Bitter Autumn

Crime Fiction by Scott Kauffman

Two Fridays before Thanksgiving, Autumn watched through a rain-runnel windshield as her father hobbled out from under the stone-archway of Lucasville Penitentiary. In his one hand he gripped a small duffel bag. In his other what looked like could have been the same Bible he had with him when the police chief he’d cuckolded ducked his head into the backseat of the village’s one cruiser to personally drive him the six hours down-state to begin serving his ten-year sentence. Her father thinner, grayer than what she remembered, and she couldn’t say if she would have recognized if not for a war-wound limp about which he always shook his head when asked.

“Not nothing you need know about.”

Her hesitant finger tapped the dashboard switch a full quarter-minute before Autumn double flashed the rusted pickup’s one headlight across the damp blacktop. When her father limped up to the passenger door, she leaned across and pushed it open a half-hearted inch.

“Thanks for making the trip down,” her father said as he opened the door, pushing his grimy duffel across the duct-taped upholstery and laying his tattered Bible on top before he got in. “Didn’t know for sure you’d be here. Never wrote back you would.”

“I don’t like making promises I don’t know I’m going to keep. Almost didn’t. Turned around twice on my way down.”

He nodded, looking skyward through the drizzly windshield.

“Well, I’m obliged you did. Would’ve been one long road to thumb a ride home on.”

Autumn didn’t answer, and as she reached for the ignition his lost-dog eyes strayed over the dashboard from key to glove box and back.

“Surprised you kept the old girl.”

“It runs. Besides, pink slip’s in your name.”

“Meaning because it’s my truck, you’d of had to drive down for me to sign ‘er over.”

“Truth be told, I’d always thought of it as Mom’s truck.” A truck her father had purchased with what left from the insurance her mother more than once promised her she’d set aside for Autumn’s college should something happen to her. Autumn the one to find her in the upstairs bathroom on the September afternoon when she’d raced shouting up the steps two at a time with her trigonometry test in hand, an empty Drano bottle lying on the floor. Autumn had run across the alleyway to Mrs. Nicholson’s who when she touched her mother’s acid-burned lips had muttered: “Good God Almighty, Marah.”

A hundred feet from the visitor’s gate, Autumn suddenly swerved off onto the berm, knocking her father against the passenger door and making a sharp U-turn in the potholed prison road so they were looking back at the forty-foot stone walls.

“What’re we doing?”

“Thought you might want to take a last look at the old homestead before you bid it a final fare-thee-well.”

For a long minute he sat staring at her before he turned and looked straight ahead, her caustic lips smiling at him in the windshield.

“So this how it’s going to be? You gonna be belly shiving me the whole way home?

The night before the afternoon when Autumn found her mother, she’d been awakened by sobs seeping through the paper-thin walls of their other-side-of-the-tracks hovel interspersed with his heated denials.

“And you’re believin’ that bitch again me!”

Accidental the coroner who attended their church had inked on the death certificate to give the holier-than-thous one less excuse to deny her mother a proper Methodist burial. Not that they attended all that often. Christmas and Easter. The occasional wedding. The more frequent funerals. Signed-and-sealed death certificate duly issued by an elected county functionary notwithstanding, Autumn had heard the whispers in the tittle-tattle pews behind them, and that night after the last mourner and nosy parker gone home, he’d sat on her bed, his black suit shiny with the years since their wedding, sixth Pabst in hand and lost-dog eyes searching the threadbare floor.

“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t . . . I’m sorry . . . .”

****

The truck’s squeaky wipers tick-tocked back and forth, Autumn nodding when a pair of ubiquitous golden arches rose in his corner of the windshield. “Looks like they’ve some sort of two-for-one sale on Breakfast McMuffins if you’ve got the hungries.”

Her father reached for his Bible.

“Save your money. Fed me before they set me loose.”

At the turnoff north onto Route 23, she glanced over to catch him watching in the direction of a man and woman as they trooped with missionary zeal up a crumbling asphalt driveway. From their somber Sunday dress and cache of what she took to be pamphlets tucked under their arms, Autumn guessed them to be Jehovah Witnesses because not a month after she’d found her mother and was standing at the kitchen sink, a woman whose pietistic hair dyed the color of honey and so reminded Autumn of her mother’s had hurried up their frost-buckled walk also with a cache of pamphlets tucked under her arm. Autumn’s father, who had started working half-Saturdays at his job as a welder at the Hanna Foundry to forestall popping his first Pabst until that afternoon’s college kickoff, answered but not until she heard the woman ask if her father knew Jesus did Autumn step into the dining-room doorway, last of their lunch dishes she was drying in hand.

