Subj:	A Son of Trinity
Date:	96-06-20 23:59:10 EDT
From:	srgrimm@teleport.com (Sister Grimm)
Sender: owner-ag-fanfic@stargame.org
To:	ag-fanfic@stargame.org

(My apologies to those who took me up on an earlier offer on 
the agothic list and e-mailed me for a copy of this little tale.  Now 
that we have the fanfic list, I thought it might be time to trot this 
sad history out again for the new list members.
        --Sister Grimm)


        There have been Bucks in Fulton County nearly as long as 
there has been a Fulton County, and they have mostly benefited 
from the weakness and misery of others.  None profited so 
handsomely, though, as Andrew Buck, Sheriff Lucas Buck's 
grandfather.  Choosing enlistment in the War To End All Wars 
over a jail term for "accidentally" burning down a delinquent 
sharecropper's shack on papa Esau Buck's land, Andrew 
distinguished himself in the black market, selling medical supplies 
and ammunition to the highest bidder, and worthless documents 
for safe passage through enemy lines. 
	After the armistice, Andrew Buck was met at the train 
station in Charleston not as returning heroes were, by a brass 
band and cheering crowds, but by a land agent with the deed to 
the biggest house in Trinity and an elderly nun accompanying his 
bride-to-be.
	Eileen Hanrahan was a convent-bred orphan from Ireland, 
a beauty hand-picked by the Mother Superior for marriage to the 
wealthy young American in exchange for a generous donation to 
the order.  She waited for his return, at his expense, at an 
exclusive Boston finishing school for young ladies.  The Archbishop 
of Charleston married them himself, in a hushed and hurried 
ceremony in the church nave.  The nervous bride and curiously 
impassive groom left immediately for their new home and new life 
together.
	Andrew bought the house completely furnished in the fussy, 
elaborate Victorian style of the elderly widow who had perished 
of apoplexy in one of its rooms.  School taught Eileen how to run 
a large household in the traditional Southern manner, from hiring 
servants to planning charity galas and balls, but6 Andrew allowed 
her to do neither.  Word spread that the newlyweds deemed 
neither the citizens nor servants of Trinity good enough to call on 
them or work for them.
	Harder still was understanding what Andrew wanted of 
her. Though she tried to be a dutiful and obedient wife to him, 
he was vicious and cruel when she displeased him.  Eileen had 
shown considerable talent for the piano in the convent, and loved 
to lose herself in the music, but after hearing her play a few hymns 
on the elaborate  piano in the parlor, Andrew tore out all the wires. 
He never approached her bed unless deep in the throes of drink, 
and when she tried to hide her terror and pain from him, it 
seemed to inflame him all the more.
	When the doctor told her, in her first year of marriage, 
she was to be a mother, she thought her prayers answered. 
Andrew declared her condition physically repugnant to him, and 
all but moved from the house, spending his time in saloons and 
bordellos while stockpiling and controlling vast amounts of 
something farmers desperately needed to keep the encroaching 
boll weevil hordes from their vast cotton fields.  Andrew hired a 
young Creole woman, Estella, to cook and clean when Eileen 
took to her bed to rest for the baby's arrival.  Estella was pretty, 
but aloof, and her cooking seemed to make Eileen very ill,  for 
which she constantly apologized as she mopped Eileen's pale, 
damp face with a rosewater-scented cloth and stoically held the 
basin for Eileen to be sick.
	When Estella finally brought the doctor to Eileen's 
birthing bed, he stared with dismay at the bedraggled waif who 
peered hollow-eyed at him from behind her swollen belly.  The 
weakened woman's labor was a long and dangerous one for both 
mother and child, but nothing could persuade Andrew to leave off 
his drinking and carousing until assured his offspring was male. 
Ignoring his ashen-faced wife, he snatched the infant from 
Estella's hands, pulled down his swaddling clothes, and after 
examining the newborn's privates and declaring him  "a true 
Buck," named his son Charles.	
        Andrew dismissed Estella and personally escorted her 
back to New Orleans, leaving an exhausted Eileen to look after 
herself and her new baby as best she could until he returned.
	In his mother's arms, young Charles soon blossomed 
from a feeble, sickly infant to a thriving, alert baby who cried 
only at Andrew's infrequent approach.  Eileen regained her 
strength, finding new purpose in caring for her son, and though 
she tried to involve her husband with Charlies' development, he 
seemed indifferent.  Servants came and went at Andrew's
direction, but Eileen's health improved steadily until Andrew 
noted that Charles was no longer nursing.  Shortly after, her 
stomach cramps returned and Andrew would firmly, though 
dispassionately, pry Charlie from her agonized grasp and take 
him to the nursery.  He would return from the kitchen with a 
bowl of nourishing chowder or broth for her, and she would 
praise his kindness as she fought to keep the food down until 
he left,  when her stomach ultimately rebelled against it.
	Charles grew fat and precocious, and his daddy began to 
win him over in his own restrained manner.  Charles saw the 
deference farmers and shop owners in Trinity showed his papa, 
and the fear in their faces when he didn't get what he'd come for. 
Eileen and Charles both noticed that the more time Charlie spent 
with his father, the better Eileen's health became.  Though she wept
bitterly for it, she had no choice but to watch as her dear little 
Charlie drifted farther away from her down some strange, dark 
stream with his father.
