Page 36 - WTPO Vol. VII #5

Helen Gaffney and her father, Francis, lived with their old dog, Albert, in a dilapidated two- bedroom wretchedly colored house, beside a foul smelling, recently condemned church. Helen Gaffney was twelve years old and her father had just last week turned forty-nine. Due to the recent discovery of
the unfavorable acts of the preacher of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church, the archaic structure had lost all but the most inattentive members of its heartbroken congregation, two months prior to it being registered by town authorities as a condemned public building.
The preacher at the Mt. Olive Baptist Church was a dashingly handsome one-eyed black man with beauti- ful skin that in the hot summer months shone like polished coal. He had come up from southern backwa- ter towns, bringing along a furtive appetite for whisky and sodomy and a lifelong talent for misappropriating donations given by all but the poorest members of
his many congregations. The irony that his devilish chickens should finally come home to roost in a town he fell upon by mere chance, a town he did not like at all, had yet to dawn upon this one-eyed lover of god, money, and black-and-white asses alike (regardless of gender). Once his truer nature was exhumed, he was quick to hightail it south again, leaving “his” church (an old and ugly building even before his arrival),
to buckle beneath a scourge of roach and rodent infestation and widespread mold, viewed equally as signs of God’s wrath by many of its infuriated former members (though on a curious side note, more than
a handful of the female congregation, unaware of the preacher’s penchant for gladly occupying any prof- fered “backdoor entrance,” were more incensed at
his having left them to settle again for their spouses’ sexual ineptitudes than they were with the one-eyed preacher’s fiscal offenses. Little did they know that
a few of their “inept” husbands had too felt the great girth and thrust of the preacher’s mighty sword, while sweat and whisky splashed their flabby rear ends, and bizarre and most unholy incantations came pouring into their ears from the preacher’s wide and hungry mouth).
Near to this condemned church (with many a story of its own), was the Gaffney house, a peculiar thing in
its own right. It was well known to both Helen and her father that some of the locals had a proclivity for occasionally driving past their odd little home, their cars full of drunken out-of-town relatives or friends, all gawking at the strange little edifice like mindless
cattle with their broad bony heads stuck between the slats of a fence.
Helen was not offended by the notoriety of her home, for as an emotionally unscarred and relatively in- nocent twelve-year-old girl, she had yet to concede
to the harsh fact that her home was unquestionably an eyesore. To young Helen Gaffney, her home was just that, her home, and she was thankful to have it and share it with her father. And for now, that was
all there was to it. Yes, she was aware that it looked nothing like the old ornate mansions that sat like fallen monoliths all about the vastness of Spring
Leaf Park, and that it held not one thing in common (beyond being called a “home”) with any of the newly erected super-sized structures, all colored like fresh corpses (to Helen’s imaginative mind), that covered two-thirds of the south side of Maple Hill. But it was, above all other things, her home, a place filled with emotional warmth, and mostly pleasant memories.
As for Francis, being often lonely, and a bit of a narcis- sist at times, he all but basked in the attention their home received. When he wasn’t pulling down ten- hour shifts as a welder (both mig and tig) for Crawley Steel, one of the largest employers in town, he was rehearsing and playing bass guitar for Virgin Blood Loss, an awkwardly mature and overly self-aware thrash metal band that played for drinks every other Friday night at the Keg and Spark Bar and Grill.
What made the Gaffney home a thing of local renown was a combination of both color, a sickly baby boy blue, and physical structure. Much like an obese and inactive woman nearing her twilight years, the house sagged in all the wrong places, looking as though
it had been hastily poured into being, or dropped, rather than carefully constructed from the ground up. Each door and window sat twisted in its shoddy and peeling frames. The patchy roof rose and fell in undu- lations from one end to the other like an unmade bed. It was a house fashioned from grotesquely colored dough, built by a bored and petulant child.
During wet days, the front door jammed firmly against its frame and Helen and Francis would enter and exit their home through the living room window, which would be propped open during the heaviest downpours, a thick sheet of industrial plastic hang- ing down inside the house like a protective veil. The chimney stack, which seemed to lose bricks with frightening regularity, led down to a blocked flue,
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The Blue House
f. X. JaMeS