Chester lay on his bunk thinking about the spaghetti-slither of Diana’s wet blonde curls against the black leather jacket he’d bought her years ago in Atlantic City.
People knew her for her hard nature — hard-headed, hard to get along with, hard to break. But Chester had seen her turn to mud, oozing loneliness, formless and dark. He had held her hard body with all its soft secrets while she wept, bled, mourned; five miscarriages and one dead brother’s worth of mourning. Her smell seeped into him, changed the structure of his own, altering the trace he left in the world.
That was the worst part of prison for him: her scent finally eradicated from his skin, replaced with that distinctive blend of metal, sweat, and disinfectant.
A lot of folk back home said Diana was the reason Chester was locked up, even if she had not physically put the tire iron in his hands. She had told him he better be the man she knew he was, protect what was his. Said to him, they come for your people, Chester.
He’d loved tracing the straps of her bra, down one shoulder blade, across the skinny band, then up the other shoulder blade as she lay in bed. He liked how he could study the freckles on her back that way, and how she was completely relaxed, resting the creased folds of her long belly against the sheet. He would tell her stories in his gruff voice about the Roman goddess who shared her name.
Most nights, she would fall asleep before the story got going, but every now and then she’d sit up, light a cigarette, and say, well carry on, you old fart, you got me up now. Those nights, he would tell the best stories he could think of, playing fast and loose with the details, adding flourishes to make the goddess Diana more like his Diana.
On occasion, Chester’s mind returned to the tire iron and its bloody destruction on that too-bright day. He lived now in its wake but didn’t care to dwell. It had happened, he had done it, nothing more to it.
But it did astonish him what a man could do. That he could spend his days going to work and loving a woman and watching the evening news, and all the while, capable of such brutality.
His grandmother cried and cried when they put him away. She had been so sure he was going places. You got a real chance, boy, she used to say, you keep reading them books.
Chester spent a lot of time at her house when he was young. Back then, his daddy was drinking heavy and hitting his mama on occasion. Chester had liked the quiet at his grandmother’s house – not the menacing, hushed stillness of his own house, but a churchy quiet. He used to play church there, passing around a pie plate for tithes in her living room. She got a kick out of that, would donate a dollar for his trouble. And maybe she really was tithing, asking God to keep an extra watch out for her grandson, who was going places if he could stay clear of danger. The devil in sheep’s clothing was everywhere, and sometimes wearing his daddy’s coveralls.
Chester did wonder whether his life might have turned out differently if he had stood up to his old man just once. Though Chester would grow up to be a burly man, he was a cowardly little shit as a boy. When his mama told him to run over to his Gram’s and stay gone a while, he could not get out fast enough.
Later, he sought to make up for the cowardice of his youth. Those who called him friend knew none more loyal. After he started making money at the plant, his mama wanted for nothing. And the old man stopped pushing her around once Chester got big enough to think twice about. Something about a look that passed between father and son one day, not long after Chester’s unfurling body had begun to take its destined form. Chester had gentle green eyes like his mama, but a baneful smoldering had commenced behind them when the old man wasn’t looking, and it would not extinguish. It reminded him of those mountains he had seen in Hawaii when he was in the service — verdant and serene, with a roiling magma beneath.
The old man took to sleeping on the porch. The fire in his own soul was flickering by those days and he was tired. He and Chester’s mama worked out their own way of living. She took care of her husband through his liver failure and his dying, and then she buried him and lived a nice life. Joined Bible study and prayer group where she made friends at last, and Chester came over for dinner every Sunday night until they put him away. After that, Diana went on Sundays.
Chester wondered what those women talked about. Each had made him in her own way, and each had ruined him in her own way, and nobody in this wide world loved him more.
The goddess Diana was a huntress. And, the goddess was a virgin, which gave his Diana fits of laughter but after Chester went to prison he got to thinking of her that way. He never did ask how she spent her nights. She had always been her own woman.
Diana was goddess of the crossroads, where spirits met. Where the world of the living crossed paths with the world of the dead.
The day those boys busted into his cousin’s store, Chester didn’t have much in the way of options. But he had learned by then that you always had a choice. Telling yourself you did not was the coward’s way. Maybe not good choices, maybe not a path to salvation like they said in church, but there was always a choice. Diana knew it, and when Chester heard that woman ask him who he was, he picked up the tire iron and showed her.
A few days after Diana had the heart attack that killed her, Chester had one of his own, alone in a metal bunk. Fourteen wasted years and sixty-eight miles and a concrete fortress had separated them, but a man always had a choice, and Chester’s was Diana.
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Some excellent writing here. Well done @Stephanie Sweeney!
AWESOME