Mr. Bones

by Paul Theroux

  “Give us a kiss, sonny boy!”

  Then he laughed and stood up and waved his gloved hands again and jerked the light chain, bringing down darkness.

  His voice had matched his face. He was so black that I dreamed he was still in my bedroom, standing there invisible in his floppy tie: Mr. Bones. I had not heard the door shut.

  I even said into the menacing gloom, “Dad—are you there?”

  Giving no answer was just the sort of thing he’d try as Mr. Bones.

  I said again, “Dad?” And in a trembly voice, “Mr. Bones?”

  I had not heard him leave. For all I knew he stayed there to scare me. But in the morning the room was empty.

  At breakfast he was eating oatmeal as usual. He had a decorous way of holding his spoon. I looked closely at him and saw some streaks of black makeup caked in the lines on his neck. I sprinkled raisins on my oatmeal.

  “Pass me the dead flies, sonny,” he said in his Mr. Bones voice.

  These days his remarks silenced the room. We all felt the effect of his angry humor. I didn’t know how deeply Mother was upset—though I knew she was. Floyd and Fred were startled but sometimes pretended to find it funny, and occasionally they teased back. When Dad made his “Toulouse and Toulon” joke, Floyd said, “Well, you’re like a town in Massachusetts—Marblehead.” Instead of being insulted, Dad smiled and said, “I like that.”

  But he kept on worrying Fred about college, and Floyd about trumpet lessons. We didn’t know what was coming next. We had not foreseen the songs or the jokes; we had not expected the black face. Maybe there was more.

  His voice was hoarse from practicing, and now every night he came home in black makeup, his wig like a too-big woolly hat. He talked about Tambo and Lightning and Mr. Interlocutor, and he told the same jokes. Hearing it again and again, I came to understand the one about the Indian and the red ant—red aunt was the point of it. We never pronounced it “ant,” always “awnt.”

  I felt embarrassed and fearful. We were afraid to ask him about his job in the shoe department these days. If Mother mentioned the house, that there were drips to be fixed, the oil burner to be mended, linoleum to be laid, painting to be done, I didn’t hear it. All our attention was on him, who he was now, Mr. Bones. To almost any question, he began singing.

  A million baby kisses I’ll deliver

  If you will only sing that “Swanee River”

  The rhythm was there, a confident slowness and drawl, yet his voice was strained from overuse. He lifted his knees and did dance steps as he sang, and he raised his white gloves. And Mother sat at the piano, looking anxious, playing the melody.

  It seemed so wrong, I was always glancing at the door, scared that someone—a neighbor, the Fuller Brush man, Grandpa—might come in and see him swaying and singing with a black face and that wig.

  He had another song too:

  When life seems full of clouds and rain,

  And I am filled with naught but pain,

  Who soothes my thumpin’ bumpin’ brain?

  He would always pause after that, and lower himself and put his head out and say, “Nobody!”

  His voice was gargly and cross, as though he was in pain. The weeks of rehearsals had taken away his real voice and given him this new one.

  When all day long things go amiss,

  And I go home to find some bliss,

  Who hands to me a glowin’ kiss?

  He was standing over Mother at the piano, and her bleak plunking notes, and smiling angrily, his wig tilted, one glove in the air.

  “Nobody!”

  The next time I sneaked after school to the window of the store and looked in, I saw him sitting where I’d seen him before, in the chairs reserved for customers, reading. He was not in blackface, yet his assurance, his posture, the way he sat, like the owner of the store, made him seem more than ever like Mr. Bones. He looked thoughtful, his fist against his mouth, a knuckle against his nose. And the other clerks and floorwalkers seemed to avoid him, talking among themselves, as though they knew he was Mr. Bones.

  At a funeral in church one Saturday, I stood beside Ed Hankey, both of us altar boys, in starched blouse-like surplices, holding tall smoking candles, preparing to follow the coffin down the main aisle. The priest was swinging a thurible—more smoke—and the relatives of the dead man were howling.

