Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 10 - Cornerstone

Photo by Gaspar Uhas on Unsplash

Everyone knows everyone in a small town, who you are, and what you’ve done. 

What you’ve failed to do.

Before leaving for college, before David and family and the tragedy that had now set upon her life like a heavy indissoluble fog, Olivia dreamed of escape.  Back then, the curious watchful stares of the town’s nosy busybody network were everywhere.  The stares fed the gossip, which traveled seemingly as fast as the wind, reaching every corner of Cornerstone, Illinois. 

Set amongst endless corn fields that disappeared into the western horizon along the border of Illinois and Iowa, her hometown never sat quite right with Olivia.  Her unrest only got worse as she got older.

Puberty came earlier to her than most of her friends.  She had pimples first, just a few, followed soon by the first bumps under her sweater, and that horrifying moment her period arrived at the end of the school day during math class.  Olivia was sure that somehow everyone knew.

The rapid changes in her body drew unwanted attention and trying to conceal them with heavy sweatshirts only made it worse.  Boys her age, still lacking the barest of social graces, didn’t so much compliment her as much as they bludgeoned her with their awkward words and stares.  Her closest girlfriends closed her off.

“You’ve got a rack,” she was told more than once before she was even twelve.

For the better part of a year, every day was an embarrassment. She started spending lunches in the library.  By eighth grade, when most of the other girls had finally caught up, she was welcomed back into the social circles she once knew, but she re-entered them with considerable caution.

Midway through her freshman year in high school, as would still be the case years later in college, Olivia had already been unwillingly dragged to more drunken parties than she could count.  Far out in the pastures and fields that framed the town of Cornerstone’s tiny grid of parallel streets, out of sight from prying parents, she and her friends danced around roaring bonfires to music blasted from truck stereos.  They pounded beers and groped each other, acting like they thought adults acted, long before they had any idea of what adulthood was really like, and how painful it could be.

Her own behavior made her ashamed, and she was fearful her parents would discover her indiscretions, which always began with a simple lie.

“I’m going up to Moline with some friends tonight to see a movie,” she’d say.

“Who all will be there?” her mother, Grace, would ask.  Her father, Mickey, would peer over from the top of his reading glasses as he waited for Olivia’s answer.

Her parents were children of farmers, themselves.  They’d met at the same Cornerstone High School Olivia attended.  They married shortly after graduation and Olivia was born less than a year after that.  Olivia had questions about the timing of that but never dared to ask. 

She’d rattle off a list of the friends of whom she knew her parents approved, usually ones they’d see the next day at Sunday Mass, ones she knew were probably lying to their own parents so they could attend the same parties.  

The next day Olivia would sit in the pews at Church feeling like all of her parents’ friends were silently judging her for things she hadn’t even done, as well as some of the things she had.  But even for the things she hadn’t done, the things she only imagined the congregation silently accused her of, she felt guilty anyway.  

When she was seventeen, just a few months shy of graduation and running away to college in South Carolina, going as far away as she could before falling into the ocean, the town of Cornerstone was hurtled into a torrential tailspin. 

Janie Wheeler, a well-known and well-loved mother of four was found murdered in a ditch just outside the town limits. The crime went unsolved for several years.  Cornerstone was forever changed. One day, everyone left their cars and back doors unlocked.  The next day no one walked alone. 

The family at the center of the mystery was prominent in town, the owners of Corklin Tractors, a mainstay that had served generations of farmers.  

Olivia’s mother knew Janie Wheeler from a Monday evening ladies’ prayer group at their parish.  Olivia recognized the four Wheeler boys, and had seen them around town, but they were all younger than her. Tommy Wheeler, the oldest son, was a junior.  Olivia had been in the same trigonometry class with him the year before, but they rarely spoke more than a passing hello.

She recognized the Wheelers mainly from church, especially after Mrs. Wheeler’s death.  After that, all four boys and their father would sit three rows from the altar nearly every week.  Sometimes Olivia slipped into daydreams as she stared at the back of Tommy Wheeler’s head during Mass.  She wondered what he was thinking, how he must have wanted to desperately find his mother’s murderer, to exact unbridled revenge upon him, and to experience the satisfaction of being freed from Cornerstone’s ever-present oppressive shadow of small-town gossip and staring eyes.

