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  SIMON’S MANSION

  Reviews for author William Poe

  Simple Simon’s message of reconciliation and hope is truly for anyone who has struggled to resolve the truth they know about themselves with the way others see them. The power of forgiveness and acceptance can resonate with all readers.

  —Melissa Wuske, Foreword Reviews, on Simple Simon

  Poe’s narrative moves quickly and smoothly and fills in the blanks left in Simon Says. These first novels by Poe will leave his readership wondering—and waiting for—what he comes up with next.

  —Publishers Weekly on Simple Simon

  Stark and gritty, Poe’s story about the search for self-discovery is a sobering testament to the author’s own personal journey which makes the story resonate that much more.

  —Publishers Weekly on Simon Says

  SIMON’S MANSION

  William Poe

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright ©2019 by William Poe

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN-13: 9781729078433

  You’ll get back to where you came from.

  —William Golding, Lord of the Flies

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Growing up in the small town of Sibley, Arkansas, living in the timber mansion his family built prior to the Civil War, Simon Powell felt out of place and out of time. It is said that culture takes root early in a child’s life, but that didn’t apply to Simon; he claimed allegiance to a home planet orbiting a distant star, an idea that occurred to him after watching Forbidden Planet on a Friday night when his mother allowed him to stay up late. So impressed was Simon with the movie that he said to himself, Always remember, you were eight years old when you saw this. That was the age when Simon realized that he felt different from other boys, an awareness that scared him. Forbidden Planet taught Simon that what dwells inside us can destroy us.

  Secluded in his bedroom, Simon wondered about life on his home planet of Zenon, recognizing Zenon culture in the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Emile Nolde, which he first saw on the pages of a Funk & Wagnalls yearbook. Pollock and Nolde spoke to Simon’s alienation, and he began emulating their style, working with finger paints to explore Pollock’s sense of ordered chaos, drawing family members in a child’s version of Nolde, applying vibrant colors from the box of Crayola crayons that his mother, always attentive to Simon’s loneliness, gave him as a present on his birthday, never commenting on his strange images and always defending Simon against his father, a man quick to ridicule his peculiar son.

  “Why paint his face red? And why’s that tree purple?” Lenny had once asked about a rendering of Simon’s uncle Jared, identified by the title Jared of Magnolia scrawled at the bottom of the page. “That’s something a crazy person would do.”

  “Leave the boy be.” Vivian glared at Lenny. Then she turned to Simon and offered, “You enjoy yourself, son.” She pointed at a wobbly planet orbiting in a hazy solar system drawn above the red-hued cousin and visible through the leaves of the purple tree. “That’s your world, isn’t it, Simon?”

  Simon nodded.

  In the evenings, Simon occupied himself by sketching scenes of flying saucers piloted by bug-eyed monsters and attacking neighborhoods on Earth as he sat on a TV pillow shaped like a cocker spaniel. Lenny would be watching his favorite television programs, half-asleep from a long day of work as a plumber, fighting to stay awake in order to catch the ending of Gunsmoke if it were a Wednesday. Vivian, who didn’t share Lenny’s affection for television, spent her evenings reading Harlequin Romances, dutifully seated on a sofa next to Lenny’s La-Z-Boy recliner. When not engaged in drawing monsters, Simon rested on the cocker spaniel pillow, hugging its neck. Vivian periodically lowered her reading glasses and gazed upon Simon; then, believing him content with his pillow friend and drawings, she would return to her fiction.

  Upstairs in the timber-hewn mansion, outside the door of Simon’s bedroom, hung a gallery of charcoal images, portraits of gloomy ancestors rendered in their Sunday best, framed in oak that had aged dark as ebony through years of being treated with Old English furniture oil. Placing his art alongside those stern faces would have affronted the ancient gods, which was how Simon’s young mind perceived the characters in those portraits, none allowing Simon to walk by without telegraphing their displeasure. Simon’s art only made sense in his bedroom, where his drawings crowded the spaces between his paintings like fanciful wallpaper.

  Lenny’s mother, whom everyone called Mandy, had been a woman well into her seventies when Simon was born, and she had cared for him as a baby and sat with him at the mansion during his pre-school days, since both Lenny and Vivian worked full-time. It was she who had instilled in Simon an appreciation for family heritage, bringing the gallery of ancestors to life through tales as vivid as if she had witnessed them herself. Mandy had conveyed stories of actual people, not the ephemeral beings with the voyeuristic eyes that peered from the portraits, nor the apparitions known from carvings on the grave markers across the road in the family cemetery—a plot of land within sight of Simon’s bedroom window and denoted by an elaborately molded wrought-iron archway as rusted as the gate it supported.

  Simon’s favorite among Mandy’s tales was the story of his ancestor James Thomas Powell, “JT” as he was known, the family patriarch, the man who had lived in the mansion during the Civil War and who had met his end when marauders strung him up because he dared to harbor a wounded Union soldier after the nearby battle of Jenkins Ferry.

  “Hanged him from that limb right there,” Mandy would say. “That old tree stands as proud as the day JT’s body swung in the wind.”

