Lineage (27 page)

“
Schindler’s List
,” Lance said as he took another sip of his whiskey.

“That’s it,” John said, pointing at him. “He did something like that. I think it was your grandparents’ way of doing what they could without fully revolting and getting killed. But they weren’t able to keep it up for long. The local SS somehow figured out what was going on. They came and executed all the Jews Erwin had working for him. They cut him too, your grandfather. Cut his face really bad. I only saw him once without the mask he usually wore. They took his nose right off, along with his upper lip too. It was horrible to look at. The way he told it, they wanted to make an example out of him, show every other German what would happen if they helped the Jews. So when the war was over, he and Annette came to
America
and eventually ended up here. They still had some money after selling their land, and Erwin started a little shipping line of his own with only two small boats to haul ore out of
Duluth
. After five years, he owned one of the largest lines in the city. That was about when your father was born.”

Lance stiffened and clenched his jaw. Up until this point, he had known nothing of his father’s history, and hadn’t dared to ask when he had still been alive. His mother had avoided questions about anything that resembled the past, so he had grown up oblivious to his lineage.

“I know this is a delicate subject with you, son, but I can’t shy away from it if you want the truth.”

“I do, but I want you to know that no matter what you’re about to tell me or how you remember my father from when he was younger, he became a monster who tortured my mother and me. He was a sadist that fed off our pain and suffering. I think deep down he wanted nothing more than to kill me and it was a freak accident that kept him from eventually doing so.”
And you saw him tonight in the restaurant,
the voice in his head intoned.

A shiver ran up Lance’s spine as he watched John nod with his eyes closed. “I understand and I think I can shed some light upon why your father was the way he was. Your grandfather was always kind to me. I think he was a good man deep down. He gave me a job when there was none to be had in the area. He paid me above the going rate and spread the word, through his wife, that I did great work caretaking at the place.

“But something was broken inside him. I could see it every time I set foot in the house to collect my pay. He would shamble from room to room like a specter, his shoulders hunched, and he would just stare out the windows at the lake. He didn’t acknowledge your father at all and barely said anything to your grandmother. It was only years later that I started noticing the bruises on both of them.” John licked his lips and raised the nearly empty glass to his lips. He closed his eyes again, lost in years past, as he swallowed the numbing liquid and let it seep through him.

“He was beating them,” Lance said flatly. He watched John’s shoulders slump beneath his light shirt.

John nodded again. “I think the war and the things he saw did something to him and he took it out on your father and your grandmother. I would see Anthony some days, his eye a nasty shade of purple and welts on his neck. Your grandmother’s arms were so bruised sometimes that she had to wear long sleeves, even in the hottest months of the summer. I saw, and I didn’t do anything. I could’ve told someone, anyone, and maybe I could’ve helped your father and grandmother, maybe even Erwin himself.
If I hadn’t been so scared.
I was terrified of losing my job and favor in the community. It was the only income we had at the time.”

Tears began to well up in the caretaker’s eyes, and Lance felt the urge to comfort him. He reached across the table and touched the thin skin of John’s hand. The old man didn’t acknowledge the contact.

“I thought your wife was a teacher? Didn’t she have a steady job?” Lance asked after a few moments. John pulled his hand away from Lance’s and drained the rest of his whiskey. He sat staring at the table’s surface for a long time before speaking again.

“I didn’t tell you before, but I had a son by that time too. His name was Henry. He was born late in our lives; the doctors told us early in our marriage that May couldn’t carry a child. We had quit hoping about the time she got pregnant. I was nearly forty-two by then, and May was forty. Henry was born with a disability; they never gave us a name for it. He didn’t learn to walk until he was three, and he was slow. He didn’t speak much, and when he did it was jumbled, indiscernible. May quit teaching when we realized that he would need someone home with him all the time, and money was tight, but we made due. We loved him with every ounce of our hearts.” The last word came out a hoarse whisper, and more tears flooded John’s eyes. He swallowed and poured another healthy draft of whiskey into the glass before him. He drank,
then
set the cup down with a clack that echoed in the quiet house. Lance watched him, a feeling of apprehension building in his stomach.

“He was twelve when he died. I had come home from working fourteen hours outside, and I was beat. My body ached and I could barely keep my head up. Henry met me in the driveway. Even though he was twelve, he still liked to be carried. I remember picking him up, and him cuddling against me. ‘
Da
,’ he used to call me—couldn’t say
dad
. I can still feel his cheek pressed against my neck. His body was warmer than the sun.

“May
needed
a few things in town. I told her I’d be fine, and would just take it easy inside while she was gone, let Henry watch some TV.” John paused to finish his drink and dropped his head until Lance could only see the crown of his gray hair.

“I was so sore that day. I got out the aspirin—it was sugarcoated. I thought I put it away in the cabinet, but I must’ve left it on the counter. I sat down in the chair in the living room and turned on the TV for Henry. Found an old cartoon for him to watch. I remember him sitting on the floor near my feet, rocking back and forth to the song the characters were singing. The next thing I heard was May screaming.”

Lance swallowed, his stomach churning the whiskey like water off a paddle wheel. John breathed shallowly, not looking at him. Lance waited. The bottles of booze hid away in John’s bedroom finally making sense.

“She found him in the kitchen, the empty bottle of aspirin nearby. He loved candy. Loved
it,
and he didn’t know any better.” John raised his head, and Lance saw the rough rivulets of tears finding their way through the wrinkled skin of the man’s face like water running through the desert. “The doctor said he just fell asleep, said he didn’t feel any pain, but I sometimes wonder at night when I can’t sleep or haven’t drank enough if that’s true. I wonder if he was scared as everything faded around him. I wonder if he called for me.”

