Biology was my favorite, though we didn’t have a very sophisticated lab on the Hill — a dozen soapstone lab tables and some old-fashioned optical microscopes.
So, I wasn’t a genius, but I had some good bench skills and I figured I was ready for TF.
I spent the rest of the afternoon studying French on Seymour Terrace. I looked through the picture in Paroles and imagined I was sitting in an outdoor café in Paris, maybe the one in An American in Paris. I’d heard that if you sat in a certain café in Paris long enough, you’d see everybody you ever knew walking by. But I didn’t think so. I didn’t think I’d see Mawmaw Tucker walking around in Paris in an old-fashioned shirtwaist dress, or Earl with a rattlesnake wrapped around his neck, or DX in his blue overalls and the Greek fisherman’s hat that Sally gave him for his birthday years ago. That would be pretty strange. But no stranger than imagining myself sitting in the café.
I liked Madame Arnot, who really was French, but not from Paris. She was very dramatic, but also informal. I liked the way she sat on the edge of her desk with half her butt sticking off the edge, one foot on the floor, playing with a scarf around her neck, making French sound so beautiful. And sexy.
After about an hour I was joined by one of the students from the class, Jean-Paul.
“Jean-Paul, mademoiselle.”
“Enchantée.”
“Et vous êtes … ?”
“Je m’appelle Lise.”
“Ah, enchanté.”
“D’où venez-vous?”
“Je viens de Chicago? Et vous?”
“Je viens de Naqada.”
“Une belle ville?”
My choices were: belle ville, grande ville, petite ville, ville splendide or magnifique or agréable or ordinaire or polluée or dangereuse.
I chose “dangereuse,” and that was about as far as we could go.
“Au revoir,” he said.
“Au revoir.”
Now I was three people: At home, in Warren’s apartment, I was a thirty-five-year-old ex-con a little worse for the wear. At TF I was an eighteen-year-old freshman; and in French class I was a baby. It was humiliating, but everybody was in the same boat. Except Madame Arnot, of course. She was beautiful and sophisticated, and she made you want to be that way too.
My Beginning Fiction Writing class met on Friday, which was Thursday. We introduced ourselves and then got right down to business.
“Intentionality is the enemy,” Claire said. I liked this. It was just the opposite of what I’d always been taught. But it made sense. Claire made her point by asking us to write a story in fifteen minutes. She had a kitchen timer, which she set on the desk so everyone could see it. I wrote in my four-subject notebook, which I carried in my new briefcase.
“Don’t worry,” Claire said. “Don’t criticize. Just tell me about something that happened to you. Most people are natural storytellers if you just give them a chance. Think about your parents and your grandparents; think about your family stories. Write about the first thing that comes into your mind.”
I started to tell about Earl making me stick my arm in the snakebox, but I’d told that story so many times I was getting sick of it, so I just started doing what Claire said to do, and something else popped into my head and took me by surprise. We were in church on a Friday and a woman from across the river in Kentucky started talking in tongues. She was handling and holding fire and drinking strychnine, and nobody thought anything of it, but all of a sudden Earl started shouting that something was wrong with her. She didn’t sound right. She was possessed by a demon. She was screaming and hollering and foaming at the mouth, and if you listened real good you could hear different voices. Demons have different voices. One was a real low scary voice, like you’d expect a demon to talk, but another was just like a little girl, and another was like an old woman. There were more than that, but those were the ones I remembered best, and I wanted to keep it simple.
There were three men from the church trying to hold her down, but the demon was too strong and she broke away and tried to run out the door. You could hear the demon talking in her in the low scary voice. “I’ve got a palace for you. If you just get out the door, you’ll be all right. Be all right. Just get out that door.” But then Earl started pointing at the door and shouting at the demon to get out, and the demon started cussing him like you never heard. The woman tried to go out the door, but she couldn’t, and then she ran to the back of the church and tried to get out the back, but she couldn’t go through the door. And Earl kept saying Jesus’ name over and over to scare the demon and some men got ahold of her and pulled her down holding Bibles on her and this time she couldn’t get away.
