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My father considered himself a pagan christian. A wiccan of some kind. Adjacent to a wizard or a shaman. I was eleven and my stepmom nineteen when my father ‘Took the Path and started following The Craft’. He was a lazy student, if anything, but he had been investigating and had drawn the conclusion that my mother had hexed him. He couldn’t get anything together. It made sense to him some outside influences were involved, malicious elements, a tampering. This couldn’t be his life.
He thought himself something of a poet. A tortured one too, if temporarily and bravely domesticated. But he was certainly without skill. Or subtly. He was ‘haunted’, he ‘just wasn’t there’. He had Pains, great Suffering, no one understood how he saw the world, however well that was. He was twisted, but wise. How lucky everyone was that he didn’t snap. And when he did freak out it was further evidence of just how much weight and past damage he was bearing and how much of a loose thread he really was. How far gone he was. Long past the point of no return. He kind of acted like a middle school girl. There was a lot of spectacle to it. He made himself up big with it, built himself up. What shores my father was crossing, what fires he was privy to and playing with. He claimed to have been a child genius. I was rather incredulous but learned to keep it to myself. He would get off the Walmart night shift and drink all morning moodily listening to Deftones, Type-O Negative, and ‘Zakk Wylde Unplugged’ in cut off sweat pants on his computer in his room until he had to take my stepmom to work. On days wed have off school he would be blackout by eleven am. Years later my grandmother, his mother, told me that he got hit by a car when riding his dirt bike and it shattered his face and skull and he died and was brought back to life. He had to have all these surgeries. And afterwards he wasn’t right. He was cruel. He was made wrong somehow morally, perhaps spiritually. He had soured. Something was mean maybe evil in him. Something was reacting in his brain. His brain wasn’t right in that way any longer. Like that maybe evil can be just something that happens.
As far as I remember my father has maintained there was a ghost in every workplace he’d ever worked at. My stepmom agreed. They’d always worked together. Restaurants, bars, then Walmart. Relatively benign ghost experiences — lights off, walking where no one was walking, standard stuff. The Walmart turned him on to sacred grounds, he claimed native spirits were at work in the Walmart. He thought bow hunting was of spiritual significance despite having never bow hunted himself. He felt everything had a spirit. When he found out about vibrations he was crazy over it. He was confident about his abilities to read peoples intentions, that he was something of an empath. His journey as he described it was his journey. He stressed this. He would count off drum signatures to tool and system of the down on his thighs to me. He said crows were of importance and that a group of crows was called a murder and this also was of importance. Crows follow under a cosmic order, Saturn-based primarily, my father said standing in the door jamb to his room, arching his eyebrows up in almost a sort of surprised expression. He offered up things he had no explanation for. Dew on morning grass, stone formations out west, terrorist beheading videos he had seen, all under accusation and careful scrutiny, always projecting an unknown knowledge. An old soul beyond their years. To be an old soul trapped in a young mans body and then to grow old. He was sure there was more to this world. And there is more of this world, certainly. It is not so easily figured.
He presented handfuls of doe flesh. A thing like a heart enrobed in his outstretched glove. He had borrowed the landlords sons 30-06 to hunt for he was a felon and not allowed to own firearms. Winded and smeared in blood he appeared on the trailers front porch. The wound on the deers shoulder was pulled open from him carrying it and it looked about ripped in half over his shoulders. The snow white of shoulder blade joints jutted from the gaping chest, organs barely hanging in place by greasy cartilage colored cords, casings purple and doing shuttering movements in the porch light, the light overhead and above and showing him shuttled with gore and washed in white and pleased seeming. My stepmom ducked around excitedly, moving furniture aside and clearing the kitchen table, pulling it to the center of the room. He dropped the corpse on the table and it cracked in dozens of ways, a quick wave of wet pops. he’d never himself dressed a deer but had looked into it. He began pulling it apart putting pieces of organs in mixing bowls and tupperware. Cool whip and country crock containers, long lidless. Everything gave the impression of being bedded in a complex system of membranes and he tore at them, hacking with blades, separating out god knows what from whatever else. The table was under the kitchen light and it appeared kind of like an occult operating chamber so my stepmom got flashlights and propped them around on the counters and up on the fridge and stove and she dug out tea candles from a drawer and lit them on plates and she got jars of yankee candles from her bedroom and lit them as well. He was still in his coat and hadn’t rolled up his sleeves and now lit at odd angles like an executioner of inhonorable caste he dismembered the doe with mirthful pageantry, with all the scenery of ritual but none of the reverence or grace. I watched from the dark living room. Even when struggling with the corpse he moved with authority and sovereignty, with the importance of ownership, the delight of dominion. My stepmom took a cigarette in and out of his mouth as he worked because his hands were too bloody to ash or drag it, her tending to him in constant. For he in need of constant soothing. What is to be said of a dead thing being butchered in the night by such a man in such a way. Of an event lit such and so witnessed in all its obscurity and obscenity and of the end of a thing being completed. That perhaps a whole life can and will conclude disconnected from fanfare and impermanent at the hands of a stranger with intentions unclear but familiar and as inevitable as banal. It may be better to think things leave this world, that this place can be left behind.
