Jules’s ears rang with the dull thunk of flesh hitting flesh, and over it all the music of the night—the grasshoppers chirping, the owls hooting—as if nothing extraordinary was happening.
He remembered a line from a play. Not the one he was named for. Another about a monster of a storm. Hell is empty. And all the devils are here. On this island. On his lawn. And he was one of them.
PART FIVE
The Spawning
Late August–Early
September 1992
The female lays her eggs in July and August close to the spot where she pupated. Then, both adult gypsy moths die.
Four to six weeks later, embryos develop into larvae. The larvae remain in the eggs during the winter. The eggs hatch the following spring.
—Forest Insect & Disease Leaflet 162, US Department of Agriculture Forest Service, 1989
46.
Jules
He was twelve. A few years younger than Brooks. His father had dragged him ten stops on the bus out to Cherryville. There were no cherries there; Jules had known that because even the toughest kids on his block, like Fireman Timmy’s son, Clive, called Cherryville the ghetto, and when neighborhood moms stopped to chat on one another’s stoops, they talked about the C-ville gang wars. He knew it was a bad place where bad shit happened because when his pops talked about Them, he meant the blacks who lived in Cherryville.
His pops said there were two kinds. Those trying to make a life for their families. And Them. Them let their kids run around in dirty diapers and too-small shoes. Them were late with bills and got their heat turned off midwinter but leased shiny cars with neon tubes lighting up the undercarriage and stereos that boomed bass so it made your stomach roll. Them let their dogs crap on the sidewalk, counting on the rain to wash it away. Them dumped old furniture, stoves, cracked sinks, and stained toilets on the sidewalk without calling sanitation for a pickup so the garbage sat for weeks.
It was his view, his pops said. Jules’s too.
Now his dad was dumping Jules there with them to teach him a lesson.
Get off the damn bus, his pops ordered.
The tired passengers turned to stare. They were all brown-skinned like him and his dad but felt foreign. Jules was in his fancy school uniform and the gray cashmere overcoat his mother had taken on extra mending work to pay for, wanting him to fit right in at school. The faces on the bus were slack, uninterested, and years later, he’d understand that they’d practiced that look of not caring to protect themselves from all the shitty things they had and would witness.
His pops’s eyes had been rolling mad since he’d picked Jules up from Mrs. Lee’s corner convenience store, where Jules worked a few hours after school twice a week. Mr. Lee had gone through Jules’s backpack and found the pack of baseball cards he’d swiped. Mr. Lee called his pops. Who was throwing Jules into the dark streets of C-ville, among the gangs of murderous thugs his dad had warned him about—spinning stories rich with guns and beheadings and heroin and man-rape and dirty switchblades, stories darker than any Grimm fairy tale. A skinny motherfucker in a private school blazer. A crybaby. ’Cause he was crying, whispering through his tears and snot. Never again, Pops. Never. I swear.
He huddled inside the bus shelter—the tips of his school shoes, polished by his mom every night, shining in the streetlight. He sweated through his clothes and when the bus came back on the opposite route twenty minutes later and he climbed on and sat next to his father, his pops’s nose wrinkled from Jules’s stink.
His father’s hand reached between Jules’s legs and pinched the soft inner skin of his thigh.
Hope you learned your lesson, son. Fear is your best friend. You stay scared. Hear me?
Jules heard him now.
*
His father visited. In the hour Jules walked the prison yard watching, waiting, for someone—a relative of the boy or a hit man hired by the boy’s family—to kill him. Stab him in the liver with a jail-made knife, break his neck with a finely placed grip-squeeze-twist. He spoke with his father in the yard, figuring it didn’t hurt that he looked crazy arguing with himself. Hell, maybe he was crazy. Not crazy enough, his lawyer had told him after the psychiatrist from court visited.
His lawyer, Stan—a jittery twentysomething in thick, black-framed glasses—had asked so many questions. About Jules’s parents, his grandparents, stretching way back when, to great-great grandparents he’d only seen in yellowed photos in his mom’s albums. Stan was digging, Jules realized, for a story. An offering for the judge. Stan asked Jules if anything bad had happened to anyone in his family, any victims of racially incited crime. Jules had almost laughed. Shit, what black man didn’t have a bucketload of stories to tell?
They had meeting after meeting. Jules recounting stories his mother and father had told him years ago, or he’d overheard as a kid at his great-aunt’s dining-room table. Jules ate half-cooked Hot Pockets and cherry Coca-Cola Stan bought from the vending machines in the visitors’ area, and the small gray meeting room filled with ghosts. His father’s. His mother’s. His great-aunt Eunice, who’d been raped by a gang of white men at the hotel she’d cleaned uptown. The further back, the bloodier the stories, the happier the lawyer seemed—nodding as he took pages of notes on yellow legal pads. More, Stan demanded, more. Jules’s grandfather Samuel had lost three fingers in a machinery accident at a lumber mill down in North Carolina. His grandmother Laverne’s daughter Susanna had drowned in the Ashepoo River floods when she was four, Eva’s age. And there was Grandpa John, his pops’s father, a sad old man with a crooked back who Jules remembered visiting when he was a boy. He’d had a cane top made from the hoof of a deer, the fur blond and silky.
Sad how? Stan asked, and Jules felt the lawyer lean forward in his chair. Hungry for a story.
He told how Grandpa John’s shop—a general store that sold packets of seeds and dry goods and other sundries to the blacks of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania—was burned down to its posts one night by a group of men Jules’s dad claimed were KKK. The lawyer pumped a sleek suited arm in the air. Like they’d bet on the right horse. PTSD, his lawyer explained. Handed down through generations. Trauma so powerful it changes a man’s DNA.