A Widow's Curse by Phillip Depoy Page A

had made in Ireland. Maybe he had also pressed the odd coin, though how or why that would be was certainly unfathomable to me at that moment.
    â€œStrange family,” Hek mused, still staring out the window, “the ones over there.”
    â€œIn Wales,” I prompted.
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œStrange in what way?”
    â€œMean. Crazy.” He set down his coffee cup. “I remember your father got a phone call when Conner died.”
    June laughed, drying the plate.
    â€œThat Conner was a pretty ornery old pistol all by himself.”
    â€œHe was that,” Hek agreed. “Did I ever tell you that he killed—now I’m going back fifty years or more—he killed a bear….”
    â€œA small bear,” June amended.
    â€œKilled a bear,” Hek went on, as if June hadn’t spoken, “by hitting it in the head with a rock. That’s the truth. The old bear, standing on his hind legs, come up on Conner while he was walking down the mountain to town. Your great-granddad shoveled up a rock about the size of his hand and brought it down once right between that bear’s eyes. Right between. Old bear hit the ground like a chimney falling. Dead before it was down. Used to have the skin as a rug in your house until your mama got rid of it.”
    â€œAnd we know this story,” I said, fingers intertwined, “how?”
    â€œIf you set one foot on that rug,” June piped up, “Conner would growl like a bear and then hit the thing in the head with his cane, like it was come back to life.”
    â€œAnd he’d tell the story, word for word the same every time, about how he killed it.” Hek was grinning.
    â€œHe told you all this?” I leaned forward. “Conner told you?”
    â€œWell, no,” Hek admitted. “We got it from your dad.”
    â€œWhen you visited our house,” I said, pressing him.
    They had not visited my house once in the several years I’d been back home, living there. I couldn’t remember their ever coming over when I was a boy, either.
    â€œWell, no,” June continued. “We got this mostly from your dad’s show.”
    My parents were itinerant entertainers, carnival performers. My father was a magician of some dexterity; Mother was his lovely assistant. They worked for the fabled Ten Show, a touring enterprise that featured the most bizarre combination of odd string-band music, startling freaks, and genuine magic ever assembled on the planet—at least according to the banners they always set up around the towns where they traveled. No one who saw the show went home unaffected, least of all me.
    But I’d been twisted more, of course, by the perennial absence of my parents than by their cold professional occupation. My father dazzled onstage, told great intricate stories—mostly to distract the audience while he worked his tricks. My mother employed her sexual energies with the abandon of a flapper or the more liberated of the Pre-Raphaelite models, which is to say that her performances were as quaint as they were erotic: smoldering, enticing, and somehow from another time.
    Together, my parents were mesmerizing on the boards.
    But they were different people when they came backstage. Hidden, private souls came back to our house. My father barely spoke, and his eyes, though very kind, seemed never to see what was in front of them, but something in his mind instead. My mother was a libertine of epic proportions, and once, greatly drunk, undertook to describe to me the details of every back door in the county—because she knew every one by heart. It took all night. I was seven.
    As much as the people of Blue Mountain loved the Ten Show and went to see it almost every time they could, they hated my mother and feared my father, though I could never put my finger on exactly why that was the case. Other men in our town were certainly strange, and my mother wasn’t the only woman who