My father had found another box of my mothers videotapes. An attached room had been built onto the trailers side. There was a wood stove in there and in the winter my brother and I would split wood for it and stack the wood along the wall. My fathers tools were kept in there, his boombox that didn’t work, and cardboard boxes and rubberneck totes of my mothers VHS tapes. She’d left them and he still had them. When I got a certain age I worked my way through them. As a hobby my mother had two VHS players hooked in tandem to make copies of movies she had rented. Three movies to a tape and hundreds of tapes, hand labeled, no clear restriction on what each tape held, just whatever she had rented that time. One of the only objects I had access to with her handwriting on it. She had me young so the tapes covered most of her twenties. I could account for trends and interests over time. I could fill in whatever intentions or implications I liked. I could have many mothers for whatever fiction suited me. It was like some diary I had of her, something she had left behind, but one fallible and unreliable, one I could have hand in authoring. My father had found another box from somewhere, perhaps my grandmothers. In it he found spell books. He threw a fit. He sent my mother a bunch of emails. He called his mother. He was out of control. As it turns out, there may well be credence to my mother hexing him. If hexing is a known quantity, is to hex such a man really black magic. Isn’t there some sort of blessing in it. Is there not a sense of good work being done.
I have wondered with regards to my father, as well a handful of others Ive chanced meeting, if someone can do so much evil that they can become an entity of such or an agent of it, if they can become something like saints of evil, forces of almost cosmic hostility and primordial impulses. Is there a dark vessel that contains all the soul of man and in it is something ancient and horrible but still Of and certain individuals can be called to it or barred from it, which ever. If it is from all or if that is a myth and there are princes among us that bring hatred and suffering to every other they encounter and revel in petty command and pity, in apathetic exercises of hurt and humiliation, and that primeval horror is just of them and unique in this world, and maybe something of wonder. A select frequency that perhaps all have access to or could be made to have access to, a brutal tumbling of urge or a summons of bygone feature, of a sinister constituent or feasibly mindless and thoughtless and somehow more terrifying. Was my father tuned in to some evil signal. Could evil be made a real thing in the world, like manifested, by those doing evil, to some revolting and horrifying sum, an inescapable and ever creeping and evolving possession or a cruel vibration of elusive natures that some are conduits to no matter what.
One of the last times I saw my stepmom she was sitting in the snow at night. She was in the yard with her legs under her and she was wearing a too big t-shirt that she slept in and only her bare feet poked out from under it like a child or a doll and blood sopped from her mouth and nose and eyes and poured in one joined stream into her basketed palms and into the snow below like black snot and she had her teeth in her hand and they fell in between her fingers and looked like pebbles and she was shaking and heaving and sobbing but without sound, making no sounds at all, the only sound was my father playing music in his room and that was heavily muffled. I remember feeling disgusted with her for whatever reason. She felt just as much culprit. I left her there in the yard. I rode off with my bike to the gas station. I rode fifteen miles and used the payphone to call the cops but the landlords son had already called the cops and no one was in the trailer anymore. I rode back. And true to their word, no one was there.
