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Jeanine Collins Malarsky, The Writing Cheekin
Category:
Literary Fiction
Publisher: Amazon/KDP
ISBN-10: 1080586105
Type: Fiction
Pages: 220
Copyright: January 11, 2020
ISBN-13: 9781080586103
Price: $6.99 (eBook)
'Unworthy' unveils the tragedy of religious hypocrisy and the damage done to our mental and emotional health when doctrine is delivered without compassion and love.
In a small town northwest of Boston, Pastor Keller’s three grown children are caught in a web of secrets and murder. With time to uncover the truth running out, egos collide and love struggles to survive as Detective D’nardo delves into their sad and twisted lives. While one sister sacrifices herself to save the other, their brother tries to protect the family he once believed was ideal. Part of the truth lies hidden in a family Bible. But who has the key? Part of the truth comes softly in a child’s song. Who will sing it?
Excerpt
Chapter 1
A Brass Key
Vengeance was the last thing on Rachel Vogel’s mind as she tied her apron strings securely behind her back and pulled her new canister vacuum from the utility closet in the kitchen. Tugged by its hose, the sleek, pearl gray machine followed her, its small plastic wheels clicking over the patterned linoleum floor. She smiled to herself as she recalled her mother’s old Electrolux gliding along on its chrome runners, the exhaust hole in its butt spewing the smell of ancient dust. Her smile faded as she remembered choking on the filthy dust cloud when she had to empty the old fabric bag, reaching her arm up inside to invert the bag and beat it against the foundation of the house. She was so grateful that her husband Butch had allowed her to buy this updated model with its retractable cord, vibrating carpet head, and disposable dust bags.
She frowned momentarily as she navigated the dining room, its scarred wood floor in desperate need of a carpet. In the Lord’s good time, she comforted herself. She plugged the vacuum cleaner cord into an outlet in the living room wall next to the low bookcase. Her eyes passed over the three shelves of books, used, but treasured. As she stepped on the round gray button, the motor roared to life and her thoughts strayed to Butch over at the church, working with a crew of faithful members who had volunteered to paint the basement rooms over the weekend. She could see why he was well liked: he never refused to help.
She directed the thrumming cleaner head with its pulsing rubber rollers over the fern and floral pattern of the carpet, taking care not to scuff the legs of the furniture, though most of it was used, some from her parents and some from other church members willing to help young families get established.
Rachel unconsciously averted her eyes from the three paintings on the walls, all wedding gifts from her father: a wind-torn young woman rowing a boat into a storm, three frightened horses rearing back from lightning bolts aimed toward their eyes, and a yellow-tinted blackish painting of a dying Indian. Her father had insisted she hang them where they could be seen and admired. But she’d learned to not see them; she hated them.
She did her household chores with great care this sunny morning of July 11th, 1976. The fatigue from sleep deprivation that had been gnawing away at her core for the past six months gave way to happy memories of the day trip Butch and she had taken the day before.
As she vacuumed and reminisced about the previous day, she began to hum This Little Light of Mine, a tune she treasured from her childhood. Like a loving couple they had strolled through Faneuil Hall snacking on yogurt and fresh strawberries. Then they had joined thousands of residents and tourists near the New England Aquarium to watch the USS Constitution lead the Tall Ships parade through Boston Harbor to celebrate the bicentennial of the United States of America.
She cherished her memories of yesterday, clutching them close inside her as she bent to vacuum under the couch. Butch had been so light-hearted and considerate, escorting her gallantly across streets, wiping bits of yogurt off her face and calling her his little owl, like he’d done during the short weeks of their courtship.
“Won’t let Satan blow it out,” Rachel sang softly as she shoved the vacuum cleaner away with her foot and vacuumed around the coffee table. “What’s that?” she asked herself out loud as a rattling sound rose from the vibrating rollers. Instinctively her foot found the gray off button and the motor wound down into silence. She stooped over, lifted the cleaning head and shook it. A tiny brass object fell to the carpet, catching a ray of mid morning sun pouring through the open window.
She plucked the small key from the green nylon fibers of the carpet where it had been hiding and stood up, turning it over and over in her hand and studying it closely. Unlike any other surface in her home, it was blemished by spots of rust. This must be the key to Butch’s family Bible she thought. I wonder if he knows he’s lost it.
