Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Lizabeta wanted to protest. John Henry, who lived with them, who loved them, a birth accident! She hoped that, outside with the chickens, John Henry couldn’t have overheard such a terrible remark.

  Dorothy said smugly, “You don’t know, Lizzie. You’d have to be the mother to know.”

  The twist of Dorothy’s lips as she uttered the name Lizzie, you could see that she found it faintly comical.

  Sometimes, goaded by her sister-in-law’s stiff silence, Dorothy began to speak freely, carelessly. Her coarse face became enlivened. She gave off an odor of yeasty female flesh, something harshly antiseptic beneath. She moved her hands about, gesturing, her hands that resembled her son’s: large, broad, with long spatulate fingers. Her eyes, like John Henry’s, were pale blue, and inclined to water. Except Dorothy’s eyes darted about with malicious curiosity while John Henry’s eyes were eager, yearning, hopeful. Where John Henry quivered like a puppy wanting only to be liked and petted, Dorothy quivered with disdain and a wish not to be touched. As a hospital worker, she’d seen too many “nasty”—“damned nasty”—things. She told Lizabeta frankly that she’d long ago lost her “respect” for suffering. She’d come to a place where you start to blame people for their damned bad luck. Sick, dying, miserable people were Dorothy Chrisman’s work; she laughed, saying you’d have to pay her to give a damn about them. When she’d first begun working at Sparta General, a girl of nineteen who’d never seen anyone die, she’d been brimming over with sympathy, but now she had to bite her tongue not to come out with “So? So what? What’d you expect from life? Open your eyes.”

  Lizabeta laughed nervously, wanting to think that her sister-in-law was joking.

  “Every day of my life I thank God that Walter took John Henry in. Else John Henry would be in some state home behind bars. I couldn’t keep him. You see John Henry now, he’s calmed down some—Walter works him like a horse out here, so John Henry can’t get so restless and excitable, the way he was growing up. Not just his brain but his thyroid had some defect. He’d never sleep through a night, not once. Wandering the house at night talking to angels, and outside in the street and in neighbors’ yards in any weather so they’d call the police. More times than I could count, John Henry was beat up bad. Scars on his face, you’ve seen them—damn lucky his eye didn’t get put out, kids kicking him. He wouldn’t be toilet-trained till he was seven or eight. Wouldn’t talk until he was six, and then he wouldn’t shut up. See, John Henry was born after a long labor. Twenty hours and I was awake for all of it. Trying to get that damn baby out of me, I was screaming and sweating like a hog. It was a forceps delivery—his head got squeezed. There’s a kind of dent in his head, like at the side, here, where the bone is soft. John Henry will always be the mental age he is, he won’t grow up. Don’t let him get into that rocking he does, back and forth, side to side, when he’s excited. He can stop himself if he tries. Don’t let him pick at his nose, or stick his fingers in his ears or where he shouldn’t be sticking them, or scratching, or, you know,” Dorothy said, with a look of distaste, “touching himself. John Henry has been trained about dirty habits—he knows better. His father was the one to discipline him, before he walked out. John Henry is trained. He knows not to touch other children, not ever.” Dorothy paused. Her words suggested that she thought of John Henry as a child, not a fully mature young man in his twenties, who towered over her. “What he does in private is his own business. You can’t stop some things. Dirty habits, it’s how boys are. Like even a trained dog will do what it wants to do if it thinks its master isn’t watching.”

  Dorothy, a chain smoker, ground out one of her Chesterfields in a saucer. Lizabeta shuddered, thinking, She is trying to befriend me. She thinks that I am as cruel as she is.

  When Dorothy left that morning, Lizabeta stood stiffly in the doorway and made no move to embrace her. John Henry, waiting outside, tried to hug her and was repelled, and trotted after Walter’s pickup the full length of the long driveway, waving his arms and crying plaintively, “Bye-bye, Mama! Bye-bye, Mama!” until the pickup turned into Braam Road and disappeared from view.

  This was the last visit of Dorothy Chrisman to the Braam farm in the Rapids, in early September 1951.

  If he’d never come to live with us. If there might have been some other way.

  “He’s here now. He will be living with us now.”

  In this way, Walter brought John Henry into their lives. The tall, gangling, shaved-headed boy with his eager smile, eager frightened eyes, gripping an overstuffed, badly worn duffel bag against his chest, ushered into the kitchen by Walter.

