“Oh, of it all …” Martha was saying to Eva, in reply. “The old-fashioned horror … of it all. The, how would you put it,” she said, “the unravelling … Linda gone, you know—” Martha looked at Fay, “and us too, at the verge of something …” Then she paused, and her voice changed. “And the … fickleness,” she said, laughing, “of that bitch Laurel’s love.”
The story had in fact been told by Martha in response to something Eva had asked earlier in the evening, though by now the question had certainly been forgotten by Martha—and no doubt by Eva as well. “Does it get any easier?” Eva had asked, even rolling her eyes a little as she said it—conscious, as ever, of the way that everything (particularly the petty miseries of a college sophomore) was predictable, inevitable; had already been done.
Fay, too, had thought of Axel’s for some reason when Eva said it, and so it seemed natural to her that Martha should have mentioned it then. In a way, though, because of this, she wished that she could have been the one to tell the story for a change. For the first time it actually felt like her story, and she knew exactly how she would tell it if she were to try. But—as Martha began her own version of things—Fay did not interrupt.
It wasn’t until later, when Martha’s story was long finished, that Fay remembered her daughter’s question. She was gathering sheets for the daybed, where Eva would sleep, when she remembered. Martha had already gone off to bed. “So,” Fay said to Eva, who was crossing from the toilet, “yes. It does get easier.”
Eva had indeed forgotten the question to which Fay now referred, and only looked at her mother blankly. For some reason, this struck Fay as very funny and she laughed. For the first time in a long time she felt happy and, still laughing, she moved off to the kitchen, leaving Eva, puzzled, to take the sheets from where Fay had laid them, and go make up her bed.
ANGUS’S BULL
“I LOST ANGUS MACLEOD’S BULL,” Steven said one day, charging like he was a bull himself into the kitchen. He had the same expression on his face as when he came back late after losing bad at cards. Only this time, worse. I put down the rag I had been using to mop up the sticky grape juice that Benny had spilled, and motioned to him to be quiet, though he already was.
That’s what they did—he and the rest of the boys, some nights. Played blackjack or poker until someone ended up going home sorry. More often than not it was Steven who did. But really—I was lucky to have married a man with as much sense as he had. It wasn’t the regular thing in our family, and so I didn’t ever really mind about the money. They didn’t get into any trouble, Steven and those boys. Sitting around at someone or other’s kitchen table, with their hats on, and the wife of the house gone to bed upstairs. They would even be careful, because of that. Keep their voices down. Not swear too much—or loud.
I would tease him sometimes, though—worry him a little when he got back home. But mostly I just did it because it could rattle him. Nothing much did. He was the sensible type. The type to, more often than not, spend his extra money and time on things for his wife and his kid. Who didn’t drink too much, or gamble too much—and you noticed it. I was lucky that way. It wasn’t the regular thing.
“What do you mean you lost him?” I said.
He had that look more than ever on his face now. Like he’d forgotten where he was, or why—or what it was he’d come to say.
“He—ran,” Steven said. And he made a motion with his hand to show me. The way his hand moved, though, it didn’t seem to indicate a bull. More like a leaf, or a bird.
“We got a couple of the boys coming down to help,” Steven said. His voice was low again, trying to sound regular, and calm. “Harley and Matthews and a couple more. Could you get them something to eat after a while?”
Then he turned around in a circle, as though he weren’t sure which way was out the door.
“How long ago did you see him?” I asked.
Steven winced. “It’s been a while,” he said. “Could be anywhere by now.”
“Well,” I said. “Not anywhere.” But only because it had suddenly just occurred to me as strange: even when you lost something it never did just disappear.
But it was a stupid thing to say, and after I said it Steven found the door quickly and hit his head with the flat of his hand as he went out, making a sound like a stuck engine. But he didn’t curse. His teeth gritted together in that way, like he wanted to, but then he didn’t, and the curse got pushed out instead, in a hiss, through the space between his teeth.
BENNY HAD PLAYED in the hall all that afternoon with a set of blocks that Steven had made, piling them one on top of the other until they came crashing down, making a clattering sound. When they fell like that, he would laugh out loud—and then start all over again.
But then Steven had come in with that look on his face, and Benny’s own got blank and calm, like it did sometimes, and after that he didn’t play with the blocks anymore, or laugh, but followed me around the kitchen with his eyes wide open. I didn’t like it when he looked that way. Like he was seeing things six times over. Because then I thought about how there was an awful lot of things that he saw or would see that I didn’t want him to, and that there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
They tell you that: how much kids notice all the time, and how it sticks. They don’t learn, right away, anyway, to shut things off sometimes, like we do. I wished Benny would learn quick. I hated to see him looking like that, like he was noticing everything.
ANGUS’S BULL was the best bull around, and Steven had had his eye on him for a while. “Just wait until we get that blue blood into our stock,” he’d said, and showed me a picture. It was a glossy colour print, from a calendar. A blue ribbon in the corner. Angus was proud of his bull, and he charged a steep price. Steven didn’t tell me how steep. It was steep enough that the boys joked sometimes about the tight rein Angus kept on that bull. Maybe feelings, they said, ran a bit deep.