She stepped over the vacuum hose and took a seat on the faded crushed velvet couch, locking her gaze on the thick antique Bible in the center of the coffee table. With its worn tooled leather covers it looked more like a leprosy victim than a treasured heirloom.
“It’s the only thing I have left of my mother,” Butch had told her when he’d brought it home three years before. “When I leaf through the pages and see her entries for her marriage and my birth, the ink black and fresh against the older entries in fading brown, it brings tears to my eyes.”
He’d placed the Bible gently on the coffee table and said, “I’d like to keep it here where I can see it every day. It’s all I have left to remember her by.”
“May I look through it with you?” Rachel had asked, noting the wide strap with its brass clasp was securely locked.
“You know how my mother died,” Butch had said, his eyes tearing up as he’d looked into her eyes for understanding. “I’m not ready to share this with anyone yet. Perhaps another time.”
Rachel grasped the tiny key between her thumb and forefinger, closed one eye and peered into the minute hollow barrel. She stared at the Bible and back at the innocuous key. What harm could come from just a peek? Oh, no, I mustn’t. I’ll just lay the key here and tell Butch about it. She placed the key carefully on top of the Bible and drew her hand back. She stared at the key. Just a little peek. As though speed would negate her sin, she leaned forward swiftly, grabbed the key and inserted it into the brass lock. With a quick turn of her wrist the metal clasp fell away.
Through the dull roar of trepidation that beat against her eardrums, she could still hear the soft music from a religious program on the radio in the kitchen. She didn’t listen closely to the Sunday morning sermons that radiated their exhortations to obey God and love thy neighbor, but she liked to tune in so she could enjoy the choral music and the powerful, deep-throated organs that echoed through the great churches that broadcast their sermons.
She gently lifted the thick cover, feeling as though she were invading the most intimate parts of her husband. Guilt threatened to attenuate her courage, reminding her that sneaking behind her husband’s back was against his explicit instructions. It was also against God’s wishes. It was a sin to violate Butch’s privacy. Perhaps the Bible’s contents will bring us closer, she argued with herself. I know so little about him. The emotional chasm between them since the day they’d been married had always haunted her thoughts. Now it teased her to continue.
The marbled paper that lined the inside of the padded cover and formed the first page was yellowed, causing the maroon swirls to look like smears of very old, dried blood. She leafed through the first few pages, brittle with age and browned on the edges, like they’d been singed with a match.
Funny, she thought, furrowing her forehead into thin ripples and squinting her eyes at the faded ink as she scanned the first page of family events. No Vogels listed. Silly me, she chided herself. Look at the dates. Of course, I wouldn’t even know his grandmother’s maiden name. Rachel leafed through two more pages of marriages, deaths, births…1910? That’s the last entry? Where is Butch’s family, his mother's birth, his own birth?
Rachel shifted her knees aside, pulled the heavy book closer to her and began flipping through Genesis, pages at a time. She saw the begats, as her father called them, and smiled when she skimmed across Methuselah’s genealogy and spotted Enoch’s name. Her brother had been named Enoch because of the biblical Enoch’s righteousness. Methuselah’s father Enoch had not seen death. He’d walked with God, which her father had explained meant: He’d been so perfect that God had taken him to heaven without allowing Enoch to experience death. I wonder if my brother will see death, she pondered. He wasn’t far from a saint himself.
She tried to ignore the throbbing in her head as she flipped into Exodus, choosing an obvious break in the splayed pages. The old stitched spine creaked as the book flattened to reveal its contents before her on the low table. A colored 8” x 10” photograph of a little girl lay exposed in the sunlight, the child’s alluring smile gazing up at Rachel. Rachel did not smile in return. She instinctively reached out to snatch the picture to destroy it, but withdrew her hand as though a poison adder had sprung from the pages and sunk its fangs into her blue-veined wrist.
A muffled cry rose from Rachel’s constricted throat as she tried to reach forward again. More than anything in the world, Rachel wanted to pull her eyes away from the picture and run back in time, to breakfast this morning, to yesterday on the wharf, anywhere but here with her eyes riveted on the innocent child’s rosy cheeks above the gauzy lilac camisole, the bare abdomen, the slim, undeveloped hips, and her tiny fingers spreading open the lips of her dewy vulva.
