Blood of Cain

79

I wasn’t sure if my brother would show up for the funeral. I didn’t know his adult face. Wouldn’t recognize him in the crowd. More than thirty-five people came to pay their respects to my mother. We left Saint Francis Catholic Church and drove four miles to Hillcrest Cemetery through a light rain, skies dark and sinister.

At the gravesite, the rain tapered off and each of the neighbors who I’d met in my mother’s home, two days earlier, stood with me and the others as she was laid to rest. Beneath the black umbrellas, and hidden in the murkiness, I looked at faces. Trying to see if any of the men, all strangers, had a genetic resemblance to me, Courtney, or some of the pictures I’d seen of my mother in her youth.

If Dillon had showed, I wanted no surprises.

I didn’t see the Murphy Village resident in the white pickup with the wide off-road tires. But because he wasn’t at the graveyard didn’t mean he wasn’t prowling in the shadows. Along the fringes of the cemetery, a willowy mist hung around the base of the pine trees like white socks that had fallen below knotty ankles. I heard gentle sobbing amid the dark clothes and umbrellas.

A fiddle player stepped forward and began playing Amazing Grace, a song, I was told, my mother loved. When he stopped playing, a Catholic priest, Father Joseph Duffy, early sixties, flushed face, cotton-white hair, delivered a graveside mass and that was more of a eulogy than a sermon. He’d known my mother, and his affection for her was genuine.

Within forty minutes, they were all gone. Gone back to their trailers and mansions, a dichotomy as unique as their nomadic history. Although, at home, they were known to be as insular and unreceptive as the Amish, these Irish Travelers were there when my mother needed them and they were there, today, when she did not.

I waited for the backhoe operator to scoop the dirt into the grave. Her headstone was set in place, and in a few minutes the backhoe was loaded on a flatbed truck and hauled away, the sound of the diesels fading in the drizzle. Silence revisited the cemetery. I stood there and looked at her grave. It was adjacent to the burial site of Sarah Burke, her daughter, my sister, and Courtney’s mother.

I set flowers on my sister’s grave, and then stepped close to my mother’s headstone. I reached into my jacket pocket and took out a hand-carved piece of wood about the size of a plum. It was the figure of a little puffin, painted black, white, red beak, and matching webbed feet. The figurine was shellacked. Its wings were outstretched. “I want you to roost here for a while,” I whispered, setting the little bird down on the edge of the gravestone.

I stood as the rain began to gently fall. I opened the umbrella, the sound of the raindrops popping, the smell of fresh earth and pine needles in the still air. The desolate call of a mourning dove came from the fog-shrouded trees. I looked up and thought I saw someone standing in the mist, at the edge of the woods, a man standing, looking at me. Was it my brother, Dillon? I felt for my Glock in the small of my back. I just touched the butt of the pistol, ready. But I didn’t sense an immediate threat.

The image seemed to dissolve in the haze, not back off or even walk away — but rather melt away. Maybe the vision was from my lack of sleep, living on the extreme edge, stress and fatigue causing hallucinations. I blew out a breath, took my hand off the gun, and lowered my eyes to the headstone. It read:

I turned away from my mother’s grave and walked in the rain back to my Jeep. As I was unlocking the door, my phone rang. I looked at the caller ID: UNKNOWN. Maybe it was Andrea calling from an undisclosed number. I answered. The voice was deep, smooth as silk, exuding coolness. He said, “Hello, little brother. This is Dillon. You left your number at our mother’s house. On the kitchen table, I was told. So, I assumed you wouldn’t mind if I called it. Did you bury our sweet mother today?”

“Where were you?”

“I was rather indisposed. Couldn’t make travel arrangements. Sean O’Brien — what a fine Irish name, although I like Sean Flanagan better. You’re somewhat late to the clan, little brother. So, let me make myself very clear. You have no claim to mother’s estate and property, including the land in Ireland. So, just turn around and go back to whatever world you came from.”

“Where’s Courtney?”

“She’s none of your business as well. And she, too, has no rightful claim to mother’s property. You probably didn’t know Courtney was diagnosed with acute paranoid-schizophrenia. Mother tried to hide it. Unfortunately, it seems to run in the family. How’s your head, Sean?”

I said nothing.

“Give me time, I will get in your head if you get in my way. Head trips are my specialty. If you’re in contact with our delusional little niece, tell her to relinquish any claims on mother’s property, and her allegations against me are a sad by-product of her pathetic mental state. My attorney will handle all probate proceedings. Poor thing, Courtney, when off her medication, believes I did an injustice to her and her parents. So now she has this vendetta for me. It’s one that will be quite dangerous for her.”

“The injustice you did to Courtney’s parents — our sister and her husband, is called murder. And you raped Courtney when she was a child. In my book, there’s a special place in hell for men like you. You touch Courtney, and you’ve just bought yourself a one-way ticket to that special place. Now, big brother, do I make myself clear?”

His voice changed. It dropped into a throaty whisper, his threat coming from someplace deep and dark where absolute evil dwelled. “Our sweet mother, the whore, might have told you she thought of me as a distant cousin to Cain. Well, the neurotic bitch was right. Like Cain, I’m a wanderer. Like Cain, who committed the first murder on earth, slaying his brother, I will do the same to you. You don’t want me getting into your head, little brother. Because once I move in … I never leave.”

He disconnected. I looked across the cemetery, the fog rising above the tombstones, the puffin barely visible, like a bird surfing the crest of a cloud, catching a holy wave to a better place.