ONE THING ALWAYS leads to another, is another thing my mother always said. Then she would seal it. She’d say: forevermore. My mother was always saying: one thing always leads to another, then forevermore.
My mother said that and my father said this: stay away from the river, he said, never swim in the river. The river was a forbidden place and so was his saddle room; and he said to stay clear of Harold P. Endicott, and to stay clear of that woman Sugar Babe, and to stay clear of the nigger too.
Two forbidden places and three forbidden people.
I disobeyed my father with the river that summer that it got dry. I jumped in the river in June and kept on all summer because it was hot, because the river was so low, and because that summer I was older than I’d been. One thing always leads to another, and when I jumped in the river that first week in June, that jump led to other jumps, other swims, longer swims up the river, and down. It led to those other forbiddens, those three forbidden people: Harold P. Endicott, that woman Sugar Babe, and the nigger.
The day that I saw all three of them together was the day the trouble blown in by the chinook first started to show.
Before that day, there was a troubled feeling on things, like the world was drifting from that round-ball place where it was hanging in the sky; troubled air lying on you, troubled sky all around.
No rain after a winter of hardly any snow.
The horses paced around the fences of the corral, making a circle, pacing the manure into a hard round path on the ground inside the square. The pigs were always breaking down their pen and getting out, and in the coop the hens weren’t laying as good. They sat on their eggs—wouldn’t move off—and pecked at you when you tried to reach for them.
The tractor broke down.
My mother said she forgot how to sleep.
When you looked out the kitchen window in the afternoon, you could see puddles of water in the yard, but they weren’t really puddles. They were heat waves—a mirage in the yard; illusion.
Mosquitoes at your ears at night.
And those hawks flying.
One morning I heard my mother let out a scream and I ran outside to her. There she stood on her patch of lawn. The lawn was covered with dandelions. Every day my mother went out there, and after she watered the Virginia creepers and the Seven Sisters rose on the trellis, she dug dandelion roots up out of that patch of lawn of hers with the paring knife, and the day before, there had not been one single dandelion there in the grass. Then that morning she screamed, there they were: on her patch of lawn like a plague.
THE DAY THAT I saw those three forbidden people together—Harold P. Endicott, that woman Sugar Babe, and the nigger—was the first time that I had ever actually seen the nigger, but it wasn’t the first time that I had seen Sugar Babe. It wasn’t my first time for seeing Harold P. Endicott either.
Twice before, on my swing, I had seen that woman Sugar Babe leave the lean-to on the other side of the river under the catalpa tree, and both times she was in a yellow dress, carrying a big yellow hat with a wide brim. I could see that her black hair was long and thick. It shined. I could see that she was wearing high heels, yellow high heels. What I could actually see was that her shoes were yellow, I couldn’t see that her shoes were high heels, but I could tell that they were by the way she walked. She walked the way my mother walked when my mother wore her high heels with the holes in the toes on Sunday.
That woman walked up the wooden planks to her old ’49 Ford and got in the old Ford and drove off to the Working Man’s Club with the blue half-moon in the window on West Center Street in Wind River, where she was a waitress. Sugar Babe in her yellow dress, in her yellow wide-brimmed hat, in her yellow high heels walking like that in a Negro bar, waitressing, serving martinis to Montgomery Clift, who sat at the bar in a suit with thin lapels, hunched over one of those special kind of glasses, smoking.
The only time I saw old Harold P. Endicott before that day that I saw all three of them together was in the Grand Entry of the Wind River Frontier Rodeo with the rest of the Matisse County Mounted Posse. I was in the grandstand with my mother when Harold P. Endicott rode in on an Appaloosa mare leading the other men on their horses through the figure eight.
The shiny dark green material of his posse shirt had two big dark wet spots under the arms and a long dark wet spot down the middle of the back. In front, the buttons strained to cinch him all in. The silver whistle that called his hellhounds hung on a chain around his neck. Lard ass my mother said, and I laughed when she said it because I had only heard her say damn once when she said damned old souse, and son of a bitch twice when the pigs got out and jumped in the river. I had never heard her say ass before, and I had never laughed before when I heard her swear—at least not in front of her. And I had never heard her say any kind of swear word before without putting the Sign of the Cross with it pretty soon after. That day when she said lard ass at the Wind River Frontier Rodeo—meaning Harold P. Endicott—was the first time I ever saw her not cross herself. When I laughed out loud she looked at me sideways for a minute, but then she ended up laughing too.
You could tell by the way Harold P. Endicott wore his Stetson hat that he had no hair because his hat came right down to his eyes like a Stetson hat on a trailer hitch, and he squinted his eyes like he was always looking at the toolshed. The squint screwed up his whole round pink face. After my mother said it, I’d look at him and couldn’t think anything but lard ass.