But finally Steven had the money. I didn’t know how. And even less what he would do about things now. Thinking of it, I began to feel so sorry for him, and for myself, that I thought I would cry. But then it seemed silly—to be crying over a bull.
I set Benny down with the blocks in the kitchen, but he didn’t play. He roamed around with a few of the pots and pans that he took from the cupboards instead while I made the meal. I made a big meal: a fancy meatloaf and two kinds of potatoes. No doubt everyone was hungry.
STEVEN AND MATTHEWS, and Carol, Matthews’s wife, came in about two hours after that. Harley had gone home. I’d already fed Benny and was about to take him up to bed when they came in. They didn’t say much. They just banged in, and took their boots off. They all looked sad. Carol came over and gave me a squeeze on the arm and looked at Benny, and said “Aww” in this way like she knew something that he didn’t know. As if it was a shame, but also sweet of him in a way, not to know it, whatever it was.
The dinner was warmed in the oven, and there were some frozen vegetables on the element, on low. I’d just put some dinner rolls on the table, and Matthews grabbed one as soon as he came in. I hadn’t made them, but Steven’s mother had, so they looked fresh, and homemade anyway, and gave off a nice smell.
I said, “You can help yourself to the food on the stove,” and went upstairs. I made a face as I left, and nodded toward Benny, so they’d know that I wished I could stay. But really I didn’t. Everyone looked too sad.
I lay upstairs with Benny and, wouldn’t you know it, when I first set him down he was all of a sudden wide awake again. But then after a while he got quiet, and I sang to him some bits of the songs that I knew, like I always did. I tried not to think about what was going on downstairs. About how sad Steven had looked, or think about what it meant for us now that he’d lost Angus MacLeod’s bull.
WHEN FINALLY I WENT DOWNSTAIRS, the three of them, Steven, Matthews, and Carol, were all still sitting around the table; they hadn’t moved. They’d made a good dent in the food, and there was a bottle of half-finished
whiskey next to Steven, and each of them had a glass.
I dragged in a mismatched chair and sat down. We didn’t have a real table set yet, with the four matching chairs.
“Good meal, sweetheart,” Steven said.
That’s why I married him. Even when he was upset like that, he wasn’t a man who’d forget to notice that the food was good, and that I’d made it.
“Thank you,” I said. I hadn’t eaten any of it myself, but then I felt awkward digging into the half-eaten meal when they were all finished, even though I was hungry. I thought I’d eat later, after Matthews and Carol were gone, but it turned out they stayed a long time, and more and more of that bottle got drunk, and I even helped them out a bit. Usually I didn’t drink because I was still nursing Benny, even though Steven, and practically everyone else I knew, thought he was getting too old. But I knew a few things, too. Like how much stronger it could make a kid’s bones. And then there were all sorts of other reasons too, so I’d kept at it. But that night I felt reckless, and thought maybe I’d quit.
“WE HAD TO SHOOT HIM,” Steven said, when I’d poured my first drink and had been sitting there with them at the table for a while. “Matthews was the one to find him.”
“Wasn’t anything to find him,” Matthews said, “he was making so much noise.”
“Had his leg wedged down deep in these two stones, part of that old fence,” Steven said. He looked over at me, and I wished we were alone because his face was so sad that I wanted to do something about it. “Back there—you know—”
I nodded. Maybe I would just touch his face where it was saddest. I didn’t know. And then even that seemed wrong when I thought about it.
“Anyway, the leg was all splintered to bits. We had to finish it.” As he spoke, Steven turned his glass in slow circles, until it began to seem as though it was spinning on its own, like a planet.
“I’m sorry,” I said, even though I wished I could have said something different. But then I thought about it a little while longer, and it really did seem to be the only thing, given the circumstances, to say.
“H-yep,” Steven said, taking a deep breath in on the word, and blinking around at us. “H-yep,” he said again.
Carol and Matthews were drinking. No one looked around or spoke.
“This is gonna take a chunk out of our savings there, girl,” Steven said to me.
He didn’t call me “girl,” usually, or anything cute or gruff like that. I was always just me, my own name, or else “sweetheart,” which was what his mother called him, and his father called his mother, and when he said that—“girl”—I felt that maybe I was, or was to become, a different sort of person now. That we’d—both of us—have to change. Adapt. Turn out, in the long run, to be the sort of couple who had regular hardships like this. Who faced up to things, and called each other offhand names when we did so, and sometimes swore out loud, in front of the kids.
Maybe it would be easier to be like that, but, instead, up until then, we’d always just used “sweetheart” and were generally optimistic about things.
Maybe that would change, too. But though it crossed my mind that it would, I didn’t really think so. I thought, instead, that after the bull was paid off or whatever would get done about it, things would go on more or less the way we wanted them to go. That we’d forget about the whole incident. That it would be an exception to the rule. Measured, and accounted for. We would, of course, have our own small allotment of troubles, just like everyone else—but no more, roughly, and probably less.
“Well, I guess there’s nothing to do about it now,” I said, and everyone seemed to think that was a good thing to say, too. They seemed to expect it. Like it was about time someone said it. Soberly, they nodded their heads over their drinks.
