Person on the Page

I. Bull’s Eye

Aunt Dinny and Mother walked ahead, their white shirts lit by the evening sun, with Cousin Payton and me behind them. He and I walked side-by-side because Aunt Dinny said Payton and I should be friends.

The dirt road behind my grandmother’s house was straight, running east to west, with woods on both sides. An evening walk westward was like marching through a tunnel directly into the waning sun.

Aunt Dinny was a widow. She and my mother each had one child. We came to Grandma’s house often in the summer, where Payton went outside to do whatever fifteen-year-old boys do, and I stayed inside to listen to the grownups talk. After supper, we made our way up Grandma’s steep backyard to the road. I was almost ten.

As we walked, Payton picked up rocks and threw them in a high arc over the trees into the woods. Aunt Dinny and Mother, enough distance ahead to be inaudible, talked to each other.

I picked up a flat piece of shale from the road. I knew I wouldn’t be able to throw like Payton, because he was older and much bigger than I was. But I did my best to imitate the baseball pitchers I had seen on TV. I threw it into the air as hard as I could.

The rock careened forward and hit Aunt Dinny flat in the back. I can still see her squared shoulders, the rigid straightness of her spine, the rock making contact, dead center between her shoulder blades. When it hit, it broke into pieces that scattered on the ground.

Mother said I was stupid for being so careless, for not aiming my throw in a safe direction. Aunt Dinny said that she was all right, but that I shouldn’t throw any more rocks. Payton snickered.

We finished our walk in silence.  I carried my awkward burden of shame and triumph. 

II. Trouble

“Shame on you. Shame on you,” Mother said, shaking her index finger at me. “You must make an effort to be friendly to Payton. What’s wrong with you?”

Mother stood next to Aunt Dinny, who had cornered me in her kitchen. Payton was outside in their backyard with his BB gun. I could hear the gun’s repeating snaps as he fired at birds in the trees.

“He wants to play with you,” Aunt Dinny said. “It’s not natural that cousins don’t play together. Not natural.” She looked down at me with her unmoving laser gaze, steady as the all-seeing lens of a surveillance camera.

Aunt Dinny took Payton out of school when he was twelve because she said he was sickly. He stayed home with her and rarely saw anyone outside of the family, except the tutor that came to their house to homeschool him. He wasn’t allowed to be around other kids in his neighborhood because, Aunt Dinny said, strangers have germs. Payton couldn’t be subjected to germs, she said, because he was delicate. He caught things so easily. 

Payton didn’t have any friends. All he had was a dirt bike that Aunt Dinny bought for him because he said he wanted it, but that she didn’t want him to ride because he might get hurt.  Sometimes he rode it anyway.

Aunt Dinny handed me a cloth and a can of furniture polish. “Go to Payton’s room and dust the furniture, she said. “And while you’re there, talk to him. Act like you have good sense.”

I didn’t want to be Payton’s friend. Didn’t want to talk to him or look him in the eye. I sometimes felt him staring at me. I didn’t want to play with him. Something didn’t feel right.

III. Things I Saw While Dusting in Payton’s Room

1. A snapping turtle he found in Grandma’s yard and kept in an old aquarium with cracked glass on one side on the floor near his closet.

2.  On his desk, armies of plastic miniature soldiers lined up in military formations, one formation facing the other, as if ready for battle.

3. On his bedside table, prescription bottles; scattered aspirin tablets; a half-empty bottle of carrot juice; a silver pinkie ring carved to look like a skull; one shiny, unused bullet.

4. On his bookshelf, paperback copies of Bernhardt Hurwood’s The Monstrous Undead: Werewolves, Vampires and More; Dr. David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask; a dozen or so science fiction paperback novels; several old, worn copies of Hustler Magazine.

5. On the wall, four square-framed watercolors of bottles in pastel colors—paintings he and his mother had done together when he was younger.

6. On the dresser, a pile of washed and folded underwear.

7. A black and white TV beaming an episode of The Twilight Zone.

8. On the bed, Payton lounging pale, barelegged, staring into the air in front of him, grimacing.

IV. I Realized that My Family Was Not Normal

Whatever normal is, my family was not. 

Unlike Payton, I was allowed to go to school and have friends. To see what other families were like. I began to realize when I was ten that what was happening to me was not normal.

A normal family does not allow a fifteen-year-old boy to be held in isolation by a mother obsessed with treating his real and imagined ailments. A normal family does not demand that a fifteen-year-old boy with no way to meet girls his age and his ten-year-old female cousin “play” together. A normal family does not shame the girl when she refuses and make her feel that she is the problem.

I heard the grownups saying that Payton had been sneaking out of the house at night, roaming the neighborhood on his dirt bike. They said that he once came home drunk, and that Aunt Dinny spent the night nursing him while he vomited.

Sometimes in my bed at night, long after the sun had set, when Mother had gone to bed and our house was quiet, I could hear the cries of rabbits as the cats in our neighborhood caught them. Long, wailing, high-pitched cries of distress. Sounding almost human.   

Cover Photo: Pixabays at Pexel