Martha Calhoun

by Richard Babcock

  “I’ve got enough things to worry about,” Bunny went on, “without having to worry that you’re gonna give up a good summer job.”

  “Well, I did some arithmetic and I figured I can make an extra fifty dollars this summer babysitting.”

  “I was never good at arithmetic, and I never relied on it,” Bunny said. “You’ve got to use intuition in these things, and my intuition says you should stay at the country club.”

  I was getting exasperated. “The only reason you don’t want me to babysit is you don’t like Mrs. Benedict,” I said.

  Bunny sighed. “Oh, take the damn job, then,” she said finally. “I don’t care.”

  The Benedicts lived in a brown-shingled house, big and angular, on Parkview Avenue, overlooking Katydid City Park—the opposite side of town from Bunny’s place, but an easy trip by bicycle. My job started on Friday. That morning, I put on a blouse and pants, kissed Bunny goodbye and set out on my bike. I pedalled down Prosperity Street, past the Katydid Tool and Die—the KTD—the subject of constant worry, since half the people in town worked there and rumors were always going around that it was about to shut down. I crossed the railroad tracks and chugged up Center Street, skirting the square, which would be crowded with traffic on a Friday morning. It was exactly eleven when I got to Parkview Terrace.

  “Martha!” said Mrs. Benedict at the door. “I think this is perfect!”

  “Me too!”

  “I adore it!” she said.

  “Me too.”

  She took my hand and pulled me in. I’d never been inside the Benedict house before. The rooms were high and spacious and the furniture all looked oversized. My first thought was that at last I was in a house that looked as if it had been designed for me. Mrs. Benedict led me into the living room where her children were draped around a huge, boaty sofa. I didn’t really know them well. The oldest, the twins, were eleven. Brenda was a chunky, big-cheeked girl with a fast circle of friends who were always huddled together in some sort of conspiracy. Arnold—in addition to having to live down that unfortunate name—had the bad luck to be skinny and clumsy. More often than not, I’d seen him tagging along with Brenda’s group. Butcher, the youngest, was nine. He was short and compact, with his mother’s dark looks and heavy, sulky eyes. All three studied me grudgingly.

  “Do you play poker?” asked Brenda. “That’s our favorite game.”

  “No, but I’m sure I can learn,” I said.

  Brenda and Arnold exchanged sour glances.

  Mrs. Benedict said she was in a hurry, but she took me around the first floor of the house, showing off the furniture and appliances. In the library, an enormous TV sat wrapped in wood, bursting with knobs and dials.

  “It’s new,” said Brenda, who’d been trailing along behind.

  Mrs. Benedict bustled to get her things together, then lined the children up at the front door. “Goodbye, now,” she said. “The Kool-Aid and sandwiches are in the refrigerator. Be nice to Martha.” She bent down and kissed each of them.

  After she’d left, the children lurked around the door. It was clear that Brenda and Arnold were a team and that Butcher was left to fend for himself.

  “Well, what do you want to do?” asked Brenda.

  “What would you like to do?” I responded, trying to be agreeable. In fact, I’d have loved to get my hands on that television. Bunny’s old TV had been broken for the last couple of weeks and she hadn’t had the money to get it fixed.

  Brenda said she wanted to play “purr kids.”

  “Yeah,” said Arnold.

  Butcher just stood there.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “You know, purrr kids—little children whose parents don’t have any money so they have to starve and try to find food in the forest.”

  “In the park,” said Arnold.

  “You mean poor kids,” I corrected.

  “Yeah. Purr kids,” said Brenda. “Let’s go.” She ran into the kitchen and out the back door with Arnold just behind. I hurried after, bringing Butcher along with me.

  Playing purr kids, I soon discovered, consisted mostly of wandering around the woods in Katydid City Park, while Brenda explained how we’d got into this horrible predicament: We were a family. Our mother had been run over by a train and our father was a drunk. I was the oldest sister, but I was retarded, so Brenda, the next oldest, had to make all the decisions. Arnold was the protector, so he carried a stick. Butcher just followed along behind, looking bored. Brenda and Arnold spent a lot of time telling him to pretend right.

