But when Ellie Fitzgerald, the only girl on an all-black baseball team from Detroit, is deliberately spiked in the face by the steel-shod shoe of a white player, Frank is right there. The chaos that follows stuns him. Frank is white. This is Canada. The 1967 Detroit race riot was last year, a mile away across the river from Frank’s home in Windsor.

That isn’t the end of it. Frank and Ellie are avid fans of Detroit Tigers star, Al Kaline, and they are fated to meet again during a do-or-die game at the 1968 World Series. Here, they discover common bonds and join forces against a brutal racist foe.

It could be the worst day of their lives, or the best . . .

“He’s white. She’s black. Both must cross the divide of race and racism swirling around them. It helps that both are baseball fanatics. Step up to the plate for an exciting and winning read!” 

— Shirley Langer, author of Anita’s Revolution

“We’ve got a lot of pride at stake, and we’re representing the American League, and we just want to do a better job than we’ve been doing.”

-Al Kaline, 1968 World Series

“I look to a day when people will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

*** Read an excerpt from “The Colour of Pride” ***

The post The Colour of Pride: A race riot and a World Series brought them together. appeared first on Implosion Press.

©David Floody 2021

“I got here a little early. The front door was unlocked.”

The startled owner could see she had been wrong about the door being boarded up—and about me—standing just inside, holding it open, and out of sight from the quiet street. I had carefully pried off and hidden the boards, front and back, the night before and come in by the back door earlier this morning. The old locks were child’s play. It was not the first time I’d done it, but it would be the last.

And I was still a shade too Black for this Montgomery, Alabama neighborhood in 1956.

Yet in December, eight months before, Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat to a White man on the Cleveland Avenue bus and things were less certain. Mrs. Parks was a great believer in the ‘Self-Help Philosophy’ of Booker T. Washington. I was too, long before she kept her seat and took a stand. I practiced a selfish, more extreme form of that philosophy.

I waited with laughter in my heart . . .

“Uh, I’m Deborah-Lee Deveraux. But call me ‘Dee-Dee’, everybody does.” Dee-Dee looked very White, putting aside the unladylike black crowbar and returning the skeleton key to the clutch purse that matched her pale pink shoes and summer dress. The noon hour was drowsy and hot. Beads of perspiration jeweled Dee-Dee’s upper lip.

“Jackson Mississippi. I’ve looked forward to meeting you,” I said.

The hesitation was fractional before the Ipana Toothpaste smile was in place, and she extended her hand to shake mine. “Just like the town?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. Not very original. Thank you for making this time available after I phoned only this morning. I go by ‘Jack’.”

“Well, uh, Jack, why don’t we start with the basement? The rest of the doors are there, or used to be.”

“The basement would be perfect.”

Deborah-Lee Deveraux, call me Dee-Dee, led the way down the central hallway to the empty basement doorway, halfway along. The house was stripped of all furniture, decoration and any personal touches. The throw rugs were gone and left behind only their lighter shadow selves on the worn pine boards of the floors.

“The kitchen’s straight ahead, of course, with the water-heater in the broom closet by the back door.” She hesitated again, when she saw the back door hanging open, yet decided not to mention it.

Now I bit down on the laughter before it could escape my lips.

“The plumbing’s a bit primitive, like everything else in these old prewar cottages. The house really needs some TLC.”

“Yes, it does.” The irony was overwhelming. I waited until Dee Dee pushed the button of the old basement light switch, and then followed her downstairs. The light from the single, clear-glass hanging bulb amplified the effects of years of humidity and neglect. The corners remained in shadow.

“Damn! Watch it, Mr. . . . uh, Jack.” Dee Dee had hit her head on a low joist and had to pull cobwebs from her stiff brown hair. But I had control now.

“I’ll be careful.”

She took a few steps forward. “This is the furnace, although we rarely had to use it when I was growing up.”

