Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Ninety Six
“She didn’t throw me out because of it either. She never made mention of it or expressed that she knew. My indiscretion didn’t factor in her plans. Your grandmother waited until our mother was too far gone to raise more than a whimper of complaint and she threatened the house staff to do it for her. I wasn’t but maybe two or three years older than you when I was driven out of that place. They pushed and yanked at me through the halls and down the grand stairs and picked up small stones in the carriage way and threw them at me to drive me off. I spent my first night out of doors, out in these woods because I refused to accept my sister as the new ruler of the roost after our father’s death. I wouldn’t let her sack the staff who were kind and honest and true, I wouldn’t back her play to start selling off the family properties abroad to keep her in the finery she thought we required. Mostly, I was hauled out of that place and left to rot like garbage because I made the mistake of reminding my sister that the lowly sort of people that we employed were nearly all family to begin with, proper people who deserved more than what they had slumming in that village.”
“Abe was an afterthought in that moment. I’m not proud to say that but he was. I loved him very much but I was angry, so damn angry. All I wanted was revenge and I already knew how awful it was out in the wild, I didn’t want him to leave the boats or the ocean or the life he loved. He found me a week later once he returned from the ocean and refused to leave. We’ll move down the coast and build a nice cottage next to the fishery and live like our grandparents did, that’s what he said but I wouldn’t hear of it.”
“My anger, my rage, my hubris, I sent the love of my life away, pushed him so, because I didn’t want him to see me at my worst. Didn’t want him to know me, covered in mud with scraped knuckles and blistered feet. Didn’t want him to love the girl who dreamt only of murdering her sister where the bitch slept.”
Jacqueline finally stopped for a few moments and Felecia considered the option of filling that moment with words until she realized that she had nothing to say or ad to the moment. The old woman grimaced as though she had swallowed some bitter drink and then continued. “I found the meadow by the beach months before Abe came along to consecrate it. I found that little spot of land that no map mentioned and I built a hovel while I waited for starvation or disease to take me.”
“I waited months and seasons and then a full year before Abe came back to me with his full backpack of food and his cap in hand for me. He found captains for the fleet and new crews. He worked as hard as any man could to replace himself and he gave it all to her, legally. My Abe never once thought about himself or his future, or ours. He gave it all up and marched out into the muck and the mire to prove that all he wanted, that all that we needed, was us.”
“We barely managed to finish that first rough house on the meadow before they came for us. She tasked Yacob with finding us out here and destroying what happiness we had. Me out here on my own was nothing, Abe and I together though, that was the surviving son daring to howl for his share of the pie someday. Yacob and his men from the village came upon us while we were busy in the field, trying to get anything to take root and grow. There was shouting, and begging, and laughing, and crying. They pawed through everything we had, pulled most of it out onto the beach and set it aflame. That was supposed to be that. Burn us out, ransack what we had built, leave us for the winter to swallow. Murder without having to commit it herself or know for certain that her charges did so on her behalf.”