Beaming Sonny Home

by Cathie Pelletier

  16

  When Mattie finally rose from her bed, leaving Lester behind, hoeing in the Garden of Eden, it was nearly dark outside. She could see stars peppering the northeast sky beyond her window. Voices ran amok in the rest of the house, voices in the kitchen, voices in the living room, the sound of flushing in the bathroom. And voices from the blasted television, one of the family now.

  “Our Heavenly Father,” Mattie said, her eyes on the black river beyond the row of wild rosebushes, which were now dark creeping shapes, crawling up the riverbank. Would He listen to her if she rang Him up? Or would He be engaged in one of those conference calls with Rita and Rachel Ann? “Dear Heavenly Father, please keep that boy safe in Your bosom. Forgive him for the mess he went and got himself into. Look into his heart, Lord, like me and so many other folks have done. Welcome him into Your arms. If nothing else, he’ll bring a little gusto to paradise.” She moved away from the window then, moved slowly in the darkness toward the crack of light beneath her bedroom door. Go toward the light. The truth was that her heart wasn’t in the prayer she had just given. Her heart was lagging way behind. What Mattie really wanted to say was “Beam him up, Scotty. Please, beam him up.”

  In the living room, she met with Gracie first.

  “Look who’s awake, everybody!” Gracie announced. Mattie blinked at the faces before her, her eyes adjusting to the light, her ears accepting the noise.

  “Did you have a nice nap?” Rita asked. “You want something to eat?” Mattie shook her head.

  “Where’s Henry?”

  “He just left,” said Rita. “He’ll be back soon. They’re bringing Sonny home tomorrow. There had to be what’s called an inquest first. Henry’s been on the phone all afternoon.”

  Mattie sat on the sofa in the living room and stared at the screen of the television. There were new faces now, all discussing Sonny. The words came at her and then flew past, her ears too full to accept any more developments, too uninterested now that Sonny was beyond earthly help.

  “Uncle Sonny’s famous,” Josh said to Mattie. He had been asleep when the shooting occurred but now he was animated, caught up in the exciting world of adults and their antics.

  “Uncle Sonny never even had a gun,” said Lyle. “But they went ahead and shot him anyway. The policeman who done it said he was aiming at the dog.” He pointed his finger at Josh’s head and fired it. Point-blank.

  “Granny, do you think the town will put up a sign or something one day?” Steven asked. “You know, something like ‘Mattagash, Maine, Population 410, Home of Sonny Gifford’?” Laughter rocked the room, Mattie’s girls finding this notion very amusing. Mattie didn’t laugh, however. With Sonny looming so big on television for the past three days, Sonny with his unbalanced grin and his Great Americans list, an underachiever whom the whole country had fallen in love with, considering all that, it seemed like a small thing if the town was to put up a sign.

  “I, for one, think he deserves a sign,” said Robbie. She was sitting in the recliner, her legs swept up under her. Her little porcelain face was whiter than ever. Of course. Robbie loved her uncle Sonny with all her heart. Mattie had forgotten all about her, so caught up had she been with her own grief.

  “Oh, Robbie, listen at you,” said Rita. “Sonny’s still the apple of your eye, ain’t he? I don’t want to speak ill of the dead or anything, but Sonny took hostages. Yet people like you see that apple while some of us see the worm.”

  “That’s because people like me know how to look for the good,” said Robbie, defiant, her eyes teary. “People like you are too busy speaking to God.” Rita gasped.

  “Roberta, that’ll be enough!” Gracie shouted from the kitchen. Thank you, Robbie. Mattie realized that she was still tired. Had it been only three days before that life was going on as usual, that Sonny was off somewhere in the world, marrying a woman he barely knew and being generally kind to spiders and old people? Was it just yesterday, for crying out loud, that most of the United States of America didn’t know that she, Mattie Gifford, was alive on the planet, that she’d borne a nine-pound, seven-ounce baby boy who would grow up to die on television?

