The Ends of Rossford

THIRTEEN

THE DEMONS ARE DEMONS

He as half awake, and it was half light. Still not used to being back from the monastery, a part of Fenn thought, “But I should be up now. I should be saying morning chants.”

There was a little bathroom off the master bedroom of this house, one of the selling points when he and Tom had bought it. Now the toilet flushed and Fenn heard the running of water. The door opened a little and Dan came across the room, turned back the covers, and climbed back into bed. Dan turned to him, throwing his arms around Fenn, gathering Fenn into this strength he never knew Dan possessed, burying his head in Fenn’s back.

“What time do you have to leave?” Fenn whispered.

Dan kissed the back of his neck, and then kissed his shoulders.

“Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“Stop that,” Fenn told him. He turned around. Dan Malloy had the sweetest, most beautiful face. His eyes shone even in this darkness, and Fenn touched a finger to the corner of Dan’s mouth.

“I don’t ever want to cause you scandal,” Fenn said. “I don’t want you to be in trouble.”

“Don’t you worry about me.”

“You’ve been here every night for a week.”

“Would you rather stay at the rectory?”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Fenn told him. He turned around and Dan turned around too, leaning over him.

“They always said God is love.”

“Actually, the Bible says that.”

“Well, I should probably read the Bible more,” Dan reflected. “But all I know is we heard about the love of God over and over again. And I never felt it. Not in the seminary. Not in my training. Not with any of my brother priests. It was a business. And it was hoping. Hoping that one day I would find this love. Living with… scraps of the love.

“But when I came back here, when I came to you, to be with you, then that was the love again. And all the care I have for you: that’s the love too.”

Dan twisted his legs with Fenn and held him close, his arms tightening around him.

“That night we came back here, and you let me in, that was the love. When I had to get dressed to go back to the rectory—”

“As you’ll have to do now.”

“When I had to go back it was the worst pain in the world. Going back to that bed alone was terrible.”

“Dan, I love you,” Fenn said.

“And I love you too! I always have. All those years ago I should have never let you go.”

“I think,” Fenn said to the wall, “I would have loved you less then.”

“Huh?” Dan looked at him. “How’s that?”

Dan lay on his side, his head propped on his fist as he looked on Fenn considering.

“You needed to be true to yourself.”

“I—”

“Shush,” Fenn said. “You don’t give yourself enough credit.

“You wanted to be true to yourself. And to God. To the voice that called you. If you had turned your back, I would have loved you less. And I do love you,” Fenn placed his finger on Dan’s breastbone. “I love you more than I can say.”

Dan lay still under Fenn’s fingers, looking up at his lover.

“I have to do seven o’clock mass.”

“What time is it now?”

“Five forty-five.”

“You didn’t even look at the clock.”

“I don’t have to. It was five-thirty five when I got up and went to the bathroom. I know time. I never wear a watch.”

Fenn nodded.

Dan took Fenn’s hand, lacing his fingers in Fenn’s.

“Do you want to make love before I go?”

“We have time?”

“I’m good but I’m not that good,” Dan laughed, reaching into the drawer for the oil. “I’d like to say I take all day, but you know it takes us about fifteen minutes.”

Fenn laughed and said, “Alright then.”

He pushed himself out of the bed.

“I need the restroom.”

“Go on ahead,” Dan said, lying on his back, and placing his arms behind his head. “I already gargled and everything.”

“You were planning this?” Fenn laughed from the restroom, shutting the door.

Dan laughed in his low voice and said, “I’ve been planning it for thirty years.”

 

There was the yearning, stretching quality of their love, the body fusing power of it. Hands clasped, fingers linked, mouths pressed and tongues locking, flesh moving against flesh, suddenly laughs of joy, the explosion of seed, holding each other through the volcano, lying there afterwards, Dan with a cloth or Fenn with a cloth, wiping the other slowly, lying on their backs, fingers laced in the wonder of it all.

Dan leaned over him, kissing him.

“I’m going to Mass, love,” he said. “And you just go on to sleep. And later I’ll be back.”

And that was exactly what happened.

 

AT FIRST, DYLAN WENT to visit Thackeray, and then he began to have Thackeray come to his apartment on the weekends. It was a chance for his brother to get out of Rossford and see the city. On Fridays, right after school, he would get on the train and Dylan would pick him up on Randolph Street.

“I know how to take the El,” Thackeray said after a couple of times. “You don’t have to come all the way down here.”

Dylan ignored this. Of course he was going to come down here. He would have taken the train to Miller if it made sense. When Thackeray was in Chicago, but out of his sight, Dylan was uncomfortable.

“You can’t keep following him around,” Elias whispered in his ear.