The dull roar in Rachel’s ears became a crashing wall of waves bludgeoning her brain, blocking her hearing and blinding her sight. Grasping her heaving stomach, Rachel raced through the dining room, smashed the bathroom door back against the wall and threw the toilet seat upright. With trembling hands she grasped the sides of the cool porcelain bowl, dropped to her knees, and thrust her face downward. She vomited so forcefully that the diluted mixture below splashed upwards and bathed her burning cheeks and perspiring forehead.
With her elbows akimbo, Rachel bowed lower and retched, spewing her breakfast in great gobs of pancake lumps that bobbed fitfully in the blueberry stained water.
As her body disgorged her breakfast, deeper inside, her latent memories—acquiescent from years of smothering and denial—began to disgorge their secrets; horrible secrets, ugly secrets, excruciatingly painful secrets.
She wiped her mouth with fat wads of toilet paper. She flushed the toilet and sat back on her heels to slow the tremors that shook her body. With another wad of toilet paper she swiped at the bits of blue slime clinging to the sides of her shoulder length hair. She cried out as disgust and nausea rolled through her body again. She bent forward and vomited until dry heaves racked her ribs and she could expel no more.
Exhaustion held her prisoner on the bathroom floor, crumpled in a heap beside the toilet. She wept until her tear ducts ran dry, then pushed herself upwards and slithered closer to a wall where she could lean and gasp for breath. She grabbed a towel hanging above her head and rolled over on her hands and knees, using the wet toilet rim to help herself stand up.
When she had completed washing herself and cleaning up the floor around the toilet, she returned to the living room, gripping chairs and touching walls to support her efforts to stay upright. Like a rat drawn to the trap by the smell of fresh cheese, Rachel sat down on the couch, leaned over the shabby Bible and methodically paged through the huge volume, sobbing quietly as she studied each pornographic picture.
Though the girls were a cross-section of races, mostly Caucasian, they were all very young, somewhere in the range of three years to perhaps six. Waves of pain and tortured memories washed through her head as she turned to each succeeding picture. Near the last third of the Bible, her already stunned and shocked mind encountered more than she could have imagined, Polaroid pictures of Charlotte, the little girl upstairs. A slight paralysis held her frozen in time and space as she studied the poses of the angelic, blond-haired child, her intense blue eyes gazing in trust, giving the camera its fair share of her enigmatic smile.
Charlotte’s mother and father had rented the upstairs apartment for the past five years. Charlotte’s father went away in the Navy for months at a time. When he was between jobs, Butch had always been kind and accommodating to her, volunteering to baby-sit and making it possible for her to run errands or have an occasional evening out. Charlotte’s mother had called Butch, “Sweet”. Yes, Rachel thought as she stared at the little girl’s picture, everyone loved Butch.
Rachel closed the Bible and carefully locked it. She slipped the key into the deep pocket of her apron and looked around the room, now unfamiliar to her, expanding and contracting as she tried to focus.
Three ceramic birds perched on the top of her bookcase rose and fell in her vision like gulls tossed about on stormy waves. Rachel tried to steady her focus on the tin flue cover on the far wall that Butch had painted over when he’d painted the living room two years before. The fluted cover blended in with the tan wall, barely noticeable, yet still reminiscent of the brass flue covers in her parents’ home when she’d been little. She winced and shook her head. Being little had hurt. Her brain felt soggy, like thick oozy mud. She could barely think.
The overwhelming urge welling up inside her was to not exist, an old feeling to which she had never found a solution. “The Lord never gives us more than we can bear,” she reminded herself in a soft murmur. As though navigating a foreign space, Rachel rose from the couch, grasped the wands and hose and began pulling the vacuum back toward the kitchen. Half way through the dining room, she let her shoulders slump, dropped the wands and hose and stumbled into the bedroom she shared with Butch. Tears welled up again as she looked at the neatly made bed where she had tried to be a good wife. She had failed miserably.
She pulled the bedspread back and folded it carefully, laying it on the faded rose boudoir chair as was her habit each evening. She fell on the bed weeping. How much of her life had she longed for surcease of pain, for the peace that passed all understanding as promised in the Bible? She longed for solace, for comfort. Never, not since she’d been very young, had anyone been there to help her bear her cross. She lay on her side and stared at the small chair, thinking back to the auction where she had purchased it for a dollar. Her mother, Willa, had encouraged her to buy it.
Yes, Willa, her mother, had gone to the auction with her.
