All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  I have no reason to think that Hattie’s husband, Fred Brummel, was anything but a decent man. My mother’s statement that Hattie was having trouble with him possibly amounted to no more than that they were of two minds about moving to Chicago. If Hattie did indeed read my book then what could she think but that I had portrayed her as a loose woman and her husband as a monster of evil? And people in Lincoln, colored people and white, would wonder if I knew things about Fred Brummel that they didn’t, and if he was not the person they took him for. I had exposed their married life and blackened his character in order to make a fortune from my writing. I was a thousand miles away, where she couldn’t confront me with what I had done. And if she accused me to other people it would only call attention to the book and make more people read it than had already. If all this is true (and my bones tell me that it is true) then why, when I walked into my aunt’s kitchen, should she be pleased to see me?

  I do not feel that it is a light matter.

  Any regret for what I may have made Hattie feel is nowhere near enough to have appeased her anger. She was perfectly right not to look at me, not to respond at all, when I put my arms around her. I must have seen Fred Brummel at one time or another or else why does his name conjure up a slight, handsome man whose skin was lighter than Hattie’s? If, now, I were to go out to the cemetery in Lincoln and find his grave (which would take some doing) and sit beside it patiently for a good long time, would I learn anything more than that dust does not speak, to anyone, let alone to a stranger? He was once alive. He married Hattie and they had several children. That much is a fact. It does not seem too much to assume that he was happy on the day she told him she would marry him. And again when he held his first child in his arms. And that he was proud of Hattie, as proud as my father was of my mother. Who are now dust also.

  The Holy Terror

  MY older brother and I shared a room when we were children, and he was so good at reading my mind that it left me defenseless against his teasing. When I learned something that the family was holding back from him and hadn’t considered it safe to tell me, either, my first thought was He will see it in my face! But by that time he and I were living in different parts of the country and seldom saw each other, and from necessity I had acquired, like any other adult, an ability to mask my thoughts and feelings. His life was hard enough as it was, and there was no question but that this piece of information would have made it more so. The older generation are all dead now, and what they didn’t want my brother to know would still be locked up inside me if my brother’s heart hadn’t stopped beating, one day in the summer of 1985.

  The firm mouth, the clear ringing voice, the direct gaze. In a family of brown-eyed or blue-eyed people his eyes were hazel.

  As a small child — that is to say, when he was five years old — he was strong and healthy and a holy terror. Threats and punishments slid off him like water off a duck’s back. My father, with the ideas of his period, believed that children should learn obedience above everything else, but he was new at being a father, and besides, three days a week he wasn’t there. My mother was young and pleasure-loving and couldn’t say no to an invitation to a card party, and often left my brother with the hired girl, who was no match for him. He was named Edward, after my Grandfather Blinn. My father’s sister christened him “Happy Hooligan,” after a character in the funny papers, and part of the name stuck. “Look out, Happy, don’t do that!” people shrieked, but he had already done it. One afternoon as my mother emerged from the house dressed fit to kill, he turned the garden hose on her. My Aunt Edith, hearing the commotion, opened the screen door and came out to see what was going on, and she too got a soaking. My brother continued to hold the two women at bay until the stream of water abruptly failed: My father had crept around the side of the house to the outdoor faucet. My brother dropped the hose and ran. At that time, my Aunt Annette lived farther down the street and if he got to her he was safe. She was not afraid of anybody and would simply wrap her skirts around him and there he’d be. She was upstairs dressing and heard him calling her, but by the time she got to the front door my father was holding him by the arm, and possession is nine-tenths of the law.

  Down through the years, when family stories were being brought out for company, someone was bound to tell the incident of the garden hose, and about how my father’s cigars had to be kept under lock and key.

  All such outrageous behavior came to an end before Hap had reached his sixth birthday. The year was 1909. My Aunt Annette, driving a horse and buggy, stopped in front of our house. There was something she wanted to tell my mother. As they were talking my brother said, “Take me with you.” Annette explained that she couldn’t but he seldom took no for an answer, and started climbing up the back wheel of the buggy in order to get in beside her. She finished what she had to say and flicked the horse’s rump with her whip. I was a baby at the time and there is no way I could remember my mother’s screams, but even so I am haunted by them.

  My brother’s left leg was amputated well above the knee. At some point in my growing up I was told, probably by my father, that if the surgeon had been able to leave three or four more inches of stump it would have made a considerable difference in my brother’s walking.

  By the time I was old enough to observe what was going on around me, my brother had an artificial leg — of cork, I believe, painted an unconvincing pink. When I opened my eyes in the morning there it was, leaning against a chair. I had no conscious feelings about it. It was just something my brother had to have so he could walk. Over his stump he wore a sort of sock, of wool, and the weight of the leg was carried by a cloth harness that went around his shoulders. In the evening after supper my father would give him lessons in walking properly: “If you will only lead with your wooden leg instead of dragging it behind you as you walk, it won’t be noticeable.” This was almost true. But when Hap was tired he forgot. It has been more than seventy years since we were boys together in that house, but my shoulder remembers the weight of his hand as we walked home through the dusk. If he saw someone coming toward us, the hand was instantly withdrawn.