“Did some as a kid. Fell out of the habit when the Army got hold of me.”

“Is this the time in your life when you maybe feel a need to fall back into the habit?”

She claimed her name was Faith, which seemed to Autumn to be too cutesy by half but maybe had self-christened herself when struck down on her own dusty road to Damascus. Her father had turned off the Ohio State/Michigan game, which if Autumn had lowered the volume by so much as a quarter decibel would have gotten her heretic hand hacked off at the wrist, and set his half-full Pabst on the ring-stained coffee table. The two had sat in their dinning room, Faith frowning at its jack-o’-lantern centerpiece Autumn had spent the better part of the morning carving with a tracheotomy scalpel that had been her mother’s in nurse’s training. All afternoon, with Bible pressed to her full-figured breasts, Faith talked about scripture and the Lord and the inner peace one could find in asking His forgiveness if we’d only open our hearts until Autumn with much pot banging started supper and Faith rose from the table.

“No, but thank you for your hospitality.”

Faith told him she had to get home to put supper on for her invalid mother she’d been caring for since the old woman’s stroke, but she left behind a stack of tracts: Watch Tower and Truth and Awake! Filled, Autumn found when she considered them the next morning once she finished the Sunday Vindicator, with twaddle. Only after her father had been sent off to prison did she consider how when Faith had hurried down the sidewalk towards theirs she’d knocked on no other door. She guessed Faith must have scoured the obituaries as do opportunistic thieves seeking out the vulnerable and put a check mark next to her mother’s.

She leaves behind a husband and . . .

****

“So you still a Witness?”

“I say I am,” her father answered without seeming to cease reading. “They say I’m not no more. Disfellowshipped they call it.”

“Sort of surprises me. I remember Faith saying how they ran an active ministry inside most prisons.”

“They do there too. For converts.”

Not for those they’d disfellowshipped, her father said. Witnesses inside wouldn’t have nothing to do with those who were. They would walk clear around the Yard just so they wouldn’t have to speak to those who had been. If he sat down at the same table with them in the mess, they would all get up and take their trays to another.

“Ten or so others in the same boat as me set up this study group. Called ourselves The Disfellowshipped.”

“That’s too bad. That they weren’t there for you when you needed them most.”

“No worse than what some others done,” her father said, shushing his lips with his bookmark. A bookmark she had searched for high and low in every nook and cranny of the house because her mother had made it in summer camp. On one side, she’d burned the Girl Scout creed in script: I will do my best to make the world a better place. Of her mother’s few keepsakes, the one Autumn had wanted most because her mother had used it to keep her place in her cookbooks when she baked, and what after Faith had browbeat her father into hauling their holiday decorations out to the township dump most reminded Autumn of their Thanksgivings and Christmases.

Autumn knew little about Witnesses when Faith first knocked on their door except she sometimes saw them as they evangelized door-to-door and sometimes got water ballooned for their meddling concern with the souls of others and was as close as they would ever get to the martyrdom they seemed so much to crave. She had heard they didn’t believe in birthdays or Halloween or Thanksgiving. Did not believe in Christmas even, which absolutely appalled Autumn who lived her whole year for Christmas. For the decorating and baking and was when she felt nearest her mother. Beginning every afternoon after Thanksgiving, they would greet her father at the backdoor to show him what they’d done and as tired as he was, his icy-blue eyes that had begun to melt around their irises from the welding torch he held before them for eight and ten hours days always sparkled.

“Does Good Housekeeping offer some kind of contest you two can enter?”

With not much squirreled away in the Hills Brothers can, they made do with fixings from Ben Franklin followed by hours of handwork. One afternoon they made pop-sickle-stick snowflakes. The next, trinkets tied from backyard twigs. Miniature wreathes made from mason-jar lids and salt-dough ornaments they baked. Bottle-cap reindeer and cinnamon-stick Christmas trees. Snowmen fashioned from peanuts dipped in flour paste and petite gingerbread men. Sparkle-dusted pears and out of cotton balls they made fluffy ornaments resembling buckets of snow she teased her mother with by dying with droplets of yellow food color.

