Only Love Can Break Your Heart

by Ed Tarkington

Genres: Coming of Age; Family Life; Thrillers

Synopsis

Six-year-old Rocky worships his older brother Paul—sixteen and full of rebel cool, smoking cigarettes, driving around in his Nova blasting Neil Young—until the day Paul, in an ill-advised act of vengeance against their father, picks Rocky up from school and nearly leaves him for dead in the woods. Paul then runs off with his beautiful, fragile girlfriend, never to be heard from again.

Eight years later Rocky is a teenager himself. Although he's never forgotten the abandonment of his boyhood hero, he's now getting over it, with the help of the wealthy neighbor's daughter, Patricia, ten years his senior, who has taken him as her lover. Rocky's in love—or thinks he is—but the affair sets off a sequence of events that brings ruin to the lives of both families.

In the spirit of Willie Morris, Tom Franklin, and Wiley Cash, this spellbinding debut draws you into a small-town American Gothic story of family fealty, scandal, and murder.

Release date: November 15, 2016

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

1

PAUL WAS MY HALF BROTHER. But I never called him that. This was partially out of loyalty — for I remained devoted to him, despite everything — but mostly because it didn’t seem quite enough, having only half of one brother. So I never thought of him that way.

We lived just inside the city limits of Spencerville, on Old Boone’s Ferry Road, a long, tree-shrouded drive through the wide, grassy fields and the horse farms on the gentle slope leading out to the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Old Man’s house was a two-story brick Georgian set up on a rise at the end of a long gravel driveway. No Colonial manse, mind you—more like the impression of one in the mind of a poor man made good.

There were four bedrooms on the upstairs floor of our house. My room was across the hall from Paul’s, facing the side yard. Before I came along, it was used by the Old Man and Paul’s mother, and, later, by the Old Man alone in the years between one wife and the next. Whether he ever had any other women up there in his bed I do not know, but I’m highly doubtful. Around the turn of the 1970s, in Spencerville, sleeping over could still do damage to reputations. Even the free and consenting adults of our town were made to feel that it was somehow more unseemly to enjoy each other in the comfort of their own homes than to be caught in the backseats of cars parked at the end of a deserted cul-de-sac, or for said cars to be seen parked outside the Marquis de Lafayette Motel across the river in Munro.

If the Old Man’s car was ever among those spotted in one of those areas designated for clandestine carnal athletics, he certainly didn’t drive it there with his much younger, much prettier second wife sitting next to him. My dear mother, bless her pious, proper soul, refused even to sleep in the same room the Old Man had shared with that other woman, the first Mrs. Richard Askew—Paul’s mother.

I learned this fact not from Paul but rather from the Old Man himself. He had a terrible habit of launching into incontinent monologues in front of his elementary-school-age son the way he might in speaking to some random stranger passing a boozy hour or two on a layover at an airport bar. Inevitably he’d catch himself and remember whom he was talking to. “If you ever tell your mother,” he would say, to which I would nod solemnly, proud as I was to be considered worthy of keeping his secrets.

My mother was young enough to be the Old Man’s daughter; hence he sometimes spoiled her as if she were. To spare her from having to sleep in his ex-wife’s bedroom, the Old Man had a large addition built behind his study with a vaulted ceiling and a great stone fireplace. The Royal Chamber, Paul called it.

Though he’d been offered any room on the second floor, Paul kept the one he’d always had. It was the smallest of the four rooms, but it had the best light—a kind of fishbowl effect that made it feel somehow separate from the rest of the house. From as early as I could remember, I would join him there whenever he would let me. Together we would stretch across the width of his bed, gazing out his windows across the yard to a broad, grassy knoll in the distance, atop which sat the old white-columned estate house known as Twin Oaks.

Twin Oaks had been vacant for many years. The house stood in a clearing on the horizon, under the two southern red oak trees for which it was named. The two trees must have been considerably smaller when the house was built, but by the time we came along, they were both giants, a hundred feet tall, as thick at the base of their trunks as the columns of an ancient temple built to honor an exalted god.

“It’s haunted, you know,” Paul told me.

