Warren’s in the hall.
“You got sweet sweet ways,” Madeline says to Beal as she gives his beard a light tap.
Warren Olsen picks the swan shower curtain to one side. Bonny Loo jeers, “If there’s school tomorrow, I want you all in your beds!”
Beal stands the way of Beans, with his feet far apart on the plywood floor. I see the veins are raised up, the deer flies have hacked away at the broad ankles. Maybe ol’ Madeline’s gonna drop right there and kiss them feet . . . How many times have I done that? Right here on this plywood floor, with my daughter watchin’ from her bed, and Beal in one of his moods. I been down there so many times kissin’ them feet and he never says, “Stop, Earlene. Stop kissin’ them feet. You’re makin’ yourself look pretty silly.” No, he just stands there like that’s the way with the world.
Can people TELL when they look in my eyes? Can they SEE me kissin’ away on them feet?
Oh . . . I see rising up the quick words like grunts from Gram’s razor-thin lips . . . but instead mine move soundlessly . . . out of the Holy Scriptures: YEA, TO HIM SHALL THE PROUD OF THE EARTH BOW DOWN; BEFORE HIM SHALL BOW ALL WHO GO DOWN TO THE DUST, AND HE WHO CANNOT KEEP HIMSELF ALIVE. POSTERITY SHALL SERVE HIM; MEN SHALL TELL OF THE LORD TO THE COMING GENERATION, AND PROCLAIM HIS DELIVERANCE TO A PEOPLE YET UNBORN, THAT HE HAS WROUGHT IT.
From across the room I can see Warren Olsen’s eyes find my face. He looks and sees what he sees, workin’ his mouth in a hard line.
7
BONNY LOO comes to me with her secret. Her bifocals are steamy with her excitement. She says, “Come on, Ma!” and takes my hand into her square hot hand.
I say softly, “Let me get a wool shirt first.”
Kaiser gets up on his feet from under the table.
Bonny Loo stands by the door, twistin’ a piece of her thin hair. “No way! He’ll wreck everythin’!” She pretends to throw somethin’ at Kaiser. He veers away into the little hall, leavin’ only his horrible smell. “That ugly animal ain’t goin’ everywheres I go!” she cries.
Bonny Loo and I walk through the evening layers of mist. I walk slowly, the baby coming in only three weeks. She leads me through birches, and the leaves underfoot are slimy with three days of cold rain.
There is an old refrigerator on the knoll. The propane kind. Freckled with rust. Beads of water have risen up on it like sweat on someone who fears.
Bonny Loo pats my elbow as I step along. She takes care with my pregnancy like I’m a gigantic one-of-a-kind spotted bug, one of her projects. She watches the path for me, watches my feet. “Well, here we are . . . We made it,” she says. “This is it.”
She is looking over my shoulder at the refrigerator. She lets go of my hand.
I say, “What kind of interestin’ thing have you come across now?”
Gram speaks: THOU DOST LAY ME IN THE DUST OF DEATH.
Bonny Loo opens the heavy door. The raindrops on it run together, stream down, gathering into rust-colored vees.
“Yukk!” says Bonny Loo. As I come up behind her, the smell of death explodes in my face. “Cripes!” she whispers. She reaches in. Works her square hands around inside. “Jeez!” she gasps. “They stink, don’t they?”
She handles them. Layin’ hens, frogs, a field mouse, a good-sized fish. All dead. The smell of them pushes into my nose like two fat fingers.
I close my eyes.
When I look again she is still bent into the refrigerator, mumblin’ to herself. It is almost entirely dark now. The only thing I can see good is this refrigerator. Bonny Loo whispers, “When I put ’em in here, they was all good.”
Alive?
She gropes around the inside of the refrigerator, into each blackened corner. She draws out one stiff hen by the foot. She puts it back. She adjusts her glasses. “Neat, ain’t it?” she says, looking in my face. “Ma, when do they get to be skeletons?”
The baby draws its limbs around itself stiffly . . . It seems to have grown old and tired in my body.
“Ma! Ain’t you listenin’?”
I can’t speak.
Bonny Loo turns to me and puts these hands on me—these hands that stink of DEATH.