The ancient coal-burner sat like a leprous toad in the middle of the windowless room, the white paint gone gray and peeling. Its heavy iron door lay on the floor in front of it, and the black oval above looked like a mouth gaping in frozen horror.

“You’d probably want to convert to oil,” she said. “It’s cleaner. Not as much soot to contend with.”

“Probably.”

Dee-Dee stooped under the fat octopus arms of the furnace’s galvanized heating pipes that appeared to support the house above. “All the wiring is still knob-and-tube though, and I’m afraid it may not be safe here anymore.” She indicated the pairs of white, ceramic insulators carrying the crusty black wires to the single light.

“Yes, I noticed.”

“The old doors are in a pile over here . . . at least they were?” Her mascara-black brows wrinkled briefly in a delicious puzzlement.

The doors were laid out in a neat line in the dim space behind the furnace.

Dee-Dee stepped forward for a closer look—then abruptly lurched sideways with another curse. I reached out to help her—didn’t want her to hurt herself.

“Thank you, Jack. These rotten old floorboards are not made for high-heels.” She stooped and tenderly probed her right ankle. The grey boards sat unevenly on the musty dirt floor. A dark smudge of dirt marred the pink fabric of her shoe. “Darn it all! I think I’ll wait here if you don’t mind, Jack? I may have a bit of a sprain. I hope the doors are all here.”

“Not at all, Dee Dee. And, yes, I believe everyone is here, now.” I stepped into the shadow behind the furnace to keep my ironic smirk private. The doors had the same pale, scabrous appearance as the old furnace’s cast metal surfaces.

“I confess we have had the house on the market for almost a year, ever since Mr. Villier’s wife had the coronary. The poor woman’s heart was weak. And then he disappeared himself, nine months ago. The sheriff searched the place, but found nothing. I accept he’s dead in the woods out back somewhere, but no body found yet.”

Why did she call her father, “Mr. Villier,” and her mother, “the poor woman?”

“Yes. That is strange.”

“I finally did take down the sign and my husband boarded the place up three weeks ago, after some vandalism. Just me left now. Mr. Villier had two older daughters and the twin boys. But almost two years back, they were driven off the road by a hit-and-run driver on their way here before Christmas.”

“Oh my! I can’t imagine . . .” More self-control, as Dee Dee nodded in painful remembrance.

“Such bad luck, too. The one time they would all be together. But the children’s annual Christmas reunion was a tradition of sorts. Almost killed Mr. Villier, as well. Five children and four of them gone in the same accident.”

“Yes. A loss that must mark you for the rest of your life.”

“It’s so very true, Jack. And I might have been with them. My husband and I were waiting for them to pick me up here in Montgomery for an afternoon outing, just the five of us. When we got the news, why I just couldn’t believe it.”

I offered her my fine white cotton handkerchief. Still that brief reluctance, but she took it and pressed it against the corner of each wide blue eye, blotting the dark mascara.

“Who could?” I agreed.

If only I had been there to enjoy the horror on Dee-Dee’s pretty pink face. But of course, I had to be miles away by then. She returned the mascara-smeared handkerchief with an apologetic smile.

 “Now Mr. Villier’s wife is lying beside them in the old Villier Family Crypt, in the cemetery down the road a bit, waiting for her missing husband.”

Dee Dee didn’t mention that the once prosperous, slave-owning Villier family had fallen quite a way since the Civil War scattered them, and that the big wreck of a house was finally torn down to provide space for the cemetery. Or that she often went by only the Villier name herself. She certainly didn’t mention that my mother, too-early dead from a cancer these three years past, was their housekeeper for some years, let go when her pregnancy began to show. Old habits die hard in the South.

The gloom hid my smile, bitter this time.

“I’m sorry to hear all that, Dee Dee,” I said. My efforts at the cemetery had been considerable, yet the smells of putrefaction were perfume to my senses, all worth it. I didn’t correct her.

“To be truly honest, Jack, I’m desperate for any offer.”

“Seven.”

“Hundred?”

“Doors,” I said. “I counted them.”

