The Beans of Egypt, Maine

by Carolyn Chute

  “Go tell ’er yourself,” says the kid Bean with the pail.

  “No . . . you!” says the one with the spade.

  “No-suh. I ain’t gonna miss gettin’ to see Rubie die.”

  I look down at the big Bean and his hand slowly drags across the dirt to his side to the torn fabric, a black place in the body, like an open mouth. And blood fills the cup of his hand.

  Daddy opens the front door and hollers, “EARLENE!”

  The big Bean’s eye is lookin’ right at me.

  I says to the eye, “In heaven they got streets of gold.”

  Daddy screams my name again.

  The big fox-color eye closes.

  I say, “Oh no! He’s dead!”

  The kid with the spade says, “Nah! He’s still breathin’.”

  Daddy comes off the step. “Earlene! Get away! NOW!!”

  I says, “Bean wake up! Don’t die!”

  Rubie Bean don’t move. His mouth is wide open like he’s died right in the middle of a big laugh. I see the blood has surrounded my left sneaker, has splashed on my white sock. I can hear the Bean kids shift in their rubber boots.

  I drop down on all fours and put my ear right there on the shirt pocket where it says R-E-U-B-E-N.

  “Get away from there!” Daddy almost whimpers. He’s comin’ fast across the grass.

  The heart. A huge BOOM-BANG! almost punches at my temple through the Bean’s shirt.

  “Hear anything?” a Bean with a coffee can asks.

  The fox-color big Bean eye opens, the teeth come together, make a deep rude raspy grunt. He says, “You kids . . . get the hell away from me, you goddam cocksuckin’ little sons-a-whores!!”

  ’Bout then Daddy’s boy-sized hands close around me.

  5

  I STAND by the stove and Daddy gets out a new bar of LAVA soap, unwraps it. I says, “Daddy! I didn’t say no swear words.”

  He gets one of the chairs from the suppah table and faces it in the corner where he keeps his boots. “Okay, Earlene,” he says. “We’re all set.”

  I says, “But, Daddy, soap’s for swear words!” I fidget with the hem of my sweater.

  His face is white with afraidness. He pats the chair. I get on the chair facing the corner. I open my mouth. He sticks in the soap—hard, gritty. My mouth is almost not big enough.

  He says at my back, “How many times have I told you to stay on your own side of the right-of-way?”

  I take the soap out. “Daddy! I was in the middle!” I wipe my mouth with my sleeve. I sputter.

  “What those Beans would do to a small girl like you would make a grown man cry,” he says.

  I sputter some more.

  Daddy says, “Earlene, put the soap back in.”

  “But Daddy!”

  “When I used to do what Gram told me not to do, I got the strap,” Daddy says.

  I narrow my eyes. I says, “But those was the olden days, Daddy.”

  “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” Daddy says.

  We hear the siren. I start to get off the chair. Daddy puts his hand on my shoulder. “Earlene, I’m serious. Listen to me.”

  Them rescue guys outdoor are makin’ a racket, radios and everything, havin’ a time gettin’ Rubie Bean off the ground. But Daddy don’t seem to notice. He puts his face close to mine. “If I ever . . .” he says slowly, “ever . . . ever . . . see you near them Beans again, you are gettin’ the horrible-est lickin’ the Lord has ever witnessed.”

  I says, smiling, “Daddy . . . you wouldn’t really do that.”

  He folds his arms over his chest. “Then I’ll get Gram to do it.”

  6

  IT’S THANKSGIVING and I help Gram set out the matchin’ dishes. Every Thanksgiving is the same. Auntie Paula comes with her kids and Uncle Loren comes in his pig truck alone. You can see snow between the tree trunks goin’ up the mountain overway and the gray air cracks with guns.

  I says, “Gram, did you used to hit Daddy with a strap?”

  Gram’s sharp little fingers move over the potatoes, feelin’ for bad spots. She says, “Spare the rod, spoil the child. Praise God!”

  Loren keeps going out on the back steps to get some air.

  Gram says, “Darn fool dresses too warm. He’s got at least ten shirts on, you know.”

  I look out through the kitchen glass. It’s raining on Uncle Loren. His arms dangle down through his legs. He smokes hard and slow.