  “My sister’s son, John Henry. He’s come to help out on the farm and around the house. He can have the room behind the kitchen.” Walter paused, seeing the look in Lizabeta’s face of shock, incomprehension. Yet he did not acknowledge the look, for this wasn’t Walter Braam’s way. Calmly he supplied Lizabeta’s name to John Henry, enunciating his words. “John Henry, this is my wife, Lizabeta. Your aunt.”

  Quickly John Henry nodded his strange shaved head, which seemed too small for his body, as if to suggest that this was a fact he knew: “Liz’beta. Aunt.”

  Walter corrected him: “Aunt Lizabeta. You will say Aunt Lizabeta.’”

  “Aunt Liz’beta.”

  John Henry’s voice was as high-pitched as a boy’s. His watery blue eyes were fixed not on Lizabeta’s stained smile but somewhere lower, her heavy breasts or her hard, swelling belly, which was partly hidden by a ratty cardigan sweater.

  At this time Lizabeta was six months pregnant with their second child, and the pregnancy was a difficult one. She moved about dazed and dizzy, and her legs (of which, in her shy way, she’d been sometimes vain) were popping ugly varicose veins; soon she’d be wearing flesh-colored support hose like the older Braam women. Yet she managed to stammer, “John Henry. Why, hello.”

  Lizabeta’s smile could not have been more forced, pained. She could feel the rosy smudged birthmark on her cheek throbbing with blood. She was thinking that the room behind the kitchen was mostly a storage room, poorly heated, that contained a ruin of an old iron bedstead and a terribly stained mattress upon which Lizabeta’s elderly father-in-law was said to have died years before; she would have to prepare it for John Henry, at least minimally, but when? Walter would want supper shortly. He’d spoken to Lizabeta matter-of-factly, but his tone suggested You will accept this. You will not question me.

  At this time, in March 1948, John Henry was twenty years old but looked both younger and older. His face was boyish and yet nicked, scarred, singed-looking, like the face of a mistreated doll; his arms and legs were long and spindly, not yet filled out with muscle; he was Walter’s height but slouched his shoulders to make himself smaller, less obtrusive. His hands were unusually large, paddle-hands, with long fingers and broken nails edged with grime. Lizabeta saw with alarm that John Henry appeared to be covered in a film of grime: the webs of skin between his fingers were shadowed with grime; grime in creases on his neck, the bony knobs of his wrists. His baggy overalls were stiff with grime. On his badly scuffed workboots were what looked like tar stains. He smelled of his young male body, eager and rancid. Lizabeta fought a sensation of faintness, thinking, Another. I’m not strong enough.

  She would be, though. She had no choice.

  • • •

  “Is he—what you’d call mentally retarded?”

  That night, upstairs in their bedroom, undressing for bed, Lizabeta dared to ask Walter this question. Walter responded with a vague annoyed grunt, neither no nor yes but a signal that he wasn’t in a mood to answer her questions. Lizabeta persisted. “He isn’t dangerous, is he? He can be trusted around children?” In her flannel nightgown, she stood barefoot with her weight on her heels; the small of her back ached from the weight of the hard, swelling belly like a melon jutting out before her, which exuded a pulsing heat. Walter stood on the other side of the bed, his back to Lizabeta, pulling off his white foreman’s shirt, pulling off his undershi
rt, letting the soiled clothes fall. Trousers Walter took care to lay across the back of a chair. His shoes were usually placed side by side in front of the chair, where he would sit in the morning to put them on.

  It was Walter Braam’s habit to undress in this way, distractedly, as if lost in thought and unaware of what he did, in full confidence that, as the previous, saintly wife, Esther, must have done, his newer wife, Lizabeta, would pick up after him, shirts and undershirts, shorts and socks, pajamas. It was what a woman did, what Braam women did, one of the easy tasks among others not so easy. Lizabeta said in a breathy rush of words, as if her anxiety might be alleviated by such information, “He—John Henry—seems very . . . kind. He’s shy with us, but he made friends with Agnes right away. She was laughing so at him! So I think—I hope . . .”Lizabeta’s voice trailed off tentatively. Walter hadn’t answered her, but Walter was listening, Lizabeta knew. It was true that at supper, though John Henry had been clumsy and self-conscious with the adults, he’d whispered and laughed with Agnes as if the two were old friends. It was clear that Agnes adored her strange shaved-headed cousin from Sparta, who, as Agnes’s father had told her in his terse way, had “come to live with us” now.

