by Bret Lott
They enjoyed working every day, too, as far as I could see, talking with one another as they tore out the cupboards and cabinets in the kitchen, me in other rooms breaking back baseboards. All the kitchen cupboards and cabinets, Tom and I had decided, needed to go. It would be easier just to buy new ones, the old ones scarred wood painted over blue, hinges bent and broken, shelves splintered and cracked. Next to go in the kitchen, once I’d gotten the base-boards pulled out, had been the linoleum floor, Grady starting at one corner, Martin the other, the two of them gently rolling back the edges, the linoleum breaking in places into huge scraped and beaten dull-yellow pieces, large, odd shapes like the maps of foreign countries. The two of them had contests to see who could get the biggest piece of linoleum up without breaking it, and, of course, Martin won each time, each time his face breaking into his old grin, Grady acting perturbed and incensed and disappointed, all to make Martin smile that much more.
Beneath the linoleum was the hardwood floor, the brown of wood murky and hidden beneath the remnants of black resin. Still, I had felt good that day a week or so ago, felt as though somehow, finally, things had begun. Starting again had finally shown me something tangible: a gutted kitchen, pipes naked and shiny, waiting, the walls empty now. Martin and Grady and I had been working hard, filling our lives with emptying this house.
“Okay,” I said, and put my hands on my hips. The fire in the stove popped, that sound followed by a slow hiss inside. “Okay,” I said again, “we’ll take a break. All of us. In celebration of Martin’s calling me by my first name.” I rubbed my hands together, felt the warmth from the stove on my back. “I’ll break out lunch, and we can all relax.”
“Sounds great,” Grady said.
Martin said, “Sounds great.” He paused. “Claire.”
I moved toward him, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He backed up, let me pass by him, and I patted him on the shoulder. I said, “Thanks, Martin,” and he smiled again, gave what I thought could have been a blush, his face going a little red all the way up to the top of his head and on into the gray, slicked-back hair.
Every day now I brought with us a picnic basket full of food, a small cooler with a six-pack or so of soda, and a thermos of hot coffee. The soda wasn’t for me; after a week solid of offering them coffee, and having them turn me down, I’d finally asked Grady what they would want to drink. “Nothing,” he’d said, then he said, “Soda pop’s fine.” Since then I had brought the cooler, even though each day the highs had been hovering around forty degrees.
I was in the kitchen, and said, “Why so much concern for me now?” I knelt next to the picnic basket, opened it up. I brought out sandwiches I’d made that morning and paper plates. Grady and Martin were in the kitchen, and I handed each a plate and sandwich. Then I popped open a Tupperware container of carrot sticks, took a few out and set them on my plate next to my sandwich. I said, “I haven’t changed my pace any since you guys started.”
I stood with the thermos in one hand, my plate in the other, and I passed between them, went into the front room. I sat on the floor before the stove.
“That’s just the point,” Grady said, and I heard him open the cooler and reach in, knew what he was doing: reaching in for a can, giving it to Martin, than taking one for himself. Almost simultaneously came the wet bursts of sound, their cans opening. Grady came in, sat to my right. Martin sat a little behind Grady.
I said, “Come on, Martin,” and looked back at him. He already had the sandwich halfway to his mouth. He stopped, and slowly set down the sandwich. I patted the floor next to me, on my left “Come sit over here. It’s warmer nearer the stove.”
He looked at Grady, who looked first at me, then to Martin, then to me again. He glanced down at his plate, and nodded. “Go ahead, Martin,” he said.
Immediately Martin stood, came over to my left, and sat down. He didn’t look at me, though; instead, he picked up the sandwich and took a bite. Slowly he chewed, his eyes on the stove as if there were something written on it he could decipher.
Grady said, “That’s what Martin means. You haven’t stopped. You got all these baseboards pulled out yourself, the baseboards in all the rooms. And you got all that paneling in the kitchen out, too, and did your fair share of the paneling in here. When you’re working, too,” he said, and his voice went a little quieter, “it seems like you’re not much, you know, different than Martin.” He stopped, and I looked at him. He was sitting Indian-style with the palms of his hands on each knee, just looking at his food, at the soda can on the floor.
