To Pin a Moth
It's going on 13 years since Gil passed away. He was our last connection to a past that wore itself for us like an invisible locket of childhood. Gil on one side, my big brother Jem on the other, lying right upon my heart. Atticus always said it's the unexpected that mortars men as kin, more than any blood. Guess that's the way we felt about Arthur Radley, too, our hidden friend "Boo," down the road. He was the kindred that came out from the shadow and saved Jem after the beating we took, costumed in the dark, stumbling home from that fateful Halloween school pageant.
Bob Ewell was an alcoholic, a physical and emotional abuser, but he wasn't an amnesiac. He'd no compunction taking his ails out on his daughter, or on our father Atticus, nor on us children-- bidding his time, as he had to, to divert suspicions. If it hadn't been for Boo overcoming a deep-set agoraphobia, Ewell would have broken bones in all three of us; me, Jem and Gil, and left us to bleed out. Revenge for the bad reputation that he'd brought upon himself, but which he'd blamed Atticus for, thinking he'd leverage social opinion and inferred racial superiority, to nurse what Atticus referred to academically as his "inferiority complex," meaning colloquially and more specifically, as perception of being "poor white trash." Like Gil said, an image Ewell had reinforced in himself, with loathing, and then berated his family with, as well.
I'd felt akin with Gil long before we'd taken those earliest vows, unofficially, with stolen kisses under the massive oak in his family's yard. Then some years after, we'd graduated and officially married, and had Alternia Radlee Finch Harris. So named, we agreed, to honor the memory of that summer that brought us all close together, him and me, and Jem; and our late housekeeper Calpurnia, and Atticus, may their souls rest in everlasting peace.
That summer turned to fall and drew us spiraling out of a dark- light ignorance and innocence, like the partitions of misunderstandings and misperceptions. I know that we were blind. We weren't blind in failing to see. We were blind in the glare of our own fears, projecting in flashes onto other people, and again by the fears reflected back onto us, from the eyes of equally fearful strangers. Trinkets of "knowledge" like that sparkle falsely and deceive us. We think we are learned, like when using big words, not quite fully cognizant of their meanings. Information becomes a collection, looked at, and not understood, not experienced. Something dead, even when living it, because we have labeled it, rather than identified with it.
Never did I suppose, since that time, that I would find myself caught up in that blaze again, and so isolated. Jem and his wife Angelica and their three children all moved to Canada years ago. We telephone a couple times a year, what with money being tight, and travel all the more prohibitive. We cherish the idea we'll one day have a small future family reunion. We'd thought maybe when Alternia has her children, though now that seems an eternity away. Maybe never.
Gil'd had a big heart, always. Too big, Alternia would say, in simplification, hugging the empty space in place of her father, when the doctor'd tried to explain the enlargement of the ventricles to her. He'd had a murmur from infancy, and it tore unexpectedly as he got older, a sudden gaping hole when he'd finished med school. Demonic twist of fates, he laughed, with a brave face. He said, "loving us was worth the pain," if loving us too much had caused the rupture in his aortic valves.
He'd held my hand so lightly from the hospital bed, weak and tender. "Don't go," whispered low when he wanted a word with Alternia. She was six, but old enough and wise enough to take things seriously, especially when he used that paternal voice. It reminded us immediately of me and Atticus, each of us precocious. How he knew then, I'll never discern, but something must have prompted Gil. He wanted me to hear. He said, "Altie, it is hard to be different; and impossible to be the same. Think of me in your trials. Have heart; and take care of your mother."
Maybe it's just the overlap of words, and definitions, that haunts me like in a crossword puzzle, and it was not at all prophetic. Just seems that way, in the blanks, now that Alternia is in juvey. She's seventeen. Eight more months and the rules would be different. They tell me the detention's for her own safety, for what she claims to have seen, not so much for the actual charges of possession and robbery, disputed. Nor for the assault she suffered, undisputedly. It pains me, for not having been more vigilant. It's as if a failing of my motherhood.
