Regina Richardson

Prologue

Josephine Klaxon had never seen her boss like this—bulge-eyed, unshaven, sticking his head out of his office every so often to bark nonsensical orders like, “Get me some coffee”—the man never touched the stuff, despised it—or, “No interruptions, don’t let anybody bother me,” when he knew as well as she did that the office was deserted except for the two of them. All the other agents and their assistants were at a Bureau conference in Denver.

When she’d brought him in some orange juice instead of the black stuff, the look of agony in his red-rimmed eyes had unnerved her. Music from “South Pacific” played from his tape deck, and she did not understand that either.

Special Agent Eduardo Reyes was always calm, restrained, methodical, the best of any of the agents she’d worked for in her twenty-three years overseeing the secretarial needs of the Boise field office. She’d known some arrogant young Eastern-born pricks in her time, and some burnt-out, foul-mouthed veterans, but because she knew every case that had been handled in the office since time immemorial, they’d always in the end kowtowed to her. Ed didn’t do that, but he never made her ashamed or slighted her or asked her to get him any damned coffee.

Today was different and she didn’t know why. It had to do with the case he’d been called in to handle yesterday, but she’d seen the pictures, read the report, and while it was grim, it certainly wasn’t the worst of the cases she’d seen him handle.

There’d been a double homicide in a Sterling Falls motel room, with possible racial overtones. The local sheriff had requested Ed’s involvement, and he’d driven up early yesterday morning.

The crime photos revealed the body of a young woman lying on the floor of the suite, her eyes wide open, her flaxen hair spread behind her head like a crown with wild and joyous prongs. She lay in the posture of the crucified Christ, or rather the Christ with lowered arms showing you His wounded hands. She herself had five site-wounds: a crushed and bloody mouth, crushed hands, and crushed feet. Seemingly not enough to kill her, yet it had.

Near the girl’s broken feet, a black man with a bullet through the back of his neck knelt in the posture of a penitent. His bowed head lay on folded hands, resting on a low footstool—the spattered blood forming a “lace cloth” for the supplicant’s prayers.

Above her head, on the back of the Welcome and Food Menu of the Sterling Falls Inn, written in the girl's blood, was one word: BETRAYED!

Who had betrayed whom, Josephine had no idea . . .

There was little to the report except that the young married couple were the Makolas from New York City and had checked into the inn two days previously. No money or credit cards appeared to be missing, and there was nothing unusual about their luggage except that they contained a set of audiotapes, neatly numbered and inscribed, “Family Legacy.”

It was these that Ed had been listening to since late yesterday evening when Josephine had finally cleared her desk, stuck her head into his office to say “good night,” and seen him smile and wave at her as he placed the first tape into his recorder. He obviously hadn’t been home yet, nor was he ready to come out at mid-morning.

Just then, her boss burst out of his office, tossed the banded tapes onto her desk, and snarled, “Don’t leave until these are transcribed! Every damned one of them, every last detail!”

The jagged scar on Ed’s right temple, a memento of a near-fatal shoot-out with a maniac early in his career, stood rigid and white against his brown skin. He rubbed it as if it still hurt him, rubbed it until it must be hurting him. Josephine reached up and stopped Ed’s hand. He stared at her as if he didn’t recognize her, then blurted out, “I thought she was safe. I thought they all were!”

And, without another word, Reyes turned on his heel and left the office. Startled, Josephine picked up the first tape, and put it into her machine . . .

“Family Legacy”: Tape One

Josephine Klaxon: transcriptionist

FBI: Boise Field Office

December 24, 1999

FBI Case File: 1151-Idaho

Now it is Alphonse's idea that I record this memoir, not mine, and nothing I can say dissuades him. He being a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology with a proposed thesis entitled, “The Legacy of the Family Value System on the Spouse-Choices of the Adult Children, as Recorded in First-Person Oral Histories,” Alphonse insists that I be guinea pig number one!

And, he adds, as I have already met his entire family—all one hundred and forty-two aunts, uncles, and cousins, which is only a slight exaggeration—and as he knows almost nothing about my family, which I assure him is all to the good—he insists I bare all.

[Male voice:] Here, let me help you.

Very funny, Alphonse—keep your hands off my blouse!

[Male, laughing:] Later then?

Yes, later—if you behave!

As I was saying, my husband is a devilishly persuasive and persistent S.O.B.—OUCH!

[Male:] Be serious!

I am being serious. Quit hovering, Alphonse. Go to your study and study, or whatever it is you do in there, or I swear I’ll turn this recorder off and—

[Male:] No need, I’m leaving.

[footsteps fading away]

Ah, good, he retires. “A petulant downturn to his handsome lips,” I would add if I were writing this. But I am not, alas. Instead, I must speak my unholy tale. And whether he shall still love me when I am through, I do not know . . .

[audible groan]

But I fear not!

Nevertheless, I plunge ahead.

