The Beans of Egypt, Maine

by Carolyn Chute

  “Beeeee!” Merry Merry calls. He sees her hands, a bloodless white, take the bars and shake them.

  “Let her down!” Beal commands.

  “There’s Beal Pimplehead who stutters!” one of them sings out. They use rusty saws and hammers to put up more bars on the jail.

  “You guys ain’t supposed to take her up there . . . I’m teh-teh-teaaaah-tellin!” Beal yells up the tree. He prowls slowly around the trunk. Although he is thirteen, he has not grown to that swagger that each of his older cousins has but has such soft hesitations and worry. Jet circles the tree with him.

  Annie squeals with laughter, “She’s prizna! She broke the law!” All three of them giggle.

  Jet stands, puts her paws on the tree.

  Beal says, “You c-ah-aaah-creeps! If I get you, I’m gonna bah-aaaah-ust your heads!”

  He clasps a rung of the ladder and pulls himself up, his shotgun under his arm. Jet barks. She races around the tree.

  “He’s gonna get us,” one of them says to the other. They giggle wildly. “Pimpled Stutterhead is goin’ to get us!”

  “Beeeee!” Merry Merry calls through the bars.

  “Here he comes,” whispers one of them. Their fox-color eyes water from the cold and their good cheer.

  Beal keeps the shotgun against his ribs.

  A nail drops on his neck. Another on his shoulder. Nails rain down. He keeps his face down.

  “Beeee!” Merry Merry calls. Her feet march and the tree-house floor groans.

  Lizzie, Annie, and Rosie hold their hammers over Beal’s fingers on the top rung. “Wanna see Pimpled Stutterhead let go?” says one of them.

  The other two shriek, “Yessss!”

  Jet circles beneath . . . whining.

  Above, Merry Merry is whining. Her dark braids swing against the jail bars. Beal can see the colored elastics the aunties used to fix her hair. She is now, as in some of his visions, lovely.

  With watering eyes, broad heads, broad bodies, mittens dangling on safety pins, the cousins shake their hammers.

  Beal looks down. Jet’s tongue flutters like it was a hot day.

  The tree house creaks, the broad gray beech riddled with nails . . . Eeeck . . . eeeck! Merry Merry shakes the bars.

  Annie exclaims, “Anybody who pees theirself right in the road goes ta jail . . . From now on this is where they go, right?”

  “Right,” Rosie says.

  “Right!” Lizzie says.

  “And anybody who is the stupidest one around . . . big and stupid . . . goes in this here fancy jail!” Rosie says.

  “Right!”

  “Right!”

  “She can’t help it,” Beal says softly.

  “Sentenced to bread ’n’ watah!” Rosie screams.

  All three hammers tap Beal’s fingers lightly.

  “That’s for now,” says Rosie. “Next gets harder!”

  “I’ll kill you,” Beal murmurs, “wuh-wuh-with this gun.”

  “No-suh! Aunties don’t let you have bullets!”

  “You fuckers,” Beal says softly.

  The hammers drop on the fingers . . . with the pressure it takes to drive a thumbtack . . . perhaps to hang a calendar.

  Beal’s chin puckers.

  “He’s cryin’!” rejoices Lizzie.

  “I’m tellin’,” says Beal.

  Rosie leans forward and gurgles happily, “What you gonna tell ’em, Pimplehead? You gonna tell you was cryin’?”

  He starts back down the tree.

  Lizzie, Annie, and Rosie wave their hammers over their heads. “Yay! Yay!”

  Beal’s foot touches the leaves. He sobs. He turns his face away so they won’t see the rivers on his pimpled cheeks. A few yards down the path, he kicks a rotted stump to pieces. The voices behind him cry out very faintly, “Ain’t loaded! Ain’t loaded! Ain’t loaded!”

  3

  BEAL SEES the stranger coming down the road through the dark trunks of spruce, then turning down the right-of-way.

  Lizzie, Annie, and Rosie are perched on the hood of Rubie Bean’s purply-red logging truck, making snowballs from the brand-new snow. “Who’s that?” says Annie.

  Jet bristles, watches hard with her blue eyes.

  Beal lays the bucksaw down.

  Rosie shapes her snowball round and hard, pitches it into Beal’s back. He ignores it.

  The stranger wears a long coat, unbuttoned. No hat. He is balding. He moves with rhythm, like his long legs and swinging long arms are accustomed to miles uncountable. There is a black beard with gray rivulets through it all the way to his belt. The stomach is rounded.