Meat
PIP BEAN gets out of his old Chevy truck, workin’ his legs stiffly over the icy yard. The two bottle blonde aunties come behind him, dressed as always like for an American Legion dance, Auntie K. holdin’ Auntie Hoover by the arm. It’s been a cold spring and everywheres you look a robin is tryin’ to peck a hole in the cementlike ground.
The baby is on the supper table, archin’ his back and screamin’.
Pip Bean, he don’t knock. He just shuffles into the kitchen and catches me in my nightgown. He looks around.
The baby is rigid and red with screams.
Pip goes straight through the swan-print shower curtain. Beal’s on the bed. His left eye is rose-colored and makes a hill on his face. His good eye widens as Pip says, “Shit! I thought they say you can’t keep a good man down.”
The baby gasps, the muscles of his belly jerking like a dozen charley horses.
I open the door for the aunties with a pink diaper in my hand. Everywheres, all over the kitchen, the pink diapers hang, a pink T-shirt, a pink bra. One scarlet wool sock.
I hear Pip say, “What you done, boy? Got in a brawl?”
I yell to him through the curtain, “Beal ain’t been in no fights! He got a splinter in his eye . . . WORKIN’!”
Pip murmurs, “Tell me the truth, boy. One of them husbands give you a thrashin’?”
I go to the hall and scream, “He got that eye workin’! WORKIN’!”
“Okay,” says Pip Bean in a tiny voice. Then he says, “Why ain’t you makin’ a bundle drivin’ truck? I thought you had your Class One.”
Beal says, “Class Two, Pip, but we couldn’t keep her renewed. Takes money to make money, that’s what you always say, Pip.”
Pip says, “I say that?”
I know the way Beal’s beard spreads over the sheet. He don’t never cut it. It’s like one of those dinky houseplants you get with good intentions, but it takes over, needs a bigger and bigger pot every time you look. The beard fills our bed at night, lies between us, and sometimes I feel it try to grip me.
The aunties unbutton their coats. Auntie K. helps Auntie Hoover slide hers off her back.
The baby wails and wails.
“Want tea?” I say. “We’re outta sugar, but we got some syrup from Johnsons’ overway.”
Auntie K. looks at me. “I don’t want nuthin’.”
The baby makes exhausted half-snorts.
On the windowsill behind the supper table is Bonny Loo’s jar of spit. She has spit in it every day for a month. She tells us that eventually somethin’ will grow out of the spit.
Auntie Hoover sinks slowly onto a chair. “I would like some tea. Nuthin’ in it, please.”
Auntie K. says, “Ain’t that little feller gonna roll off the table an’ be cripple for life?”
I put my hand out to the baby. He is so mad, his belly almost burns my hand. I take off his diaper and put the dry pink one on.
Auntie Hoover squints. “Pink on a boy?”
“It was an accident,” I says. “It got washed with that red sock over there.”
Both aunties squint their eyes at me. They are huge women. Auntie Hoover, it’s hard to tell she ain’t a real-blood Bean. She’s growed to be one. She’s been a Bean longer than her bridegroom Fred, run over by his nephew on his weddin’ night . . . She’s never been in the family way . . . just been a Bean from hangin’ around. The hands of both Hoover an’ K. fuss with their white blouses and jewelry. They are like the hands of young men.
I pick up the baby. His name is Dale Bean. He weighed almost ten pounds at birth. Almost tore me apart.
“What we come ovah for was to tell Beal about his poor mother,” says one of the aunties.
I try to make Dale comfortable in the plastic laundry basket by the stove.
Hoover touches her b
eads. “We had her sent away.”
Hoover and K. look at each other.
I put a bottle of milk in a pan on the stove. It’s the last milk in the house.
Auntie Hoover sighs. “Seems while we was gettin’ older, she was gettin’ stronger.”
I watch the steam curl up around the bottle.
“She went wanderin’ off . . . We lost her all night . . . one night . . . She coulda froze,” Auntie K. says softly.
“Is that right?” I says. The baby sucks on his fist.
There’s no voices comin’ from our bedroom. I go over and push the swan curtain open. Pip Bean’s against the tall bed with his hips. He’s holdin’ his huntin’ knife over a lighted match, gettin’ ready to operate on Beal’s eye.
Auntie Hoover says, “We done the right thing. No one can tell me we ain’t done the right thing.”
Auntie K. clears her throat. “We used her good.”