“Oh, Autumn! Goodness gracious. What goes on inside that head of yours?”

****

After a while, her father bookmarked his place and looked out the windshield.

“Need for you to drive me to the courthouse tomorrow.”

“Use Mom’s truck. I’ll get by without.”

“License expired on me. Not looking to get sent back so soon.”

“Guess I can, but why the courthouse?”

“Gotta register as a sex offender they say.”

Autumn’s caustic lips again blistered in the windshield.

“Now for that I can definitely take off.”

“Take off?”

“Foundry.”

“You’re working at the Foundry? Doin’ what?”

“Bookkeeper.”

“You went to college for them to learn you bookkeeping?”

“Missed out on the part about going to college. The Barrows were good enough to give me a job.”

****

She and her father did not attend services that first Sunday after Faith targeted them but all the next week he sat in his easy chair after supper reading top to bottom from the stack of pamphlets she’d left. While he read, he had the television set on but kept the volume set to mute, even for Monday Night Football. Five of the six Pabsts not opened when Faith had knocked still not opened. Butts in his ashtray Autumn emptied each morning fell to two or at most three. Twice during the week he called upstairs to say he was taking a walk, and when she walked by his room to start breakfast the next morning the knees of the trousers he’d left hanging on his doorknob were dark with dried mud. Not once during the week did he step out to his American Legion Post, which from what had sobbed through their paper-thin walls on the night before her mother died was where the wife of their police chief worked behind the bar lending a sympathetic ear to graying veterans with black memories in need of numbing.

“Let me freshen that up for you, soldier.”

The second Sunday, though, her father didn’t sleep in notwithstanding it the one day of the week when the truck engine didn’t rattle in the alleyway before first light. He shaved and showered and put on the same serge suit (he owned only the one) and tie (he owned only two) he’d worn for the funeral. Same suit he had worn when married seventeen years earlier, Autumn born seven months later and two months premature they told her, which when Autumn was twelve and stumbled upon the birth certificate in her mother’s drawer as she was putting away laundry seemed to have been providential because at nine pounds two ounces, Lord knew how much she would have weighed if her poor mother had held out two months more.

****

Her father turned a page in his Bible. Then another.

“So which book you studying?”

“Matthew.”

“Uplifting?”

“Um.”

That much had not changed anyway. Her father never had been much of a talker. Not that either of them now had all that many civil words to share. With a three-hour drive ahead, Autumn started to reach for the radio only to jerk her hand back to the steering wheel.

“Go ahead,” he said without looking up. “If I’d waited until it’d got quiet enough to read, I’d never of made it past the first verse of Genesis.”

“That’s okay,” she said, not wanting to give him cause to dial in one of those pulpit-thumpers you so often picked up in Appalachian Ohio. Like the one they’d heard that second Sunday after Faith knocked on their door. Autumn had been excited as she dressed for church that Sunday because despite her mother’s Biblical name, Autumn had never attended weekly services. She and her father took back seats in the elementary-school auditorium where in lieu of a consecrated Kingdom Hall the Witnesses held their services until Faith had looked over her shoulder.

“Would you want to sit up front with Mother and me where you can better hear God’s holy word?”

But the only words Autumn heard that Sunday from the self-righteous charlatan bloviating up on stage were holy hooey heaped up to his flimflam ears. She learned later that Witnesses, in addition to everything else they didn’t believe in, didn’t believe in forking over for a paid preacher. One who might at least keep his flock from nodding off while he went about shearing them. They believed in only lay speakers rotated among the men, never the women even though women exceeded men in attendance by two to one. The words thumped from the pulpit that morning taken from Revelations about the Hellfire certain to befall them before they so much as sat down to their pot-roast Sunday dinners. When the services got to their final Thank-God Amen, Faith introduced them to Elder Edwards.

“We do hope to see the two of you next Sunday.”

Autumn, however, only hoped to Hell that next Sunday her father would just pop a cold one and turn on NFL football while she cleared the Sunday dishes.

