Little Bird of Heaven Read Online Free Page B

course he dared not approach the house, nor even make telephone calls to the house, which he’d partly remodeled and in which he’d executed so much carpentry over a period of years. (In an extravagant and reckless gesture my father had simply deeded the property over to my mother—“The least he could do,” my mother said bitterly.)
    In the months following the divorce, so far as we knew, Daddy lived in Sparta with friends, or relatives; Daddy may even have been taken in by a woman friend; for there were many who knew Eddy Diehl well, who’d gone to high school with him, and been drinking-friends of his, scarcely known to Lucille or to us. These people—mostly men but not exclusively men—were convinced that Eddy Diehl hadn’t done what it was claimed by others that he had done, committed an act of murder: “homicide.” They would not cease to believe in Eddy Diehl’s innocence even after he’d been taken into Sparta police custody, even when it was leaked to the media that he’d “failed” a polygraph test; even when his picture began to appear in local papers and on local TV news in the company of the other “prime suspect” in the case, the father of a classmate of a Sparta man uncannily resembling Eddy Diehl in age, height, physical type.
     
    SUSPECTS IN KRULLER HOMICIDE QUESTIONED BY POLICE
     
    T HOUGH MY MOTHER HAD had our telephone number changed, and removed from the directory, yet my father managed to acquire the number as if by magic, and called us. Sometimes when one of us answered he didn’t speak: you listened and heard only a crackling sort of silence, like flames about to erupt. Timidly I said, “Daddy? Is that—you?” but Daddy would not answer, nor would Daddy hang up the phone; at such times I did not know what to do, for I loved my father very much, and was frightened of him; I had been made to be frightened of him; among the Bauers it was whispered that he was a brute , a murderer . And there were many in Sparta who believed yes, my father was a brute , a murderer . If Ben answered his voice went shrill, he was furious, half-sobbing: “We don’t want you to call us, Dad,” but Ben’s voice weakened when he uttered Dad , though he’d steeled himself not to say Dad , yet Dad had come out. Once when I picked up the phone expecting to hear my friend Nancy’s voice instead the voice was a man’s, low and gravelly: “Krista? Just this, honey: I love you.” On trembling legs I stood in the kitchen dazed and blinking as the voice continued, “Is your mother nearby? Is she listening?” and I could not manage to answer, my throat had closed tight, “Don’t hang up yet, honey. Just want you to know I love —” but the look in my face was a signal to my mother, with an angry little cry Mom took the receiver from me and slammed it down without a word.
    So that the phone could not ring again, Mom removed the receiver from the hook.
    “How dare he! He’s been warned! I should call the police….”
    We could not sit down to our dinner! We were too excited to eat.
    My mother insisted, we must eat. We must not be upset by him, he must not have such power over us. Numbly we sat at the table, we passed platters of the food that my mother and I had prepared together, we tried not to see where my father stood brooding and smoking in a corner of the kitchen.
    My mouth was too dry, I could not chew or swallow. “Maybe he just wants to…” Numbly I spoke, my words were barely audible.
    In her cool calm voice my mother said, “No, Krista. It’s over.”
    And there were the times, how many times we had no idea, when my father drove past the house; when my father cruised slowly past the house, pausing at the end of the driveway; when my father dared to park at the side of the road, in a stand of straggly trees, not visible from the house. Word sometimes came back to us, from relatives. One of my mother’s cousins called. Virtually all of the Diehls supported Edward, their Eddy; the