The Rose
Copyright 2013 by Michelle Erin Berthiaume
The Rose (Excerpt)
The Canadian wind had done its job; leaves were strewn across the sidewalk. I was having fun stomping on them, but it was getting dark and it was hard to tell which leaves were dry and which were soggy. I felt sudden coldness against my bare skin. The trees above my head were shutting out the evening light.
I halted abruptly. I hadn’t arrived in front of Charley’s decaying two-story home, but at the nearby Houston house. A chill ran down my spine.
Billy Houston was standing on his front porch, wearing a white t-shirt. A pack of cigarettes was rolled up tight in the right sleeve. He faced me, but I couldn’t see his eyes. They were hidden in the shadows made by the visor of his baseball cap.
I stepped back and ran my foot up and down my leg, trying to dislodge a soggy leaf that had stuck to my pants.
“Where you headin’?” Billy asked.
“Nowhere,” I said. I wanted to step off the curb and walk across the street to the Broshoe house, but my feet wouldn’t move. My friend Charley was afraid of Billy. So was I, although I wasn’t sure why.
“Want to come up to my room and see the Swiss Army knife I got for my birthday?” Billy asked. He stepped off the porch and walked towards me.
“No,” I said.
“Why not? You like knives, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“See,” he said, and thrust a fat red-handled knife in front of my face. I blinked up at the shadow that covered the upper part of his face, then sat down on a dry part of the sidewalk and began putting on my shoes.
Billy had thrown Ricky’s new shoes down a well last week, and it made my mom cry. That’s why I don’t like him, I thought.
Billy held out the knife again for me to see and said, “It’s got a can opener, a fork, a spoon, four different blades, and all kind of gadgets inside. See?”
It was the biggest jack knife I’d ever seen. As I reached for it, he pulled his hand away.
“You got to come in and see my other knives,” he said. “Come on up, I got them in my room.”
“No, I said. “I’m going to Charley’s.”
I stood up and brushed off my pants.
“Come with me,” Billy said. “Charley is coming over later.”
“He is?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Billy said. “He just went home to get his knife to show me. He’s coming right back.”
I watched Billy fold the blades back into the handle, one by one. It was the coolest knife I had ever seen.
“Come on,” Billy said.
I looked across the street at Charley’s house. The porch swing swayed in the autumn breeze and the leaves scratched across the walkway leading up to the front step.
“He’ll meet us up in my room later. Come on,” Billy said.
I hesitated.
“Hey, you want one of my knives? If you come up, I promise you can have one.”
I followed Billy into his house, through a long hallway, past the kitchen, and up the twelve stairs to his room. The room was dark. The evening sunlight filtered in over the top of a stained brown curtain that hung on a slanted rod across the only window. It cast an orange glow.
Clothes piled at the bottom of the unmade bed had spilled over the edge and onto the hardwood floor. In the mirror hanging on the wall across from the bed, I could see reflections of knives of various sizes sitting on top of a long oak chest. I walked toward the chest to get a better look. I heard the door close and turned to see Billy walking toward me.
I stared at the snaps on Billy’s jeans. They were undone, revealing his white underpants. Something moved beneath the thin material. I backed up into the side of the bed. It was hard to breathe in the tiny room. Then I heard it, a soft guttural sound rising in pitch, like a child starting to cry.
“Shhh! Do you want the knife or not?” Billy asked. He took the knife from his pocket and held it out to me.
The noise stopped rising in my throat. I took the knife from Billy’s hand and stared at it, afraid to look in the direction of the thing stirring inside his underpants.
Without warning, Billy grabbed me by my shoulders and spun me around. I felt my pants and underpants slide down to my knees. I reached down with my free hand and tried to pull them back up. Billy took the knife away from me and pushed me face down onto his messy bed. It smelled of sweat and dirty feet.
I tried to get up, but Billy kept pushing me down. He had one hand knotted in the thick curls in the back of my head, pushing my face deeper into the dirty laundry and tangled sheets. My screams disappeared into soiled blankets. It was hard to breathe.
