Sins of the Father

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. That night was—up to the moment I saw the single orange eye glaring at me from Slaughter’s Hill—completely ordinary.

Toothpaste dribbled down my chin as I stared through the small window to the right of the bathroom mirror. Images pushed open the dusty boxes in my brain and tried to show themselves to me all at once. I couldn’t stop seeing them; like a family photo album of old polaroids…you didn’t really want to look at them, yet you had to turn each page one by one until closure. I finally noticed the sound of the water gurgling down the drain and pulled myself forward through the seven years that had elapsed since…

Since then.

I put away the toothbrush and wiped my face. I sat down on mama’s bedspread folded up at the foot of the bed, gripped it in a bunch with one hand, and looked again. It was still there, a tiny orange signal flare.

When the sun was shining, I often thought that the cabin, with its grayed cypress planks, looked like a skull sitting exposed in the sun. It was clean, pure, just a memory. It was like when father killed Garfield, our old steer, and left its skull to be cleansed by nature. At first, it was awful watching the birds and bugs picking at it, seeing the eyes cloud, then recede, and finally be pecked away. But then, after a while, it just became more and more beautiful and pristine until the sun had bleached it to a light gray and the hollows of the eye sockets were like open doors to possibility.

Just like the skull, the cabin had appeared at first as if it were alive, the planks only recently milled, and with a rich reddish-brown color, the color of Garfield’s short soft fur. There were even occasionally little sprouts of green on the edges, but they soon died and became that same color. As I watched from my bedroom, it grew from almost nothing in the course of a few days until it was complete, but then as weeks and months went on, its life faded.

Even during the days that father spent nearly all his time there, it seemed empty, devoid of life.

Mama said he needed to be there—to be by himself so that we could all get by. At first, I didn’t understand, but I preferred when he was in the cabin. It was like he didn’t exist then… Just mama and me—we were the only people in the world, or at least the only people around.

The candle was only lit when mama went for a visit. I never really knew why father preferred sitting in the dark, but once every week or so, after the chores were done and we’d had dinner, mama would pack a big basket of food and the bible, then walk the path up Slaughter’s Hill. She never had to tell me not to come, but I could see in her eyes she was ready to if I ever tried to come with her. I always watched her come back too, though it was too dark to see much. She always brought the bible back with her, and often I heard her crying as she came into the house.

And now the candle was back, even though mama was dead and wouldn’t have gone back there even if she weren’t.

I stood up and crossed to the other side of the room and looked down on the wooden cross standing between the vegetable patch and the shed. The grass over mama was green and healthy. Mama was where she should be, right where I buried her after dragging her corpse out of the cabin that night seven years ago. But what about father? Surely he was dead too, wasn’t he?

The images that had sprung to mind never showed father. Why was that? The doubt left this nagging void. What had happened to father?

I had to go up to the cabin. I had to know.

I remembered hearing mama’s screams the last time that awful candle had been lit, and I’d raced down the stairs, but this time, I was calm and quiet. I didn’t want to disturb mama. She should rest in peace.

I put on my boots and walked out the front door. Turning to look up the hill, I could still see the candle. In a moment, I was walking swiftly up the incline, the path now just a memory too. And just like seven years ago, I noticed I was carrying the ax only when I observed that I was using it to push branches out of the way as I slowly crept up the hill. Strange not to remember grabbing it, but it had been right on the way, sticking out of the old stump where nature could continually cleanse it, so maybe it was perfectly normal.

The faint light of the moon only served as camouflage as its light timidly pushed through the trees and onto my face and nightshirt. Father wouldn’t see me.

The back door was closed, but of course, it didn’t have a lock. I quietly opened the door into the tiny kitchen area and stepped onto the dusty linoleum floor. Father might hear if I weren’t very quiet, so I moved my foot very slowly across the floor straining to see in the dim orange light. What was that?

After a moment, I recognized it. It was an old skull, split into two pieces, and the rest of the skeleton was there as well, clean and pristine. I stepped carefully over it and continued into the living room. Two more skeletons—what happened here? One of the corpses had not yet been fully purified, and a mouse scuttled away as it saw me. Still, I was even quieter than the mouse as I turned toward the bedroom and peeked inside.

A young man was rummaging around in the closet. Then he turned to a drawer, pulled it open, and slammed it shut finding nothing but old dust and the tiny mites that were part of nature’s plan. He looked hungry and angry. I recognized that look—I had seen it many times.

How father got into that body I will never know.

…

I look out my window by the sink and see just a faint outline of the gray cabin on top of the hill as I wash my nightshirt in the reddish-brown water. There hasn’t been a candle burning there for seven years, and I hope it stays that way, for mama’s sake.