  Mandy would point an arthritic finger at the red oak dominating the front yard, the limb that once secured the hangman’s rope now supporting a tire swing, and under the swing, a sandbox, favorite playground of Simon’s oldest niece, Cheryl, and her younger sister, Victoria. They would play there when Simon’s only sister, Connie, ten years his senior, and her husband, Derek, came for visits from the town of Tulip, where they’d moved to be closer to Derek’s parents.

  According to JT’s will, the oldest child in each generation inherited responsibility for the property—the ma
nsion, as everyone called it, qualifying for such a grand name due to its size, not for any hint of elegance. Responsibility fell to Lenny upon the death of Aunt Opal, sister to Lenny’s father, a woman who’d spent her final years as caretaker and lone resident and who now guarded the property from a prominent position in the family cemetery, her grave marked by a delicately carved angel, its marble head bowed with graceful hands placed over a sorrowful face, the less-than-life-sized statue sitting on a granite platform, now marred by vandals who sometime in recent years had spray-painted block letters on its edge that read, if one were to look closely enough, witch.

  Sibley residents had long accused Simon’s great-aunt of ungodly behavior, commenting on the fact that she hung talismans from trees around the property, even though many of the area’s residents performed a similar act of superstition, placing colored bottles on the ends of dead branches in the belief they captured evil spirits and prevented misfortune. On Halloween, Aunt Opal strung an effigy of JT on the red oak to ward off trick-or-treaters. Aunt Opal knew the good people of Sibley were more likely to leave her alone if they feared being cursed for walking across the property, and Opal valued privacy, finding solace in her life as a recluse.

  Lenny had once confided to Simon that if he had been JT, the Union soldier would have become garden fertilizer. In later years, Lenny claimed he had moved the family from Little Rock to Sibley following Opal’s death because his older brother didn’t want to move into the mansion. Lenny portrayed the move as a noble act of family duty when in fact a darker truth underpinned the decision.

  Following the integration of Little Rock High School in 1957, Lenny couldn’t tolerate the idea of Simon and Connie attending mixed-race schools. Moving to Sibley all but guaranteed the continuation of segregation, given the makeup of the population at the time. If descendants of the men and women enslaved by Sibley’s founders had stayed behind after the Civil War, they were long gone, chased away by Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, prevented from reentry by the imposing statue of General Marmaduke that stood in front of the county courthouse, a monument to the battle fought for preservation of the South at Jenkin’s Ferry on the Saline River, a conflict symbolizing the dangers of slave rebellion in the eyes of Sibley’s residents, since it was well known that former slaves had fought and died alongside Northern soldiers.

  When Simon came home from school during the second grade and announced that he had made a new friend, a boy with brown skin and eyes different from his, Lenny flew into a rage and stormed off to speak to the principal, who told Lenny that Simon’s newfound friend had recently moved with his family from Hawaii to work in a local company analyzing defunct bauxite strip mines that threatened Sibley’s groundwater. Flummoxed, Lenny informed Simon that if a classmate wasn’t white, he wasn’t to play with them. Simon refused to take the order to heart and never shunned a girl or boy for not looking the same as him. Simon knew what it was like to be different, and a boy from Zenon must always be on guard.

  Racism wasn’t the only source of Lenny’s rage. He especially disliked people who failed to behave the way they should. That Lenny despised homosexuals became evident whenever Liberace appeared on television. “Damn faggot’s queer as a three-dollar bill,” Lenny would rail, wagging a finger at the sequined performer, outbursts that instilled fear in Simon’s young heart, for Simon identified with the showmanship of the pianist. Those were the earliest stirrings of what later became apparent: if Simon wasn’t from Zenon, then he was a stranger to his friends, because his desires were different from theirs. Words from Forbidden Planet echoed in his thoughts: “My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it!”

  Just as Vivian had supported Simon’s art, she recognized Simon’s love of music, allowing him to take piano lessons from a woman who lived farther down the unpaved road that led from Sibley’s town center to the mansion. The teacher’s home was within sight of Simon’s front porch, where Vivian would stand as she watched him leave for his lessons, her confidence that Simon would find his way heightened by the prominence of the neighbor’s white gravel driveway, causing it to stand out against the orange dust of the road.

  After a few lessons, the woman told Vivian that if Simon kept practicing, he might become a professional, so quick was the boy to associate the notes on the page with the piano’s black and white keys.

  Lenny heard about the neighbor’s praise at dinner one night and said, “No son of mine’s going to be a goddamn sissy pianist.”

  And so ended Simon’s potential career as a future Liberace.

  CHAPTER TWO

  God is a judgmental being, always ready to punish his children. Such was the viewpoint Simon internalized as a boy, beliefs reinforced each Sunday by the pastor of the Southern Baptist church his family attended, roots going back to its very founding. The pastor, an admirer of the colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards, who articulated the belief that all people are sinners in the hands of an angry God, claimed that God demonstrated his concern for humanity through judgment, which he described as an act of love toward disobedient children.