She closed her eyes and pictured her mother. Willa Keller was a homemaker, mother of three, minister’s wife, church organist, and piano teacher. For Rachel, Willa was a shell; never really there, not when Rachel had needed her. Rachel buried her tear-stained face in the pale green pillowcase and prayed she would never wake up. Though her mother had never shared her inner feelings with her children, Rachel sensed that her mother had also felt this way most of her life, spending endless hours at the church practicing the organ or hiding away from her family in the darkened bedroom, weeping or pretending to be asleep. “Just a little sinking spell,” she’d tell her children when they knocked on her bedroom door after school. “I’ll get up later and fix supper. Please peel the potatoes and scrape the carrots.”
No, Rachel told herself: Willa was no help.
She couldn’t talk with her father, even though he was a minister. Weren’t ministers kind and loving people? And I do love him deeply, she hurried to remind herself. But she’d never felt comfortable with her father. Fresh tears flowed onto the pillowcase.
What about her siblings?
All through his childhood her older brother had been committed to the ministry. But after his marriage failed he had become a policeman. On occasion she and Enoch talked but when the discussion turned to family and more personal things, she changed the subject. Enoch had introduced her to Butch and she was ashamed to admit she wasn’t happy. No doubt Enoch would blame her like Butch did.
And Jessie, her younger sister? Smart, energetic, but impetuous, and so defiant. “She kicks against the pricks,” their father said of Jessie’s resistant behavior. “She’ll burn in hell the way she’s going.” Rachel often defended her thoughtless sister though she too had caught the lash of her unkind words and self-centered behavior.
Once Jessie had moved into her own place in Boston, she’d had little time for home and family. If Willa asked, Jessie would join them for Sabbath dinner, proof that she did have a kind heart. Maybe, this one time, I could talk with her. Rachel’s head pounded as she propped herself up on an elbow and reached for the bedside phone. Maybe this once.
When Rachel heard Jessie’s cheery message on the answering machine, she almost hung up. Instead she stayed on the line long enough to leave a brief message saying her call wasn’t important and not to worry. She’d been right; there was no one she could talk to. She must carry her own cross. That’s what she’d been taught. That’s what she would do.
Chapter 2
Exit Into Madness
“What the hell are you doing in bed at this hour?” Butch yelled at Rachel from the bedroom doorway. “Where’s my supper?” He came closer to the bed and reached out for the phone. Rachel winced. “You can’t even hang up a fucking phone. How long’s it been off the hook?”
“I fell asleep.” Rachel spoke faintly as she forced her swollen eyelids fully open. She pulled her hand from under the pillow and brushed her wispy brown hair off her face. The air felt stifling. Dust motes danced in the low slanting rays of the late afternoon sun.
“I paint God-damn ceilings all day and come home to a lazy bitch who can’t move the vacuum cleaner out of the way. I broke my neck tripping over the fucking hose.” He returned to his position in the doorway. As was his custom, Butch didn’t look Rachel in the eye. He either looked over her head or to the side as he was doing now. “And the house stinks. What’s been going on here?” This last question was addressed to the balls along the top of the cheap brass headboard.
Rachel sat upright and tried to collect her thoughts. Butch’s harsh words were familiar, his nasty tone, his condemnatory attack; it helped restore her mind to the present.
“I thought you guys were going to play softball when you finished painting,” she said. She slid off the bed and slipped past Butch, going into the bathroom to wash her face and comb her hair.
“We lost,” he said through the closed bathroom door. “I’m hungry and it looks like you haven’t even started cooking.”
“I’ll be right out,” Rachel said through the door.
“Well you’d better hurry.” Butch’s snarl penetrated the bathroom walls, loud and clear above the running water in the sink. “You promised me chicken cacciatore and I don’t see a damned thing going in the kitchen. You can’t cook that in five minutes.” He returned to the kitchen, grabbed his catcher’s mitt and softball from the table and stormed out to the back room where he stashed them high on a shelf.
Rachel avoided looking at Butch as she quickly reached through the kitchen doorway and took the heavy cast-iron skillet from its hook on the wall near the washing machine. Though cast-iron had its role in her cookery, she had relegated the dull black skillets to a wall in the back room where they wouldn’t detract from her collection of shiny stainless steel and copper pans on display in her kitchen.
She placed the skillet on the large front burner and went to the refrigerator to get the package of chicken. When Butch reentered the kitchen, he banged the door into Rachel’s back as she poked around on the shelves, looking for the thawed chicken. She closed the refrigerator door and gave Butch a frantic glance then opened the freezer door and spotted the white package with the black grease pencil label. She closed the freezer door and looked at Butch in dismay. “I’m sorry, Butch. I forgot to set the chicken out to thaw this morning.”
