“That wasn’t my fault!” shouted the man. “It was an accident!”
“It was not an accident. You were drunk out of your mind, just like you are now,” said Amos Junior. His voice was shaking. “Get out of here. The cops are already on their way.”
“Bullshit!”
“I called them the minute I saw your car. Brown Trans Am, license plate New York State 290JEY. Sound familiar? I’ve been waiting for you to show up, you dirtbag. You make me sick. You want to beat on someone, beat on someone who stands a chance against you. Now get out of here.”
“Make me!”
“I will,” said Amos Junior. “Believe me I will. I would love it, so just give me a fucking reason.” Boy, I thought, he must really be mad. Swearing was forbidden in the Shumacher home.
“Here’s your reason, you goddamn redneck,” said the man, and he launched himself toward Amos Junior in a hopeless flying tackle.
Amos didn’t even bother getting out of his way. He threw a slow, lazy uppercut, the trajectory of which was timed perfectly to coincide with the flight path of Adam’s father. It caught him hard on the chin and flipped him over on his back. He lay on the ground moaning, blood pouring from his mouth. Then he sat up and tried to say something, but there was something wrong with his mouth; the sounds came out wet and garbled.
“Oh no,” said Amos Junior. He was a very gentle boy and it was the first time I’d ever seen him hurt anything. He was polite to everyone, even the cows.
Adam’s father spit something out on the ground. He looked at it for a moment in disbelief and began to scream. It was the front two inches of his tongue. He’d bitten it off when Amos punched him.
“Oh no,” said Amos Junior again.
“Hah!” screamed the man. He got to his feet unsteadily. “Hah! Heeh! Hunh!” he said. Blood was pouring freely from his mouth. Already the front of his thin winter jacket was covered with it.
“Jesus, mister, why did you make me do it?” said Amos Junior miserably. He made a snowball and gave it to the man. “Put this in your mouth,” he said. To me he said, “Billy! Go tell Mutti to call an ambulance!”
I ran inside the house. Mutti, the girls, and Adam were sitting at the kitchen table. Adam was crying; his voice was like a puppy’s, soft and whining and inconsolable.
“Amos Junior punched him and he’s bleeding, and call an ambulance,” I said.
“Mein Gott,” said Mutti. She went to the phone.
“Don’t cry, Adam,” I said. “Amos beat him up with one punch. He bit his own tongue off,” I added, “so now he can’t talk either. Okay, Adam? You’re even with him now.” I could hear the man’s inarticulate wails from the front yard as Amos tried to calm him down. The sound just seemed to frighten Adam further. He crawled under the table and wrapped his head in Hildy’s skirt. I went back outside and stood on the porch. The man was kneeling in the snow, sobbing in a high womanish voice. Amos Junior was making another snowball; he’d picked up the man’s severed tongue and was packing it in snow, in case they could sew it back on.
I heard a siren approaching. The sheriff pulled in a moment later, a short, balding man with a large belly. He joined Amos Junior and Adam’s father. In another minute the ambulance had arrived and the attendants were hurriedly loading the little man in. With a thrill, I recognized the black man who had driven Grandpa and me to the hospital after he’d broken his hip.
“Hey!” I shouted to him, waving. “Hi!” The man flashed me a peace sign, grinning hugely.
“Hey, little brother,” he said. “How’s that lip?”
He got back in the ambulance and they pulled out with a roar and a spray of snow and mud and were gone. The sheriff came toward me.
“You see what happened?” he asked.
“That guy tried to hurt Amos Junior,” I said.
“Hurt him how?”
“Tried to tackle him.”
“Amos Junior hit him?”
“Yah.”
The sheriff looked at me more closely. “What’d you say your name was?”
“Billy Mann.”
“Oh,” said the sheriff. “That’s right. Where’s Mr. Shumacher?”
“Here I am,” said Fatti, appearing from behind the porch. He was red-faced and blowing hard from his run—he’d been in the fields, fixing fences. He and the sheriff stepped out of my hearing and conversed secretively for a few moments. Then the sheriff went back to Amos Junior, who was standing there holding the snowball that contained the man’s tongue. He’d forgotten to give it to the ambulance attendants. I crept up behind them to listen.