“That came out wrong,” Grady said, and I turned away from him. I took a bite of my sandwich, swallowed hard to get the food into me. I took a sip of coffee from the thermos lid.
I said, “How did you mean it to come out?”
“Different,” he said quickly. “You’re not like him, you know, you’re not—”
“Okay,” I said. “I get it.”
He glanced at me and gave me a quick smile.
I said, “Eat.”
We sat that way for a while, Martin oblivious, merely eating the food he needed to continue working, supplying his body with what it needed, and I wondered what things he thought of, what sorts of images came to his mind when he sat this way, and what sorts of patterns or ideas came to him when he was in his savant mode, every bit of him focused on the task at hand, whether it be the mortaring of hearth bricks or measuring and cutting clapboards. I wondered what he thought, what he knew, what words were in him, and how they moved through his brain to do what it was he knew to do.
And I wondered if Grady weren’t closer to some truth than he’d thought, wondered if Martin and I weren’t more alike than I could know.
I looked at Martin. He was still silently eating, now on his second sandwich, and before I knew what I was saying, before I realized what words had lined themselves up in my throat and mouth, but because I wanted to know, to know perhaps how his mind worked, to know how I was like him, I turned to Grady and said, “What can you tell me? About Martin, I mean. Was he born like this?”
I stopped, embarrassed at my own cruel curiosity. As though I might be able to bury my words, pretend I hadn’t spoken them, I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be asking anything that’s—”
“Okay,” he said. He looked at me. He said, “I get it,” and we both smiled.
It had been a long time since the child in Grady had surfaced, not since the day we stood with Martin and Tom below us in the crawl space, the sky blue, the trees colors I couldn’t imagine anymore now that winter was almost on us. Not since the day he had laid out that small piece of history about Martin and his daddy and Mr. Clark, and how he’d had Martin put in the state hospital. Since then he hadn’t forgotten letting himself show, letting down his guard, the smile he had given me that day never returning, his hair always tucked back and away instead of ignored and fallen in his face.
But now, the food before us, the stove warm, the house gutted and less and less a home, he seemed to falter again. It was in his shoulders and how they seemed to sink, and I thought of pine boards sinking into my father, and of my mother sinking into herself, growing older and older.
His hair, too, was down in his face again. He didn’t bother to push it back. Then he reached one hand out to his sandwich and picked it up. He took a bite, swallowed it.
“You really want to know,” he said, not as a question, but as observation, some judgment made upon me.
I was silent.
He took a quick breath and smiled, one last stab at regaining his adult air. “You keep working like you are,” he said, “and that info won’t really matter. You’ll be dead, or broken-backed. You keep up this pace.” He went quiet again, and looked down. “I don’t know that I should say—”
“Say,” Martin said from beside me.
I turned to him. He was looking at Grady, not me. He, too, was sitting Indian-style, his elbows on his knees. He held his sandwich with both hands. He swallowed. “You tell
her. She can know.”
Slowly I turned to Grady, me sitting there between them. Something was going on here, something I couldn’t understand; I saw on Grady’s face, that boy’s face, and felt in Martin’s words some subtle shift in authority, in who was in charge. Something had changed here.
Grady said, “Do you think—”
“I think,” Martin said quickly. “She can know.”
Grady swallowed again, though there was no food in his mouth. He reached for his can of soda, tipped it back and took a sip. He set it down. He wasn’t looking at me.
He said, “I don’t think this is the wisest thing. But, hey. Martin said it’s okay.” He cleared his throat, put a finger to the rim of the can and slowly ran it around the edge in a gentle circle. “Martin’s the way he is because he was born that way. He was born retarded. But it wasn’t—” He paused, and I watched his finger stop before continuing on with its circle. “It wasn’t, you know, in his genes that way. He’s not retarded retarded. He was just born that way.”