	It was in this way, by absenting herself from his life, that 
Eileen lived to see Charlie's 13th birthday.  His curiosity about this 
ghostly woman who said she loved him but shrank from his touch 
and avoided his presence was tempered by his disdain for the 
way she allowed his father to treat her. The strange cries Charlie 
heard from the maid's bedroom were no longer mysterious when
Andrew encouraged him to watch through the half-opened door.  
He looked on solemnly as Andrew sprinkled a white powder,
"medicine" he called it, onto his mother's food twice a week, which 
seemed to make Mommy a little sicker each time.
	Charlie was not a good scholar, but no one in the Trinity 
expected much from him, since his father's shrewd dealings 
ensured his future.  One thing he learned about most unexpectedly 
in school was the miracle that had almost single- handedly saved 
the South's cotton crop, the one that had lined his father's pockets 
so handsomely.  South Carolina owed a lot to what they called  
Paris Green,  known by chemists as arsenic.  If only the farmers 
had known from the start how sick it could make the people who 
handled it, the teacher lectured, the war against the boll weevil 
would have been fought with nary a life lost.
	When Andrew came home that night, he found Charlie 
sitting beside his mother's bed, stroking her long, blonde hair 
and holding her frail, trembling hand.  Barely thirty years old, she 
was worn out by the poison, and the struggle to live without love 
and her son.  Charlie angrily confronted Andrew with his 
suspicions as his mother lay in agony on her delicate lace sheets.
Andrew asked what Charlie intended to do about these mad 
accusations. When Charlie put on his coat and said he was 
going to fetch the doctor and sheriff, Andrew smiled coldly at 
him and beat him senseless. 
	A pitcher of cold water doused him some hours later. 
Charlie sat up to find himself lying naked on the floor, struggling 
to keep from whimpering with pain.  Deputy Patterson threw a 
robe at him, urging he cover himself.  Doc Richardson stood at 
Eileen Buck's bed, calling for the ambulance. In the hallway, he 
heard a strange noise.  It was his father, talking to the sheriff 
between violent sobs.
	"I came home early, and when I called out, no one 
answered.  My wife's been an invalid for years, so I was worried. 
I came right up here, and found him . . .them .   I pulled him off, 
but  I couldn't stop myself from hitting him, again and again.  
His own mother!"  Deputy Patterson jerked Charlie roughly to 
his feet, clumsily wrapping the robe around him and tying it with 
the sash before pulling his hands behind him and fastening the 
handcuffs.  Charlie twisted his head to see his mother, one last 
time.  He wished he hadn't.
	The lacy bedclothes were stripped from the bed.  His 
mother's cotton nightdress was torn from its high neck to where 
it bunched above her hips.  Blood-filled bite marks dotted her 
exposed breasts, and a thin glaze of blood and semen clung to 
the insides of her thighs.  Doc Richardson gingerly held out a s
tained, crumpled pillow to the sheriff, guessing aloud that Charlie
used it to keep his mother from crying out,  nearly suffocating her 
in the process.
	"No!" Charlie screamed.  "It wasn't me!  I didn't do it!"
	"Your father caught you in the act, boy." Patterson 
growled as he dragged Charlie out of the room, past his 
devastated father.  "You're in a world of trouble now, you little shit."
	From the back of the sheriff's car, he saw the ambulance 
pull up and the attendants lift his mother's frail, comatose body 
into the back before moving slowly down the drive;no sirens, no 
lights.
	In the years that followed, Charlie attained a fine 
understanding of what it meant to have influence and money in 
Fulton County, South Carolina.  Andrew Buck prevailed upon 
Doc Richardson, for a generous consideration, to put his wife in 
a private sanitarium as Jane Doe for the rest of her brain-damaged
life, where she could be looked after away from any reminder of 
her monstrous offspring.
	For an additional sum, the sheriff and Deputy Patterson 
were persuaded that Andrew's son needed discipline, not punishment.  
Admiring the restraint with which he declined to send the boy to 
prison, they transported Charlie to a brutally strict military academy 
of some notoriety, and left him to receive an education at the hands 
of the most corrupt and brutal men in the country.
	He left the academy just short of completing what he 
considered to be his sentence.  He won an early release, not for 
good behavior, which he surely could not have claimed, but 
because of his father's death.
	He was lying on his bunk when the Commandant came 
to give him the news.  His father had been hunting with friends in 
a patch of swamp when a huge, black crow swooped down and 
pecked at his prize bloodhound.  He tried to shoo the bird away, 
and when it turned on him he swatted at it with the butt of his 
shotgun.  The damned thing went off in mid-arc, blowing away
 half his head.  Pete Patterson, now the Fulton County sheriff, 
said the only crow his investigation found was an empty bottle of 
Old Crow, and declared the death a tragic hunting party accident. 
The Commandant looked carefully at the boy during his account, 
but while Charlie didn't betray any sorrow or pleasure, he also 
showed no surprise.
	Charlie made it home for the funeral.  Before the 
undertaker removed the casket to the graveside, Charlie made him 
open it up again, so he could whisper his farewell into the corpse's 
remaining ear.
	Legend has it that he said "I'll see you again in Hell, 
Daddy."


Sr. Revilia Grimm, president
Chapel of the West Academy of Divine Sciences
and Auto Upholstery