Origami Eagles and the Whuppin’ Belt

The will was brief and precise. I got everything.

The house, the land, the money. The house and property were tucked away in the northern part of the Texas Panhandle, miles from a highway and light years from anything I had ever known. The money was tucked away in municipal bonds, earning two percent a year.

 Eighty-nine years of RG’s life distilled into legal documents and an old photograph. Grandpa Rook, who insisted that I call him RG, died peacefully in his bed while I was sleeping peacefully in my bed, two hundred miles away.

Everyone left except my wife and me. Belinda looked at the photograph, curled and brown from age. The scalloped edges looked both quaint and sinister.

“RG’s childhood home,” I explained.

“And he left it to you, not his kids. I wonder why,” Belinda stared at the grainy, sepia-toned picture, no doubt trying to find something remarkable in the unremarkable. She was often successful at this, and it was the main reason I fell in love with her.

Belinda turned the photograph over, reading the scrawling, spidery words.

Go see the house. If you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll understand me.

                                                           ______________

Danielle opened the door and stood aside to let us in. She handed me the key and turned to leave, but Bel asked her to stay. Danielle frowned slightly, yet nodded her head.

The first thing I noticed was the cleanliness of the house. Everything gleamed. No dust, no cobwebs, no musty odor.

“Your grandpa had me come in once a week to keep the place tidy. Don’t ask me why. My services cost him a pretty penny,” Danielle’s voice, flat and impassive, reminded me of the lawyer’s voice that read out RG’s will. The recently dead, having been dealt with, were to be thrown away, forgotten, dismissed, along with last week’s leftovers.

“He had lots of pretty pennies,” I snapped. This woman had no business judging RG. Bel laid a hand on my arm, her way of calming me down. It always worked, even after a dozen years of marriage and two kids.

“The electricity and gas is off, but everything else is pretty much how it was when your grandpa’s dad died. Your daddy’s room is there, off to the right. It’s the one with all the books,” Danielle said. She didn’t sound very impressed by anyone who owned lots of books.

She should have been, though. RG had stuffed shelves of books that reached to the ceiling, all braced against the wall.

“Damn! I bet there’s over a thousand books here!” Belinda was amazed at what she saw. Being a writer meant that she had a large library, but she didn’t have quite the collection RG had.

“You going to count them?” I wasn’t serious, but she started counting anyway.

On top of RG’s dresser was an origami eagle made of paper. I studied it while Bel continued counting books.

“Where did my grandfather get this?” I held the eagle up for the surly cleaning woman’s appraisal.

“He made it, according to my mom. Won some sort of art competition in eighth grade for it. My mom came in second that year,” Danielle sniffed.

“And your mom is?”

Danielle looked at me with a steady gaze. I kind of understood why the house was so clean now. Dust and dirt wouldn’t dare invade this place when she was around.

“Her name was Diane. She died fifteen years ago. Her and your grandfather was what the kids call frenemies. I think she was in love with him, but she never said it direct.”

“Oh?” I was interested in this, but I felt that getting information out of this woman would be a delicate matter. I had to act like I wasn’t all that interested.

“She talked a lot about him. How he was a fish out of water and all that. But mama was, too. She was a hell of an artist. But,” Danielle huffed, “she married my asshole dad. Left us when I was ten, and we had a hard time of it.”

“I’m sorry, Danielle. Kids should have happy childhoods,” Bel said, pausing her counting to show Danielle she had genuine feelings for the subject. Danielle ignored her.

“Your grandpa had the right idea. Get the hell outta this place. Mama never did. I understand why, though. This place just kinda sucks you into itself and you can’t leave. Like when you put your hand on the end of a vacuum cleaner.”

“So, are you stuck to this place?” Danielle’s observation about RG interested me. The more I knew about this barren, windswept land in the northern panhandle of Texas, the more I would understand RG.

“Yep. Got me a husband and two kids, all growed up.”

“Life is good, yes?”

