had to offer. A few months later, he received a letter from O’Grady. The letter read as follows.
“I failed you. I failed you as I failed my wife and my son. I’m sorry. I pray that God will forgive me for what I’m planning to do as it is a great sin. I can no longer go on. My burden is too much for me to carry. Good bye.”
The Duke later heard that O’Grady had killed himself. It was a big story in the local paper there.
Thank God, the Duke thought, now that idiot will never talk. The Duke was safe now, to carry on as he saw fit.
Article XI: “Run, run, run away...”
Just as he thought she would, his cousin had bailed on him. Sam shook his head. Marion had once been so full of life. Marion was the oldest of them, with Sam next in line, and then James. She had been their leader. Marion always knew the latest music, and had saved up money from Christmas gifts and doing odd jobs around the village to buy a small portable radio. The radio was her constant companion. Marion had also been the one to teach him to fish, and the three of them, Marion, James and him, had spent many summers camping out at the various islands that surrounded their tiny village. She was the one who paddled them from island to island and navigated the ocean currents like a village elder. She was also not someone to be messed with. Sam’s nose never did set right after Marion broken it when he had tried to steal one her Spider-Man comic books. Their grandfather spoke very highly of her, and it was clear to all that she was his favorite. Though their grandfather spoke very little English, Sam had once overheard him say to one of his uncles in Abiectio, “Marion is an old soul: a soul too stubborn to join our ancestors. She has too much to do here.” It was pretty clear to all that if Marion had stayed in the village she would have been a force to be reckoned with. And, Sam thought, probably would have been running the place when all was said was done.
The problem was, and had always been, his aunt Ruthie. Ruthie, to put it kindly, was not the most stable person in the world. Ruthie had always said that Marion looked like her father. Who her father was, however, was a bit of a mystery. There were many candidates to choose from. Most of the men in the village had “known" Ruthie at one time or the other. Ruthie liked two things in this life. She liked booze and she liked men, and wasn’t too choosy about either. Her favorite kind of booze was whatever she could get her hands on, and her favorite kind of man pretty much fell into the same category. If Ruthie had been fat or ugly maybe that wouldn’t have been a problem. But, Ruthie was beautiful. The most beautiful girl in the village, and that was her curse. Ruthie left for the bright lights and big city of Seattle with one of the local village booze hounds, and as it turned out would never return. Much to the great relief of all the wives whose husbands admired Ruthie’s many charms. The collective thought among the village wives was good riddance.
Soon word got around the village that Ruthie had married a man named the Duke, and was sending for her children. Sam wouldn’t see his cousins again for almost five years. Not until after Ruthie died.
James was the one who told him what had happened. James had heard someone stomping loudly down the stairs. That wasn’t much of a surprise. The Duke, his stepdad in name only, loved to stomp up and down the stairs especially late at night when everyone was trying to sleep.
“He was weird, you know,” James confessed, “he was like a little kid. He always needed attention. I remember he used to watch Monday night football, and he would crank up the TV volume as loud as possible. We would be trying sleep because we had to get up for the school the next day, and he would be yelling and screaming at the top of his lungs while the game was on. I hate football to this day because of that asshole.”
A few minutes later, James hears someone stomp back up the stairs. Now it was about eight AM on a Saturday morning. Neither James nor Marion watched Saturday morning cartoons anymore. They had tried to watch the new Fantastic Four cartoon once, and the Duke had screamed at them for nearly an hour, even after the cartoon ended, about watching a cartoon with a gay fucking robot. H.E.R.B.I.E the robot was stupid, both James and Marion agreed on this, and a poor replacement for the Human Torch, but that was beside the point. So nobody wanted to get up and see what was going on. James figured the Duke was on a tear, and wanted no part of it.
