The Red Granite Confessional

By K. L. Kemp

Tanner Means wants nothing more than to be normal but is plagued with terrifying, uncontrollable, and inescapable images in his head. Accepting his psychic abilities with the help of a woman called Kansas, he encounters various residents of East Tower Grove Park of St. Louis, each plagued by their own inner demons. Most bewildering of all is a girl named Opal, and Tanner is drawn into the dark mystery of her life. What can he do to help her? Why is her life any business of his? For Tanner and Opal, is it ever too late for revenge and redemption?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524528904

Book preview

1

Tanner Means emptied the rose porcelain bowl of blood and spittle and returned to sit at the feet of his now dead grandmother. There were no tears, there was no despair, no remorse. He had experienced those things too many times in the past few years to feel anything now. In the last six months he had grown numb to any emotion he might have once felt for his last family member.

He straightened her faded Rose of Sharon quilt, the last one she’d put needle and thread to, and tucked it around her shoulders. More tired than he had felt in weeks, he settled his six-foot-one frame into the sewing rocker by her bed, where he had slept so many nights breathing in the ointments, the salves, and the smell of slow death, if you call it sleep, his half dozing and half listening to the sounds of her tortured body. But tonight, there was no sleeping, no rocking. The stillness that had settled around the death bed drew him into an inexplicable calm. No longer did he need to listen for her coughing. Lillian Means hadn’t struggled to breath these last few weeks. She didn’t breathe so much as air seeped into her lungs then escaped out again. Then in the last three days her breath came with a fair amount of murky liquid and clots of blood. That was now over for her, and he was grateful more than anything else.

Sometime that moonless night, Tanner straightened the stack of poetry books on her nightstand. For months he had read to her for endless hours while she slipped slowly from life. In the early days poetry comforted her, though he honestly couldn’t tell for sure any more, she gave no signs of approval or disapproval. Even though he had watched her closely, she gave very few signs of still being alive. Poems of love, poems of simple living, and poems of forest and fields had always been her favorites. He turned off the light in her bedroom and called Corn Mortuary from the phone niche in the hallway. Lillian’s gone, was all he said. In the small town of Eagen Lake, everyone knew that Lillian Means was dying; it was only a matter of time before Tanner would call.

She was buried on a cold but clear Minnesota February morning.

*     *     *

Three months after the funeral, when spring had finally come up from the south in full bloom, Silas Babb, the family retainer, stopped at the simple Means farmhouse to meet with the sole survivor of the Means family. Tanner always thought of Silas as The Gray Man, because everything about him was gray, from what was left of his hair to his clothes and shoes, even to the shade of his pale blue eyes. Even his personality was a faint gray.

Tanner asked Silas to have a seat at the kitchen table. He wasn’t sure what else to do, since Silas didn’t seem to be in a hurry about anything when he arrived. Tanner waited as Silas settled at the far end of the table and asked him, Why are you still here on what’s left of this old farm? There’s a whole world out there for a young man like you. Go, find out what it has for you.

As a boy, Tanner hadn’t left the farm very much, and he knew that people around Eagen Lake watched him from behind partly drawn drapes as he went to and from school. Sometime during high school, three years ago this coming June, he began jogging in all weather at all times of the day and night, and sometimes, to Larsen’s roadside market on the edge of town. It was a faster way to get around, and he enjoyed the adrenaline high that running gave him.

This is home. He explained without emotion to Silas, as if he examined a bag of groceries from Larsen’s and pronounced, This is a pound of butter.

Silas watched as Tanner made a pot of coffee on the old high-legged gas stove, and poured it into heavy, white, ceramic mugs. This was your grandparents’ home. This was your mother’s home before she ran off to Minneapolis.

Tanner stirred his coffee, no cream, no sugar. His spoon made a great deal of noise in its useless task. This has been my home since Mom died when I was eight. It’s the only home I know.