  Hankey said in a whisper, “You going to the minstrel show?”

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  “My old man’s in it. So’s yours.”

  “I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be.”

  “It’s a wicked pisser. Just a bunch of old guys singing, like a talent show,” Hankey said.

  Then we saw the priest glaring at us. We straightened our candles and approached the coffin.

  This big event was just a talent show to Hankey. And his white-haired father, who worked on the MTA buses, was just an old guy singing. Yet in our house Mr. Bones had taken charge and intimidated us all.

  He had a different complaint about each of us. These objections were clearer when he was in blackface and a wig than when he was just Mr. Bones in name. He was now a man in a mask, someone to fear, saying things he normally avoided, singing strange songs. In his minstrel show costume he could be as reckless as he wanted.

  It was true that Fred told fibs and didn’t want to go to college, true that Floyd owed him money and hated trumpet lessons. And it was easy to see that Mother’s nagging caused him to tease her and change the subject. His jokes were more than jokes; they were ways of telling us the truth. The yellow mustard in big quart jars was cheap and tasteless; “mouse turd” was a good name for it. The stale raisins that Mother bought cheap in the dented-package aisle were like dead flies. But it was so odd hearing these things from his gleaming black face, his white-outlined mouth, his woolly wig askew, and rapping his tambourine after he spoke.

  “Dad,” we said, pleading.

  “Dad done gone. ‘That was prior to his decease, Mr. Bones.’ I says, ‘He had no niece.’”

  Shika-shika-shika went the tambourine.

  He was happy, not just smiling but defiantly happy, powerfully happy, talking to us, teasing us in ways I’d never heard before. He had once been remote, with a kindly smile that made him hard to approach. Now he was up close and laughing at us and he wouldn’t go away.

  He was someone new, convincingly a real man, as though he’d been turned inside out, the true Dad showing. Swanking in the role of a comical slave, he’d become a frightening master to us, and because he was so strange we had no way of responding to his tyrannical teasing.

  Something else I discovered, because I kept going to the store to lurk and spy on him, was that instead of sitting silently alone in the shoe department he’d been hired to run, he now had company: Mel Hankey, John Flaherty, Morrie Daigle, and two men I’d never seen before. All of them with their heads together, sitting in the customers’ chairs, whispering, as if they were cooking something up. So odd to see this in a store where everyone else was working or shopping or being loudly busy.

  That was his secret. Mine too. The whole affair looked more serious than just black faces and songs and jokes. These men were like conspirators, with a single plan in their minds, and the sight of them impressed me, because Dad was in charge. I could see it in his posture, sitting upright like a musician holding an instrument; but the instrument was his hand. Wearing white gloves, he seemed to be giving directions, issuing energetic commands. Mr. Bones was their leader.

  So, after all, he had friends—these five whispering white men, who were black conspirators. We had taken him to be a man with no friends outside the family, no interests outside the house and the church; but here he was with his pals, Tambo, Lightning, Mr. Interlocutor, and the rest whose names I didn’t know.

  But that same night, as though to dispute all this, he came home after dinner in blackface and floppy coat and wig, and said, “Listen to Mr. Bones.”

  Fred was fiddling with the radio,
Mother was at the sink with Floyd, I was looking at a comic book.

  “I says, listen to Mr. Bones!”

  He spoke so loud we jumped, and as we did, he banged and clicked his tambourine. He was like a drunk you couldn’t talk back to, yet he hadn’t had a drink.

  I ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody,

  I ain’t never got nothin’ from nobody, no time!

  And until I get somethin’ from somebody, sometime,

  I don’t intend to do nothin’ for nobody, no time!

  He searched us, shaking his head, and moaned, “Nobody, no time!”

  Was it a song? Was it a poem? Was it a speech? It was too furious to be entertainment. We sat horrified by the sight of Dad in blackface, rapping his tambourine on his knees and his elbow and then bonking himself on the head with it.