Beal’s black beard on the sheet seems to creep toward some escape . . . twistin’ into the valleys of the sheet, hurryin’ in different directions in zigzaggy panic. Beal’s good eye is closed, waitin’. He trusts Pip Bean. He trusts him good.
I back off.
Auntie K. says, “Where’s your girl?”
“In school,” I say.
“Where’s all the chickens at? Madeline take ’em to her fancy new house?”
“Beal dressed ’em out,” I say.
Auntie K. looks at Auntie Hoover. “I thought they was Madeline’s birds.”
I say, “They was, but she don’t ask about ’em.”
Auntie K. sniffs. “Bet she’s got them girls callin’ her new man Daddy. When Rubie gets out, the shit’s gonna hit the fan.”
I says, “They’re kinda big to change, ain’t they?”
I back up to the rocking chair, roll the big baby over my lap. He muckles onto the bottle. He will have fox-color eyes.
2
BONNY LOO SMOKES. She’s in her room with the door shut, prob’ly smokin’ in the dark.
I rock with the baby and look out at Rubie’s old loggin’ rig, parked for years and years behind the house. Madeline has sold most the parts off it. The ancient load is in tatters of rot and moss. The twilight makes a queer lavender halo around the truck.
I would smoke if I had cigarettes.
I blow out the lamp. I push through the swan curtain, lower Dale into his basket by our bed. I light the lamp on the chair. Beal’s on his back, his hair and beard sweaty, his eye a hideous bulge. Just as I set on the bed, Dale starts up.
Beal’s voice comes like a growl: “Make him stop!”
I says, “Shhh, Dale.”
I walk around with Dale in the kitchen, rub his broad back. I give him a bottle of water. He pushes it. I put syrup in the water. He screams. He tries to eat my shirt. He makes a purple face. I gotta laugh at his funny face. I laugh and kiss this funny face. I rock him in the greenish lamplight. He closes his eyes.
I know Bonny’s in there smokin’ cigarettes, ones her friend Allen gives her.
I go back through the swan curtain. The bedroom stinks of Beal’s eye. When I put the baby back in the basket, he screams. So I rock him in the kitchen some more, my heavy, snarled hair damp against my back. My hand hunts for cigarettes. “What are you doing, hand?” I giggle. I pace the kitchen, heat another bottle of sap and water. The grit of the linoleum sticks to my feet.
Dale shoves the bottle away.
The fire in the stove is dyin’ but it seems like a hundred degrees in here.
I give Dale peanut butter scraped from the jar on a spoon. He sucks at it, makes a face. Next I try mayonnaise. That doesn’t go over well with him either. I wish I was one to breast feed. But nobody was for it. “Hippies do it,” Rosie Bean says. And what would Gram say to hear me considerin’ it? Seems I don’t know anymore what Gram would say. If only . . .
Beal gets out of bed and walks like a hundred-year-old man to the front door with a blanket around him. He stands in the dark and pees off the piazza.
When he comes back by, Dale is snivelin’, workin’ up to a scream. Beal stops and glares at the baby with his one good eye, his other one like an enormous hard pink apple.
I says, “Beal, this ain’t right. He ain’t had milk for this many days.” I hold up the fingers of my right hand.
Beal has the shakes. He clutches the blanket around himself and his teeth go crazy clatterin’ together.
I says, “He spits out everything else. If we only had potatoes or somethin’, I could mash him some.”
“So it’s my fuckin’ fault I ain’t workin’. You are fuckin’ right!”
“I’m not sayin’ that.”
Dale makes a wildcat screech.
“Beal, can’t I go for food stamps?”
“NO!”
More than food, I want a cigarette.
Beal says, “And how’re you supposed to get to Portland with a truck that’s out of gas?”
“I’ll ask somebody to take me.”
Beal makes a noise in his throat like he’s about to spit on the floor. “And do you know what would happen to us if they find out I’ve been workin’ under the table this long? Guh-uh-uh-government gets out the old fuh-uh-feelers . . . Once you get in the old welfare game, they got a trail on you . . . ’cause, lady . . . when you’re poor, you stink!”
“It don’t work that way, Beal.” Dale tries to eat my shirt.
“You go for them stamps, Earlene, and I see one government official hangin’ around this place, and I’ll beat the shit outta you!”
