by Andre Dubus
In perhaps five seconds, Art realized he could not lift the slab. Then he was running up the lawn to the red house, up the steps and shoving open the side door and yelling as he bumped into the kitchen table, pointing one hand at the phone on the wall and the other at the woman in a bright yellow halter as she backed away, her arms raised before her face.
‘Fire Department! A boy’s drowning!’ pointing behind him now, toward the brook.
She was fast; her face changed fears and she moved toward the phone, and that was enough. He was outside again, sprinting out of a stumble as he left the steps, darting between the two boys, who stood mute at the brook’s edge. He refused to believe it was this simple and this impossible. He thrust his hands under the slab, lifting with legs and arms, and now he heard one of the boys moaning behind him, ‘It fell on Terry, it fell on Terry.’ Squatting in the water, he held a hand over the Whitford boy’s mouth and pinched his nostrils together; then he groaned, for now his own hand was killing the child. He took his hand away. The boy’s arms had stopped moving—they seemed to be resting at his sides—and Art reached down and felt the right one and then jerked his own hand out of the water. The small arm was hard and tight and quivering. Art touched the left one, running his hand the length of it, and felt the boy’s fingers against the slab, pushing.
The sky changed, was shattered by a smoke-gray sound of winter nights—the fire horn—and in the quiet that followed he heard a woman’s voice, speaking to children. He turned and looked at her standing beside him in the water, and he suddenly wanted to be held, his breast against hers, but her eyes shrieked at him to do something, and he bent over and tried again to lift the slab. Then she was beside him, and they kept trying until ten minutes later, when four volunteer firemen descended out of the dying groan of the siren and splashed into the brook.
No one knew why the slab had fallen. Throughout the afternoon, whenever Art tried to understand it, he felt his brain go taut and he tried to stop but couldn’t. After three drinks, he thought of the slab as he always thought of cancer: that it had the volition of a killer. And he spoke of it like that until Maxine said, ‘There was nothing you could do. It took five men and a woman to lift it.’
They were sitting in the backyard, their lawn chairs touching, and Maxine was holding his hand. The children were playing in front of the house, because Maxine had told them what happened, told them Daddy had been through the worst day of his life, and they must leave him alone for a while. She kept his glass filled with gin and tonic and once, when Tina started screaming in the front yard, he jumped out of the chair, but she grabbed his wrist and held it tightly and said, ‘It’s nothing, I’ll take care of it.’ She went around the house, and soon Tina stopped crying, and Maxine came back and said she’d fallen down in the driveway and skinned her elbow. Art was trembling.
‘Shouldn’t you get some sedatives?’ she said.
He shook his head, then started to cry.
Monday morning an answer—or at least a possibility—was waiting for him, as though it had actually chosen to enter his mind now, with the buzzing of the alarm clock. He got up quickly and stood in a shaft of sunlight on the floor. Maxine had rolled away from the clock and was still asleep.
He put on trousers and moccasins and went downstairs and then outside and down the road toward the brook. He wanted to run but he kept walking. Before reaching the Whitfords’ house, he crossed to the opposite side of the road. Back in the trees, their house was shadowed and quiet. He walked all the way to the bridge before he stopped and looked up at the red house. Then he saw it, and he didn’t know (and would never know) whether he had seen it yesterday, too, as he ran to the door or if he just thought he had seen it. But it was there: a bright green garden hose, coiled in the sunlight beside the house.
He walked home. He went to the side yard where his own hose had lain all winter, screwed to the faucet. He stood looking at it, and then he went inside and quietly climbed the stairs, into the sounds of breathing, and got his pocketknife. Now he moved faster, down the stairs and outside, and he picked up the nozzle end of the hose and cut it off. Farther down, he cut the hose again. He put his knife away and then stuck one end of the short piece of hose into his mouth, pressed his nostrils between two fingers, and breathed.
He looked up through a bare maple tree at the sky. Then he walked around the house to the Buick and opened the trunk. His fingers were trembling as he lowered the piece of hose and placed it beside his first-aid kit, in front of a bucket of sand and a small snow shovel he had carried all through the winter.