I felt something firm and wet roll across the soft skin of my behind. There was a steady pressure like when I had to go to the bathroom, then pain seared through me, splitting me in half. It was the knife, I thought. He stuck me. I felt my skin unfold over the blade as he pushed into me, deeper and deeper, until I was certain he had reached my stomach. I wanted to throw up, but was afraid to move.
A woman’s voice shattered the stillness, “Billy? What’s going on up there? Why is your door closed?” Her shrill voice carried through the door. I could hear footsteps on the staircase.
Billy moved quickly to the other end of the room, but I still felt him inside me. The ache was deep inside my loins. My legs trembled as I struggled to stand. I felt Billy’s fear in my own chest. When his mother reached the landing, I caught my breath and pulled up my pants and watched Billy zip his fly just before his mother pushed open the door.
Mrs. Houston was a tall woman with a hatchet face. Her thin red nose curved downward at the tip. I stared at the tiny brown mole above her upper lip. It quivered when she spoke.
“What are you doing in your room? Who is this?” She asked. Her dark eyes turned toward me.
“Just a friend,” Billy said. “I was just showing him my knives.”
“Are you all right?” Mrs. Houston asked me. Her voice softened. It reminded me of the wind creeping in under my sill during a hard rain.
I looked away from her and wiped my eyes.
“He fell,” Billy said, “we were—“
“Are you all right?” She repeated.
I shook my head up and down. I was afraid to look at her mole. It was staring at me like a third eye.
“What were you doing in here? Why are you crying?” she asked. Her voice was stern.
I looked down at my shoes and tugged at my pants to be sure they were all the way up.
“We were looking at my knives, that’s all—” Billy said.
“What were you doing?” she asked me.
I jumped back as she moved towards me. Her long thin fingers picked something from the sheets where I had so recently been lying. She rubbed it between her fingers and stared at them as though they would fall off. Billy’s eyes were black holes, sunken in his head. He stared down at me. I shivered.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Then why are you in here crying?” She said. The wind cracked through the sill. I sucked in a deep breath.
“He fell—“ Billy said.
“Shut up!” Mrs. Houston said.
“He said he was going to give me his knife.” I said.
“Which one?” she asked.
“The fancy one,” I said. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. Her mole was twitching so fast I thought it was going to jump from her face.
Mrs. Houston looked over at Billy and held out her hand. “Give it to me.”
“No,” Billy said. “I was going to give him one of the others.” He glanced at the knives on the chest.
“Give it to me!” she said. Her voice grew shrill at the end.
Billy lay the Swiss army knife with its thick red handle into his mother’s trembling hand.
“Here,” she said. She unfolded my clenched fist and thrust the knife into my hand. “I think you’d better leave.”
I felt their eyes following me as I walked slowly from the room. My butt hurt. I wanted to pull the wet underpants away from my buttocks, but was afraid to touch myself in front of either of them. I felt dirty. I wanted only to get home to clean myself. When I hit the sidewalk I moved as fast as I could until I had reached my room and shut the door.
I never told my mother what happened that autumn day on Church Street. I knew what Billy had done was wrong, but I sensed that if I told her it would hurt her– and then there was my Dad. Although I didn’t want to see my Mom cry again over something Billy had done, I feared the look on my father’s face even more.
I buried the memory deep inside me and didn’t think about what happened until thirty-six years later, when I sat in a dimly lit room looking across a cluttered old desk at the flaccid face of my therapist and told him what had happened.
Michelle Berthiaume is a retired Florida attorney and freelance journalist. She was a leading civil rights attorneys in southwest Florida, where her cases garnered state and national attention in newspapers and on television. Several of her appellate briefs have influenced Florida law. She is former editor-in-chief of Roger Williams School of Law’s award-wnning journal The Docket. Her memoir-in-progress has the working title The Rose. She is currently enrolled in a MFA creative writing program (nonfiction) at Southern New Hampshire University.
After eighteen years of stealth, Michelle has decided to come out so she can assist the LBGT community.