Slaughterhouse potpourri

Slaughterhouse Potpourri



    I think that I really noticed that something was off at Reverend Ripley’s funeral, not something off about the funeral, but some thing off about my life. I was only nineteen then, but I think I knew that the deep end was coming for me, heading there or not.

    Oh, it was a great day, sunny with a touch of rain scent in the air, kind of perfect, really. I remember a blue jay was just filling in a nest in the oak over the grave, chattering despite that hush that seems to be around graveyards. I don’t think that it was seeing him dead that bothered me either, though the mortician had done a bit too good a job on the make up if you understand. He had that weird living if not for being so still look that sends chills up your spine, or it does mine anyway. No, I like my corpses to look dead, not like they might get up and ask for some punch.
         
    Maybe it was mom’s odd composure through the whole thing. She’d worked for him in the church office longer than I’d been alive, several years longer, in fact. Yet she seemed to be somehow less than sad. She wasn’t laughing or joking or anything, and I doubt that anybody but me could have noticed, but it sure felt like she just was not going to miss him. I can’t say now how I sensed that then, but I’m sure I did sense it then rather than remember it that way later. More than notice actually, that dug at me, I couldn’t shake it, like when you swallow bad milk, yeah, like that.
         
    The funny thing was that the Reverend was a great guy, loved by the little town I’m from, and was sure to be missed by the huge flock of black sniffling beside his grave as some pastor from somewhere read from the Bible. Something about that scene has always stuck with me, all that sorrow, sanctioned by a pastor nobody even knew, made me think of how important it is to lead a good life, so you can be remembered. I got a lot of attention at that funeral as well, despite my pulse, since everybody knew how close I was to the Reverend, him sort of taking over for my missing dad. Not dad’s fault at all, mom told me, he died before I was born. So it doubly made no sense for mom to be acting as she was. This was the man who’d looked after her, and me, kept her in a job, and helped out in tight times more often than I could count. I’m ashamed to say that I remember being more than a little angry with her over that one.
         
    Like I said, mom had worked at the Church for forever, nearly twenty-five years, and I can never remember her complaining about work or the Reverend much at all, in fact she always told me to respect him as I would a father. And I did for the most part respect him, and even loved him as a father. The guy was good to me. The nearest major league park was over an hour from home, but he took me to the game whenever I wanted during my short-lived baseball phase. He bought me a bow when I thought my destiny was to become the next Fred Bear, and even took me up to Canada to terrify the trees and amuse the deer with it. All that without preaching and lecturing, quite a trick for a Preacher, but he did it. In short, he was a Godsend, one that my mother seemed happy to send away. I was so very sad over losing him, I do think that I remember that the most.
         
    After the funeral, after that uncomfortable cold-cut thing in the church basement, she seemed so very quiet. It was as though she’d finished a major project, and was resting. I didn’t think of it that way at the time of course, I was a kid; I thought she was just sad. Honestly though, I didn’t think about it too much, I was sad, and did what sad nineteen year olds do, I got surly and sucked down every bit of illicit alcohol and drugs I could get my hands on. Really though, the drug war had had too many victories in that little town, or wasn’t a fair fight to begin with, so other than the odd beer and a bowl, surly had to do.  Dancing around in that juvenile hell, I noticed that there was no gardening being done, little in the way of housework, and the lawn was working its way up to savanna classification, but since I damn sure wasn’t going to do it, I left it alone.
         
    It went on like that for a couple of months, she went to work, but otherwise didn’t seem interested, more a spectator really, a spectator of air and window panes. Somewhere inside I knew that she felt real pain, or was in trouble, but that sort of thing doesn’t get past the selfish drives of a boy, certainly not me anyway.
         
    It got past that Sunday afternoon, got past mightily. I’d been out all night, trying like all hell to get into Mary’s pants, or at the least her shirt, and was downright irritated since all the farther I’d gotten was a hand under her thong by sliding down her back. That’s it. Five hours of coaxing, six beers, and I get a flat cold no.  Pissed off, I remember bumbling half drunk up onto Fred’s back porch to drink more beer till I dropped into fuzziness then brought back to a world that was far too clear. After throwing up in Fred’s bushes, I walked.
         
    It was well into afternoon when came home, and I know this sound’s like a cliché, I felt like it was just a little too quite, something was wrong. The kitchen was spotless, not just clean but pristine and smelling of cleaners, not the everyday status you know? The living room had that same photographers are coming later sort of clean, but no sign of mom at all. No T.V. no radio, nothing.
         