In My Life
I HAD MY HAIR in curlers all afternoon the day they electrocuted Sonny Broussard. Or the day before, I guess, because they did it at midnight. That seems in a way a strange time to do it, but when you think about it, it starts to make sense. Better for it to happen at night. At least I think I wouldn’t want it first thing in the morning, staying awake all night, then dawn, then sunrise through the cell window and it waiting for me; I think I’d rather wait all day and see the sun set and the dark come and know now in the night I was going. But maybe that’s only because I work nights and don’t like mornings. His real name was Willard, he was big, and sometimes I still remember his weight on top of me and his smell of booze and nigger.
‘I bet you liked it,’ Charlie said once. ‘I bet you twitched a little.’
‘Shit. I was dry as a cracker. I just lay there and watched him with my legs like this and I was saying to myself Dear Jesus because I thought when he finished he’d cut my throat and that’s why I wouldn’t even shut my eyes.’
‘Didn’t he say nothing, all that time?’
‘There. He said There when he finished. He said it twice. When he was leaving he stumbled, he was still pulling up his pants, and he knocked over the lamp—there used to be one over there on the dresser, a little lamp I had—and it broke and he started running. That’s when I stopped being so scared and I wanted to kill him and I called the sheriff.’
Charlie is married. It seems after you get to be twenty-five there’s nothing around but married men. I was married when I was eighteen, we had to, but I miscarried, and inside of two years I couldn’t stand the sight of him. His name was Brumby, and I came to hate that name, and I would pronounce it hating. I’d say, ‘Okay, Brumby.’ One morning I woke up and he was gone. I went in the kitchen and there was a note on the table, with the salt shaker resting on it. I was grinning when I picked it up. It said: I’m sorry, I’ll send money. Brumby. I laughed, I was so glad he finally took it on himself to leave. But while I was laughing there was a little frost in my insides, listening to the quiet in the house. Then I turned on the radio and put water on for coffee. While it was dripping I took a shower, humming. I went naked to the kitchen, it was summer and already the morning getting hot; a mama blue jay was making a racket in the fig tree. I got a cup of coffee and a cigarette and turned up the radio so I could hear it in the bathroom and went back and made up my face. The radio was playing hillbilly. I took a long time with my face, I felt good and free, and I prayed: Thank you sweet Jesus, don’t let him change his mind. He left me the car. That afternoon I went to town and bought a yellow dress at Penney’s; when I got home I put it on and drove up the little white shell road through the pines to the highway. The Bons Temps was a mile down the highway and I went there and asked them if they needed a cocktail waitress and Mr. Breaux hired me because I’m pretty. Brumby sent me a money order for fifty dollars and asked if I was going to divorce him, and when I got around to it, I did.
The only time I ever missed him was around dusk and I knew it wasn’t really him I missed. The sun would go down and I’d have the lights but it wasn’t the same. But I was lucky: I’d be fixing supper about that time and getting dressed and made up for work. I’m glad I don’t work in the day, especially in winter when it gets dark early. If I worked in the daytime I’d leave a light on when I left in the morning so it’d be there to come home to. We have Blue Law in our parish, s
o sometimes on Sunday afternoons I go see my sister and her husband in Opelousas or go to a movie and I always turn some lights on first, the overhead light in the kitchen and the floor lamp in the living room. On a good sunny day I can’t even tell they’re on, the sun comes in so bright in those rooms.
