by John Fulton
“Sure,” the missionary said.
“A man’s or a woman’s voice?” The bum seemed very interested.
“A man’s,” the missionary said. When the toast and tea came, the missionary made them say a silent prayer and they bowed their heads and closed their eyes. The bum’s thick fingers drummed slowly on the tabletop.
After the prayer, the bum opened his eyes. “I didn’t hear any voice,” he said. In the bum’s huge hands the slices of toast seemed as small as playing cards. He ate each slice in two or three bites, and then looked over at our table. “Is anyone going to eat that?” he asked, pointing at Jenny’s full plate of fish.
“It’s not mine,” I said. I was wishing that our mother would return. I was wishing that people would stop asking us for things. It didn’t much matter to me anymore whether he could hum or not. I just wanted to be left alone.
“To whom does it belong?” the bum said. He actually said that—“to whom”—with this very exact pronunciation. I pointed to Jenny, who was finished with her coloring and was now just looking at what she had done. “That’s splendid,” the bum said. “Really. Your sister has something there.” She didn’t know, of course, what I did—that this man was himself a kind of artist and that his opinion meant something. We all looked at her picture—the missionary, the singing bum, and me—and I think we all saw that it was a little remarkable—the perfection of each animal, the green of the grass, the brown of the fence, the golden circle of the sun in a sky that she had touched with blue and tinted with silver and somehow managed to give depth to. We all looked at her then, at her face, still red from tears. She was done crying, but you could see that she was still suffering.
“I didn’t hear God’s voice, either,” Jenny said. I guess she’d been praying along with them, and that upset me. I didn’t know why she insisted on being religious.
“You have to keep an open heart,” the missionary said. The fact that he was just a few years older than me didn’t stop him from pretending to be the only one of us to whom God spoke.
The bum pointed at her plate of fish. “Go ahead,” she said. He ate rapidly and neatly, and I couldn’t help feeling that I was tired of giving people things that day, even if they were things we didn’t want and even if this guy was hungry and, as I knew, exceptional in his way. I could understand then why my father had yelled at the man with nice shoes. I could understand his feeling that we worked hard for the little we had, that feeling that anything could be taken away from you, that somebody else having something meant that you couldn’t have it, that feeling—simple and immediate—that you could lose everything in an instant. I was pretty sure the bum would leave us alone now, though I was wrong about that. When my mother returned, she left a four-dollar tip on the table, which was a lot of money for us, for my father and me and Jenny, anyway, even if it was nothing to Curtis Smith. When she turned her back, I snatched two dollars from the table, and the bum, leaning back in his chair and looking full and satisfied, winked at me as if we were both in the same business of taking whatever we could get.
Four
WE DIDN’T TALK MUCH on the way to Oak Groves. The rain had become a fine, grainy mist that speckled the windshield, and I was thinking about the dead man. I didn’t know anything about him, even though he’d had everything to do with what was happening now. He was making my father unlovable. He was making my mother decide to go with a man called Curtis Smith, whom she barely knew. A dead man was doing this. “Who was Mr. Warner?” I asked.
“He liked to be called Colonel Warner,” she said. “When he could recognize his name, anyway. He didn’t always know you were trying to talk to him. If he did understand that he was being addressed, he wasn’t very nice to you.” She paused. “He was no one, really.”
“Who was he?” I asked.
“Does it really matter?” she asked me. “You’re making me need to smoke again.” She took out a cigarette and lit it.
“Can I say the Ten Commandments now?” Jenny asked from the backseat.