First, I report that my “spouse-choice,” Alphonse Bernard Makola, is black. Actually, he's a light brown with hazel eyes, silky black curls, a thin mustache, a swimmer's body, and much given to smoking pencil-thin cheroots.

Since we first met at an avant-garde art gallery in Greenwich Village at which he had a showing of acrylic paintings of dirigibles—yes, dirigibles, those large gray floating things, and, no, they don’t capture my imagination, either—it may come as no shock that in his early twenties he lived in black turtlenecks, charcoal corduroys, and a maroon beret with a Croix-de-Guerre on the ribbon. He is now 28-years-old and still very full of himself.

I myself am of Irish-Danish stock, American born-and-bred, with irritatingly fine, “corn-silk” hair and blue-gray eyes . . . I turn twenty-one today.

I stress these few physical details because, in the “family value system” of my now-dead father, that makes me . . . a Nigger Lover.

So, you—whoever you are—may well wonder whether I originally dated Alphonse as a slap in my dead father's face. Perhaps, at first. But, if so, thank God for a daughter's revenge, because I am smitten by this man, though six months married is not a true test—

[Male:] It bloody well is!

[footsteps passing]

No, it isn't, Alphonse, and I'll thank you to just keep on going to the kitchen. Sheesh, what a pest. [loudly] And don’t sneak up on me again! Wear your cowboy boots!

[Male:] Too déclassé.

Okay, then carry a bell like a medieval plague victim.

[a snort of masculine laughter, receding]

Where was I? Oh, yes, the “test” of a true marriage. This tale of family values will actually turn out to be about my mother's marriage, about the test it required of her, and whether she passed . . . or failed it . . .

Or perhaps both!

[explosive exhalation]

So, I begin . . .

It was New Year’s Day 1983 when Cousin Alexandra came to live with us in Sterling Falls, Idaho—a pretty little high-country town of farmers, loggers, cement workers, and store owners. I had just turned four years old and I adored her, but I was that kind of child. I adored my handsome minister-papa, Parker Carson; my dark-haired boom-laughing mother, Becky Carson; and above-all my twelve-year-old brother, Caleb. I positively worshipped Caleb. So, it seemed to me that when Cousin Alex came, she fit right in—bubbly, cheerful, and unambitious, except where my daddy was involved, and pretty as only a milk-fed, nineteen-year-old Southern farm girl can be.

That's when our family began to unravel, but only Mama knew that, and she and I only spoke of it much later . . .

Daddy was a Christian Identity minister, as was Grandpa Miles—Mama's daddy—before him. Grandpa Miles was a red-headed, red-bearded giant, with a bluff manner that apparently charmed everybody he met. He died when I was three so I can't say that I remember him, but Caleb idolized him, and anyone Caleb idolized, I idolized by reflection.

Grandpa Miles, nine-year-old Rebecca—my one-day-to-be mama—and her younger brother Jesse, moved from Alabama to Idaho in the late-1950s, so Grandpa and his family could be with their “own sort.”

I’ve listened to many of my daddy's sermons, so I can tell you just what our “own sort” means, but I'm going to stay back a bit in this history before I do because it's more pleasant for me . . . and postpones the dark inevitable a bit longer.

My grandmother having died before the move to Idaho, Mama said that she and Jesse grew up a bit wild. Grandpa Miles got housekeepers, of course, but Mama said she could always twist him around her little finger, and I don't doubt that as she was a helluva charming woman—still is!

If you detect a touch of Southern accent in this tale, it's because it's there. Alphonse teases me, and says I lapse into it as an affectation, since I never lived in the South, but it's much more than that. Mama never lost her ‘Bama accent and when I speak like her, I feel like her, and I'm glad.

Mama and Daddy met in the late 1960s when she was nineteen and he twenty. He escaped the hippie-influx into California (or “Californication,” as my Uncle Jesse would always have it) by heading East and ending up happy in our conservative little corner of the U.S.A. Daddy too was looking for his “own kind,” and he said that L.A. with its “Jews, whores, homos, and monkey people”—[softly] forgive me, my love!—was unacceptable to him, and of course, later, to us.

I know my papa's sermons by heart. When I have the courage, I will recite one or two, if they will not scorch my tapes as they have since scorched my heart.

For now, I rest . . .

* * *

I am refreshed and cheerful. Alphonse took me to Chez Cybele in midtown Manhattan for my birthday and we drank ourselves silly and danced in a sultry, barely decent fashion, until I wanted to rip off his clothes right on the dance floor.

Oh, damn. I'm treating this like a diary instead of a—[calling loudly] Alphonse?—a “valuable historical document”—Alphonse?!—appropriate for Ph.D. committees and/or posterity and/or—oh, hell! He can erase this part later.

Oh, I know what to report, Mama called, and she's doing well. Caleb still refuses to see her and she still refuses to give up on him. I haven't spoken to him since I was eleven, and don't wish to ever. But, oh, how I miss her!