“Oh. You wouldn’t think there’d be that many in a small house like this, even with the front and back I mean.”

“Yes. I didn’t count those.”

“Mr. Villier took the doors off his self, you know. And began to leave the lights burning all night . . . all night. Drove the nearest neighbours to distraction.”

“Why, I wonder?”

“I asked him that. He said, ‘To keep away the shadows’.”

“Ah.”

“Kind of embarrassing. Must have gone a little crazy after his wife’s death.” I could just make out Dee-Dee’s moue of distaste. “He found her body right there, behind the furnace.”

Strictly speaking, the wife wasn’t necessary. I could sympathize. She was a kind of victim too. Yet I was curious about the effect her added death would have on old man Villiers.

“Found here? Are you sure?” I waited . . . and Dee Dee finally felt her way over, favouring her right foot like a wounded animal.

“Just where you’re standing, Jack.” she agreed. “I guess he about tripped over her in the dark.”

“Yes, I know.”

Deborah-Lee Deveraux, “call me Dee Dee, everybody does,” didn’t have a chance to scream.

I opened the seventh door in the row and kicked her body into the hole underneath. Next came a thick layer of quicklime, smoothed with the shovel like the frosting on a wedding cake, one my mother never had. Husband, wife, sisters and brothers—one big, happy family together again.

Almost.

“Six children, actually, Dee Dee. Welcome home, little sister.”

The final door was closed, like it and the others had always been. Now I was free at last to leave the home I’d never known. This time I walked out the front door into the empty street and let it hang open behind me. The sun was blinding white, so I slipped on my dark glasses.

I left the light burning in the basement against the shadows to come.

“For you, Father.”

End

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When you hate and love?

How do you choose?

The Insect-Youth are on the wing,

Eager to taste the honied Spring, . . .

Thomas Gray (1716 – 1771)

*** Read an excerpt from “Insect Youth” ***

The post Coming Soon: for those who struggled in their teenage years . . . appeared first on Implosion Press.

Subtle amphibians live on these red cedars
in a frog-soft marriage of fungi and algae,
inserting delicate web-tips into the deepest crevices
of their ancient hosts, and tempted up to rampart heights to overlook
eight-hundred years of soaring solitude.

Their vapour breaths dissolving air in water
make rain-coloured fronds of forest on forest,
the least of things arraying the arms of giants to touch
the farthest fingers of creation and patter silver streams of drops
uplifting rooted stands of acolytes below.

Do we blindly ripple out our ignorant destructions
and manage the massive thrusts into neat pieces,
relentless right angles of singular uniformity?
Do we stand apart in panting satisfaction
at our power to bring their green horizons low
and stare in doubtful wonder at the empty space of air?

© 2017 D. Floody

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GIVE me Michael Jackson’s lips,

High my voice and slim my hips.

BOTOX my wrinkles line by line,

Depilated Frankenstein.

LIPO-SUCK my butt cheeks dry,

Belladonna big my eye.

SPLICE my genes with Calvin Klein,

Lift my face and recombine.

AMAZING Bow-flex Power Rods,

Fifteen minutes, look like gods.

PATCHELL Evans Aberator,

Sweat guru fat body hater.

PARIS Hilton worn once dresses,

Vacant head, Medusa tresses.

JEANNE Bekker growing-older,

Fading beauty death-grip holder.

TROPHY wife Trump number three,

But wedding of the century?

FARWELL tour for singer Cher,

Rock-hard nipples, bigger hair.

VUITTON luggage chic and classy,

Helps to hide your sagging assy.

SEXY leather goods from Prada

Let’s all be MARQUIS DE SADA!!!

David Floody 2020

The post Opening Pandora’s Botox appeared first on Implosion Press.

When you hate and love, how do you choose?

It’s 1970, the period of the 1967 Detroit Race Riot and assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., an era of deep social change and divide.

