Songs in Ordinary Time

by Mary McGarry Morris

  Klubocks’ dog got up then and lifted a leg and wet on the foundation. Its yellow stream trickled down the newspaper that was stuffed into the broken cellar window.

  “Your father broke that,” Louie said.

  “I know,” Benjy said, watching the dog cross the driveway, then disappear into the coolness of the lilac bushes that bloomed at the edge of Klubocks’ yard.

  “He was drunk,” Louie said.

  “I know.” Some things just couldn’t be bluffed.

  “Your father’s always drunk,” Louie said, watching him.

  “Not all the time.”

  “Do you hate your father?” Louie asked suddenly.

  “Why, do you hate yours?”

  “Yes!” Louie said, and Benjy laughed. “He makes my mother cry. Sometimes the phone rings and she picks it up, but nobody’s there. Just some breathing. My father said she likes the calls. He said she likes men to look at her and call her up, and she always cries when he says that.”

  Louie’s small round face moved in close to Benjy, who stiffened back. The dog was growling in the lilac bushes. Now Mrs. Klubock’s music sounded heavy and sad. He thought he heard squealing tires.

  Louie was telling him how they might have to move to Arizona because of his father’s swollen hands and knees. His mother had cried because all her life she was scared of snakes. She said a lady in Arizona was going to the bathroom once and she heard this splashing noise in the toilet and she jumped off the seat and this ten-foot rattlesnake was swimming in the pee water. “You think that’s true?” Louie asked, his eyes suddenly raw and watery. “You think a snake can come up the toilet like that?”

  Benjy leaned forward, looking toward the white blur turning the corner of the driveway. It was the same man he had seen in the woods. His chest was heaving, and his face was fiery red, and the cuffs of his pants flopped with mud.

  “Is that your father?” Louie asked as the man stumbled down on one knee, then scrambled frantically to his feet with a backward glance.

  “No!” Benjy said, his eyes wide with fright.

  The lilac bushes quaked with the dog’s barking. A horn sounded on the next block, a long steady blare.

  “Don’t tell them niggers I’m here, boys,” the man panted as he ran behind the house.

  “What’re niggers?” whispered Louie.

  “A Negro,” Benjy hissed, eyes shifting between the road and the back of the house. “A black man and he’s got a knife!” he whispered.

  “He’s got a knife!” Louie wailed, bolting off the steps into his house.

  The music wrenched to a stop. Moments later, Mrs. Klubock held up Louie to her kitchen window. “See,” she said loudly. “It’s only Benjy!”

  “A nigger’s gonna come,” Louie wailed. “The man said so, and he’s got a knife!”

  “No, no. It’s only Benjy,” she soothed, putting the boy down, then coming back to the window. “I’m surprised at you, Benjy. Scaring Louis like that! I think Mr. Klubock’s right. I think it’s about time you hung around with boys your own age and left Louis alone!” She slammed the window shut on Louie’s screams. The dog’s barking had subsided into a low steady growl.

  Benjy sat frozen on the step. He sat for a long time, staring up at the Klubocks’ kitchen window. In its reflection was the crooked chimney of his own house. He scratched a bite on his arm and the little hairs bristled. He slid to the end of the step and glanced around the corner of the house, relieved to see no one there. He ran inside and locked the door. He turned on the television and sat on the couch, his knees drawn to his chin. The house filled with strange crackling, scratching, moaning voices. He turned the volume up as loud as it would go and stared at the familiar faces on the screen. As the scratching grew louder, he felt himself grow smaller and tighter. Once, a few years ago, his father had broken into the house and crawled into his bed. All night long, his father held him in his arms, until morning, when his mother threw his father out of the house. She yelled at Benjy for not waking her up and telling her he was there. He couldn’t explain how scared he’d been. How tightly coiled he’d lain all night, smothered by his father’s arms and breath. Now, as then, the trick was to almost stop breathing, to not even be here, and then the scratching would go away.