  Another snowball thuds into Beal’s back. The three cousins giggle. “Pimples! Hey, Pimples!” screams one of them. “Turn around. Let’s see some pimples!”

  Sometimes Beal wishes he had no face at all, just a soft white empty place like the sky. But if he could really wish—and make the wish come true—he’d wish for his cousin Rubie’s face, the eyes always steady on you and, around the haggard mouth, a black mustache like the lowered wings of a crow.

  Another snowball. Another. Another. One breaks apart on his neck.

  Beal thinks he’s seen the stranger before, but realizes it’s probably just because the stranger looks like Santa Claus, a big, young Santa Claus.

  “Looks like Santa Claus!” exclaims Rosie.

  “Not Santa Claus,” Lizzie hisses. “The Boogie Man . . . Ernck!”

  Lizzie, Annie, and Rosie are whispering.

  The stranger doesn’t raise his hand in greeting. The face is gray and grained as barn boards. There are no white hairs in the mustache, only in three distinct streaks, one spewing from the chin, two from the temples.

  Jet growls.

  “Be good girl,” says Beal.

  Jet’s tail thumps.

  Annie, Lizzie, and Rosie slide off the hood of the truck onto the high bank of snow. Lizzie sucks snow from her mitten. Lizzie and Annie and Rosie look the stranger up and down. Hanging from his belt is a homemade sheath of dark leather and shoelace, the handle of a huge hunting knife sticking out.

  “That your knife, mistah?” Rosie asks.

  The stranger squints at them all as if he can’t quite make them out. Beal is just opening his mouth to speak when the metal door of the mobile home peels open. Auntie Hoover and Auntie K. run out into the snow in their sneakers, screaming, “Merry Merry!”

  They gallop toward the barn with their eyes on the stranger, his eyes squinting after them . . . trying to focus on their zigzagging path. Beal glances at the stranger, the steady hands with no gloves. The stranger puts him to mind of a workhorse, a great docile Belgian, tired of the plow, but with smooth-striding shoulders and large sniffing nostrils, gentle mouth.

  “Ain’t you got mittens, mistah?” Lizzie asks.

  Beal says, “Get lost, Lizzie.”

  Lizzie sneers, “Get lost yourself! Crybaby!”

  The stranger settles his green almost milky eyes on Beal and squints. “Well, I know you. Ain’t you Rubie?”

  Beal squares his shoulders. “I’m Beal.”

  “Beal? What an awful name . . . Well, no worse’n Granville.” He moves closer to Beal, trying to make out the face. “Ain’t hearda you, Beal. But I imagine there’s a story.”

  The stranger squints for a long time on Beal.

  “Can’t you see good?” Annie asks.

  “Good as a bat,” the stranger says.

  Lizzie, Annie, and Rosie giggle ferociously.

  In the barn there’s the sound of a cage slapping shut.

  The man looks long and hard that way. “Them women gettin’ ready ta fix me a cage?”

  “That’s Merry Merry’s bunny they’re puttin’ back. Name’s Whitey,” Lizzie says.

  Annie says, “Jeez . . . Ain’t you ever shaved, mistah?”

  The aunties lead Merry Merry out of the barn. Merry Merry walks between them like a captive Indian princess, her thick braids swaying. She has a small smile and hundreds of acne scars. When she s
ees the stranger, her smile does not increase or decrease.

  “Why you actin’ so crazy, aunties?” Lizzie asks as they pass by.

  “You girls go play!” Auntie Hoover commands.

  “Cripes,” says Annie, “there’s weirdness today.”

  Auntie Hoover’s getting ready to close the tin door behind her . . . She stops, and says out of the corner of her mouth, “Well, you got the barn to yourself, Granville! Get in it and we’ll bring you some dinnah! Beal Bean, you look after them girls . . . Don’t take your eyes off ’em!”

  Beal raises his chin with the solemnness of this duty.

  “Cripes!” says Annie.

  The stranger smiles. A kindly Santa Claus-pink tinge comes to his face. “Well, I know a good barn when I see one,” he says, and moves toward it. He moves like a workhorse, happy to see the barn, happy to enter it, the huge back and shoulders passing out of the white light of outdoors into the cavity of darkness, swinging his arms.

  “What a weirdo,” says Rosie.

  “One of Pip’s friends prob’ly,” says Annie.

  Lizzie sucks her mitten.

