It’s hard to trust anything when you’ve been silenced by more than endless lies…
“Back in my day, men lost hands for stealing.”
Although confident Cecil’s statement is factual, I place down the handwritten letter I was in the process of reading before pivoting around to face him. He knows my hearing is so shit, even while sneaking up on me, he makes sure I can either see his lips or he stands at my left.
“Did you ever bring her out here?”
Cecil dumps a deer carcass onto the dining room table I molded from a pine tree that didn’t survive a snowstorm last winter before returning to the foyer to remove his jacket and shoes. We stock up on deer and rabbit meat just as snow starts falling. The cooler conditions mean we don’t have to cure the meat, which saves us from an extra salty winter.
“She’d been here before. Just not with me.” The unease of his last sentence keeps me quiet, much less what he says next, “Excluding the pieces you’ve added the past three years, everything you see here was from Rosie’s private collection.” I smile along with him when he pushes out with a grunt. “She dragged it down the damn mountainside herself. That woman was as tiny as a fairy but stronger than a giant.”
His smile switches to a scoff when I ask, “Is that how her husband found out about your affair?”
Roderick’s claims last month were factual. His grandmother did have an affair with Cecil in the months leading to his grandfather’s death, but what he failed to mention was the fact his grandfather was an abusive piece of shit who was only with Rosie for her parents’ money.
He also skimmed over the part that Cecil and Rosie met because Cecil saved his grandmother from an inferno similar to the one that engulfed Ophelia’s car almost four years ago. Rosie was trapped in the wreckage, and although her husband didn’t have a scratch on him, he sprinted for cover instead of ripping off the passenger side door like Cecil did.
When Rosie woke up in a hospital bed, her memories of the accident were sporadic, but she remembered the kind eyes of the man who never left her sight until first responders closed the doors with her on one side and the stranger on the other.
After learning her savior’s details from a local journalist covering the story, Rosie wrote to him. That one letter soon expanded to thousands. Then, almost five years later, they organized to meet.
I don’t think either of them were anticipating an affair. Rosie merely wanted to thank Cecil in person, and Cecil was desperate to conduct his own assessment of how well she had recovered from her injuries.
Cecil assures me they were nothing but friends for several months after their initial meeting. Things didn’t heat up until Rosie’s husband, Memphis, offered Cecil a job. It was during those long hours that Cecil realized Rosie deserved more than a husband who thought money was the only thing needed to take care of her.
He swears on Rosie’s grave that he didn’t woo a married woman. He simply showed her how good life could be with him, but anyone north of Texas will tell you he’s the worst liar. He wooed her with everything he had, and just when things started to look on track for them, Memphis found out about their affair, died in a car accident the same night, then only eight short months later, Rosie’s convertible sailed over the same edge of road.
Her wreckage landed half a mile from where Cecil’s cabin now sits, and although Cecil was at the main house at the time, he explains the collision was like a bomb going off. It rattled the cabin window, and flames stretched past the treetops. Even if he wanted to save her, the blast wouldn’t have allowed it.
Cecil’s story becomes a little shady after that. As with most estates when both parents die, Rosie and Memphis’s assets were divided between their children. Since Roderick’s parents were deceased, their share went to him.
Only one piece of property was excluded from the asset register. The cabin Cecil calls home. Even before they had met, Rosie had the deed for the cabin placed into Cecil’s name. It was a seemingly innocent gesture from a survivor to her savior until you unearth how much a piece of land like this is worth to a mining company. The ground out here is filled with minerals—minerals neither Rosie nor Cecil ever want to see mined.
That’s why Cecil never leaves. Roderick is working off the theory that possession is nine-tenths of the law, and since he believes it won’t be long until Cecil ‘takes himself out to pasture’ as he often quotes, I see his visits becoming more frequent.
“D-did they ever find out who put the s-spikes on the road the night of Rosie’s first accident?”
Cecil places a bucket under the stream of blood flowing from the deer’s sliced neck before shifting on his feet to face me. Usually, he sets my ears on fire with stories from back in the day. Today, he doesn’t seem as interested. “A local journalist was on the case more than the sheriff’s office. I don’t know if she found out anything. She vanished around the same time of Memphis’sdeath.”
He doesn’t articulate the word ‘death’ like he believes it. He mutters it out with a scoff like he either doesn’t believe Memphis is dead or that his death wasn’t an accident.
He has good reason to be suspicious. Although the culprits were smarter the second time around when they remembered to remove the spikes that punctured Memphis’s SUV’s tires before a search team was called in, it was clear to anyone with half a brain that the circular holes in the front tires were not from sticks perforating the rubber matter.
Despite rumors circulating that Memphis had been murdered, the coroner ruled his death as an accident due to excessive speed and an increase in blood-alcohol content.
Naturally, Memphis’s family blamed Cecil. Rosie wouldn’t hear a word of it, though. She defended Cecil right up until the day she died, but regretfully, the assurance of a dead woman isn’t much to go off. Cecil was removed from his position the day of Rosie’s funeral, kicked out of the house they shared with only the clothes on his back and ordered to return the truck he had been using to the quarry.
Although I’m not one hundred percent sure how much time passed before he arrived at the cabin Rosie had left him with a bundle of rope and an extra sharp knife, I do know his bid to end his life was as unsuccessful as mine almost four years ago.
Every time he got close, he heard Rosie calling his name. It was so crystal clear he pulled his knife out of his pocket and hacked it through the noose on the brink of killing him.
After landing with a thud, he searched the dense woodlands for her for hours. When he failed to find her, he took shelter in the hollow of an old tree and slashed his wrists. He woke several days later in the cabin she had left him with bandaged wrists and a robust pulse.
He doesn’t know how he got there or who carried him from Rosie’s crash site to the cabin, but the curiosity in learning their identity is what has kept his heart beating the past several years.
He travels to the hollowed-out tree once a day to pay his respects to both Rosie and the person who saved him. It was where he was coming back from when a deer must have caught his eye. Although we have plenty of meat from a late fall hunt, there’s no such thing as too much protein for a growing man. I’ve bulked up so much the past three-and-a-half years, even with my hair now past my shoulders, you couldn’t accuse me of being feminine even if you spotted me from behind.
I learn a wish to splurge during winter isn’t the reason for the last-minute hunt when Cecil says, “His hide is extra thick.” A grin pulls at my lips when he mutters, “Figured my floorboards would appreciate a bit of cushioning between your lard ass and itself this winter.”
