NOT YOUR FATHER’S
SON
Roy Dorman
Summer, 1989
Fulton County Sheriff Milo
Carson placed the
small tape recorder on the table between himself and five-year-old Jeremy
Stillson. Jeremy’s mother, Mary Stillson,
frowned her disapproval. Sheriff Carson
shrugged.
He hit the record button
and said, “August 12,
1989, interview with Jeremy Stillson regarding the disappearance of his father,
Jerome Stillson.”
“Now, Jeremy,”
Sheriff Carson started, “We’d
like you to tell us what happened to your father. Can you tell us where he is?”
Jeremy teared up and looked
at his mother. She nodded at him and mouthed the words, “Go
ahead.” She gave him a small smile in an
effort to comfort him.
“I already told everybody
a hundred times,” he
said to the sheriff. “A monster ate ‘em!”
Jeremy then started bawling in earnest.
“There, there, Jeremy,”
said Sheriff Carson,
handing Jeremy a box of Kleenex. “Just
take a minute, okay?
“I just wanna go home
and go to sleep!”
“And you can do just
that when we finish here. Can you start at the beginning and tell it
like a story?”
Jeremy looked at the tape
recorder. He liked stories. His
dad had always read stories to him at
bedtime.
“I guess,” he
said. “Me and my dad went for a walk that day in
the woods behind our farm. We did that a
lot on Saturday mornings. He always said
it was ‘our time.’
“We walked as far
as the pond. Dad told me to stay back and he walked up to the
edge and stared at something in the pond.
From where I stood, I could see something big and shiny and green, kinda
floating in the pond a little bit from where he stood. It looked like a giant
lily pad. Dad got down on his hands and knees. To
get a better look, I guess.
“He reached out to
try and touch it. And when he did, it jumped out of the water
at him and took his …., his …., took his head in its mouth …., and …., and then
it pulled him off the shore …., and then it opened its mouth really, really
wide and …., and it swallowed my dad!”
Jeremy started crying hysterically
and his
mother yelled at the sheriff, saying, “Enough!
That’s enough!”
Sheriff Carson was not a
cruel man, but it had
been a week since Jerome Stillson had disappeared and he needed to get some
answers.
He took two candy bars out
of drawer and handed
them both to Jeremy.
“Here,” he said. “Take a little break.”
Jeremy looked at his mother
and she nodded her
permission. He took his time and ate
both candy bars.
“Now, Jeremy,”
said Sheriff Carson. “I’m gonna tell you a few things so that we
can get to the bottom of this. First
off, there are no monsters in Georgia.
Or in the whole United States. We
have some wolves, and mountain lions, and bears, but no monsters. And there
are no monsters in that
pond. We checked.”
Jeremy stared at the sheriff
before
speaking. “I bet your men didn’t even go
into that pond, did they?” he said.
“They prob’ly just stood on the shore and made jokes about my dad.”
Sheriff Carlson turned a
bright red.
Mary Stillson looked at
the sheriff with
disgust. “Answer the boy,” she
said. “Did any of your men go
into the pond? Any at all? Did
you?”
Deputy Sheriff Andy Olson
had been standing in
the corner, listening. He cleared his
throat as if to say something, but instead turned and left the room.
“End of Stillson interview,”
the sheriff said,
hitting the stop button on the tape recorder.
***
Jeremy Stillson had then
walked with his mother
to the cemetery on the anniversary of his father’s death from the first
anniversary when he was six, until his mother died when he was twenty-four.
The year that she died was
the last time he’d
stood over his father’s grave. Jeremy
knew all along that his father was not in the ground beneath that gravestone.
He’d been there when
the swamp monster had
dragged his father into the slimy pond in the woods behind the family farm and
had swallowed him whole.
Jeremy had had his mother
cremated and her
ashes were on the mantle above the fireplace.
He couldn’t bring himself to have her buried next to an empty coffin.
***
Summer, 2024
Jeremy was now forty and
had a seven-year-old
son of his own. For the last ten years
he’d gone to the edge of the pond on the anniversary of his father’s death to
try and kill the swamp monster. So far,
nothing had worked.
He’d thrown roadkill
stuffed with different
poisons to it, but none had killed it.