So I shall return to my narrative with earlier, happier times to relate. Drum roll, please: “Mama’s Wedding Day, September 1, 1969.”

Mama always said her wedding day was full of laughter. The ceremony was held in my Grandpa Miles's church, later my daddy Parker’s church, and she said the little place was so full of teary women and proud men that there was barely room for her and Parker. She'd known these folks all her life—they being her daddy's congregation—and there was a small but vocal bunch of jilted suitors who kept up a steady stream of catcalls, informing Parker that he was in no way good enough for the “beauteous Rebecca Fenton,” informing her that she was most definitely marrying herself a dope-smoking hippie type, and informing her daddy that to protect his daughter from her folly, they were planning to hog-tie Parker's scrawny butt and send him home on the 11:40 Greyhound.

Mama said her daddy laughed so hard at Parker's “discomfiture” that he could barely conduct the service. And that though he tried to keep order he mostly failed, so she finally told that rowdy group of non-grown-ups that each and every one of them would get to kiss the bride royally and properly if they would hush up long enough to let her become one.

So, they licked their chops and quieted down and Mama, “laughing inside and out,” as she used to say, turned back to her beloved Parker and stared him into calm assurance as they were wed.

Now, Mama's wedding night was kind of a mixed thing, too, but not unhappy. No, but mixed. I pulled out her old diary and I’m going to read from it, as telling this part of the story makes me blush.

[laughter]

I’m glad you can’t see me!

So, in Mama’s own words and—if I can do it justice—in her own “sweet as mo-lass-es” drawl:

I unclasped and let down my hair with a calm that went straight through my mind and body, while Parker trembled so hard he couldn’t loosen the ties of my nightgown.

I helped him release it and take it over my head, and then I lay back—bold as Mata Hari—on a gorgeous rosebud-and-wedding-ring quilt. The yellow light from a single oil-burning lamp next to the bed gave my skin a wicked glow.

Well, Parker gaped and gawped so that I could barely suppress my laughter, and my belly quivered with the effort. If ever a man was in awe of his unexpected good fortune, it was Parker Carson!

Then—like a man afraid he might burn himself—Parker reached out and stroked my belly with the tips of his fingers, and suddenly I wasn’t laughing anymore. I was the one who was trembling and I was the one who was afraid . . .

After that I let him do anything his hands and mouth wanted to do, until I was swept up into a rapture that I never knew existed—never dreamt of outside of religion.

As I twisted and turned under Parker’s touch, I kept remembering my daddy’s reception toast, in his deep bellowing voice:

“As our first mother Eve cleaved to her husband Adam, so let our daughters and wives cleave to their husbands. As Christ is the head of the Church, so the husband is the head of the wife. But let him treat her with the utmost tenderness—Parker, you hear me now, boy! Don’t make me come after you!—”

And Parker’s stammering, “Yes, sir, I mean, no, sir,” reducing us all to laughter.

“But, Becky, you hear me, too. Just because your foolish old papa let you run wilder than he should have—and I’ve paid the price, Lord, I have paid the price!—”

More laughter by wedding guests and waiters alike!

“Don’t you go forgetting you are your mama’s child, Becky-girl. Submit to your husband in all things, as your mother did to me, and be happy, as we were happy. Submit to your husband in all things, I say . . . and be happy!”

And I, Rebecca Carson, decided then and there, drenched in love and coital sweat, to do just that.

So, here is my pledge before God:

I will ever and always submit to my husband, Parker Carson. . . and BE HAPPY!

[A long silence. The soft whirring of the tape recorder. Finally:]

Oh, Mama! How I wish I’d been an angel on your shoulder to slap you silly and pinch your ears pink, if it would’ve made you revoke that pledge before it could drown us all in madness and grief.

[A deep sigh.]

Anyway . . . I better explain how I came to have some of my Mama’s most intimate writings—her diaries and letters and such. Well, when Mama was a little girl, they had a grease-fire in their kitchen in Mobile—nothing terrible, but it broke through to her parents’ bedroom before it was contained. They lost all the family photo albums and the diaries her own mother had been keeping ever since she was a little girl. Mama said she had never seen her mother grieve anything like she grieved the loss of those mementos of her youth.

So when Mama was fourteen, she talked Grandpa Miles into buying her a fireproof safe to be used by her and her alone. And that’s where Mama kept each diary as she finished it, her prom corsage, her yearbooks and wedding album, and later, Caleb’s and my report cards, our drawings, our school pictures, her letter to Baby Miles—unfinished and undelivered, I might add, since that sweet little guy died so young—anyway, stuff like that. When I came to New York at nearly age twelve, she emptied the contents of the safe into a small trunk, locked it tight, and had it sent to the boarding school ahead of me.

I read through everything once, that first week in my dorm room, locked it back up tight, and swore I would never look at it again.

And I never did.

Until now . . .

* * *