The Beans of Egypt, Maine

by Carolyn Chute

  My socks sag around my ankles. I reach in my boots, pull my socks up one at a time.

  I scream, “Daddy! Wait up!” but he don’t.

  The Beans tee-hee and snort with laughter . . . Them and their dog come to the edge of their yard . . . narrowing their fox-color eyes on me, their snowsuits sliskin’.

  I run.

  “He’s sure anxious to get a Christmas tree,” I mutter.

  I look back and the Beans’ve lost interest in me. They’ve gone to heave a fan belt to the dog.

  As I pass the mailboxes I run hard.

  But Daddy . . . he speeds up, too.

  “Daddy! I’m HERE!” I call.

  Big white rags of snow start ploppin’ down. The ground gets white quick. My socks drop.

  I don’t see Daddy nowheres. I yank up my socks. In a while I see his tracks in the new snow. The tracks turn into the woods, over a stone wall, down a steep gully. Then in the blackness of softwoods, I hear Daddy’s axe. I pull up my socks. I zigzag through bushes and then I see him cuttin’ a spruce taller than three houses. I say, “JEEEEZ!”

  His breath comes out like white cabbages. I sit on a rock, my chin in my palms, my eyes on him. I say in a low voice, “This is BEAN land.” I take a breath, narrow my eyes in the spaces between trees. Somewhere Beans are out there watchin’ us.

  Daddy stops hackin’. Takes off his parka. His khaki shirt is wet all up and down. His hair is like a wild man. Then he moves toward the spruce, swings the axe with his whole body.

  “Maybe they’ll hang us in their barn. EAT us. Beans will eat anythin’,” I say to myself. I pull up my socks.

  Daddy gasps, the axe takin’ out big bites. Snow sticks to the fine hair on his arms. His back twists in a kind of fit. The snow drops all around like white mittens, white hats. It fills in the land. I never seen such fast, big snow. Daddy goes around to the other side of the tree and hacks on that side. His face is red and wet.

  I say into my fingers, “How’s he plan to get that thing into the house?”

  I hear the tree crackin’. It drops like a hundred trees. It fills the path with branches and an explosion of snow. Some of the snow flies in my face.

  Now there’s no sound, just Daddy standin’ there with his pale eyes like dimes, lookin’ at me. I don’t say nuthin’. Then the wind lifts with a hiss and a howl. Snow drops from limbs of other trees with a thump. I look at Daddy through the blowin’ snow. Daddy leans on his axe.

  Birds fly out of a balsam and I see Daddy’s eyes follow them. He’s motionless except for his turning eyes.

  I chirp, “Jeez, Daddy! You call THAT a Christmas tree!”

  He moves his eyes back from the birds to my face. He looks at the tree like it had a mouth and just called him a name.

  I say, “Daddy, we need a better tree than that! Jeez, Daddy!”

  But he’s still lookin’ at the tree, kneading the axe handle with his fingers. His eyes get big, then bigger and BIGGER and BIGGER. He says, “You don’t approve of this tree, Earlene?”

  I says, “No.”

  He jumps on the Christmas tree, his mouth a savage curl. He holds the tree down with his foot. He hacks. Slivers splash up. The arms of the tree quiver, struggle. He bashes those limbs with his heel. He jumps all over. He don’t stop actin’ this way till the tree’s in a million pieces.

  7

  AFTER THE CHRISTMAS PAGEANT at church, Auntie Paula drops me off at the top of the right-of-way ’cause it ain’t plowed yet. It’s pitch dark. I wear my coat over my angel suit. The wings make enormous blobs on my back. Down on the right-of-way, the blue Christmas lights of the Beans blink and wrinkle so the mobile home changes shape before my eyes.

  Daddy said he’s sorry, but he had a headache and couldn’t make the pageant. When I left with Auntie Paula, he was on the couch with his hands between his knees, lookin’ at my mother’s snorin’ red red mouth. I imagine he’s still there now, limp hair, limp half-smile, watchin’ her by the light of the kitchen coming through the archway.

  My knee hits a drift.

  Then a flashlight flutters over the snow and trees, burns between my shoulder blades. I turn around fast. It’s Beal Bean . . . with a new haircut . . . nearly bald . . . his head and face big and bare as the broad, white Bean land behind the mobile home.

  “Quit it!” I scream.

  He makes a snowball. It splats between my feet.

  “MISSED!” I scream.

  “I missed on p-peeeee-pah-purpose!” he screams back.