And then the little-girl voice started talking, real sweet like at first, but then promising to do anything Earl wanted, talking a lot of real dirty sex talk. Earl told the demon to come out of her and the little girl voice started screaming and crying. Earl kept saying “Come out in the name of Jesus, come out in the name of Jesus, come out in the name of Jesus.” And then the demon came out and the voice started coming out of DX, who’d just come into the church and still had his fisherman’s hat on, but now it was an old-woman voice. When a demon comes out it’s got to go somewhere. It can go into another person, or just go into the air. Earl told it to leave DX alone and go into a dog that was barking outside the church, and DX started flipping around and took off his hat and threw it down on the floor, and the spirit left him and went into the dog, and that poor dog started howling and crying, and the owner …
I was just getting to the best part, or the worst part, when the kitchen timer went off. We had thirty seconds to finish our stories, but I had so many things to say I just seized up for that last thirty seconds and didn’t set down a word.
If I’d known we were going to have to read our stories out loud I probably wouldn’t have written about the demon. Maybe something about Earl singing “Precious Lord” when we were all gathered around the pit head after the explosion that killed my daddy, or going over to Norris Dam in Tennessee with Mama and Daddy and Pawpaw, and Pawpaw telling us it had been Noah’s flood, covering up the whole town underneath, all the houses and everything.
The first story that someone read was about a mouse in a music store, listening to the music. The mouse was a Beatles fan and he built a little tiny guitar. The second story was about something called “Skittles,” which I couldn’t understand because I didn’t know that Skittles were a kind of candy. And then I read my story. I had no idea how it was going to affect the other students, but then I could see mouths dropping open, eyes opening wide, everyone looking at me. I didn’t know if they liked the story or if they thought I was crazy.
Claire didn’t praise or criticize any of the stories, but after class, out in the hallway, she asked me did I have any more stories like this, and I told her I had hundreds, and she asked if I’d ever written any of them down.
“No,” I said.
“You should,” she said. “You’re a natural storyteller.”
I wanted to thank her for her vote of confidence, but I said, “You said everyone was a natural storyteller.”
“But they don’t have stories like yours.” She laughed. She offered me her guest room again, but I said I felt right at home in the woods.
“How did that story end?” she asked. “The one you told in class.”
“Earl got his shotgun out of the truck, and when he was coming back the dog started snarling, though it was always a nice friendly dog before. Earl had a little bottle of anointing oil in his shirt pocket, and that’s what the dog went after. He went right after the oil. Earl knocked him down with the butt of the shotgun and then shot him. Blew him to pieces.”
“I’ve got to sit down,” Clair said. “You want some coffee?”
We walked to Seymour Terrace, carrying our briefcases. On the way Claire said, “I can’t believe it. But I do believe it. That’s what I can’t believe!”
“I can’t believe it either,” I said, “but it’
s true.”
In French we continued to greet each other and inquire about our hometowns in every possible way, and to ask about our family, our friends, our hobbies, our ambitions.
Someone—it was never clear who—had passed out a double-sided, single-spaced Xerox of the kind of French that wasn’t taught in school, and these words and phrases, though we weren’t sure how to pronounce them, gave an edge to our conversations: brouter le cresson, fumer le cigare, ramoner, baiser en levrette: to graze the watercress, to smoke a cigar, to sweep the chimney, to do it dog fashion. Some of the words were the same as in English: chatte for “pussy.” Others were not so nice: moule for cunt. I’d seen mussels at the fish counter at Hy-Vee in a string bag on a bed of ice, next to the catfish, but I hadn’t smelled them. Oignon for asshole. And you had to be careful to put the right accent on répétez when you asked someone to repeat something, which you had to do a lot when you didn’t know the language, or you’d be asking them to re-fart.
And then we moved on to the imperfect tense, which I liked because it was so regular. Madame Arnot said you could live your whole life in the present and imperfect tenses. You didn’t really need anything else. At least I thought that’s what she said.