And when the Grand Entry was over, the posse in their shiny green shirts faced the grandstand in formation, all of them lined up sitting tall in their saddles. In front of them there were two more posse men on horseback presenting the Idaho state flag and the Matisse County posse flag, and in front of those two, centered between them, was old Harold P. Endicott carrying the American flag. Old Glory snapped at the end of his pole. Harold P. Endicott took the Stetson off his head and that must have been the signal. Once Endicott showed his bald, sweaty head, the two men behind him took their hats off, and then the straight line of posse members to the rear took theirs off and then all the men and all the cowgirls in the grandstand with hats, took them off. Everybody put their hats on their chests when Harold P. Endicott put his hat on his, and then the organist in the announcer’s stand started playing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and we all sang—sang about how America was there in the sky in the twilight, sang about rockets and the red glare and proof through the night. We sang through the waves of dust, things smelling like horse turds, cow manure, fried onions and hot dogs; people sang with their hats on their hearts, sang their heads off with Endicott’s Old Glory snapping, the animals nervous, the Shoshone-Bannock hoop dancers nervous, drinking Thunderbird behind the back pens, under the grandstand, and in their beat-up cars in the parking lot. The steers and bulls and calves and clowns’ trick dogs restless and penned up and hog-tied and caged—every person and creature restless for what always comes after that song: the snap of the gate, the bursting in air, whips, spurs in the flesh, ropes that burned the hide, that choked.
Brave we sang, and free.
THE SADDLE ROOM, my father’s saddle room, was in the barn. Its door was always locked, but just from peeking under that door you could see how the cement was swept clean. There was no straw, no dust, not ever. The door was made of two-by-eights—six of them—and creaked like the Inner Sanctum door on the radio when my father pulled it open by its leather strap. My father kept the key to his saddle room door in the little pocket on the right side of his Levi’s. The extra key he hid under a board in the feed manger next to the red radio he used to listen to when he milked the cows.
I never went into that saddle room. I disobeyed my father about the river that dry summer that I was older, and with one thing leading to another like it does, I ran into those other forbiddens, those three forbidden people, but I never did disobey my father when it came to the saddle room. Not once did I set foot into that place—his secret place—not ever, that is, until that night that I got mysel
f out of that room in the St. Anthony’s Hospital and hitched a ride back to the farm with Wolf and Mona Lisa and the others in the Studebaker; not until that night that I found the nigger hanging there. And after I realized what it was, who it was that was hanging, and after I could think and walk again, I walked straight to the red radio and got that key out from under the board in the feed manger, and unlocked the saddle room door. I walked right in there and turned on the light and went straight to the drawer where I knew his secret was. The drawer was locked so I took the twelve-gauge and cocked it and blew a hole in the drawer and then reached right in there and took my father’s secret out; opened the manila envelope, took it out, took them all out and had a good look.
After all that time standing outside that locked door, finally I was holding the secret in my hands; I was inside the secret room, opened by the secret key hidden in a secret place.
It wasn’t a place I’d ever expected to be.
But I knew what to expect once I was in there. Oh, I knew about his guns in there; his .22, his .25-20, his twelve-gauge. I knew about his saddles and his bridles, and his saddle blankets and his curry combs. I knew that he made outlines on the wall of things hanging on the wall so that when you took a curry comb down or the twelve-gauge down, their outlines in red were left on the wall like red haloes. For some strange, secret reason, he did that—made red haloes of his things on the wall. I knew about this stuff because once he slipped up and left the door open. I went over to the door and stood there at the threshold—looking in for half a minute or so before I locked it up again. In those thirty-some seconds I felt like I felt in the St. Joseph’s Church at Our Mother of Perpetual Help Devotions when Monsignor Canby put the Body of Christ in the monstrance and turned to the congregation with God in his hands and I was kneeling below him on the stairs ringing the Gloria bells. That’s how I felt looking in there, into my father’s place, like I was a footstep away from trespassing on some holy place, or maybe like I was lying flat on the cookie sheet with a ripple in it, staring at the sky; but even more than that, because the feeling I had way down deep in me was as bright as the toolshed without a shadow: I was looking into the mystery of my father’s awful, secret ways.
After all those years that I had studied my father as faithfully as catechism: his Stetson hat tilted back, strands of black hair wet against his forehead; him in the barn, me hidden behind the post among the cobwebs, the milk strainers, and the bag balm, NBC on the red radio tuned to Dinah Washington or Tennessee Ernie Ford, the suction cups sucking the teats of black-and-white cows, my father’s fingers working their nipples, the gold of his wedding band pressed against cowhide; him in the toolshed banging on hot red iron, bright sparks flying from the welder, I could not look.
I knew his smell, too, at close quarters with my father in the house, in the bathroom after he got done. It was only how he always smelled, but stronger, like his boots and his socks that he left on the back porch and by the stove in winter. Sometimes his smell was mixed with Old Spice, usually on Saturday nights and on Sunday mornings driving to nine-o’clock Mass.
But after standing so long before that locked door, after locking it back up that one time he left it open, there I was that night after I found the nigger: holding my father’s secret in my hands.