She backed away from the refrigerator and ran her hands down the front of her wrinkled apron in an attempt to control their trembling. Her thin cotton dress added to her fragile appearance. The fear in her eyes was an invitation to Butch’s aggressive nature and drew him closer to her.
“What do you mean, you forgot?” He reached out and pushed her back against the sink.
“I said, I forgot.” Rachel tried to stand straighter and move away. “I’m very sorry. Maybe we can eat the meatloaf left over from Friday night.” She tried to duck around Butch and return to the refrigerator. “I think we have some mashed potatoes left also, and I can make up a nice salad.”
“You sniveling, lazy bitch,” Butch said as he grabbed her left arm and tried to turn her to face him. “Rotting in bed, whimpering and crying about how you can’t sleep anymore and how hard you work.” Rachel tried to free herself but as she turned away, Butch twisted her arm behind her back and started to press upwards on her wrist. Tears scalded her reddened and swollen eyes; pain exploded through her shoulder. She tried to wrench herself free just as Butch launched her across the kitchen. She bounced off the table and crashed into the tall baker’s rack where she stored her carefully shined and polished cookware. She grabbed an upper shelf.
The baker’s rack fell forward, emptying its shelves in a cascade of clanging metal. The pots banged and bounced on the floor as Rachel lost her balance and tumbled among them, landing on her twisted arm. Pain shot through her shoulder like a knife ripping through silk.
“Stop it,” she whimpered, letting her head droop as she grasped her injured arm. The sensation of oozing mud she’d felt in her brain earlier in the day returned, thickening and solidifying. The kitchen grew darker. Thunderous waves beat against her ears.
Rachel dragged herself toward the stove, pushing the pots out of her way. She grasped a chair and hoisted herself unsteadily to her feet and leaned back against the stove.
Butch grabbed his newspaper off the counter where he’d thrown it earlier and headed for a chair at the kitchen table. He gave Rachel a little smirk and said, “I’ll read the paper while I wait. Heat up the meatloaf.” He turned his back to her and dropped into a chair. “Hurry up,” he said. “I’m starved.”
Rachel slumped against the stove and stared at the back of Butch’s bent head, noticing each tiny brown hair of his crew cut and the robust muscles of his neck, shoulders and upper arms. Though he’d been out of the army for ten years, he still maintained a military haircut and exercised daily. She turned toward the stove but was stopped short by searing pain in her left arm. She braced herself against the stove with her right hand and stared down into the blackness of the iron skillet she wouldn’t be needing to cook the chicken.
She took a deep breath and grasped the heavy skillet with her right hand. She must return it to its hook in the back room. As she began to turn away from the stove, a great charge of energy rushed through her body tensing her muscles into a taut spring. She lifted the cast-iron skillet and let it swing away from her body like the ball on a medieval flail. Light as a ballerina in a dance of death, Rachel gracefully swung the skillet in a low arc and crashed it into the side of Butch’s head.
The impact with Butch’s skull sent fresh waves of pain through Rachel’s body, but she couldn’t feel them. As though in a trance, she watched Butch slump sideways and tumble out of his chair, sprawling face down among the scattered pots and pans.
The oozing sludge in her brain pressed more heavily but she knew it was important to return the skillet to its hook. As the uneven embroidered words on her first sampler, now hanging on her kitchen wall, read, “A Place For Everything and Everything in its Place”. She looked at the sampler hanging by the utility closet, then down at the pool of blood flowing from her husband’s head. The blood spread out into threadlike fingers following the depressions in the geometric pattern of the pale linoleum; like a river fanning out across its delta, she thought. Again, searching for a reference to the familiar, she turned her gaze to the other sampler she’d embroidered a year later. “Cleanliness is Next to Godliness”.
Vaguely reassured of her bearings, Rachel stepped around Butch’s body and went out to the back room. She restored the skillet to its sturdy hook, untied her apron and carefully hung it on its nail near the iron cookware.
She returned to the kitchen and turned off the radio that had been playing softly since morning. She pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, placed her elbows on the table and dropped her chin into her hands. Staring at the worn boomerang pattern on the dull Formica surface, she let her eyes go out of focus and loosened the tenuous grip on her last thread of sanity.
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