysitter. “If you’re interested in Mayor Sanders and his house, there’s a photo in the 1930s album of him on his front porch.”

We weren’t interested in Mayor Sanders, but we trooped politely to a table of photo albums, each embossed with a decade. I opened the 1930s volume and paged through it, Vin leaning over me with his chin on my shoulder. The pictures were mildly interesting. There were lots of locals in old-timey outfits gathered in various locations for various occasions. Vin recognized most of the places, and even I could spot some familiar scenery. We didn’t know exactly what we were looking for, but there was no harm in flipping through the book with Vin warm and attentive behind me.

“I think this is the photo she was talking about,” said Vin, pausing at a family trio on a roomy porch. “That’s the old mayor’s house, anyway.”

“Vin,” I breathed, jabbing him with my elbow. “It’s him. It must be him.”

Standing at the far edge of the house, segregated from the family, was a black man, rake in hand, who might have seemed subservient except for his bold gaze directly at the camera. Caught in wonder, we gaped at photographic proof of the presence of a black man in Titusville in the 1930s. And Vin, Mr. Eagle Scout himself, slid the museum’s photo out of its plastic sleeve as if he owned it, and turned it over to check the back.

1933. Clayton Sanders (mayor) and Mrs. Tamar Sanders
Demetrius (son of T.)
Negro Gardener (Aaron Moore?)

“Aaron Moore,” I whispered.

“And T.”

I was nearly hyperventilating, but Vin, cool as a cucumber, put the photo back. He carried the album over to the docent, smoothly scanning the “Doris Smith” on her name tag

“Mrs. Smith,” he said, like the nice mannerly young man he was. “Can you tell us a little about this photo?”

“That’s Miss Smith to you,” said the single lady, not putting down Words with Friends. “I told you, that’s Mayor Sanders on his front porch.”

“Yes, but who are these people?” I demanded. The docent, not about to be hustled by the kids these days, pulled out the photo in her turn and took her time studying the back.

“That’s the mayor,” she explained, “and that’s his wife, and that’s her son, and that’s the gardener.”

“Ah,” said Vin, keeping me patient by squeezing me, “I see. Do you know anything about them?”

Miss Smith chewed on her thoughts for a moment. “He died in the Titus house fire. And she might have died in childbirth. Or, no just after childbirth. Or maybe she was in the fire too?”

“Childbirth?” Vin was killing me with how casual he was being, but he at least he was getting results. “That’s quite a spacing between her children.”

“She was a widow, you know.” Miss Smith was now ready to be obliging; she got up out of her chair. “We have a portrait of her over here.”

“I didn’t know Titusville was important enough to have artists,” I murmured to Vin, recovered just enough to be snide.

“All humans deserve art,” said Miss Smith, whose ears were sharper than she let on. “But not all humans ought to have their portraits painted. Mrs. Sanders was an exception, I think you’ll admit.”

Several undistinguished paintings of past dignitaries were clustered in a small gallery. We didn’t need Miss Smith to point out which canvas we were looking for. Even the artless style could not disguise Mrs. Sanders’s personality. She was a woman of decided character and decided jaw. And decided hair, red hair, red as Vin’s as he stood with decided jaw reading the label.

“Tamar McGrath Sanders.” He jerked up his head to look at Miss Smith. “McGrath?”

“Yes, she was one of the McGraths. The McGrath, in my opinion.”

“But her son, Demetrius,” I said slowly, over the sounds of wheels turning in my head, “was he a McGrath too?”

“I told you she was a widow.” Miss Smith shook her head at our obtuseness. “After Andrew Titus killed her son, she married the mayor to get back at him. But — I told you wrong before — then her baby died, and they decided to bury the hatchet, and then the whole house burned down and killed them all while they ate dinner. So there was no one left to feud in the end.”

“But what about the corn maze?” The effort cost me a few years of my life, but, clinging to Vin’s example, I played it light. “The legend about the feud and the pact and the lynching? The black man in the photo?”

Miss Smith glared at me. “I told you they had a peace dinner. People don’t end feuds by burying innocent men in fields. The gardener wasn’t from around here, and he went back to wherever he came from.”

“But why is there even a corn maze legend?” I pressed. “Was there really a body?”

Miss Smith refused to be pressed. “Because people are simple, that’s why. Likely some local farmer killed a tramp in a cornfield for stealing, and didn’t want to get in trouble so he made up a fantastic story.”

I was deflated. “That’s… not very exciting.”