  4

  PIP, WHO SOME CALL PA, comes down the right-of-way with his plow up. Pip’s gray hair stands straight up as usual. He takes his Thermos off the seat. He looks at the ground, the huge footprints leading to the barn. “Granville Pollard’s here, ain’t he?”

  Beal is cutting cordwood with the bucksaw. The aunties never let him use the chain saw though by age thirteen all other Bean boys know the chain saw, like they know the engine, the come-along, the winch, the rifle, these tools of sustenance and power. He says, “Yup. He’s here.”

  Lizzie, Annie, and Rosie, building what looks like an upright grizzly bear out of snow, squinch up their noses. “What a weirdo!” they exclaim.

  Pip grins. “I seen him comin’ up through, but I was down back. Called ta him, but he don’t see ’n’ hear when he don’t want . . . Goddam wild turkey.”

  “He your friend?” Annie asks.

  Pip laughs.

  Jet follows Pip to the barn. Rosie takes Beal’s hand and hangs there a moment, all of them watching the silent barn with unblinking eyes.

  5

  “PASS THE TATAHS,” says Pip.

  Pip has a chair. Not everybody has a chair.

  Pip doesn’t take off his coat.

  Merry Merry is at the table next to Pip. She has a seat with arms and a cushion. She thumps her foot while she eats.

  Rubie Bean is at the table, one elbow to each side of his plate. “Gimme the buttah, Ma.”

  Auntie K. and Auntie Hoover just stand around and watch the rest. They’ve already filled up while they were cooking, tasting this and that from the big kettles.

  Lizzie dumps gravy on Merry Merry’s potatoes. “An’ here’s your bread, stupid,” she says.

  Auntie K. says in a low voice, “Lizzie, no more calling her stupid. No more.”

  Rosie rips up Merry Merry’s turkey meat with her fingers.

  “Don’t do it with your fingers,” says Auntie K. in the same low voice, soft and threatening, motherly and managerial.

  Uncle Wayne eats standing, holding his plate. He laps gravy off the edge.

  There’s a car coming in the yard. Auntie Jeannie and her kids.

  Auntie Hoover gets out more plates.

  Auntie Hoover and Auntie K. both look like they’re waiting for a ride to an American Legion dance . . . always dressed up nice like any minute someone might show up and say, “Let’s go!”

  Beal stands against the wall with his plate. Auntie Jeannie comes in and one of her big babies hugs Beal’s legs.

  “Hurry with the door!” Auntie Hoover tells Auntie Jeannie. “Where’s Walt?”

  “Ain’t comin’.”

  Another thing Auntie Hoover and Auntie K. both do is pluck their eyebrows off and draw new ones on from scratch. And both are bottle blondes. They are both big with big hands . . . but actually only Auntie K.’s a Bean by blood. Auntie Hoover’s Bean by marriage.

  Ernest is just coming in. He stomps his boots at the door.

  “Hurry with the door,” says Auntie Hoover.

  Ernest takes off his army jacket, gives it a toss to the jacket pile. His shirt is also army. Has badges and corporal insignia. But Ernest isn’t in the army. He just likes the way the army look feels. He fills his plate at the table and stove, then stands next to Beal. He and Beal both eat without talking.

  Rubie Bean makes snorting noises while he eats.

  Auntie K. washes pots in the sink.

  Auntie Hoover says, “Reuben, get that squash off your whiskahs!”

  Rubie wipes his mouth on his sleeve.

  “Ain’t he ever goin’ back to his wifey?” Annie asks.

  “Shut up!” says Rubie. He belches.

  “You quit bashin’ her, maybe she’ll like you,” Annie says. She pours herself some milk.

  Beal drops one of Auntie Jeannie’s babies a piece of turkey skin.

  The babies circulate. One climbs over Pip’s knees.

  Merry Merry pats her turkey meat with the palm of her hand. “Keeee!” she says. She fingers all the things on her plate. Her hands meet each warm, wet surface with tenderness and playfulness like when she holds her bunny, Whitey.

  Annie says, “I like the part best where she called the cops on you and they come out and got you and kept you in the jail for this many days . . .” She holds up both her hands.

  Rubie wipes his mouth again. He glares at Annie with his fox-color eyes. Some of his fingers are missing. One nail is shaped like a claw, and with this one, he picks something from his back teeth.

  Pip butters a piece of bread. “Ain’t this Wonder Bread?” he asks.