On the weekends when Thackeray stayed, Elias and Lance slept in one room and Thackeray stayed with his brother. They talked long into the night whispering about this and that in half sentences, finishing each other’s thoughts so that Lance and Elias really weren’t entirely sure what the two of them were saying, and then they would go to Dylan’s room and talk some more, watch television and fall asleep.

“Are you awake?” Thackeray said one Saturday morning.

“Yeah,” Dylan yawned, punching his pillow, “now that you just woke me.”

“Don’t you have to get up and chant, anyway?”

“I don’t get up early for that on Saturdays. I think it’s all those years living with Todd.”

“Oh, well, I was thinking of something.”

Dylan turned around and said, “Well, out with it, now that I’m—” he yawned. “awake.”

“Whatever. You’ll be passed out in five seconds. Did you know you have a really huge boner.”

“Yes. Did you know you won’t see if you don’t look, you little perv?”

“Anyway,” Thackeray continued, “I was thinking, we should do a tribute for Mom.”

“What?”

“You know, a memorial or something.”

“And there goes my boner.”

“I’m serious.”

“I am too. I enjoy my morning boner.”

“Please, Dyl. She was our mom and we should… do something.”

Dylan turned around and plumped up his pillow.

“I tell you what? You come up with something, and when I wake up we’ll… put something in motion.”

“I knew you’d come around.”

“I have a hard time telling you no. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to try to go back to sleep and dream of something dirty.”

“Dylan?”

“That’s not helping me fall asleep.”

“Do you ever feel weird when you wake up with a boner?”

“Only when I wake up with my little brother.”

“Are you taking me seriously?”

“Arrrrgh,” Dylan turned around, looked at his brother and said, “Yes, Thackeray, I am taking you seriously. Absolutely.”

“Because you’re my big brother and you have to tell me things.”

“Like about sex? Because I’m gay, and unless you are too, I’m not sure what I’d have to tell you.”

“Well I mean, you’re a guy. You live with guys. Whaddo you do with the feelings?”

“Since, as you pointed out,” Dylan spoke through a yawn, “I live with my boyfriends, we have sex. That’s how that works.”

“But like before, when you were my age.”

“When I was your age—and I am not advocating this—I was having sex with Lance.”

“Oh,” Thackeray sounded nonplussed.

“Again, I’m not advocating it.”

“How old were you?” Thackeray asked him, “when you started?”

“This is a subject that makes me so seriously uncomfortable that you need to let me go to sleep so I can dream up some lie for you.”

“What about brothers telling each other the whole truth?”

“I never heard of that clause.”

Now it was Thackeray who yawned.

“I think I’m just gonna go back to bed.”

“That is an excellent idea.”

 

 

Logan hugged himself and yawned. He had slept too late, and past the warmth of the blankets, he could feel the chill. He stretched and then pushed himself out of the bed, grabbing his house coat.

“Are you cold?” he inquired.

In the bed, Ruthven Meradan knuckled his eyes and hunkered under the covers.

“I could use some heat,” he said.

“I’m going down to turn on the furnace.” Logan belted his housecoat. “It got so cold so quick.”

A few minutes later the gas was coming on, and in the kitchen Logan was scooping coffee into the coffee pot. Sheridan had once said, “It’s so easy to just make it the night before.” He had never learned that.

By the time the coffee was brewing, Logan was on his way back upstairs. He climbed under the covers and Ruthven muttered, “Damn, boy, you’re cold.”

Logan pressed himself into Ruthven.

“But you’re all heat.”

“You ever think of premaking the coffee.”

“Why don’t you? You stay here every night.”

“I kind of do, don’t I?

“Had you considered putting the coffee maker on the same floor so we don’t have to go all the way downstairs?”

Logan turned around and pressed his back into Ruthven as he thumped his pillow.

“You bitch a lot, you know that?”

“I just don’t like the cold. I’m a California kid.”

“You haven’t lived in California for six years.”

“I just went back.”

“Please shut up.”

“You’re harsh man. You’re fucking harsh.”

Neither one of them said much of anything for a while, and then Ruthven lay on his back with his hands behind his head.

“All you guys seem real down on Cali.”

“All what guys.”

“Guys in porn.”

“Because Cali was where we did the porn,” Logan said. “By the way, I hate Florida too.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

Suddenly Logan chuckled and turned around.

“What?” Ruthven looked at him.

“I give up, man. I give up on pretending to be too grumpy to talk. You’re like a crazy little Chihuahua. You’re just going to pull a conversation out of me.”

“Alright then,” Ruthven said, turning over and smirking at him.

Suddenly, Logan took the blanket down, just to Ruthven’s hip. He was so young and beautiful, and Logan’s eyes followed the small thread of gold brown hair from under his breast, to his stomach, to where it ended in the blanket. He ran his hand in wonder over Ruthven’s side and stopped at the wonder of the hip bone, at that place where the tight stomach ended and the thigh began.