“That’s right,” said Carol. Then, “Honey, you look beat,” she said. “I’m going to pour you another.” She splashed more drink in my glass. I wouldn’t have chosen on my own to drink it like that—straight up, without any soda, or a splash of hot water or something, but it didn’t seem right to go about fixing that up, so I didn’t protest, and just sipped it down with the rest of them. It made me feel good not to complain about it, and just do it like that.
I got drunk quickly on account of the fact that I hadn’t drunk anything in so long or eaten anything since the middle of the afternoon, and then the bottle seemed to empty itself, and everyone’s spirits got a little lighter.
Matthews started joking a little, about Angus. About what a stuck-up son of a bitch he was anyway, with his pin-up bull. They laughed about the glossy pictures, and made a few assertions, which were crass, and that made everyone laugh harder, and even I was laughing—though I was worried, too, about waking up Benny.
Then, suddenly, Steven got up and said he had to hit the hay. The rest of us should stay up, he said. Finish the bottle for him.
Mathews and Carol agreed, and poured me another. So I drank it, and stayed, even though I would have liked to have gone upstairs, with Steven. Would have liked to have come back down to earth for a minute and say something like, “All that nonsense aside, what are you going to do? How are you going to tell Angus tomorrow?” But instead I had to sit there with Matthews and Carol until the bottle was gone, and by that time I was too drunk to speak at all, and so when they left, they patted me on the head and said, “You sure you’re all right getting up those stairs?”
Carol giggled through her nose and her teeth. “Get him to hold yer hair back if you need to,” she said. I didn’t like to hear her say that to me, like we were back in high school again or something. I said, “No, no, I’ll be just fine,” and saw them to the door, to prove it. I did all right.
After they were gone I drank a glass of water and moved very carefully up the stairs, my hand on the wall the whole time. I realized, going that slow, that the wall was actually rough and bumpy, and not smooth at all, like I’d thought it was.
I hoped to God that this was going to be a night that Benny slept through.
When I got upstairs I fell into bed beside Steven and then crawled over and propped myself up so I was looking at him. He kind of woke up then; I hadn’t tried to get in quiet. I’d just checked to see if Steven had scooped Benny up and put him in the crib, and when I saw that he had, I fell down in the bed where Benny had been. I could see, by the way that I’d fallen—quite close, with my head turned toward his—that Steven was awake. He had one eye opened and was looking at me, but in another moment—he was still that close to sleeping—he could have closed it again, and forgot.
When I saw that I had that chance, though, I started kissing him pretty hard on the mouth, and trying to get him to turn over. But he seemed heavy and not at all willing to turn. I kept kissing him anyway.
“I love you,” I said. “I fucking love you.”
I don’t know why I said it like that. It wasn’t what I would have said at any other time, or if I’d thought about it. But I liked the way it sounded when I said it. The swear in the middle there. Of all those nice words.
“You got drunk,” Steven said. It was just a statement. There was no expression in his voice, or any reaction at all to what I’d said, or the way that I’d said it. He was probably too tired or drunk himself to care about that one way or the other.
“Do you mind?” I said. My mouth at that point was not quite—but almost—touching his ear. I could smell him. He had a musty outside smell to him. I didn’t think it was a good smell, but I didn’t think it was a bad smell, either. It was just a smell, and I noticed it. I kept at him. “Do you mind?” I asked again, and the words had even more shape now against his ear. He was waking up, finally. I could feel it, with how close I was to him. His muscles quickening in that way, and then he came awake for real, and said, “Hell no,” very quickly, and turned over the way that I’d wanted him to turn.
IN THE MORNING I HAD a headache so I took two Aspirin. Benny was cranky and cried a lot, but I tried to pay attention to him and come up with little reasons why
he was so upset.
“Juice?” I said, and remembered that I’d left the floor sticky from where he’d spilled it the day before, and would have to clean it up sometime.
But it wasn’t juice, because when I offered some to him he threw it down, and cried louder than ever. This time, though, I’d given it to him in a sippy cup with a round bottom, so when he threw it down the juice just splashed around, unspilled, inside.
“What is it?” I asked Benny. I could feel my headache going away by then, as the Aspirin kicked in. With every beat of my pulse it got a little better. It was a strange thing to notice because usually you just take the Aspirin and the thing hurts and hurts until one moment it’s gone.
“What is it? What is it?” I asked Benny. He didn’t want to eat, or play, and he’d just had a wash, so finally I had to give up. I just held on to him, and let him cry. Let him smear his wet face and his runny nose on my shirt.
When my parents or Steven’s parents were around they’d always say, “You’re going to spoil that kid,” but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to just put him down and leave him there, and have him just, like everyone else, have to “put up” with things. It seemed to me that at least for a certain time in life, when you were that young, you should be able to cry about nothing at all if you really wanted.
But it drove me crazy sometimes. I wished Benny would stop and give me some peace that morning of all mornings. I wanted to make breakfast for Steven, especially if he was going to have to go down to Angus’s first thing.
This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories Page 10