The lawyer looked around at the kitchen of the old farmhouse: the yellow painted Hoosier cabinet, the plain table where they sat under the lone kitchen light, the mismatched wood chairs. Doesn’t look like anything of yours. Looks like stuff your grandparents had. From the day they were married, probably. Where’s your stuff? Where’s your life, Tanner?

My bed is upstairs, and my exercise weights are in the front room. Tanner saw his visitor strain to look through the narrow door into the next room. They used to be in the basement, but I couldn’t hear Grandmother when she called, so I moved them upstairs. By that time she never got out of bed to complain about stuff all over her living room floor. Tanner rubbed a hand across his chest and down his thick left bicep and patted his hard abs to show off. Physical workouts had been his only release in brief moments of respite from his Grandmother during her illness. It was only on her good days that he had dared jogging very far from the house.

Yes, you’ve made quite a man of yourself. Anyone can see that. The girls must fall all over you. Tall, blond, and strong, Scandinavian ancestors, any girl’s dream man.

Tanner blushed and turned away. He wanted the girls of Eagen Lake to notice him, the pretty ones or even some of the not so pretty ones. Any girl would do if they simply smiled at him first. But they had all teased and made fun of him since the day he’d arrived to live with his grandmother. He had always been taller than everyone else, and extremely shy away from home. The torments of his classmates had grown crueler as the years went by and now they had nothing to do with him. Better not to talk about it. What could old Silas Babb do anyway about making girls like him?

Silas looked around him and continued talking. So you have a past, you have a present. Where is you future? What is tomorrow for you? You going to find a wife and bring her here? Surround her with all of your grandmother’s things? Speaking of things, what are you going to do with all this stuff? Lillian sure liked to collect things didn’t she?

Tanner didn’t need to look around. He knew exactly everything in the house. Neatly stacked by the sink were his plate and mug, his one glass, spoon and fork, and the skillet and pot he used to cook for himself and his grandmother. Nothing else sat out on the shelves or counters or the back of the stove. Yet the entire house was crowded with glass-fronted cabinets crammed full of stuff. He had grown so accustomed to his surroundings that he no longer gave them any thought. He moved among them, but he wasn’t a part of them like he once had been. Not anymore. Now they were just physical things taking up space. Nothing else.

Silas waited for a response, but Tanner wished the old man would go away, so he said nothing, and hoped Silas would take the hint and leave him alone. But Silas Babb didn’t seem satisfied and didn’t give up. Didn’t she drag you all over the countryside to fairs and fleas markets and auctions? Isn’t that where she got all of this?

Tanner finished his coffee. There was more in the pot, but pouring another cup would show his guest he was expected to stay a while longer. Tanner wanted him to leave, but he didn’t know how to suggest it, and Mr. Babb appeared to be in no hurry to budge from his chair.

Tanner recalled days long gone. It was fun actually, poking around old shops and barns. Grandma always made it an adventure. The Grand Adventure of Everyday Living she called it. She thought what people did everyday, what they did with their hands, the things they owned, all showed how they lived, was more exciting than seeing the pyramids in Egypt.

When Silas rose and helped himself to another cup of coffee from the pot on the stove, Tanner sunk back into his chair. Why had he been so stupid to make a full pot? He might as well continue talking. Whatever she bought, I’d hold it on the way home, and I would make up stories about the people who owned it; who they were, what they were like. Sometimes I think Grandmother bought stuff just for the stories I would tell her. She liked to hear my stories; she liked me to read to her from the books she bought. Before she died … Tanner choked. Before she died, all she wanted was for me to read poetry to her. He coughed to clear his throat.

Silas looked across the wooden table with its red plaid oilcloth cover. Why did she stop buying? As her lawyer, I know she had money. Not a lot, but enough for her to keep searching for trinkets. Didn’t she stop all of a sudden? Did she decide the house couldn’t hold anymore?

