around, they decided Neil had killed Alfred in cold blood.
They couldn’t have gotten it more wrong.
We spent the next twenty-four hours shoeless. It was early spring, and what I remember most clearly was how cold my feet got.
We’d been sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a room I’d always remembered as a small bedroom but which I later found out had been a closet. In the early days our mother would have given us the bed and taken the sofa, but she graduated from that and we’d been forced to make do with a mattress scrounged from a vacant apartment next door.
We slept in our clothes, often in our shoes too, and that morning we wore identical PF Flyers our mother bought at Chubby and Tubby. We didn’t see new clothes often, and I remember being incredibly vain about those orange sneakers.
Alfred T. Osbourne.
I heard him quarreling with our mother that morning. Then suddenly their arguing was replaced by a silence I remember to this day.
A few minutes later Alfred had Neil by the ankles and was dragging him around the room, cackling and laughing, making fun of Neil’s protestations, mocking his squeaky preteen voice. It could have been me. Alfred simply grabbed the first feet he saw. I’d seen him coming and pulled my feet up under the blankets.
Bouncing across the floor like a rag doll, Neil couldn’t see Alfred’s deranged eyes the way I could. I was across the room wedged into a corner, trying to make myself invisible, wondering why our mother didn’t come out of the kitchen and put a stop to the insanity. It was only then that I noticed the bloodstained knife in Alfred’s free hand.
“You little shit,” Alfred said. “You stinkin’ little shit. I’m finally gonna teach you some manners.” He threw me a bloodcurdling look. “And
you’re
next.”
I think about the past more than I should. I think about our mother, about that morning with the piano mover from hell. People tell me I’m a candidate for psychotherapy, but I tried a counselor once and she only pissed me off. There are things people never recover from, and for Emma Grant Wollf it was the death of her fireman husband six years earlier. For me it was the loss of our mother and the rest of that morning with Alfred.
Walking home on the wet streets on December 6, I could feel that old anger beginning to build in me. There had been random arsons before I got to Six’s, but last night we’d been hit by a true pyromaniac.
There was nothing I hated more than a pyromaniac.
I had no doubt our pyro had been watching for at least part of the time, watching our red lights and sirens drive past, watching as we stamped out his pitiful little fires, probably watching the Pennington house too. Pyros sometimes set fires just so they can see the firemen and trucks. The experience of watching the flames feeds a sexual appetite in some pyros, who might stand in the crowd and masturbate. Setting fires is almost never the work of a bold man as, too, it is almost never the work of a woman. Fire-setters are a breed apart—the lonely, the loony, the lost.
I’d been feeling the rage grow all night and knew if I ever ran into this guy I wouldn’t be able to control myself.
What made it worse for me was that this pattern of serial random nighttime nuisance ignitions was occurring in the same part of town as the fire that killed my father.
While I have absolutely no recollection of our father’s funeral, I recall vividly the weeks and months afterward in the darkened house with our grieving mother, drapes pulled, dishes piling up, milk spoiled. I recall our mother’s endless bouts of weeping, the fact that she wouldn’t come out of her bedroom for days on end.
Neil was seven. I was four.
Neil pretty much took care of me after the neighbors and relatives stopped coming around.
Mother stopped paying bills, and eventually, about a year and a half after my father’s death, we were evicted for the first time.
They couldn’t have gotten it more wrong.
We spent the next twenty-four hours shoeless. It was early spring, and what I remember most clearly was how cold my feet got.
We’d been sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a room I’d always remembered as a small bedroom but which I later found out had been a closet. In the early days our mother would have given us the bed and taken the sofa, but she graduated from that and we’d been forced to make do with a mattress scrounged from a vacant apartment next door.
We slept in our clothes, often in our shoes too, and that morning we wore identical PF Flyers our mother bought at Chubby and Tubby. We didn’t see new clothes often, and I remember being incredibly vain about those orange sneakers.
Alfred T. Osbourne.
I heard him quarreling with our mother that morning. Then suddenly their arguing was replaced by a silence I remember to this day.
A few minutes later Alfred had Neil by the ankles and was dragging him around the room, cackling and laughing, making fun of Neil’s protestations, mocking his squeaky preteen voice. It could have been me. Alfred simply grabbed the first feet he saw. I’d seen him coming and pulled my feet up under the blankets.
Bouncing across the floor like a rag doll, Neil couldn’t see Alfred’s deranged eyes the way I could. I was across the room wedged into a corner, trying to make myself invisible, wondering why our mother didn’t come out of the kitchen and put a stop to the insanity. It was only then that I noticed the bloodstained knife in Alfred’s free hand.
“You little shit,” Alfred said. “You stinkin’ little shit. I’m finally gonna teach you some manners.” He threw me a bloodcurdling look. “And
you’re
next.”
I think about the past more than I should. I think about our mother, about that morning with the piano mover from hell. People tell me I’m a candidate for psychotherapy, but I tried a counselor once and she only pissed me off. There are things people never recover from, and for Emma Grant Wollf it was the death of her fireman husband six years earlier. For me it was the loss of our mother and the rest of that morning with Alfred.
Walking home on the wet streets on December 6, I could feel that old anger beginning to build in me. There had been random arsons before I got to Six’s, but last night we’d been hit by a true pyromaniac.
There was nothing I hated more than a pyromaniac.
I had no doubt our pyro had been watching for at least part of the time, watching our red lights and sirens drive past, watching as we stamped out his pitiful little fires, probably watching the Pennington house too. Pyros sometimes set fires just so they can see the firemen and trucks. The experience of watching the flames feeds a sexual appetite in some pyros, who might stand in the crowd and masturbate. Setting fires is almost never the work of a bold man as, too, it is almost never the work of a woman. Fire-setters are a breed apart—the lonely, the loony, the lost.
I’d been feeling the rage grow all night and knew if I ever ran into this guy I wouldn’t be able to control myself.
What made it worse for me was that this pattern of serial random nighttime nuisance ignitions was occurring in the same part of town as the fire that killed my father.
While I have absolutely no recollection of our father’s funeral, I recall vividly the weeks and months afterward in the darkened house with our grieving mother, drapes pulled, dishes piling up, milk spoiled. I recall our mother’s endless bouts of weeping, the fact that she wouldn’t come out of her bedroom for days on end.
Neil was seven. I was four.
Neil pretty much took care of me after the neighbors and relatives stopped coming around.
Mother stopped paying bills, and eventually, about a year and a half after my father’s death, we were evicted for the first time.
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