  I hum one of the songs Gram plays on the organ at church. Uncle Loren don’t go to church. Gram says Uncle Loren ain’t accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior. Uncle Loren lives alone. We never visit him. We’ve seen the outside of his place about a million times. When we drive by, only his kitchen light is on. Daddy says Loren sleeps in the kitchen. Daddy says Loren’s big house is cold as a barn. Uncle Loren comes back indoor and trudges into the living room where Jerry and Dennis and I are playin’ the Cootie Game which Gram keeps for us kids. Uncle Loren sits on Gram’s flower-print divan and he looks me in the eye.

  Gram hollers from the kitchen, “Loren . . . don’t go layin’ your head on that lace scarf!”

  Uncle Loren wears striped overalls. When I look in his eyes, I get a shiver, which I like. I like scary things, I guess.

  Gram comes to the living room door and says that Auntie Paula made that divan scarf and that the oils off Loren’s head would make it black . . . eventually. Auntie Paula doesn’t say much herself about it because she’s a quiet person but her expression is worse than words.

  Uncle Loren ignores them both. He looks over at me instead. “Earlene,” he says, “did you know I got ghosts in my house?”

  Gram says, “He’s just tryin’ to scare you, Earlene. Don’t listen to him.”

  He looks big and solid and square settin’ there on the divan . . . but he’s really as short as Daddy. He says, “Ghosts bust up my house all the time. They don’t hurt me . . . but they keep me awake rollin’ them big Blue Hubbards around and smashin’ up glass. They get right under the sheets with me and run around in there under the sheets.”

  Gram’s eyes widen on him sayin’ the word “sheets.” Sheets, beds, naps . . . this is all got somethin’ to do with the Devil, I guess.

  Jerry and Dennis watch Uncle Loren with open mouths.

  Gram snorts. “He just says stuff like that so no one will visit him and discover his squalor. He hates people visitin’ him. People, good Christian ones, upset him. He don’t know Christ as his Savior.”

  Then he moves his deep pale scary eyes on me.

  7

  AFTER DINNER, I go out to where Uncle Loren is settin’ on the back step and watch him strike a match on the buckle of his overalls. It’s almost dark, but there’s still some shots up on the mountain.

  Uncle Loren don’t say nuthin’, just squints his eyes as the smoke sifts up over his face.

  I twirl a piece of my white hair and put it in the corner of my mouth.

  Loren shifts his boots on the step.

  “How’s the hogs?” I ask.

  “Good,” he says.

  He smokes.

  I twirl my hair.

  “Uncle Loren,” I says, almost in a whisper, “you ever heard this word? . . . ‘Goddamcocksuckinlittlesonsahoowahs’?”

  Uncle Loren chuckles, sends his cigarette butt spinning through the rain. It hisses in the grass. “Why don’t you ask one of them in there?” he says with a jerk of his thumb at the house.

  I trace one of my dress-up shoes with my pointing finger. I narrow my eyes.

  Uncle Loren puts them pale scary eyes on me. And I shiver.

  8

  ACROSS THE RIGHT-OF-WAY the Beans’ black dog stands by an old rug, looking at me. “Yoo hoo!” I call through cupped hands.

  Daddy’s gone to Oxford to work on a bank . . . He’s late gettin’ home. They say the roads are greasy.

  I take a step onto the Beans’ side of the right-of-way. The black dog watches me, the hair on its back raised. But it don’t bark.

  I step
over a spinach can with water froze in it, a clothespin, an Easter basket, the steerin’ wheel of a car.

  Out of the dog’s nose its frozen breath pumps. I draw nearer to the hole with the spoons and coffee cans ringed around it. The dog charges. It gallops sideways with stiff rocking-horse legs.

  I says, “You bite me and you’ll regret it!!”

  I look up at the closed metal door. No Beans.

  The dog’s eyes glow a bluish white. Its bluish tongue flutters. I say, “Beat it!” and kick a beer bottle at it.

  It noses the beer bottle, picks it up in its teeth, and drops it at my feet.

  “Go away! I ain’t playin’.” I look at the Bean windows. No faces. The dog smells my small moving feet. “You ugly grimy Bean dog. You’re goin’ ta BURN IN HELL!”

  There’s a scalloped serving spoon at the edge of the hole. “So this is the hole,” I says to myself. The dog watches me pick up a trowel. I point it at the dog. “ZEEP!” I scream. “You are instantly DEAD!” The dog blinks.

