Virginia unbuttons Rubie’s wool jacket. “Oh, Daddy! How’d you get a beer gut in prison?!”
There are other people in the house, a kind of party. I hear Madeline’s voice: “That’s because you’ve never been there, Ronnie!”
But Rubie don’t seem to hear Madeline. His mouth scuttles down toward Virginia’s low-cut sweater. He fills his fists with the raspberry-color wool.
Steve says, “Okay, Dad! That’s enough.”
Warren takes one step sideways in Rubie’s direction.
Beyond the open door stands a white-painted hutch full of carnival glass. On the wallpapered wall are diagonally arranged studio photos of the three girls.
Warren looks like a little boy who has to pee, moving from foot to foot as Virginia’s arms wind and ripple at Rubie’s hips. Now she goes on tiptoe to whisper in Rubie’s ear.
Kaiser harnesses his jaws around Rubie’s calf.
“JESUS FUCKIN’ CHRIST!” Rubie snarls and wheels around out of Virginia’s embrace. He points at the dog like his finger was a revolver.
Virginia takes Rubie’s face in her hands. “I just can’t believe it!” she gasps. “It’s real! You are just like I remember! Just the same . . . a dear, sweet lamb!”
Warren says, “Let’s not get carried away, Virginia.”
Rubie kisses Virginia’s tight ring of braid.
She moans, “Oh, Daddy, at times I thought I’d never see you again.”
Kaiser is peeing on the snow tires of Steve’s new truck.
Virginia says, “I loved loved loved your postcards!”
Rubie lifts Virginia and they spin around. She arches her back. “I never thought this day would come! You are a . . . a . . . a prince!” she squeals.
Rubie flattens her to the door frame for another kiss.
Steve ambles up the step, puts his hand on his father’s arm. “Come on, Dad, that’s enough. You seen her.” Rubie shrugs off the hand. Steve says, “Dad!”
Warren says, “There’s no need of this . . . He’s just tryin’ to aggravate this family.”
Rubie don’t seem to hear none of this.
My back crawls. I move toward the truck.
Kaiser lunges again at Rubie’s legs. Rubie says hoarsely, “Get that fuckin’ mutt off . . .”
Warren Olsen is makin’ the slickest move . . . I never seen no slicker man . . . Yanks Virginia by one of them long slinky arms of hers . . . right in the door and the door slams and locks.
The light over the step goes off.
Rubie puts one hand on each side of the door. I guess he’s gettin’ ready to bash down the door with his head.
Steve says, “You wanna go back ta prison forever?”
We can’t see Rubie’s front, just the moonlight on the back side of his coat. Kaiser barks at him from the bottom step.
Steve says, “Dad! Don’t forget you gotta get up early and go to work. I’m comin’ for ya at six-thirty sharp. Ain’t wantin’ you ta fall asleep at the chipper. You just lost the bet, Dad! You owe me fifty bucks.”
You can almost hear it, Rubie’s skeleton rearranging itself, one bone set against the other, the angry blood backing down. He takes his hands off the door frame. Steve and I just look at each other, then head back for the truck.
13
RUBIE SITS in the dark tonight, in the red rocker, lappin’ Skippy off a spoon. He stares out the glass to the Smiths’ house . . . brightly lit.
I push through the swan curtain barefoot in my granny gown and robe. I say, “Reuben, it’s three-thirty. Ain’t you sleepy?”
He makes ghastly noises out of peanut butter. He don’t answer.
I hold my hands over the stove. “You make a good fire. I like how you keep it goin’ all night, but . . .”
He lowers the spoon. He tries to focus on me, but I can tell he can’t see me in the dark.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” I ask.
He rocks back, cocks one knee up. “Sort of.”
I tighten my sash. I sit on the stool in the corner, way out of the light of the moon and the light of the Smiths’. He tries again to focus on me.
I says, “When you first come here, I made you up that bed in the other room. If you don’t want it, Dale’s been used to it . . . He’d love to have it back,” I say softly.