“Well, my husband don’t beat me and the dogs don’t bite, so it’s right decent.”

And with that colorful description, Danielle and I wandered into the kitchen, leaving Bel to count books.

                                                    ______________

“I reckon you could sell this place for a pretty penny, son. A good twenty acres, and the house is solid. All the furniture and appliances is older than Moses, but you can get rid of all that.”

The woman was besotted with pretty pennies.

“You know, your grandpa caught some hell with that there paper eagle. Boys started pickin’ on him for it. And lookie here,” Danielle pulled out an old photo album from a kitchen cupboard, “your grandpa was right skinny.”

I thought of RG and tried to imagine anyone picking on him. I couldn’t.

“Didn’t last long, mama said. He gave as good as he got, and the boys stopped their bullyin’. Seems your grandpa was one to hit first and ask questions later. Good thing, too. His daddy woulda beat him raw if he found out your grandpa backed down from a fight.”

RG rarely talked about his dad. A sad look would come into his eyes and he would change the subject. I often wondered what transpired in this lonely place, behind closed doors.

“What’s that?” I knew what it was. A belt, hung on a wall, in the living room. It seemed out of place, like a sofa cushion in a horse stall.

“A whuppin’ belt,” Danielle said, as if that explained all. I continued to stare at it, mystified as to what a whuppin’ belt was.

“A belt for whuppin’ your ass,” Danielle helpfully added.

I looked at her, still not understanding.

“When a kid needs a whuppin’, the dad gets the belt down from the wall and whups his ass. You see these holes here? They’re bigger than the normal holes. It hurts worse with big holes, you see. When a dad gets a new belt, he makes the holes bigger in his old belt.”

I was horrified at this. So was Bel. She stood in the doorway, her eyes wide, her mouth slightly open. We had been raised without corporal punishment, and this bit of news hit us hard.

“So — so did you ever get the, uh, whuppin’ belt?” I eyed Danielle closely. She remained stoic.

“’Course. All kids do, in these parts. Made me the woman I am now,” she said, a slight smile on her face.

“And your kids?”

“Their daddy used to beat them tolerable well and tolerable often. That’s why they’re God-fearin’ people, not like city heathens.”

“I’m a city heathen,” I retorted.

“Yep.” Danielle said, her feelings for our kind abundantly clear.

                                                      ______________

Bel and I stayed after Danielle left. I wandered around, sliding my hands over old surfaces, filled with old thoughts. I tried to see RG living here, getting the whuppin’-belt treatment, playing outside, making an origami eagle, reading books. It was a past so alien to me that I didn’t know how to take it all in. I grew up with Legos and love, not belts and beatings.

“RG had 1,213 books. Most of them had to do with escaping something.”

“Like the origami eagle,” I added.

“That interests me. He took something flat and lifeless, a piece of paper, and made something out of it that expressed his desire to fly.”

Bel. She sees things that no one else sees.

“So,” I turned to my wife, “what should we do with this place?”

Bel kissed my shoulder before responding. “My first instinct is to take everything that’s important to you and then burn the place down.”

I laughed. “Yeah, or we could sell it.”

“The people who live around here? They aren’t so bad. They just don’t know any other way of showing love than with a piece of leather with holes in it.”

I watched the sky turn magenta and indigo before disappearing behind the horizon. The darkness around here was overwhelming, along with my thoughts. The quietness bothered me, like something evil was holding its breath.

“You say that, but RG never hit my dad, and my dad never hit me. They found a way to express things without resorting to a belt.”

“That’s because RG was smarter than others, better than others. That skinny kid in the photographs with the dirty face and the worn clothes? He was just waiting to origami himself into something different.”

I turn to Bel, gazing at her thoughtfully, a little sadly, but definitely with pride.

“I think RG was wrong about me being smart enough to figure him out. I think you’re the one he should have been looking to do that.”

Bel squeezed my arm. “Well, he knew you were smart enough to marry me, so it’s close enough.”

