The Cuckoo

Contributed by Rivka Jacobs on 28/05/09

The police officer did not look happy. He stood with his hands on his hips, his dark blue uniform wet under his arms. Across the street from the Marcum home the neighbors were congregated, heads bobbing, tongues clucking as they watched the drama.

David Marcum shook his head apologetically and said in the most humble way he could, “I am so sorry officer. He got out somehow. It won’t happen again.” Marcum walked carefully off his lawn, cooing and whistling to his grandmother’s pet rooster. “Cock Robin, stay boy, stay there.” Marcum stepped onto the weathered bricks of the old street just west of downtown Huntington and gently grasped the Phoenix rooster on both sides, carefully immobilizing the colorful wings. The rooster made a low, affectionate clucking noise as he was raised in the air.

The policeman eyed him impatiently as David, still holding the rooster, walked back up to the house, mounted the front porch steps, stopped, and turned around. Behind David, to his left, his grandmother Estelle Marcum sat on a porch swing that squeaked and creaked every time she moved it back and forth. Estelle’s eyes blazed and narrowed and the muscles of her body stiffened as she stared at the black and white HPD cruiser parked in the driveway. “It’s okay, Mamaw, you’re okay. He’s not talking about you,” David said over his left shoulder.

Officer Barker crossed his arms, shook his head again. “I’m sorry, David. But the Zoning Board and City Commission decided. You can have chickens as long as you keep the coop clean, and keep your backyard sanitary. But no roosters. I’m giving you one day to get rid of the rooster.”

Later that afternoon, David sat at the dented and chipped oak table in the small dining room and gazed out the window at the back yard. Tears of anger and frustration welled, and he pressed both eyes with the thumb and forefinger of one hand. When his vision cleared, he focused once more on his mamaw, out in the chicken pen. This was where she was most happy, where there were never any outbursts and violent acts. He had sectioned off a portion of the property behind the house, installed chicken-wire, and built an amazing two-storey coop, painted sky blue, Mamaw’s favorite color. The neighbors had not complained even when they acquired Cock Robin as a chick. He was a beauty — with long silky tail feathers and peppery plumage and a brilliant red comb. But once the rooster had reached sexual maturity, and had started to crow, that’s when the neighbors started their petition. Cock Robin’s crow sounded like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to David Marcum, but he understood how the other families felt.

In the evening, after feeding his grandmother her dinner — which he had to do carefully using only soft or liquid foods — David helped her prepare for bed. He managed to bury all the anger he’d felt earlier in a little pocket in his mind, sealed for future use. He turned off the overhead light in his grandmother’s room, leaving the blue glow of a nightlight, and sat in a rocking chair beside her bed. She was terrified of being alone, of being locked in again, so he sat with her every bedtime, rocking, talking about family, sharing neighborhood gossip, or community and state news.

At around ten, David Marcum returned to the kitchen to clean up. He sighed as he surveyed the interior of the small, brick home. There was almost nothing left that hadn’t been broken, scratched, colored with crayons or markers during one of his grandmother’s furies. All remaining dishes and cooking utensils were unbreakable. He pondered the reason she had never become enraged or acted out when she was feeding the chickens or walking among them. Probably because the only time she was happy was when she was a little girl taking care of the family chickens in the front yard of the coal camp house where they lived. Estelle’s father, David’s great-grandfather, Golden Anderson had owned some excellent farm and grazing land in Fayette County, when the coal companies discovered the huge bituminous reserves in the New River gorge and Fayette County plateau. Golden Anderson had refused to sign over his rights, his land, but in the end everything was stolen from him anyway. The Anderson family ended up in a coal camp town, working for the mining companies. That was in the early part of the 1900s.