“Jesus Christ, give him the friggin’ bed. I’m all right here.” He digs into the peanut butter jar again, makes noisy work of it. I can smell it.
“See that house?” Rubie points with the spoon at the Smiths’.
“Yeh.”
“It looks like a three-ring circus, don’t it?” he says hoarsely.
I giggle.
He says, “When I get myself workin’, I’m gonna get us some juice in here, too.”
“That would be nice.”
“Then at Christmas we can get some of them goddam colored lights like Pip has up—blue ones—line the whole Christly place with ’em . . . and leave ’em up all year long!”
“Only at Christmas, Rubie!”
“No . . . all the time. It would make this ol’ place real homey.”
I sigh.
He says low, “Earlene, don’t let me fall asleep.”
Silence.
He says, “Come here a minute.”
Silence. I don’t move.
He’s got the peanut butter jar gripped between his thighs.
I get up. “What?”
“Listen here.” He points at his chest with the finger that has the claw.
The peanut butter smell is so strong it almost warms my face. I lean over him, flatten my face and hair against the shirt. BOOM! BANG! BOOM! BANG!
He says, “The old ticker, it’s started up this shit of racin’ at night . . .” His voice sounds huge against my ear . . . but I keep listenin’ . . . the voice . . . the heart . . .
He says, “If I go off to sleep, it wakes me up doin’ that racin’, scares the shit outta me. I figure the end has come. Can’t hack it, Earlene.”
He belches.
I pull away, stand up and pat his shoulder. “And that’s why you don’t never go inta bed?”
“Ayuh. Scared shitless. Wouldn’t you be?”
I knead at the shoulder.
The peanut butter smell dances.
He says, “Earlene . . . ain’t you the friggin’ little wimp that used to live across from Pip . . . an’ your ol’ man put up all the signs?”
I say flatly, “I ain’t no FRIGGIN’ LITTLE WIMP. And it was only one sign.”
He chuckles.
He turns his face from me, his face much like the moon, a land of rocks, no place I’d want to visit. And yet, somehow I’m already there . . . at home.
He rocks slowly and deeply from the knees, eyes wide. When the chair comes back against my hip, my yellow hair brushes his arm. I knead his shoulder harder and faster. The chair eases forward, then comes back against my hip. I see his thighs loosen from around the peanut butter jar.
Now I use both hands, hard and slow.
He rasps, “What happens when you die, Earlene? What’s the Bible say about the Hereafter? What is it I gotta do to make ’em like me—you know—UP THERE?”
I sigh as he looks up at me from the moon side of his face, the black mustache makin’ its wicked and heavy lunge. My fingers stop what they’re doin’. In a fadin’ whisper, in a voice that is Gram’s, I say, “Reuben, you are goin’ ta burn in HELL.”
Postscript to the Finished Version (1995)
WITHIN MINUTES after The Beans of Egypt, Maine was first published in 1985, I knew the book was far from finished. I started to keep a hardcover copy in my workroom. I used it to make changes. Inserts. Slashes. Meanwhile, I anguished over the thousands of “unfinished” published copies OUT THERE.
Whenever I mentioned to people that I had a “finished” version, they would wave this off as silly. “Writers are never finished,” they’d tell me.
I disagree. Novels are like pans of popping corn. There is a moment when all the kernels are po
pped and fluffy. You can pull the pan off the fire too soon. You can leave it on too long.
Every time I opened that Beans book, a kernel would pop and smack me in the eye.
I don’t feel this way with my second book, Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts. It’s not a perfect book. But I have a sense of peace about it. And several years have passed since that one was published. And Merry Men, out now for over a year. That one does not torture me either. But Beans has caused AGONY.
Some people say dismissively, “It’s okay, Carolyn. It was your first published work. Go forward. Forget it. No one expects the first work to be like later work.”
Meanwhile, hundreds of people approach me or write me with “I read your book.”
“What book?” I ask.
“Your book. The Beans of Egypt, Maine.”