    “Mom”
         
    No answer.
         
    “Mom!”  Louder, heading up the stairs.
         
      Nada.
         
    Now I’m really getting antsy, she’s not in her bedroom, but looking over I can see a little flicker of light under the bathroom door, like you do when a candle is burning in a room with the door closed. I went up to the door and gave a knock.
         
    “Mom?”

    Still nothing.
         
    “Mom!” after a louder knock.
         
    Something was very wrong, I knew that it was, but I still waited. I stood there not so much afraid of what was inside but of breaking that unwritten law about bathroom privacy where moms are concerned. Finally after a few heartbeats and a couple of aborted attempts I grabbed the handle and yanked the door open. The scent of potpourri hit me first from the two candles that had nearly burned themselves out on the side table beside the tub, only too be mixed brutally with the earthy stench of a slaughterhouse. Mom was in the tub, it looked at first that she was in a bath of dirty black oil so dark did that water look. I remember actually believing that for a few moments while my mind tried to recover enough to see the truth. My first thought was why nap in oil?
         
    I think I phased out of reality for a time, I found myself sitting with my back against the door, with that muddy sweet scent that blood has, mixed with the freshness of spring potpourri with the rancid undercurrent of what must have been very stale, very pricy, Cristal champagne the bottle of which set, near empty, on the stand near the tub. I’ve always been proud of the detachment that I had that day, I didn’t crack, I just got cold. I remember thinking that my hands should have been at least shaking as I reached for her exposed neck, knowing that I’d not only find no pulse, but cold hard skin as well. I was right. Looking over the tub, I could see the dark sheen of partially congealed blood was more of a skin on the water, and when I pulled her arm from the water I saw the skin of blood cling to her arm but not concealing the harsh lengthwise gash starting at her wrist and angling well into her forearm. Still in cold calm, I reached for her other arm and lifted it from the goo that had once carried her life to see a slash every bit as vicious as the other, if not more so. I can’t tell you how many nights I’ve lost sleep wondering just how one would be able to do the second wrist. So you see, commitment is a family thing.
         
    I knew I had to clean her up, there was no way some ambulance jockey was going to get any jollies of her crimson nudity. Besides, blood is a personal thing, it’s private, and the only way to keep it that way was to drain the tub, scrub the blood off of her and cover her. I almost did too good of a job, at least one of the cops in town was convinced that I’d done her in, especially after an autopsy showed that she’d taken enough Vicoden mixed with the Cristal to whack a moderate sized elephant, but blood loss killed her. That saved me from trouble, that and the blood I couldn’t get off of the old porcelain of her tub. Somehow she’d dropped the straight-razor that she used into the tub with her, open, without slicing herself open anywhere else. Mom did do it with style, that razor was an antique with an ivory and pearl inlaid handle of the finest wood, quite a piece. I’ve kept it all these years, even now it’s a part of my personal effects.

    Obviously, that was a rough month. Since there really was not any other family, once the cops determined that I hadn’t somehow managed to slice both the wrists of an unbound person without a struggle, I was left to make the arrangements for the planting. There I was with a meticulously clean house, an upside down world, and way, way, too much help. Every bitty, busybody, spinster, widow, Sunday school teacher, organ player, and choir singer attached to mom’s Church showed up to “help” me. Supposedly this was to get ready for the funeral, organize affairs, and so forth, but it was really to gawk at the son of two suicides. Oh, I may not have mentioned that the Reverend died by asphyxiation, the sort that happens when you let the car run in the garage while listening to Shakespeare’s entire works on audio. So I was the talk of the town for a while. I let the assorted menagerie of assistants organize the funeral and dig into whatever records that they might like to investigate, and tried to decide just what the hell to do with myself.
         
    I was stunned and shocked by the whole thing, as anybody would be, and really not at all ready to check the mail. There was no suicide note in either case, and I was just getting used to the idea that all this really happened when a letter showed up in the mailbox three days after the death, a Wednesday, the day of the funeral as a matter of fact. There was no return address, but I recognized mom’s handwriting in the actual address. I think that my heart stopped when I saw that, addressed to me, knowing that an explanation must be inside. I got the mail early, before the funeral, and I knew that I’d have to wait to read it until afterwards in order to have time and to be able to keep it together during the festivities. So, during my mother’s funeral, I had in my pocket a letter from her from beyond the grave, literally burning in my pocket as the same unknown preacher talked about ashes and cycles. For a moment, just as the casket was lowered I had the strongest desire to toss the letter onto the casket and let her misery die with her, kind of as a testament. I couldn’t do it. My curiosity wouldn’t let me, and what a difference that would have made, a fateful moment really, not just for me.
         