“No,” said Miss Smith with satisfaction, “but it’s probably the truth. No photos, young man!” she said, startling Vin who was focusing his phone on Tamar McGrath Sanders. “This is a museum, not a free-for-all. Come back again if you’d like to look at Mrs. Sanders. Please put that book away when you’re done.” She settled back down with her tablet. “If you’ve enjoyed your visit, you can leave a donation in the offering box.”

“I don’t believe her,” I snapped outside. “I’ve been to plenty of museums where you can take pictures of the art. Your tax dollars at work indeed.”

“I need to sit down,” said Vin. “I need paper and pencil. I’ve got to see this all written down.”

“The diner?”

“No. I can’t deal with everyone in Titusville right now. Let’s go to my place.”

“Let’s,” I said, my heart skipping a beat at the unexpected invitation. “I’ll follow you over there.”

Vin lived up a set of icy steps in the second floor of an old house. His apartment was nothing much to write home about. The paneled wallboard screamed “cheap 80’s renovation” and and the brown paint of the trim suggested that the designer had never seen a real piece of wood. I thought with real envy of how small his rent check probably was. The furnishings were bachelor spare and the kitchen mostly bachelor clean, but there was nothing wrong with the place that the aroma of coffee wouldn’t smooth over.

One mug and several sheets of paper later, we had a rough chart.

“My line is easy.” I traced up the family tree. “Me, to my mom Linda, to my grandfather, Aaron Moore, born 1934, to his father, Aaron Moore, and T. his Scots-Irish mother, who could be Tamar McGrath Sanders.”

Vin took his turn. “Me, to my dad Dan, to his mom Kay, to her mom Helen, born 1934. Mother, Lavinia. Father, unknown”

“Aaron Moore is connected to your grandmother by his mother. Tamar had a child who died in 1934.”

“Your grandfather shows up at an orphanage out of town in 1934.”

“Aaron Moore the father disappears in 1934.”

Our eyes locked across the table. The air was electric with the thrill of discovery.

“Aaron Moore is connected to the Tituses through his mother.”

“Tamar, possibly his mother, has a son, Demetrius.”

“Who is roughly the same age as Lavinia Titus.”

“And Helen Titus is born in 1934, out of town.”

“And everyone else dies in a fire.” Vin sat back in frustration. “It doesn’t make any sense. They go to have a peace dinner, and everything burns down. That’s pushing the idea of accident too far.”

“It has to be an accident, right?” I said, uncertainly. “Why would it be deliberate? What would they still be feuding about?”

“If the mayor knew about Tamar and Aaron, he’d be mad,” Vin said, and I couldn’t disagree. “But no one in Titusville ever knew about Aaron Moore’s son with T. — except Father Walsh. Which means that no one, including the mayor, talked. Which could make sense if you think of a missing baby. Is the mayor going to want everyone to know that his wife had an affair with a black man?”

“But how does Andrew Titus come into it? Why would he care if Tamar McGrath shamed herself with a black man?”

“He might care a great deal about his daughter, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that there have never been any rumors in town about a Titus girl and a McGrath boy, which you’d expect if they were simply a pair of star-crossed lovers.”

“Not necessarily,” I said, thinking hard. “What if she got pregnant and Andrew Titus was angry and beat her so badly that she had to go into an institution? And he covered it up so no one would ever know.”

“And Demetrius McGrath wouldn’t publicly denounce him, or just elope with Lavinia in the first place? No, that doesn’t sound right to me.” He couldn’t sit still anymore with  the speed of his speculations. “I think it’s worse that that. What’s been the running theme of the Titus-McGrath feud?”

“Revenge?”

“That’s right. And what would Andrew Titus want revenge on the McGraths for now? Tamar McGrath wasn’t really bothering him anymore. She was busy with the mayor, and she had her side piece going on.”

“Hey now!” I was indignant. “That’s my great-grandfather you’re talking about.”

“It may be my great-great… great-grandmother I’m talking about.” Vin would not be deterred. “Is it Tamar who strikes the next blow in the feud? Or is it Demetrius?”

“Oh my god.” His meaning began to dawn on me. “You mean you think Demetrius was the one who messed up Lavinia so much she was paralyzed in an institution?”

“Not just paralyzed,” said Vin grimly. “Pregnant.”

The ugly apartment, Vin pacing, the lamplight — everything about the situation felt remote and unreal, as if I was watching from outside myself. “That’s sick,” I said, trying hard to keep myself from floating off away from this conversation. “I’m going to be sick.”