  “Now, it’s nightfall,” said Brenda after a while. “We’ll have to make camp.” She picked a spot on the path underneath a big tree, where not much grass was growing.

  “I’m not lying down in the dirt,” said Butcher.

  “You do what you’re told,” said Brenda sharply.

  “Yeah,” said Arnold, waving the stick around.

  “Now, now, let’s be nice,” I said.

  Brenda and Arnold sat cross-legged in the dirt. I found a little clump of grass and sat on that.

  “I’m not getting my blue jeans dirty,” said Butcher.

  “What a baby,” said Arnold.

  “You’re a brat,” said Brenda.

  “Now, now,” I said. “Let’s get on with pretending.”

  “How can we pretend when he won’t sit down?” asked Brenda.

  “Let’s pretend he’s got a bad leg and can’t sit,” I suggested.

  “That’s stupid,” said Brenda.

  “Really stupid,” agreed Arnold.

  Brenda went on with her explaining: We were going to starve unless we could grow a garden. We’d grow carrots and peas and lettuce and take turns staying up all night to make sure animals or drifters didn’t steal anything. Arnold started rooting around in the dirt with his stick, making holes to plant the seeds in. Butcher came over and stood by me.

  After a while, the noon whistle blew down at the KTD. Arnold leaped up. “Noon,” he yelped. “Time for Noontime Adventures.”

  “Arnold, I’m not finished,” said Brenda.

  Arnold was torn, but he sat down again.

  “And so, if we have a big harvest, we’ll have a day of thanksgiving,” Brenda went on. “And we’ll invite the Indians and the drifters. And so we’ll have corn-on-the-cob and turkeys and peas, and we’ll have a big feast, with dancing … and so … aww, let’s go,” she said, jumping up. She and Arnold ran back down the path toward the house. I walked back with Butcher.

  “Do you like to watch Noontime Adventures?” I asked.

  “Naaa,” he said.

  I served sandwiches and Kool-Aid on TV trays in front of the television. The show was mostly cartoons. Afterward, we tried some soap operas, The Brighter Day and then The Secret Storm. I was settled on a sofa, enjoying every minute. Bunny’s TV is about the size of a toaster, and even when it works, the screen has black, squiggly lines running across it. But pretty soon Brenda and Arnold started grousing and chasing each other around the room. Then Brenda’s friend Laura Brinkman came to the front door.

  “Can we go back to Laura’s house?” asked Brenda.

  “I don’t think your mother would like that,” I said.

  “Awww. Well, can we go out and play in the yard?”

  “Of course.” I started to get up.

  “I don’t want to do that,” said Butcher. He’d been the only one besides me interested in the soap operas.

  “We don’t want you to play out there anyway,” said Brenda.

  So Butcher and I kept watching soap operas and Brenda, Arnold, and Laura went out to the yard. I wasn’t worried because I could keep an eye on them through the back window.

  Butcher, I started to realize, was a very strange little boy. He almost never smiled, and when he knew people were watching him, his face was contorted into a sort of squinty frown.

  “Butcher, is something bothering you?” I asked, when The Secret Storm was over.

  “No.”

  �
��You seem unhappy.”

  “Do you want to come look at my room?” he asked in a solemn voice.

  “Sure.” I checked outside, and the kids were doing fine. Butcher led me up two flights of stairs, his black sneakers leaving diamond imprints on the carpeted steps. On the third floor, the ceiling was low and slanted.

  “Here,” he said, opening a door with “Butcher” stenciled on it. I paused in the doorway to look. Inside, the room was filled with cowboys. There were cowboys on the wallpaper, cowboys on the rug. A giant horsehead was sewn into the bedspread, and ten gallon hats decorated the curtains. There was a lamp made out of a cowboy boot and a carving of a horse rearing up. A bowl shaped like a rolled-up lariat was plopped in the middle of the bureau, and an animal skin was tacked up above Butcher’s bed.