Return, however, they did, notwithstanding Autumn not in the mood for another hatful of Holy hooey and so the next Sunday claimed she had a cold coming on and on the next told him her period was giving her cramps. By the Sunday after, however, her father was on to her, not dissuaded by her vomit, having used the same ploy when he’d had a high-school history test he’d failed to study for. Then because Sundays were the Kingdom Hall’s second weekend service, they began to attend the ones held Saturday evenings as well as those on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Every fourth Saturday he showered and shaved when he came home from the Foundry at noon and made Autumn put on a dress to go with him to meet Faith, the three of them knocking on village doors that thank God seldom opened, the telephone lines above them Autumn swore she could hear humming as they walked up the next driveway.

Don’t answer your door. They’re on our street this week.

****

The rain had let up by the time they were driving through Chillicothe, and as they passed a muddy game of kickball going on in a grade-school playground Autumn nodded out the window.

“Seems like somebody’s having fun.”

Her father looked up from his scriptures.

“Seems like from the looks of them they’re going to catch it when they get home too,” she said.

“Wouldn’t surprise me none.”

“But what the hey. Part of being a kid is having fun with friends then catching it when you get home. Or so I’ve been told.”

Her father let go a resigned breath and returned to his Bible. Neither had to say it. For if one of her friends were the one to open the door the three of them had knocked on, Autumn would flush a deep shade of oak-leaf scarlet. It didn’t take long for the teasing at school to grow wanton, Apostle Autumn they called her, but when she whined about it her father would half quote a snippet from the Beatitudes.

“Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you for my sake.”

At Faith’s meddling (“they just abide too much hanky panky there”) he forbade Autumn from participating in school functions. No football, no basketball. Neither clubs nor sinful slumber parties. She was to come straight home. Her father even called the school principal one evening.

“I’m sorry, but he is your father,” Autumn forced during pep rallies to sit in a study hall empty save for a half-dozen other Witness kids with only a window open.

Give me an H!

Soon, the only kids who would hang with her were her fellow Witness rejects. Their sole alternative to attending football and basketball games and going to slumber parties and participating in pep rallies were Witness youth groups chaperoned so severely they put Autumn to sleep except for when she could sneak out for a smoke or to slip some Witness boy her tongue in the broom closet while letting him cop a feel. Mostly, Autumn begged off on attending the youth groups, saying she had to study. At Faith’s prodding, her father spoke to Elder Edwards, but the old windbag had sided with her. Autumn’s grades, he said, were a true testament to Witness principles that might convince the unwashed not to rebuff their message so out of hand.

“Or at least stop their infernal water ballooning.”

She and her father settled into an uneasy ceasefire until Faith noticed how Autumn, without excuse not to attend the youth groups in summer, drew overly-long looks from boys. Faith warned her father this the time in life when a girl’s ears most attuned to Satan’s seductive whispers. So while permitted to attend the severely chaperoned youth groups, Autumn forbidden to date. Not that she at high risk of being asked out as all the cool kids considered Witness girls way too not cool. But oh if the fools only knew how Witness girls could gratify every debauched dream those boys had ever pugknuckled in steamy bathroom showers.

Because, however, the cool kids didn’t know, Autumn left with only her youth groups where Faith, notwithstanding she was a fool, not wrong in seeing the boys’ lust. Faith should have but didn’t see Stephen’s because Stephen, son of Elder Edwards, seemed safe. So serious and spoke with such intensity of his coming missionary year in Nigeria when he walked Autumn home after their youth group meetings. His inordinate recitation from the Song of Solomon, though, should have tipped them off for Safe Stephen, like any seventeen-year-old suffering acute hormone overload, not all that safe. Not safe especially on warm, firefly lit August nights when he lay with her while whispering scripture: “Thy two breasts are like . . . .”

****

The first snowflakes of the season melted on the pickup’s windshield. Her father, silent since Chillicothe, glanced up.

“This Columbus?”

“Yeah. About to hop on I-71. A Denny’s up ahead if you’ve got the hungries yet.”

Her father shook his head and returned to his Bible from where he had had been looking out his window at a billboard depicting a longhaired girl with a telephone pushed to her ear, her other hand raised to a deeply furrowed forehead, the number for the local Planned Parenthood hotline in four-foot letters below.

Autumn had felt his seed germinating inside her even as he zippered up and so wasn’t too taken aback when she missed her period three weeks after Safe Stephen had left for his missionary year in Nigeria. Nor was she surprised when on a rainy Saturday afternoon in September after she’d driven up to the office of Planned Parenthood storefronted on the worst side of Youngstown (with the steel mills shuttered all sides bad but the Eastside with its burned-out-shell after burned-out-shell by far the worst) to be told by the kind-voiced counselor what she’d heard the girls whisper in the high-school restroom:

“Any woman under eighteen needs the consent of at least one parent except in the case of rape or incest.”