Vin knelt down and chafed my shaking hands. “Don’t you see? Demetrius covers it up because he doesn’t want to get caught, and Titus covers it up because he’s a man of strict honor and it’s shameful for his daughter to lose her virtue.”

“It’s not her fault! You can’t blame her!” I protested.

“I don’t. And it sounds like Titus blamed someone a lot more than he blamed Lavinia. After all, she’s the only one who survived.”

“No.” Now I couldn’t be still, not with the pounding in my head and the horror clogging up my nose and eyes. “You don’t know any of this. You’re just making this all up. Stop it, Vin. This used to be a fun family mystery game. Why do you have to ruin it?”

“I’m not making up the family tree,” Vin said, trying to sound sensible and only getting as far as pedantic. “Track back the degrees of connection on the DNA report and it will suddenly make sense that Kay’s grandfather is the half brother of your grandfather. We are all kinds of messed up, cousin.”

“So what? It doesn’t mean anything!” I sobbed. “It means nothing to us. It means nothing about you and me.”

“Easy for you to say,” Vin retorted. “You aren’t descended from a rapist.”

“You do not know that!”

“But I believe it.”

He stood trapped in anguish generations in the making. It broke my heart to see him so oppressed. Since he would not come to me, I went to him and laid my head on his heart and tried to pull him back into the present.

“Listen to me.” I would stop crying; he would understand me. “You are you. You’re not anyone else in your family tree, not Demetrius, not anyone else. Your ancestors don’t define you, or me. We don’t have to make their mistakes. We can start fresh.”

“Start fresh.” Misery made Vin motionless. “What does the Bible say, about the iniquities of the fathers being visited down to the third and fourth generation? My whole family line is dysfunction and absence. Then at last my dad managed to get married, and you’ve seen how that turned out. I wouldn’t inflict that life on anyone, wife or child.”

“You are not your father.”

But he sighed and gently removed my arms.

“It’s presumptuous of me to think that I can somehow straighten the twisted family tree. Maybe it’s better if we leave it be.”

“‘Leave it be.’ What’s ‘it’? You mean us? Because that’s not an ‘it’ to me.” He kept trying to turn away, but I made him look at me. “I am not an ‘it’. I am Erin Moore Ramirez, and you are Vincent Titus, and I am telling you that right here, right now, we can end the Titus-McGrath feud. Don’t you see? We’re the descendants. We’re the end of the line. It stops with us.”

“It stops, yes.” Vin retreated and wrapped his arms around himself to hold everything together. “If we walk away from each other now, and you find someone else, and I… I just stay alone.”

“Why don’t you make a better family instead?”

“No more generations. No more curse. I’m sorry.”

The familiar fire of temper, that I’d tried so hard for two weeks to tamp out, flared up as hotly as it ever had at my mother, and this time I let it blaze. “If there was anything I’d be glad to walk away from, it’s you saying you’re sorry, again. Stop apologizing. Own your cowardice for once. Just say you’re afraid.”

I stomped to the table and grabbed my purse. Let the neighbors downstairs get an earful. I hoped they complained to the landlord.

“Erin, I really am sorry,” Vin begged. “But it just makes sense this way.”

I yanked my coat on and wrenched the door open. “It’s the fifth generation.”

“What?”

“If you count Demetrius and his iniquity as the first generation, you’re the fifth generation. So you would have been out of it anyway.”

A hearty slam for the people downstairs, and a good furious trounce down the stairs. And then there was even more noise, as I went flying on the ice and slammed my outstretched fingers into the wall of the house and yowled in pain.

Vin clattered down behind me, pulling on his jacket. “Erin, are you all right?”

I cradled my hand. “Go away.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Only my dignity. And not even that. ” I was not going to go into hysterics about the crazy ache and the freaky way my middle finger was bent. I was not. “My dignity is fully intact. So is my integrity.”

“Can I see?”

“No. I’m going home.”

“So you’re going to drive down the mountain at night in December with one hand?” He took it anyway and pressed gently on the nail, and I hummed and choked in spite of myself.

“How about this. Can you feel me touching your fingertip?”

“Don’t touch me, you asshole,” I hissed, white hot both with fury and because I could indeed feel it. “You tell me to go live my own life because you’re incurably diseased, and then you come running to rescue me when I go boom down the stairs? As if that hurts more than you turning away from me?”

“I don’t think it hurts more than walking away,” said Vin, messing with the wrong angle of my joint. “Not if the way I feel is any indication. I just think that this, at least, I can fix.”

“Absolutely not,” I moaned. “I’m not going to be stuck in Titusville a minute longer at whatever cut-rate medical facility sees patients at this time on Sunday. Ow! Vin! Motherfu--!”