I spent a month there alone. My brother three years younger went to my grandmothers and my littlest brother went with his mother. My father was in jail for a bit then was at my grandmothers out on bond. I stayed at the trailer. I went to school a couple days a week, stayed home two or three because there was no one to stop me. My grandmother sent me money and brought me groceries, driving all the way up from Gettysburg. She didn’t want to talk about it and there was no one else around so I didn’t talk about it. In a flash of theater I poured out all my dads liquor bottles. I thought a lot about how ‘haunted’ the trailer felt. I rode my bike out to some train tracks and watched trains and it was all nebulously meaningful to me. I rode out to this road in the middle of some fields to look at the light of the prison, it almost twenty miles away but so lit up that I could see it glowing out there and this was of significance to me. I walked around the house unimpeded and looked at rooms and at artifacts and thought simple statements like ‘this happened here’, ‘this is where we watched tv’, ‘this was my fathers so and so and this was my stepmoms whatever and this my brothers’ with severe gravity. I thought it was ‘haunted’ in a way without ghosts, that places could become haunted by those still living if enough transpires. That my stepmom now haunted the trailer, that my father did as well. Its sort of silly to think of now if not endearing. But though, do we leave behind our impressions in a place. Can enough bad happen to make it something like the inversion of a holy site. Does a transference of a type occur. Are there instruments of evil and likewise arenas for it. Is it so commonplace. Maybe events seem to repeat or are cyclical but in fact all things only happen the once in the one way and each happening in this world is wholly unique and individual and so the forms of evil unreal in how numerous and vast and isolate and without note. What if kindness is but of one acting force and we are beset by evil and there is no consoling.
Or is all experience of a great world soul, that theres a score being set and every life poured into a shared basin, a clayed receptacle of god and all things are poured into it. An accounting. Is it intentional then the suffering and pain adjoined therein, is there a prescriptive degree to evil. A keeping of a ledger outside of all understanding, a cosmic affliction, a hidden tallying. Every incident of intimate treachery distinctive and every idiosyncratic despair within its place and of sound manufacture and obligate to this greater thing. Is even the transgressions of empire necessary. And there is an event far off waiting, when the vessel is filled and each imperative affixed, a celestial whole is completed, perhaps the sole project of man and entire intention for mans being. A resolved matter, a completed god. What does a completed god look like. Or maybe it more congress than court, that god is always complete and just one component and the evil of man is another, is removed from god, contains no more aspect than anything else of god, conceivably much less. Is there an allotment to evil, a set limit to evil, something with borders and definition. Or is man delineating the perimeters and so it is ultimately without bounds. It accumulative and viscously coiling like stygian slugs and the substance overflows from the brim of the thing and it unimaginable the unfurling until only dreg is left to run over. Or maybe it just as cream tipped into coffee waiting to bloom with agitation. A point of outside intervention or exterior instruction, an implacable comfort or grandiose consoling or an immense grief — a great shame, a rogue signal among countless others. Or it replaces what is there and uses it up and when everything is used its gone, when all is wrung out from a thing - and then all things - that evil ends. A footnote of a time past and done with along with a litany of other strange entries and charges. What if a contract was made and we caretakers to all that will ever be — in solitary care of the lone unrepeatable feature of a singular occurrence, of a fluke gesture given weight — and we in breach of the promise. This is what we’ve amounted to. This is what remains. We live in the age of man.
After some years my father had disappeared to live out of a van leased in his mothers name. When it all shook out, we had gained custody of my then sixteen year old youngest brother and that seemed the last grounding so he took the van. The handful of credit cards bearing family names were canceled and so was much trace of him. Rodent holes of his progress across disparate pockets of valley laden and mountain buried Appalachian wastes, posting memes on facebook with his gps on — in Martinsburg tonight, Mechanicsburg last week, in Myerstown. Why. What for. The path of a fleeing father imparted to his eldest son as a puzzle of flaming skull gifs and big tidded girls on motorcycles smoking weed while touching their pussies and pictures of guys holding dead deer with captions about murdering Hillary Clinton and proclamations on love and the universe and very long Norwegian death metal songs linked from youtube. These among musings on loyalty, betrayal, and trust. Imagine him in a parking lot of a Sheetz or a Rutters somewhere southwest of rockville Maryland at three twenty in the morning deciding to share several compilations of the best Dimebag Darrell live solos with resounding full caps RIPs, this my running scared father — and then as the state of PA built its case against him even these trails ceased and he seemed to have the sense to vanish finally.
There was the trailer now eight months back-owed and to be destroyed set on the back far corner of the sole stubby grazing field of a hobbyist horse farm. However the landlord came upon the parcel and modest fortune I do not know. Id never thought about it. When we moved into the trailer I was too young to imagine anything could have been different. There a child and a child’s eternity to every moment as if things were set as they have always been and merely unfold slowly week through week etching like to stone by hidden burin. Past and memories and family histories are mutable as are the lands that allow them and this must be learned again and again — as tethers are cast so are more that emerge. Ceaseless bondage in dead destinies of blood relations, of ruined cars and cousins, of court dates and steward ships under grandparents, to thieves go uncles and brothers, and more and more births and found or dropped faiths and callings, and destructions and guilt and violence rattling up all bloodlines, kinship to sty-riddled kinship, lashing to aglets so as if a lightning stone, moments blasted and petrified, gentle and cruel moments indistinct.
