Read Online No Story to Tell by K. J. Steele - Free Book Online Page B

when the twins were born, realized she’d not get another go at motherhood. She guarded over them with ten times the paranoia of any first-time mother, resulting in passive and somewhat effeminate sons who were wholly unprepared for life and as naive as two beans sprouted in a greenhouse. Army recruiters, extolling the virtues of fighting for and possibly dying for one’s country, found in them a compliant cooperation eager to please. Their father was to drive them down to Fort George, where a train would pick them up and deliver them to who knew what fate. The boys could not contain their excitement, giggling and teasing each other about the fair-haired delicacies they envisioned tasting in foreign lands. Death was a strange word emitted from others’ lips, a dark horse so far in the distance its color was not yet visible. It was inconceivable to them that their lives might not lay in front of them but rather behind, and they strode forward under the banner of invincibility.
    So often it is the humble and unaccountable things in life that alter the course of history, and for the Spiller boys a beer bottle carelessly tossed on the edge of the road proved to be every bit as deadly as the shrapnel that awaited them. The flat tire slowed them down by a good thirty minutes. Time, with its poltergeist hand, arranged for the train to run late as well, and it caught them full-square at an unmarked crossing, crumpling the truck under its carriage like a wad of aluminum foil.
    A mother’s brain has no capacity to receive the news of the loss of her chicks, and for Mrs. Spiller the death of her boys, along with her husband, proved a load unbearable. From that fateful moment on, she’d become a nonentity trapped on the wrong side of death in a perpetual search for her family. She served up on the kitchen table huge meals that her flock of cats devoured convincing her that her boys had been home, and she’d only just barely missed them, again. And again and again.
    Victoria watched as Elliot approached the old wretch, and she opened her window a little. She felt a little embarrassed for him, sure he had no idea what he was getting into. Mrs. Spiller had been known to fly into fits of rage, convinced somebody knew where her sons were but had conspired not to tell her. Other times she’d mortify people by bursting into uncontrollable tears, begging them with an inconsolable anguish to make her boys come home. It wasn’t right, the town agreed. She put people in awkward positions, disrupting everything from suppers to funerals. Should be locked up was the general sentiment felt but seldom expressed, Mrs. Spiller’s sister Doris being in strong disagreement with such opinion. Elliot walked toward her, speaking soft words Victoria couldn’t hear, his manner as calm as if he were approaching a skittish colt. Head cocked to the side, the old woman watched him like a crow; Victoria half expected her to fly up and attack him.
    “Hello there, Mrs. Spiller. How are you today?” Elliot asked with a charming smile, squatting slowly beside her, taking her hand in his own and stroking it lightly. The intensity in the old face dropped, and Victoria realized for the first time it was fear and not hostility that hovered there. A black grin cut across her face, weak eyes searching.
    “Oh . . . oh my. Is that you, Johnny Woodstaff? Is that you, son?” Her voice creaked and cracked like old stairs in a windstorm. Victoria opened her window further to catch her words.
    “It’s Elliot, ma’am. Remember? Remember last week? I gave you a ride out to your sister Doris’s, and she gave you some carrots and peas from her garden—”
    “Her garden! Doris has got her garden in already . . . in this weather? Why, that gal’s a bit of a dim bulb. It’ll all freeze sure as day, I tell you.” She stuck her fingers through the holes in her blanket and pulled it tight, shivering against an invisible cold, her rotted prune face contorting so violently