  With his eye at the crack in the garage door, Duvall could see down the driveway to the street. He crouched in a cold sweat as the black Lab scratched at the door, growling. Duvall ducked back as the dog snuffled its muzzle along the crack and then began to bark. A car was coming down the street, now slowing, now rumbling into the driveway, its brakes grinding metal against metal. The dog’s barking grew frantic. Duvall closed his eyes. The car door creaked open, slammed shut, and then footsteps raced toward the garage. He buried his face in his sweaty hands, whispering, “Deliver me, Lord. Deliver me, and I will never, ever…”

  “Get out of here!” a woman hissed. “Goddamn dog…go on!”

  He watched through the crack as she went to the lilac bush and snapped off a switch of new blooms and swatted the fleeing dog’s rump. “Get over in your own yard and stay there!” she called, throwing the branch after him.

  The dog ran onto the back steps of the yellow house, still barking. With her arms folded, the woman stood on the edge of the driveway, staring back at the dog. Something in her stance and the sag of her shapeless skirt reminded Duvall of a child, willful and hard-edged where softness had probably never been allowed, who would, if she had to, stand out there all night, facing that ugly animal down.

  The screen door of the yellow house opened and a slender woman with soft blond curls leaned out and caught the dog by its collar. “Marie, I’m sorry. Really I am. Louis keeps letting him off the rope,” she called, and when she got no response, pulled the struggling dog inside the house.

  “Yah, you’re sorry,” Marie muttered as she came around the front of her dented old car. “Sorry he didn’t take my arm off.” She sighed then and hurried into her own house.

  A few minutes later a girl with limp brown hair dragged down the driveway with an armload of books pressed to her chest. The seat of her navy blue school uniform was shiny and wrinkled. She hesitated on the back steps a minute, then squared her shoulders and went inside. Next to arrive was a stocky boy, his baseball cap rimming a practiced scowl. When he turned at the door, Duvall saw that his shirt was ripped halfway up his back.

  After another hour had passed and no one else had come, Duvall closed his eyes and sank back against a stack of newspapers that were bundled and tied with string. He hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours and wasn’t sure when he last had eaten. His exhaustion and hunger had rendered him numb. As soon as it was dark he would be on his way. By tomorrow’s sunset he would be rolling again. Many’s the time he had been down before. “Many’s the time,” he whispered into the gloaming silence of the cluttered garage. But never down for long, he reminded himself. “Never for long,” he groaned softly, drifting into sleep.

  A little while later, his eyes shot open with the smell of frying meat. His stomach growled, and for a split second his eyes washed with tears, for it seemed he was a young man again, awaking for the first time in a cell.

  From the house now, their voices rent the stillness like stabbing thrusts.

  “Did you see about the job?” the woman asked.

  “I had a game,” her son said.

  “Who ripped your shirt? You know what Mr. Graber said, if you were in one more fight.”

  “We were just fooling around. Some of the guys—”

  “Just fooling around, huh? Doesn’t matter! Brand-new shirt, what do you care?”

  “Mom!”

  “Did you see Jarden Greene about the job? Uncle Renie said—”

  “I had a game! I told you!”

  “Uncle Renie said not to wait, to be the first one to apply….”

  “Mom! I told you! I had a game!” the boy shouted.

  “And I told you to get this job! That nothing else matters! Nothing’s more importan
t, you hear me, than this goddamn job! No game! No practice! No goddamn fooling around! Nothing on this earth is more important right now than that! Just like your sister in there!” And then her voice changed, mimicking a young girl’s sing-songing whine. “‘Cushing’s won’t hire me. Nobody in this stupid town will hire me. So I think I’ll just go to the goddamn lake for the—’”

  “Mom! I’ll get the job!” he interrupted. “I said I’d get it!”

  “When?”

  “As soon as I can….”

  “When? When you feel like it? Next week? Next month? When?”

  “Tomorrow! I’ll go tomorrow! Just leave me alone, will you?”

  “I’ll leave you alone!” she shouted back. “I’ll leave you all the hell alone and then see what happens. See who pays the bills or does a goddamn single thing for any one of you. Nobody will! Nobody on this earth but me. I’m the only one! The only one!”

  Doors banged. Pans rattled; then all at once there was quiet, that uneasy, bated, writhing, staticky quiet.

