Tommy Jenkins Went to Hell - Part 1

John stands at the front door of his wooded cottage. Joseph’s words from earlier that day gnaw at the back of his mind. Isabella’s death was not your fault. But how can Joseph be so sure of it? He wasn’t there when she died. Hell, John only arrived on scene to cradle her in his arms for her last breath. And he was only there by accident. Does the blame not fall on him for being an absent parent? Does it not fall on him for not recognizing the strange circumstances that befell his daughter—circumstances that she was never able to free herself of? John thinks Joseph is wrong. While he may not have struck the blow that took her life, his lack of action to help her meant that her death, yes, was very much his fault. Isabella deserved so much more than he gave her, and now she’s gone and he has nothing but guilt and the house he raised her in.

And being home did not help the guilt that sat heavy in his heart. He has to remember that the house is just a house, and the land that was passed down from his great-grandfather when they settled in the area is just land. The original house was made of logs and nails, but over the generations it became an architectural conglomerate of logs, bricks, and stone as the family expanded and more children were born into the Bernard name.

Now, as time goes on, it is only occupied by John and his immediate family. The elders passed and his siblings and cousins moved on to other towns and cities as they tried to break the generational curse that was rumored to linger on the land from the spilled blood of Caddo natives. John was the only one foolish enough to stay, passing the name of Redwater off as the color of the natural land instead of giving into the tales of the battles long fought between the natives and the white men.

The expanded cottage sits on 140-acres of land, half covered in uncorrupted woods, while the rest was transformed into crop and livestock farmland, enough to sustain his family and for Jane to sell around town for a small profit.

John places his hand on the front door handle, feeling the sun-heated iron under his palm. He lingers there for a moment, eyes fixed on the fist-sized pockmark that serves as a reminder of the day he lost his daughter to the Devil.

Seven years ago, John sat across from Him in the form of eight-year-old Isabella; and he was lost for words. He could only stare at her, brows furrowed, elbows propped on the dining table, and fingers laced in front of his mouth. He watched as Isabella squirmed under his scrutinizing gaze. Her thin, pale fingers played nervously with the hem of her yellow Sunday dress. She refused to make eye contact with him, finding the brown slats of the log walls much more interesting.

John wholly appreciated that Mrs. Williams was discreet about the situation. What he did not appreciate was that she pounded the front door so hard that she left those pockmarks in the aging wood that he shall notice until the day he dies. She said she had found Isabella at the edge of the woods near the church, saw dark mud and leaves against the bright dress, and dragged the girl home before anyone saw them. John apologized for the inconvenience of it all, and Mrs. Williams scoffed at him, only saying that she hoped he could beat the devil out of her. Mrs. Williams was an elderly woman, wise in her years, and tough, but mostly forgiving of first mistakes. She believed in hard work and learning, but did not stand for repeated offenders and those unwilling to “make room for Jesus in their hearts.”

But that had been the first signs of any trouble within the confines of Isabella’s mind. Before that day, she was kind and courageous. She was headstrong, certainly, but always acted with the best intentions and other people at the center of her care and attention. That’s why John knew that when he confronted her about her and Tommy’s adventures in the woods that day, that the responses spewing from her lips were not formulated by Isabella.

The warmth of the handle begins to burn under his palm. He just needs to open the door. He hasn’t been home in the past two weeks—since Isabella passed in his arms—and he can only imagine the science experiments growing within the pantry of vegetables and fruit and leftover bread, but he can’t avoid the house any longer. The Donahues were nice enough to let him stay, but he felt the tension growing as he lounged on their living room sofa and ate at their small dining table cramped between them and their four children.

It’s time.

John sucks in his breath and pushes the door inward. The mid-afternoon light floods in behind him, illuminating the main living area of the cottage. The main room is a large rectangle, with a bench and a hat rack off to the right, a sofa pushed against the far wall, and miscellaneous décor that the Bernards have accumulated over the decades. It lived up to it’s cottage name with organic oak furniture, an array of books covering a plethora of subjects (both fiction and non-fiction), and homemade crafts like pottery, whittled figures, and wood-burned frames hosting Bernard artistry. While John does not live up to the Bernard name, giving his life to science and reality, Jane blossomed when she married into the name twenty-five years ago.

At that time, John’s parents still lived in the house, before they decided to move an hour away to Dixon to be closer to John’s ill sister, Joanna. His grandparents had already passed two years before his parents moved, and once they were gone, the house was left to him and Jane to use and tend to and to fill with a family of their own. They were unsuccessful for nine years. And in that time, Jane used her creative gifts to paint and tailor and harvest the land. John used that time to work.

And when Isabella was born in 1894, John continued to work.

But between his house-calls and faraway medical conferences, he found time to build, too. Isabella’s room was the first door on the left down the hall from the main living area. The bed frame, the vanity, the dresser—all of it was John’s handiwork. He was proud of it down every last crooked nail or screw. The boys also had rooms of their own down that hallway. Silas’s room was adjacent to Isabella’s, because he was the second eldest, and then Josiah’s next to his. There was one last room at the end that John and Jane always wanted to fill with another little Bernard, but Josiah seemed to be the last blessing. Or he was until Jane confessed to a surprise pregnancy just six months back.

At that time, John was ecstatic. He was thrilled to hear the pitter-patter of little feet running around the cottage again.

But now, he stands at the closed door to the empty room and realizes that the house was never going to be graced with little feet of a Bernard ever again. In fact, it’ll only have echoes of the ones that were there before. He opens the door to the room. It sits empty, as it always had, but with a thick layer of dust on the floorboards. He decides that this was going to be the best place to sort Isabella’s things. One-by-one he was going to sort her stuff into this room in piles—things to throw away, things to donate, and things to keep.