  Lifting his head from the scribbles of flying saucers and space aliens he’d drawn in pencil on the margins of the church bulletin, Simon began to understand from the pastor’s sermons how Lenny justified his prejudices. On a succession of Sundays, the pastor made it clear that some people were better than others, quoting Ephesians: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ,” and, adding his own touch, explained that slaves were in bondage because their skin color indicated a curse from Genesis: the mark of Cain.

  Lenny declaimed against all sorts of people of whom he disapproved, using the words queer and faggot to identify any male who wasn’t masculine enough or any woman who wore pants, at least until the invention of culottes, which confounded his arguments and led to Lenny’s use of new terms for women who wore them. Vivian, in a rare moment of defiance, stood up to Lenny and said that culottes were not pants and that she planned to wear them whether Lenny approved or not.

  In young Simon’s mind, God and Lenny merged—one in heaven, all aware, observing every action, listening to every thought; the other on earth, limited, unaware, avoidable. If God knew what Simon did with his friend Ernie during sleepovers, he would make an exception (Simon was from Zenon, after all), but Lenny must never find out.

  Though the word homosexual had not entered Simon’s vocabulary, he understood what the pastor meant when preaching about Sodom and Gomorrah. Nothing put fire in the man’s eyes like rage against sex between men. The sermons began to sink in, and Simon soon began to doubt that God would continue to excuse his behavior. After all, Ernie was a human from Earth, even if Simon was from Zenon. Simon began paying closer attention to the pastor’s infrequent sermons about God’s compassion, explaining that sin is forgiven through the blood of Christ. Simon learned the words to the congregation’s favorite hymns, “Are You Washed in the Blood?” and “White as Snow.” Simon began to feel the need for salvation, moved by the choir’s singing and the pastor’s weekly call to confession:

  Come home, come home

  Ye who are weary, come home

  Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling

  Calling, “O sinner, come home.”

  Simon needed to confess the sin taught as a secret game by Ernie’s older brother and conveyed to Simon when Ernie explored his body in a secluded spot deep in the woods. Simon knew that what he and Ernie did was wrong, and he hoped that being washed in the blood would provide forgiveness; but even more urgently, he hoped to wash away the desire that increased each time they played their games. Simon enjoyed the intimate acts with his friend, acts that created a profound sense of guilt.

  Hoping that he might be wrong about God’s expectations, Simon questioned his Sunday School teacher when she explained that God is love. “If God is love,” Simon asked, “how can some love be wrong?” Simon had recently learned that the two men who lived next
door to Ernie were together because they loved each other. At least, that was the answer one of them had given when Ernie asked why they didn’t have wives. Ernie mentioned the neighbor’s response to his mother, who made sure he understood that men were not allowed to love in that way, that the neighbors were committing sin, and that God would judge them in his own time. The Sunday School teacher answered Simon’s question by explaining that the devil corrupts God’s love by giving people lustful thoughts.

  Simon remembered the message of Forbidden Planet—that what is within us can destroy us—and decided that what really mattered was what people found out about us. If only Professor Mobius had not learned of his daughter’s attraction to the captain, all might have been well on planet Krell. Simon would never mention his desires to Lenny or Vivian. But what about the all-knowing God? Simon could no longer sustain the fantasy that he was a boy from Zenon. The rules applied to him, just as they did to others.

  On a Sunday morning, as the choir sang, “Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling, ‘O sinner, come home,’” the pressure became too great. All of Simon’s Sunday School friends had made the journey down the aisle to salvation, and now it was his turn. Breaking free of Vivian’s hand, Simon left the pew and walked toward the pulpit, toward the pastor, who met him with a reassuring embrace, whispering into his ear, “Do you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior?” Simon burst into tears, sure that the devil would leave his heart as Jesus entered. God knew what Simon had done, but he would forgive. Upon his salvation, Simon would be free from unholy desires, as innocent as they were at his young age—he had not yet celebrated his tenth birthday.

  Congregants came from all over central Arkansas to attend the church Simon’s family attended, not least because of its famous sanctuary, illuminated by brilliant hues filtering through twenty-foot stained glass windows imported from Germany, each panel depicting stories from the Bible. The windows proceeded chronologically, starting with Eve taking fruit from a serpent, then moving to Noah adrift in a sea of darkness, releasing a raven to test for land; Joseph parading his multicolored coat before jealous brothers; Daniel praying heavenward, surrounded by lions as tame as lambs; Ezekiel riding to heaven on a vehicle not unlike a flying saucer; and a pregnant Mary aglow in the presence of Gabriel. From there the windows progressed to an angry Jesus overturning moneylenders’ tables, smiting an olive tree, and telling his chosen that one of them would betray him, then ending in the largest panel, filling an entire window: Jesus nailed to a cross. According to what Simon understood, the church believed in the cleansing ablution of Christ’s blood, though resurrection seldom factored into Sunday sermons, other than to mention, in passing, that Jesus had conquered death, and those who believed in him would be carried to heaven after his return to judge humanity.