They took a long time getting around to killing Sonny, almost sixteen months after he walked in the front door (I keep them locked now and I have a dog that barks at niggers walking past on the road and a pistol that I at least know how it works) and did what he pleased and stumbled out drunk. So I had a lot of time to get over him; or it. Everybody at the Bons Temps was nice to me while it was still in the papers. Then I had my period. Then Earl came along: he was married, he was a postman, and on Friday and Saturday nights he played electric guitar in the hillbilly band at the Bons Temps. I’d say Earl saved me in a way. I still felt different, like I had sores or something, and I thought Sonny Broussard being a nigger would keep a man away; but then one Saturday night Earl came home for a cup of coffee with me and everything was all right. I woke up wondering if he still felt the same in the morning. He couldn’t get out on week nights, so I didn’t see him till Friday and as soon as he grinned I knew it was okay. So it was every Friday and Saturday nights for a couple of months, and I’d watch him get up and dress fast in the cold. In the morning I’d wake up late and lie there smoking and looking out at the frost on the grass that was left, and the brown earth, and beyond that the pines in the sun. Or some mornings it was doing that slow cold rain and I didn’t want to get up and light the heaters, it was so cold, and I’d stay in bed a long time till I felt like the quiet was going to explode; then I’d get up and soon the bacon was sizzling and smelling. Then his wife found out and she even wrote me a letter calling me a hateful woman for carrying on with her man; the letter came to the Bons Temps and I read it thinking, Her man? Why it wasn’t even him, it was just a couple of times a week, about four hours all told. But that was the end of it with Earl; his wife was waiting up for him. But I was all right then, Earl had taken care of me.
There was Vern between Earl and Charlie, while Sonny Broussard was waiting, and most of the time I didn’t think about him; but sometimes I did and I wished it had come out at the trial that he had done other things too, robbery or maybe an old knifing, but he hadn’t. It was just that one thing with me and I had called the sheriff, I had wanted him dead when he knocked over the lamp and ran; I wanted him dead when the sheriff and a deputy came, then went up the shell road way back up in the pines where some nigger shacks were; I wanted him dead when they caught him that same afternoon in Port Arthur, Texas; and I wanted him dead when I saw him in the courthouse. But when they said they would do it I felt funny, sort of like surprised, and scared too. Then, like I say, there was Earl and he didn’t mind; and the trucker Vern that came home on a Friday night and stayed with me all day till time for work Saturday, then he was on the road again; I haven’t seen him since but some day I hope to. Charlie is good to me, though. He’s a big rough man and it doesn’t matter if his wife waits up for him or not, he’ll tell her it’s none of her business where he’s been. Once he stayed until the sun was coming up, and there were shadows from the pines.
They killed Sonny Broussard on a Thursday in March. In late afternoon I took my curlers out real slow, then the sun was going and I turned on the lights and put the rice on and played the radio; while I was brushing my hair I tried to picture him in the prison, they probably had every corner lighted up, and I wondered was he eating supper. I don’t care about niggers one way or the other. I hated his smell and his black and his booze breath and him in me, I hated his panting and grunting over my face, and his big hands pressing mine back on the pillow. I’d never go with one on purpose. His lawyer wasn’t much older than me, already getting sloppy fat and with a crewcut. He asked if I put up a fight; I said not much, I was scared he’d kill me. That was all he asked me about that. He mostly tried to show Sonny Broussard had a clean record and that night he was dead drunk.
Brushing my hair at the bathroom mirror I thought myself pretty and I wondered how long I’d be pretty, so many days and nights go by, and I forget where they go, and I wonder if it’s like that to get old, if the time will come when I dye it black over the gray and if I won’t be able to remember that Vern’s last name was Mackey and that I knew him between Earl and Charlie in the winter of nineteen fifty-six. Then I thought about Sonny Broussard standing there when I woke up with my heart pounding and he dropped his pants and pulled back the sheet and spread my legs like parting canes in a canebrake and I was so dry but still he done it fast, maybe a couple of minutes like Charlie is first time around, then him saying There. There.
I thought maybe I could tell Charlie. But for a long time he wasn’t at the Bons Temps that night; even for a Thursday there wasn’t much of a crowd, not even enough people to change the air, so at eleven o’clock I could still smell the dance wax. I kept looking at the door and the clock. About eleven o’clock I got nervous and it got worse, I always had a cigarette going in my ash tray at the bar. Then about eleven thirty-five I was serving a table of four, my tray was wet and the quarters and nickels sticking, but still this fellow was prying up every one of them until his pressing on the tray made it hard to hold. When he had the last nickel, Charlie behind me said: ‘Jill.’
I spun around and almost grabbed him. He was bigger in his mackinaw, a big broad face with thick reddish hair.
‘I thought you wouldn’t come.’
‘Hell yeah,’ he said. He was grinning.