  Barefoot and flat-footed, slightly short of breath, Lizabeta observed her silent husband across their bed: the man’s broad, muscled, faintly scarred back, which was very pale and going to fat at the waist; his dark, thick-tufted hair, which was nonetheless thinning at the crown of his head. Walter was forty-three years old and had a foreman’s air of authority. In the Braam household, as at the Sparta quarry, it was rare for him to be questioned. Lizabeta loved him, and was fearful of him. You did not love a man who didn’t inspire fear, though you might fear a man—many men—whom you did not love. Walter was unpredictable in his moods. He was known to be a generous man, and yet he was quick-tempered, he could be cruel. As a father, he was a strict disciplinarian; his sons respected him, resented him, and seemed, Lizabeta thought, to love him, though not wildly, as their little half-sister, Agnes, loved him. He never went to church yet could not abide anyone speaking disparagingly of God, religion, as he could not abide profanity in the household and yet, when he became angry, he lashed out with the most obscene words Lizabeta had ever heard, which frightened her, suggesting such violent disgust with the human body and with sex, which meant, as a wife must acknowledge, with her. Through the Rapids, Walter Braam was admired as a loyal friend and neighbor, one who leased acres of farmland to other, poorer farmers for modest fees, yet Walter never forgave an enemy and maintained feuds with other men for decades; his “oldest enemy,” as Walter called him, had been in Walter’s eighth-grade class at the Rapids school, at the time Walter had dropped out of school to work on his father’s farm. Lizabeta had the idea that he disapproved of his sister Dorothy, yet how readily he’d taken in Dorothy’s castoff son, John Henry. Lizabeta thought, He is a good man—he can be strong enough for both of us.

  Lizabeta had fallen in love with Walter Braam within minutes of his having noticed her: he’d smiled at her, not greedily or mockingly but in a kindly way, and called her Lizabeta. How beautiful this name sounded in Walter Braam’s mouth! While in the mouths of other men the name had sounded clumsy, foolish. Lizabeta had worked in a Sparta rooming house as a chambermaid, but she’d also worked in an adjoining tavern from time to time, and men who noticed her, who approached and spoke to her, hadn’t always been kind. Men who’d touched her, put their hands on her, bought her drinks, told her how “good-looking” she was—how “sexy, like Jane Russell”—and laughed at her, hurt her and zipped up their trousers afterward and walked away whistling. Sometimes the men had left tips for her, sometimes not. Sometimes they were friends of the man who owned the rooming house and the tavern, and sometimes not. Then there was Walter Braam, who left tips for Lizabeta out of kindness. Asking her full name, which was Lizabeta Torvich, which no one knew, or cared to know. A widower, Walter Braam. An older man with nearly grown sons and farm property out in the Rapids who worked in town, as foreman at the stone quarry. God, let this man love me. God, let him want me. God, I will be a good person all the days of my life, God, have mercy on me. Lizabeta had not ever known why Walter Braam had singled her out for his attention, still less why, soon afterward, he’d asked her to marry him; years later, after Lizabeta had had their first child, Agnes, while Lizabeta was pregnant with their second child, she would not have been astonished if he’d decided abruptly that he didn’t want to be married to her any longer and told her to go away. (But would Lizabeta be allowed to take Agnes with her? Or would Walter insist upon keeping his daughter? In her fantasy of self-abasement, Lizabeta hadn’t fully worked out the plot of this cruel fairy tale.) For the house on Braam Road was elderly Mrs. Braam’s house, after all, which Walter would inherit when his mother died.

  Lizabeta had come around the bed to touch Walter now, to hesitantly stroke his bare, muscled arm as you might stroke the neck, the rippling sides, of a horse, to placate the horse, that his terrible bulk and strength would not turn against you. She’d annoyed him, she knew, by her questions. For there was the implication in such questions that Walter Braam might have acted rashly and without regard for his family, which could not be so. For Walter Braam cared passionately about his family, and his manhood was bound up with this care and his pride in himself as the protector of his family, Lizabeta knew, or should have known; yet her concern for Agnes and for the baby to be born—yes, and her concern for herself: It is yourself you are thinking of, John Henry’s eyes on you—had caused her to speak impulsively, recklessly. And so Lizabeta would placate her husband now, stroking his arm, laying the side of her head against his shoulder, just lightly, as might a child who has roused a parent to anger half purposefully, to be forgiven. Lizabeta’s milk-heavy breasts swung loose inside the flannel nightgown; she’d seen with a fascinated repulsion how swollen they’d become, how the once tight, taut little flesh-colored nipples had turned brown and widened to the size of half-dollars, and the skin of her distended belly was a strange waxy white, stretched tight as the skin of a drum, and her pubic hair seemed to have become drier, and scratchier, and the soft marble-white flesh of her thighs, which had grown heavier, rubbed together now in a damp slapping way that was perversely arousing and left her short of breath. In these early years of their life together, the sexual feeling was still strong between them, despite Lizabeta’s pregnancies, but now Walter stiffened and pushed her away without looking at her, saying another time, for the final time, “John Henry is living with us now.”