James heard his mom and the Duke talking. They were probably having a fight, but surprisingly the Duke wasn’t screaming at her at the top his lungs as he normally did. Instead he spoke in a harsh whisper. Then their bedroom door opened. It was eerily quiet for a few seconds. Suddenly he heard his mom scream. This was followed by several loud thumps down the stairs. James lay in his bed, not wanting to get up. His curiosity was getting the better of him, but he was still too afraid to see what was going on.
Almost at the same time as he heard his mom scream, the doorbell rang. Then someone was pounding on the door. He heard someone, the Duke, he thought, run down the stairs.
Someone was still pounding on the front door and ringing the bell. Finally James couldn’t take it anymore. He opened his bedroom door, and walked out of his room. The first thing he saw was all these little green army men dumped over all the top of stairs. The kind of toys you could get at the store for 50 cents a bag.
Marion was out of her room now. She peered over the stair railing, and then screamed at James to go back to his room. James started to protest, but Marion screamed at him again. He knew something was wrong. So he pretended to go back to his room as Marion started down the stairs, doing her best to avoid all the toy army men on her descent. Since their stairs curved half way down, he couldn’t see the bottom. The only way you could see the bottom is if you looked over the railing to the living room below. Since a teenage growth spurt was at least a year away, James still had to stand on the bottom rung of the rail and look down. He wished he hadn’t. His mom was there at the bottom of the stairs. She wasn’t moving. Her neck was bent in a weird angle that wouldn’t have been possible if she were still alive. James had seen enough horror movies to know that his mom was dead.
Marion had opened the front door, and two policemen filed in.
The police called for backup. Then they separated James and Marion into two different rooms to question them in private. James told them the story as he would relate it to his cousin Sam a few months later.
It turned out that the police were there to ask the Duke some follow up questions about a break in at the college, and their arrival seconds after Ruthie’s death was just a remarkable coincidence.
As for the Duke...
...the only clue was that the back door was left wide open. There were some shoe prints in the wet grass outside, but that was about it.
Sam had been part of what happened next. A social worker called their grandfather. His grandfather did what he always did when a white person spoke English to him. He told them to contact his son Benjamin then hung up the phone. Ben was Sam’s dad. Sam was home when he got the call. He heard his dad sobbing in the kitchen, which scared him. His dad was a very traditional Native, and rarely showed much emotion.
“Ruthie’s dead.” His dad cried. “They think she’s been murdered.”
Sam waited a few minutes to let his dad calm down, and then asked about Marion and James.
“I need to go down to Seattle and pick them up.”
Sam asked if he could go. Sam was about 16 at this time— old enough to be considered a man. In the village you grow up fast. His dad did something he had never done before, and would never do again. He hugged his son.
They rode the ferry down with their truck. It was about a four day ride. Neither of them said very much on the way down. When they hit Bellingham, they drove the rest of the way to Seattle. Marion and James were staying with a neighbor named Keith and his wife.
His dad wasn’t very comfortable talking to white people, so Sam did most of the talking.
“I never liked how he treated those kids, especially Marion” Keith said. “We used to hear him screaming all the time.”
&nbs
p; Yeah, Sam thought, but you never did anything about it, did you.
The men packed up a few things from the house. Marion waited in the truck. Most of it belonged to the Duke, and the Duke was very stingy with his money except for groceries. So there weren’t many personal things to pack. Sam asked Marion if she still wanted her comic books or the portable radio. She simply shook her head, and continued to stare out the window at nothing in particular. Sam packed them up anyway, and put them in the truck. They left everything else to be sold at state auction including the house, and headed home.
Marion, in the five years since he’d seen her last, had grown up to be quite beautiful. Even more so than her mom, Sam thought. But, there was something broken inside of her. She rarely spoke now. When she did it was in a nervous sort of way. Like everything she said scared her. She hated being touched, especially by men. She would often cringe or back away if anyone went near her. When people came over to visit, she would run and hide in her room. Music didn’t follow his cousin everywhere anymore. The girl who came to stay with Sam and his family wasn’t the same one he remembered all those years back. Marion existed, but she didn’t live. She simply went through the motions of life.
When he was 19, Sam