With a pop, the pain was only an echo. A window flew open downstairs and a choice stream of profanity accompanied a request for us to be quiet.

“What did you do?” I asked, weak with relief.

“A closed reduction.”

I wiggled my finger tentatively, waiting to see if it would stay normal. “I called you an asshole, and you fixed me anyway.”

“‘Asshole’ seems pretty mild for you, to be honest,” he said, pressing my nail again. “And for me, too. You should still see a doctor, just to be sure, because you’re going to be pretty sore. And it is entirely outside protocol for me to perform a reduction, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention my name.”

He pulled a roll of medical tape from his jacket pocket and wrapped my middle and pointer fingers together.

“You carry tape in your pocket?”

“Who doesn’t? Here.” He pulled out a little bottle and shook two pills into my hand. “You want some water?”

“Ooh, are you prescribing me the good stuff?”

“Certainly not,” he said sternly. “I can’t prescribe anything. This is just ibuprofen, friend to friend.”

“Okay, friend.” I knocked back the pills like I’d seen people do in the movies.

“Let’s get you up.” He put his arm around me and helped me up, and I put my arm around him and pulled him into a soft, snuffly, cold-nosed kiss.

“That,” he said, once I’d released him and he’d released me, “was not fair.”

“Nothing about this is fair,” I replied, and walked stiffly to my car.

Next.

Knives Out

The short review: yes, you absolutely must see this, especially if you are fan of Agatha Christie, big house mysteries, fantastic set decor, southern accents, Chekhov's gun, crazy families, donut holes, and whodunits that keep you guessing until the end.

Someone asked us, "Does this movie have any sympathetic characters who end up happy, or is it blistering satire all the way through?" The answer is that the movie works because of one good character, pure of heart and motivation: Marta, the young nurse of the murder victim, mystery author Harlan Thrombey. In a houseful of oddballs and egomanics, she's the only one who cares about something other than her own skin -- although her efforts to save her skin drive most of the plot to delightful effect. And Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), to my surprise, was not the sumbitch paterfamilias of a Christie mystery, but a genuinely interesting and careful patriarch. 

Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, the private inspector with the deep-fried accent, has the most glorious movie detective monologue I've ever heard. If there is any justice in the world, suits at major studios are even now begging director Rian Johnson to develop a Knives Out franchise with Blanc's further exploits.

(For the parents out there wondering: we took our 13, 11, and 9yos and had a fantastic time. I don't know others' tolerance for profanity and mild violence, but this fell within our own family's parameters. Of more concern to me personally were two passing jokey (and inaccurate) accusations of masturbation, but they went over my kids' heads.)

Strange Plots 18

Previous.

August, 1934. Aaron Moore stared at the tiny brown-eyed bundle shoved into his arms, and to his horror he found that he wanted it to live.

There was no reason why it should live, or that he should want it to live. Life had never dealt him a fair hand from the day he was born, starting with the color of his skin. Everything he possessed, everything he called his own, had been clawed from someone else. That was how you made your way in this world. If someone else had it, you didn’t. If you had it, someone was waiting to take it from you. Possession was nine-tenths of the law, but you had a lot more scope for possession if you stayed outside the law.

Along the way he’d found that he had a talent for hatred. If a saint was someone who was holy, he was the anti-saint. He craved the sufferings of others to make him feel alive. Let fools talk about love, about family, and sacrifice and the common good. Fools were weak. The strong didn’t need those crutches. The strong took what they needed, and when they had what they needed, they took what they wanted, and when they had what they wanted, they took for the sheer joy of depriving other people of their strength. Brook no rivals. Leave no disrespect unavenged. If you hit back late, hit back hard.

And so everything about his situation in Titusville had been sweet as honey to him, a game where he could pick off the pieces at his leisure. Tamar was his ideal woman, the anti-angel to his anti-saint, a woman whose lust for revenge ran as deep as his own. He enjoyed her comforts of her home and the heat of her body. He relished her hatred of the Titus family, a rivalry that meant nothing to him but gave him free play for any horror he could set in motion. With her help, he’d molded her clod of a boy into something almost useful, a pawn whose red hair and pale skin gave him entry to situations that Aaron was barred from by the accident of his birth.

And Demetrius had been oh so useful. Aaron savored the memory of Tamar’s revenge, even though he’d only played a background role. Even now in his sleep he heard the sweet sound of the screams from the Titus house. Demetrius had lost his head with his first taste of cruelty. Aaron had been impressed by the boy’s thoroughness, but it did make the cover up more complicated. In the end they’d had to wrap the limp, moaning body in a sheet and haul it up to the top of the hayloft, carefully passing it from step to step up the boards nailed up for a ladder. Then they toppled it over the edge of the rail..