  The corridor of the hole is curved. I slide down on my bottom, workin’ my legs, the entrance behind me dwindling to a woolly little far-off cloud in the distance. I feel soda bottles along the way. A measuring cup. A rock drops from the ceiling and thwonks my shoulder. A spray of dirt lets go and fills my hair. I enter a big warm room. In apple crates are what feels like Barbie clothes and Barbie accessories. There’s a full-sized easy chair.

  “Jeezum!” I gasp. I sit in the chair. “This is real cozy.”

  I lean forward and feel of the dirt walls, dirt floor. My hand closes around a naked Barbie.

  All of a sudden there’s a thunder up there.

  The warm earth lets go, feels like hundreds of butterflies on my face.

  “It’s GOD,” I says in a choking whisper. My heart flutters.

  It’s Rubie Bean. The tires of his old logging rig hiss over Daddy’s crushed-rock driveway. There’s the ernk! of the gears.

  “Uh oh!” I says to myself. “I’m trapped in this hole. I can’t go up there now.”

  A rock from the ceiling punches my outstretched legs.

  More Beans come. Three or four carloads. The mobile home door opens, closes, opens, closes. Out in their yard Bean kids big as men run over the earth’s crust above me. THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP. The soft slap of sand is on my neck. Sounds like the Bean kids are throwing something for the black dog to catch. It sounds like a piece of tail pipe or some other gross thing.

  I hear Daddy’s car.

  After a while there’s Daddy’s voice: “Earlene! Supper!”

  It’s very very dark. The Beans have gone indoor.

  The dog is up there at the top of the hole, sniffin’ for me.

  Hours and hours and hours pass. Hours of pitch black.

  I says to myself in a squeak, “I am goin’ ta get the strap.” I turn naked Barbie over and over in my nervous fingers. I mutter, “Well . . . I just ain’t ever gonna leave THIS HOLE.”

  9

  THERE IS LIGHT AGAIN at the top. The light flutters. Boots tromp. They come down waving a flashlight—Annie Bean, Lizzie Bean, Rosie Bean. They put the light in my face. “What’re you doin’ in here?” one of ’em asks.

  “Nuthin’,” I says. My stomach growls.

  They make wet thick sniffin’ sounds. Their open mouths are echoey. They fill this dirt room with their broad shoulders, broad heads. Dirt sifts down from the ceiling through the enormous light.

  “You runnin’ from the law?” one of ’em asks.

  “NO WAY!” I scream. My scream makes more of the ceiling fall. I think I’m gonna gag from their light in my face. Now and then I can make out a Bean nose, a sharp tooth. Then it fades into the glare.

  “You’re runnin’ away from home?” asks one of them.

  I bristle. “No! I ain’t!”

  “Well, how come your father’s up there callin’ you so much?”

  One of ’em pushes a saucer with cake on it into the light. There is only the cake, the saucer, the hand. The cake is sky-blue. “Here!” a voice says.

  Their clothes rustle.

  “What’s that?” I scrunch up my nose.

  “We was goin’ ta eat it, but you can have it. Ain’t you starved?”

  I look at the cake, squinting up one eye.

  “I didn’t run away,” I says softly.

  “You prob’ly fell in here,” one says.

  “No-suh!” I holler.

  I make out a fox-color eye which is round and fierce on me.

  I take the saucer and arrange it on my knee next to Barbie. I says, “I ain’t never leavin’ this hole. I’m stayin’ here forever . . . as long as I live.”

  “You like it here pretty well, huh?” one of ’em says.

  I am alone. Between me and them is this wall of light. I hold the saucer with both hands, careful not to touch the cake. A bit of sand spills from the ceiling onto the cake.

  The three of them guys giggle.

  The cake is the blue of a birdless airplaneless sunless cloudless leafless sky . . . warm steaming blue. “Prob’ly POISON!” I gasp.

  “No way!” one of ’em says. “It ain’t. It’s Betty Crocker.”

  The Beans

  Merry Merry

  BEAL BEAN comes into the low-ceilinged room where his Auntie Roberta lies on a mattress with her new baby and her old baby. Beal’s black dog, Jet, stands back out of the light, her bluish tongue fluttering. Jet is pregnant again.

  Roberta says, “The TV, she’s rollin’. Beal, can ya fiddle with that thing in back?”