Across the Detroit River, in Windsor Ontario, sixteen-year-old Frank Phelan is surprised by love. The beautiful Starr Summers, the newest student in his grade ten graduating class, screams her upset as their arrogant history teacher straps Frank until blood flies from his fingertips. Starr has her own history of blood.

Laura Phelan is not a mother any teacher wants to cross. She confronts Michaels, grinds Frank’s blood-spattered baseball jersey into his face and gets him suspended amid a storm of controversy. The enraged Michaels vows revenge, unaware that Laura’s friend, Gisella Taglio, a former WW2 assassin, has plans of her own for him.

A few weeks later, Frank suspects Starr has been sexually assaulted. After their violent confrontation with his enemy, Dixie, in a deep railway valley, Frank is left unconscious. Starr becomes silent and withdrawn, and refuses to talk about it. But the torn condom wrapper Frank discovers in the old boxcar after they were attacked leaves no doubt in his mind.

Starr refuses to tell her mother and family, more worried about the wounding in the eye of her beloved Jack Russell terrier, Angel, she found abandoned in that same cut. Angel tried to defend her, but Dixie shot her in the left eye with his BB gun. The law will do nothing.

Frank becomes even more angry when he discovers the attack on Starr was planned. Evelyn Flowers, the Prom Queen, wants revenge on Starr when she receives the coveted award for the highest mark in the graduating class. Evelyn becomes even more angry when Frank refuses to become her Prom King, and instead asks Starr to be his date.

When Frank continues to ask questions, Starr breaks off their relationship and then runs away, not to be found. A few nights later, there is a disturbing report of a dim figure jumping from the Ambassador Bridge into the Detroit River. The identity is unconfirmed.

Frank is in deep conflict. He’s the only one who can avenge the girl he loves and bring justice down on Dixie.

Frank slips into the railway valley and climbs “Fatboy”, the wide cement pillar overlooking the punks in their weekly BB gun war. He puts his eye to the telescopic sight of his powerful, Perazzi pellet rifle.

The sun is blistering hot, Fatboy a searing grill and time crawls by on caterpillar feet. At last, Frank has Dixie’s angry face in the crosshairs. Should he take the shot? Step across a thousand lines and never again step back?

“Starr”, he whispers.

In the moment he fires, Frank sees himself reflected in the lens of Dixie’s eye.

But will Frank ever see his first love again?

End

*** Read an excerpt from “Insect Youth” ***

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(We’re Both Vintage Models)

Honda 305 Dreams

My body is a vintage motorcycle I struggle to keep running.
My plug, doesn’t spark like it used to, with that bright eagerness to throw my leg over a saddle and ride baby ride!

My gas tank, too, brimmed once with high-octane spirits, and sped me past the days of my life like trees blurring by the roadside.
Now, my fuel petcock lever sits on Reserve, a finger-flick from Off.

My throttle-blips at Red stoplights belie the go of Green to come. A massive truck grinds up my guts in diesel gears behind!
I kick the shifter down to first, give it gas––my clutch slips–I’m almost lost . . .

My white-wall tires are dingy with the dirt of half-forgotten highways.Their flabby rubber over-pressures the combustion chambers of my heart. My rpms drop, my ignition pulse turns thready, my eyes close like headlights dimming and I dread the final stall to come.

David Floody 2020

The post My Honda 305 Dream Motorcycle Tribute appeared first on Implosion Press.

THE FIFTY-NINTH MINUTE IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST: Moby Dick’s Lesson

Remember “Call me Ishmael” and actor Gregory Peck,

the peg-legged Ahab in a funereal suit,

soaked dead and black,

crucified against the white body of the whale,

a lesson in nemesis?

I do.

Moby Dick plunged

and rode to the surface,

plunged and rode again,

the whale boats in cold pursuit

on that far-away celluloid sea,

and Peck’s dead arm

in serial motion, waving them on and on,

until “The End.”

What happened to Moby Dick?

We never find out.