I heard the high screech of the stove door, and looked up. Martin was standing there, and tossed into the red and orange a large piece of wood. The piece landed with a dull thud, and I could see inside the shower of sparks sent up. With the stick he’d used to open it, he pushed closed the door. He sat down.
This time it was me who wouldn’t look at him. I was ashamed at my question, at my wanting to know. It didn’t matter, I saw. What happened to him, how he was born, didn’t matter. He was just a man.
But Grady went on, obedient to Martin’s wish. “The story starts with that family I told you about over there in Worthington. I’ve already told you about them, but there’s other stuff you need to know. About that family.” He took a breath, held it a moment. “But this story, this particular one, starts with a hobo.” He paused. “A hobo, you know? Riding the rails.”
I nodded, my eyes now on that flat, black stove and the heat waves shimmering up from it to make the air dance, waver.
“A rail-runner,” he said, “and it’s time for the sap to run, March, and he comes into Chesterfield looking for work, and finds out there’s this job at the sugar house in Worthington, and he gets on there, gets a job just tending to the firewood. To keeping sure there’s enough firewood to make sure the sap keeps boiling day and night. That’s his job.” He paused, and took in what seemed a huge breath of air, then slowly let it out. “So he meets this girl named Elaine out there in Worthington, the sister of the man my grandfather Clark hates so much. But this man, this brother of Elaine. This brother of Elaine is a son-of-a-bitch. He’s terrible. He’s evil. When he gets wind of these two, of this hobo who’s only trying to make enough money just to eat and of his sister, he goes off the end. The brother does, and he forbids the two ever to see each other again. He forbids them ever to even look at each other on the road if they ever pass each other.”
He stopped, and I glanced down. His hand was around his can now, the grip firm, his thumb pressing into the aluminum, making the smallest dimple. He released his thumb, and the dimple disappeared, giving off a sharp pop. I watched his hand around the can. He lifted it, and my eyes followed it to his face. He was smiling, and took another sip, his hair falling back as he did.
He put the can back on the floor and uncrossed his legs, bringing the knees up. He held his knees together, his feet flat on the floor, and looked at the stove. He said, “But the joke of it was on the brother. The last laugh was on this brother because she was already preggers by this time. By the time the brother found out about the two of them having some kind of love interest, she was already with child. That’s the joke.”
“But,” Martin said, and before I could turn to him, Grady went on.
“But,” he said, “it’s not a joke. Because the brother found out about her being pregnant, and he came down to the sugar house. He came running down there through the snow, through the woods, and he busts into the sugar house, and here’s the hobo leaned over the fire, facing the fire beneath the vats of sap, and the brother lays into the hobo’s back with a piece of oak. A good piece, about yay long—” He put his hands out, spread apart about three feet to show me how long the piece of wood had been. Then he put his hands back around his knees. “He puts a good one right into the hobo’s back, and then there’s this fight going on, the brother up against the hobo, and the hobo wins. The hobo beats the hell, just beats the hell out of the brother, and just before he’s about to kill him—he’s got the same piece of oak raised up to bash in the skull of this son-of-a-bitch—he stops. The hobo stops, and he just tosses that piece of wood into that fire, and he’s gone. He just goes, hops another train, one heading south to where the weather’s already warm.”
“My God,” I whispered.
“Your god,” he said, and he gave that same sort of laugh again.
“Yours,” Martin said.
I looked at both of them. They were looking at the stove, and then I looked, too.
“It’s not over yet,” Grady said, and shifted his weight. He still held his knees, but now one foot was tapping to something inside him.
“It’s not over because now she, the sister, this Elaine, has her whole nine months to live out, after that a baby to raise. And those whole nine months, every day that’s left of them after the hobo’s gone, she’s got to live out under this brother of hers, this son-of-a-bitch.”
