Mytholmroyd

Mytholmroyd Madeline Kearin (bio) Mytholmroyd The way my father recounted it, he was on the train from Boston to Ontario when he saw the headline. SLAYS WIFE AND BABES. Farmer near Mytholmroyd kills family with hammer—then cuts his own throat. He felt his heart quicken, needling his ribs. It was unusual enough to see his hometown mentioned in a national newspaper; it was a small, obscure town on the banks of the Ottowa River, just a sparse grid of shops, one church, and a town hall circled by a dense belt of farmland. But nothing had ever happened in Mytholmroyd that was worse than the failure of a season's crop or the death of a prized cow. The only real crime he had ever heard of—the only crime for which anyone had been arrested, in his memory—was when Andrew MacDuff and John Watson had gotten into a fistfight over the matter of the former's pigs destroying the latter's vegetable garden. Though my father had not lived there for almost a decade, he still knew the face of every person who lived in Mytholmroyd. He looked for the name and found it. Then he closed the newspaper and folded it in his lap. For a few minutes he watched the steel gray waters of Lake Erie murmur by his window while the blood drained from his head. The man in the seat opposite wasn't looking at him, but my father feared that if he did, he would be able to discern the truth in his quickly whitening face. But surely he hadn't read the name correctly. One glance would prove his perception wrong and quiet the storm that was pitching the ocean in his stomach. He slowly peeled open the newspaper, as though he thought a snake might be coiled between its leaves. Once again, he saw the name of his older brother, Charles Forsythe Munro, but this time, other words surfaced alongside it, hazy and out of sequence, with the name, his own name, punctuating them in a continuous, sickening refrain. Beaten with a hammer. Highly respected farmer. His little daughters of two and five years. Murdered in their sleep. His wife [End Page 63] Florence. Discovered by the hired man. Slit his throat from ear to ear. His wife found unconscious but still breathing. Heads crushed to a pulp. My father's mind reeled back to the last time he had seen his brother. Charlie's eyes had been lidded with grief as his family packed their belongings into a cart bound for the train station. The two brothers had come to Providence five years earlier, Charlie with his new wife, Florence, a wiry young woman with a frizzy halo of flax-blonde hair, and Alistair, alone. My father was young and inexperienced, and he envied the way the two of them looked at each other, with the same tight-lipped, knowing smile, like they shared a delicious secret. While my father toiled endlessly as an apprentice to a tinsmith, Charlie had risen quickly to become the manager of the Marsden Perry farm, and he and Florence and soon their two children lived in a small but elegant white house on the property. Charlie loved his girls. My father never wanted children of his own, but he couldn't help feeling a small pinch of envy whenever his brother held Hattie or Clara in his arms, with that look on his face like he had never touched anything so rare or precious. Charlie hadn't wanted to leave; it was his father-in-law, the reeve of Lochwinnoch, who demanded it. He wanted to know his grandchildren before he died, and he didn't like the idea of them growing up so close to the city, right on the train line, with its noxious influences channeled directly to their door. Charlie might have been able to resist the old man's orders if it weren't for Florence, whose gut was still hollowed out with homesickness for Mytholmroyd. She had lost weight over the years, and the births of each of the children seemed to pare another layer of flesh from...

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