by Jim Hanas
Thorne’s face was still. She tried staring at him harder. His gaze fell. His hand moved slowly to hers. He helped her upstairs to the bathroom where she threw up. Multiple times. He held her hair back until she was finished and then called her a cab. There was no spreading, no eating, no initiation into life’s mysterious carnality (for which she would have to wait another three years).
Thorne did, however, still recommend her for the Masters program in Early Childhood Education at Tufts, where she could put more of his theories into practice at Children’s Hospital Boston as part of her practicum while composing her thesis, placed into various rotations throughout the hospital but out of uniform, so that the children could disassociate her from the procedures they were about to undergo, or the illnesses they were currently fighting, and see her more as an ally. Often, she would be the last person they saw before going under; and the first person, if they were lucky enough to survive, when they woke up. The success cases in those serious patients were often the worst, largely because they were flown in from all over the country, insurance rarely covering the additional costs of their parents’ tickets, many from families much too poor to afford frequent trips on their own. These children developed an even stronger attachment to her, as did she to them, because she was all they had, making her a sort of surrogate parent. When the surgeries made it possible for them to go back home, the emotional blow was sometimes too much, because she knew from experience that within a few months they would be back.
After graduation, Chris Eaton was offered a similar job at the St. Hecarion Children’s Hospital in Houston, this time with a focus on the terminally ill, or at least the ones least likely to make it, those with heart and lung problems and sometimes leukemia. She was tasked with setting up a playroom — a space that was entirely off-limits to other hospital staff — in hopes of increasing the comfort level of the children, and even those who were confined to bedrest were wheeled down at least once per week. If they couldn’t make it, she brought toys to them and helped them decorate the curtains around their beds to create a starry night with full constellations, a circus, or — the strangest request of all — to keep the white of the curtain as a snowy landscape, with explorers trudging towards the gray stain in the top right.
She met a young doctor, also named Julian, unfortunately, and after a few tearful confessions about the children over coffee, they moved to dinner, and then a movie, and eventually to dancing at Bayou Mama’s. Houston was going through hard times with the oil crisis, but had not yet turned rough. It was just not growing. Julian said Houston was like that nice kid in your class whose parents had just split up and wasn’t sure what was right anymore; it was only a matter of time before he started breaking into your house when you were away for the weekend, but for now he was still fun at parties. She thought Julian was funny, and cute, she thought she might even be falling in love with him, but the first time he asked her up to his place, she withdrew. Her period, she lied. She’d waited so long already, she didn’t want to enter into anything lightly, and she was naturally more than a little afraid. On the third invitation, she let him remove her top and even finger her uncomfortably, but it quickly felt like someone was flicking her frostbitten ear, or kneading a bruise, so sensitive was her clitoris, so she feigned a charley horse until he grew aggravated and went to sleep. Otherwise, things could not have been described as anything but good.
She was asked to spend a few weeks observing a young boy who was so severely autistic she was almost sure he had no idea she was there, that he viewed her as a piece of furniture, except when he kicked her, which he did not do to any of the chairs or tables. He seemed happiest when his hands were submersed in water, so she kept a large basin of it on the floor in the center of the room. And near the end of the second week, already hopeless about forming a connection with him, she decided to rearrange the furniture. He moved with such grace around the room, even with his eyes closed, not seeming to pay attention to anything he was doing. Not once did he ever trip, stub his toe, or deviate from his path except to kick her in the shin, so she thought transforming the environment might help. He paused on entering the room, cocked his head to the left and back as if to smell it, then went straight for the basin of water as usual. So she decided to remove that object, moving the chair to the opposite side of the room and storing the basin in the closet; he paused again and stood still, for the entire day, at the closet door. On the third day, she moved the chair again, to the other side of a toy castle, and placed the castle in the closet. On the fourth day, she arrived to find him already there, the chair completely on the other side of the room, everything else in the closet. The boy had even balanced another chair atop the first.
On the fifth day, she purchased a game of checkers and left it in the middle of the room, with two chairs, should he invite her to play. The next morning he was, again, already there. Both chairs were side-by-side. The table and the game of checkers were gone.