  “The whole country is saying good things about him,” Robbie added angrily, but Rita had gone back to the kitchen. Robbie got up and stomped into the bathroom, slammed the door. Mattie noticed some dead leaves on her geranium, sere, ugly things. But she couldn’t find the strength to reach out and pick them off. They would fall on their own soon, would churn themselves into fertilizer. She tried not to think of Sonny’s cold body lying in some morgue in Bangor, waiting to enrich the earth back in Mattagash, Maine. Mattie had already decided to give Sonny her own plot in the Mattagash Catholic graveyard, the one next to Lester. It didn’t matter that Sonny wasn’t a Catholic. Neither was Mattie. Lester was the only one in the family who was supposed to be Catholic, even though a minister had married him and Mattie. She would give the boy her plot. It would be the first time that Sonny and his father ever got together without shouting at each other. She would give Sonny her piece of the American pie. But she wouldn’t tell the girls just yet. They’d be all up in the air, saying she was still favoring Sonny, giving him her plot instead of one of them. But how could Mattie tell them the things that she’d never forget? Things about Sonny Gifford that only a mother could know? How could she say to them, His hands were always like ice, even in the heat of summer, and he had a cowlick with a mind of its own. And sometimes, in the dark of night, when no one could hear him but me, he’d cry out, like he was fighting some silent war in his head. And when I’d come into his bedroom, he’d reach out and grab me like I was a piece of driftwood and he was a drowning boy. He done this the last time I saw him, girls. He done this as a grown man, reaching out for his mama, crying like some little baby. He brought me blue flag irises, many times, from the back swamp, and they stunk to the high heavens. But they were so pretty to look at that I kept them in a milk bottle up on the kitchen window, where the sun could hit them and make them blue as velvet, so pretty that the smell didn’t matter.

  Mattie put the cup of coffee Rita had given her down on the end table by the sofa. It was suddenly too heavy to hold, just like her motherly heart was too heavy. Just like Sonny’s terror, whatever it was, was too heavy. She remembered again how limp his child-body felt, limp as a rag, all those nights he’d clung to her in terror. She had let him breast-feed until he was three years old, let him breast-feed while the girls were at school and wouldn’t see. What would they say about that? She had given him five dollars once, when it was all she had in her pocketbook. So help her God, she’d given it to him so he could buy his own picture puzzle, a moonlighty scene with water fountains full of lilies, and pretty weeping willows hanging all over the place, and a whole parcel of rich folks walking around the lawn, the women wearing ghostly blue-white dresses, the men all smoking cigars. Mattie even remembered the name of it—An Evening on the Plantation—she remembered it, and she had given Sonny the money to buy it because it looked like a life he might have wished to live, if he hadn’t been born to her, to Lester Gifford, if he hadn’t been born in Mattagash, Maine. She had given him the money in hopes that he would cry out a little less in the dark of night. But now she knew she’d been wrong. This was what she would never tell her daughters. She was wrong. She had spoiled him too much. She should maybe have taken a stick now and then and beat him into the reality of what his life was, so that he could settle down to it, bruised maybe, like his sisters were, but at least able to live. She would never tell her daughters this, would never give them the pleasure. It would be her last legacy to Sonny, just like that five dollars had been a legacy.

  And now, sitting on the sofa, her mind swirling with these thoughts, Mattie realized what her grandsons Steven and Josh had been so interested in, perched in front of the TV as they were. They were replaying the VHS tape of Sonny being shot in a spray of blood and bone, Sonny going down on both knees, his arms r
ising up in genuine surprise. Humphrey, the dog, arriving at his master’s side, licking at the blood spilling out of Sonny’s wound. The women hostages being pulled away. Sonny being carried to the ambulance on a stretcher, one arm dangling lifeless from beneath a white sheet. Mattie sat frozen, unable to turn her head away, and watched the replay of Sonny’s last stand: Sonny being carried over and over again, his arm going back up inside the sheet each time Steven rewound the tape, with men taking him off the stretcher, Sonny getting up from his knees, the blood going back into his head, all the splatters disappearing back into the future, to the point where Mattie thought it might be a mistake, that Sonny’s death could be undone, rewound. But then Steven would run the tape forward again, toward its future, and there would be Sonny fulfilling his death, Sonny being carried on a stretcher down from the trailer’s front porch by men who were kinder to him than his own sisters, men who saw the good that Mattie and Robbie saw. And Mattie knew then, sitting before the VHS tape of Sonny’s Hollywood debut, that for all the rest of her life, she would never listen to anyone say a crippling word about her crippled son. She would never admit to her girls, those big hateful girls, what she knew to be the truth. She would never say, Listen, you bitches, maybe your brother wasn’t a go-getter. But I know this much. Sonny Gifford was like them blue irises that grow down in the swamp. Once you learn to forget the shortcomings, you can concentrate instead on what’s pretty. She would never say this to her daughters.