He was sixteen then. I was almost eight.

“No, it isn’t,” I said.

“Sure it is,” Paul said.

In a low, theatrical voice, Paul explained how Twin Oaks had once been the country home of Frank Spencer Cherry, a descendant of the founder of Spencerville and heir to the large fortune his ancestors accumulated in the tobacco trade. Cherry was no farmer, nor did he do much of anything, according to Paul—his first cousin ran the family business.

“What did he keep on his farm?” I asked.

“Liquor, poker, and whores,” Paul said.

Paul sat up on the bed and lit a cigarette. In 1977 you could still buy cigarettes at sixteen. They didn’t even shut down the smoking pavilions at the public high schools until more than a decade later. In a town built on tobacco money, people were willing to plead ignorance as long as the world would let them.

Still, it baffles me now that my parents let Paul smoke, especially in the house. My mother swears she never smoked in her life, not even in college. I’ve seen sepia-toned photographs of the Old Man holding a pipe, but he had given that up long before I was born. Years later, when I asked my mother what they were thinking, she made no apologies.

“In this life,” she said, “you choose your battles.”

Since I didn’t know any different, Paul’s smoking seemed perfectly normal to me. I loved to watch him tamp the filter against his knuckle and flip his Zippo open with a kind of showy flourish, the way I imagined Fonzie would have fired up his Camel if the networks allowed smoking on sitcoms. Paul didn’t have a leather jacket or ride a motorcycle, but I already sensed that he was cooler than the Fonz. After all, Paul could smoke in his bedroom; Fonzie couldn’t even smoke in the men’s room at Al’s.

Paul reclined against the headboard, holding his cigarette aloft.

“Whores?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Paul said.

I didn’t need him to explain. His crooked smile and breezy air of matter-of-factness made clear exactly what a whore was.

The room was shadowy and blue in the dusk. The only light came from the pulsing flame at the end of Paul’s cigarette and the glow-in-the dark poster on the wall behind us—the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

Outside in the distance, the sun sank below the horizon behind Twin Oaks. A pale orange glow filtered through where the front and rear windows of the large upstairs rooms aligned. I studied the windows, looking for the movement of ghostly shapes.

“Liquor, gambling, and whores,” Paul continued. “Every moonshine runner in the state stopped off at that house at one point or another.”

He puffed thoughtfully on his Camel—a short, dramatic pause to let the tension rise.

“Back home,” he explained, “Frank Cherry’s poor wife suffered alone while he ditched her and the kids for days at a time to come out here. All the leading men of the town felt sorry for her that she had married such a son of a bitch, but the same men were at ole Frank Cherry’s card table on Friday and Saturday nights. No one said shit to him or tried to do a thing about it.”

I don’t know how Paul presumed to know all these details. He was certainly no scholar. He must have heard it from the Old Man, a compulsive storyteller prone to embellishment. I’ve since done my own research and learned that the bare facts, at least, are accurate. Frank Cherry still has descendants in Spencerville: a fairly wretched lot, penniless and uneducated, deferentially tolerated by the aged few who know or remember that theirs was once among the town’s most affluent and influential families. Unsurprisingly I could find no evidence of any epic debauches at Twin Oaks involving the town’s “leading men.” But Paul told the story with authority.

“In 1929, the stock market crashed, and Frank Cherry lost everything,” he continued. “The party was over. The next day, he rode out here by himself. A few days after, when his horse showed up on Main Street with no rider, the police came out and found him in his rocking chair, with a pistol hanging from his cold, dead fingers. His brains were splattered all over the front porch.”

Paul sucked on his cigarette. His eyes were black and ominous in the yellow bloom of light around his face. My own must have looked wide and full of terror.

“No one’s lived there since,” Paul said. “But that doesn’t mean the place is empty, does it, Rocky?”

I was born with a droopy eye and had always had a deep voice and an unruly mop of dark, wavy hair. Everyone else called me Richard or Dickie or (painfully) young Dick or little Dick, after the Old Man. But to Paul I had been Rocky, the Italian Stallion, Rocky Raccoon, for longer than I could remember.