With a liberal education under my belt, according to the TF catalog, I could be anything I wanted to be. And that’s the way I felt at the end of the week. I could become a famous biologist, maybe figure out how you got life out of inanimate matter, like the Miller-Urey experiment in the biology textbook. I could learn to speak French and go to Paris. I could write a book and see it in the window of the University Bookstore or the Co-op on State Street. Maybe I wouldn’t do any of these things. I didn’t even know how to get through the weekend, which is what I had to do.
In Naqada a weekend meant gearing up for church; on the Hill it meant hanging out and watching a movie in the recreation room. On campus it meant gearing up for a party to which I hadn’t been invited. But out at Jackson’s it meant hooking the tractor up to the bridge that had been knocked into the stream by a flood and dragging it up to the near bank, which was about six or eight feet above the water, and then renailing the planks—two by eights—that had come loose. And it meant splitting some of the oak and hickory that Warren had cut before he got too sick to work. Jackson and I pulled the splitter out of the garage and hooked it up to the tractor. The wood was stacked at the very back of the property by a funny-looking hill that Jackson said was an Indian burial mound, and we had to take the tractor out to the road and then around to the county highway that I’d taken to Oquawka so we could cross the stream on the highway bridge and come into the property from the back. Jackson hadn’t told anyone about the burial mound because he didn’t want the State people coming in. He wanted to keep it for himself, for when he retired. He said you could get really lost out here at night because of the mound, which was disorienting. It was a pretty poor thing compared to the mounds at Cahokia, but I didn’t say that to Jackson.
The splitter was a serious horizontal splitter, like the one Earl and DX used to split wood for the church, with a six-inch main frame and a two-inch solid steel base plate. I could see that Jackson was uneasy—but not too uneasy—about letting me do most of the heavy lifting, but I liked to work, and once we got the splitter fueled up and topped up with hydraulic oil, we fell into a nice rhythm. Jackson helped me load the logs onto the splitter and then stacked the split wood next to the mound. We’d have to load it into a wagon later on and pull it up to the house with the tractor.
While we worked we talked about our days and swapped stories. I told him about my first biology lab, in which we learned how to use different kinds of microscopes, and he told me about his seminar on hunter-gatherer societies, which included the Mbuti. That was his specialty, because he’d lived with the Mbuti for four years, and he had lots of stories that weren’t in the book. He told me about being initiated with the Mbuti boys, and I told him about the first time I handled a serpent, and after that we got into a kind of storytelling competition. He told me about hunting an elephant, and I told him about hunting serpents in the Shawnee National Forest. He told me about an invasion of army ants in the middle of the night, and I told him about Mawmaw Tucker’s two sisters coming to Naqada after Mawmaw died and praying her back to life. He told me about Claude dying and how Kachelewa, the elephant hunter, had made him lean over and take Claude’s last breath into his own mouth. I told him about Punkin Bates, the evangelist, getting serpent bit and while we were all sitting around praying for him, another serpent came and almost bit him again, but Earl grabbed it by the tail and slammed it down on the floor and broke its neck. And he showed me two tiny black spots on his forehead, about an inch above his nose. His pygmy girlfriend had cut two deep slits with a rusty razor blade and inserted little pieces of graphite from a lead pencil. The black spots, which were still visible, were the marks of a hunter. They meant that he would return to the Forest. The black marks were barely visible, but I could feel them if I ran my fingers over his forehead.
Jackson was really interested in the Church of the Burning Bush. He asked a lot of anthropology-type questions, and wondered if maybe we could go down to Naqada some time, but I told him it was a bad idea. I was thinking about Earl and about what would happen when Earl figured out that I was out of prison, and about what it would be like to go to bed with Jackson. It had been so long I was about to burst. I’d stored up a lot of sex feelings, like the money my mama used to tuck away in an old canister, or the eighty thousand that Warren had tucked away in the bank. I was ready to “sweep the chimney.” Or have my chimney swept.
And with Jackson you wouldn’t have to do it in the back of a truck. He had a queen-size bed upstairs with a nice firm mattress.