  “You hit me with any more snowballs, I’m callin’ the deputy!!!” I says.

  The jaw. Daddy says Beans got the Cro-Magnon look. Bean mouths always got slack. And in the slack is their chunky yellow teeth.

  Beal Bean says, “Earlene, you wanna see somethin’? A m-m-mah-miracle?”

  I says, “No-suh. I don’t wanna see no miracles. I HATE miracles!”

  “You’ll like this miracle. Honest.”

  I stop, let him catch up. He is in fifth grade . . . stayed back a million times . . . big as a man. He looks down at my angel suit hangin’ out under my coat. He puts the flashlight there.

  “Quit it!” I roar.

  He moves the spot of light over the snow. He’s breathin’ through his mouth.

  “What color is this old miracle?” I ask.

  “You’ll see,” he says.

  I watch his back as he lunges ahead of me, leadin’ the way. I can make out in the darkness the white curve of his Sherpa collar.

  He is goin’ to get me behind the trailer of Beans where ten big Beans, ten big ugly Beans, will grab me and kill me. They are probably mad about what Daddy did to that Christmas tree on their side of the brook. “PEACE ON EARTH GOOD WILL TO MEN!” I scream.

  His long legs drive through the snow with ease. I try to use his footprints . . . but his footprints are deep like dug wells.

  “PEACE ON EARTH!” I sing.

  He don’t say nuthin’.

  I say, “That was my lines in the pageant, you know. At church. I go to church. I know Beans don’t never go to church. You prob’ly ain’t never heard ’bout peace on earth ’n’ stuff.”

  He stops and looks at me. He don’t say nuthin’. In school in the cafeteria he don’t never talk. Just chews his lunch and looks at his hands. I think how if he keeps stayin’ back, I go past him, and graduate, and Beal Bean will just go on forever in fifth grade . . . eatin’ rat sandwiches and gettin’ bigger and BIGGER and BIGGER.

  I says, “At church we sang Christmas songs. ‘Silent Night.’ And ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’!!”

  The brownish spot of his flashlight moves over the snow, near the hem of my angel suit.

  I say, “Gram says Hark! all year long. If there’s a noise in the yard . . . you know, a noise . . . she says, Hark! And you gotta listen. Ain’t that a funny word?”

  The brown spot moves even CLOSER to my hem. I says, “Do you think all old ladies say Hark? Does your aunties say Hark?”

  “I guess,” he says softly. He springs the light onto my angel suit.

  “GET THAT OFFA ME!!!” I scream.

  He says, “You’re weird.”

  He knees into the snow, aimin’ the flashlight on the hills of snow which is the junk Beans always keep in their yard. When we’re at the back of the trailer, Beal Bean moves his eyes over me. He puts the flashlight on an opening in the trailer skirting. That’s where the pipes are under the floor. “In there is th-th-thaah-the miracle,” he says.

  “You ain’t gettin’ me in there,” I says, trying to hold my angel suit out of the snow . . . This suit is actually Gram’s old lace tablecloth.

  His fox-color eyes hold mine. My skin prickles with fear. “It’s neat in there,” he says.

  We hear squeaks.

  My eyes widen. “Rats. You call that a miracle?” I back away.

  He smiles. “Ain’t rats. It’s something you’ll laww-law-love . . . Honest.”

  Even as I duck down to look, somethin’ ugly sloshes down the Be
ans’ drain above my right ear. “I don’t see nuthin’ in there,” I says.

  “Go in,” he says. He puts the flashlight in my hands. I hear him breathin’ through his mouth. My heart shakes in my chest. I go down on all fours.

  There’s a low growl . . . the thump of a tail.

  Then I see the black dog with the bluish-whitish eyes. Around her a mound of moving parts . . . like smaller pieces of herself. Puppies. They charge toward me, flying at my face. They box at me with their little feet. They pass over me from all directions . . . seems like fifty of them. They lap and suck my eyes. They tug on my soggy angel suit. They are everywhere, dragging me down.

  Overhead, the Beans walk over the mobile home floor in heavy parade.

  The mother dog keeps her eyes on me.

  I am on every inch of me stingin’ with pain . . . a trillion needle teeth.

  Beal comes up beside me on his knees. He says, “These puppies don’t have no father.”

  “So what?” I gasp, a puppy snatchin’ away my holly halo.

  He says “no father” in a deep manlike voice. He cradles the mother dog’s head in his hands.