“Am I still a Chihuahua?”

“You’ve been around for so long,” Logan murmured. “How the fuck did I never see you?”

Ruthven laughed uncomfortably.

“Stop that, man. Going on like I’m some… Mona Lisa or something.”

“Well, now you know I don’t go in for Mona Lisas,” Logan said.

Ruthven went red and turned his head away, pulling up his blanket.

“You can’t be saying stuff like that about me. You’ll make a motherfucker all vain and shit.”

Ruthven lay back down, looking soft and boylike.

“You wanna go some place interesting tonight?”

Ruthven looked up at him, raising his eyebrow.

“Where?”

Logan cleared his throat.

“The Butt Hutt.”

 

“This is definitely the oddest will reading I’ve ever been to,” Maggie said, untying the rag from her head.

“Though I confess it’s also the only one I’ve ever been to.”

Bill Affren was in a sweatshirt and ball cap, and sitting down on the edge of the sofa he said, “Mom dictated that everything be done like a housecleaning, and now everything she wanted to give away has been given away.”

“Except the money,” Maisy muttered, folding her arms over her chest.

“Maisy,” Bill said sternly.

“And the house,” she added.

Bill cleared his throat and began to read, “To my daughter Maisy Madonna Affren Baird, and to her husband, Russell, I bequeath—”

“Mom was so not a bequeather—”

“I put that in there. But please listen, Maise—your father’s old leather suit case under the right side of the bed.”

“What the hell?” she began.

And then Barb left a lamp, and a golf bag, and cereal boxes, and Dena and Milo looked at each other when they inherited a crate of Coca Cola.

“Well, it’s mine, and I’m going to get that suit case,” Maisy said, at last.

While she was gone, Bill said, “and lastly to my great-granddaughter Margaret—”

“Who’s that?” Maggie said.

Meredith frowned at Maggie and said, “It’s you.”

“I forgot that was my—”

But just then there was a scream from upstairs and Bill, never once dropping the will, folded it and was running toward the stairs and his sister. But Maisy was coming down lugging the suitcase, and cackling. When Milo said, “Aunt Maisy, what’s up?” delirious with laughter, she collapsed at the base of the stairs and let the suit case fall open.

“Holy shit!” Robert swore.

“Damn,” Dena muttered.

Stacks and stacks of green bills fell out of the suitcase and Nell said, “It might be prudent to check all the golf bags and Coke crates and see what’s in them.”

So for the next twenty minutes everyone went hunting up the obscure things left them, and when it was done, the family sat in amazement, laughing, Dena and the children calmly stacked bills from the Coca Cola crate while Milo shook his head and muttered, “Grandma! Even to the bitter end.”

Though he was flushed over the money, Bill reminded them, “We still have a will to read.”

“You witnessed it?” Milo said.

“Yes.”

“But you seem so surprised.”

“I didn’t know what she was putting in all that crazy stuff. I knew she had some game. And then I witnessed the signing and helped in the writing. That was all. And of course, with this last part I’m about to read… I helped with that.

“To my great-granddaughter Margaret…”

Bill gave her an envelope. When she looked tentative, Dena and Meredith said, “Open it.”

Maggie, shaky handed, opened the envelope and her brows knit as she read.

“What is it, Babe?” Ed Palmer asked.

Maggie’s mouth opened, but she didn’t speak. She just shook her head before handing the note over to Ed.

“Read it,” Meredith whispered to him.

Ed Palmer nodded and read:

 

 

 

“I was the youngest child of a father who hardly knew me, with nothing to my name when my sister moved to Rossford to live with our grandma. A year later I came so I could work, and that’s how I met your great-grandfather. Grandma died before the wedding, but she passed this house to me, the very house where she raised my mother. Her last name was Eisinger, and mine was Affren and now the house comes to you, Margaret Amelia Biggs. No matter what the names, five generations of women have lived in this house and now you will be the sixth.

                                           Keep it well,

                                                                    Grams.

 

 

“So this is where you started,” Ruthven said.

“Yeah,” Logan answered. “How’d you like it?”

“Is there a reason you said drink out of the cans, don’t get a mug?”

“Yeah. Because it’s hard to tell how clean these glasses are.”

“That’s,” Ruthven began, looking around, “what I thought.

“Ey, look at that poor kid?”

In the middle of the dark room some skinny blond boy in briefs swayed, and Logan said, “With promise he could end up where I am right now.”

Ruthven saw Logan’s wry expression and said, “Where you are now isn’t so bad.”

Logan shrugged, and then he said, “You wanna get out of here?”

“Get out of the Butt Hutt? Is there life outside of the Butt Hutt?”

“Just barely,” Logan said, shrugging and getting up. He left a fold of what Ruthven assumed were some serious bills on the table and said, “Let’s go.”