I settle back into the rocker. Dale paws at my shirt wildly.
Beal goes back to bed.
I say, “Dear Jesus, please help us . . . Get us some money.” I look up at the spotty ceiling. “Amen.”
The baby is screamin’ so hard, he stops short and kinda half-vomits.
I hear a thumpin’ sound in the bedroom. I know the sound by heart. I’ve heard it a hundred times since my marriage. It’s Beal punchin’ hisself in the breastbone . . . punchin’ his belly . . . bangin’ his head on the headboard of the bed.
Bonny Loo the brat. She probably lays on her back in a comfortable way, blowin’ that smoke out her nose. I can smell it . . . It’s comin’ out under her door. The school says Bonny Loo’s got gum disease. They send notes right and left: “DEAR MRS. BEAN . . .”
Pip Bean likes to say how in his time there were no officials . . . no officials, no experts, no shit . . . you just had your people and you all had a part. Your people. His people. Pip . . . he’s never alone. But Beal and me, we ain’t got no part. It’s all slippin’. And it gets more lonely . . . so lonely.
I look out and see the moon come up over Rubie Bean’s loggin’ truck. The old mossy load of pulp seems to bulge up to meet the moon.
I hear another sound in the bedroom. The clink of Beal’s belt. I swish through the swan curtain, tryin’ to hang on to the strugglin’, gaggin’ baby.
“What are you doin’?” I ask Beal.
He stoops for his boots. His black beard swings out from his body. “Goin’ for some meat!” he snarls. He looks like a monster with that eye, the kind in movies when they play creepy music.
I close my eyes. “Beal,” I say softly. “You can hardly walk.”
The tops of his cheeks have a high flush.
I put out my hand. “Don’t mess with me,” he says.
I take my hand away. I kiss the baby’s sour, cryin’ mouth. “Oh, Dale! Dale!” I sob.
I smell cigarettes . . . I open my mouth . . . It drifts in.
Beal goes to the hall closet, hauls out one of Rubie’s dark guns. He holds a box of shells up to the lamp. He loads the gun and mashes a handful of shells into the pocket of his dungarees.
I hear him go out.
I change into my granny gown and get into bed. Both pillows stink from his eye. I cradle the baby against my gown. The baby tries to eat my gown.
3
HOURS PASS. I hear a thud on the piazza. I cover Dal
e, who is sleepin’ fitful on the sheets that are damp from Beal. I step through the moonlight in the kitchen in my granny gown. When I open the door to the piazza, I hear sobs. Beal’s in a wooden chair with the gun across his knees. I creak over the piazza floor and put my hand on his hair. He sobs louder.
He says, “Cocksuckas can see me, but I can’t see them.”
“Where’s your flashlight?”
“BATT’RIES, BABY, BATT’RIES!! It don’t work without ’em!”
I feel his forehead. I’ve never felt anyone burn this much. “How long’ve you been settin’ here?”
“The whole time. I ain’t worth a piss.”
I gasp. “Beal! You are goin’ ta die. Let me go call someone . . . please. I can get dressed an’ go down ta Crosmans’.”
He shifts his gun.
I say, “Your eye . . . Beal . . . it must hurt!”
He looks at me. “Woman, you don’t know what hurtin’ is.” Then, through half a sob, he says, “What good am I? I musta come outta my mother’s asshole.”
“Why won’t you let me do anything? . . . We gotta DO somethin’. You should be in the hospital.”
He says slowly, “Ain’t no free admission.”
I hear his teeth chatter, rhythmic, like fits. I say, “I hearda these papers you make out . . .”
His good eye widens.
“It ain’t the regular welfare, Beal. Maybe they won’t check us out.”
“They got computers.”
“But we gotta . . .”
“Drop it, Earlene!”
“Let me call my father . . . He can give us a little loan . . . a tiny loan for milk and stuff and maybe a little down payment for the hospital . . . Maybe they’ll be happy with that when they see how bad off you are, praise God!”
He ignores me.
The baby. His first cry is a scream of pain. I take a step sideways.
Beal moans, “Leave him.”
“Beal! He’s a helpless baby!”
“Lah-ha-lahh-LEAVE the goddam son of a bitch where he is.”
The Beans of Egypt, Maine Page 16