  “No, Pa, it’s the store brand,” says Auntie Hoover.

  “Goddam shit,” says Pip.

  “Oh, Pa,” moans Hoover, one of the few to call him Pa, while Pip is what he is to most of the world.

  Auntie Jeannie, big and square like all Bean women, sits cross-legged on the floor and unzips a plastic satchel. With her left hand she pushes a Barney Rubble baby bottle to the mouth of an infant; with the right hand she eats turkey stuffing from a plate on her knee.

  “We got them lights out for you, Pa,” Auntie Hoover says.

  “Hoover, dear . . . I ain’t in the Christmassy mood today!”

  “Well . . . there they are! . . . in the hall . . . Till they go up . . . we’ll be steppin’ on ’em.”

  “Put ’em away, then.”

  “Pa! You know the trouble we went through draggin’ all that stuff out!”

  Pip laughs. Chewed-up bread drops from his mouth to his plate.

  Uncle Wayne eats silently. His mouth, like a feeding fish, opens and closes around the edge of his plate. He paces in front of the TV. A pair of orange work gloves sticks out of his back pocket like feathers stick out of a rooster’s rear.

  “Who is Granville Pollard?” Beal asks.

  Rubie and Pip and the three aunties look at each other. Rubie’s eating noises stop. The air is quiet, almost snowy.

  Lizzie pipes up, “A horrible sight if you ask me!”

  Auntie K. sighs. “He’d be a handsome man if he got ridda them Christly whiskahs.”

  “Yes-suh,” Auntie Hoover groans. “Every time he breezes in, them whiskahs is hangin’ another inch below his belt. Looks like hell.”

  Pip is watching Beal. Pip’s mouth is open with the chewed bread at rest in there in full view.

  Auntie Hoover says, “Looks ain’t nuthin’ . . . It’s his morals . . . He’s got the morals of an old cat.”

  Rubie laughs. Wipes his mouth.

  Merry Merry laughs.

  Auntie Hoover glares at Rubie. “There’s nuthin’ atall funny, Reuben.”

  Auntie Hoover pulls some dishes off the table, jams them in the sink. “Ain’t no time to be discussin’ Granville Pollard’s habits with all these kids in the room.”

  Rubie snickers. “You’re always crankin’ on my morals.
Let’s give ol’ Granville’s morals a whirl.”

  Annie leans forward. “Does this have anything to do with sex?”

  “Yes,” says Rubie.

  Lizzie claps her hands. “Oh, boy! This is like Twenty Questions. Ain’t it like Twenty Questions?” She looks at Rosie.

  “Yip,” says Rosie.

  Auntie K. says, “Reuben, let’s not start now. I don’t think when you got one of your hangovers you’re fit to talk at the dinnah table.”

  Annie makes a face at Rubie with her thumbs in her ears.

  Rubie lunges forward, scooping hot squash from a bowl . . . His chair falls over. Annie’s face gets the squash. Annie screams through Rubie’s long and short fingers.

  “Reuben, simmer down,” says Auntie K. softly. She puts her hand between his shoulder blades, pats him.

  Auntie Hoover waggles her penciled-on eyebrows. “Reuben’s always gotta make some scene.”

  Rubie laughs deeply, stoops to pick up his chair.

  Annie is crying, getting up from her chair.

  Pip says, “Reuben, take an aspirin.”

  “Let’s talk about sex!” Lizzie squeals.

  Pip looks sideways at Lizzie. “Eat!”

  Rubie says, “Ain’t it a pisser how Granville can’t keep his hands off Merry Merry—I mean, Jesus fuckin’ Christ!—Merry Merry ain’t no Marilyn Monroe, you know!”

  Lizzie looks at Merry Merry. “Her?”

  Beal looks at Merry Merry.

  Merry Merry chirps, “Keee!” and stretches forward to pat the turkey carcass in the middle of the table.

  Beal can’t take his eyes off Merry Merry.

  Now everyone is looking at Merry Merry’s hands. Her right thumb pivots on the turkey’s spine. The wrist kicks back. They watch in foolish silence this reflex none of them can make heads nor tails of.

  6

  THEY’RE HUNKERED around the radiator at Beans’ Variety . . . a half-dozen or so, some standing, some scooched . . . one or two have seats. Merry Merry shuffles behind Beal in her green rubber boots. Beal commands, “Go set over there with them!”

  The men around the radiator look at Merry Merry, then look at each other. Nobody talks.