In order to do that, he would have to actually go into her room. He doesn’t want to. He stands there in front of it, places his hand on the knob, and just stares at the upside-down cross etched into the wood. He remembers the day Jane found it and she screamed. So, so loud that John heard it from down the path as he was on his way home. So much had already happened between the day the Devil “possessed” Isabella and the day she etched the cross into the door. However, in all honesty, the cross never bothered John.

John is not a Christian. Not like Jane is. He’s a man of science and pessimistic reality where things can be proved and experimented. He’s never cared for religion or spiritual philosophy, though, he admits that over the past several years, his orthodox belief in science has been tried over and over again; and the many attempts that these otherworldly forces have made to crack at his rigid foundation has slowly began to be successful.

Over the years, they have caused him nightmares and doubts and hallucinations of blue fire and deep, guttural voices echoing on the wind. In the past, he has been able to push these to the side of mind tricks played on him by his own irrational fear and the religious trauma that had been inflicted on him since he was a boy. But now, they mock him again. He hears a noise. Nothing threatening—no—but unsettling. It’s his own voice, floating into the front living room from the kitchen. John moves from Isabella’s door and goes closer to the voice, to hear it clearer. When he enters the kitchen, he sees the ghostly silhouettes of himself and Isabella at the dining table. Across the way is the phantom of himself, unable to process what Mrs. Williams had told him earlier that day, and he was unable to accept the state of his daughter as she sat direct from him.

It was Spring of 1901. Her hands were in her lap, tangling her fingers in the hem of her dress that was caked in mud and debris. Her shoes were also covered in mud, leaving a trail of thick, wet foot prints from the door to the kitchen table. The yellow bow in her hair was crooked and entangled with twigs. She looked as if she had been in a war in the woods.

John’s voice echoed, “Isabella, what mess have you made?”

She had looked up to him then, her doll-like eyes wide and, if he had not known any better, terrified. She was not actually terrified in that moment—not of John, anyway, and not of the consequences of her action—but of something else John was not privy to at that time. Looking back, he can see now that her eyes gave away a secret. If he had known that day what she did, would he have acted differently? Would he have done more to protect her? The Lord talks about forgiveness, and that he finds that he is quick to, but would he have truly forgiven her so quickly if he had known the depth at which she opened her heart to the darkness she found that day?

“What did you do to your dress?” John asked.

Her eyes went wild for a moment, appearing to be a fright (although he realizes now that it was excitement rising from her). Her hands wrung at the dirty hem.

“It was Tommy’s idea,” she said quick.

“What was?”

“The woods. I’m sorry, papa. We went to Marwos—we didn’t get far…” She slouched in the chair. Her dress rode up around her shoulders, gaping at the neckline. Her chin touched her white-laced collarbone, and she looked up at John with her doe-like eyes. She knew she wasn’t allowed in the woods, let alone Marwos. It was private property. It was dangerous. There were coyotes and poison ivy. There was a sickness that hid in the trees that John has felt in his bones since he was a child. Until much later in his adult life, he had never stepped more than a couple feet underneath the canopy of the white pines that dominated their town, surrounding their cottage, and lining the main roads that led in and out of the countryside. Rumors of native curses or not, something spread within the woods in Blackrock, and even worse, the looming aged pines of the Marwos property seemed to be the source of John’s irrational anxieties.

“I don’t care whose idea it was,” He said firmly, “just… where did Tommy go? Did Mrs. Williams bring him home, too?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“No.”

“Isabella, where is Tommy?”

“He went home sick.”

John forced a disappointed sigh. It wasn’t like her to be difficult. Strange and silly, certainly, but not secretive.

“I’m going to have a word with Thomas’s father. We’re going to head over there to make sure he got home safe, and you are going to apologize to Mr. Jenkins for encouraging this behavior. This is not going to happen again, do you understand?”

She stared at the table, her fingers no longer fidgety. A frown sat on her face.

“Isabella, do you understand me?”

“It was only a goat.”

John cocked his head, flustered, “Wh—excuse me?”

“My dress. It’s goat’s blood.”

He saw it then, in the lamplight from the five-point chandelier above the table. The light casted an amber hue to the room, but upon closer examination he could see that the stains he had mistaken for mud were not quite the right consistency. Or maybe not the right color. The waters of Blackrock tended to have a reddish-brown tint due to the natural clay deposits that sat at the edges and bottoms of the rivers and lakes, but the thought of those stains against the bright yellow of her dress turned from mud, as he initially thought it was, to the blood she claimed it to be. And now the stains looked much, much redder.

“It’s... not yours?” What kind of question was that?

She shook her head. Then blinked and corrected herself, “Maybe some of it is.”

He was baffled. He was so unbalanced by the confession after struggling with her silence for what felt like hours that he wasn’t sure what was true anymore. First Marwos, now a goat, and Tommy got sick? Images pieced together in his mind about what could have happened, but the range of possibilities made him dizzy. He wanted to sit down, but no. He had to make sure Tommy got home safe.

John ran to the phone and dialed the Jenkins’ number. The operator picked up.

“Joseph Jenkins, please,” John said.

“One moment,” the operator said.

And then a frantic voice picked up on the other side, “Sheriff Evans? Did you find him?” The voice was Joseph.

“No…,” John said, “It’s John Bernard. Tommy isn’t home?”

“No, he’s not. How—how did you know I was looking for Tommy?”

John went silent for a moment as his heart dropped. Tommy was missing. Isabella might have been the last person to see him. “I’m coming over,” John said, “We need to talk.”