“You mind coming down with me, Amos?” said the sheriff. “Just to take a statement.”
“Yah,” said Amos. He looked as if he was going to cry. “I didn’t want to hurt him that bad,” he said. “God, I’m sorry.”
“You’re not in trouble, Amos,” said the sheriff. “He had a restraining order on him. Wasn’t supposed to be within a mile of this place, and he knew it. Far as I’m concerned, you could have shot him. I know that guy. Done business with him on several occasions. Repeat customer. Used to beat his wife up, before she got wise and hit the road. Too bad she left the boy behind. He’s scum, Amos. Don’t lose a minute of sleep over him.”
“Okay,” said Amos. He tossed the bloody snowball away and got in the backseat of the police car.
“Don’t sit back there,” said the sheriff. “Want everyone to think I arrested you?”
Amos grinned sheepishly and got in the front seat. They pulled out of the driveway and headed down the road. Fatti, beside me, sighed.
“You see some crazy people in this world,” he said philosophically. “It’s sad.”
“Why sad? That guy was a jerk.”
“Yes,” Fatti said, “but he was a poor jerk, and now on top of everything else he has no tongue.”
“He hurt Adam’s throat,” I reminded Fatti.
Fatti looked at me. “You love Adam,” he said. “And he loves you. That’s good.”
“Are you going to keep Adam?”
“Yah,” said Fatti. “I hope so.”
“Me too,” I said. “Can I come visit you after I go back with Grandpa?”
“Yah,” said Fatti. He hoisted me up on his shoulders and we crunched through the snow toward the house. “We love you, boy.” He said it simply, thickly—it sounded like “Ve laff you, poy.” And we went into the house, where Adam had emerged from under the table, and Fatti made jokes and Mutti made hot chocolate until everyone felt better again, and with the amnesia that blessedly comes to children, I forgot about the visit from Adam’s father.
I went home on December twenty-second. Mrs. Wheeler came again in her long red car to get me, and she sat smoking her thin brown cigarettes at the kitchen table. She smelled strongly of perfume and lotion; her foreign, citified odor had the effect of stupefying Fatti, and of sending Mutti into a territorial cleaning frenzy at the kitchen sink. Mrs. Wheeler sipped thick black Shumacher coffee. Her lips left livid smears of paint on the rim of her mug.
“Are you packed?” she said to me.
“Yah, he’s packed,” said Mutti, sniffling.
“Best to get it over with right away then,” said Mrs. Wheeler. “They get attached quickly at this age.”
“Yah,” said Fatti.
“Okay, then,” said Mrs. Wheeler. “Did you thank the Shumachers for taking such good care of you?”
“He doesn’t have to thank us,” said Mutti.
“Thank you,” I said shyly.
“See what a good boy he is?” said Fatti proudly. “He thanked us anyway.”
Fatti carried my suitcase out to the long red car and put it in the backseat. Mutti stayed in the house. Fatti put his hands in his pockets and then stuck one out to me. I took it and we shook. Suddenly he picked me up by my armpits and crushed me against him.
“Remember everything Frau Weiler said,” he told me. “Remember everything you have seen here. Yah?”
“Yah,” I said.
“You come back soon.”
“Yah.”
“Auf weidersehen.”
“Auf weidersehen, Fatti.”
Fatti clamped me against his massive chest for a moment longer. I could hear his heart thudding in him like a bass drum. Then he put me down and stepped backward a few paces from the car. The other Shumachers came out in the driveway; the boys shook my hand stiffly, unaccustomed to such formality; Elsa and Hildy kneeled down and drew me to them, crushing me against their pillowlike chests without mercy.
“Let’s go,” said Mrs. Wheeler gruffly.
I got in the car. “Wait,” I said, before the door was shut. “Where’s Adam?”
“He’s playing,” said Fatti vaguely. “We’ll tell him you said good-bye.” So I knew Adam had been decoyed, and that he didn’t know I was leaving yet, nor would he until I was gone.
