The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [203]
It was this version of the story Clark told Annie on the hot summer night of her freshman year at Annapolis, when she’d asked him why Sam didn’t talk about her parents. A few years later Jack confessed the truth about the judge’s death to Sam and Sam confessed the truth to Clark as he was recovering from his own car accident. She told no one else.
As Clark lay in the ICU, critically injured, Sam had phoned Jack with the sad news that Clark might die. A few weeks later Jack suddenly showed up in Emerald, only a day after Annie had left to return to classes. Clark had survived and was recovering. It was then that Jack told his sister a different version of the story, a confession that he had covered up the evidence that their mother had murdered their father. He said that he’d fabricated their father’s suicide in order to spare Sam the ordeal of her mother’s arrest. He said that he’d found Grandee that night, sitting on the floor with the judge’s bloody head in her lap, his skull broken open. He said that he’d wrapped his father in a rug and carried him to the car. He wrote the suicide note himself, forging his father’s handwriting, and left it on the table in the hall.
He told Sam how, as he drove off with their father’s body to the top of River Road, the car slipped sideways in the smear of mud that switchbacked along the hill above the river. Rain and wind thrashed the black trees. The car skidded onto the shoulder, scraping against scrub brush. He was almost on top of the fallen telephone pole before he spotted it and slammed his foot to the brake. The telephone pole lay tangled in live sparking wires, blocking the road at its sharpest curve above the black river.
He said it was as if the storm was telling him what to do. He pulled the body out of the sedan, rolled it out of the bloody rug and propped it up in the front seat. Then he steered the running car toward the shoulder’s edge, almost sliding off the soft bank, and at the last second, jumped clear. He’d seen it done in the movies.
The roiling red current carried the car along, floating it in the churn like a raft, until he’d nearly despaired that it would ever sink. But finally the river sucked it under.
Carrying the bloody rug, he walked back to Pilgrim’s Rest. The storm scudded away and sullen clouds crept into the sky.
He burned the rug and put the bloody kitchen mallet he’d pulled from his mother’s hand into the dishwasher with the supper dishes.
Judge Peregrine’s funeral was the biggest at St. Mark’s since the funeral of his grandfather, “The Boss.” The judge was buried next to his dead son Johnny. Sam sent out the invitations, cooked the food, and cleaned the house for the reception. Three hundred people attended, including the lieutenant governor.
Jack refused to come to the funeral. Instead he robbed the house and drove off in Grandee’s Mercedes. Sam was left to take care of their mother. It was only after Grandee stabbed Sam in the arm with scissors that she’d been persuaded to have her mother institutionalized. But until Grandee died, Sam went daily to see her, even when, propped like a doll on her bed and fumbling with the wrappers of candy, Grandee had no idea who Sam was.
More than a year passed. One day “out of the blue,” Sam would say, “like Gary Cooper in Now and Forever,” Jack returned home with the baby Annie and the airplane he’d named the King of the Sky. Grandee was in the hospital at the time, having one of her “episodes,” and her son did not go to see her during his month-long stay.
Years later, when he returned with the seven-year-old Annie, Sam told him their mother was dead, although he hadn’t asked.
Sam took care of Annie until the girl went away to college at Annapolis. Sam tried her best to make sure that Annie had, as far as childhoods go, a happy one.
***
Clark was standing beside Sam’s bed when she awakened. His white lab coat appeared to her to be billowing, wriggly. A black head with a white topknot peeked out and Teddy barked.
“You can’t bring dogs in here,” Sam mumbled.
Clark spilled Teddy onto