Maybe it was my fault for not leaving Maycomb. Maybe it would have been the right thing to do, by the family, to sell Atticus' house and leave behind the Ewell's and especially Mayella. Jem said the Ewell's had tainted the county for him and he was glad to get away--- to college out of state, and then out of the country altogether. Jem had talked a lot about Human Rights, and why he was following in Atticus's footsteps as counsel. He worked pro bono whenever he could, and we were all rightly proud. He'd never had much respect for Mayella, though. It was like he sensed she'd carried a sickness, latent, that which had progressed so detrimentally in her father. I confess I held it against Jem, a little, as though he had hardened his heart, unjustly, and I tried to keep mine open.
Psychologists claim that victims perpetrate, or perpetuate, their wrongs. Still, I thought it unfair to look down on her, her history being what it was. Bob Ewell, had long been a neglectful self-indulgent. It's hard to add the word "father." Mayella had been deprived of many things, foremost childhood, and parental love. I reckon I'd cheered for her silently when I'd heard she'd married Robert Farrow and that they'd had twins, a boy and a girl, and I'd lost track of them, in our own family plights. The little I knew from our catty neighbor was that after less than three years Rob'd left her, and that Mayella had picked up on some her father's habits, what with drinking and other rumored substance misuse, prescription as well as illegal. Maybe it'd always been like that, just better kept, behind curtains.
I had no idea of the depths of abuses. We hold "Mother" in such esteem. Reviled behaviors are incompatible with its definition. Men are as if always one step removed from the tie of paternity. Culpability is more easily placed, maybe on account of this doubt, for emotional or physical abuses, even sexual abuse. But how could a mother? ...a Mother.
Altie had been, with my repressed reservations, as well as charitable encouragements, friendly with the Farrow twins. She'd always been closer with Warren, than Cassidy, Cassidy being reticent in words and gestures, and quick to bow out of group activities. Our Altie'd no such reservations and wouldn't hesitate to drop in to visit Cass whenever she withdrew. It should have been a red flag, but it seemed an adolescent phase that Cass withdrew more, and more, and Alternia with her, pulling away from home.
It tugged at my heart that my girl was grown, and soon I'd be empty nesting, as they say. It did not occur to me that things were complicating, in ways that would subsequently implicate my baby.
She'd come back one night, not so long ago, and said something that stopped me in my retirement to bed with my books and chamomile tea.
"Wherever did you hear words like that, sweetie?" I asked her, biding some time to respond judiciously. My landed work as a real estate agent had prepared me for emotional data gathering, pitching and making a sale. I scanned her body language. I inferred she'd had a disagreement with her friends.
"um.. tonight... Warren said you were a 'butch-mom' when I left after our study group, Scout." Hanging his quote with clawed fingers. The teen's words meant most obviously to wound, instill doubts in the most vulnerable areas of stability, and pierce self-image.
She accepted my definitions and resource suggestions. I departed thinking of growing pains and could only wonder what was going through her mind. Again, I thought of Atticus always treating us as "reasonably thinking individuals."
When she came home a few nights after with a split lip, it was too late. Something had gotten out of hand, and it was spreading in the neighborhood by mouth. The stares, the whispers, the silence, the cold treatment, and the heated slurs. I suspected down deep, it was creeping up from the Ewell-Farrows. Our experience from the Bob Ewell/ Tom Robinson trial in our youth had prepared me to see it as an illness of humanity, nothing personal.
It was Cassidy who was in peril.
***
Author's Note: sequel to "To Kill a Mockingbird" ... in which the main character Scout, now widowed mother of one teenaged daughter, finds herself in the trial of a lifetime to stop the incestuous abuses of a neighboring mentally unstable Mother (Mayella Ewell-Farrow) against her children (Warren and Cassidy Farrow), and the wrath that incurs from inherent social needs, sibling jealousies, parental emotional ties; and community outrage.