“No,” my mother said. “Mr. Warner … Colonel Warner was alone. That’s for sure,” she said. “He was ninety-two last Wednesday and had no one in the world save for a stepsister in Reno who did not once come to visit him and who was pretty interested when we called her this afternoon. She must have known that she’d get whatever money he had left to his name. Maybe his wife really loved him when she was still alive. He’d sometimes talk to her in the tearoom as if she were sitting across the table from him. He’d say, ‘Oh, Martha, not again. Please. How many times do I have to tell you?’ as if he were really disappointed in her for doing something he didn’t like for the thousandth time, like putting too much sugar in his coffee or overcooking the chicken. But they might have really loved one another. He was retired military, and they paid for him to be at Oak Groves. Oak Groves is not cheap, you know. But he had no one,” she said again, her voice soft and spooked. “Not a single soul.”
“Was he in a war?” I asked her.
“More than one,” my mother said. “I think he was in all the big ones. He used to talk about the Adriatic Sea as if it were out in front of Oak Groves. I wonder what war happened on the Adriatic Sea,” my mother said. “He would wake up at night from dreams. He’d be afraid, and I could tell it was because of the wars. It was a specific kind of fear. You could see that in his face. He would be remembering something terrible, something worse than most people ever have to experience, and you couldn’t tell him anything that would make it better. I don’t think he understood much of what anybody said to him at the end. All you could do was hold him for a while. He liked that. His wife must have done that for him.”
“Where’s the Adriatic Sea?” I asked her. I was glad we weren’t talking about her leaving my father anymore. I half believed that it might disappear if we didn’t think or talk about it. So instead I thought about the vastness of the world, the places I might see someday, especially if I became a pilot. I thought about war—the fear and death of war—which wasn’t really a terrible thought since I could hardly imagine it, since it happened in places like the Adriatic Sea, which must be very beautiful, must have that quietness and peace of any place where terrible things once happened but were now only a memory.
“Hmmm,” my mother said, looking out the windshield as if she were trying to spot somewhere in the gray drizzle what I’d imagined would be a brilliant, glassy expanse of translucent ocean blue that might, in an instant, be rippled by a sudden sea wind. “Somewhere else,” she said. “Somewhere far away from here. Maybe in the Middle East. It sounds biblical to me.”
“No,” Jenny said, as if she were the expert. “That’s the Dead Sea. That’s the sea of the Bible.”
“There’s more than one sea in the Bible,” I said, though in truth I had no idea. I had never read the Bible.
“He was very much alone,” my mother said, returning to a familiar thought. “More than I can even imagine.”
I wanted to know more about Colonel Warner, but I didn’t want to have to keep hearing about how he had no one, how alone in the world he was.
“The Ten Commandments start with Moses,” Jenny said, “when he brought them on stone to the people wandering in the desert.”
“Mom said no,” I said. If you gave Jenny a chance to be in the spotlight, she would take it, and I was in no mood to give her all the attention she wanted that afternoon.
“Go ahead, Jen-Jen,” my mother said. “What are the Ten Commandments?” I could tell she didn’t really want to know. She was just trying to relieve her guilt for everything she’d done and was still going to do to us that day.
“Thank you,” Jenny said. And then, as we were barreling down Seventh East in the rain, getting closer to Oak Groves, Jenny started going through them, very slowly and carefully. “One,” she said. “I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, and thou shalt have no other gods before me. Two: Thou shalt worship no idols or graven images, for I the Lord thy Go
d am a jealous God. Three: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” As she gradually worked through each phrase, each shalt and shalt not, her voice took on a strange depth. Her articulation became solid and distinct and powerful, as if some chilly, distant voice, not quite my sister’s, spoke the commandments through her. There was something remedial and balanced about each sentence, and this quality seemed to have taken hold of her. It was unsettling. It made me wonder what had suddenly happened to the frivolous, happy drill team member that my sister had recently become. “Five: Honor thy father and thy mother,” she said. “Six: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s oxen or his wife.” She hesitated. “No,” she said. “That’s not six. Six is not killing. Thou shalt not kill.”