  “That’s a gazelle skin,” Butcher said. “My father got it during the war. It sweats in hot weather.”

  I climbed onto the bed to get a better look. Sure enough, drops of liquid were zigzagging down the wall under the skin. “Weird,” I said.

  “I don’t let anyone come in here,” he said. “Not even my mother. I clean the room and make the bed myself.”

  “Why?”

  “I like to be alone.”

  “But don’t you have friends?”

  “I like to be alone.”

  I turned around and sat on the bed. Butcher had taken some wrinkled pieces of drawing paper out of a drawer and was clutching them in his hand. He stared at me for a moment and then came and sat beside me, thrusting the papers into my lap.

  “What’s this?” I asked. The papers were covered with crude, childish drawings of people strangely entangled. It took me a few seconds to realize that the people were naked, embracing. Balloons floated out of their mouths, circling words like “Oh, Oh,” and “Mmmm.”

  “Butcher, these are ridiculous,” I said.

  “I drew them myself.” He slipped off the bed and stood a few feet away, watching me leaf through his artwork. He was very intense, and I sensed his dark little eyes moving back and forth across my face.

  “People don’t even look like this.” I pulled out a drawing of a woman whose breasts were entirely covered by her nipples.

  “Oh yeah?” said Butcher. He was stuck in a kind of pose, one leg in front of the other, hands in pockets. Still, those eyes covered me. I felt uncomfortable and slid down the bed a few inches, but his eyes followed.

  “Here, put these away,” I said, handing him the drawings. “You should throw them out.” I was hoping to break the spell, but he kept staring as he stepped forward to take the drawings from my hand. He slipped them back in the drawer and then stepped over beside me. He was standing too close, almost touching my leg, but he was acting so oddly that I didn’t think to move away. Outside, the voices of the other children drifted up. Butcher’s room was incredibly hot. The windows were all closed. I felt a little dizzy. It was almost like another world in that room.

  “I like you,” Butcher said.

  I fought to restrain a high-pitched laugh. Here was this grumpy little boy, trying to act like a man. He was so wound up he was tight, a dark little ball of muscle, a fist.

  “Let me take off your shirt,” he said.

  I should have said no, but instead I said, “Why?” I can’t explain it. Everything was silly, and it just seemed to happen. I don’t think I even thought about it. He reached out with one dark little hand and fumbled with the top button on my blouse. I put my hand up to protest, but then dropped it. He needed two hands to undo the button. Then, using two hands, he undid the next, and the next, and the next. His eyes were drawn down and I was watching his face. I wish I could explain it, but I can’t. I’ve worried about it so much since. It was a kind of madness in me, really. I was hypnotized—not by him, but by his fascination with me.

  My blouse fell open, and he stepped back to examine what he’d done. He was absolutely motionless. For a few seconds, I was actually enjoying it—feeling the way a snake-charmer feels, probably, exercising a power that he can’t really understand. Then I looked beyond Butcher across the room. His bureau had a mirror on it. I saw myself reflected back in the glass, framed by the cowboy-boot lamp and the wooden bucking bronco. I was trying to understand what I was seeing when Mrs. Benedict walked into the room.