In the first weeks after the unsolved crime, Olivia would look over at the Wheeler men as Fr. McClintock offered counsel from the ambo to a family and a town that had stumbled and lost its footing.  How does a community move forward when it seemed forever stuck between the reality of the tragedy that had occurred and the lie they all wanted to believe that everything would somehow be okay?

It was on one of those Sundays after the town was brought to its knees by that senseless and unexplainable situation that their pastor preached the only homily Olivia ever remembered from her days in Cornerstone.

Fr. McClintock was a relatively young priest just starting to show gray hair around the edges of his ears.  His eyes were perpetually red-rimmed from either allergies, sleep deprivation, or both.  That Sunday he stood before the small congregation, closed his eyes, and just breathed.  

For what felt like an endless minute, the sanctuary was covered in uncomfortable silence.  Finally, Fr. McClintock opened his eyes and began to speak.

“Isaiah tells us that ‘the people who walk in darkness will see a great light,’” the priest began.  “Those who live in a dark land, the light will shine on them.”

Again, Fr. McClintock paused and closed his eyes.  

Olivia looked around and realized that her parents, as well as most everyone else around them, were at that moment watching the Wheeler family in the third row, sitting quietly with their faces turned toward the floor.  

“Matthew likewise tells us that ‘the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death, light has dawned,’” Father McClintock continued.  “2 Corinthians states, ‘For God, who said, '“Light shall shine out of the darkness,” is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.’”

The priest stopped and cleared his throat as he looked down at his hands.

“Over and over and over and over and over again the Bible tells us not to fear the darkness,” he said.  “And we must not live in the darkness.  In all things, we must seek the light.  Always seek the light.  No matter how dark life becomes, no matter how painful life is, no matter what horrible and inexcusable and unexplainable things befall us in this life.  No matter this present darkness in which we find ourselves.  We are assured, in John’s Gospel, we are absolutely and undeniably promised that ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’”

Olivia was surprised, then, when Fr. McClintock stepped down from his lectern, walked into the aisle, and down to the third row.  He put his hand on Mr. Wheeler’s shoulder and looked directly at his four sons.  Mr. Wheeler continued to stare down at the floor.

“The light will shine in the darkness,” Fr. McClintock said, speaking slowly and deliberately.  He met each of the Wheeler boys straight in the eyes one by one.  “Light always overcomes the darkness.  It’s a law of nature, and it’s the nature of God.”

After Olivia left Cornerstone, it was years before she thought about that homily again.  She didn’t think of the priest or the Wheeler family or that Church.  Somehow, when she left town, those memories were placed into the recesses of her mind, as if locked away in an attic, in the same place where creepy Mr. Fairchild and the recollection of her first period had been relegated to reside.  

But now she and her children were like Mr. Wheeler and his sons were all those years before.  All eyes were on her once again, those eyes filled with pity and unrelenting remorse, judgment, and condemnation. And all those eyes set squarely upon her and Mark and Rosie. They were just the latest family awash in extreme and unexpected grief.

The evening of David’s funeral, after she said goodbye to the last lingering mourners who’d stayed to help clean up from the stream of visitors who’d paid their respects, she hugged her parents goodbye before they drove their rental back to the airport for a late-night flight back to Illinois.  Jeremy was the last to leave.  He and Mark were in the driveway shooting hoops.  

“You need to sleep on the couch?” Olivia asked him.  There was a line of empty beer cans next to the garage door.

“Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Jeremy said. 

“Can I have a beer?” Mark asked.

“I’m surprised your uncle didn’t already give you one.”

“He did,” Mark said.  “I’m asking if I can have another.”

It was the first time in days Olivia’s laugh wasn’t faked.  She said goodnight to her brother-in-law and her son and stopped by Rosie’s bedroom.  Her light was already off and she was breathing deeply.  They’d all just needed to get through that horrible day of goodbyes.

There will be light, the priest had said all those years ago.  Even though she’d long forgotten that day in Church, the memory of it came back to her after all that time.

There will always be light, for the darkness can never overcome the light. 

But at that moment, she wasn’t so sure. 

Alone now in her room, Olivia was awash in a darkness so deep it was nearly impossible to imagine that sentiment could possibly ever be true.

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