I imagined the white whale

swimming on into legend,

where it lives for us now,

carrying Peck like a human barnacle,

his black New England wool

and fierce flesh abrading,

until nothing but white skeleton

against white body remained,

the perfect image for a black pirate flag:

Whales and humans beware!

I remember as a kid sharing the horror of Pinocchio

escaping his creator, Gepetto,

before the Blue Fairy gifted him with flesh,

only to be swallowed whole by a cartoon whale.

But wait a minute!

It’s like a sea-going getaway car I decided.

If the whale spit Pinocchio out, no problem.

Wood floats and drifts.

Humans swim and sink.

Pinocchio would wash up

on a beautiful desert island somewhere,

like going to a better place.

The local natives would

set him up, driftwood white,

in a shrine of bamboo and palm leaves,

and worship the mysterious

minor god from the deeps.

What treasures from the sea,

what abundance they might

pray for!

A few years later I watched

“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.”

I wanted to be the rollicking, jollicking Kirk Douglas,

with his surgically cleft chin and cool,

red-striped sweater, another peg-leg

dancing his hornpipe in the conning

tower of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus,

the Victorian submarine with its

saw-toothed prow as big as

a bowhead whale’s.

Was his peg-leg like having

a later, cartoon clownfish’s undersized fin?

Did it make it harder to get around,

but easier to move in circles,

like bad history repeating itself?

But no, Captain Nemo was a White Knight of the Deeps

taking arms against our sea of troubles

and by opposing, trying to end them.

He searched out and sank the Captain Ahabs,

the Nautilus cutting through the keels

of the whaling ships like

a flensing knife through blubber,

valuing the whales for more than oil and ambergris.

What of our differences,

whales and humans?

It must be a fluke of our natures,

I came to believe.

Yes, we’re both mammals, but we’re

clever monkeys, and quick.

Our rhythms are circadian, diurnal,

not the slow steady beat of the seas

at work around the edges of the Earth.

We move at the speed of necessity.

They drift like island continents.

Of course, we have big brains

compared to our body masses,

and so do the whales.

We’re both intelligent mammals, curious.

But a whale’s intelligence has fluid depths.

It follows signposts of pod memory

invisible to us, to family and food and deep

parts of our planet we will never experience,

unless we armour our flesh against

the very element that gives them

life and support. That supports us, as well.

But our pod memories are short, and

we too often forget that, foul the oceans

with their blood and our wastes.

All of that richness could be lost,

like men at sea.

If we’re made in god’s image,

that’s about the only thing

we have in common with cetaceans.

I don’t mean the image,

I mean the same Creator.

God gave the whales flukes and fins,

and humans opposable thumbs.

And that was our glory

and their curse.

Humans have bad days; whales have bad centuries.

Maybe Jonah had the best view,

inside the belly of the beast.

Not rough, not slouching toward Bethlehem,

but maybe its last hours.

What did Jonah learn? Not much.

Of course god sent the whale to save Jonah.

That was god’s mistake—and that long ago

biblical whale’s. It should have spit him out

to sink or swim. But that’s not in their nature,

as far as we can understand it. We got the opposite

mission and still diligently pursue their destruction.

In my high school science book, I remember

an illustration of the scale of a human

compared to a blue whale.

Too often, it’s how we prefer to see them─

I mean only in relation to ourselves,

larger curiosities, fluked, fleeting, ephemeral.

We watch whales; measure them;

track them with critter cams;

record their fluke patterns like fingerprints;

are deeply moved in our clown-fish orange survival suits

when they nudge our zods and we

look them in the eye, touch them: Leviathan.

Where are their survival suits?

How could a species so small,

decimate a species so large?

We just had to give it some thought.

We already had the thumbs.

Of course, our real weapon is much more

destructive than a crude harpoon gun.

It’s us. We’re the real weapon of our own mass

destruction and their’s and the planet’s.

I mean our increasing numbers and

the laws of mathematical progression.

We humans are in a suicide pact with ourselves.

But we don’t want to go alone.