As she continued, I realized that I didn’t really know the Ten Commandments. I knew some of the basic ones: Thou shalt not kill, for example. But my knowledge went no further than that. I understood that my mother did not really know them, either, since she hardly seemed to expect what Jenny was about to say in her weird, chilly voice as soon as we had pulled into the parking lot of Oak Groves. “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” she said three or four times, until my mother turned around and said, “Shut up, Jenny. Please, shut up.” Jenny shut up then, though that didn’t keep me from wondering what our ignorance of these laws meant about us, even if I didn’t believe in God or an afterlife or any kind of divine justice—at least, I didn’t think I believed in it. As we sat in our parked car looking out into the rain, I had to ask myself the very stupid question of how my family would have been different if we actually knew those ten laws and lived by them. It was pretty obvious to me that if that were the case we wouldn’t have been the Parkers at all. We would have been an entirely different family. And because that thought led absolutely nowhere, I put it out of my mind.
All the same, I had to ask Jenny a question that was itching away at me. “What about loving your neighbor as you love yourself?” I asked. “What number commandment is that?”
“That’s not a commandment,” she said. “That’s something Jesus said later.”
“Oh,” I said.
* * *
Oak Groves didn’t have any Oaks. It didn’t have any trees at all, which made sense because Salt Lake is basically on the edge of a desert, and aside from the pine trees that you see in the mountains, there aren’t that many trees. The name was a cover-up for what was nothing more than a number of small, square buildings called facilities. The buildings were linked by sidewalks on which two men in white were quickly pushing an empty hospital bed through the rain. Nurse Brown met us at the front desk of facility Number Six, where my mother had been bathing Mr. Warner when he fell on her and died. Nurse Brown was a large woman with short black hair and a bloodred mole about the size of a pebble on her upper lip. “Where have you been, Mary?” she asked. “We have people waiting for us.”
“I’m sorry, Betty,” my mother said. “I was taking care of family matters.”
“I’m sorry is not what I need to hear right now.” The nurse glanced over at Jenny and me—the family matters, her eyes seemed to label us.
“This is Jenny and Steven,” my mother said awkwardly. “My kids.” She didn’t need to think at all about what she said next. She just said it. “I’m quitting, Betty. I’ll go do whatever I need to do. After that, I’m afraid I’m done.”
“We would have appreciated two weeks’ notice. You realize that you’re jeopardizing us.”
“I wish I could do that,” my mother said. “But not after Mr. Warner. It’s not my kind of work.”
Nurse Brown sighed. “Yes,” she said. “I guess we all saw that.” She looked over at Jenny and me again. She had a wide chin and a single eyebrow and a large, indistinct bust that seemed too solid to be a woman’s breasts. She wore the same all-white nurse’s uniform that my mother did, and a small black walkie-talkie clipped to her belt. Looking at her, you got the impression that she’d seen hundreds of old people die without flinching, and that she was ashamed of my mother’s squeamishness, her girlish, nonsensical fear of death. Her eyes, quick and unkind, moved from my head to my feet and back up again, and I felt myself bristle, as if touched in an unpleasant way. She did the same to Jenny. She distrusted us. She distrusted all kids, I guessed. “Will your children behave themselves if we leave them on their own for a while?”
“Yes,” Jenny said. “We will.”
“I am talking to your mother,” Nurse Brown said.
“They are very well behaved,” my mother said.
“What happened to him?” Nurse Brown asked. I looked down at myself as I often did when people asked about my arm.
“Just an accident,” my mother said. I wondered then why we never told the truth. Why didn’t we just say that I’d been given a thorough beating by another boy my age? I sometimes just wanted to say it outright, to tell everybody that some stupid kid had kicked the shit out of me.
“Well,” Nurse Brown said, “you will probably be happy to know that I got some other girls to prepare Colonel Warner. He’s cleaned up. We just need a report from you.” She was looking at me while she talked about Colonel Warner’s body, how it had been prepared. It was terrible. I wanted her to look away, to stop bothering me with her eyes that knew so much. “They can wait in the game room for you. Mrs. Smith and Mr. Alan are in there. They won’t mind, so long as Jenny and Steven behave.”