  IN the earliest picture of my brother that I have ever seen, taken when he was a year old, he is sitting astride Granny Blinn’s shoulders. He was her first grandchild and the apple of everybody’s eye. As soon as he was old enough to walk he wanted to be with the men, where the air was blue with cigar or pipe smoke and the talk was about horses and hunting dogs, guns and fishing tackle. Between my Grandfather Blinn and my brother there was a deep natural sympathy — the old bear with the cub he liked the smell of. In my mind I see my brother sitting in the front seat of a carriage, studying now the details of the harness on the horse’s back and now my grandfather’s face for a response to what he is telling my grandfather. And being allowed to hold the reins when they came to a place where the horse was not likely to be startled by any sudden movement from the side of the road. At a very early age he resolved to follow my Grandfather Blinn into the profession of law, and he never deviated from this.

  He was nine years old when my grandfather died. My grandmother died that same year, and the house was sold to a family named Irish, from out in the country. They had three boys and a girl, and Mrs. Irish’s mother lived with them. I think it is more than likely that before the moving men had finished carrying the Irishes’ furniture up the front walk and into the house Hap and Harold Irish had sized each other up and decided it was safe to make the first move. As it turned out, they were friends for life. Harold was a sleepy-eyed boy who noticed things that other people missed. My brother preferred his company to that of any other boy he knew. Harold understood, without having to be told, that my brother could not bear any expression of pity or any offer of help. With intelligence and skill he circumvented his physical handicap. My father and mother never made anything of this, but they cannot have failed to notice that there was very little other boys could do that Hap couldn’t do also.

  On October afternoons while the map
le leaves came floating down from the trees, the boys of the neighborhood played football in a vacant lot on Eleventh Street. The game broke up when they couldn’t see the ball anymore. With a smudged face and pieces of dry grass sticking to his clothes, Hap would place himself on the crossbar of Harold’s bicycle, which was always waiting for him. He had a bicycle, and could ride it, but to do this with security and élan you need two good legs. Hashing over plays that had miscarried, they rode home to Ninth Street. If other offers of a ride were made, my brother declined them.

  In winter when it was still dark I would be wakened by the sound of gravel striking against the window, and Hap would get up from his warm bed and dress and go off with Harold to see if they had caught anything in the traps they had set at intervals along Brainerd’s Branch. They had learned from an ad in a boys’ magazine that you could get a quarter for a properly stretched and dried muskrat skin, and they meant to become rich. If they waited till daylight they would find their traps sprung and empty. Other boys — coal miners’ sons from the north end of town, they believed — also knew about that ad. More often than not it was bitterly cold, and to reach the pasture where the traps were they had to cope with a number of barbed-wire fences half buried in snowdrifts. I am sure, because I used to see it happen on other occasions, that Harold climbed through the barbed wire and walked on, leaving Hap to bend down and hold the wires apart and pull his artificial leg through after him. My mother was forever mending rips in his trousers.

  The summer he was fifteen he and I were sent to a Boy Scout camp in Taylorville, Illinois. With the whole camp watching him he climbed up the ladder to the high-diving platform, his cotton bathing suit imperfectly concealing his stump, and hopped out to the end of the board and took off into a jackknife. His life was one long exercise in gallantry. He wanted to make people forget he was crippled — if possible to keep them from even knowing that he was. He wanted to be treated like anyone else but behaved in such a way as to arouse universal admiration. Not leading with his artificial leg but dragging it after him across the clay court, he won the camp tennis singles. It is no wonder so many people loved him.

  BEFORE I was old enough to have any recollection of it, my Aunt Edith worked for a time as a nurse in a state asylum for the feeble-minded, out past the edge of town. She met there and eventually married a resident physician named William Young, who soon struck out on his own. As a child I loved to sit on one of his size 12 shoes while he walked back and forth talking to my mother about grown-up matters. A deep attachment existed between our whole family and this big, easygoing, humorous man, whose hands smelled of carbolic acid and who never said “Not now” to anything any child wanted him to do.

  It was he who told me the truth about Hap’s accident. I was in my late twenties when this happened. One day when we were alone together he spoke in passing of my brother’s “affliction” — of what a pity it was. Out of a desire to make the unacceptable appear less so, I mentioned something I had been given to understand — that the leg had been broken in so many places they had no choice but to cut if off. My uncle looked at me a moment and then said, “It was a simple fracture, of a kind that not once in a hundred times would have required an amputation.” After which, he went on to tell me what Hap didn’t, and mustn’t ever, know.

  In those days, their fees being small, doctors commonly eked out their income by dispensing medicine themselves instead of writing out prescriptions. The family doctor in Lincoln, with easy access to morphine, had become addicted to it and should have been prevented from practicing. Uncle Doc, not liking the sound of what he was told over the telephone day after day about Hap’s condition, got on a train and came to Lincoln. He saw immediately that the broken bone was not set. He also saw the unmistakable signs of gangrene. And taking my father aside, he told him that the leg would have to be cut off to save my brother’s life.