  Mattie turned her head away from the flickering images on the screen. Rita and Marlene and Gracie were now filing into the living room, carrying plates of food.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Marlene shouted. “Look what them kids are playing!” She grabbed Steven by the neck.

  “Turn that off right now!” Gracie ordered.

  “Leave him alone,” Mattie said. “He didn’t mean nothing by it.” Gracie should know that kids these days can’t tell the real thing from television. They should be teaching things like that in women’s studies courses. But Gracie and Rita had already forgotten about the little mishap, for they were passing out sandwiches. The phone rang. Both Rita and Marlene rushed to answer it.

  Mattie stood, her legs wavy beneath her. She stepped over Josh and then Steven. At the sofa she knelt down and patted a hand about on the floor until she touched the sheet of cardboard that held Easter Rising. She slid it out from its hiding place and looked down at Jesus with his one pitiful eye.

  “Oh, honey,” Mattie whispered. “Oh, sweetie.” She placed one finger into the gaping hole and then rubbed as gently as she could, caressing the empty socket, the way she wished she could place her fingers into the bullet hole in Sonny’s head, could stop that awful gush of bright red blood. She thought of Irwin Fennelson’s missing eye, the one he left in Vietnam in 1969, and she knew that God had had a hand in that, too. God even had something to do with the tree branch that had sprung up in front of that old Watertown man’s eyeball, all those years ago. “I guess it was God’s will,” Mattie remembered Martha Monihan saying when they had met the old man on the street one day. It wasn’t that Mattie didn’t believe in God. She did, she most surely did. She just didn’t like some of the things He did, is all.

  “Oh, you poor lost boy,” Mattie said to Jesus, “with no father there in your life to hold you.” She was whispering, afraid Rita would hear her and bring out that blasted Bible again. But it was true. It was what Jesus and Sonny had in common: While their mothers were standing in the background, wringing their hands and crying over milk that was bound to spill, where, pray tell, were the fathers, earthly and heavenly? Where were those deadbeat dads? And she would ask Rita this, if she must. But in the meantime, she had to take her share of the blame. She had to admit that maybe it would have been better to reach out and catch that glass of milk before it spilled. What good had it done Sonny that she had always been there, like a good motherly soul, like a good woman, to mop up the mess? What good had it done for Jesus to see Mary weeping and wailing in the distance, turning up at the Crucifixion while they gave him vinegar on that pitiful sponge at the end of a reed? There had been too many long reeds in the lives of some children, too many ten-foot poles between them and their parents. Yet little Bill Clinton had never even met his father. He had grown up with an abusive man, and yet he had become president of the most powerful country in the world. No, Mattie had to take her share of the blame, there was no doubt about it. Just as Mary needed to take her own blessed share.

  She didn’t have to worry about Rita giving lectures of a religious nature, however.

  “Listen up! Listen up, everybody!” Rita was now bellowing. She had hung up the phone, her face flushed with excitement. “That was a producer from that TV show Hard Copy, and he wants to talk to us. I told you all hell would break loose when someone found out Sonny has a family!”

  “I can’t go on TV looking like this,” Gracie said. “He ain’t coming tonight, is he?”

  “Do you suppose I should tell him about Sonny’s Le Mans Birth Method?” Rita now wondered. “It was pretty funny when you think of it. There I was, in the middle of labor pains and no one to drive me to the hospital but Sonny. Then he gets that Pontiac Le Mans of his going so fast I’m afraid I’m gonna have a heart attack instead of a baby. We fly up to the emergency door of the hospital at about eighty miles an hour and Sonny stomps on the brake. My water breaks and water is running down my legs.”