“I’ve been in that house, you know,” Paul said. “One night, Rayner and me broke a window and crawled in.”

“What did you see?” I asked.

“A lot of dust and garbage,” he said. “Whiskey bottles and beer cans. Some random stuff written on the walls. Plenty of people have snuck in to have a look over the years. Maybe a hobo or two has tried to sleep there. But I doubt too many have made it through the night.”

I gazed out the window at the house.

“Rayner was upstairs when I first noticed it,” Paul said, his voice low and ominous.

“What?” I asked.

“The sound of a rocking chair, creaking back and forth.”

“No way,” I gasped.

“Uh-huh,” Paul said. “At first I thought Rayner was just messing with me. But the noise was definitely coming from downstairs. As I walked around, it got louder and louder, but I never saw anything. Then it stopped. Swear on my soul, Rocky, the air in that room got colder by about fifty degrees. Rayner felt it too. It took us about a second to think about it before we both ran as fast as we could out of that house. We didn’t stop running until we were halfway down the hill. When we stopped to look back, we heard a loud crack like the sound of a pistol shot.”

Paul took a last drag and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table. The ember flared and sizzled and disappeared.

“You know what else, Rocky?” he said.

“What?”

“I didn’t find out until after that about old Frank Cherry and the pistol and the rocking chair out on that front porch. So you know I’m not making it up.”

Paul slipped another Camel from the pack he kept in his shirt pocket and lit it. I stared back out the window at the shadow of Twin Oaks.

“Want to go check it out, Rocky?”

Of course I didn’t.

“Sure,” I said.

MY BROTHER PAUL had a reputation around town as a “bad kid.” This wasn’t entirely undeserved, although what passed for “bad” in provincial little southern towns like Spencerville probably wouldn’t arouse much notice in more cultured, cosmopolitan locales like Richmond or Washington, DC, and its suburbs, up there in the other Virginia, the part of the state the Old Man referred to as “occupied territory.” The people of Spencerville, however, were not yet inured to the roving carelessness of the young.

We were coming of age in the late seventies, at the sweaty, nauseous, split-headed peak of the hangover between Watergate and “Morning in America.” For nearly a decade, our parents and their peers had watched horrified as the far-flung corners of the world burst into flames on their brand-new, first-ever color TVs. The Old Man and his buddies who had survived World War II and Korea felt like they had beaten back Hitler and Tojo all for the sake of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and Martin Luther King Jr. None of the kids played Vietnam on the playground. Burning cities, race riots, hippies fucking in the mud at rock concerts, cars lined up for a mile just to fill the tank, Commie wackos and disgruntled vets storming the barricades at political conventions—to watch the news was to believe that the country had, in fact, found sympathy for the devil.

But not in Spencerville. In Spencerville, elementary school kids could walk alone or ride their bikes to school. Daughters were safe from the clutches of filthy hippies and horny English rock stars in tight leather britches. Sons worshipped God, loved their mothers, and feared their fathers. In Spencerville, what passed for change was a new strip mall or movie theater or some other minor civic improvement, like recalibrating the traffic lights so that, if you observed the speed limit, you could drive the twelve miles without stopping from First and Main downtown across the bridge over the James River (where Main turns into Riverdale), through Colonial Heights and the Spencer College neighborhood, and on out through the last light before Riverdale turns into Highway 29.

The ways in which the world outside Spencerville was evolving showed up in the form of small, short-lived trends, like disco or laser light shows or key parties—occasional frights, distractions, or subjects of titillating gossip, but nothing really to be afraid of. The bad things happened elsewhere. I do not mean to say that the town was free of any sort of calamity, or that we all lived oblivious to the news of the world. But we could still leave our doors open at night. We were isolated, insulated, largely ignored, and perfectly content.

Hence boys like Paul and his friends must have seemed a lot worse than they actually were. Especially among the good Episcopalians and Presbyterians of the Boone’s Ferry neighborhood, Paul and Rayner Newcomb and their crew were symbols of menace, with their muscle cars blasting loud rock out the open windows, with their cigarettes and their unkempt hair and their insouciant contempt for the naive idealism of the “good” kids who played sports, ran for student council, and filled the ranks of scout troops and church youth groups.

