Regarding the Deaths of Mmes. Jensen and Parker

A young observer arrives at an epiphany as he recounts the tale of a small-town feud with devastating fall-out.

    Carly Jensen broke her arm when she fell from the big sycamore by the salt pond at the Greenwood place. Troy Parker had said girls couldn’t climb trees, and Carly said of course they could and hoisted herself up to a branch about halfway to the top and fell. It was when the Halloween storm was blowing in off the sound, and a gust threw her clean off the branch, and they knew right away it was broke from the little piece of bone sticking out of her forearm there, so Troy Parker ran up West Street to tell Mrs. Jensen what happened, but he tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and split his skull open and went brain dead. 

Mrs. Parker had complained to the town council about cracks in the sidewalks being hazards for the old folks already, so she was well angry and not just broken-hearted about it. After they pulled the plug on Troy Parker, some black-suited lawyer from Stamford came to town - Eastport didn’t have any lawyers then - and told Mrs. Parker she should sue the council for what they’d done to her son - or hadn’t done for him, really - because, if you thought about it from one side, the lawyer said, you could say the town killed Troy Parker, and that’s what Mrs. Parker did. 

Now, it happened that Mrs. Jensen was president of the town council at the time, had been for six months or so by then, and Mrs. Jensen took it personal when Mrs. Parker tried to sue her cause, even though she sympathized, Troy Parker’s the one who got her daughter hurt in the first place, and if he never got her daughter hurt, he never would’ve run up West Street, and if he never would’ve run up West Street, he never would’ve tripped on the crack and gone brain dead. So it was Troy’s own fault, if you thought about it from one side. That’s what Mrs. Jensen’s lawyer said, anyway. He was from Stamford and wore black suits, too. 

The Parkers and the Jensens had been neighborly for two generations and they were well into their third and everyone in town aimed to keep it that way, but it all came to an end after those lawyers filed papers in county court and neither Mrs. Jensen nor Mrs. Parker would back down. 

It dragged on more than three years and cost heaps and heaps of town money - so much town money that settling no longer made any fiscal sense, the lawyer told the town, and it bankrupted the Parkers altogether in fees. When the town had to cut back on trash collections and some workers were laid off to pay the Parkers their damages, everyone from the Aaronsons to the Walliams blamed Mrs. Jensen for being the worst council president since the town’s incorporation 362 years ago and made a pariah out of her, which in a town like this was akin to death.

Mr. Jensen - a respectable man, well-liked, and a gifted boat-maker, too - well, he left her because he didn’t want to be associated anymore with someone everyone hated and Mrs. Jensen had a breakdown and they shipped her off to Silvercrest down in Old Sayersville in a jacket to get some rest. They still used jackets back then. Mr. Jensen skipped town with Carly while Mrs. Jensen was away and moved up the coast to Newington without saying anything to Mrs. Jensen, who came back from Silvercrest to an empty house and a note saying Mr. Jensen filed for divorce and his lawyer was petitioning the court in Stamford for full custody of their child because Mrs. Jensen was crazy. So Mrs. Jensen wrote a note of her own on the back of Mr. Jensen’s note and stuck her head in the oven, which is just where Johnny Griggs found her about a week later when he came round to ask if she wanted to contribute to the church’s bake sale the next weekend. 

They say Mrs. Parker laughed a devil when she heard about Mrs. Jensen, but no one really knows for sure if she heard about Mrs. Jensen at all because she stopped leaving the house on Frognal Lane when her husband left her for the pretty young librarian the town hired after it sorted its finances. They moved to Florida and had babies right away, but Mrs. Parker never could let go of Troy or the anger that lawyer from Stamford riled up in her against the town and Mrs. Jensen.

After the divorce she gave all the money she kept from the settlement to some money guy next town over, who paid her bills every month while pocketing about a third of it and when Jake Peters found caught him, he wrote to Mrs. Parker and she wrote him back saying she didn’t didn’t give a damn about it, and if she didn’t care, there was nothing to be done. 

