If You Don't, They Will.

The small boy slumped in an obstinate and lifeless crouch on the bottommost stair. Sulking, he eyed the big man's turned back and in despondence scuffed his toe along the wood of the floor. The big man who was his fatherunit turned and spoke offhandedly, but the boy ignored it with a decisive furrowing of the brow.


The big man surveyed the small boy who was the last product of the last loveless marriage and then turned to his work once more. He was an imposing figure, roughly cut with corded arms from a prison yard; an expensive button-down shirt and slacks could not conceal that he was as crudely hewn as any common bar-brawler.

He had become increasingly displeased with the progressive disrespect from his children; no, he absolutely would not tolerate it, would not stand for it. There would be consequence for Matthew, he marked grimly. Speak when spoken to. Just as he had not spared the birch, or the belt, or his fist. After all, the boy should have learned by now.



Here was a woman barely beyond girlhood: She sat upright with military rigidity and the fraught of slowly fraying nerves. Her thin right hand clutched the opposite wrist; she avoided looking him in the eyes and instead made every effort to stare down at her whitened knuckles. Tonight. Her speech was stilted and received distantly by her own ears. She crossed and uncrossed and recrossed her legs and eyed the clock. Choking fear and doubt rose in her as it had done so many times before, this time laced with the rust of fatigue. What had she done, allowing him so far into her world? Most times it was good. Most times he had given her the means to banish her doubt to the seven winds. Did those times, she wondered now, make up for this fear and the endless brick wall of a shame too longstanding to break? She thought of a phrase, symphonious to her own ears, that would never be accepted by the grand tribunal of Margretville: "Johnny Early and Miss Cecilia McCloud." He looked at her red lips and mahogany hair and had no premise of attaching his love to the concept of a wealthy socialite; she gazed at his green emerald-pool eyes and tumbled sweep of Gaelic black hair... and heard, over the music of his words, her father incanting the old hateful catechism: poverty labor vermin, shanty Irish drunkards, brawlers, idiots, dogs. And she loved him, loved him dearly, but to her own mind she could not justify why she had never made a move against the mistake her intellect insisted this was. She couldn't be involved with boys, not this boy, not any boy, not now, she couldn't. Not with her father... that way... these years. The years since she had developed breasts and her aristocratic cheekbones had become prominent and her legs grew long. Closed futility drew blinds over her eyes. The boy did not sense her growing distance this time. She silenced the boy with regret in her parting gesture and set off on the path home. The boy watched her go with a surprisingly delicate sorrow; she moved as if she wished to be away from herself, and one could not miss the bow of her head in a quiet and long-lived shame.



The big man stood at the upstairs window. Cecilia was late again. He would not, of course, stand for that. She knew that he worried about her, worried himself to death; after all, she was such a pretty girl, and he worried about her.


No emotion read in her face as she pushed the front door shut behind her. She moved into the living room with the expressionless calm of one who has accepted the gallows. She perched on the couch and took no comfort, a body comprised of wan and exhausted angles. Her hair hung along her jawline and took a dead lustre from the yellow light.

She didn't have to wait long.


Her father's frame filled the door, massive shoulders silhouetted against the hallway light. "You know how I worry about you, Cecilia. I worry a lot."

"I'm sorry I'm late, Daddy, I promise it won't happen again." She formed the words as from a lifeless shell with eyes downcast.

"There are boys out there, all of them, they only want that one thing. You aren't going to give it to them, not that thing that they want. I worry about you and here you are late. I will not take this sort of disobedience. You have forgotten." He took one step into the room.

"Daddy, I promise..."

"Just tonight Matthew had to be punished for his disrespect. I worry about you, all day and night, and here is what I get for my care. I will not take this from my children." His face was implacable.

She said nothing.

"It's a big world, there are a lot of boys and all of them only want the one thing. Most of them are willing to hurt you for it. And all I do is care. I never hurt you." His voice grew dangerous and gentle. "And still I get nothing but disobedience. You have forgotten. All these boys that will hurt you... and you are such a pretty girl."

He gazed down at the young woman: his silent, guarded, broken daughter.

"Oh, Cecilia, I worry a lot." Quietly.




The big man stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. Outside, the small boy stared at the closed door from his corner with strange, dull eyes. Then there was silence save for the sound of his heel rubbing along the lines in the hardwood floor.