We’ve posted the note all around us:

dead seas, barren earth, poisoned skies.

It’s written in lipstick red letters

on the mirrors of our bathrooms,

the tip-off, the point. We stare and don’t

believe it. We shave our image clean

and forget it.

Here’s a thought experiment.

Imagine Jonah is the whole human race

and the whale that swallowed him is

the planet Earth and all its resources.

The whale is some fifty million years old;

Jonah’s span a few hundred thousand years,

say a mere hour of geologic time.

It’s black all around him, so in the first five minutes

Jonah discovers fire and pushes back the dark.

And wow, it’s big and empty in there, but

hey, by the firelight, in her sabre-tooth tiger skin,

Janey is smelling ripe and looking sexy. Maybe they

should cuddle up and keep warm?

Time flies when you’re having fun,

and they double their population

once every minute and begin to

spread out into that vast area.

More minutes pass and they’re still having fun.

Soon all the Jonahs and Janeys are training

their kids to sit on flush toilets,

little kings and queens on their white ceramic thrones.

“Where is all that crap going, Dad? Jonah Junior asks.

“Don’t worry, Son,” Jonah says, “still plenty of room.”

The minutes tick by, the toilets flush, the fun continues.

“But, Dad . . . Dad . . . .”

“I said, don’t worry, Son.”

Jonah checks his watch.

“By my careful calculation, we’ve been here

a little more than fifty-nine minutes

and the place is still only half full.”

© David Floody 2020

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It’s been 50 years since I stood atop the six-story Wyeth Brothers Drug company roof, on the Windsor Ontario side of the Detroit River, and watched in alarm as the fires of racial hatred consumed the Motor City I knew and loved for five long days. It was the most disturbing experience of my life at that time. It was as if the Vietnam War, the first “television war” brought into our living rooms each evening, had come home to the United States, Canada and the watching world.

I was just twenty-one and working the nightshift as a summer janitor at Wyeth Brothers while attending the University of Windsor. Can you imagine the technicolour horror of the spreading flames; the too-young national guardsmen, uncertain and white with dread; the armoured personnel carriers invading neighbourhood streets; the serial pounding echoes of .50 calibre machine guns that could take down a brick building; the smells, sights and sounds from Huey helicopter gunships stirring the smoke into towering black whirlwinds as they hunted rooftop snipers targeting white police, firefighters and emergency workers?

Well, now you can, sort’ve.

The Detroit Free Press has funded and promoted a 50-year documentary entitled, “12th and Clairmont”. This was the neighbourhood where the riot broke out when white Detroit police raided an an illegal ‘blind pig’, where friends and family were drinking and celebrating the safe return of two Black veterans from the Vietnam War. Almost two hundred Blacks were arrested. A beer bottle was thrown through the back window of a police cruiser and racial chaos erupted into five long days and nights of arson, looting, shooting and violence.

I had been immersed in Motown culture for all of my early life: concerts by Diana Ross and The Supremes; blues clubs featuring B. B. King; hockey games starring Red Wings legend, Gordie Howe; major league baseball at Tiger Stadium with my idol, Al Kaline.

The riot changed Detroit forever, with the burned-out neighbourhoods, the so-called “white flight” to the suburbs, the widespread unemployment, the deterioration of the education and social systems and, most telling, the drop in population from 1.4 million in the mid-sixties to 700,000 today.

I didn’t deal with it well. Attending the most integrated Windsor high school of the time, and at last, writing and publishing my coming-of-age novel, The Colour of Pride, helped me immensely. How sadly ironic that the racism and rise again of white supremacy, re-invigorated under the incompetence and divisiveness of the Trump administration, is dangerously reminiscent of the those times and values.

The post YA Novel The Colour of Pride & 50th Anniversary of 1967 Detroit Race Riot appeared first on Implosion Press.

“I got here a little early. The front door was unlocked.”