  TWO

  The Katydid Police Station is tucked into a corner of the Katydid County Courthouse, a solid, red-brick building that towers over one side of the town square. I’d been inside the police station often enough—sometimes to pick up my bicycle registration, sometimes with Bunny to pick up Tom. I always felt a secret thrill in there. A bulletin board hanging in the front room is covered with wanted posters, and I usually managed to slip over and examine the pictures of fugitives for a few minutes. My game was to try to guess the crimes they’d committed. I was never very good at it. Most often, the hardest faces would turn out to be accused of something like mail fraud, while the sweet-looking ones were wanted for armed robbery or murder. I always wished they’d include pictures of the criminals as children, just to see if you could spot something early on. Occasionally, I’d find a wanted woman tacked up on the bulletin board. Most of the women were accused of minor things, like writing bad checks, though once I saw a poster for a woman accused of shooting a man. The police apparently didn’t have a mug shot of her, so instead they used an old snapshot. She was wearing a two-piece bathing suit and posing with a beach ball—the picture of silly innocence, lined up beside men with numbers across their chests. A few of the wanted women hadn’t committed a crime but were being sought because they were believed to be “traveling with” so-and-so, some dangerous wanted man. I always tried to imagine what their travels were like—long silent stretches in big cars, nights at tiny, shingled motels, where bugs buzzed around yellow door lights, meals huddled together at truck stops or drugstore lunch counters. It was always summer in my imagination, and the fugitives were young, and there was something achingly wonderful in the way they passed over the country in constant flight.

  Underneath the wanted posters, a long, wood bench was pushed up against the wall. I’d never paid any attention to the bench before, but Chief Springer told me to sit there while he phoned around to locate Bunny. He’d driven up to the Benedicts himself to pick me up. He’s old, and his back is bent from arthritis, and waiting alone in Butcher’s room, where Mrs. Benedict had left me, I had heard his slow, hobbling steps on the stairs. He opened the door without knocking and then stood with his hand on the doorknob, staring at me and breathing heavily. The walk up two flights had winded him.

  “I didn’t expect this of you,” he said after a while.

  “It’s not what it seems,” I whispered.

  “What?” he said, still wheezing. “What?” He’s also a bit hard of hearing.

  I couldn’t bring myself to say anything more. Deep inside, I felt a terror fighting to get out, and I struggled to hold it in. It wasn’t even so much that I was afraid of what would happen—I didn’t let myself think that far ahead. What really frightened me was a feeling I had that this had been bound to happen, that one day I’d make a mistake and from that moment everything would unravel. The feeling was terrifying, but calming in a way, too. It had always been just a matter of time.

  I knew I had to keep my wits about me until Bunny got there. Above all, I must not cry. Bunny hated crying and she often warned me against it. She thought that when you cry, you lose all your strength, that tears flowing down your cheeks wash away your dignity. Through all her troubles in this town, refusing to cry had been her act of defiance. I wasn’t even supposed to cry at the movies.

  Chief Springer watched me from Butcher’s doorway. He seemed unsure of what to do, and he took his glasses off and chewed on the frame. Finally, he said, “Well, come on, then, I’ll drive you to the station.”

  I followed him downstairs. The hallway at the bottom was empty, and we got outside without seeing any of the Benedicts. In the car, he was quiet at first. After we’d g
one a few blocks, he asked, “What do you hear from Tom?”

  “Nothing,” I said, in a tight, cracking voice. I almost started to cry. Chief Springer looked sharply my way. I’d frightened him.

  Once we were at the station, he went in back to do the phoning and left me on the bench in the front room with Mrs. Donaldson, the police clerk. She was sitting behind a counter that’s protected by a tall, wire screen. After I’d been sitting there a few minutes, she unlocked the gate in the screen and walked around the counter to me. Her slacks and blouse were made of the same blue material as the police uniforms.

  “What are you doing here?” She asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. It seemed the easiest thing.

  “There must be some reason,” she insisted.

  “No.”

  She shook her head and went back behind the counter.

  Later, a policeman named George brought me a Coke. “Eugene V. Debs once sat on that bench,” he said. “Do you know who he was?”

  “No.”

  “He was a famous Communist. He started riots all over Chicago, so they put him in jail out here, where there wasn’t hardly enough people to riot with.” George stared, waiting for me to say something. “Didn’t they teach you that in school?” he asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “That’s history,” he explained.

  Chief Springer came out and told me he couldn’t reach Bunny at home, and no one was answering the phone at the bar at the country club. I suggested he try calling out to the room in back where Shorty the greenskeeper lives.

  “Shorty?” asked Chief Springer, cocking his head back.

  “Sometimes she goes there to rest between shifts.”