He went quiet again, and slowed his foot, barely touching the toe of his boot to the floor. “But she was beautiful,” he said, and only then did I wonder how he knew all this, all the detail: the piece of oak and how long it had been, the tossing aside of that piece instead of killing the brother, the beauty of Elaine. How could he know? And of course it came to me: Martin. Martin must know all these things, must have told Grady. But still I wondered, because Martin had never shown me anything that would make me believe he could tell a story, even string three sentences together outside of his savant trance. But, I realized, I didn’t know them. I didn’t know what they talked about when they were alone. This moment was the closest I’d come yet to seeing, perhaps, the truth of the two of them, Martin guiding the conversation, Grady following.
“She was beautiful,” he went on. “She was beautiful, and she was quiet and she was real fragile. And she was small, and she was scared to death of her brother. For the rest of her nine months he wouldn’t let her, his sister, out of their house. He wouldn’t let her out. He told her she was vile. Vile was the word he’d used. That was it. So she stayed in the house out there in the woods for the rest of her being pregnant. Then in November it was time for her to have a baby.”
Martin sniffed, and from the corner of my eye I could see him rub his nose, gently touch his throat.
“By this time she’s almost dead. Her mind, that is. The brother hasn’t let her ever feel good about anything for a single day, when he should be glad he’s alive, the son-of-a-bitch, glad the father of this baby didn’t bash in his head that day. Not a single minute can she feel good, because all this time he’s been killing her with his words, his looks, his threats. So that day, that day she’s going to have—”
His voice broke to pieces, quiet pieces, a certain quivering in the words, and I reached a hand over to his shoulder. I let it rest there, tried to give to him the same sort of comfort he had given to me when we had stood in the kitchen that day, but he shook my hand off with one violent move, his shoulders twisting.
“Grady,” Martin said, firm and quiet.
“Well,” Grady said, and swallowed hard. His eyes hadn’t left the stove.
“Don’t go on,” I said.
“Tough,” he said, his eyes full. “That’s just tough.” He was almost whispering now. “Because I’m going. Because you asked.” He paused, and took a breath. “So this is the day. And she’s going to have the baby. And because he’s killed her by that time, killed her mind, she decides that, no, she’s not going to have the baby. Here it is pushing out, the brother’s wife—the wife. God. The brother’s wi
fe. She’s the only good thing about this. She’s the only good person the brother was ever lucky enough to have love him, though I don’t know why she would ever marry him. But since she’s a woman and she’s married to this brother, all along the wife can’t do anything to stop the brother killing his sister.” He paused. “I forgot to tell you about the wife.”
“But go,” Martin said, his voice with that same taut, deep tone.
“Go,” Grady said. He was still looking down. “Go, he says. I’ll go. I’ll go.” His voice was darker now, harder, and I could hear from outside the midday, mid-December wind hitting through trees, a sound I’d taken for granted now after all these days I’d worked out here, but a sound that surfaced just then, made its way into my ears as though that clatter of branches were somehow important. I wondered, too, if this were the sound she heard that day.
“So the sister decides she’s not going to let it out,” Grady said. “She’s just not going to let it out. She’s not going to let her brother lay eyes on the baby. She doesn’t want that curse, doesn’t want that hate on her baby, and so she holds against the pushing. She puts her legs together, and she holds it, she holds it in. She holds it in until finally she passes out, and the baby finally comes, and this baby is born wrong. It’s born retarded, and not because of anything that’s the matter with its genes, but because it was put through that kind of birth. And there you have him. You have Martin. You have Martin from day one.” He paused again, the only sound the slow hiss of the fire inside the stove, and the black strain of leafless branches against December wind. “Now you know,” he said.
I closed my eyes, because there was nothing for me to do. I had asked. And it had been Martin who’d made him go on, Grady only a sort of interpreter, a speaker for Martin and his history.
Grady moved to stand up, and I opened my eyes. He picked up his plate with the half-eaten sandwich on it with one hand, the empty soda can with the other.
“Wait,” Martin said. “Wait.”