  Beal yanks off his new nylon mittens and tosses them on the mattress. He fiddles with the TV and he says, “Auntie, it’s wicked bad back home . . . Can I stay here tonight?”

  She shifts her feet around. The old baby watches Beal hard.

  Roberta murmurs, “Rubie cranky?”

  “Ain’t Rubie . . . It’s everyone else.”

  “There! That’s good. She’s stopped rollin’. Come sit here.” A great long arm reaches for the nylon mittens on the covers. “Holy cats!” Roberta exclaims in her long-neck reedy voice. “Ain’t that funny-feelin’ stuff!”

  The only light is the queer grayish haze of the TV, and through this haze Beal sees she has her hair in a messy bun tonight. The whole room smells like Bag Balm, but Beal can tell Roberta is the source. It roils out from her each time she shifts the covers.

  “Can I, Auntie?” He scooches down on the mattress next to the peaks in the quilt which are her feet. He looks straight ahead at the TV.

  “Ayuh . . . but Auntie Hoover’s gonna charge over here in the mornin’ rantin’ and ravin’.”

  The TV picture rolls three times.

  “I doubt it. Ah-ah-ah-auntie Hoover’s back at the mill,” says Beal.

  “Third shift?”

  “Yeh,” says Beal. The black dog watches Beal. She’s not used to the inside of a house. Her sides heave in and out. She moans.

  “Bet she hates it goin’ back,” says Roberta. “I ain’t never goin’ back.”

  “She hates it,” says Beal.

  “You can’t have no feelin’s in that ol’ hole,” says Roberta. “They treat you like you was a machine that runs on gas.”

  Beal says softly, “Pip says she ain’t gonna last.”

  “What’s Pip know?” Roberta asks. “He ain’t Hoover. Ain’t you tired of him speakin’ for everybody else?”

  The new baby stirs and punches its fist into its mouth. Roberta rearranges her pillows and wipes her hair out of her eyes. Her head is queerly small and her eyes are ringed in shadows.

  Beal sighs.

  “Take off your coat, Beal,” Roberta says.

  He doesn’t move. He stares at the TV, which now and then rolls. “Auntie . . . Are you my mother?”

  She shifts her feet. “Beal! I’m just a child myself!”

  He turns and looks her up and down. “Maybe I ain’t got one.”

  She smiles. Her tall teeth open up. “Beal, you’re a lucky boy. You got a bunch
a mothers.”

  The old baby gets under the covers and looks from the TV to Beal and back to the TV.

  Beal scowls. “Yeh . . . but which one did I come out of? Which one let me lie on her like that?” He points at the new baby sprawled on Roberta’s narrow chest.

  “Well . . . it ain’t no secret . . . I guess they just figured you knew. I mean . . . they prob’ly told you when you was little.”

  “I forgot.”

  She takes his arm in her scarred, hard fingers and kneads it. “I wish you was mine. You’re steady as a brain surgeon . . . Some day you’re gonna be quite the prize. I got eyes for that kinda thing, you know . . .” She flutters both eyelids.

  He looks at her with his steady fox-color eyes.

  She says reedily, “But you ain’t mine. You’re Merry Merry’s.”

  Beal’s broad-shouldered at thirteen, big as a man, looks so much like Ernest Bean and Chris Bean, you can’t tell one from the other at certain distances. He flattens his hands on his thighs.

  “You ain’t surprised?” says Roberta. Her fingers travel down his forearm. She takes his hands and plays with his fingers.

  “No, I ain’t surprised,” he murmurs. He looks at the TV. The TV makes a cold light on his face. Jet moans and drops to the floor, head on the corner of the mattress, panting more softly now, eyes on Beal.

  Roberta says at Beal’s back, “And, of course, you ain’t got no dad that you call Daddy. You know how that goes. Like these babies here . . . You see . . . they ain’t got one. It happens now and then.”

  He closes his eyes. “I wish you wa-a-ah-was my mother, Auntie.”

  She keeps playing with his fingers. She says, “Shit! I ain’t nuthin’.”

  2

  MERRY MERRY is prisoner again. When she paces up there, the whole tree house shakes. She pokes her broad nose through the bars and calls, “Beeeeee!”

  Beal stands with his shotgun across his thighs, looking up, while Lizzie, Annie, and Rosie balance like cats on the outside platform of the tree house. “She’s prizna!” Rosie shouts.