“There were other things, too,” Dick said, “but I’ll just tell you one. Grampy hired a woman to help out around the house after his wife died. She cleaned and cooked. At dinnertime, she’d slat out everything on the table at once, from salad to dessert, because that’s the way ole Black Grampa liked it. Dessert was always cake or puddin. It was put down on a little plate or in a little dish next to your dinnerplate so you could look at it and want it while you plowed through the other muck. Grampa’s hard and fast rule was you could look at dessert but you couldn’t eat dessert unless you finished every bite of fried meat and boiled greens and mashed potatoes. You even had to clean up the gravy, which was lumpy and didn’t have much taste. If it wasn’t all gone, Black Grampa’d hand me a hunk of bread and say ‘Sop er up with that, Dickie-Bird, make that plate shine like the dog licked it.’ That’s what he called me, Dickie-Bird.
“Sometimes I couldn’t finish no matter what, and then I didn’t get the cake or the puddin. He’d take it and eat it himself. And sometimes when I could finish all my dinner, I’d find he’d smashed a cigarette butt into my piece of cake or my vanilla puddin. He could do that because he always sat next to me. He’d make like it was a big joke. ‘Whoops, missed the ashtray,’ he’d say. My ma and pa never put a stop to it, although they must have known that even if it was a joke, it wasn’t a fair one to play on a child. They just made out like it was a joke, too.”
“That’s really bad,” Danny said. “Your folks should have stood up for you. My mom does. My daddy would, too.”
“They were scairt of him. And they were right to be scairt. Andy Hallorann was a bad, bad motorcycle. He’d say, ‘Go on, Dickie, eat around it, that won’t poison ya.’ If I took a bite, he’d have Nonnie—that was his housekeeper’s name—bring me a fresh dessert. If I wouldn’t, it just sat there. It got so I could never finish my meal, because my stomach would get all upset.”
“You should have moved your cake or puddin to the other side of your plate,” Danny said.
“I tried that, sure, I wasn’t born foolish. He’d just move it back, saying dessert went on the right.” Dick paused, looking out at the water, where a long white boat was trundling slowly across the dividing line between the sky and the Gulf of Mexico. “Sometimes when he got me alone he bit me. And once, when I said I’d tell my pa if he didn’t leave me alone, he put a cigarette out on my bare foot. He said, ‘Tell him that, too, and see what good it does you. Your daddy knows my ways already and he’ll never say a word, because he yella and because he wants the money I got in the bank when I die, which I ain’t fixing to do soon.’ ”
Danny listened in wide-eyed fascination. He had always thought the story of Bluebeard was the scariest of all time, the scariest there ever could be, but this one was worse. Because it was true.
“Sometimes he said that he knew a bad man named Charlie Manx, and if I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d call Charlie Manx on the long-distance and he’d come in his fancy car and take me away to a place for bad children. Then Grampa would put his hand between my legs and commence squeezing. ‘So you ain’t gonna say a thing, Dickie-Bird. If you do, ole Charlie will come and keep you with the other children he done stole until you die. And when you do, you’ll go to hell and your body will burn forever. Because you peached. It don’t matter if anybody believes you or not, peaching is peaching.’
“For a long time I believed the old bastard. I didn’t even tell my White Gramma, the one with the shining, because I was afraid she’d think it was my fault. If I’d been older I would’ve known better, but I was just a kid.” He paused. “There was something else, too. Do you know what it was, Danny?”
Danny looked into Dick’s face for a long time, probing the thoughts and images behind his forehead. At last he said, “You wanted your father to get the money. But he never did.”
“No. Black Grampa left it all to a home for Negro orphans in Alabama, and I bet I know why, too. But that’s neither here nor there.”
“And your good gramma never knew? She never guessed?”
“She knew there was something, but I kep it blocked away, and she left me alone about it. Just told me that when I was ready to talk, she was ready to listen. Danny, when Andy Hallorann died—it was a stroke—I was the happiest boy on earth. My ma said I didn’t have to go to the funeral, that I could stay with Gramma Rose—my White Gramma—if I wanted to, but I wanted to go. You bet I did. I wanted to make sure old Black Grampa was really dead.
“It rained that day. Everybody stood around the grave under black umbrellas. I watched his coffin—the biggest and best one in his shop, I have no doubt—go into the ground, and I thought about all the times he’d twisted my balls and all the cigarette butts in my cake and the one he put out on my foot and how he ruled the dinner table like the crazy old king in that Shakespeare play. But most of all I thought about Charlie Manx—who Grampa had no doubt made up out of whole cloth—and how Black Grampa could never call Charlie Manx on the long-distance to come in the night and take me away in his fancy car to live with the other stolen boys and girls.