Fiddleback

FIDDLEBACK

  A Novel by Jeff Vrolyks

  Copyright 2013 Jeff Vrolyks

  Prologue

  Mr. Thompson locked the classroom door behind him with Mrs. Cuthbert standing at his back with an appraising stare. She wondered what a young Mrs. Thompson might look like, then wondered if Freddy Thompson did the same to her. Granted, she was on the wrong side of her twenties and he probably still wore the same clothes as he did at his alma mater, Cal State Sacramento, but she liked to think she was still in his league. Freddy pocketed his keys, turned to a warm grin from the neighboring Jameson grade-school teacher. With only three months employment under his belt, Freddy still marveled that the school grounds could be as desolate and muted as they were at the quitting time of 3:30, just thirty quiet and sacred minutes after the bell rang and two dozen knee-highs shrieked and wailed their exuberance, egressed through the door to become ghosts of Freddy’s imagination for the next sixteen hours.

  They coursed the covered walkway side by side through the tightly knit complex of classroom units toward the parking lot.

  “What’s the good word, Beth?”

  “Oh, you know: another day of washing paste out of a child’s hair. The usual.”

  “Jacob again?” Freddy asked.

  “Surprisingly, no. Not this time. A little booger named Wilhelm. Regal name, hell-on-wheels boy. His parents probably adore the hours he’s my ward.”

  They passed the admin office. Up ahead was the final cluster of buildings. A grassy field (a popular recess destination) lay ahead. Before it stood a double-row of orange fiberglass bench-tables with a line of maple trees shading them. Blocked from sight behind Mrs. Edward’s classroom was another popular recess destination: a sand box. A playground. It was a smaller, secondary playground, only ten yards by ten yards, with two sets of two swings and a teeter-totter, enclosed by railroad ties infamous for giving kids splinters.

  Beth Cuthbert was asking the young teacher about his most topical student—problem child is how he had described Maeve, though he maintained that the jury was still out as to the source of the problem—when they heard the sweet song of the knee-high. It was coming from the sand box still invisible to them. The lively tune was a nursery rhyme, Oh My Darlin’ Clementine. Freddy suspected he knew who was singing it. He ceased listening to Beth, lengthened his stride. He’d been meaning to have a one-on-one with the child to ask the difficult question, but thus far had been too cowardly to do so. The many times he told himself that today was the day (usually early morning) became a postponement until a stronger case could be made for child abuse (usually just before the final bell rang). He had observed other children staying behind after school to squeeze a little more fun out of the playground before their summoning home by the long arm of the parental law, but rarely Maeve Marlowe. And of all the students at Jameson grade-school, Maeve probably had the soundest reason to avoid being home. Or so Freddy suspected. The jury was still out. As Stephen King wrote, we fool ourselves so often we could do it for a living.

  The covered walkway delivered them to the open outdoors, the mostly-sunny day. Beth was just noticing that she’d lost the young teacher’s attention, who was now focused on the orator of the century-old nursery rhyme. “Though in life I used to hug her, now she’s dead I'll draw the line. Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my daaarling Clementine!” Freddy had advanced a full step ahead of Beth when Maeve entered his view.

  A sharp gasp. He stopped so abruptly that Beth collided into him.

  Maeve Marlowe was a sprightly little thing of six or seven. Walnut brown hair cinched back on the days she wasn’t wearing it down as a veil over her fair skinned neck. Her incessant smiling was as unconditional as it was sincere. Eyes were her most characteristic trait—cobalt blue with a delicate fringe of amber around the iris that resembled a fully eclipsed sun amidst the deepest blue cloudless sky (the amber ring being the sun’s fiery corona). She wore faded jeans and a San Francisco Giants sweatshirt. Freddy had never observed Maeve wearing anything that exposed her limbs, and speculated that come summer time she’d still be wearing winter attire.

  Maeve saw her teacher and teacher’s friend and ceased her song. Her smile broadened, lips separated, merciless white teeth gleamed against the token sunny February day. Maeve held tightly a butcher knife.