You see, most people, because of the media furor over The Beans of Egypt, Maine, have only read Beans, have only HEARD of Beans. To most readers Beans represents me as a writer.
Imagine you are a professional carpenter who builds houses and barns and little gazebos and little wooden bridges, benches, towers, windmills, boats. But these, for some reason, are all out in the woods of some private uninhabited island. And the only visible thing you’ve built, the thing you are known for, the thing that represents you, is the crooked little magazine rack you made for your Mum in junior high school shop.
But there’s something even worse than pride involved in my wanting to “finish” this Beans book. Not only is it a clumsy youthful attempt at the art of writing, but there are misconceptions that many readers have about the characters that I can’t live with. As I created the Bean people, I never dreamed how condemning many people of the middle class can be of the working class, that every action of a working-class person is seen to have a naughty intent, even as the same action in a pastel-shirt middle-class professional is seen as okay. The word villain comes from the word villein, meaning “poor peasant.” It is not a new idea to equate wealth with virtue, lack of wealth with sin. This dangerous chasm in the classes is alive and well in the United States of America. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s not. And if art can’t reveal the universal human heart from one to another beyond the chasm, nothing else can. As an artist, I feel a weighty responsibility.
2
THERE IS NO incest between the father Lee and the daughter Earlene. Many reviewers and some readers thought there was. Lots of social workers thought there was. And certain feminists said there was.
As I read the nap scene over and over, I wonder what makes people see incest. Recently some friends suggested that in fiction or film, whenever a man and child appear in a scene alone together, especially a bedroom scene, with the suggestion that something is wrong, readers and viewers assume incest.
A social worker approached me at one of my first book signings for Beans, and she declared that people who don’t make a lot of money are prone to incest.
When I still insisted that there was no incest between Lee and Earlene in Beans, she leaned toward me and said with glittering eyes, “What about the back scratching?”
When I told her that wasn’t my idea of incest, she explained in her most professional tones that children who make coffee for their parents are considered victims of a certain insidious form of abuse because no child should feel “needed for adult tasks or accommodate adults for adult needs.”
Wouldn’t this make all children born before the 1950s abused, since it seems that only since World War II have children been kept more as performers, pets, and princesses than useful human beings?
However, as I continued to insist that there was no incest between Lee and Earlene, the social worker stared hard into my face and said that probably I had had an incestuous relationship as a child or was surrounded by incestuous relationships and it was coming out in my work unbidden and my denial of the real incest in my life was continuing now in my protection of this fictional father.
“Well, well,” said I. I felt tired.
3
EARLENE AND HER father have a nurturing relationship, both cowed by Gram, Lee’s mother. Lee is definitely cowed by Gram. Earlene sees Gram and God as one being. But she usually makes her peace with this.
In the nap scene, Gram has such dominance over her son that he is shamed and apologetic just to quiet her down. He feels guilt, yes, guilt . . . guilt for tempting the devil. He feels guilt for anything that his mother (God) disapproves of.
Lee and Earlene quote Gram as much as they do the Bible.
When Gram dies, Earlene is devastated. The maker of rules is gone. God is dead. The home is empty. Like her mother who is hospitalized, Earlene has the kind of body chemistry that makes her susceptible to depression. But no reviewer or social worker has ever pointed out this logical connection. They seem only to want to be titillated by something nasty. Incest. Incest. Incest. Why, in the 1980s, was there such a hysteria over incest?
I often wonder if so many reviewers hadn’t misinterpreted Beans as a book on incest, would anybody have bothered to pick up the book at all? Aren’t the lives of ordinary people, stressed to breaking point by the crumbling of America’s big dream, interesting enough?
4
FEMINISTS TELL ME that the scene where Earlene and Beal first encounter each other sexually is rape. But Earlene never says no.
I must admit this rape idea really puzzles me. It must be my peasant upbringing. Might a feminist, in the same fashion as the social worker, accuse me of having a family that enjoyed sex without my knowing it and it is unconsciously coming out in my work? I’d be interested to hear what kind of sex feminists would not describe as rape.
