The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter by Susan Hahn Read Free Book Online

about her, she is putting Aunt Sonya’s “man-packed” grave scene into one of her plays—the men being part of Celine’s ever-increasing collection.
    Cecily loves to write about our family. The only person she never writes about is her father, Uncle Abraham. While fighting in World War II, he was captured for well over a year, returning to this country a prisoner of his own mind. He was the only person who could brighten Grandmother Idyth’s eyes, give them a little life. She would even take his hand. Maybe because he was her youngest—her baby—or maybe because she could tell he understood what it meant to have, if not a broken mind, at least one badly cut into—something Cecily believes she, too, understands well.
    When Uncle Abraham returned after the war, as an outpatient in the rehabilitation hospital, he made a bracelet for Cecily. It was a strip of pliable tin with her name carved into it with open delicate spaces around each letter and small, carefully hammered pinpoint indentations in the shapes of two flowers at both ends. She was just a baby then, but as she grew up and grew into it, she has never taken the bracelet off. Because it is so tarnished now and oddly bent, it goes well with the stained look she has costumed for herself—“the stain” first put there by Uncle Emmanuel.
    When Uncle Abraham died he left Cecily his Purple Heart. She feels it is the color of her own heart gonebloodless and when the anger and isolation she experiences grows too large, it is then she takes out her pen to fill the festering emptiness. I do understand this—to a point.
    Unlike Aunt Lettie, Uncle Abraham never spoke about the war. About what it was like being held by the Japanese for so long. About what exactly had been done to him; what he saw being done to others. Yet he always listened intently to Aunt Lettie’s stories, his face crimson, while everyone waited and hoped that he, too, would say something. That never happened. He took all those experiences into the ground with him.
    If you go deep enough into most family histories in this cemetery you will find a gulag, a stalag, a pogrom, a concentration camp, and the souls who stayed so silent in their lives about what happened to them in such places talk freely to each other here. Sometimes the dead historians are allowed to listen. They then find out that their writings, their books, are so incomplete because the many voices who knew so much chose silence and it is also then that the dead historians worry that is why these horrors keep happening over and over again, which indicates an over-thinking of the power of themselves and their writings.
    In the weeks and months after Wyatt left, I would pull hard at my nipples, not just for the excitement it would bring, but for how much I needed to remember that he had once been there—in my life, in me. That he truly had existed and how he had the power to make me feel—feel wonderfully wild. When I would tell Cecilia, “He Was My Greek God, My Satyr, My Myth,” she would laugh with such joy, and when she quieted, she would take both my hands in hers and whisper the most melancholy,
“yes, yes,
Ceci, oh yes.”
She never tired of how many times I needed to say this and needed to hear her response. I can still hear her sweet girlish voice.
    I often wondered if money were involved—if my father gave Wyatt money to leave me alone—for he never called again, and eventually I learned he had left town. I know it was then that the cells in my body began their slow mutations into an unrelenting grief that would chew at me piece by piece and eventually swallow my life. Of course, there were other factors that conspired with this. I had put myself on birth control pills when they were filled with mega-doses of hormones, which I continued taking for over seven years, always hoping for Wyatt’s return. Celine knew a doctor to whom I quite eagerly, boldly,