Do Unto Others

I turned the light on the page. A picture of me stared back at me. It was a photo that’d been on the front page of the local newspaper, The Mirabeau Mirror, when I’d gotten the librarian job. That’d been the biggest civic news in town that week. In the picture I looked a little startled, as though getting the library job was an honor I hadn’t expected. Across the picture of my face, written in heavy red ink, were the words: FIRE PURIFIES. My throat felt thick and I swallowed. I wondered for one moment if the library had been her only intended target for arson; maybe she’d have burned my house down, with me and my family inside, and hummed a little hymn for our sinning souls. I dropped the Bible and the newspaper clipping on the floor. The next two Bibles apparently weren’t being used in Beta’s odd filing system.

The third one I checked fell open at the beginning, in the book of Genesis. Mama’s quote about bearing children in sorrow came from there. I let the Bible fall noisily to the floor and pulled three letters, yellowed and crackling with age, out of a small manila envelope. Mama had loved the man she wrote them to, and she’d written them to Bob Don Goertz. I tried to remember to breathe as I read through them. Mama had always been sentimental to a point, but I’d never heard her speak to Daddy with such tender emotion. For her privacy I won’t record them here. But the last one was the hardest to read, because she asked Bob Don to stay out of her life and her unborn baby’s. She begged him, if she loved her and their child, to follow her wishes. She could not hurt Lloyd-she loved him, too-and there was little Arlene to consider. I read the last one through three times. I switched off the flashlight and leaned against the dusty bookshelf.

“Oh, Mama,” I finally said. “Why didn’t you ever tell me? I should have heard this from you.” I put the letters in my jacket pocket, feeling cold anger that Beta Harcher had touched them, read them, kept them here to hurt me and my mother. I tried to think about Bob Don but he just appeared in my mind as sort of a shapeless blob that I couldn’t picture as my father. I was putting back the Bible that contained Mama’s letters when some paper slipped out the back. A photo, and another letter. I stared at that photo a long while, feeling cold in my veins. A much younger Uncle Bid and Beta Harcher smiled at me from the picture, looking merry under a Ferris wheel. The letter was to Beta from a woman whose name I didn’t recognize and mentioned Uncle Bid’s name. The postmark was from Norway. I put the letter and the photo with Mama’s letters. Some Bibles remained and I flipped through the rest of them. They were empty except for one notable exception. I guess Beta felt she had holy words to spare, because she’d scooped out most of them from this particular volume.

The pages had been cut away, so you could hide something in the closed Bible. The something there was a videotape. According to Gaston, Hally Schneider had a camcorder stolen on a trip Beta chaperoned. She’d checked out a book on how to operate a camcorder. If my guess was right, the proof Beta had gotten on Matt and Ruth’s drug operation was on this tape. I tapped the tape against my forehead, thinking, and let the scarred Bible tumble to the floor. I tucked the cassette into my jacket, deciding I needed to get to the nearest VCR possible and see this tape. I snuck back out of the house into the cool spring night.

Clouds hid the stars now and the breeze was brisk, strong with the woody scent of river. I eased around the corner of Beta’s house, glad that the moonlight seemed to be gone. I was about halfway across her yard when a twig snapped and I froze. I glanced around, didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything. Probably a raccoon, I told myself. I ran on to the car and headed home. The den lights blazed when I opened the front door, even though it was near midnight. Mark and Mama sat watching a talk show. I found it real hard to look at Mama, but I made myself. She stared at the TV screen, not laughing at the jokes.

Somewhere in that muddled mass of neurons that was her brain, there were memories of Bob Don and the truth she’d never bothered to tell me. I felt incredibly angry with her, but I knew chewing her out would do only me good. Not the time or the place. I swallowed the fury I felt and let it start to burn an ulcer in my gut. Mark bolted up from the couch. Now he didn’t look like a wisecracking thirteen-year-old, but more like a worried little boy. “Have you heard anything about Shannon?” My news on her was hours old. I hoped it was still current.

I told him what Ruth had told me when I’d seen her at the hospital.