The Alienist - Caleb Carr [183]
“No, no,” I answered quickly. “You’re only giving us a better understanding of the background, we quite understand that.”
Dury shot Laszlo another quick, skeptical look. “And you, Doctor? Do you quite understand, too? You haven’t had much to say.”
Kreizler kept very cool under Dury’s scrutiny. There was, I knew, little chance that this man of the earth was going to make so seasoned a madhouse campaigner as Kreizler uneasy. “I have been too absorbed to comment,” Laszlo said. “If you’ll allow me to say so, Mr. Dury, you are very well-spoken.”
Dury laughed once humorlessly. “For a farmer, you mean? Yes, that was my mother’s doing. She made us work at our school lessons for hours every night. I could both read and write before the age of five.”
Kreizler cocked his head in appreciation. “Laudable.”
“My knuckles didn’t think so,” Dury answered. “She used to come across them with a stick like—but once again, I’m off the subject. You wanted to know what became of my brother.”
“Yes,” I answered. “But before that, tell us—what sort of a boy was he? You’ve said odd—odd in what way?”
“Japheth?” Having secured the wheel to the manure spreader’s axle, Dury stood and laid hold of a large pole. “In what way was he not?…I suppose you couldn’t expect much more, from a child born out of anger and unwanted by both his parents. To my mother he was a symbol of my father’s savagery and lust, and to my father—to my father, much as he wanted more children, Japheth was always a symbol of his degradation, of that terrible night when desire made an animal of him.” Using the long pole, Dury knocked the piled rocks out from under the spreader’s axle, at which the machine fell to the earthern floor of the barn and rolled a few feet forward. Satisfied with his work, Dury took up a shovel and kept talking. “The world is full of pitfalls for a boy left on his own. I tried to give Japheth what help I could, but by the time he was old enough for us to be real friends I had been sent to work on a nearby farm and saw little of him. I knew that he was suffering all that I’d endured in that house, and even more. And I wished that I could have been more help.”
“Did he ever tell you,” I asked, “just what was happening?”
“No. But I saw some of it,” Dury said as he began to shovel manure from the floor of several livestock stalls into the spreader. “And on Sundays I’d try to spend time with him, and show him that there was much he could still enjoy about life, whatever happened at home. I taught him how to climb the mountains, and we spent whole days and nights up there. But in the end…In the end, I don’t believe that anyone could have counteracted my mother’s influence.”
“Was she—violent?”
Dury shook his head, and spoke in a voice that seemed judicious and honest. “I don’t think Japheth suffered in that way any more than I had. The occasional strap to the backside from my father, and nothing more. No, I believed then, and I still believe now, that my mother’s ways were far more—devious.” Dury laid his shovel aside, sat down on one of the large rocks that had supported the spreader, and took out a pouch of tobacco and a pipe. “I suppose, in a way, that I was luckier than Japheth, only because my mother’s feelings toward me had always taken the form of thorough indifference. But Japheth—it didn’t seem enough for her to merely deprive him of love.