  Even though it was painful to hear, it was being spoken by a man who had our full attention. We had to listen; we couldn’t look away. That proved he was the opposite of the poor soul he was describing—he was stronger than we were, but I recognized the “nobody” he spoke of. It wasn’t Mr. Bones, it was Dad.

  After that, he went over to Fred and said, “What are you going to do for Mr. Bones?”

  “College,” Fred said, blinking fiercely.

  “Know the difference between a college professor and a railway conductor?”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No, Mr. Bones.”

  “One trains minds and the other minds trains. Which one do you want to be?”

  “College professor, Mr. Bones.”

  But Mr. Bones had turned to Floyd. “What are you going to do for Mr. Bones?”

  “Trumpet lessons, Mr. Bones.”

  “You always were good at blowing your own horn. Ha!” Then he had me by the chin and was lifting it, as Dad had never done. “Who was that lady you saw me with last night?”

  With his white-gloved hand gripping my chin, I couldn’t speak.

  “That was no lady. That was my wife!”

  Mother muttered as he shook his tambourine.

  “You’ll need some Karo syrup for that throat,” Mother said, and handed him a bottle and a spoon.

  He took a swig straight from the bottle, then said to Fred, “Here, want to keep this bottle up your end?”

  I didn’t know it was a joke until he lowered his shoulders and swung his arms and shook his tambourine.

  I had been dreading going to the show for weeks, and when the day came I said, “I don’t want to go. I’ve got a wicked bad stomachache.”

  “Everyone’s going,” Mother said, trembling with a kind of nervous insistence that I recognized: if I defied her, she might start screaming.

  On a wet Saturday night in May we went together to the high school auditorium in our old car, Mother driving. I could tell she was upset from the way she drove, riding the brake, stamping on the clutch, pushing the gearshift too hard. Dad had gone separately. “Tambo’s stopping by for me.”

  I hurried into the auditorium and slid down in my seat so that no one would see me. When the music began to play and the curtain went up, I covered my face and peered through my fingers.

  Dad—Mr. Bones—was sitting in a chair onstage, and the others, too, sat on chairs in a semicircle. Mr. Bones looked confident and happy; he was dressed like a clown, but he looked powerful. He was wearing his floppy suit, shiny vest, big bow tie, white gloves and tilted wig, and his face was black. All of them were in blackface except Morrie Daigle, in the center, who wore a white suit and a white top hat.

  “Mr. Bones, wasn’t that music just beautiful? Didn’t it touch you?”

  I pressed my fingers to my ears, closed my eyes, and groaned so that I wouldn’t hear the rest. I wanted to disappear. I was slumped in my seat so my head wasn’t showing, and even though I kept my hands to my ears I heard familiar phrases: physician of good standing and that was prior to his decease.

  The songs I knew by heart penetrated me as I sat there trying to deafen myself. Mr. Bones sang “Mandy.” “Rosie” and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby” were sung by others. Someone else sang “Nobody.”

  I heard, You should see my brother, he walks like this, and knew it was Mr. Bones. I heard, bare-faced liar. I heard, Toulouse and Toulon. Even so, my eyes were shut, my palms stuck against my ears, and I was groaning.

  There was much more, skits and songs. People laughing, people clapping, the loud music, the shouts, the tambourines, the familiar phrases. This was silly and embarrassing, yet the same jokes and songs had intimidated us at home. And Mr. Bones had been different at home too, not this ridiculous man clowning, far off on the stage, but someone else I didn’t want to think of as Dad, teasing us and making fools of us and getting us to agree with him and make decisions. That was who he was—Dad as Mr. Bones.

  When the people onstage were taking their bows and the auditorium was still dark, I said, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and ran out and hid in our car.

  Back home afterward, no one said anything about the show. Dad was in his regular clothes, with the faint greasy streaks of black on his neck and behind his ears. He was excited, breathless, but he didn’t speak. The strange episode and uproar were over. Later, I got anxious when he hummed “Mandy” or “Rosie” while he was shaving in the kitchen, but he didn’t make any jokes, didn’t tease or taunt anymore. Looking through the side window of the store, I saw him standing near the cash register, in the shoe department, smiling at the front door as though to welcome a customer.