They threw beer parties when their parents were out of town. They parked their cars in empty lots and dead-end streets, drawing the less reckless but still hopelessly curious girls and boys to them like sailors to the Sirens’ song. They picked fights and pulled pranks. They trespassed anywhere and often, mounting the roofs of tall buildings and dangling perilously from trestle bridges. Invading construction sites and boarded-up houses, they plowed the fertile fields of former vestal virgins, leaving behind their spent condoms and beer cans and cigarette butts like dogs marking trees. And Paul was one of them.

I didn’t know any of this when I was five. All I knew was that Paul was effortlessly cool—that even the people who scowled at him plainly desired and envied both his beauty and his indifference.

Naturally I worshipped him. And so, naturally, I would follow him anywhere he’d let me, no matter how terrifying, including up through a broken window and into the dark bowels of a haunted mansion.

WE SLIPPED DOWN the stairs and out the door into the damp cold. My shoes and pant legs quickly became soaked in the tall, wet grass. We stopped once, in the middle of the field, for Paul to flip out his Zippo and light another cigarette. The smell of the smoke mingled with the musty odor of the dormant grass as we trudged forward and up the slope of the hill to the house, dark and ominous beneath the towering oak trees, which flanked the great columns and the wide, sagging porch like impassive sentries.

Paul took a last drag off his cigarette before flicking the still-burning butt onto the wet black leaves in the fountain at the center of the circle.

“Wait here,” he said.

He walked around to the right side of the house. Climbing onto the cellar door, he hefted himself up and through the same window he must have used before.

I studied the long front porch, imagining Frank Cherry’s blood and brains on the walls and on the floorboards beneath a solitary rocking chair. I listened for the sound of that chair creaking back and forth, back and forth in the lonely wind.

As the minutes stretched on, a powerful sense of dread overcame me. I wanted nothing more than to be home, secure in the fishbowl of Paul’s room or, better yet, before the roaring hearth of the Royal Chamber, watching The Muppet Show while my mother read her Bible and the Old Man sat at his table in the corner, poring over his legal pads and contracts.

I was about to turn and run home when the shape of a man emerged from behind the house on the side opposite where Paul had climbed in.

Though it was very dark, I could see that the man was dressed in a long, dark coat and black leather boots. He looked old, with gray hair cut close to his skull. As he rounded the corner and stepped onto the porch, I realized that, whoever or whatever he was, I wasn’t imagining him—he was there, before my eyes, heading toward the front door. I watched in mute horror as the man simultaneously reached for the doorknob and drew a pistol from the pocket of his coat.

Before I could gather my wits to move or speak, a booming crack and a flash of light exploded from within the house, rattling the loose panes of glass in the frames of the windows.

Over the roaring and ringing in my ears, I heard my brother moaning through the black rectangle of the open front door. At last my voice returned to me.

“Die, Frank Cherry, you whore!” I cried.

I didn’t wait to see if “Frank Cherry” had heard me. I just ran. I ran so fast the field seemed to fly beneath me. I ran and ran, heaving and sobbing between breaths, stumbling and falling and climbing back up to my feet again, my legs always moving, my eyes fixed on home. When I reached the steps of our house, I barreled through the front door, tracking wet mud and grass across the carpets and the Persian rugs, back to the Royal Chamber.

My mother looked up with a start from where she sat in her armchair. As the Old Man rose from his seat at the corner table, I ran to him and buried my face in the soft cotton of his red flannel shirt.

“What in the hell,” he said.

“Frank Cherry shot Paul,” I cried.

My mother warmed me with a throw blanket, fussing all the while about how wet and dirty my pants and shoes had become, how cold I was, how likely I might be to come down with pneumonia on account of having been tramping around outside when the temperatures were still dropping below freezing at night. I babbled about Paul and Twin Oaks and Frank Cherry’s ghost and the gun and the brains on the wall beside the rocking chair.

