Читать книгу Hades' Melody - JD Belcher - Страница 5

Spring 1986.

Many things happened that year; the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded live on national TV, my father left our family for the first time to work on an engineering project in California, and my mother planned a trip from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with my two brothers and I to Fort Wayne, Indiana to visit my grandmother Barbara over the course of a weekend that would forever change my life.

Grandma lived in a single level ranch home—similar to ours back in Monroeville—on Broken Arrow Drive with her second husband George, a pastor and part-time taxi driver, inside a suburban development called Concordia Gardens not far from the banks of the Saint Joseph River. Apart from the incident which transpired during our stay, I can barely conjure up any extraneous details. I remember the gray clouds and rain that day; sitting on the piano bench practicing chords; the white carpet in the living room; and my brother Amos, who had the nickname AJ, perched on the couch, watching the bulky floor model television which sat up against the wall. In a framed painting above me was a rendering v

so vivid that it almost looked like a photograph, one of the resurrected Christ walking with two men—all of them with their backs turned—down a shaded dirt road to the town of Emmaus. Next to me, a dining room table with placemats squarely positioned in front of each seat circled a basket of fake fruit covered in shiny fur.

Two candles plugged the weighty, amber-colored holders on either side of the decorative bassinet. Behind the table, a sturdy, wooden china cabinet displayed vintage plates sketched in dull blue ink, depicting various long-forgotten American countryside landscapes.

My younger brother Jodan, who everyone called Tre, rose to his feet, and wandered past me down the hallway that led to three bedrooms and a bathroom. A few minutes later, I heard him screaming at the top of his lungs, as if someone was attempting to take his life, with the rumbling voice of my step-grandfather ranting in the background.

There are two versions of the story that survive. One, as was always the case with Tre and his manners as my mother recalled, was that he entered my grandparent’s master bedroom, grabbed a piece of butterscotch candy from a dish, and attempted to return it to her and ask if he might have it. The second version, as I remember, involved Tre entering the same bedroom, swiping the wrapped, hard candy and asking George for it, making the naïve mistake of calling him by his first name instead of Grandpa—as was proper when addressing a well reputed, old-fashioned preacher—and as a result, ending up with a smack across his soft, three-year-old face.

Either way, when Tre came back into the living room with George’s pink handprint on his cheek and ton-sils vibrating from his frantic lamentation, my mother jumped to attention, and darted down the hallway to find out what had happened. I heard it all from the piano: Grandma unsuccessfully trying to resolve the matter in her usual, humble, peacemaking fashion, my mother snapping away at George, demanding that he keep his hands off her damn child, and George wanting both of them out of his way, probably en route to the bathroom for a bit of solace.

But my mother wasn’t having any of that— no, George had to pay for hitting her son. She quickly and briefly appeared at my side—I immediately stopped practicing my chords and made a 180 degree turn on the piano bench toward the television in the living room—

and I saw her lift one of the heavy candlestick holders from the dining room table. What transpired next, I would remember for the rest of my life. The arguing turned up a notch, and I peeked my head around the corner and down the hallway to get a glimpse of the action. After I looked—for whatever reason, I didn’t want to experience it all live, in real time—I turned back to AJ, who continued to watch television on the couch, and the first thought that entered my mind had been how very strange it was to see all those people in the hallway. There were too many of them, not just Grandma and George and my mother, but three others, wearing red and white robes from neck to foot. One stood beside my mother, whose raised arm with candlestick in vii

hand at any moment might have come crashing down atop George’s head; another behind George, who was bent over my grandmother, just seconds before pushed out of his way to the floor; and the last, kneeling near Grandma, as if checking to make sure she was all right.

When I took a double take, they were gone.

The next thing I knew, Mom came storming in from the hallway crying, telling us to gather our belongings and head to the car. She picked up the phone and dialed the police. All the while, I couldn’t get the image of the people with the red and white clothes out of my mind.

When we all finally settled into the car out in the driveway, windshield wipers slamming back and forth and my mother exclaiming to us how she wanted so badly to hit him, and had even tried with all her might, yet her arm wouldn’t move, like someone had been holding it back—a sight I clearly remembered seeing—I finally spoke up. With my ten-year-old intellect, I explained how I saw the other people in the hallway, and that I thought they were angels. Even at my young age, it all made sense to me—George’s life had been spared. She surely would have killed the old man with the heavy candlestick holder. My mother might have gone to jail for murder, losing everything; her marriage, her children, her future. When the police showed up, they asked my grandma if she wanted George to leave. She said no.

Instead, Mom drove us back to Pittsburgh and wouldn’t return to Fort Wayne for another two years. The story spread throughout the family, and from then on, I was known as the child who saw the angels.