He’d had a go of it judging by the state of the trailer. It was unclear how long he and my little brother had been living without power. Inside there were perhaps seventy lanterns, maybe more. He had been filling them with gasoline. My old bedroom had seven or eight empty red jerry cans in it alone, the windows all busted in from the outside. The front door had a screwdriver driven into it through the frame and the door and it was impassable. My husband, my brother, and I had to get in through the back door in the trailers addition. The addition was waist high with every manner of article and garbage, firewood and chairs, the cast iron furnace, broken and found things, mowers and weed wackers amid deconstruction, mattresses and lanterns, dozens of lanterns. We crawled over top it and it held our weight. My brother went back to his room, his childhood room and the only real room he ever had his own, and he grabbed what he’d wanted to grab. He seemed unfazed. The trailer did not strike him as unusual. He had lived this way with my father for four or so years. Only the two of them. I was shocked. I did not know what I had expected but this was not it. In my absence, there were things I can never be privileged to, private transactions in seclusion. I went back to my fathers room. The windows were covered in black plastic sheets and there was a mattress in there and thousands of rig caps and empty pill bottles. It had the aspect of a funeral to it. But there was no body. A place takes on characteristics of what happens within suppose and maybe after a certain point is haunted no matter living or dead. What had my father been doing all this time if not haunting this place.
My brother had lived with his mother and her new husband for many years before moving back in with my father. I had only been up to their place three times. It was way up north and way out. They had a piece of land and some animals on it. I had to get her to sign some paperwork for custody. I drove a couple hours down there alone. She didn’t want to see her son. She specified in her email that she didn’t want my brother there. Her husband was at work and her daughter was taking a nap. It was almost evening. I never saw the girl and was told the daughter was nine and home schooled, was advanced for her age — above her grade level — but doesn’t speak at all. Had spoken at some point when younger but stopped and hasn’t said a word since. She asked how I was and said she still thought of me every day and that she prayed for me and my brother, my other brother, not her son. She was again specific. I had never called her mother, always by her first name. She was only eight years older than me, my father ten years older than her at least. At nineteen she had the responsibilities of three boys, one a baby — her child. She said she had breast cancer three years back but they caught it early and she was fine now. She did chemo and all that. Before she signed the papers she had to tell me something about my littlest brother. Something had happened. She was vague. My brother nine and his sister four. They shared a room. The girl did talk but my brother did something and the girl hasn’t spoken since. There was a degree of doom to the recounting. It was Unspeakable and so she did not speak it. And thats when he went to stay with my father. I didn’t push her for details nor do I think I could if I desired. She said something was wrong with him. He was a bad seed. He wasn’t her son any longer and she would never nor could ever forgive him. She thanked me for trying to give him a better life, that she wishes him all the best and that she does not hate him anymore but that she does not pray for him. And she signed her parental rights over to me. Before this I had paid my father five hundred fucking dollars for his half of my brother. I was now legal guardian of the boy. What am I to make of this. What did he do. Would I want to know. How do I look at him, surely not the same. It was strange at first to be in his presence knowing this. I of course never told him. What would I say to him. What would I have to say to him. Would I understand. Would I want to understand. What did I expect him to say and what would he say. What happened to that little girl. What did he do to his sister. She doesn’t speak.
This last summer my stepmom died. She was thirty nine. The daughter fifteen and only her daddy left and her still mute. My brother told my husband who told me. My brother and I weren’t on speaking terms because of a whole separate personal strife. He either missed or more likely wasn’t invited to the burial or wake. He didn’t seem to feel or think anything about it and he said as much. The widower husband had found some letters. The sister wrote dozens of letters to my brother and his mother had pretended to send them. And the widower mailed these off to my brother, for whatever reason, moral obligation I guess. Since he moved back in with our father he’d not seen his mother alive or dead. Its probable he will never see his sister again. Nor probably should he. Or I don’t know. Maybe he should. I don’t know where the right is in this. I suppose its none of my business.