  * * *

  The knife was enshrouded in sand dust, save for the glimmering streaks of silver where a youth’s finger had touched. It lay conspicuously on the fibrous orange bench-table between the concerned teachers and child. Maeve’s smile was a lesser one, but her fondness and trust in Mr. Thompson gave her little reason to be unnerved. Her gaze jumped from him to her, her to him. “Am I in trouble?” she asked.

  “No, you’re not in trouble.” Freddy looked nervously over his shoulder.

  “Sweetheart, where did you get this?” Beth said with a gesture at the large knife.

  “Am I in trouble, Mrs. Cuthbert?”

  They insisted she wasn’t. Freddy urged her to answer Mrs. Cuthbert’s question.

  “I found it at the playground. That one. Under the sand.” The liveliness drained out of her at the speed of a thought. Her bright Cobalt eyes gazed down submissively. “You’re going to tell my parents, aren’t you?”

  Beth began an inquiry: Freddy touched her arm and said let me handle this. She nodded. He leaned forward, fixed an earnest and sympathetic stare at the girl who appeared as if her future lied in the answer to her question.

  “We’re not going to tell your parents,” he said. “You have my word.”

  Maeve was less than assured.

  “I cross my heart and hope to die,” Freddy said, crossing his chest, “I won’t tell your parents. Okay?”

  Maeve grinned, perhaps more show than sincere. Do children Maeve’s age smile measuredly? Freddy considered the sanctity of pre-adolescent innocence to be in its unbridled honesty and self-expression. Too young to wear the masks inevitably developed at puberty. The masks of Who I want you to think I am, and How I want you to think I feel about that.

  “What were you going to do with the knife?” Freddy asked.

  “I was just playing with it. I’m not allowed to touch the ones at home. If I knew I wasn’t supposed—”

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” he interrupted. “Let’s forget about the knife. I’ll dispose of it and nobody will hear another word of it. Sound good?” She nodded enthusiastically. “But only if you answer a couple questions honestly. If you don’t, I might have to call them.”

  “I’ll answer. Do you promise?”

  “I promise.” Again, Freddy crossed his chest. “Why aren’t you home?”

  “Mom said stay here till five.” She angled her wrist to show Freddy her Care Bears watch. “It’s only 3:30. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Why did she tell you that?” Beth asked. “Is that normal for her to want you to come home late?”

  “Sometimes I go to the park till five. They need their Mommy-Daddy time sometimes. Who am I to deny them that?”

  Freddy wondered how many times this girl’s parents had said just that. It was a reflex answer, probably word for word what they had chided her with before. He asked her how things were at home.

  “Good.”

  “You’ve had several absences, and for days at a time.”

  “Mom said to. I wanted to go to school.”

  Beth and Freddy straightened their postures. “Why didn’t she want you to go?” he asked. “You weren’t sick?”

  Maeve looked at their hungry eyes. Hungry for a tattle. “I was. Sick. I was sick.”

  “I don’t think you were sick. Honey, this is hard for me to just come out and ask, but do your parents ever hurt you?” She shook her head. Freddy noticed that she looked away before her reply. “W
hen kids do something bad,” Freddy continued, “it’s normal for their parents to punish them. Grounding, no video games, no TV… how are you punished?”

  “Grounded. No video games. No TV.”

  Beth had an idea. “Most kids, even me when I was your age, get spanked when they do something bad. But only when they deserve it. Sometimes with a belt, sometimes a wooden spoon, sometimes with their hands. It happens. Doesn’t it, Maeve?”

  Staring vacantly at the knife, she squeaked out a no tinier than the girl uttering it.

  “I guess I have to call your folks and tell them you were playing with this large knife,” Freddy said regretfully. “The deal was for honesty. You’re not being honest.”

  “Please don’t call them,” she pleaded desperately. “Please don’t call them, Mr. Thompson.”

  “One last chance for honesty. Do they ever hurt you?”

  “If I say yes,” her eyes now misty, “you’re going to tell them I told you.”

  “And what will happen then?”

  “I’ll be in red trouble.”

  “Red?” Freddy and Beth said in unison.

  Maeve’s eyes blinked wide. “Big! I said big!”

