The Secret

by Brett Rutherford

Since you had to leave town, I lived
in West Newton with Gertrude and Claudius.
The town hugged two river banks
of the angry, dark Yoghiogheny. Hornets
buzzed on the bridge that divided it.
Trains roared through the middle
of the tiny main street. It was a place
you went when you needed to be
where no one knew your original name
or why you left where you came from,
where a man and a woman could pretend
to be married, and no one asked
for proof on paper. So I was Hamlet,
in teen-boy guise, housed with my mother
and the man who was once an uncle,
now a no-name lord of the manor.
In my basement laboratory I tried
in vain to make alchemical potions
that might turn a grown man to a frog,
or tastelessly poison a chutney jar.
None of my called-down curses ever worked.
The miscreant sat in his TV room at night
watching Gunsmoke and John Wayne westerns.
My mother spawned a daughter, and then
a son as well, while “Uncle” spewed scorn
on my useless, book-centered universe.
He railed against Jews, bragged that the town
would never build a park or a swimming pool
“’cause if we did, the niggers would come.”

I stayed at school as late as I could,
volunteered for anything that kept
my presence from his shadow.
He made me know I was not welcome,
a bookworm boarder to last as long
as the child support payments came
from my silent and absent father,
and after that, “I want you gone.”

The house had one book only
that was not mine: on the dryer,
opposite their bedroom door,
a well-leafed copy of Lady Chatterley’s

Lover that opened instantly
to the sex scenes. My uncle
had used it to seduce my mother,
sweet poison to eye and ear.

I tried to imagine their coupling,
but judging from the contents
of the medicine cabinet, for
hemorrhoids, psoriasis, and
unpronounceable ailments, all
I could picture was something
like a Hammer Films blob
undulating upon a mattress,
as though two pizza slices
had toppled upon one another
inside the melting oven.

The new town
tolerated me. I had Latin at last
to occupy my thoughts,
new streets to haunt,
a vast night gallery
of riverside graves
where I could brood
and plan my escape
or some spectacular
suicide.

When poetry came.
I figured I wouldn’t last
to thirty, anyway.

When summer came
and I could run off
to my grandmother’s house,
a scant five miles
from Scottdale,
the exultation of home
came back to me.

I phoned my friends,
and one by one their mothers
answered and said, “No.
Tim’s not around.” “Dave
won’t be around this summer.”
“Tom is not permitted
to take a phone call right now.”

I never saw my friends again.

Decades – no, a lifetime later,
I hear from an old neighbor,
the Polish girl whose porch
we could see from our kitchen
window. “You were just gone,
she told me. “One day, just gone.
Our parents wouldn’t tell us why
you were gone. Your whole family
just vanished without a word.”

I choked up as she told me,
“We cried forever.”

My mother took up
with my father’s sister’s husband,
and not content to run away,
they wove a story:
that my father and his sister
“did it first.” Incest, that is.

Their proof: a missing condom
that his young daughter and a friend
had blown up as a water balloon
and thrown away in secret;
and the mailman’s account
of seeing someone naked
moving around in the afternoon,
pale skin viewed through panes
of an inner doorway.

So, armed with “They did it first”
and D. H. Lawrence, the furtive nights
and parked-car couplings began.
Two divorces, and the flood
of door-to-door and phone-
to-phone gossiping. Have you heard
about the Rutherford incest?
Brother and sister — the mailman saw
everything. And wasn’t it almost
incest, what the other two did,
a woman and her in-law?

More than four decades later
I came to the town again. The street
of yellow bricks greeted me
with a full rainbow against
the backdrop of nearby hills.

It was just a town. A place
of stately homes, a new library,
a red brick church
my great-grandparents helped build.

I ought to feel happy here.
The graves of my ancestors
are here in their fine plots.
My grandfather had been Burgess,
a great-uncle a financier;
even a Rutherford bookstore once.

Yet I kept looking backwards,
tense at each corner expecting
the crowd with pitchforks,
torches hastily lit to be rid of me.

Who can undo
the evil of false witnessing?
Who can come home
to where they “cried forever?”