When my mother, startled and worried, looked at me then, I knew right away that the Mrs. Smith in the game room was the mother of her lover, Curtis Smith. I didn’t want to meet the old woman, especially in this strange way, and both my mother and I must have squirmed in our places. But Nurse Brown was not the sort of person to be directed by signals and undercurrents. “This way,” she said to Jenny and me.
The hallways were windowless and brightly lit by buzzing, white fluorescent lights reflected by the white walls and white waxed floors. The floors shone with an icy veneer of brightness that seemed almost dangerous to walk over. At intervals on either side of us were closed doors behind which, I knew, old people lay sick and frail or maybe just resting, napping. An ancient person—man or woman, I could not tell—motored past us in an electric wheelchair, a blue, veiny hand pressing forward on the joysticklike knob on the chair’s armrest. As the chair whizzed by, Jenny took my arm. “This is freaky,” she whispered.
“There is nothing to be afraid of,” Nurse Brown said. She had somehow heard Jenny’s whisper, despite the fact that Jenny had spoken in a barely audible voice. “If you just mind yourselves, that is,” she added.
Nurse Brown ushered us through the door of the game room. “Wait here,” she said. “Your mother will come for you later.” Then she was gone.
The room was entirely white as the whole facility seemed to be. At the center of the whiteness, surrounded by two Ping-Pong tables, a Foosball game, and a number of chairs, Mrs. Smith sat alone at a large round table looking into the air. Jenny was staring at her, studying her, just as I was. She must have noticed our mother’s nervousness and made her own conclusions. “Is that her?” she whispered.
“Who?” I said, wanting to pretend ignorance.
“You know.”
I sat down directly across from the old woman while Jenny wandered over to Mr. Alan, who sat behind Mrs. Smith and me at a card table playing checkers with himself. “King me,” he said triumphantly. He turned the board around after each move and his voice changed, higher or lower, depending on whose turn it was. “Go ahead,” he said as he carefully turned the board around once again and considered the next move he would make against himself. My sister, in her overfriendly way, sat down opposite him and said, “Hi, Mr. Alan. I’m Jenny Parker. My mother works here. It’s nice to meet you.”
Mr. Alan wore baby blue pajamas and one of those plastic hospital bracelets on his wrist. Fuzzy patches of gray hair were scattered across his thin scalp. “Excuse me,” he said to Jenny, “but I am sitting in that seat.” Jenny looked down at her lap, puzzled. “U
p,” he said. “Up … up.” Jenny stood up and hovered around his table now until Mr. Alan, still not pleased, shooed her away with a hand.
“He’s strange,” Jenny said, sitting down next to me.
“He’s just old,” I said, though I was in the middle of my own odd encounter. For the last thirty seconds at least, Mrs. Smith had been staring at me, though she didn’t seem to see me. She saw past me with her bright, glassy eyes. She was dressed meticulously in a gray suit with a silver brooch on her jacket and a gray scarf draped over her shoulders. She might have been decked out for an occasion of some sort. Her hands were on the table, and I could see the slightest trembling in her liver-spotted fingers, though her nails were manicured and painted. I put a hand up and waved at her.
“Hi,” Jenny said.
She made no sign of seeing us, though finally she nodded and smiled at no one. “Please pass the potatoes, if you would, dears,” she said, not seeming to speak to Jenny or me. I hardly knew what to do. There was nothing on the tabletop. “Crown me!” Mr. Alan shouted out from the other side of the room. “Oh, damn you!” his other, higher voice said, angered and defeated. “Please pass the potatoes, if you would, dears,” Mrs. Smith said again with the same vacant shine in her eyes. I looked over the table again, feeling a little frightened, trapped by the emptiness I saw there. There were no potatoes. I looked back up at her: her face was ghostly pale, the silvery color of moth wings.