“Maybe that will account for her face,” said Aaron, contemplating the sprawled legs and head all askew. “If you gonna throw up, boy, do it outside in the stream so it will wash away.”

They’d driven away without being seen, without leaving behind Tamar’s pie, without leaving a trace to indicate that anything McGrath had ever set foot on Titus property.

“Buck up, boy,” Aaron had said to the shaking Demetrius. “Even if he realizes she didn’t just fall from the loft, he’ll think a tramp did it.”

Tamar and Aaron had savored their pie that night, and then he had savored her with a hunger aroused by the day’s hard villainy. Tamar was all the more luscious for being another man’s wife. Tamar shared something with him that she’d never give to Sanders, even if he was capable of understanding it. Their minds locked together as infernally as their bodies did in the close confines of his garage room. He wanted to consume her, her every evil impulse and smooth lie and the slender creeping tentacles of her plots of revenge. There was in her no imperfection, no passing softness to mar the glorious intensity of her rage. Aaron could have loved her, could he have loved anyone.

And they had gotten away with it. Andrew Titus had been seen driving hell for leather for the city that night, although he’d only just returned from there. Eventually he had come back, haunted and hollow, but Lavinia was gone. The talk was that she’d fallen from the hayloft, that she was paralyzed, that she was dead, that she had brain fever, that she did not know who she was. Aaron listened attentively to the talk, as he stood at a respectful distance in the butcher shop or the general store, but no speculation went any deeper than wondering if she’d ever walk again.

This tickled at the back of his mind, that even the gutter nature of town gossip had not picked up on the idea that Lavinia might have been ravaged. It struck him that there was an intelligence at work behind the chatter, someone directing public opinion and shaping it from a safe distance. At least, that’s how he would have worked him himself. But there was no one in town but Tamar to equal him for plotting. They were safe, and it was time to lay their plans for the next stage of their overarching scheme: escape from Titusville, with name, reputation, riches, and revenge intact.

Every option was more intriguing than the last. Should they murder the mayor and have Tamar move away as a grieving widow? Was there a way to get out of town fast enough to leave pursuit and justice behind? Should they take Demetrius, or leave him to fend for himself? The boy had his uses as an errand runner and a front, and Tamar had an attachment to him, but he’d gone weak in the head since his assault on Lavinia. He knew better than to tell anyone what he had done — Aaron had made sure to describe to him in full and gory detail all the pretty operations a mob could perform on a rapist — but right now he was idle and gloomy and no help. He could be dealt with later, whether he would be salvaged or tossed aside.
The plan was falling into place slowly enough. Tamar was buying time for herself by playing sick. This groundwork for this piece of the plot had been laid the very day of the Titus revenge, when Aaron had picked up Demetrius early from school on the pretense that his mother was ill and needed him at home. This was a precious little lie that had pulled all sorts of duty — it had built alibis for both Tamar and Demetrius, and had gotten Demetrius into fatal contact with Lavinia, and set an impression that Tamar was fragile.

There was nothing more useful than sickness as a cover for evil plans. Tamar had seen to it that she was well-liked in town, and she had local sympathy on her side when she pulled back from making pies and performing the social duties of the mayor’s wife. It had gotten her out of other wifely duties too, very convenient for the appetites of the conspirators.

But there came a time when playacting went too far. Tamar began to live in the role, a temptation Aaron had seen fell even seasoned professionals of crime. She was a little too languid, a little too choosy, a little too moody. Someone was going to catch on if she didn’t pull back her performance.

He spoke to her one morning in the kitchen, after Sanders had left for city hall and the hired girl was busy upstairs. Tamar sat in the front room, wrapped in kimono and slippers, every now and then opening her eyes to watch the snow drift down outside the window.

“The chores are done, ma’am. Is there anything else you need?”

“No, that will do.”

“Are you sure, ma’am?” Aaron checked to make sure his boots were clean and stepped into the room on the carpet. “It seems to me that there ought to be some task around the house I could do.”

“I can’t think of any. Go away,” she said, not turning her face from the window. But Aaron knelt down by the end table and began inspecting a loose table leg.

“You sure are beat, ma’am,” he in a low easy tone. “Perhaps you should consider going out of town for a while. I hear that Florida is nice this time of year, but a clever person can find lots to do in Chicago. Perhaps I could help you make some arrangements, but of course there’s lots of doors open to you that aren’t open to me.”