  I blink up at Beal Bean, the flashlight laying in the dirt making only the undersides of his face show, the Cro-Magnon jaw, the two holes of his nose.

  He says, “Wouldn’t that make ’em the sons of God?”

  I work my breath up slow. I work my fingers in the dirt.

  The Beans

  Buzzy Atkinson’s Paper-Plate Kiss

  WHAT’S THAT racket?” Artie asks.

  Marie Bean keeps a couch in her big kitchen . . . and this is what Artie usually does . . . lays on it and looks at magazines . . . the kind with black-and-white pictures of women motorcyclists with their shirts around their waists . . . and Artie eats. He’s broad across the chest and has a double chin . . . the only one of Marie’s boys who hasn’t quit school to work in the woods.

  Artie eats baloney sandwiches, peanut butter on a spoon, carrots, ice cubes . . . anything he can find.

  “That’s one of them Letourneaus comin’ for the junks,” Marie says, squinting through the glass oven door at her pies. She sees herself. Pats her hair. Adjusts her glasses.

  Artie sits up, pitches his magazine onto the end table littered with magazines and a wagon-wheel lamp. He lights a cigarette. “Ma! You’re gonna get a bust in the head when Dad hears this,” he says, standing up, pulling the yellow curtain aside.

  Down the crumbly road roars the car hauler, says, LETOURNEAU’S USED AUTO PARTS on the door.

  Suddenly, the back part of the house shakes. It’s Otis out on the glassed-in porch. He rolls his nose along the panes. He sees the junkman riding with his arm out, wearing gloves. Reflections of overhead maples drizzle over the car-hauler windshield.

  “Which Letourneau is it?” Marie asks her boy, patting her hair again . . . her brand-new permanent . . . with a black rinse that doesn’t quite cover up all the gray at her temples.

  “Damned if I know . . . Can’t make him out,” says Artie. He blows smoke out of his nose. Rubs his stomach. Yawns.

  Otis sniffs under the porch door. A growl flickers low in his chest.

  The kitchen smells of mincemeat. It’s Marie’s day off from working at the office of Allen’s Oil. Her cooking day. She goes to the window herself and stands behind Artie, peering past his wrist . . . her cold blue-eyed stare . . . her rimless glasses reflecting the car hauler as it sweeps by them. “It’s Buzzy Atkinson,” she almost whispers.

  “They prob’ly sent him ’cause they don’t wanna throw away one of their better yardmen,” says Artie, turning from the window. “ ’Cause if Dad comes around while he’s messin’ with his rigs, there’s gonna be broken bones.” He sniffs, goes to the refrigerator, drags out a new jar of green olives.

  Marie says, “I got bills to pay. If Rubie Bean thinks he can prance around with that ticket he’s shacked up with now . . . and stick me with the bills, he’s got a surprise comin’.”

  Otis doesn’t know one junkman from another. He gallops from one end of the glassed-in porch to the other, his nose sucking along the outside wall.

  Marie takes two mincemeat pies from the oven, sets them on cutting boards. She can smell the exhaust of the car hauler here in the kitchen as Buzzy Atkinson backs up to her ex-husband Rubie Bean’s fifteen-year-old Caddy in mint shape with its wheels on concrete blocks. Marie still wears her wedding ring, a brutish silver band with hearts slashed into it. She says, “Don’t touch these pies, Artie.”

  Artie is looking at the pies.

  “You got two of ’em!” he says, his voice croaking inside his double chins. He has a softness across the eyes that the other two boys don’t have. Although he shows no interest in logging with Rubie and has Marie’s taut, unplayful mouth, he has rages . . . He is his father’s son.

  He gets a fork for the olives, sits at the table . . . slides a magazine in front of him.

  Otis is shaking the porch with his wish to get out. Sometimes, Otis makes messes on the linoleum. The glass porch is cold. He doesn’t want to be there, ever. He is only happy with Marie . . . to drop his bread-box-sized muzzle into her lap, to have her twirl his ears. Marie. Her whisper.

  Marie says she has plans for the pies. She goes into the bathroom, which is off the kitchen, closes the door.

  Artie listens to Buzzy Atkinson working the winch . . . the whine of the winch . . . knowing the Caddy is rearing up. He says, “That Buzzy Atkinson’s married to one of Lucien Letourneau’s sisters. He’s got the brain of a flea. Did you hear what he did at Gaston’s last summer? Dad was tellin’ . . . Remember?”