Then she received the call from Phoenix about her father.
Robert Eaton was throwing a party. To celebrate his retirement, his new cabin, just to throw a fucking party, Jesus, why don’t you just get down here already, I never get to see you. Her father never used to swear. But one time, when she and her sister were visiting for Christmas, she mistakenly rented a film about reluctant British gangsters who screw up a job for the biggest boss and have to recruit a bunch of other fuckups to make it right, and when her sister arrived partway through the barrage of obscenities and asked her parents what they thought, they replied that it was a “great fucking movie” and “fucking awesome,” and when she laughed at them, the floodgates were open from then on. That was before her mother died of breast cancer in her early fifties, and her father threw himself into planning for his retirement, with a lump of sorrow in his throat so large that he sometimes couldn’t fit through the massive double entrance to his job at Stoic Heran Tool and Die, which despite popular assumptions (not helped in the least by the accompanying bird logo) was not merely the result of an overzealous and undereducated sign maker, but was, in fact, named for its founder, Patric Heran, an Anglo-Norman name derived from the old English heiroun, for heron, and otherwise had nothing to do with the bird at all.
It was also a name that had almost disappeared entirely, a century before old man Heran was even born. When his great-grandfather, James, first arrived at Castle Garden in the New World in the mid-1800s, he was asked to state his name, occupation, and the amount of money he was carrying. Since he had neither of the latter two, having never been much good at anything specific in the second category and having lost what he had of the third playing dice with the Irish thugs on the voyage over (which actually scratched gambler off the second list as perhaps his last remaining option), he was not particularly distressed when the overworked state processors mistook him as part of his new group of “friends” and issued him papers under the Irish spelling of Haran, which he promptly altered one more time once he was through by adding an O’ to the front. If he’d learned anything on his trip — besides never to gamble again, a rule he would break over and over throughout his lifetime — it was that the Irish had already overrun the place, representing more than half of U.S. immigrants at the time, and had placed themselves in so many supervisory labor positions that finding work in that sector might even be easier this way. Besides which, he’d come to America to escape the influence of his own family, so starting all over with a new nationality seemed fitting.
That was how Jimmy O’Haran started west, or more accurately for the West, which would move away from him and his descendants each time they drew close to it, like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, following the Irish lilts from labor gang to labor gang, hefting a pick and shovel and laying the infrastructure for the nation. He was quiet, mostly to hide his poorly mimicked accent, but this was seen as an asset by most businessmen and contractors; the country was expanding at an alarming rate, and there was money to be made, t
he contractors told them, if for a moment they could all just forget who they were and put their nose to the grindstone to make the country work. O’Haran bought it, hook, line, and sinker. At least he wasn’t working at his father’s pencil factory anymore, wasn’t part of that new British nouveau riche. After toiling for more than a year on the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal, he was discovered by another man named O’Haran (presumably his actual name) who told him of some work in South Carolina, connecting a railway to Memphis, Tennessee, that would pay near double what he was currently making. He probably would have stayed in the South were it not for the outbreak of the Civil War.
Whatever part Jimmy O’Haran played in the war is uncertain but easy to surmise, as he was, like most Southerners, disinclined to discuss it, and like most cowards, disinclined to fight. Like as not, he faked an injury or, judging by where he eventually ended up, put his newly acquired brogue to good use and won the heart of some defenseless widow, who snuck meals and other treats to him in her horse barn until the fighting was over. In the spring of 1865, April 9 (the very day Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant), the city hall of New Orleans contains a record of the marriage of “the widow Hibbard,” whose deceased husband had run a moderately successful business manufacturing blackboard chalk, to one “Jimmy O’Hara.” We can presume the name was not the result of a typo this time, but James’s final step in adopting his Irish alter ego.