  Beth asked Maeve to stay put for a moment, signaled her counterpart for a word alone. Thirty feet from the girl whose head was buried in her folded arms on the table, Beth said, “Oh my dear Lord. Poor thing. We have to do something.”

  “I know,” Freddy said with the grim realization of what needed to be done and the fallout it would bring, namely on Maeve. “What do you propose?”

  “Let’s talk to Harvey,” the school’s principal, “see what he advises.”

  * * *

  Maeve Marlowe sat at her bedroom desk, legs treading air under her chair. She was reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Granted, she knew almost none of the words, but as always she looked her part, and what more could her parents ask for? She paid no attention to the phone ringing in a distant room. She remembered the kitten she had encountered on her walk to school that morning, smiled with hopes of getting to pet it again soon. Hopefully it would be by the Anderson’s front yard again tomorrow. Its long gray fur was the softest on earth, she estimated. It meowed the quietest she’d ever heard from a cat. She wished she could have another pet, one to replace the last one. A kitten this time.

  The door thrust open. She knew their look well. Too well.

  Red Trouble.

  Chapter 1

  “Maeve Minnow, precious as thee be, lend me a favor, I’m yours eternally.”

  Maeve bolted upright in bed, clutching her blankets. “Who said that?”

  “In the valley of the barren, seek me. In the wasteland it stands, a tree.”

  “I don’t understand. This is a dream.”

  “I am yours, you are mine. In the soil is my release, the undoing of time. Save me.”

  “Mom!”

  A short moment later the door opened. A thick silhouette asked peevishly what her problem was.

  “There’s someone in my room!”

  “You had a nightmare. Go back to sleep.”

  “Could you turn the light on? I think it’s under the bed.”

  “Do you want a spanking? Go to sleep, there’s nothing under your bed.”

  “Please, Mom? I wouldn’t ask if it were a dream. Please?”

  Her mother called for Luke over her shoulder. “Your daughter is acting up!”

  “No, I’m sorry, Mom. Don’t get Dad. I’ll go back to sleep.”

  “Are you going to behave?”

  “I promise.”

  “Good. Now get to sleep. We’re leaving early tomorrow. The last thing I need is a bratty kid who didn’t get enough sleep.”

  Behind the larger, a thinner silhouette appeared. “What’s the matter? Is she having another nightmare?”

  “Wouldn’t you know it. Ten years old and still believes in the boogeyman. I took care of it.” She closed the door. The room returned to the shadows of deep night once again.

  “Maeve Minnow, precious as thee be, lend me a favor, I’m yours eternally.”

  “Go away!” Maeve roared, though she did so in a whisper, lest her mother be alerted. She pulled the blanket up over her head, covered her ears and sang quietly. “There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there’s a hole in the bucket dear Liza, there’s a hole. Then fix it dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry, then fix it dear Henry, then fix it.”

  “In the soil, in the barrens, excavating for a time, dwelt a miner forty-niner and his servant Clementine.”

  Maeve joined in, “Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling, Clementine. Thou art lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.” She withdrew her hands from her ears to listen.

  “In a churchyard on a hillside where the flowers grow and twine, there grow roses amongst the posies, on the grave of Clementine.”

  “In my dreams she still doth haunt me, robed in garments soaked in brine; though in life I used to hug her, now she’s dead I’ll draw the line. Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my da-aarling Clementine.”

  “Past the churchyard on a hillside where the flowers grow and twine, amongst the wasteland there’s an Oak standing on the grave of Clementine.”

  Maeve hummed the chorus and settled into a deep comfort. Soon she grew too sleepy to sing, and fell asleep.

  “Help me.”

  Chapter 2

  It was the kind of sunny spring morning that inspired poetry. Maeve was drawing on her notepad when the station wagon pulled off the main road onto a crude dirt road. It cut through a meadow of devil-grass and budding yellow and white flowers, and continued for a curious stretch before it dead-ended at the foot of a grassy knoll, where an Oldsmobile and Cadillac were parked. Topping the low hill was a rudimentary wooden-plank shack that may or may not have been a vagrant’s domicile. There were no windows, the roof flat. A three car garage may have outsized it.