  The following year there was talk of a minstrel show, but nothing happened. We had a TV set then, and the news was of trouble in Little Rock, Arkansas, integrating the schools, black children protected by National Guardsmen, white crowds shouting abuse at the frightened black students who were being liberated. The bald-headed president made a speech on TV. Dad watched with us, saying nothing, maybe thinking how Mr. Bones had been liberated too, or banished. It was not what he had expected. The expression on his face was vacant, stunned with sorrow, but before long Dad was smiling.

  Our Raccoon Year

  THEY WERE LIKE hissing animals, blinded by the dark, thinking that no one knew. So we pretended we didn’t and hoped they’d stop. Then he’d say something, and she’d say something, and—Don’t say anything more, I thought, and held my breath—he’d say something sharp, and after a gasp and some crackling, their talk swished back and forth in furious whispers. Sometimes a thump, and a swelling silence that terrified Sam and me more than the hisses.

  It was not a question of our being happy or sad, but a condition, worry without a payoff, as though the house was always the wrong temperature. Then one muddy March day Ma said she was going away, she didn’t say where. She looked at us with bright anxious eyes and swallowed whatever she was about to tell us. Soon she was gone, down the driveway, where someone was waiting, under the sky like a low ceiling.

  “She’s where she wants to be,” Pa said. “With her friend.”

  I did not know it at the time, but that was when our raccoon year started, the first feature of it, Pa stopping whatever he was doing to squint, and wrinkle his nose, with a listening tilt to his head.

  “There’s this funny smell.”

  He had been an attorney. “My partner Hoyt used to say, ‘I bite people on the neck for a living.’” He smiled. “That wasn’t me.” He had been the first man in our state to gain full custody of his children in a divorce settlement, his best-known case. It happens these days, but years ago it was unheard of, the divorced husband holding on to the house and the children. I was one of the children, my younger brother Sam the other child, both of us still at the Harry Wayne Wing Elementary School in town. Pa was now a financial counselor, working from home, handling investments.

  “I’m a bottom feeder in the money business,” Pa said. “Just pawing through it like a scavenger.” But he was more than that: a reasonable cook, sometimes painted pictures, kept a boat on the creek in the summer. He gave us his wind-up Victrola and his
collection of old 78 rpm records, which we often played—“South American Joe,” “One Meat Ball,” “Shanghai Lil,” Hawaiian tunes.

  After Ma left, he would not hire a babysitter for Sam, or a cook for us, or a cleaner for the house. He waited with us for the school bus on the main road, and then—as he explained in the evening—he cleaned the house, did the laundry, and went grocery shopping. His office was at home, so he could easily combine housework with his business. He stopped sketching and sailing. He took up fancy cooking, the sort of cooking that makes a person bossy, using recipes out of books, talking about his sauces and his fresh ingredients. He used expressions like “my kitchen” and “my garlic press,” and of some dishes, he said, “Those beef tips pair nicely with a Merlot,” or “Anything with a mouth would eat that.”

  But there was nothing he could do to fill the empty space that Ma had made by leaving. Watching him trying so hard made me sad. And so I ate the food he prepared with frowning attention, even when I was not hungry.

  Our house sat on the brow of a hill, allowing us to see that we had no neighbors. But we had visitors. Just after Ma left, we began to find twists of scat like heaps of blackened sausages in corners of the porch, or we’d forget a plate of half-eaten food—it might be a leftover lump of risotto Milanese on the picnic table—and it would be gone in the morning, the plate licked clean. We found scratchings and evidence of prowlings, clawed earth, overturned buckets, but saw nothing of the perpetrators, as Pa called them. They were like phantoms. Even when he was wrinkling his nose, Pa praised them for being invisible, ripe-smelling ghosts that were about to arrive or had just left, content to live among themselves, never showing their faces, and shadowing us and living on our scraps.