Then for a while I talked to Charlie at the bar and waited table; I was still nervous but happy too because he’d be with me that night. I looked at the clock at five minutes to twelve while I was waiting for Curtis to mix a Vodka Collins and open three beers. Then I brought them to the table. The juke box had stopped so I took my quarter tip and punched three Hank Williams songs. It said one minute, and Hank was singing. I looked at the maybe twenty faces scattered about at the tables, there were some men together but mostly couples, older than me, and I watched their cigarettes and their hands and faces. I thought Sweet Jesus. I thought I have felt his body and now they are going to burn it. Then I thought No. Then I said it out loud, ‘No,’ and it was midnight.
We got home at one-fifteen and went into the kitchen that was lighted up. This time I didn’t put on coffee, I said I’d drink with him a little, and I took from the cupboard the bourbon he kept there for his time with me. He was being careful, he wasn’t sure how to treat me, he hadn’t known tonight was the night until I went fast from the dance floor and stood beside him sitting so big on the bar stool and I put my face on his arm and said, ‘He’s dead, Charlie.’ So now he made us some drinks, we had one in the kitchen, the next one in bed, naked under the covers, but I still wasn’t sure I wanted to do anything. We were on our sides, looking at one another, propped on our elbows so we could drink.
‘It was just a couple of minutes,’ I said. ‘That he was in me.’
‘Yes.’
He was watching me, and I thought for a second how good it was that he was relaxed, not like Earl, he never hurried to leave.
‘If they shot him that morning,’ I said. ‘Or if you’d known me then and you’d dragged him out of his shack and beat him up.’
‘I would’ve.’
‘Do you want another drink?’
‘Nope.’
‘Could we just lay here a while?’
‘Sure.’
He put our glasses on the bedside table and lay on his back with one arm out for me and I got my head on it and lay half on my side so all of me was snug against him.
‘Can you wait a while?’ I said.
‘There’s other nights coming.’
‘I’ve had eleven,’ I said. ‘I don’t count him.’
‘You’re off to a good start.’
‘One knocked me up and he was a slob,’ I said.
Pretty soon I fell asleep. A long time later he woke me up and I
said yes I wanted to. Over his shoulder there was pale light at the window.
If They Knew Yvonne
to Andre and Jeb
1
I GREW UP in Louisiana, and for twelve years I went to a boys’ school taught by Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order. In the eighth grade our teacher was Brother Thomas. I still have a picture he gave to each boy in the class at the end of that year; it’s a picture of Thomas Aquinas, two angels, and a woman. In the left foreground Aquinas is seated, leaning back against one angel whose hands grip his shoulders; he looks very much like a tired boxer between rounds, and his upturned face looks imploringly at the angel. The second angel is kneeling at his feet and, with both hands, is tightening a sash around Aquinas’s waist. In the left background of the picture, the woman is escaping up a flight of stone stairs; her face is turned backward for a final look before she bolts from the room. According to Brother Thomas, some of Aquinas’s family were against his becoming a priest, so they sent a woman to his room. He drove her out, then angels descended, encircled his waist with a cord, and squeezed all concupiscence from his body so he would never be tempted again. On the back of the picture, under the title Angelic Warfare, is a prayer for purity.
Brother Thomas was the first teacher who named for us the sins included in the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, which, in the Catholic recording of the Decalogue, forbid adultery and coveting your neighbor’s wife. In an introductory way, he simply listed the various sins. Then he focused on what apparently was the most significant: he called it self-abuse and, quickly sweeping our faces, he saw that we understood. It was a mortal sin, he said, because first of all it wasted the precious seed which God had given us for marriage. Also, sexual pleasure was reserved for married people alone, to have children by performing the marriage act. Self-abuse was not even a natural act; it was unnatural, and if a boy did it he was no better than a monkey. It was a desecration of our bodies, which were temples of the Holy Ghost, a mortal sin that resulted in the loss of sanctifying grace and therefore could send us to hell. He walked a few paces from his desk, his legs hidden by the long black robe, then he went back and stood behind the desk again and pulled down on his white collar: the front of it hung straight down from his throat like two white and faceless playing cards.