The first time she’d knocked, Faith seemed to Autumn not so much gold digger as ditch-digger’s daughter. After Faith’s mother’s died midway through that hard February winter, however, the aging spinster grew more dogged, making a point to sit in their row of folding metal chairs. More and more often invited her father to knock on doors where he insisted less and less that Autumn accompany them. Afterwards, he and Faith would sit drinking coffee in a back corner at the Country Kitchen, and when he picked her up for services (Autumn preferring to walk), she scooted ever closer to him on the pickup seat, their fellow congregants winking their speculation.

“Got all the symptoms for a fall ceremony I’d say.”

****

Autumn passed a flatbed overloaded with Christmas trees, a sign on its back bumper plugging Henry’s Christmas Tree Lot off the Wadsworth exit, her father shaking his head. He told her when he’d been a boy, they at least had the decency to wait until the day after Thanksgiving before they started in with all their heathen shilling.

“Be starting up on the Fourth of July afore you know it.”

While wary of Faith since that first cold-blooded knock, she didn’t hate her until Christmas when Autumn so much needed a mother’s closeness. Faith, however, caught her in their living-room window trimming the tree Autumn had sledded home that morning from the lot across from the village square and charged up their walk into their living room without so much as knocking.

“Haven’t we warned you celebrating Christmas is a sin! Do you want to put your salvation even more at risk?”

Then having shamed her father, Faith lent a zealous hand in stripping off years of mother-daughter ornaments. So her father not backslide on Autumn’s tears, she’d carried the packed boxes out to his pickup herself then rode shotgun in the truck with them to the village dump.

“It’s for your own good, Autumn, so stop with all your sniveling. You’ll thank me some day.”

Her father celebrated Christmas that year in his easy chair reading a year’s worth of backlist Witness tracts. Autumn in turn stayed upstairs relishing Moll Flanders, letting her father fix himself baloney sandwiches for his Christmas dinner. Her only Christmas came when she went out to wander the streets that night looking into the lighted windows of someone else’s.

One last hurdle barred Faith’s path. She’d heard, the Elders had heard, the whispers. With Autumn’s grades a lead-pipe cinch for a full-ride scholarship (she with no friends and nothing to do after school but study and cook supper), Autumn guessed as Faith must have of how her father dreaded the prospect of being alone save for the ghost in the bathroom upstairs.

“But before they’ll consent, you must confess your sin.”

Which he did the second Sunday after Autumn missed her period. Over Sunday dinner she confessed hers. Proposed her solution.

“Absolutely not!” her father had roared red faced across the table. Never would he endanger her salvation let alone that of his unborn grandchild. Never would he compound her sin with one worse. Would never compound his own.

“What the hell do you care!”she’d screamed back at him.

So what if she murdered a glob of protoplasm that at most filled a quarter test tube after he’d murdered her mother, Autumn grabbing hold of the table, waiting for him to backhand her, but he only pushed back his chair and  slammed their back door, not returning until well after dark. He did not speak so much as a single syllable to her until the next Sunday.

“You ‘bout ready? Cause if you are, seems you’ve got some sins of your own in need of mending,” which was when she told him if she did it would certainly set Elder Edwards ear’s burning.

The Saturday after they’d attended their first service at the Kingdom Hall, what of her mother’s they hadn’t driven over to the Rescue Mission housed in the abandoned Chicago & Southern depot they had carried up to the attic. Beginning the day after his refusal, Autumn brought them down one at a time and started to leave a bottle of Drano out in the upstairs bathroom for when he woke in the middle of the night from his disquieted sleep. She avoided speaking to him but stayed in her room, though once after putting away the dinner dishes she caught him holding her mother’s wedding portrait Autumn had brought down and set on the lamp table beside his easy chair. Another time when she was upstairs studying for a biology exam, Autumn heard the click of their backdoor deadbolt and did not hear its click again until well after she was in bed. The next morning, however, she found traces of vomit on the toilet rim and an empty pint of Four Roses buried in the trash.

Saturday was her turn to throw up, and once her father came home from his half day at the Foundry she again drove up to the Planned Parenthood offices but again the kind-voiced counselor had shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Autumn, but our hands are tied. Only in the case of rape or incest.”