David’s grandmother Estelle was born in 1922. As a girl, she was known as a beauty. Her flawless porcelain skin, her lovely, curly chestnut hair, her large blue eyes attracted attention. The men started calling on her when she was no more than thirteen, and she accepted Sid Marcum and married him when she was only fifteen years old. Sid was a coal miner, an acquiescent man who rarely said the word “no.” He had adored and pampered Estelle during their initial years together. After their marriage they moved to one of the Kaymoor mining camps, close to the C&O Railroad line and the New River. By the time Estelle was nineteen years old, she had given birth to three children, a boy and two daughters.

David once again tried to suppress the intense anger that rushed through him from head to toe. He felt feverish. His kitchen chores completed, he moved to the living room and sat in an old tattered recliner. One table lamp remained on, casting shadows over all the family pictures, many damaged now, dotting the battered walls. Prominently displayed was the square photo of Sid Marcum in his World War II uniform — he had served in the marines and fought in the Pacific theater, including Iwo Jima. Next to that old black and white print was a large oval frame surrounding the face of high-school graduate Solomon Marcum, Estelle’s youngest son and David’s father.

David listened for a moment to the sounds of his grandmother crying out in her sleep. She never woke up, and his father had taught him, never wake her up, because “the terrors would kill ‘er.” David’s father, Solomon, had bought this house in Huntington for his mother, some sixteen years before. It was a kind of triumph, a present for himself at least, if not for Estelle, for whom it probably came too late.

David gritted his teeth, tried not to get upset as he recalled the years and years of battles with the courts, the state department of health and human services, the medical establishment. His entire childhood had been devoted to freeing Mamaw Estelle from Weston State Hospital, and finding justice for the horrors that had been inflicted upon her.

He remembered that moment when finally, they — his father, mother, sister, and himself — had won her release. He remembered their joy, how they embraced each other and cried. David remembered how they despised Solomon’s brother and two sisters for not helping all those years.

David checked the clock; it was three in the morning. He sat back in the cracks of the chair, feeling the ridges of duct tape they’d used to try and patch it. His sister Kory would be back soon, maybe in time for breakfast. Kory was thirty-four years old, two years younger than himself. Like him, she had never married, and joined him in the particular care and protection of their grandmother when their parents were killed in an automobile accident in 2004.

Abruptly, Estelle’s voice rose on the air, piercing and clawing at the gloom, sending shivers into David’s soul, making his hair stand on end. “No, no, please don’t, please stop, please it hurts, it hurts so bad ….”

David gripped the chair arms, trying not to weep, feeling sick to his stomach, as he always did when he heard her dreams. Who even knew which degradation she was reliving, which despair and pain she was enduring all over again?

Some people defend coal towns, David thought. Some people think it was okay for a company to own people, to issue their own money, to pay for the law enforcement officers who patrolled the streets and ran their territory like fiefdoms. So much abuse, and so much corruption. Life in West Virginia was divided between those who were rich and the rest who were very, very poor. And the rich, the opportunists, who climbed to the top on the suffering of their former neighbors, remained at the top of the heap. Sid and Estelle were among the very poor.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, no one got to the recruiting office faster than Sid Marcum. He went off to war in 1942, leaving Estelle isolated from her family and alone. It was then that one of those bought-and-paid for officers of the law, a man named Randall Greene began following Estelle, knocking on her door, finding her in public places and pressing up against her, touching her in ways that made her eyes spit fire and one time, slap him in public. He was the law in their coal town, and there were no other police, no one else a person could call. There was no “911.”

One day in 1943, on a Sunday, when her children returned home from Sunday School, they found Estelle in her kitchen, lying on her stomach, her head turned to one side. She was naked except for her black church stockings rolled up past her knees. She was covered with bruises and blood, her beautiful face was unrecognizable. Blood flowed from under her, from “where peepee comes,” Solomon’s sister Annette had told him years later. Little Annette, no more than five at the time, had been the first to find her mother, and had gone running out the kitchen door calling for help, followed closely by her two toddler siblings.