Tanner looked at Silas’s pale eyes behind his thick spectacles. He hadn’t thought anyone else knew she had stopped the buying trips as fast as if she had flipped off the light switch on the back porch. What business of Silas’s was it to know the truth? But then, what difference did it make to anyone now? It certainly wouldn’t make a difference to Grandmother now, even if he had once promised her that he would never tell anyone.

"I scared her with my stories. They were fun at first, the wild imagination of a little boy, and she would laugh at them. When I got older, the stories got longer, and I didn’t just know the stories, I felt them as if they were real, and I felt them like everything had happened to me, as if I had lived those stories. Sometimes I couldn’t get them to stop even after we got home. Then the stories would sometimes be dark and scare me. They would hang around in my head for days no matter how hard I tried to make them stop. All I could do was wait for them to fade away.

That’s when I started to get in trouble at school, because I would tell these stories to other kids, and I couldn’t stop myself. One day, Grandmother had to visit with this traveling lady who came to the school and told Grandmother I told stories to make up for my parents being dead. She said Grandmother must make me stop, or I would have to go away to a home or a hospital or something. I don’t remember, but it scared her an awful lot.

Silas Babb took off his glasses, huffed on them, and wiped them with his handkerchief. Tanner watched, then went on.

But I liked our trips in her old car, so I begged her to go out again to see what we could find.

The old lawyer slipped his glasses back on, and adjusted them with great care. So she took you?

Only after I begged and whined enough, I guess. Tanner barely smiled as he recalled the exasperation on his grandmother’s face the day she gave in and they went out for the last time. In some store over in Georgetown, we found a little silver box. On the way home I started a story about a pretty little girl who got it from her father as a birthday present. I think the father gave her lots of presents. But the box was so pretty that the girl’s mother was jealous and stole it and punished the girl for being careless and losing it. Many years later, the girl, then a young lady, found it hidden away in a sack of ground corn in the family chicken coop. Tanner shuddered and stopped. Not all stories have pleasant endings. He didn’t want to go on.

Silas titled his head sideways, as if he had missed something important, but Tanner knew he hadn’t missed a word.

Is that all there is? Silas asked.

Tanner jerked his hand up as he felt a sharp pain across his forehead and behind his eyes. Ever hear of Lizzie Borden? She wasn’t the only one to split her mother’s head open. The story ends with as much fun as Lizzie’s bloody ax. There’s more, but I don’t want to ever tell the end of that story again.

Silas whistled and leaned back in his chair, nearly falling over backward before clutching the edge of the table.

Grandmother was never the same after that. She started cleaning everything she could get her hands on. I would come home from school and find her at the sink, her hands red and her knuckles bleeding from scrubbing in all that hot soapy water. Everything was so clean we could have eaten eggs off every surface in the house. I never asked her to go out again, and we never did. We stayed home after that. Never went anywhere. We became a pair of hermits.

Tanner rinsed his cup at the sink, and watched through the window as spring rain soaked the side of the old unpainted barn behind the house. He had told Silas Babb too much, and he was too embarrassed to reveal that he was never allowed to touch anything old ever again. New things never had stories with them, it was the old that dripped with tales and stories and fancies. Grandmother made sure he had new things around him, or at least things she had bought new for herself at one time or another. He wasn’t allowed to touch anything owned by his own mother for fear the stories in his head would return.

Tanner saw a strange look on his visitor’s face. No. There was nothing wrong. Maybe not right either. Just a kid with a wild imagination that his grandmother couldn’t handle.

The two listened to the rain grow heavier against the kitchen window before it tapered and stopped.

So, Mr. Babb, you didn’t come here to learn wild stories about the strange kid in Eagen Lake did you? Just why are you here? Tanner asked.

Silas gulped down the last of his now cold coffee. Down to business then. Where do I start?

You wanted to know why I am living here, Tanner offered.

This won’t be easy. You have to think about your future. What you are going to do from now on.

