have come from about an hour ago?”
I died.
But I didn’t die.
• • •
Father knew exactly where it had come from. He had heard the bang. He had seen me at the top of the ladder in the cupola, with the Springfield in my arms.
He made a wet hiss, sucking in air through his clenched teeth. It is the sound stoics make when they have been hurt a good deal. He said, “Oh, Jesus.”
“Yes,” said Morissey. And everything about his manner said that no possible good could come from our being made to suffer for this unfortunate accident, which could have happened to anyone. He, for one, would do all in his power to make whatever we had done somehow understandable and acceptable to the community. Perhaps, even, we could convince the community that the bullet had come from somewhere else.
We certainly didn’t have the only .30-caliber rifle in town.
I myself began to feel a little better. Here was this wise and powerful adult, the chief of police, no less, and he clearly believed that I had done no bad thing. I was unlucky. I would never be that unlucky again. That was for sure.
I took a deep breath. That was for sure.
11
SO EVERYTHING was going to be okay.
And Father’s life and Mother’s life and my life would have been okay, I firmly believe, if it weren’t for what Father did next.
He felt that, given who he was, he had no option other than to behave nobly. “The boy did it,” he said, “but it is I who am to blame.”
“Now, just a minute, Otto—” Morissey cautioned him.
But Father was off and running, into the house, shouting to Mother and Mary Hoobler and anybody else who could hear him, “I am to blame! I am to blame!”
And more police came, not meaning to arrest me or Father, or to even question us, but simply to report to Morissey. They certainly weren’t going to do anything mean, unless Morissey told them to.
So they heard Father’s confession, too: “I am to blame!”
• • •
What, incidentally, was a pregnant mother of two doing, operating a vacuum cleaner on Mother’s Day? She was practically asking for a bullet between the eyes, wasn’t she?
• • •
Felix missed all the fun, of course, since he was on a troop bus bound for Georgia. He had been put in charge of his particular bus, because of his commanding vocal cords—but that was pretty small stuff compared to what Father and I were doing.
And Felix has made surprisingly few comments over the years on that fateful Mother’s Day. Just now, though, here in Haiti, he said to me, “You know why the old man confessed?”
“No,” I said.
“It was the first truly consequential adventure Ufe had ever offered him. He was going to make the most of it. At last something was happening to him! He would keep it going as long as he could!”
• • •
Father really did make quite a show of it. Not only did he make an unnecessary confession, but then he took a hammer and a prybar and a chisel, and the machete I had used on the chickens, and he went clumping upstairs to the gun-room door. He himself had a key, but he didn’t use it. He hacked and smashed the lock away.
Everybody was too awed to stop him.
And never, may I say, would the moment come when he would give the tiniest crumb of guilt to me. The guilt was all his, and would remain entirely, exclusively his for the rest of his life. So I was just another bleak and innocent onlooker, along with Mother and Mary Hoobler and Chief Morissey, and maybe eight small-city cops.
He broke all his guns, just whaled away at them in their racks with the hammer. He at least bent or dented all of them. A few old-timers shattered. What would those guns be worth today, if Felix and I had inherited them? I will guess a hundred thousand dollars or more.
Father ascended the ladder into the cupola, where I had been so recently. He there accomplished what Marco Marítimo later said should have been impossible for one man with such small and inappropriate tools. He cut away the base of the cupola, and he capsized it. It twisted free from its last few feeble moorings, and it went bounding down the slate roof, and it went crashing, weather vane and all, onto Chief Morrisey’s police car in the driveway below.
There was silence after that.
I and