Fatti shut the door and Mrs. Wheeler started the car. We pulled out of the slush-filled driveway and made our way slowly down the dirt road. Mrs. Wheeler turned on the radio and lit another cigarette. The radio gave off a harsh, tinny sound. On the way back to the old Mann farmhouse, we passed an Amish buggy, drawn by a single horse. It occupied the middle of the road. The driver hadn’t heard us come up behind him, and Mrs. Wheeler leaned on the horn hard. As the car roared past it the horse reared in its traces. I turned to watch as the man driving the buggy stood up on the footboard to get control of the frightened animal. He wore heavy overclothes, his long beard protruding from under his muffler. There was a woman next to him, also heavily wrapped, her bonnet with its long brim shielding her face. “They never look at you eye to eye,” I remembered Grandpa saying. “They don’t want to know we’re here.”
“Buncha weirdos,” said Mrs. Wheeler, of the Amish couple.
I turned to look at her. I was suddenly angry.
“You’re the weirdo,” I said.
Instead of spanking me again, she gave me a surprised look, and we drove on in silence.
Twenty minutes later we pulled into the driveway of my ancestral home. Grandpa was standing out in front of the house, wearing only a thin sweater against the cold. He had lost a great deal of weight, which he hadn’t been able to afford; his neck was thin and scrawny, and he looked much older. I got out of the car and walked slowly toward him. He smiled shyly.
“Almost don’t recognize me, do ya,” he said, and in truth I didn’t, but his voice was still the same, and it all came over me in a surge of emotion. I ran and wrapped my arms around his waist.
“Oof,” he said. “Careful. I’m still a little sore.”
“Sorry,” I said.
He put his hands on my head and looked at me for a long time.
“You’ve grown three feet, I think,” he said. “Go get your suitcase.”
I ran back to the car and got my suitcase from the backseat. Then Grandpa and I went into the house together. I heard Mrs. Wheeler’s car crunch out of the driveway. I hadn’t said good-bye to her. Neither had Grandpa. She didn’t exist anymore. I was home again, amid the same familiar smells of living and the sounds the old house made when you walked through it. I sat down at the kitchen table.
“Hungry?” Grandpa asked me.
“Yah.”
“Yah?”
“Yeah, I mean.”
“Whillikers,” said Grandpa, as he stooped stiffly to retrieve the frying pan from a low cupboard. “You been hanging around with a bunch of Krauts, sounds like. Fried baloney all right?”
“Yeah,” I said. Fried baloney would always be all right, as long as Grandpa was the one who made it. We sat together at the kitchen table and Grandpa watched me eat, and he asked me what I had been up to, and I began to tell him the whole story. I picked up speed and chattered away until the whole thing was told: the Shumachers, how much they ate, how big and loud they were, Trevor, Adam, Adam’s father, the cows, the visit to the Mennonite lady. I went on and on until my tale was spun, even telling him how Mrs. Wheeler had honked her horn at the Amish buggy and nearly caused their horse to bolt. Then I arrived in the present, and the whole thing was history. It was just me and Grandpa again, sitting in the kitchen, and he ruffled my hair and made me another sandwich.
5
My Thirteenth Year; More of Annie; The Steamroller
I returned from my sojourn with the Shumachers a changed boy. I’d ventured into the outside world and come back in one piece, proving to myself and to Grandpa that such a thing could be done successfully and with no lasting harm; also, I’d met other people, and now considered myself worldly enough that the idea of school no longer held much terror. I was learning, in my own seven-year-old way, that there were at least two kinds of people in the world: the Trevor types and the Shumacher types, the bad and the good, the scary and the safe. And I learned also that even though the former could ruin things for you pretty quickly, they were made up for by the latter, by the secure, kind, warm Shumachers. Perhaps I would like school after all—if Marky Shumacher liked it, then it couldn’t be so bad. So I acquiesced to Grandpa’s will and allowed myself to be enrolled in the second grade. Grandpa himself would have preferred to continue teaching me at home, in his informal but effective way, but he in turn was acquiescing to the state, as personified by Mrs. Wheeler.
