JACOB
The smooth wooden handle of the shovel was gripped against my palm, the heavy metal lodged against the concrete floor as I stared into a small room that I hadn't stepped foot inside in over twenty years. The door was plain and unassuming, the dirt floor torn up and heaped in piles as I peered down into the hole I'd dug.
It hadn't been hard to find where the ground was last disturbed, the dirt smoothed over my whatever tool my father had used to bury the confession I assumed was hidden in the metal box I found. With sweat dripping down my temples and my teeth so tightly clenched they were aching, I couldn't bring myself to reach inside that hole and extract the box my father had buried before he died.
I wasn't sure why Father Timothy's carefully spoken words had echoed in my head the moment I reached this room. Perhaps it had been divine guidance, or some subliminal understanding that I hadn't directly recognized, but I knew as soon as I opened the door that if my father had truly confessed to anything, his words would be contained in this space.
The guilt alone was an insufferable blanket smothering me and stifling my breath, weighing on me with each step I'd taken down into the basement. I hope he died suffocating on that guilt, hope it became a knot in his throat that choked him and stole the last breath from his lungs.
If it had just been about me, I would leave that box in the hole, allow it to rust and rot away without relieving my father of the guilt he carried into death, but my need to understand Jericho had me kneeling down, had me trembling as I reached to extract the confession from its hole.
Knowing what my father had confessed, reading the words and reliving the horror would certainly destroy me, but I was falling down an endless dark tunnel, writhing and scrabbling for some truth - some honest reason - why two boys that were genetically the same, who lived the same lives, the same horrors, had turned out to become opposites.
Nature versus nurture certainly couldn't explain it. We were identical in every way, had lived the same lives, the same traumas, yet in the end, I had walked away only slightly scathed while Jericho had lost his mind.
Why?
It was the same damn question on an endless loop, the one now screaming in my head as I lifted the metal box, brushed the errant dirt from the top and sat back to place it in my lap.
The ice cold temperature of the metal seeped down into my jeans, an icy finger reaching down through my skin to trace the veins of regret and fear, anger and remorse, the memory of lashing and violations that scarred me. Phantom screams erupted inside my head, my brother's young voice only quieted by my own, and as my fingers traced the latch holding the lid of that box closed, one more voice lifted up to remind me that my father's abuse hadn't been the only scorn we'd suffered.
"Maybe if you two didn't break the rules, he wouldn't have to punish you."
"Shush, Jacob. Don't speak of it in public. You'll only destroy the family."
"It helps if you walk away and don't listen. He'll eventually stop and all will be silent again."
I wasn't sure what was worse: my father's abuse or my mother's complacent acceptance. While he beat us down with fists and belts, she kept us silent while painting a picture of the perfect, Catholic family. My father's abuse had been performed in anger, but what was her excuse? Fear? Or was it something else?
My mother, Christy Samantha Hayle, had been a beauty queen when my father met her. According to the stories, at least. She had long brown hair and green eyes that sparkled in the sunlight. I remembered loving her as a child, gravitating to her before the darkness crept in to shadow her gaze. From birth until age five or six, my family had been absolutely normal. Yes, my father had still been a self-proclaimed Saint, a man who believed he wielded the might of God in his hand, but he hadn't been abusive. It wasn't until Jericho and I had been caught with that book that the abuse started.
"Do you look at your mother that way, boy? With lustful eyes? The devil has gotten inside you. He's filling you full of his evil."
Thinking back now as the memories flooded me, it was odd he'd dragged my mother into that accusation. We were just small boys, just innocent youth, but he'd immediately assaulted us with disgust. My mother. Why would a young boy ever look at his mother in that way? And why had my father assumed we had? In truth, all I knew about my cock at that time was that it was useful for pissing while standing up. It wasn't until he'd made such a big deal of it that I'd become curious as to its other uses.
Perhaps our curiosity had scared him. Our interest in the female body leading him to believe we'd been touched by some sinful thing. Whatever it was had shattered the happy illusions of a close-knit family, had crushed the belief that his undying faith could protect his sons from real life.
I never saw my father hit my mother, never saw him threaten her or make her fear for her life. But I clearly remember the wineglass in her hand that, through the years, transitioned into a tumbler, a pint glass, a bottle. I'd grown to hate her more than my father's angry fists just because she sat back and silently allowed it. Every time my brother cried out in pain, it wasn't my father I'd wanted to punish...it was her.
As it turned out, it wasn't necessary for me to strike out at her, she'd taken care of that all on her own with the amount of alcohol she drank. It sapped the life out of her as the years churned on, destroying her on the outside as well as within.
My mother wasn't a beauty queen any longer by the time I left home. She was a shadow of the woman she’d once been, a victim of my father's torment even if he'd never laid a hand on her.
Staring down at the box, I flipped the latch and opened the top.
What I thought would be a simple handwritten confession turned out to be so much more.