When he finally shared his story with me, late one night when neither of us could sleep, I was in awe of him because of how he had coped with a horror that I could not imagine being able to endure. And I knew it was all true, because it had been a media sensation the previous year.
Corbett Ormond, Litton’s father, was a wife beater. In May of the year that Litton turned eight, his mother, Roxanne, left his father, filed for divorce, and moved in with her parents, Mark and Laura Rollins.
Although Corbett never contested the divorce, made no threats against his wife, even granted her sole custody of their son as if the issue meant nothing to him, he was furious. Hot-tempered and vengeful, he was also patient and cunning. For six months he had no contact with his ex-wife or his son, so that they came to feel safe. On Thanksgiving Day, when Roxanne and her brother and her sister and their children gathered at the Rollins’ home for the annual feast, Corbett came calling. He shot and killed seven adults and four children, sparing only Litton.
Instead of taking the boy with him, he forced him to stand at the center of the slaughter and said, “This happened because of you, Litton. When you chose her over me, you killed them all. Now live with it, boy.” We know this because Corbett left a video—an angry, rambling statement so chilling that the news media reached a new level of depravity in the exploitation of what they insisted on referring to as his “manifesto,” which wasn’t a manifesto by any definition, but only an insane rant.
Litton called the police.
Because Corbett remained a fugitive and inspired fear, Child Welfare found it impossible to place Litton in any foster family longer than a few weeks. For months he was cycled from home to home, until he came to the orphanage, hidden under a new name.
He told me his story just that one time. By mutual unspoken agreement, we never returned to the subject. I remember how he sounded in the telling: his voice colored neither by fear nor by grief, neither by anger nor bitterness, but hushed and reverent, much like the subdued and chastened tone the sisters took when speaking of the mysteries of the Passion or the rosary.
I often puzzled over why he trusted only me of all the kids at the orphanage. Considering where my life has taken me since then, I wonder if he intuited that I was destined to deal violently with those violent souls who would bear away all our peace and hope.
Some nights he cried in his sleep. When awake, he never wept over his losses or about what he had seen. However, his dreams wrung tears from him, as well as pitiable sounds of fear and grief.
Before he became my roommate, I had a night-light, for I used to think that something sought me as I slept, but that it could harm me only in the dark. By that dim glow, I often moved a chair beside Litton’s bed when he suffered his worst dreams and watched over him. I found that if I spoke to him in the softest of whispers, I could reach him without waking him, and gentle him out of a nightmare into peaceful sleep.
Meanwhile, Corbett Ormond had shaved his head and grown a beard and gone off the grid, living under another name, dealing drugs. He made a new life for himself but couldn’t make a new man of himself. He didn’t use the drugs he sold, for the only drugs that got him high were anger and resentment. The police never learned how Corbett discovered where his son had been given refuge.
Mater Misericordi? stood at one end of the block, Bellini’s Italian Specialties at the other end. We children received modest allowances and were permitted to buy candy, cookies, or other treats at Bellini’s, as long as one of the sisters accompanied us.
On the day that it happened, Sister Margaret took four kids to Bellini’s. I am grateful I wasn’t one of them, but Litton was among the four. Later we assumed Corbett had been running surveillance of the orphanage, because he followed them into the store.
As the kids were at the checkout counter with small bags of their favorite cookies, Corbett approached and asked, “Who did the bitch, your mother, sleep with behind my back?” As twelve-year-old Litton turned toward his father, Corbett said, “You don’t look anything like me,” and shot the boy dead.
Corbett turned the gun on Sister Margaret, a freckled redhead as sweet as she was shy, young and devout and quiet, as helpless in those circumstances as a lame kitten in the path of a high-speed train. Michael Bellini, son of the owner, was behind the counter, where they kept a gun to defend against robbery. He was quicker with his first shot than Corbett was with his second; he put an end to the murderer before Sister Margaret could become yet another victim.
A profound spiritual darkness settled on Mater Misericordi?, and everyone within its walls was traumatized. Hearts and minds heal with time, which is a grace of the human condition. Mine healed more slowly than others, and in fact for the first time I, the happiest of children, slipped into depression. I could not understand why such evil could befall a gentle boy like Litton, why the world was shapen to allow it. I was despondent, beyond the present exercise of hope, sad and distressed.