Читать книгу Head To Head - Linda Ladd - Страница 10

The child sat on the bed beside the mother because she was getting over another beating. She’d failed to get the blood out of the father’s white shirtsleeve. He’d punished her with the strop until she could not walk.

She whispered to the child, “He’ll stay in the cellar until dinner. He won’t come up here.” When she reached out to him, she groaned in terrible pain. “Don’t ever leave me, and I won’t ever leave you. We’ll always be together.” She began to weep, softly so the embalmer wouldn’t hear. The child glanced at the door in alarm, afraid for her but not crying; that was against the rules. She went to sleep after a while, and the child walked to the window and looked outside. It was a beautiful spring day. The red rosebush that the mother tended on the trellis by the side gate was heavy with blooms. She loved roses more than anything. She picked them and put them in a vase beside the child’s bed, and they perfumed the room. The mother was lying still now, one forearm flung across her eyes.

Tiptoeing, the child moved out into the upstairs hall. It wasn’t scary in the house in the daytime like it was at night, when they used the candles and shadows flickered up the walls like grasping fingers and the furniture crouched in wait like dark, devouring monsters. Downstairs, the sound of the embalmer’s saw drifted up from the cellar in a distant whine, as if someone were crying. The father was busy. It was safe to sneak outside.

Once in the warm sunshine, the child breathed in fresh air, not used to being alone. The mother kept the child at her elbow at all times. It was against the rules to leave the house. Fear rose and made it hard to breathe, then receded when the sweet fragrance of roses wafted on the breeze. The mother loved roses. She would be happy if she had some beside her bed.

The child ran fast, reaching the lush rosebush and jerking off three roses before a car approached on the road. A black hearse pulled in the driveway, and the child hid behind the thick trunk of the nearest oak tree as the cellar door swung open under the porch. The father walked up the steps, and the child’s breath caught with fear as the embalmer looked around the yard. Then the man driving the hearse called hello from the front yard, and the father walked down the brick walk to meet him.

Minutes later the embalmer and hearse driver pushed a gurney down the sidewalk and descended into the cellar with a dead body. The child squatted behind the tree and waited until the man had driven the hearse away, then sprinted toward the back porch.

Racing across the porch into the kitchen, the child made it to the entrance hall before the embalmer stepped out. “You think I don’t know what you’re up to, sneaking around, breaking my rules. You think your mother can hide you behind her skirts now?”

The embalmer grabbed the child around the waist and descended into the cellar. “You broke my rules on purpose, didn’t you? You were spying on me in the cellar, weren’t you? Well, I’m going to show you what I do all day in the cellar. It’s about time you earned your keep, you lazy, ugly brat.”

The words were mouthed in the embalmer’s awful, vicious whisper, and the child was terrified. The cellar was big and dark except for bright circles of fluorescent light that shone down on two long metal tables. Naked bodies lay on both embalming tables, and one had strange black hoses snaking from the corpses into big brown bottles. It smelled terrible, like the iodine the mother put on the child’s half-moon cuts after the beatings. Another smell came from the dead bodies, a strange, unpleasant odor, and the air was so cold that the child shivered uncontrollably.

The father forced the child to sit on the table beside the body from the black hearse. “I’ll teach you to go outside alone. I’ll teach you to be disobedient. You’re just like your mother. Evil, pure evil.” He reached over and dipped his hand in the blood pooled at the end of the slanted table. He smeared it on the child’s face. “You’ve got the blood of this dead man on you, you ungrateful brat. Don’t you move. You’re not going to cry, are you? You know what happens when you cry. Go ahead, cry like a little baby.”

The child didn’t move as the embalmer began his work on the corpse; didn’t cry when the scalpel slit open the veins and the blood began to drain.

The child was seven years old.