Estelle of course survived, and she tried to tell the truth. She told them, Randall Greene raped her and beat her. She told the state police, the judge in Fayetteville, the New River Coal company men. When she came home from the hospital, still in pain, she told everyone she could. She called on their pastor and her congregation to witness that she was a good woman, that she had been wronged. But Randall Greene told a different story — that he had been seduced, that she was a wicked woman who deserved what she got. And then he told everyone in the town and the church, not to speak of it again. The company men told Estelle Marcum not to speak of it again. The judges and the state warned her, if she continued making these outrageous statements and awful accusations against an officer of the law, Randall Greene, she would be sent to the place crazy women are sent. Weston State Hospital. Estelle Marcum never stopped trying to tell the truth.

It was at Weston that she gave birth to Solomon, David’s father. By the time Sid Marcum returned from the war, the town had consolidated their story. Sid never visited Estelle in the asylum, but he did take the little baby — it took some effort to get custody and not let one of the nurses there sell Solomon for an adoption. Sid Marcum raised Solomon as his youngest son. He never remarried. He moved out of the coal town, took a job with the steel industry, and moved his children into a new suburban, middle-class life.

It was Annette who first told Solomon the truth about his beginnings. Once Solomon graduated high school, he began visiting his mother, and began his life-long fight to have her released. Every extra dime he made, and then most of the money he and his young wife collected, went to the legal fight. And over and over, they were met with the same old scores, the same old money, everything from outright bribery and corruption to scandalous indifference and incompetence. Meanwhile, Estelle endured years of cold water baths, electroshock, beatings and possible further sexual abuse. She had been diagnosed as “schizophrenic” and no one in Weston questioned it, finding in her every word or movement proof that she was schizophrenic. Estelle Marcum was given the first of the typical antipsychotics including Thorazine in the 1950s, and developed Parkinson’s-like symptoms. She was given Mellaril to the point she couldn’t sleep or keep still. She was switched to atypical antipsychotics in the 1980s, and conditions improved a little bit.

All the while Solomon, his wife, and now his two children, relentlessly, obsessively, worked for her release. Finally, as plans were being made to close the old Weston complex and build a new facility, Estelle Marcum was discharged into the care of her son and his family.

David Marcum realized he had dozed off. He awoke at the sound of a car in the driveway and Cock Robin giving forth his arak-rak-rak-roooo. He noted his watch. It was almost seven a.m., and his sister Kory was back! He rose from his chair stiffly, stretched. He tiptoed down the hall to Mamaw’s room and peeked through the crack of her open door; she was sleeping face up, her features relaxed. No bad dreams at dawn.

Kory came in through the carport door, and stopped in the laundry room. David heard her lift the lid of the washer, heard her open a cabinet and then listened as the lid of the trash can flew up and plunked shut. He waited, knowing she was changing clothes. Finally Kory emerged, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, and sauntered into the kitchen. David went to her, kissed her on the cheek. Then they hugged. “Did everything go okay? Do you want some breakfast?” he asked.

She nodded. “Breakfast would be nice. Our own eggs, too! And no, there were no problems.These are the easier jobs, dontcha you think? I think it’s harder when we teach someone a lesson; it takes more thought and planning.” She glanced pensively towards the hallway leading to the bedrooms. “How’s Mamaw?”

“She had a bad night, but she’s very peaceful now.” He smiled, knowing Kory was thinking what he was thinking.

“Yeah, it’s like Mamaw knows when we take care of a piece of business. It’s like a little more darkness is lifted from her,” Kory said with a wistful tone. “You’ll take care of the trash as usual.”

David nodded. Kory took care of the laundering — getting out blood stains was difficult. She was good at it. He was responsible for disposing of anything else that needed to disappear. They took turns delivering justice. David was so happy Kory was back, in any case. He needed to talk to her about the police and Cock Robin situation.

Kory padded on bare feet to the kitchen window that also looked out on the backyard chicken pen, and smiled as she saw their array of Bantam and Phoenix hens high-stepping around Cock Robin, who lifted his silver shanks and claws with dignity, flashing his spurs. “I’ll go get Mamaw up and get her a bath, ” Kory said cheerfully. “You fix that breakfast!