“I can’t go anywhere right now,” she said.

“Can’t, or don’t want to, ma’am?” he persisted. “It’s not always healthy to stay in one place for too long. It wouldn’t be too hard for a woman of your position to get away. If you set your mind to it.”

“A woman in my position is not allowed to travel,” she said, looking full into his eyes. “A woman in my position is well-advised to lay very low.”

“Laid indeed, ma’am,” said Aaron slowly, taking in her pallor, her peaky face, her tired hands. “The best laid plans… And the father, will he be surprised?”

“I don’t know,” said Tamar. “I don’t know if he will be surprised or not.”

Aaron slid a hand into her kimono and placed it on her stomach, considering. For a moment neither of them moved. Then Tamar shuddered and heaved, and Aaron stood up.

“There’s no rush, ma’am,” he said conversationally. “You seem to have a number of months before you have to make a decision.”

Those months, however, did not seem to give either Tamar or Aaron any clarity. In hurried whispers in stolen moments, they weighed their options. It was too risky to go to the local doctor to take care of the problem, and any home remedies had dangerous side effects. Then Tamar’s condition became obvious, and her opportunities of traveling alone to Roanoke were over, had she even been able to. Mrs. Sanders was no young farm wife, able to work right up until the moment she dropped her bairn. She was ill, confined, weary. Her recipe box sat neglected in the kitchen. Mayor Sanders was ebullient, slapping backs and speculating on what great gridiron feats his son would accomplish. Demetrius lurked at his mother’s side, leaving Aaron no excuse to be near her. The boy was definitely a liability, and Aaron reworked his careful plans to leave him out.

But there came a day toward the end where the house was quiet and Aaron was able to make it upstairs without any bar. He sat on Tamar’s bed. Her hair, drained of fire, fell lankly on her shoulders. All the color in her face had faded to a watery wanness.

“You’re here at last,” she said.

He picked up her swollen hand from the coverlet and began to knead it softly.

“You’re not an easy person to get to these days,” he said.

She laughed, a cracked ugly sound, and shifted her bulk to face him fully. “I never go anywhere anymore.”

“The day will come.”

“Or perhaps I’ll never go anywhere again. Perhaps I’ll die here, in this room.” A heavy tear slid down her cheek onto the damp pillow.

“Hey now,” Aaron said, wiping it away. “You never died before.”

“Those times were different,” she said. “There wasn’t as much danger.”

“Danger for you, or danger for the child?”

“No danger at all if the baby has blue eyes.”

Aaron studied their paired hands. “If the child can’t pass for Sanders’s brat, you and I are finished. You will have nothing. And me… I’ll be lucky if I survive the night in the county jail. Or not so lucky, depending on the night.”

“Sanders wants me to go to the maternity hospital in Roanoke. But there’s too much risk there.”

“It might be safer for you,” said Aaron.

“But not for you,” said Tamar. “There are too many people who will have hands on the child right away.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “I need a private nurse here, from the city.”

Aaron stood up. “You’ll have one.”

Sanders, who knew nothing about birthing babies, was prevailed upon to send a letter to a nursing agency in Roanoke. Aaron carried the letter to the post office himself. In a week, Nurse Cornelia arrived and took up her duties at home. She was a martinet of the old school. Sanders found himself relegated to an hour’s visit each evening, and Demetrius was allowed to kiss his mother before school and after dinner. Aaron was pressed into service to run errands, to carry specialized exercise equipment up to Tamar’s room, to do any heavy work Cornelia might require.

The afternoon that Tamar paced, groaning, from doorway to doorway, turning, sitting, rising, Nurse Cornelia sent Mayor Sanders to his office.

“Father only gets underfoot,” she scolded. “You’ll get regular updates, but I expect you to stay away until you’re summoned. Mother must have no agitation.”

Cornelia and Aaron sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee despite the heat of the afternoon, when Tamar staggered in and tried to sit. “Oh, no,” she gasped, getting right back up again.

“Not much longer now, I think,” said Cornelia briskly, rubbing her back with a firm hand. “You’re doing fine, dear. Keep walking.”

“Don’t,” said Tamar through clenched teeth, pulling away and leaning on a chair.

Aaron watched her sway and gasp with sickly fascination. “Can’t you do something for her?” he demanded of the nurse.

“She’s doing it all herself,” said nurse, with the easy calm of one not in pain. “Anything I give her will slow down the process, and I have Sanders nicely out of the house now.”