THAT DAY THAT I saw all three of them together was one of those days that came about from one thing leading to another: jumping in the river, swimming upstream, sitting in the water in the narrow spot by the jut of lava rock just down from the dogleg where the water was fast. That day I moved farther upstream than I’d been—to the wide place in the river where the dead limb of the catalpa tree got stuck on a gravel bar. I was sitting on that dead catalpa branch thinking about things, not any one thing in particular, just letting one thought lead to another, when I heard a woman scream. I didn’t realize until I heard the scream how close I was to the catalpa tree and the lean-to. I ducked down and looked over that way—the way of the scream—and I saw that woman Sugar Babe come flying out the back door of the lean-to and land on the ground, her long black shiny hair down around her waist, with only her brassiere on and her panties on. That brassiere and panties were white against her brown skin. She came flying out the back door of the lean-to, her hair flying, because he had hit her. Harold P. Endicott had hit that woman Sugar Babe. I knew for sure it was Harold P. Endicott because then he came out the door right after her. She managed to get up and then Endicott hit her again; she was screaming as she fell down in the dirt. Harold P. Endicott started pointing his finger at her like the Holy Cross nuns do to you at the St. Joseph’s School and he was yelling at her and using those swear words men use. Then he kicked her in the stomach and went to kick her again, when suddenly the nigger jumped on him from behind. The men struggled like that for a long time, the both of them yelling terrible and cussing at each other, the nigger’s right arm around Endicott’s neck and his left hand smacking at Endicott’s face and chest, Endicott bent over, his Stetson hat knocked off, his pink head pointing at me fat and round. All the while that woman Sugar Babe was screaming and cussing like usually only men do, saying all those words, and then I saw Endicott put the whistle that was hanging around his neck into his mouth. There was a high-pitched sound, the sound I think the planets must make as they whirl in their orbits around the sun in infinity, an awful, other-worldly sound, and then those hellhounds came around the corner of the house and jumped on that woman Sugar Babe and the nigger.
I dived and swam downriver, staying underwater as far as I could, holding my breath, my heart beating everywhere, and in my chest a pain—from not breathing and their screams.
Their screams were the worst sounds that I had ever heard: that woman Sugar Babe and the nigger screaming, scared and mad and crying out like lost souls. Running through the cottonwoods, I could hear their screams still. I could hear the dogs on top of them, teeth biting into their flesh. As I swam, as I ran, I was thinking those dogs were after me. I could feel their teeth on my calves and ankles. I ran and ran and I could hear them the whole time: the hellhounds, the screams of that woman, the screams of the nigger and what he was calling out to her, to that woman Sugar Babe.
Mother, he was calling out to her.
Mother is what the nigger was screaming out to Sugar Babe, to that woman. Mother, Mother.
THAT NIGHT, LYING in bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about the hellhounds, and about Harold P. Endicott, and about that woman Sugar Babe and the nigger; couldn’t stop hearing the nigger calling out to her, calling out Mother like that.
I tried praying the rosary again but I was too nervous to keep track of the beads.
But more than anything, what I was thinking was that I had run away.
NOBODY WAS ALLOWED to read the newspaper before my father read the newspaper, and that night, two days after I saw the three of them together—Harold P. Endicott, that woman Sugar Babe, and the nigger—when I came in for supper that night, my mother had put the newspaper on the coffee table next to my father’s chair like usual. I looked over and this was the headline: “BODY OF WOMAN FOUND IN PORTNEUF RIVER.”
I picked up the newspaper without thinking and then put it back down because nobody was allowed to read the newspaper before my father read the newspaper. My father always read the newspaper after supper with his coffee, usually in the front room or, when it was hot, on the front porch.
“What’s wrong?” my mother said when she saw me. She had been asking me that for two days.
“Nothing,” I told her as I had all along.
“Something’s bothering you,” my mother said. “Has been for two days now.”
“Nothing’s bothering me.” But I was acting bothered and lied again.
My mother just looked at me and put the tuna casserole on the supper table—it was Friday again—but that Friday my father wouldn’t eat the tuna casserole because my mother had tried something new and put potato chips in it, so my mother scrambled him up some eggs and spuds, which he did eat.
All through supper she watched me with that look on her face—that same look she had that first night of the chinook when she swept past the bathroom door.
There’s not much you can do when my mother turns that eye on you but let yourself be watched, so I concentrated on my tuna casserole and had part of a second helping. I didn’t like tuna casserole much either, and my mother knew it, so I took part of a second helping to let her know that I knew she was watching me and also to let her know that the potato chips helped out some.
I watched as my father left the supper table when he got done eating his spuds and eggs. I saw in my head how he walked down the hallway of the butterflies and the dice, and into the front room, where he picked up the newspaper that my mother had folded for him and placed on the coffee table, and, because the evening was so hot, how my father went out onto the front porch. There was no screen on the front door, and no screen door spring to make any kind of sound. My mother poured my father’s coffee for him, stirred the two sugars in, cut him a piece of rhubarb pie, and took them out to him on the front porch. When my mother came back into the kitchen, she unplugged the percolator and poured herself a cup of coffee and set the cup on the table. Then she went back to the stove and cut me a piece of rhubarb pie and asked me again what was wrong. I didn’t say anything until after I finished my pie; then I just shrugged my shoulders and still didn’t say anything because how do you start telling your mother something that begins with one thing that led to another? Just where do you start with something like that?
Faraway Places Page 3