whatever he was about to say. She remembered the small boy who’d been picked on and the big brother who’d defended him, and her heart ached more than she thought possible. She reached across and took his hand in hers.
“Don’t tell me if you don’t want to. You’re my brother, and nothing you say or don’t say will change that.” She was silent for a long while before she spoke again. “We’re family, Virgil. I lost you once, but I’m not going to lose you again. Mama was right in wanting a better life for us, but she was wrong in thinking we’d be better off apart.”
“I honestly don’t know if she was or wasn’t. She thought for sure Martha Mae knew where Daddy was that night and figured if we were scattered around there’d be nobody left but her to blame.”
Margaret wanted to ask what blame he was talking about, but she didn’t. After a few minutes, Virgil began speaking.
“Do you remember in Barrettsville that night when Mama fell down the steps and broke a couple of her ribs?”
When Margaret sat there looking puzzled, he continued. “It was not long before we came back to Coal Creek; A month or two at most.”
Margaret nodded. “Oh, yes, now I do.”
“Well, all along, Oliver didn’t believe Mama had fallen down the stairs. He thought her being hurt was Daddy’s doing. Then that next night, she went around twice to make sure the door and windows were locked. Oliver figured she was scared of something and suspected it was Daddy.”
“Why?”
Virgil shrugged. “He’d been in an ugly mood the night before, and everybody knew if he got drunk he was capable of most anything. Anyway, Oliver and Ben Roland decided to keep watch that night to make sure nothing happened to Mama or us younger kids. Since the house was locked up tight, Oliver expected Daddy to come banging on the front door. Nobody knew he had a key, so nobody heard him come in. When he started up the stairs, I was coming down. That’s when all hell broke loose.”
“What do you mean?”
For a moment Virgil was quiet, almost as though he was picturing how it happened.
“I was in the way; Daddy shoved me, and I started screaming. He pushed me down the steps, and then he saw Oliver coming at him. They fought, and there was a lot of yelling and banging around. I was still dazed from the fall and honestly couldn’t say who was getting the best of who. But I did hear the shot. When I looked up, Ben Roland was standing on the upstairs landing with Mama’s shotgun in his hand.”
Margaret’s eyes went wide, and her words grew wobbly. “He…shot Daddy?”
Virgil nodded, then doubled over, covering his face. When he finally spoke again, his voice was thick with emotion.
“Daddy was always so hurtful to me that I’d wished him dead a million or more times, but seeing him there on the staircase with blood all over his face was something I never…”
Margaret moved closer and wrapped her arm around his trembling shoulders. “It was an accident. Wishing somebody dead doesn’t mean—”
Lifting his face, he turned to look at her. “I’m not crying for myself, Margaret, I’m crying for Ben Roland. My screaming was what made him fire the gun.”
“You don’t know that. He was probably just trying to scare—”
Virgil shook his head. “You know Ben Roland could shoot the eye out of an eagle if he wanted to. He shot to kill.”
They sat there for a long time, brother and sister wrapped in a blanket of silence, the swing no longer moving. As the sun ducked in and out behind a bank of clouds, Virgil went on to tell how Oliver and Ben Roland put their daddy’s body in the wagon, rolled it down to the river, and watched him float away.
“None of us were the same after that. It was as if a piece of us died that night right along with Daddy.”
Margaret’s eyes grew teary as she listened to Virgil tell of how their mama had sworn all three boys to secrecy. All of a sudden, her constant fearfulness even when they returned to Coal Creek made sense. Although Virgil never said it outright, Margaret knew if the police did trace Martin to their door their mama would have claimed she was the one responsible for his death.
“Even though Mama told us to never speak of it again, we did when it was just the