My earliest school memories are of being examined by a battery of specialists, all of whom were intent on discovering just how much I knew. They tested my reading, writing, and numbers, Mannvillian standards of education not having progressed much beyond the three R’s in those days; in retrospect, I can see now that they were also testing Grandpa, to see whether he’d really taught me all he claimed. They seemed dubious at first, but they were forced to conclude that Grandpa had told them the truth: I was, in fact, educated, at least to a point. Though I was only seven, I could read and write as well as any ten-year-old, and my mathematical abilities were decent. As a result I was allowed to skip kindergarten, first grade, and the first half of what would have been my second-grade year, and was put into Mrs. Schmeider’s second-grade class at Mannville Elementary, right where I would have been if I’d been in school all along.
I was late for my first day of school because the Galaxie wouldn’t start. When I walked into the classroom, I was clutching a brown paper bag with a fried baloney sandwich and an apple in it, and wearing a brand-new pair of Zips sneakers of which I was immensely proud. Grandpa, recognizing the import the moment held for me, had purchased them for just this occasion. I hung up my jacket in my cubby and joined the class on the floor, trying to ignore the sea of curious faces staring at me. For a moment the old fear of strangers surged up in me; but that fear had been planted by Grandpa’s paranoid warnings, and it was soon overcome by my natural interest in my new surroundings—I had never been inside a classroom before. Also, Mrs. Schmeider was reading us a story. Although Grandpa read to me often, it was never children’s material—usually it was from a newspaper or a magazine. I was spellbound by the bright pictures on the shining pages of the book the teacher held. And then I felt a cold little hand work its way into mine and squeeze it in welcome. I looked at the hand, and then at the arm attached to it, and then at the owner of the arm. To my astonishment, it was her—the little girl from up the hill with the long braids. It was Annie. She leaned over and whispered, “Did your cut get better?”
I nodded, too surprised to speak.
“That’s good,” she said.
To say that I was overjoyed to have found Annie again would be a gross understatement. I had to take two time-outs in the corner that day because she and I wouldn’t stop talking. That was all right, though. For the first time in my life I had a friend. After that first day I bounced out of bed bright and early every morning, urging Grandpa to hurry up and make my lunch, and asking was he sure the car was running today because I didn’t want to be late to school again. If I was late, Annie might think I wasn’t coming, and I couldn’t let her down.
“Of course it’s running,” he barked one morning when he couldn’t tak
e any more. “It just didn’t run that one day because I was in the hospital for so long. A car needs constant attention, boy. Just like some people around here I could name.”
Meaning me, I suppose.
Second grade passed for Annie and me in this manner, and so did third, and then fourth, and the years rocked along like the cars of a speeding train. None of my classmates seemed to mind that I was a Mann; the Fiasco of the Ostriches, it appeared, had been forgotten by everyone except Grandpa, and nobody made fun of me for it. And Annie’s hand stayed in mine right up to the year we turned thirteen, or so it felt, which was when things of note began once more to happen. Perhaps the holding-hands part is merely my imagination, because thirteen was when I began to feel shy around her. But shyness notwithstanding, we were together, and before I knew it we were in eighth grade, which was the year of The Steamroller.
Early each morning of that year, just as she had every morning for the last several years, Annie walked down the hill from her house and met me at the corner of Mann Road and the County Road. The County Road never had a name except for just that: the County Road. It was like everything else in town: The Square, The Oak, The School, The Steamroller. In a town the size of Mannville, where there is generally only one of everything, there’s not much point in giving things a proper name; everyone knows what you’re talking about.
Annie’s father didn’t know she and I were walking to school together. If he had, he would have found some way to stop us, maybe even by forbidding her to come to school altogether. He hadn’t spoken to me since the day Grandpa slipped on the ice, six years ago now. That was because I’d done my best to avoid his presence, never going into the house or any nearer to it than I needed to let Annie know I was waiting. He sat in front of the television all day, leaving the house only to buy beer, which he drank on the couch until he passed out. I knew this only from Annie, of course. I hadn’t dared to set foot inside the Simpson house again. His belly, according to her, was growing ever larger, his skin turning the sallow shade of death, his eyes smaller and beadier and more and more like the devil’s. She shuddered when she spoke of him. I learned not to bring him up.
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