Katie Ardor began bringing groceries to her twice a week, which the grocer, Mr. Abdul, comped out of pity and charity, and Katie would leave them on the dilapidated, wraparound porch a few steps from the front door, then hide behind the big sycamore on Mrs. Parker’s lawn and wait for Mrs. Parker to open the door and get them. She would peek from around the tree and see Mrs. Parker come out and take the groceries inside and Katie’d swear to the other kids in school that she saw a real-life witch. The other kids would tease her and call her a liar, but every time they walked past Mrs. Parker’s house alone at night and they saw the light on in the second floor window, they walked on with a little bit more purpose. Sometimes people would swear they could hear her voice quietly speaking to someone as they walked down Frognal, but not as though she were yelling at a thing inside her house, more like her voice just wafted through the air like the stench of rotting flowers. But those are all just stories. They’re not real like the one I’m telling you now - it’s real. My pop and grand pop told it to me, and they tell the truth, but don’t fall for all silly ones.

It was twenty-six years since the Halloween Carly Jensen broke her arm and Troy Parker cracked his skull when Mrs. Parker died. It’d been my responsibility to leave the groceries outside her door for the past couple years, still twice a week, still for free, still from Mr. Abdul, only his daughter ran the shop by then. There were many others between Katie and me, of course. I didn’t do what Katie did - I won’t lie and say I wasn’t curious about Mrs. Parker or anything, but I just didn’t want to be rude to the poor, old lady so I never stuck around to see her. 

When the bags began piling up on the porch after a couple deliveries, I figured something must be wrong so I called Chief Blunkett over for a welfare check and sure enough she was dead. I was there when he opened the door, and I swear the smell changed the way I saw the world. It wasn’t bad - well, it was, but it wasn’t only that. It reminded me of the crumbling, old church in the woods, the one up the hill from the cemetery behind the new church. The old church was older than the country and no one worshipped in it since before the civil war. I went in there once on a dare before they tore it down for good when I was eleven. All of us knew the stories about it, and we were all a bit scared the way kids get before they shake their superstitions. It was overgrown inside, overgrown and dusty and cobwebby and moldy and mossy and moist and rotted and decayed, like something out of Nathaniel Hawthorne story, but I wasn’t scared by it. I sat on the soggy remains of a wooden pew where the aisle must of been and saw the blue moonlight passing through the vines crawling through the broken windows like spider’s legs, and all I felt was peace. All the smells in there combined a bit like a history textbook, like they were a whole bunch of facts ordered over long stretches of time you absorbed separately until they came together all at once to make a bigger thing. I guess this a long way of saying that Mrs. Parker’s house smelled like how sad feels, and I didn’t know smells could do that.

I was still curious, but I didn’t go in the house with Chief Blunkett to look at her even though he said I could if I wanted to. I suppose it was because I was a bit scared of seeing her. Or maybe scared of seeing death up close cause I never saw it before. I was still young then, so maybe I wasn’t ready to see it yet, especially one as painful as Mrs. Parker’s, because I knew I was scared of pain, and the way I saw it, Mrs. Parker had been dying in pain for twenty-six years.

It struck me then something about pain while I waited outside for Chief Blunkett. It seemed to me there’s a set amount of pain in the world that never changes and each person’s got to shoulder their fair share, but the thing is they don’t. Everyone’s only got a certain amount they can handle, and it’s not equal, and if someone fills up early, the leftover’s gotta go somewhere, so it spills onto someone else.

And the thing is you can’t even blame anybody for filling quicker than anybody else - it’s just how they’re made and they can’t help it. But what did all this mean for poor Mrs. Parker? Well, she lived with hers and Mr. Parker’s and Troy Parker’s pain. That’s three peoples’ worth of pain. And she did it everyday for twenty-six years. Think on it for a minute.

People around town called Mrs. Parker crazy, and it’s probably true that she was crazy, but to me she’s got to be one of the strongest people I ever heard of, cause she never let any of that pain spill out anywhere else. It made me wonder: if carrying three peoples’ pain and not giving any out made Mrs. Parker crazy, what did that say about all the other people we all called crazy? Maybe they were reservoirs of some kind, made uninvited into vessels to collect drop-by-drop something of the world’s spillage without anyone really knowing it. And if that were true, then I knew I owed Mrs. Parker my gratitude.

There, on Mrs. Parker’s porch, with the dusty remnants of her existence just over the threshold of her door, I was ashamed for never having knocked, not once in two years of deliveries, just to say how nice the weather was or something.

But I don’t know. I guess thinking about it that way made me a bit more… what’s the word… the one where you learn to understand something about someone else? I can’t remember. Doesn’t matter anyway.

 

 

Author's Note

Warning: Death, suicide, and other upsetting subject matter in story.

Grammar sometimes sacrificed for narrative voice.

Please be RUTHLESS in critique. Trying something new. Want to see what works, what doesn’t.

Thanks