  Luke parked the wagon beside the pair of pollen-dusted cars. Doors swung open; Mother ordered Maeve to come along and bring her book. She snatched her Tale of Two Cities novel, notepad and pencil, and slid off the vinyl bench seat to the lush grass. Her mom saw the notepad and gave her a look, the one that meant business. The notepad was hastily returned to the wagon.

  The three lumbered up the knoll’s beaten path to the muffled conversations of adults inside the shack. A single door distinguished the dwelling from perhaps the world’s largest shipping crate. It stood open.

  “Sit down somewhere and read,” said her portly mother. “Don’t wander off and I don’t want to hear a peep.”

  Maeve nodded. She sat on a clearing of flattened grass beside a clump of rushes growing against the crude structure. With a sigh she opened the book to a dog-eared page. The door closed with a thud. She stretched her legs clad in jeans out in front of her, placed the book on her lap and leaned back against her locked arms. She scoped out her environment. The place was pretty, she thought, aside from the house-thing. The flowers especially. The mild breeze carried with it hints of what the flowers (were they daisies?) might smell like if she applied herself. A bird cawed its suspicion at Maeve from a nearby tree. Fair-weather clouds scudded lazily across the late-morning sky.

  The door grated open on its rusty hinges. A motherly head peeked through the opening and saw that Maeve was doing as instructed; satisfied, mother retreated back inside.

  “Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’ Clementine,” Maeve sang.

  “Maeve Minnow, precious as thee be, lend me a favor, down by the tree.”

  “You,” she said contemptuously. “Who’s saying that? Where are you?”

  “Your friend, my sweet Minnow, your friend. The other side of the hill is where you ought to be.”

  “No way, Jose. I’ll get my hide tanned for sure.”

  “Place your faith in me now and for eternity, and I promise that you will be forever safe. Leave now and they won’t learn of your adventure. It is time.”

  “Why
should I have faith in you? I don’t know who you are. Show yourself and maybe I’ll go.” She got up and scanned the area. The grass was tall. Was he hiding in the grass?

  “I wish I could, but you first have to help me at the tree. Help me and I’ll show you a neat trick. How would you like those spankings to stop once and for all?”

  “You can’t do that. I wish.”

  “Ye with so little faith. What have you to lose? The grown-ups are busy and have already forgotten about you. But me, on the other hand, I will never forget you. Come help me.”

  “It better not be far.”

  Chapter 3

  Maeve descended the backside of the low hill through the high grass, collecting flowers along the way. A yellow one here, a white one there. She sniffed one of each and decided the white smelled better. She discarded the yellows and purposed to pick only white flowers—daisies they were, she was almost sure of it. The hill leveled off into a vast dirt hardpan. An overwhelming expanse of lifeless barren land. She glanced over her shoulder to contrast the severity between the two landscapes. It was like seeing the on-location sets of The Sound of Music and The Good The Bad and The Ugly butt up against each other. As far as the eye could see was flat and dead, all the way to the horizon which seemed like a billion miles away.

  The dirt hardpan was cracked, innumerable little fissures that reminded Maeve of her bedroom window after having kicked a soccer ball from the front yard into it. She hoped this little act of mischief would have a better outcome than did that one. One thing was for certain, if she got caught it would have precisely the same outcome. She felt a phantom pain steal over the back of her legs and butt. She walked at a comfortable pace.

  In the shimmering horizon she descried what appeared to be the only survivor amongst this wasteland: a tree. “That must be it.” She considered herself to be safely distanced enough from the shack to risk raising her voice. “Can you hear me?”

  No response.

  She persevered along the cracked ground, occasionally breathing in her tuft of daisies. The sun was now so high that she cast no shadow. She had been walking for twenty-three minutes according to her wrist-watch, and was exhausting herself thoroughly. She scaled back her pace a tick. Maybe there’d be a bigger fire in her belly if she had eaten oatmeal for breakfast, but a half bowl of Cheerios is what was given to her. The tree wasn’t far, another five minutes or so should do it.