“Fine with me. Being the dumbest person in our family is a source of pride for me.”

“Well, as your better, I propose we get out of here and back to civilization. I’m starting to hear ‘Dueling Banjos’ tuning up.”

I shivered, and not from the cold.

                                                        ______________

“Shouldn’t you be writing your next amazing novel instead of going through RG’s old books?”

We had been back for a week, and I was still undecided on what to do with the property he left me. It made sense to sell it and take the money, but something held me back, niggling at the back of my brain.

“That’s what I’m doing, sweetie. Look,” she stood and handed me a piece of paper,” this is what I’m finding in a lot of his books. Observations on what he read, the happenings of the day, his thoughts about it all.”

I read the crumpled, yellowed piece of notebook paper.

Daddy whupped my ass today because I forgot to close the screen door. Mama sat in the kitchen and cried. It hurt like hell, but I felt bad for mama, and I promised her I’d be better from now on. She cried even harder. I read this book after the whuppin. Them kids stranded on an island don’t get how lucky they are. Nobody to whup their ass for leaving a door open. No mama cryin about some kid getting their ass whupped.

“I have dozens like this. All I can tell you right now is that he was a sad kid who knew the tragedy he was living through. He hated his dad and loved his mom, but he couldn’t find a way to resolve any of the injustices in his life — not until he got older.”

I sat down and read a few other reminiscences from RG when he was a kid. They all were the same. Beatings for no good reason. Praise for fighting at school. Hard work after school and during the summers. Thoughts on books, teachers, adults.

Bel slipped behind me and handed me another piece of notebook paper. “This is the one you need to burn, sweetie. Read it first, though.”

                                                       ______________

I hit daddy over the head with one of mama’s frying pans. The big one. He was in the barn, so nobody saw me. I loaded him up in a wheelbarrow and toted him out to the back of the property and buried him deep. I had dug the hole last month, when the ground was still soft from the rain. After I covered him up, I put some cactus and flowers on top of him. The police didn’t come snoopin around until months later. They never found him.

Mama got a job as a bookkeeper. I worked part-time in a restaurant. Sometimes, I stole food so we could have money for the bills. Mama don’t cry anymore.

I looked at Bel, shocked at what I just read. RG had committed premeditated murder. The gentle, affable, soft-spoken RG that I grew up with had been a stone-cold killer.

“It was in this book,” Bel held it up for me.

The Count of Monte Cristo.

“Revenge. Retribution. Makes sense, sweetie,” Bel said, her soft voice cutting through the truth.

I sat in front of Bel and took her hands. “What do we do about this? Bel, what the hell do we —”

“Nothing,” she said, sharply and forcefully. “Nothing at all. We burn this and carry on.”

“He murdered his dad.”

Bel looked at me and shook her head, pursing her lips. “He preserved the family. His choices were limited — fight or flight. He chose both.”

In the end, I agreed with her.

We spent the next month going through every book and taking out all the notes that RG had written. Bel continued to write her next novel, a thriller about a son who murdered his father, and the ramifications of this desperate act of love.

We sold the house and property for a pretty penny, but I kept the origami eagle.

                                                ______________

Hammering woke me up. Disgruntled and sleepy, I traipsed into the kitchen and made a cup of coffee. I drank it to the tune of more hammering, emanating from Bel’s office. I made another cup of coffee before investigating the matter.

Bel was standing back from her work and admiring it. She turned to me and flashed me a grin, accompanying it with a quick kiss on the cheek.

“You like?”

I stared at what she had painstakingly hung on her office wall. It seemed out of place among the Renoir prints and Ficus plants. But I understood it.

“I do,” I said, sipping my coffee and slipping an arm around her waist. We both stood, rooted to the spot, gazing at the addition to her décor.

“What are you going to tell the kids when they see it?”

Bel laughed and set the hammer on a nearby table.

“I’ll tell them that mama has acquired a new interest in large frying pans.”