“Do not put me to sleep,” demanded Tamar, seizing the nurse’s arm with intensity, if not strength. “You must not put me down. I have to be conscious when the baby is born.”

Afternoon shaded into evening. Tamar had retreated upstairs with Nurse Cornelia. The doctor was in the house now, so Aaron was forced back below stairs, pacing the kitchen with Demetrius. After a time Nurse and Doctor came back down in clinical discussion. 

“In two hours, then, Nurse,” he said at the door. “Send word if anything changes.”

“Of course,” she said, shutting the door. Aaron rushed out of the back hall.

“What’s happening, Nurse?” he pleaded.

“I’m going to break her water,” said Nurse, all business as she marched up the stairs. “We’ll have a baby in half an hour. Be ready.”

“For what?”

“For whatever you need to do,” said Nurse, turning into Tamar’s room and closing the door.


Nothing in Aaron’s career had prepared him for this night of waiting. He had spent a lifetime inflicting pain on men and women, had spent time waiting for others to inflict pain on him. He had waited with patient endurance for schemes to bear their bad fruit, taking the setbacks with the same spirit as triumphs. But this was different, this night of labor. Sounds drifted from the top of the stairs, drawn-out, muffled, agonized. Should he be up there with Tamar? He could do none of her work and take none of her pain, and even if he could, would it be worth it for another man’s child? Sanders could claim the baby even if it were not his, as long as it was even passably white. Light skin would ease this child’s path in life, give it passage to worlds that Aaron could only see from the outside. To sit where you pleased, eat where you pleased. To enter by the front door.

“Please,” Aaron prayed, for the first time in his life. “God. Let the child be white.”

A fresh voice wailed thinly from the room upstairs. Not long after, the door opened and nurse called down. “It’s a boy. Come look.”

Tamar lay exhausted and murmuring on the bed. Bloody linen lay piled on a sheet on the floor. Nurse finished wrapping baby in a blanket and handed him to Aaron.

“Who is he?” Tamar could not open her eyes, but she lifted a hand to Aaron. “Who is he?”

Aaron carried the child to the lamp and inspected him. The baby was a healthy red, its nose no broader than any other baby’s. His hair, as Aaron slid the blanket off his head, was fine and dark. Aaron turned over a tiny hand to check the color of the palm, but at his touch the little fingers closed on his. The cheeks, the lips — nothing marked this child as different. He could live. Whether his son or Sanders, he would live.

“He’s white,” Aaron said.

Tamar shuddered with great sobs. “Give me my baby.”

Aaron handed her the mewling infant. He nestled in her arm and bumped his small chin at the nipple Tamar brushed against his lips. With a hum of content, the baby closed his mouth on his mother’s breast. His small face unscrunched, and he finally opened his eyes to take in the world.

His father’s eyes.

Tamar wailed in bed as Nurse Cornelia reached for the baby. “It’s better not to bond,” she said. “I can give it a shot. It will all be over in a moment."

“No!” Tamar roared. She pushed the child at Aaron. “Take him! Don’t let her hurt him!”

“It’s easier this way,” Nurse soothed. “The Mayor will only ever see him wrapped up with his eyes closed. No one will ever know.”

“Don’t white babies ever have brown eyes?” Aaron asked, buying time to think.

“They can,” said nurse. “But not Mayor Sanders’s baby. He’s not that stupid."

“Aaron, please,” sobbed the mother. “Please.”

The child looked at his father with cloudy brown eyes. The father looked at his child with clear brown eyes, and saw that he must live. Everything was wrong. The plan was shot to hell, and there was no way it could end well now. But it must not end this way, with his son condemned to death for the crime of being like his father.

“You’ll have to kill me first,” he said to the nurse.

Nurse Cornelia hesitated, looking from the dangerous father to the devastated mother. “Well,” she said, “That would be difficult for me to explain.” She pondered. “You’ll have to dig a grave in the back yard. I’ll tell Sanders the child was born dead and deformed, and that the mother couldn’t bear for anyone to look at it.”

“Will he believe that?” Aaron asked.

“Long enough for me to leave,” said Nurse. “I’ll be long gone by the time Sanders suspects that you killed or stole the child.”

“Father Walsh,” begged Tamar, clutching at Aaron's arm. “Bring him to Father Walsh. Father will take care of him.” She fought her way past nurse out of bed, and promptly fainted.

“The sooner you get out, the better,” said the nurse, wrestling the bleeding body back in bed. “I can explain a missing child, but not a missing child and a dead mother.”