  He stared into the garage rafters, his eye fixed on the narrow strip of coppery sky where a roof board had rotted inward. He was remembering the quick wordless scuffle amid the sour rise of pig muck and Earlie’s astonishment at seeing the blade in his own hand and Duvall’s suddenly turn and then, with one quick thrust, slice through flesh and sinew; and then the long, long fall, through days, weeks, seasons, in segments of buckling knees and hip joints folding; and then the odd little thud his head made as it met the ground. He had blinked—that was all, the one little blink like a word in the air between them—and then he lay with his eyes wide, as a fat bee buzzed from clover to clover around his head.

  I’ll get help, Duvall had whimpered, then added, begged, Don’t move. Please don’t move, certain that Earlie would never move again, but by saying it, by stumbling off only a few yards more before calling back again, Don’t move, had absolved himself, had given just cause to his flight, had left the faithless Earlie with the will to move, and had pronounced him alive and well enough so that he could be certain by now Luther and the old man had not only found Earlie, but had gotten him to a hospital where the doctor would assure them it was only a flesh wound, which was why the blood had gushed and run so. Just a nick, really, the blade kind of slid in sideways, the doctor, by this time, would have already explained, illustrating with a quick pass of his hand under Luther’s cold dumb eyes. “Thank the Lord,” the old man would sigh of his grandson, Earlie, his only living relative.

  Outside, the crickets’ song quickened with deepening shadows, and he assured himself that they were probably on their way home this very minute. Probably drive all night with Luther smoking his dope in the oncoming rush of the bug-pocked headlamps, while in the back seat, the old man’s husky gibberish would soon have Earlie snapping at him to shut up and go to sleep. Duvall’s eyes widened with their voices: Just saying my prayers, the old man sighs. When you gonna be done? Earlie asks. When you done sinnin’, the old man replies, and Luther laughs, his head swaying dreamily over the wheel, laughs and says what he always says, Then you gonna be prayin’ a long time, old man. Maybe forever.

  Duvall sat up dizzily, his stomach still churning on those bald tires and all those endless miles of bad food as he willed them farther and farther away, absconding with his car, his clothes, all that he had ever possessed, until like a dissolving comet they had shrunk to a speck of dusty taillights, and now with the blink of an eye were gone. Gone.

  He looked around and saw the dusky shadows rush to take the shapes of a wheelless bike upside down on its seat, a large steam presser, a lawn mower, its rust-frozen blades laced to the wall with spiderwebs, a mud-encrusted shovel; and he felt the passage of days into weeks, into months, until whole years seemed awash in the smell of sizzling pork fat and the rustle of walled voices that had stirred in him this abject and limitless hunger. Suddenly he was on his feet and opening the garage door. And as he made his way to the lilac shrub and broke off the thickest blooms, he knew, not with his brain, but from deep in his belly, what he would do next, and where he would go, and what he would say to her. For with a glance he had already appraised the peeling clapboards and buckled roofing tiles and knew not just by the seam of ragged lawn where the boundaries lay, but knew by instinct. Just as he already knew that woman in there, knew that she waited. Marie, whose high-boned cheeks and weary eyes he had met a thousand times before. For such things, his heart was as keen as the musician’s ear or the artist’s eye, his mastery, as theirs, a born gift, but his, having been so rawly honed by desolation, would always be the more skillful and tenacious.

  Approaching, he noted well the paper-plugged cellar window, the creaking inner door and its cardboard-taped pane where a man’s fist, in a last howling plunge, had demanded entrance. And as he went to remove his straw hat, his eyes shot into hers with the awful certainty of where the missing hat must at this very moment lie. She seemed to smile, and he noted the awkwardness with which her hands met the lilacs, and then the hands themselves, ringless and broken-nailed and, like the daughter’s beyond her at the table, nervous and self-inflicting.

  The boy at the table was younger, the staring child Duvall had seen on the steps. She would refer uneasily to the older boy, and Duvall, eyeing the untouched setting, the cracked green plate, the bent-tined fork on its blue paper napkin, would understand. The older boy had been sent to his room in this neglected little house, where she was ever more master than the brief mistress who had bothered to fold the paper napkins into ship sails; next week it would be back to white again, and some weeks there would be toilet paper squares beneath the forks.