  “No,” she says through the door. She is brushing her hair, her heart racing.

  “Yee-hah!! Ma! You gotta see this one . . . a broad fuckin’ an eel!”

  “You ain’t handlin’ them pies, are you?”

  “No!” he croaks. “I’m settin’ right here!”

  “You been known to throw your voice.”

  He whispers to himself, “Wonder where they get eels that Christly huge . . . prob’ly some rare ocean kind . . . Jesus . . . I can’t stand it.” He whimpers. Jiggles his leg.

  The winch stops.

  Otis mashes his face to the glass . . . the juices of his lips hanging like stalactites.

  Outside, Buzzy Atkinson looks at the house for the first time, looks right into Otis’s eyes. Otis’s nose is steaming.

  Buzzy Atkinson has let his crew cut grow out the front of his orange tie-up hunting hat, and the hair sticks out and up like the gray horn of a rhino. He stands in a way you’d think he has cement in his gloves . . . pulling forward . . . like his back is about to give out from the weight of them. The gloves are the orange fuzzy kind with blackened fingers and palms. He scratches his loose, stubbly cheeks, his massive lips, with the glove of his right hand. Then he scratches his ribs. He moans. It’s plain to see he’s a nervous wreck. But whether or not he always is or just here . . . that’s the question. In his left glove is a receipt book, the cold wind flapping at the yellow sheets.

  Marie comes out of the bathroom. Artie’s with the mince pies, feeling them. He says, “Don’t Buzzy Atkinson have ten kids?”

  “That’s what I heard,” she says. She crosses the room.

  “That’s stupid,” Artie croaks.

  He gets himself a paper plate and the stainless-steel pie server. “Well, all them kids are goin’ ta be fatherless soon.” He chuckles.

  Marie goes through the front room. She pulls open the front door and goes out on the step with her arms folded across her white shirt, the wind slapping at her hair. “Hey! Mr. Junkman!” she shouts.

  The sun shows behind the haze like a flashlight behind lacy curtains.

  Buzzy lopes up over the grass, his gloved hands leading the way. He walks from the knees, and his loose lips and cheeks flutter. He scratches his belly as he hikes along. He doesn’t look directly at Marie, avoids her cold, blue-eyed stare. “Ayuh,” moans Buzzy. “You got a bear out behind. Charg
e extra for the worry.”

  “Mr. Atkinson . . . wouldn’t you like some mincemeat?”

  “Prob’ly,” he says. He looks back at the car hauler. “To take with me?”

  “Why don’t you come in? You a coffee drinker?”

  “Ayup.” He follows her inside.

  He smells like the underneath of a car. His smell swells to fit the whole front room, billowing from his orange work gloves and green work clothes like a stinging, puckery, black smoke.

  When they enter the kitchen, one pie is gone, Artie is gone.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Atkinson,” says Marie, patting her hair. “How do you like your coffee?”

  “Half coffee, half can milk.” He looks at the table, the magazine spread open showing a young woman with an enormous eel passing into her deepmost parts . . . a look on her face of fatigue. Black-and-white. Buzzy’s eyes widen. Then he looks away fast.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m fresh out of canned milk,” says Marie. “Had a chowder couple nights ago. Want some reg’lar Oak-hurst?” She studies him with her pale eyes behind those metal-rimmed glasses.

  “Ayuh,” says Buzzy Atkinson. He scratches the back of his neck. A wooden clothes rack over the hot-air register catches Buzzy’s eyes. Wool socks and T-shirts and dishtowels lifting up on the blowing heat show in fluttery miniature on his eyes. He moans. Seems like an ordinary kitchen. Seems warm and clean and nurturing. Seems like a person could be happy here, could thrive.

  “You can sit down, Mr. Atkinson.” She smiles.

  “Oh, yuh . . . I know . . . in a minute.” He looks at her, his loose cheeks quivering. He has green eyes. Broad shoulders. He leaves on his hat, leaves on his nasty gloves.

  Marie turns away, thinking about his green eyes.

  Meanwhile, a suspicious silence comes from the glassed-in porch.

  “How many kids you got, Mr. Atkinson?”

  “Ten.”

  She turns with a glass cup and shoots her icy eyes into his green ones. “Sit down. Sit down!” she commands. Not smiling.

  He sits. He rests his elbow directly over the eel and the legs. Marie sets his coffee by his gloved hands and his yellow receipt pad. “Ten,” she says softly. “Your wife sounds like a wonderful woman.”