Aaron wrapped another blanket around the baby. “Make Demetrius dig a grave and fill it in,” he said to nurse. He knelt by Tamar’s side, and kissed her clammy forehead.

“I will come back for you,” he said.


Father Walsh was just turning to lock the mission church after his vespers when a hulking figure clutching a parcel appeared and pressed him against the door.

“Don’t make a sound,” growled Aaron Moore, forcing him back inside.

“Well, now, it’s good to see you too,” said Father in his placid brogue. “Needing some help, are we?”

Aaron hauled the little priest down the aisle and pushed him into a chair in the office.

“Is it stolen property perhaps?” Father asked as Aaron pulled the curtains. “Don’t worry, I can help you return it.”

Aaron leaned over the priest in the locked room. “Oh, you’ll help me, all right, or God help you.”

“He always does,” said Father. He lifted the fussing bundle from Aaron and unwrapped it. The baby blinked dark eyes at him and closed them again. “So it’s the child, is it? And how is mother keeping?”

Aaron knelt by the chair, drained of bravado. “Tamar told me to bring him to you. She could die.”

Father Walsh rocked and clucked over the newborn.“There, there,” he cooed. “There, there. You’ll be fine, wee one. St. Patrick will watch you, and St. Brigid too.”

“So you’ll keep him?” Aaron demanded.

“Think about it, my wee babby,” Father said to the baby, jostling him gently. “What will people say when Father Walsh turns up with a child on the same day that Mrs. Sanders’s wee boy dies? This is not the big city to lose a child in. The good people of Titusville know what dad looks like. How safe are you here, babby? How safe is dad?”

Aaron rubbed at his bloodshot eyes. “What do I do now?”

Father still sang to the boy. “Babby must take a little trip, yes he must. The sisters at the orphanage in Roanoke won’t turn away my boy. There’s work and safety for dad in Roanoke.”

“How do I get to Roanoke with a newborn?” Aaron jumped up and prowled the little room. “They gonna be out there searching the roads for me tonight. Baby gonna cry.”

“Father will take a little trip down to Roanoke tonight, yes he will. Won’t it be funny if babby and dad stow away?”

The tension slowly drained out of Aaron’s shoulders as he leaned against the door. “All right, Father. Let’s get going then.”

“Not in such a rush,” said Father, unlocking the sacristy door and carrying baby into the church. “There’s only one gift I can give this poor child, and given his unorthodox little life so far, I don’t like to put off until the good sisters get a hold of him.” He held the infant over a holy water font. “What name shall I give him, then?”

“Aaron,” said his father, crumpling his hat in his hand. “Give him my name.”

“Aaron Moore,” Father intoned, dipping his hand into the basin. “Ego te baptizo in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”


At midnight, an dirty automobile sputtered to a smoking halt in an alley down the street from the Holy Cross Convent and Orphanage. Two figures stirred and stretched in the dark car. The third slept.

“The sisters don’t separate the black babies from the white,” a gentle Irish voice remarked. "They’re all brought up together. Your son will be safe with them.”

“And what afterwards?” rasped the other. “What kind of life is it for a black orphan?”

“It’s better than no life at all.”

The baby snuffled in the silence. His father held him closer.

“I can do all the talking, if you like,” Father offered.

“I’ll take him myself,” Aaron muttered, still unmoving. “I just… I just gotta say goodbye to him first.”

He bent his face over the baby. “You looking up at me, huh, boy? You know your daddy?” His voice cracked and failed as he stroked the whimpering child. “Don’t you cry, now, baby boy, ‘cause you look like daddy. You shoulda taken after your mama. You could have been anything you wanted, if you was just a white boy. You could have been President one day.”

Shuddering sobs wracked him as he rocked his son. “I ain’t never done anything good in my life, baby boy. I have lied and I have hated and I have killed, and my old man was no better. But Daddy gon’ come back for you one day. He gon’ take you away to a little cabin, and teach you to fish and to fight. You’ll be a man, my man, my little man.”

Father and son cried together. The priest waited patiently, lips moving, beads passing through his fingers. Presently Aaron scrubbed at his eyes and began to swaddle the baby more securely.

“Don’t tell him goodbye,” said Father mildly, picking up the conversation as if there had been no interruption. “Tell him you’ll be near him, working hard to bring him home with you.”

Aaron got out of the car, but leaned in before he shut the door.

“You go home,” he said gruffly. “They gon’ need you in Titusville real soon.”

He slipped away and blended into the shadows across the street from the convent, watching until the auto turned around and drove back toward the massive shadow of the mountain.

Next.