Read Online The Uninnocent by Bradford Morrow - Free Book Online

wired them to say that our mother had died.
    During her last month, the woman began calling out for Desmond during the night. She had never concealed her preference for Desmond over Cutts. Desmond had from the beginning been her favorite, her final born, her glory, and it was on him that she pinned a wide range of impossible hopes. Desmond would bring fortune and respect to their family, Desmond was her golden boy. The world, she felt, would be wise to spread itself willingly at his feet and provide for him a passive surface upon which he might make whatever mark he pleased, take whatever path he liked.
    But for all the heroic qualities attributed him by his devoted mother, Jenny and Cutts’s younger brother, Desmond, was as dim-witted as a milking stool. Be that as it may, Cutts did allow him to participate in the various escapades of the neighborhood gang, even though he was younger by several years than most of its members. Lanky, proportioned like the reflection in a funhouse mirror, Desmond stood a head taller than any of the other boys. Gamely, he trailed behind the pack, loping, slouched, knuckles swinging at his sides like a tight row of bantam eggs attached to the fronts of his fists. At his older brother’s proprietary bidding, Desmond pursued whatever follies the gang did, but less for the adventure in and of itself than for Cutts’s treasured attention. His wildness belied his weakness. He played a willing fool whenever called upon to do so.
    If Cutts had his first taste of beer at twelve, or his first cigarette, then Desmond accordingly had his by nine. The tolls of Desmond’s adolescence were an arithmetic function based on Cutts’s own imperfections, needs, frenzies, to the exclusion of anything else. Desmond himself was not compulsive, but was caught as if in a vacuum that was created in the wake of his brother’s will. It was always just ahead of him, drawing him on.
    Cutts knew it was for his approbation that Desmond lived. He offered it only when he found it convenient or useful, when it fit into some specific scheme. If it suited Cutts, whenever any or all of the gang were in trouble, Desmond would be delivered up as the collective scapegoat. Out from under Cutts’s fickle wing he would come, tacit and willing to atone for some petty theft, a water tower east of the city painted with obscenities, a smashed window, a broken arm or black eye.
    In time Desmond had a worse reputation than Cutts, or any of the others. That is why when he broke the code of silence about what had happened to Jenny that one August evening, sunk now with a quarter century of other Augusts into anonymity, no one, not even his mother, believed him.
    After that August, Desmond went moody, glum. He exiled himself from the gang of boys. He disappeared for days at a time. He wouldn’t speak when spoken to. He died in November, just a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday. No one would ever be quite sure what had occurred. There was no looped belt nailed to a basement crossbeam, nothing as telling as that, no bridge off which he’d hurled himself into a partly frozen river. Nor were there any guns in the house. No, he simply tumbled down the stairs to the cellar floor, opened his head like an overripe melon on a flange where the railing had been detached.
    Cutts found him first. Jenny had been putting out bread crumbs on the crunchy snow for late robins and meadowlarks that needed feeding for their migration south. Mr. Beechel Gray, the butcher, took the call from Cutts and passed the phone across the smooth white stone counter to Desmond’s mother, who fainted on the sawdust-strewn floor when she was given the news.
    The water, loosely cradled in my fingers, cooled my face. I soaked a hand towel under its thin, lazy stream and, hunching forward over the shallow sink while holding my hair up off my shoulder, ran the cold, wet cloth across the nape of my neck. It trickled down my back when I stood