  And so it was, and would be.

  3.

  He worked.

  Eager to work as a work dog, restless and uneasy and doubtful of being loved when not working, saying, “What d’you want done?” in his anxious high-pitched voice.

  “Aunt Liz’beta? Ma’am? What d’you want done? O-kay!”

  O-kay had the tone of a phrase of pop music, something breezy and cheery John Henry must have overheard on the radio. O-kay was one of John Henry’s numerous code sounds, which signaled yes, John Henry knew what such code sounds meant, just as you did. O-kay! was sometimes accompanied by a salute of John Henry’s right hand to the right side of his forehead, as he’d seen soldiers in uniform do. O-kay, Aunt Liz’beta!

  Watered and fed the barn animals. Mucked out their filthy stalls, cleared away filth and debris from their drinking pond at the center of the barnyard. Groomed the horses, milked the cows. Carried on animated if one-sided conversations with the horses, the cows, the barn cats, the lame mixed-breed Labrador. And the chickens. Gathered eggs each morning from the hens’ nests. Separated sick chickens from others not yet afflicted. Braved the roosters’ angry pecking at his hands, legs. Shoveled hay. Shoveled manure. In winter shoveled snow from the long driveway and from the paths. In spring yoked the horses to plow the half-acre garden behind the house. Helped his aunt Lizabeta, whom he adored in a puppy’s way of craven affection, to hoe, rake, seed, and water the garden and with the thinni
ng of plants, weeding, and harvesting. Repaired the falling-down fences, for a farm’s fences are in continual need of repair. Hacked down tall grasses with a rusted scythe. Nailed tarpaper strips to the sheds’ roofs, amid the hammering talking and laughing to himself, for such work, the rhythm of such work, repetitions of such work, is deeply comforting. Heavy lifting, carrying. Clearing out the cellar after torrential rainstorms, leakage. Helping his aunt Lizabeta with housework, though Lizabeta was hesitant to put John Henry to work indoors for, oh! John Henry was clumsy with household things, “ladies’ things” John Henry called them—he dropped and broke plates, collided with furniture, became confused sorting cutlery into a drawer (a task that little Agnes could do unfailingly), and skulked away deeply ashamed. And if John Henry volunteered to carry a stepladder indoors for his aunt to use while dusting the high corners of a room, he was likely to ram the ladder against a doorway and gouge the wood; carrying a ladder upstairs, John Henry was likely to miss a step and fall backward, landing on his back, stunned and breathless and the damned ladder on top of him, so Lizabeta had to stoop over him to help him scramble out from under it, frightened that poor John Henry had injured himself, guilty as if she’d caused the accident herself. Oh, why didn’t John Henry go away somewhere and leave her alone? He made her so anxious. Except Lizabeta loved John Henry, of course, everyone had come to love John Henry, who was so good-hearted, such a good worker, far more reliable and capable than, for instance, Walter’s sons Daniel and Calvin, so good with children, and children loved John Henry, very young children especially. John Henry loved to observe the new baby, Alistair, being bathed, though he could not help with the bathing; John Henry loved to watch over Agnes and Melinda outdoors and was happiest when called upon to rescue a child from a hornet, for instance, or from one of the angry red roosters rushing to peck at a child’s soft bare legs so the girls squealed Oh! oh! oh! John Hen’y, help! and John Henry clapped and whistled and chased the bad rooster away. In the village of Rapids, where, usually on Fridays, Lizabeta shopped for groceries and took the girls with her, there was a notorious black dog that stood in the road and barked and snarled menacingly, and John Henry had the power to calm this dog by talking to him at length in a calm voice, explaining afterward that the dog was Big Fred he’d used to know and was a friend of his.