Read Online The Good Neighbor by William Kowalski - Free Book Online

under and around, holdin’ onto the feller ’s hair all the while. Like as not he’s kickin’ and screamin’ about it, so, why, yeh just got to kneel on his chest and hold ’im down. Then, yeh just give a mighty tug, and off she comes, hair and all, and if you done it right, it’s just as neat as can be. They usually fall pretty quiet about then, and you just run your blade acrost his throat, and that’s the end of ’im, an’ a fittin’ end it is, too, the filthy bastards.”
    Said one truly horrified gentleman, a dandy lawyer from New York City:
    “Why, then, sir, do you not simply remove the entire head, and carry that around with you?”
    The Captain was as unfamiliar with the principles of sarcasm as he was with architecture. He explained:
    “Yeh cain’t put a human head in a saddlebag, nor tie it to a sad dle horn. It spooks the horse.”
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    Upon his retirement, Captain Musgrove decided to move back East and marry. With all the deliberation and forethought that men now give to purchasing automobiles, he chose a wife from a family whose background was as similar to his as possible. This meant that he married his first cousin, because who else but other Musgroves could possibly be suitable for a Musgrove? Most every one else in the world suffered from weak blood and water-on-the brain, anyway. That was not for the Captain; he wanted strong children. Musgroves wanted their line to prosper. It was the only right way.
    Her name was Marly. She was sixteen to his forty-three, which was considered by everyone, including Marly, to be a perfect match. Marly was short and thick-waisted, with a wide, sturdy pelvis and strong forearms; her features were a little too heavy to be considered attractive, but to the Captain, who had spent most of his life in the company of men, she was the epitome of woman hood, and he gladly took possession of her from her father. This girl would eventually bear the Captain ten children—including two sets of twins—and would assist in running the farm, as well as overseeing the few hired hands. Marly succeeded admirably in all these tasks, until she died under the hooves of a runaway horse when she was fifty-three, carrying an infant grandchild in her arms. That grandchild, Lincoln Flavia-Hermann, survived the acci dent without a scratch, and lived long enough to see the assassina tion of President John F. Kennedy replayed on television some eighty years later. Lincoln would watch it on his little black-and white set in his nursing home, and he would remember the story of the tragedy that had attended his infancy, marveling at how eas ily death came to some, while others, such as himself, had to pray for it.
    Of Marly’s ten children, two died at birth, one died before she had learned to walk, one died of tuberculosis, and one drowned in
    54 W ILLIAM K OWALSKI

    the nearby river, which was deeper and faster then than it is now. This was not to mention the two who died in the flower of adult hood, during the outbreak of the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed more people in the United States than all twentieth-century wars combined, yet which is almost never spoken of, or indeed remem bered, by anyone now alive. Of ten Musgrove children, in fact, only three lived long enough to die of old age: Hamish and Ellen, who were fraternal twins, and their younger sister, Lucia.
    The Captain and his wife buried their young children, one by one, in a little cemetery on the far end of the property, which in later years would become hidden by creeping wisteria and lilac, as well as the second growth of the trees that had been cut down to build the house. The five Musgroves who survived early child hood—Hamish, Ellen, Lucia, Olivia, and Margaret—were accus tomed to visiting the cemetery often in their youth. They played their loud and carefree games six feet above the decomposing bod ies of their siblings, imagining, with a sense of duty, that they were keeping them