Lance felt his own tears sliding freely down his cheeks, tickling like the beats of invisible moth wings. John opened his mouth and then closed it, and Lance wondered if he would be sick again, on the table this time instead of the floor.

John’s voice finally found its way out of his chest and into the air. “I wonder if he’ll forgive me when I see him again.” His face folded, grief twisting it. The house’s silence pressed upon them, as if it were holding its breath.
Waiting for something.

After a time, John reached out and topped his glass off again, but when he offered it to Lance, the younger man waved it off, feeling too full and too drunk already.

“May wasn’t ever the same after that. She said she’d made her peace, had forgiven me for my unforgivable mistake, said she still loved me, but I could tell. Something broke inside her, and when it did, it gave passage to the disease that claimed her years later.”

“John, you can’t—” Lance began, but John’s words, louder than before, cut his off.

“Can’t what? Say things for what they were? I saw it. I took care of her as she passed from this world to the next, and Henry’s face was the only reflection in her eyes, not mine. And I don’t blame her a bit.” John shuffled his feet below the table and sat back in his chair, his blood-red eyes staring straight at Lance. “You try to get along in life without being noticed too much. Just try to make a living and take care of your family without disturbing something that might come back at you with teeth. Life is a shattered glass that we’re all
treadin
’ on,
tryin
’ not to crack it any further lest we all fall through. I know that what happened to Henry was punishment for not setting things right at that house,” he continued. “I saw Erwin was beating them and I did nothing. I’m as much to blame for what happened to you as I am for my Henry. I put my own ambitions and employment before the needs of others. And now I’m reaping it.” He turned the brown-tinted glass in one hand. “And this is all I have left.” He raised it and took a long pull before setting it down in the center of the watery ring it had left on the table.

“You can’t carry it all on your shoulders. The world has too many avenues to pinpoint one as the wrong choice. My father might have been a lunatic even if he had a good family life, you never know,” Lance said, staring across the kitchen at the ticking hand of the clock over the stove.

“Yes, that’s what kills me sometimes, never knowing,” John said.

The oppressive stillness surrounded them, huddled close, until Lance asked the question he had been wondering since he first heard Harold speak his family’s name. “What happened to them, my grandparents?”

John shifted in his chair and seemed to come out of the fog the past had enveloped him in. “Your father moved out the year he turned eighteen, wasn’t a surprise to anyone in the area. Erwin and Annette kept on like they had all along; they were considered recluses by most. They didn’t socialize much on account of how Erwin looked, I imagine. No, they kept to themselves until a man by the name of Aaron
Haff
came to town. He just showed up one day—no one saw him arrive or how he got here—and he started asking a few questions around town.” John turned his head and looked at Lance, his eyes showing no signs of the whiskey coursing through him.
“Asking about your grandfather.
He stayed about a week, befriended Harold and Josie’s daughter actually, before he went up to your grandparents’ house one afternoon, walked in the front door, and shot Erwin through the head.”

The clock’s ticking became the loudest sound in the house as Lance leaned
forward,
sure he hadn’t heard the old man correctly. “Someone murdered him?” he asked.

John nodded again, sipping more genially out of his cup. “From what the police gathered, he came in, pointed a gun at Annette and Erwin, and made Erwin kneel down on the floor of the living room.
Blew his brains out with a forty-five.”

The silvery stain on the living-room floor surfaced in Lance’s mind. He could see the speckles radiating out around the main mass—
the splatters.
Lance felt like he might be sick. All at once he felt too hot, his light clothes clinging to him, suffocating him. He almost told John he needed to use the bathroom when the caretaker continued.

“Annette saw the whole thing. She shut right
down,
never spoke again as far as I heard. Couldn’t do much for
herself
after that. Your father came back for the funeral but didn’t stay. Annette ended up at the retirement home just south of town, needed care and medication, I believe. They buried Erwin at the place there, just like he wanted.
Said so in his will, as much as I gathered.
His grave is off on the north side of the property, just a little trail leading into the woods. You can see the lake from there. Not a bad place to rest.”

Lance sat absorbing everything that had flooded into his life in the past two hours. It became a mountainous pile of intermingling information. As soon as he began to climb, trying to unthread a single strain of reckoning from it, he would fall back to the bottom. As he fumbled within his mind, another aspect began to take flight in the midst of all the confusion. Something whispered to him that everything that had happened since he had moved into the house now had an explanation. He was meant to come here. Something had pulled him to the house and had shown him things.
The locked door, the opalescent stain, the night visitations, Andy’s trance, and now the revelation that the estate had been in his family before.
He had finally come home.
No matter what, you always come home.

Lance’s eyes fluttered and he felt John’s hand on his forearm.

“Thought I lost you there for a minute.”

Lance tried to smile and drank the last of his whiskey.
“Just a lot to comprehend.”

“I can’t even imagine, son. I know it’s a shock to you, and that’s why I had such a hard time coming out with it.
That,
and the guilt I felt every time I looked at you.”

Lance sighed and bowed his head. “It’s not your fault, and
thank
you for telling me. It wasn’t easy on you, either. When did this happen?”

“Nineteen-eighty,” John replied.

Lance closed his eyes, the number already having formed itself in his mind. The year he had been born.
Of course.

“And what happened to this Aaron, the murderer?”

John rubbed his brow. “The police caught him. In fact, he sat right down on the sofa after he killed Erwin, like he was spent. They put him in prison but never got a reason out of him, wouldn’t talk to anyone. He died a few years back down in
Illinois
—that’s where they shipped him after the trial.”