The Old Man disappeared into his closet. A few moments later he emerged wearing his hunting boots and jacket. In one hand he held a large police-style flashlight; in the other, his .38 snub-nosed revolver.

“Dick,” my mother said, her voice shrill with alarm.

“Just a precaution,” he replied.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said.

But he was already off, down the hall and out the front door.

My mother led me upstairs and helped me out of my wet clothes.

“Get ready for bed,” she said.

She went into Paul’s room to stand vigil at the window, her eyes following the journey of the Old Man’s flashlight up the hill toward Twin Oaks.

As I envision her there now, standing before the window with her arms crossed, I remember that my mother was still very beautiful then, and quite young. Except for a bit of lingering postpregnancy weight in her belly and hips, she was slim and dainty, with delicate, nervous hands. She wore her sandy blond hair in a girlish bob. Her eyes were wide and earnest, as if she was always seeking someone’s approval.

I had only just begun to comprehend the abnormality of my parents’ marriage. In 1977, my mother was thirty-three years old; the Old Man was nearing sixty. The previous fall, on parents’ day at my school, my teacher had mistakenly identified the Old Man as my grandfather. I barely noticed her error and would not have been bothered by it but for her obvious embarrassment and the casual scorn in the Old Man’s eyes when he corrected her.

I still can’t grasp exactly how they ended up together. My mother couldn’t have been without other prospects. The most obvious explanation was the most cynical: that she had married him for his money. The dime-store psychiatrist’s explanation would be that she had married a father figure. Both of her parents were killed in an accident when she was very small; she was raised by her grandmother, who was already a widow before my mother was born.

Life with the Old Man couldn’t have been easy for my mother. Even when you think you know what you’re getting into, some situations can’t be adequately prepared for—namely Paul, who was not quite old enough to be her brother but too old to be her son and, in his mind at least, too old to follow her rules.

Years later, my mother told me she’d only once considered leaving the Old Man, before I was born. Paul had done her some horrible insult, the nature of which she would not reveal to me. The Old Man had taken Paul’s side, and the argument devolved from there. The next day, when the Old Man came home, he found my mother sitting at the kitchen table, her eyes stained with tears. On the table in front of her were a checkbook and her three credit cards: American Express, MasterCard, an Exxon gas card.

“What are you doing?” he had asked her.

“I was going,” she said.

“Where?” the Old Man asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just knew I wasn’t going to come back.”

The Old Man sat down next to her and grasped her hand.

“Why did you stay?” he asked.

“Because—” she said, “because I don’t have any money of my own. Because I knew you could stop my checks and cancel these cards, and I’d have no one to turn to.”

“I would never do that,” the Old Man said.

His voice was pained and gentle, she said. Filled with love and guilt.

“But I would use the cards,” he said. “I would use them to find you.”

She must have thought of that moment and all its implications as she stared out the window into the darkness, her arms still crossed, her face blank and absent, as if she had forgotten I was there. She must have seen that flashlight again, moving faster, coming closer, until she could see the Old Man emerge from the darkness into the glow of the front porch light.

“Dear God,” my mother said.

We hurried from the window and down the stairs to open the front door.

“What happened?” my mother asked.

“He’s been shot,” the Old Man’s voice replied.

“By who?”

“Brad Culver, the stupid son of a bitch.”

I pushed past the Old Man and out the door. Paul sat on the porch with his back against the railing, his face ashen, clutching his leg with bloody hands.

“Get towels,” the Old Man said. “Call the emergency room.”

I knelt next to Paul and threw my arms around his neck.

“Don’t cry, Rocky,” he said. “’Tis but a flesh wound.”

“Are you going to die?” I asked.

“No, he’s not going to die,” the Old Man said, appearing at my side with a stack of worn-out bath towels. The anger in his voice felt strangely reassuring.

A pair of headlights turned into the driveway and drew closer. A silver Mercedes sedan sped up to the house and stopped, sliding a bit in the loose gravel of the driveway. Out from the driver’s side door stepped the black-clad man I’d seen at Twin Oaks.

“Frank Cherry!” I cried.