  “Oh, be quiet, Rita,” said Marlene. “You never thought the Le Mans Birth Method was funny until that producer called.”

  Mattie carefully lifted the cardboard with Easter Rising on it and carried it out to the kitchen table. The girls would be busy now, too busy to care about picture puzzles. She reached into her apron pocket and found the eyeball piece. She leaned down to the sad face in the picture, the hair touching the shoulders, like Sonny’s own hair—what Rita called hippie hair—and she eased the blue piece of eye gently into the glaring socket. It fit perfectly. Now Jesus looked up at her with two full, serene eyes. There was a great kindness in them, Mattie noticed, now that they were complete. A kindness mixed with that rain cloud of suffering. But everyone who knows life knows that rain cloud. It hangs over all heads.

  “There, precious,” Mattie said to the calm face on the cardboard before her. “Now you can see what kind of mess you left us in.”

  She found her homemade sweater hanging on her bedroom doorknob where Gracie had left it earlier. And Lester’s suitcase, still sitting like a patient dog in the bedroom closet. She carried the suitcase quietly, back down the narrow hallway of Lester’s little Spruce Goose, and out into the kitchen, past her pots and pans hanging from their hooks behind her good old stove with the old-fashioned burners. The girls had now gathered like grackles in front of the television set, waiting for even more follow-up announcements and dispatches and bulletins and reports. Waiting for more calls from producers. Mattie could see Roberta, back in the big black recliner, her face pale with emotion. She had loved her uncle Sonny. Once, he had driven Robbie and her girlfriends all the way to the Fort Fairfield County Fair, when no one else would, and he had paid for them all to ride the big Ferris wheel, until they were reeling with the dizziness and happiness of life. Now Roberta’s dizziness was caused by another of life’s elements, a baby, a child, another soul to join the planet, to get counted in the census books of Mattagash, Maine. That was all the more reason that Sonny’s kindness would become a warm blanket to her, down through the years of Roberta’s life, a sweet memory. Looking now at her granddaughter, at the small oval face, Mattie could almost envision Robbie as an old woman, an old woman leaning on a rake and overseeing her yearly garden. “That was my uncle Sonny I’m talking about,” she could hear the aged Roberta saying to some child, her own grandchild, maybe. “He was always bringing us kids candy, and surprises, and taking us for rides in his convertible. One year, he even took us all the way down to the Fort Fairfield County Fair, when no one else would, and
we rode that big Ferris wheel until we were dizzy with life.” Mattie saw this picture movie before her face, watched it unreel as surely as if it had just taken place. She had looked ahead to Roberta’s future, with some kind of twenty-twenty vision that sometimes comes on the heels of tragedy. Sonny would live on, kind of the way a yearly garden lives on. There was still hope, Mattie could tell, still a reason for human beings to push forward. Peter Laforest would make Roberta a good husband. He’d never be president of the Watertown Savings and Loan, much less the president of the United States. He’d never own a department store, or a yacht, or one of those little airplanes sportsmen flew into Maine’s lakes with pontoons for feet. He’d never fly to Paris on that fast-flying jet, the Concorde. He’d never play golf with bankers, smoke rich cigars from Cuba, go to some island for a winter tan. But he would get a steady paycheck each week, and he would hand that steady paycheck over to his wife, Roberta, so that there would be food and clothing and warmth for his family. And, in the night, he would rise, mumbling and tired from a hard day’s work, he would rise to comfort one of his children who had cried out in the darkness, in the terror of a dream. He would wipe a thousand snotty noses, mop up a million tears in his career as someone’s father. And every now and then, catching the softness of his wife’s face as she sat on the sofa and watched television, he would bring her a cup of tea for no reason at all, other than that he felt a need to do so, the push of love. And when the time came for Peter Laforest to take his place in some graveyard, maybe the Mattagash Catholic graveyard, down by that clutch of pine trees that lines the old meadow, Sonny’s graveyard, there would be no mistresses in the crowd wearing black and weeping. There would be just his family and friends, and they would cry over the loss of him, because in losing Peter Laforest, his family would lose a great earthly treasure. Mattie saw all this, and then the movie of Roberta’s life faded away.