Autumn thanked her but refused the woman’s offer to speak to her father. Outside their offices, she’d sat in the truck, the hate it would take to drink a full bottle of Drano eating inside her. She, however, not about to burn her guts out. Nor be a mother. Not at seventeen. She was not about to scotch her chance of a scholarship. Of getting clear from him and her soon-to-be stepmother-from-Hell. Two blocks from home, she parked at the curb outside the Hanna Police Department. She asked to speak to the police chief who’d divorced his wife a month after Autumn found her mother but still lent a sympathetic ear at her father’s Legion Post to graying soldiers burdened by black memories.

Autumn figured she had a week in which she could dangle the prospect of a retraction before the lawyer he would have to hire demanded she be tested. Her father would then demand she clear out of his house. She never figured when they returned from services the next day where the cuckolded police chief was waiting with his lackey deputy that her father would within an hour give a full confession.

“Don’t recall all that much. Pretty well stewed when I come home.”

“Must not’ve been on one of them nights when I seen your truck in the parking lot and hers somewheres I shouldn’t.”

Nor had Autumn figured for him the next week to plead guilty, Faith visiting him in jail only once. In the years to come, she would now and again see Faith at the A & P with her new husband whose late wife Autumn remembered reading in the obituaries had died within a year of his marriage to Faith but guessed from the refusal of the Faith’s eyes to meet hers when Autumn bumped her shopping cart against theirs in the checkout line that Faith had not written to her father once during his ten-year penitence.

Even before the police chief with all the righteous redress of cuckolded revenge grinning on his face had walked her father, handcuffed and shriveled inside his orange jumpsuit, down the rainy courthouse steps gripping his elbow, Autumn had called Planned Parenthood. Made appointments. Remade Christmas ornaments based on yellowing clippings she’d come across on an upper shelf of a kitchen cupboard. She wandered an empty house full of memories but no longer tenanted by her mother. In her mother’s place, she felt the swelling of a contentment not felt since a September afternoon as she ran upstairs shouting to show off her A in trigonometry and been the only A that Mr. Alstead had handed out. A feeling of contentment she wanted never to lose again.

****

Autumn pulled the pickup into the alleyway behind the house with its rickety carriage barn and collapsing hayloft they used as a garage. From the twin corners of the back stoop, two jack-o’-lanterns with tops caving into rotted skulls grimaced their welcome home.

“Forgot about it being Halloween.”

“Likely you forgot about Thanksgiving being week after next. Christmas next month. Marah loves them as much as I did with Mom.”

“Marah?”

Autumn tilted her chin toward the swing set secluded behind a copse of barren blackthorns she’d assembled one afternoon from a kit gotten on sale at K-Mart. A ten-year old with honey-hued hair cut in a pageboy sat studying them, neither smiling nor not smiling.

“From the photos up in the attic, the spitting image of Mom at her age.”

The swing arced to a stop.

“She going to know who I am?”

“I told her last night I might be bringing grandpap home.”

“What else you tell her?”

“Stuff growing up.”

Stuff she hadn’t much wanted to tell. That got in the way. Like them sledding down Hanna Hill, Autumn screaming as she lay on his back. The two of them ice-skating on Mirror Lake, he holding her hand as her wobbly feet slid every which way out from under her, and afterwards the hot chocolate the high-school kids hawked at a quarter a cup to pay for their prom next spring. The Easter egg hunts he took her to. Memorial Day parades where he’d helped her deck out her bike with two-foot long handlebar streamers and showed her how to weave the rolls of tri-color paper mache in and out of the wheel spokes of her bicycle before it’d gotten smashed up in her accident. Fourth-of-July cookouts and fireworks. Daytrips up to Cedar Point where the two rode every ride and he let her eat all the cotton candy and hot dogs that wouldn’t land back up on her lap with the next ride. The two of them raking leaves into blazing bonfires then roasting marshmallows and him carrying her upstairs on his shoulder when she fell asleep with the white-tipped blackened stick still clenched in her hand. Her junior-high commencement where he had stood tallest and applauded loudest when she finished delivering the valedictorian address celebrating their futures full of promise.

“Stuff about Thanksgiving and Christmas when she’s helping me make ornaments. The presents. About the fun we had.”

Her father sat looking out the windshield at the tentative face looking back at him.