  “Your Grandfather Blinn called that doctor in and cursed him all the way back to the day he was born,” Uncle Doc said to me. “In my whole life I have never witnessed anything like it.”

  This may have a little relieved my grandfather’s feelings but it did not undo what had happened. My Aunt Edith, more sensibly, went to Chicago and came home with the finest set of lead soldiers money could buy. Cavalry officers wearing bearskin busbies and scarlet jackets. On black or white horses. For many years my brother played with them with passionate pleasure. Nothing could really make up for the fact that he was doomed to spend the rest of his life putting on and taking off that artificial limb, and could never again run when he felt like it, as fast as his two legs would carry him.

  SINCE I was not a natural athlete like my brother, or an athlete at all, it crossed my mind more than once that having an artificial leg would not have been such a great inconvenience to me, because what I liked to do best was to retire to some out-of-the-way corner of the house and read. I even entertained the fantasy of an exchange with Hap. Along with this idea and rather at odds with it was a superstitious fear that came over me from time to time when I remembered that my mother’s only brother lost an arm in an automobile accident when he was in his early twenties. Was there a kind of family destiny that would one day overtake me as well?

  There was a period in my life when I lay down on a psychoanalyst’s couch four times a week and relived the past. Eventually we arrived at my brother’s lead soldiers. I begged to be allowed to play with them and my brother invariably said no. He kept them out of my reach, on top of a high bookcase. One day when Hap was out of the house I put a stool on the seat of a straight chair and climbed up on it. I had just got my hands on the box when I heard the front door burst open and my brother called out, “Anybody home?” In my guilty fright I tried to put the box back, lost my balance, and fell. If my mother had not appeared from the back part of the house at that moment, I don’t know what my brother would have done to me. Not one horseman survived intact. I see Hap now, sitting on the floor in the living room, gluing a head back on one of them. The horse already had a matchstick for one of its hind legs, so it would stand up. He never forgave me for what I had done. I didn’t expect him to.

  The Germanic voice coming from a few feet beyond the crown of my head suggested that my brother’s accident had been a great misfortune not only for him but for me also; because I saw what happens to little boys who are incorrigible, I became a more tractable, more even-tempered, milder person than it was my true nature to be. About these thoughts that one is told on good authority one thinks without their ever crossing the threshold of consciousness, what is there to say except “Possibly”? In support of the psychoanalytic conjecture, a submerged memory rose to the surface of my mind. At that Scout camp where Hap won the singles tennis championship I was awarded a baseball glove for Good Conduct.

  WHO has that picture of Hap sitting on Granny Blinn’s shoulders, I wonder. Or the one of him driving a pony cart. It was a postcard — which means that it was taken by a professional photographer. On the reverse someone had written “Edward, aged seven, at the Asylum.” It was an odd choice. Uncle Doc was practicing in Bloomington by that time. Did the family, even so, regard the asylum grounds as home territory? The road to the Lincoln Chautauqua ran alongside them, and driving by with my father and mother I used to stare at the inmates standing with their hands and faces pressed against the high wire netting, their mouths permanently slack and sometimes drooling. Perhaps the photographer wanted the institutional flower beds as a background. In the photograph my brother is wearing a small round cap. The pony and cart were not borrowed for the occasion but his own. He is holding the reins, and the pony is, of course, standing still. My brother’s chin is raised and he is facing the camera, and the expression on his face is of a heartbreaking uncertainty.

  Most children appear to be born with a feeling that life is fair, that it must be. And only with difficulty accommodate themselves to the fact that it isn’t. That look on my brother’s face — was it because of his sense of the disproportion between the off
enses he had committed and the terrible punishment for them? Was he perhaps bracing himself for a second blow, worse than the first one? Or was it because of what happened to him when he left our front yard to play with other children? A little boy who couldn’t run away from his tormentors or use his fists to defend himself because they were needed for his crutches, and who could easily be tripped and toppled, was irresistible. Since Hap refused, even so, to give up playing with them, my father paid a colored boy named Dewey Cecil to be his bodyguard.

  I ASSUMED, irrationally, that Hap would die before I did; he was older and when we were growing up together he always did everything first, while I came along after him and tried to imitate him when it was at all possible. During the past few years I have often thought, When he is gone there will be no one who remembers the things I remember. Meaning the conversations that took place in the morning when he and I were dressing for school. The time we had chicken pox together. The way the light from the low-hanging red-and-green glass shade fell on all our faces as we sat around the dining-room table. The grape arbor by the kitchen door. The closet under the stairs. The hole in the living-room carpet made by the rifle he said wasn’t loaded. The time I tried to murder him with a golf club.

  We were waiting for my father to finish his foursome, and for lack of anything better to do Hap threw my cap up in a tree, higher than I could reach. I picked up a midiron and started after him. With a double hop, a quick swing with his bum leg, and another double hop he could cover the ground quite fast, but not as fast as I could. I meant to lay him out flat, as he so richly deserved. Walter Kennett, the golf coach, grabbed me and held me until I cooled down.

  My brother didn’t mind that I had tried to kill him. He always liked it when I showed signs of life.