Later in the porch scene, just before the end, when Beal has the infection in his eye and Earlene accommodates him while the hungry baby cries, many people have described this as rape.
I see it as a scene of “hell” in which Earlene and Beal are both raped by America’s big corporate consumerist culture, modern education’s absurd aspirations, fast-lane America. And here, the lives of Beal and Earlene in ruins, all that’s left for comfort, all that’s left for dignity is sex. Especially for Beal, who has failed so enormously as a provider.
5
IN THE SCENE after Reuben comes home from prison, where at the home of the hardware store owner he and his daughter Virginia embrace overzealously . . . some reviewers say that is incest. But I meant it to show how Virginia and Reuben are trying to annoy Warren Olsen. And they do.
I go over and over these scenes in my mind wondering, wondering, wondering. How much of this misinterpretation is due to poor writing? How much of this, no matter how it is written, is due to the deep chasm between the classes?
6
I HAVE SAID that Roberta Bean is shy. Some people say that Roberta Bean is not shy. Otherwise, why would she try to seduce the new neighbor Mr. Goodspeed, the highway engineer, by helping him jump-start his Lincoln, helping him get his Lincoln out of the ditch, and leaving rabbit meat in a bag on his door?
Don’t these folks know neighborliness when they see it? Neither did Mr. Goodspeed. But that lonely highway engineer, in spite of his arrogance, is eventually drawn in by the old, old welcoming ways of Roberta Bean.
Lots of people say there’s no love in The Beans of Egypt, Maine. Well, not as long as they call love incest, rape, seduction, or abuse.
Yes, love under stress is a lot different from love on the beach or love on the ski slopes or love in a fancy restaurant. But are we so innocent as to think that in the homes and hearts of big money and medium-sized money there’s no stress, no breaking point, no nastiness?
7
NOW WITH ALL that said, I can’t deny the incest between Beal Bean and Roberta Bean, nephew and aunt. When I was working on these two characters, I saw them as both so shy, turning to each other again and again for many kinds of comfort. Both willingly. I did not see this as abuse. I wish now I’d made Roberta aunt by marriage because then the book could be incest free! Not that I have anything against a story in
which characters have incest, but I feel that perhaps what Roberta and Beal did isn’t the way incest happens because feminists have told me that all incest is brutal or damaging. So, gosh, I guess Roberta and Beal aren’t realistic. I really don’t know anything about incest. Therefore I guess I shouldn’t have written about it, particularly with primary characters.
Which reminds me. Lots of people when they first meet me say, “We thought you’d be shorter.”
No, I’m not Earlene. This is fiction, not a biography.
But then, yes, I am Earlene. I am all of my characters. Characters are made up of a writer’s own cells.
Yes, I did have a quote on one of the earlier Beans jackets saying, “This book was involuntarily researched.” That doesn’t mean biography. But I have known the grief and anger of having little money, sometimes no money. And I have known the riches of an interdependent family. The riches of home. And I foresee these riches lost, lost to big global business, more and more generations lost to the absurdities of modern education, and ghastly laws and cruel punishments, this hi-tech, cold, cold, cold, impersonal, unaccountable new age.
So, yes, with this book, as with my other books, I have paid for it with my life.
8
RECENTLY A reporter asks, “Why do you write about these people?” And his lip curls.
I guess I look puzzled.
He chuckles. He flicks his hand toward a copy of The Beans of Egypt, Maine.
“What do you mean, ‘these people’?” I ask. “These are made-up characters. I don’t select characters. They pop into my head.”
“Yes, but why this kind of people?”
“Kind? You mean ordinary?”
He snorts. “These aren’t ordinary people.” Like the social worker’s eyes, the reporter’s eyes stare hard into my face. Like a district attorney during questioning. Why does this feel like an endless tribunal? Why endlessly interrogated in this way that seems like they expect me to reveal some secret atrocity? I am tempted to lean confidentially toward this man and whisper, “Because when I was only ten years old, I fucked a hog.”
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