I still often dream of my stepmom. It is her as she was when I was a teenager. Its funny because almost twenty years have passed since then and she had a whole other life after that that I don’t know anything about but she hasn’t aged in my dreams. Why would she have I guess. She’s dead and someone remembers her from her twenties. But in the dreams we are in the trailer — the trailer now demolished as well, in the real world but never in the dreams — and somethings always happening like my dad is stabbing me or choking me or taking things out of my hands and screaming, and she is sitting in background nodding, sitting with her legs under her, only her bare feet peeking out. And for awhile there was this thing where I was always trying to scream out for help and I was too winded to do it, like I couldn’t get enough air to make sound — but I realized what was up with that later on, in the real world, some childhood memories shit and that stopped happening in my dreams. Which was worse because now I could scream to her for help but I would sound stupid and she would make fun of how I was speaking or I couldn’t think of the combination of words to make her understand me, I would try out strings of phrases, movie quotes, song lyrics, on and on, and nothing would work. Sometimes my dad was just doing shit like making fun of me in the dreams and my stepmom would be laughing. I suppose its not a flattering memorial. Its just dream stuff, though. Dreams don’t matter. Whatever meaning dreams have is best taken in parts of ones own picking. Its not the real her.
There was a real her. Thirty nine is crazy young to die. From what I know, when she was a kid her dad died and her mother and her went to live with her dads parents. Then her mom went crazy, maybe with drinking Im unclear on the details, and the grandparents got custody of her. She met my father at her job. They both worked at the same restaurant, her a waitress and he a line cook. She was seventeen. This was shortly after my mother left. My father was her first boyfriend. She went to work trying to mend his broken soul or whatever. She got pregnant with my brother quickly. I was ten, my stepmom eighteen, my father thirty three. He already a father to four, two of which — my older sisters — refused to live with him any longer and stayed at our grandparents. When my littlest brother was born, my brother three years younger and I moved out with them to the trailer on the horse farm. We all lived there for about six years before he beat her up so bad that one night. That was just the final fight after years. It was quite final though. I moved in with a friend and stopped following what anyone was doing in my family. I moved away two years later and eventually got caught up with all the family stuff after a run of bad luck forced us to move back to my hometown, now ten years had passed by then. She got another husband and had a daughter and had my little brother living with them since Id been gone. Then that thing happened. From what my brother told me, one day out of nowhere his mother and stepdad forced him to live in the shed. That he had a mat and blanket out there, that he drank from the hose, they had buckets for him to shit in. He wasn’t allowed in the house anymore. They brought him out a space heater at night. They stopped schooling him. He was nine, way out there in the country like twenty miles from anything, living in a shed. No clean clothes, no books, no contact. He said he never knew why they started doing it, he just remembers it being that way from some point on. This is all coming from him though. He is a faulty narrator if ever there was one. He’s supposedly evil. But I mean — still, man. I do not know him to be very bright, I can say that of him. Perhaps were he smarter, he would be able to find new ways to do evil so its better for all this way. Best limit a craftsman of his tools if he’d ruin a work using them without understanding.
He is crafty and motivated. It is often overshadowed by his inefficiency and lack of skill. He has many plans. Last I heard he was doing this yard work scheme that he planned on making into a business. He texted us that it was his ‘homeless man business idea — a small business for homeless people’. Like it was some gift or spark of philanthropy. Like he was doing charity. He and some homeless guys he knows will go around shoveling snow from peoples drive ways without asking if they want their drive way shoveled. When they finish the drive way they go and ask the people for payment. And he says ‘most of the time, they pay’. Remember this is just the plan. Right now he is doing it by himself. My twenty three year old brother is out here doing this. It takes a long time, he says. He’s out there by himself shoveling for hours and if they’re not home when he finishes he waits in his car for them to come home. This is what my brother spends his days doing. I couldn’t help but feeling a diminished pang of evil in his plan. It is at least a very rude thing to do — it lacks decency all over. Imagine my brother in his coat and with his shovel trodding up to your home, maybe you’ve been watching him all this time, and he knocks and expects you to pay him — the gall of the kid, what kind of creature does that. He says some people won’t pay him and he’s almost been in fights because of it. What am I to make of it. He with his dead mom and his mute sister, shoveling peoples drive ways without asking and spending hours at it hoping to force payment. Waiting outside the homes of others in his car.
If haunting is a thing that happens, my stepmom can haunt for real now. She could take many forms I imagine. Its weird because with her dead it stands a good chance that one day I will be older than she ever was. Me now older than she was when she was with my dad. If she could stay around the world, would she. Did she. She did believe in witchcraft. My father by all accounts still does. She believed she had birthed an evil thing. Perhaps she is a ghost. I can’t pretend to know how it would all work. How it does work, if it does.