  The lilacs would stand in a milk bottle. Of course there was no vase, for who here had ever received flowers? Not her, certainly, who in a self-conscious gesture set them in the middle of the table, then kept glancing at them. Later, when they were all in bed, she would remove them to pare the woody stems to symmetry, then return them to the table, thinking no one would notice, but they would. They would all notice, just as now they saw her hands flutter to her throat and the softening of her mouth. “They’re lovely,” she said, and with the curious tilt of their heads, Duvall knew the rarity here of such a word. Lovely. Yes, they were lovely.

  First it was only a crust of bread and a glass of water for which he would beg. And then as he picked crumbs from his soiled lapel and laid them on his tongue and saw her quick eyes flinch between his and that last chop, the son’s, on the split platter, he quickly thanked her for her goodness and edged toward the door, knowing as he moved how soon that bone would be gnawed clean of its meat and fat and gristle; and then as he placed two grateful quarters on the table and saw her long neck stiffen with the refusal of stubborn pride, he saw how easy the next request would be, the ride to the bus depot; and then the ride back here after his mock shame at the ticket window to find his pockets empty; and the next, even easier, not even voiced, as he fluffed and set the pillow on the pallet of blankets she carried to the garage, passing them through, her eyes averted as shyly as if she stood outside his bedroom door.

  Then, as he settled himself with a weary sigh, on the edge of sleep, he remembered how queerly her younger son had watched him, his grave eyes alert, until he had laid aside the gleaned bone and begun his tale, and then the relief easing the boy’s frown. It was as if the boy needed the tale told and needed it told right; as if he knew it all as well as any rhyme, and in the telling would have every word and rhythm right. Had the boy’s lips actually moved with his? Duvall wondered. Or had his rapt gaze only made it seem so?

  “I am Omar Duvall, this morning a peddler through these emerald mountains. And tonight a helpless beggar, first disgraced and then plundered by a sorry band of black-hearted strangers who, out of the kindness of my Christian soul, I took on board and tried to help with their magazine selling while I did mine….” His eyes scanned the messy countertops. “Household utensils!” he cried, seizing a wire whisk clotted with butterscotch pudding. “Eggbeaters a
nd spatulas and can openers and these.” He smiled, reverently touching a slotted spoon. “These humble kitchen tools, these nuts and bolts of the family, of the heart, in a manner of speaking.”

  And as he spoke, it had come to him, as it did now and would later with the day’s first light sifting through the rotting roof, that here he might finally be safe.

  The older boy might be a problem. He had come from his bedroom into the kitchen, and when he saw his dinner eaten, and in his place at the table, at the head of the table opposite his mother, a stranger, a male stranger, his lip had curled and instinctively his fists had clenched. “What the…”

  “Norm, this is Mr. Duvall,” Marie said, her cheeks bright.

  “Omar,” Duvall corrected, extending his hand; but the boy turned to his mother, demanding to know what was left for him to eat.

  “Cereal,” she said. “Or some toast,” she added absently, looking back to Duvall. “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “From everywhere,” he said. “But lately,” and he spoke sadly for it had become the truth, “from nowhere.”

  The fragrance of lilacs filled the kitchen. Benjy stared at the cornflakes box as he chewed.

  “Good morning, sunshine!” the radio announcer called and Benjy winced. He dreaded going to school today and facing the boys who’d seen his father hit him yesterday.

  “It’s now eight-oh-five in the valley. Outside our studio on State Street, the temperature is sixty degrees and rising by the minute! It looks like the coldest, wettest spring on record is finally over, thanks to the high pressure that’s moving rapidly up from the south. It looks like summer’s finally on her way!”

  The little house began to tremble with vibrating pipes and an outburst of cranky voices. Norm had to get into the bathroom to brush his teeth, but Alice was still in there. His mother hollered from the top of the stairs for Alice to give Norm his toothbrush. She slid it under the door.