I was thinking that after working shoulder to shoulder as we’d done Jackson would invite me in for a drink, and then for supper, and then into that big queen-size bed. But he didn’t, and later that night I heard a car creep into the drive. This time I knew for sure it was Claire. I watched from the window as she walked down the ramp to the house.
About half an hour later I walked down to the house myself—barefoot and quiet as a mouse. I went around to the side window that opened into the living room. I crouched down and peeked through the low window. I could see a light in the kitchen, at the other end of the house, but the living room was dark. I waited a little while to let my eyes get used to the dark. I could make out the wood-burning stove, and then the big leather davenport. Claire was on top of Jackson. If she’d looked up, she would have seen my face in the window. But I didn’t think Claire was seeing anything. Her blouse was open, her breasts swinging. I could feel the ground trembling under my feet. I could feel heavy breathing. But the heavy breathing was not Claire; it was the dog, Maya, who’d come up behind me and was sniffing my butt.
I made a noise and jumped up. I thought I was going to faint, and then I was running … Maya chased me all the way up to the garage. I stopped at the foot of the stairs to pet her. I held her head in my hands. I bent over and kissed the top of her head. “Good dog, good dog.” I didn’t know what I was saying.
Up in the apartment I drank some of Warren’s whiskey. I was really pissed. I buzzed the intercom, which was on my desk next to the computer. I held my finger down for a full minute. When I let my finger up I could hear someone saying, “Sunny, Sunny, are you all right? Are you all right?”
I wanted to shout NO, but I kept my mouth shut.
I was so angry and upset when I got out of bed in the morning that I thought about moving into the dorm. I cooked more bacon and more eggs. I broke the yolk of one of the eggs. I could hear the dog. Her four barks, then quiet as she chased after the stupid Frisbee. I looked out the window and saw Jackson throw the Frisbee. Another hot day. I wondered what the dog was thinking. Wondered what it was like to be a dog. The same routine every day. Jackson takes you out three or four times a day to play Frisbee, and every time you bark with joy. Joie de vivre.
I ran my fi
ngers through my hair.
Maya had been spayed. She wouldn’t fall in love. Male dogs wouldn’t fall in love with her. All this freedom, but she didn’t run away. Jackson whistled and she came. What does she do all morning, when Jackson is gone?
How was I going to behave toward Jackson? Toward Claire? Was it was too late to change my mind about living in the dorm? Too late to take a different class or get into a different section of Beginning Fiction Writing? How would I explain? And how would I explain buzzing the intercom? I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. Claire waving her arms, as if she were conducting a symphony. Her breasts flopping, as if she were possessed by some kind of sex demon.
I directed my anger at Claire. Claire was a married woman. She had no business fucking Jackson.
But then it occurred to me that I was a married woman too. Still married to Earl.
The dog leaped into the air to catch a high throw and almost fell on her back. I started to laugh. Joie de vivre. I knew how to pronounce it now. Joie de vivre. I was ready to forgive her—forgive Claire. Jackson too.
Almost ready.
The bacon had burned to a crisp and the eggs were solid. I ate them anyway.
That afternoon I went to the public library and got a library card and checked out a book on divorce, on how to do it in Illinois. I was hoping by now that Earl would be glad to be shed of me.
But nothing in life is ever simple. Illinois is not a no-fault state. You’ve got to have “grounds.” I didn’t want to get Earl all fired up by listing “attempted murder” as the grounds, so I figured I’d go with “mental or physical cruelty.”
What I needed was a Petition for Dissolution of Marriage, a Domestic Relations Cover Sheet, and a Summons. All I had to do was fill out the forms and sign them and file them with the County Clerk of the Court and pay a filing fee. The County Clerk would transmit these documents to the Sheriff’s Department in Naqada, and the sheriff would “serve” them on Earl. I shouldn’t say this, but it suited me to think about the sheriff knocking on Earl’s door with the summons. It was scary too, but I could see the look on his face when the sheriff handed him the papers. He already had two felony counts against him and had to be real careful. Then he’d have thirty days to file an Appearance and Answer. If he didn’t file, we’d be divorced automatically.
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