“Yeah. We did have fun, didn’t we.”

He lifted the door handle and limped out across the leaf-strewn back yard to the swing set. A limp she had learned at the A&P from the police chief’s ex-wife one rainy Saturday afternoon when their carts were queued up one behind the other in the long check-out line was the reminder of a bayonet wound acquired on the Bataan Death March followed by four years of starvation rations in a slave-labor camp on a Malaysian rubber plantation and notwithstanding his eighteen months in an Army hospital had never properly healed.

Marah said something to him with an upturned face and words lost in an autumn wind bitter as had been the years, her reddened hands gripping the rusted chains that hung from the overhead bar, its spiraling circles of circus-pattern paint already fading. Her father leaning forward met his granddaughter eye-to-eye, his upturned fingers beckoning her as they had Autumn when she was eleven on the morning after the thick plaster cast finally came off a shattered and much withered leg at the end of the summer at the beginning of which a drunken car had thrown her off her bike a hundred feet down the hard asphalt pavement. The police chief’s ex-wife had told her of how when her father came home from the hospital he tracked down the hit-and-run driver, pulling the drunken milksop off his bar stool and pummeled him to a bloody pulp. Her police-chief ex-husband said the six or so Legion patrons he interrogated an hour before she came on shift couldn’t provide consistent descriptions of what the ruffian looked like to save their souls. To a man, they claimed they’d never laid eyes on him before though they’d all belonged to the same Legion Post as her father since they came home and two had been in the same high-school class as her father until he dropped out at sixteen when an industrial explosion at the Foundry had incinerated his own father. Twelve weeks later on the night after her cast came off, Autumn heard them on the other side of the paper-thin walls, her mother in hysterics because Dr. Ross shaking his head had warned them she would be a cripple for the rest of her life, warned them nothing could be done, and her mother had demanded of her husband what was to become of their daughter? How would she ever find a suitable husband or at least one who wouldn’t beat her into an early grave? Her father in the weeks and months to follow nevertheless taught Autumn to walk again. Taught her just as from the papers she found buried in the back of one of his drawers she was cleaning out to rid him from her life for good he must have had to learn when the Army sent him for those eighteen months to Walter Reed.

As Autumn had been that first morning after her cast came off, Marah a bit tentative, a bit like last Christmas right before she’d hopped up on Santa’s lap, until she slipped off the swing and for the first time wrapped her arms around a grandfather’s neck, he for the first time since Autumn had allowed him to be driven away, maybe for the first time since before her mother’s death, holding another close.

She glanced at the Bible lying open on the duct-taped seat:

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kind of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad for great is your reward in Heaven.

Across the alleyway, Mrs. Nicholson was stepping off her back stoop. Yesterday when Autumn had asked her to keep an eye on Marah, she told her why. Told her of her own tentativeness.

“You know, Autumn. The afternoon you found her wasn’t the first time. She’d been trying ever since a teenager. If not for your father, she would’ve long before you came along.”

She watched as grandfather and daughter still held each other. Tomorrow she would drive him to the courthouse. Maybe explain to his parole officer. To her father. Tomorrow maybe explain to herself.

---

Bio: Scott is a former criminal prosecutor and until recently was in private practice in Irvine, California, where he focused on white-collar criminal defense and tax litigation. His short story “What You Left Behind” appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Solstice Literary Magazine, and his short story “Luck Can be Like a Woman” appeared in the April 2023 issue of The Briar Cliff Review.  He was a 2022 finalist for the Bellingham Review Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction was the recipient of the Mighty RiverShort Story Prize awarded by Big Muddy, a Journal of the Mississippi River Valley. He is the author of the historical-suspense novel Saving Thomas (The Wild Rose Press), which was named as a finalist for the 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Award, the 2022 Chanticleer Murder and Mayhem Award, and short-listed for the 2022 Goethe Award for late historical fiction. I am also the author of the coming-of-age novel Revenants, The Odyssey Home (Moonshine Cove Publishing) and the legal-suspense novel, In Deepest Consequences (Medallion Press). In addition to The Briar Cliff Review and Big Muddy, my short fiction has appeared in Adelaide Magazine, and Lascaux Review. Scott markets his writing on Threads (scottkauffmanauthor @scottkauffman author) and Instagram (scottkauffmanauthor@scottkauffman author).

Cover photo by: pexels/Connor Scott McManus

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