    After the funeral, the reception, the countless well wishings, and a half a dozen private pull asides for condolences and offers of help and jobs, I was alone in mom’s shiny house. I don’t go through life being afraid, obviously, and I didn’t then either, but I think that breaking open the glue on that letter was the most terrifying thing that I have ever done. My heart rate must have been around one sixty and I could barley breathe. I was right to be terrified. The letter started out with an apology for hurting me, then jumped right into the explanation for her sangria party. This is hard for me, so I’m just gonna be blunt. The Reverend was my father, he’d raped mom brutally right after her husband died, and had sworn to accuse her of embezzlement from the Church if she charged him with rape. He had the evidence since he was fleecing his flock himself you see. I was the product of that rape. He kept her in constant fear through the pregnancy, and used me, and my life, as a threat to avoid having to use force to rape her through the first few years that I was alive. He really did give her money, money that he had stolen from the Church, and had her convinced that she’d face felony charges if she ran. He owned her.
         
      When I was a few years old though, he told her that since I was his blood, that he would treat me as a son. From the tone of the letter, I suspect had he not done the things that he had for me that she may have run no matter the risk. But as it was, a caring father figure for me seemed worth the cost to her. She said that the sex she had to give him got less and less as time went by, and though she was miserable and ashamed she could endure so that I could have a relationship with my father, as twisted as that may seem. Everything might have worked out if she hadn’t looked in his private safe. 

    In that safe were photos. Photos of me, and of him. They were not rated for general admission. She told me in the letter where to find them in case I did not remember  the things that he did. I still don’t remember, though I know its true, all of it. Not only were there those photos, but there were also letters between him and an associate implicating the good Reverend in the car wreck that killed the man who should have been my father. My mother said in her letter that she knew then that she’d never be able to allow herself to live with the guilt of what she had allowed him to do to me, but that she had something to do first. She seduced him. Lingerie, wine, the works, and after he fell in to a wine assisted sleep, mom ran a hose from the exhaust of her neon to the Reverend’s window. She had to pack a bath towel around the sash to get a good seal, then let the car run for an hour. Since his bedroom was on the first floor of the rectory, it was simple, though hard, to roll his dead form onto a kitchen cart and roll him into the garage where Shakespeare and destiny awaited him. After that it was a simple process of savoring the revenge, and waiting for a night when I’d be out.

    The letter also told me where she had hidden two hundred thousand dollars in cash that she had taken from the Reverends safe that he’d stolen from the Church. Mom said she though he owed me that much, at least. What she owed me she could never repay. She said she told me so all of this so I’d beware and not be mishandled by evil people as she was, but instead make them fear me.

      Two hundred grand is a lot of jack for anybody, but it’s an awful lot for a nineteen year old kid. I had no idea what to do, I was the son of murders. I wandered around, drunk or high most of the time, trying to get away from the reality of my scared mind. I was a hard guy, not to be trifled with, shot a man when I was twenty in a drug deal. I invested that two k you see. That’s plenty to set up a dealership. I pimped. I thought that the underworld was where I belonged, where bad people did bad things. But I didn’t find bad people, just desperate ones, nobody like dear ol’ dad, or even mom for that matter. Then I started to realize that I had a duty, a duty to bring a little justice to people who’d been burned up like me, but who didn’t know it. I owe mom so very much for telling me the circumstances of my life, without that I’d never have known my destiny. Once I realized that the supposed criminals were not evil,  I looked higher on the food chain.

    That’s really how I got around to realizing that nasty people are all around, just not in the places that you’d expect. All that goodness out there must be hiding something, has to be really. Why else devote all that time to creating the image of goodness. Just because the crime can’t be seen, doesn’t mean punishment can be rescinded. That’s why I hunt the best; they have the most vileness hidden. I started small, as you know, but my game was always good sport.
You likely assume that you know all those that I judged, you don’t. As special as the cases that you do know about were, they were nowhere near as valuable as those that I reached in a more subtle manner. Wickedness isn’t something that I charge by degree, and so it does not matter what the exposure is so long as there is punishment for the true offense.

    It would, I think, stun you to learn just how many supposed pillars rot in cells similar to mine due to my gentle additions to the justice system, some in this very facility, facing my fate, guilty surely of horrendous acts, just not those they are charged with. With that I think its time to return to my cell.