He’d lured it to the shore with raw hamburger and then fired both a
rifle at it one year and a shotgun at it the next, only to see it sink below
the surface and return again when he visited the following year. He’d
even bought a half-dozen piranhas from a
mail order place and the monster still had shown up for the following
anniversary.
It was as if the monster
was waiting for Jeremy
to make a fatal misstep.
***
Things hadn’t been
good with Jeremy’s marriage
since his son, Justin, had been born.
He and his wife often had
quiet, but heated,
arguments after Justin had gone to bed.
But seven-year-olds are curious and Justin had been eavesdropping since
he was four or five.
“He’s got red
hair,” Jeremy often said, opening
the old argument. “I don’t have
red hair. You don’t have red
hair. Nobody in either of our families
has red hair. But one of those guys who
did our roof eight years ago had red hair.”
Jeremy’s wife, Carole,
no longer put up much of
an argument. She would deny having an
affair and would then cry, saying she didn’t know how their son, Justin, came
to have red hair. She tried to tell him
that one of their distant ancestors could’ve had red hair, but Jeremy wouldn’t
let it go.
Justin had grown to hate
his father for making
his mother cry.
“Not my father.
Not my father. Not my father,” he
would whisper to himself into his pillow after overhearing the argument.
***
“Come on, Justin. Let’s go for a walk in the woods.”
It was a beautiful summer
Saturday and Justin was
happy to have something new to do outside.
Jeremy had never taken Justin on Saturday walks like his own father had
done. The two ambled through the fields
to the woods behind their property and eventually came to the pond.
Justin had never seen the
pond because his
mother had told him he wasn’t allowed to go into the woods by himself. He
knew nothing of its history. It was never spoken of in the house.
Jeremy walked right up to
the edge of the
pond. It was the anniversary and he knew
the monster would come to the shore like it always did.
“What’s that,
Daddy?” said Justin, pointing at
the large green mass that had surfaced a few feet from them.
“That’s a monster,
Justin, and you’re gonna
help me kill it.”
Jeremy took a hand grenade
from his pocket that
he’d bought for a hundred dollars from a back-alley ne’er-do-well in Atlanta.
“This is like a little
bomb,” he said showing
it to Justin. “We’re gonna stick it down
its nasty throat.”
Justin had a worried look
on his face. He didn’t know anything about monsters or
bombs. How could he possibly do anything
to help his dad kill a monster with a bomb?
“But, why, Daddy?”
“Cuz years ago, this
monster killed my own
daddy. Your grandpa, who you never got
to meet.”
This was a lot for a seven-year-old
to take
in. Justin looked at the green monster
floating in front of them.
“Here’s what
we’re gonna do,” said Jeremy. “You stand here at the edge. I’m gonna start the bomb and hand it to
you. When it opens its mouth, you throw
the bomb inside of it.”
Justin thought about this. “But why don’t you throw it in,
Daddy? You could prob’bly do it better
than me.”
“You’re gonna
do it because I’m your father and
I’m tellin’ ya to, that’s why.”
“Are you my
father?”
“I am till I say I’m
not, so you’ll do as I
say.”
Justin stepped a little
closer to the pond’s
edge. The monster also came a little
closer. It trembled in
anticipation. Justin looked at his
father and saw a look he didn’t like. It
was a look his father sometimes gave his mother just before he shoved her after
one of the “red hair” arguments.
Jeremy pulled the pin on
the grenade and
quickly moved up to hand it to Justin and shove him into the pond. Justin took
the grenade, but dodged his
father, and catching him off balance, pushed him into the pond, throwing
the grenade in after him.
The monster opened wide
and took both Jeremy
and the grenade into its mouth. The
grenade went off as Jeremy was screaming and bits of monster and Jeremy
splattered Justin’s face.
“Not my father.
Not my father. Not my father,”
Justin chanted quietly, staring at the pond.
After a bit, he knelt at
the pond’s edge and
dipped his hand in the water. He washed
some of the monster’s and Jeremy’s flesh off of his face. While
he knelt there, a much smaller version
of the monster floated up to him. They
both were motionless for a minute as if each was assessing the other.
Justin stood and backed
away from the pond and
the smaller monster sank slowly to the bottom.
Something had happened here
that was too much
for Justin to digest right then.
On an August Saturday the
following year, he
had an urge to go to the pond.
THE END