I’ll get around to that someday.

That day is now, Tanner. You have no more money.

It’s all gone? I thought Grandmother took care of that?

Yes. Lillian made sure she had enough to last her. She was very good at providing for herself and for you as you grew up. I don’t think she figured on supporting you forever after she died. Plus there were all her medical bills. There is a little bit left but not much.

How much?

Two months. Three months if you are careful. You can sell what’s left of the farm, she did leave it to you, but you know it hasn’t been farmed for a long time, and excuse me for saying so, but you don’t seem to be much of a farmer. It’s not prime acreage anymore, and she wouldn’t lease it out. A buyer would have to put in a lot of work to get the place paying again. And, if someone did buy it, I’m sure they wouldn’t want the house and the barn. They would probably tear them down to get as much acreage under plough as they could.

Tanner dropped his chin and studied his hands on his knees. He felt the same as he did on that day in the school principal’s office when Grandmother was told his stories had to stop or the consequences would not be good for anyone.

Silas Babb clasped his hands and leaned over the table. Tanner? Do you have any questions? Is there anything you want to say?

Tanner shook his head. He had said too much already.

Young man, you have to face this. You can’t run from it. I am afraid your grandmother may have taught you how to hide all too well.

She did what she had to do. I’ll think about this. Give me a few days.

Don’t wait too long. You don’t have many days left. Call me with any questions. I’ll be glad to help. Silas Babb patted him on the back and let himself out through the kitchen door.

Tanner listened to the lawyer drive away down the gravel drive to the main road. When he was sure the old man was gone, he wandered into the living room and opened the heavy drapes. All the trinkets and collectibles his grandmother had gathered for so many years were all locked away in a bizarre assortment of glass-fronted cabinets and curios that lined every wall, snaking their way from the front room to the dining room, and down the hall into the kitchen. Protecting them from Tanner, or protecting Tanner from them? If she was that scared, why didn’t she just get rid of everything?

Tanner was suddenly angry with his grandmother, with his mother, angry at his entire childhood. In a rosewood bow-front vitrine that faced the front door, sat the little silver box, laughing at him. He raised his right booted foot and kicked in the glass door. He reached in through the broken glass and pulled out the box, adorned with hearts and ribbons, and Lilies of the Valley. Before he took another breath, he relived the little girl and her jealous mother. Nothing had changed. The hatred, the screaming, the blood, was as fresh now as it had been all those years ago. Tanner hurled it across the room where it hit the plaster wall and bounced back to his feet on the bare floor. He snatched up a forty-pound weight from his barbell set and smashed the box. He flattened the hearts and lilies beyond recognition.

At twilight, Tanner buried what was left of the box in the rich rain-softened earth of the old apple orchard behind the house.

It would be days before he’d be able to get its story out of his head.

He had to escape his life. But escape to where?

More importantly, how do you escape from yourself?

2

With sharp military precision, Shameless pushed the grocery cart with its rickety rear left wheel through the dark streets of St. Louis. At each curb and uneven break in the sidewalk, he used the cadence in his head and forward marched to the front of the cart. There he planted his feet in a firm stance, and stretched his arms out wide before bending and grabbing the lower frame of the cart. With firm big hands he heaved the front wheels up and over whatever obstacle blocked its forward movement. His task performed, and the cart able to move once again, he stood up straight, shoulders back as always and arms to his side, as if ready to salute the cart or its contents. Then with the same quick pivot step march he always used, he moved in precise thirty inch steps to the back of the cart, gripped the handle where frayed pieces of duct tape indicated where his hands should be placed, and leaned into the cart to move it forward.

Behind him followed his short companion, bundled in layers of clothes despite the early spring warmth, his pants bagging around his heavy shoes, a hoodie pulled up tight against his ears. He waited and watched Shameless repeat his drill and said nothing. Off the curb and into the street. Over the curb and out of the street. Off the curb into another street, and again and again. The going was slow, but there was no use complaining. Whining of any sort would only send Shameless adrift into a world where not even he wanted to go. This night was dark enough, and Shameless’ private world, even to Shameless, was always too dark.