“What did you say?” the Old Man asked.

“Don’t let him take Paul, Daddy!” I wailed.

“Shut up!” the Old Man barked.

“Dick,” the man said. “Let me drive you.”

“You’ve done quite enough, sir,” the Old Man answered.

“I told you it was an accident,” the man said. “He just surprised me, that’s all.”

The Old Man stood and moved toward the man, who, illuminated by the headlights of his car, was still, for all I knew, a ghost. My mother, who had returned from the kitchen phone, grasped my shoulders and held me there.

“Dick,” she cried.

The Old Man had pulled his own gun from the pocket of his hunting jacket.

“An accident, you say?” the Old Man repeated.

The man said nothing; he merely stared at the Old Man—or, more accurately, at the gun in the Old Man’s hand.

“Would you be surprised,” the Old Man said, “if I accidentally blew your goddamned head off?”

The man had no answer for that question. On the steps beside me, Paul observed the scene with bemusement.

“Dick!” my mother cried. “Your son!”

The Old Man turned his head toward my mother, his face constricted in a rictus of fury.

The Old Man slowly put the gun back in his pocket.

“I’d like you to leave,” he said to the man.

“All right,” the man said. “I’ll meet you over at the hospital. You can shoot me there if you’d like.”

“Maybe I will,” the Old Man said.

The man returned to his car, which was still idling. He made a sharp three-point turn and sped away.

The Old Man marched back up to the porch. His lips parted, peeling back to reveal his gritted teeth. His face seemed weighted with something more obscure and troubling than mere rage. With his free hand, the Old Man reached out to take the keys from my mother. With his other, he presented the gun to her, handle first.

“Here,” he said.

“I don’t want to touch that,” she said.

“Take it,” he said. “I don’t have time to put it away.”

My mother grasped the handle of the pistol with her thumb and index finger and held the gun out, dangling from her hand like a dead mouse hanging from its tail.

The Old Man stripped off his hunting coat, revealing where the strain of his efforts and his worry had seeped out of him, staining the armpits of his red plaid flannel shirt. He stooped and draped the coat around Paul’s shoulders.

“All right, son,” he said. “I’m going to get the car.”

He turned and walked briskly toward the garage.

“Yo, Rocky,” Paul said. “Could you do me a quick favor?”

He took one hand away from his leg for a moment and tapped the breast pocket of his shirt.

My mother looked on helplessly as I knelt and removed the pack of Camels. I placed a cigarette between Paul’s lips, flipped open his Zippo, and sparked the wheel into flame as if I’d done it a thousand times.

2

PAUL DIDN’T DIE. When I came home from school the next day he was there in his room, his leg heavily bandaged and propped up on pillows. Leigh Bowman, Paul’s girlfriend, sat on the bed beside him. Across the room by the window, Rayner Newcomb slouched in the desk chair. All three of them were smoking cigarettes and laughing the careless laughter of impudent youth.

“Here’s Rocky,” Leigh said.

“Die, Frank Cherry, you whore!” Rayner squealed.

Again, they laughed, even Paul—perhaps Paul most of all. My whole head went purple.

“Aw, come on, Rocky,” Paul said.

“It’s not funny,” I said.

“I think it’s pretty funny,” Paul said.

My eyes brimmed at this small betrayal.

“Well, it’s not,” I said. “You scared me!”

“I know,” Paul said. “I’m sorry. But I didn’t shoot myself, you know.”

My mother appeared in the doorway.

“Hey, Alice,” Paul said.

“Are you feeling any better?” my mother asked.

Paul shrugged.

“It hurts,” he said.

“Do you need anything?”

“Nope,” he said. “Thanks for asking.”

“Rayner, would you mind opening that window?” my mother said. “Paul could probably use some fresh air.”

Rayner sat up to lift the window sash closest to the desk. He slouched back into his chair without looking up or uttering a word.

“Thank you,” my mother said. “Richard, I left your snack on the breakfast table.”

The moment she turned and drew the door shut behind her, the three of them dissolved into that same cruel laughter.

“Come here, Roc. . .