The startled owner could see she had been wrong about the door being boarded up—and about me—standing just inside, holding it open, and out of sight from the quiet street. I had carefully pried off and hidden the boards, front and back, the night before and come in by the back door earlier this morning. The old locks were child’s play. It was not the first time I’d done it, but it would be the last.

And I was still a shade too black for this Montgomery, Alabama neighborhood in 1956.

Yet in December, eight months before, Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat to a white man on the Cleveland Avenue bus and things were less certain. Mrs. Parks was a great believer in the “self-help” philosophy of Booker T. Washington. I was too, long before she kept her seat and took a stand. I practiced a selfish, more extreme form of that philosophy.

I waited with laughter in my heart.

“Uh, I’m Deborah-Lee Deveraux. But call me Dee-Dee, everybody does.” Dee-Dee looked very white, putting aside the unladylike crowbar and returning the skeleton key to the clutch purse that matched her pale pink shoes and summer dress. The noon hour was drowsy and hot. Beads of perspiration jeweled Dee-Dee’s upper lip.

“Jackson Mississippi. I’ve looked forward to meeting you,” I said.

The hesitation was fractional before the Ipana Toothpaste smile was in place and she extended her hand to shake mine. “Just like the town?”

“Yes. Not very original. Thank you for making this time available after I phoned only this morning. I go by Jack.”

“Well, uh, Jack, why don’t we start with the basement? The rest of the doors are there, or used to be.”

“The basement would be perfect.”

Dee Dee led the way down the center hall to the empty basement doorway, halfway along. The house was stripped of furniture, decoration and any personal touches. The throw rugs were gone and left behind only their lighter shadow selves on the worn pine boards of the floors.

“The kitchen’s straight ahead, of course, with the water-heater in the broom closet by the back door.” She hesitated again when she saw the back door hanging open, yet decided not to mention it.

Now I bit down on the laughter before it could escape my lips.

“The plumbing’s a bit primitive like everything else in these old prewar cottages. The house really needs some TLC.”

“Yes, it does.” I waited until she pushed the button of the old basement light switch and then followed her downstairs. The light from the single, clear-glass bulb amplified the effects of humidity and neglect. The corners remained in shadow.

“Damn! Watch it, Mr. . . uh, Jack.” Dee Dee had hit her head on a low joist and had to pull cobwebs from her stiff brown hair. But I had control now.

“I’ll be careful.”

She took a few steps forward. “This is the furnace, although we rarely had to use it when I was growing up.”

The ancient coal-burner sat like a leprous toad in the middle of the windowless room, the white paint gone grey and peeling. Its heavy iron door lay on the floor in front of it, and the black circle above looked like a mouth gaping in frozen surprise.

“You’d probably want to convert to oil,” she said. “It’s cleaner. Not as much soot to contend with.”

“Probably.”

Dee-Dee stooped under the fat octopus arms of the furnace pipes that appeared to support the house above. “All the wiring is still knob and tube though, and I’m afraid it may not be safe anymore.” She indicated the pairs of white, ceramic insulators carrying the crusty black wires to the single light.

“So I noticed.”

“The doors are in a pile over here . . . at least they were?” Her mascara brows wrinkled briefly in a delicious puzzlement.

The doors were laid out in a neat line in the dim space behind the furnace.

Dee-Dee stepped forward for a closer look—then abruptly lurched sideways with another curse. I reached out to help her. Didn’t want her to hurt herself.

“Thank you, Jack. These rotten old floorboards are not made for high-heels.” She stooped and tenderly probed her right ankle. The grey boards sat unevenly on the dirt floor. A dark smudge marred the pink fabric of her shoe. “Darn. I think I’ll wait here if you don’t mind? I may have a bit of a sprain. I hope the doors are all here.”

“Not at all. And, yes, I believe every one is here.” I stepped into the shadow behind the furnace. The doors had the same pale, scabrous appearance as its cast metal surfaces.