Shameless had nicknamed his little buddy, standing not quite five feet tall with all his abundance of accumulated clothing, Tidy. The same as he had once nicknamed Bernard, his pal in the Marines who stood six foot seven, Tiny. Shameless had been called by his own nickname for so long, he sometimes had to stop and think if he had ever been called by any other name.

The trio of cart, Shameless, and Tidy, moved eastward along Magnolia Avenue to the north entrance into Tower Grove Park.

Tidy kept a firm grip on his worn trousers. Not through the park. It’s late. There’s cops in the park after dark.

Shameless didn’t hesitate or fall out of cadence with his steps. Then fall in and step it up. We’ll make it. Watch us.

The cart led the way between the stone pillars and behind the tall iron fencing with its spear-pointed tips. They moved eastward past the artificial ruins and its pond, beyond the circle connecting the ornate Cypress Picnic Shelters, and finally out of the east entrance, guarded by enormous stone columns topped with painted griffins. Shameless kept Tidy moving despite his self-imposed, never-ending travel routine. Being caught in the park after dark might find them a better place to sleep, but, like Tidy, he was not in the mood for sleeping in a jail cell tonight. As a distant church bell reached its eleventh chime, Shameless heaved the cart down off the curb and into Grand Boulevard. They were out of the park at last.

Now where? Tidy asked as Shameless came to an abrupt halt.

Shameless looked around and scratched the scruff at his neck. Around here somewhere. Bastard Billy said it was somewhere east side of the park. That’s all he said.

Somewhere? Tidy looked all around. Could take hours to find the place.

You got something else that’s mighty urgent to do tonight? Something you ain’t telling me about?

Tidy shook his head no, and fell into his place behind Shameless and the cart.

Then began hours of wandering. Shameless was on the lookout for a landmark rising above the assortment of old houses and low apartment buildings of the Tower Grove East neighborhood. They crossed Arkansas Avenue, Wyoming, and then Arsenal streets. At the corner of Victor and Nebraska, Shameless decided they had gone too far and turned back.

Tidy never complained. He had a chance to stop at each curb and break in the sidewalk as Shameless continued his regimented routine in moving the cart forward.

Finally, they stopped in front of a church on Pestalozzi Street. This is it, Tidy. Welcome home.

Tidy grabbed his left trouser leg and yanked it up, to keep it from catching and causing him to trip. Holding his baggy pants up as far as he could, he looked up at Shameless. Sure ’nough? This is it? How can you tell in the middle of the night?

Shameless pulled a torn piece of shopping bag paper from one of the plastic bags hanging from the back of the cart, and in the yellow glow of a streetlight, he examined the handdrawn picture of a church. Tower. Windows. Garden with a bench under trees squeezed between the church and the house next to it. He eyed the sidewalk in front of him and calculated. Fourteen steps forward, then left sixty-one steps to the church, then another twenty-seven steps to home. With military precision he went to the front of the cart and heaved the whole thing to the left, putting the cart onto its new path between the church and the matching house next door. No easy, gentle curves for Shameless, his cart always traveled in a straight line. He put his hands back on the duct tape and pushed. Forward one. Two. Three. At exactly step number seventy-five, between the church and the building next to it, he stopped pushing and counting.

In the garden, Tidy plunked himself down. I’m gonna sit. Benches are for sittin’.

Shameless stopped the cart while his friend rested. He cocked an ear as he heard the lawn sprinkler on the other side of the church begin its rhythmic, nighttime sounding, raat-spit-spit-spit-spit, raat-spit-spit-spit-spit, raat-spit-spit-spit-spit. Listen! You know what that sound means?

Tidy turned an ear toward the direction of the sounds. "Means