“I confess we have had the house on the market for almost a year, ever since Mr. Villier’s wife had the coronary. The poor woman’s heart was weak. And then he disappeared himself, nine months ago. The sheriff searched the place, but found nothing. I accept he’s dead in the woods out back somewhere, but no body found yet.”

Why did she call her father, “Mr. Villier,” and her mother, “the poor woman?”

“Yes. That is strange.”

“I finally did take down the sign, and my husband boarded the place up three weeks ago, after some vandalism. Just me left now. Mr. Villier had two older daughters and the twin boys. But almost two years back, they were driven off the road by a hit-and-run driver on their way here before Christmas.”

“Oh my. I can’t imagine . . .” More control as she nodded in painful remembrance.

“Such bad luck, too. The one time they would all be together. But the children’s annual reunion was a tradition of sorts. Almost killed Mr. Villier, as well. Five children and four of them gone in the same accident.”

“Yes. A loss that must mark you for the rest of your life.”

“It’s so very true, Jack. And I might have been with them. My husband and I were waiting for them to pick me up here in Montgomery for an afternoon outing, just the five of us. When we got the news, why I just couldn’t believe it.”

I offered her my fine white cotton handkerchief. Still that brief reluctance, but she took it and pressed it against the corner of each wide blue eye, blotting the dark mascara.

“Who could?” I agreed.

If only I was there to enjoy the horror on Dee-Dee’s pretty pink face. But of course, I had to be miles away by then. She returned the mascara-smeared handkerchief with an apologetic smile.

“Now Mr. Villier’s wife is lying beside them in the old Villier family crypt, in the cemetery down the road a bit, waiting for her missing husband.”

Dee Dee didn’t mention that the once prosperous, slave-owning family had fallen quite a ways since the Civil War scattered them, and that the big wreck of a house was finally torn down to provide space for the cemetery. Or that she often went by only the Villier name herself. She certainly didn’t mention that my mother, too-early dead from a cancer these three years past, was their housekeeper, let go when her pregnancy began to show. Old habits die hard in the south.

The gloom hid my smile, bitter this time.

“I’m sorry to hear all that,” I said. My efforts at the cemetery had been considerable, yet the odours of putrefaction were perfume to my senses,­ all worth it. I didn’t correct her.

“To be truly honest, Jack, I’m desperate for any offer.”

“Seven.”

“Hundred?”

“Doors,” I said. “I counted them.”

“Oh. You wouldn’t think there’d be that many in a small house like this, even with the front and back I mean.”

“Yes. I didn’t count those.”

“Mr. Villier took the doors off himself, you know. And began to leave the lights burning all night. Drove the nearest neighbours to distraction.”

“Why, I wonder?”

“I asked him that. He said, ‘To keep away the shadows.’”

“Ah.”

“Kind of embarrassing. Must have gone a little crazy after his wife’s death.” I could just make out Dee-Dee’s moue of distaste. “He found her body right there, behind the furnace.”

Strictly speaking, the wife wasn’t necessary. I could sympathize. She was a kind of victim too. Yet I was curious about the effect her added death would have on the old man.

“Found here? Are you sure?” I waited . . . and Dee Dee finally felt her way over, favouring her right foot like a wounded animal.

“Just where you’re standing,” she agreed. “I guess he about tripped over her in the dark.”

“Yes, I know.”

Deborah-Lee Deveraux, “call me Dee Dee, everybody does,” didn’t have a chance to scream . . . .

I opened the seventh door in the row and kicked her body into the hole underneath. Next came a thick layer of quicklime, smoothed with the shovel like the frosting on a wedding cake, one my mother never had. Husband, wife, sisters and brothers—one big, happy family together again.

Almost.

“Six children, actually, Dee Dee. Welcome home, little sister.”

The final door was closed, like it and the others had always been. Now I was free at last to leave the home I’d never known. This time I walked out the front door into the empty street and let it hang open behind me. The sun was blinding white, so I slipped on my dark glasses.

I left the light burning in the basement against the shadows to come.

“For you, father.”

END

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