Of course the irony in all of it was that through this single act of integration — and in the manufacture of writing implements, no less — James was able to break into the lower echelons of the upper class, becoming like everything that he had tried to escape in the first place, an act that would follow his descendants like a curse through the generations, each new brood trying to forge its own path only to end up in exactly the same place (personally if not geographically). James’s only boy with the widow, Carey O’Hara, couldn’t change back to Charles Heran and head for Texas any faster. An avid, self-taught amateur geologist, Charles was convinced of two things: first, that salt and oil were inextricably tied, and where you found one you’d find the other (a view shared by other so-called lunatics of the time like Patillo Higgins and E. I. Stronach), and at the turn of the century, Charles worked briefly south of Dallas for the Corsicana Oil Development Company, on a hill called Spindletop under the famed Pennsylvania oil man John Galey; second, unfortunately, that salt, rather than oil, was the fuel of the future.
This assumption was not as far-fetched as it might seem today, or rather, no more far-fetched than the oil, equally ridiculed at the time, since up to that point oil had only been used for lamps and lubrication. Until the Industrial Revolution and the internal combustion engine, ground salt had been hard to come by, one of the more dangerous and expensive substances to get out of the earth. In Rome, they used prisoners as slaves to extract it. Similarly the salt mines were where the Nazis would send their criminals. Now that salt might be removed more easily, Charles’s theory was that the geothermal heat could be captured from the salt domes and used for fuel, and by over-salinating water one could extract the hydrogen from it so it could burn freely — not to mention his plans for molten salt reactors. But when the Spindletop gusher began producing more than a hundred thousand barrels of oil per day and the local population grew from ten thousand to fifty thousand almost overnight, everyone and their dog erecting another derrick, any ideas of extracting salt had to be abandoned. Like his father, Charles turned to gambling, this time coupled with drinking and whoring.
Among the various progeny he sired, Stoic’s father, also a Charles, would keep up his end of the rebellion seesaw by continuing to Arizona, becoming a farmer and marrying an Evangelical Lutheran. Stoic’s mother, Gradine, would be one of the initial founders of the state’s Anti-Saloon League, and thus one of the leading supporters of eighteenth amendment for national Prohibition in 1919. Most citizens had assumed Prohibition would decrease crime and violence while improving the country’s overall health and morality, but this was far from the case. Illegal stills popped up in every second basement and backlot. Contraband moonshine, which was far from regulated, often contained things like creosote or embalming fluid, resulting in frequent blindness and paralysis for those who drank it. And perhaps the strangest consequence of all came from the rampant theft of bees, whose honey was needed to kick-start the fermentation process. Without their pollinators, crops began to suffer. Charles II lost almost everything he had worked to create for his family. And while Gradine welcomed God’s test, Charles began to lobby for change. When it came time to repeal Prohibition, three quarters of Arizonians voted in favor of this amendment too. Gradine never spoke to her husband again. Charles started drinking, and became one of the state’s most popular politicians.
Naturally, the greatest question young Patric faced in his earliest years (as well as those in the middle, the twilight, and basically right up until the end) was whether he would be shaped more by the prudish determination of his mother or by his father’s clandestine addiction to everything bacchanalian. Rather than choose a side, Patric shunned emotions and issues of morality altogether, and earned what would be his nickname for the rest of his life. Even after his tool and die company became so successful during the forties, allowing him to support the war effort in the only way he could, affording him a much larger home, a membership at the most prestigious golf and country club, and cars for all of his daughters on their sixteenth birthdays, Stoic Heran seemed to take little pleasure in it. Success, to him, was just another aspect of life, with no more celebration to be taken from it, or time taken to dwell on it, than failure, or luck, or breakfast, or a daily bowel movement, with each moment of every day just one tic closer to the end, when he might finally let everything loose and really enjoy himself in the afterlife. He was like one of his employees, counting the seconds in front of his machine, longing for the weekend, rather than thinking about the other able-bodied Americans who were, at that very same second, perishing in a trench in France, or perhaps wishing they were. Life was the job; Heaven was the reward. And as with any job, he felt no need to be good or pious or even particularly pleasant to people, merely putting in the time until he could punch his card and have his feet massaged all day in Heaven by the hands of the sinners.
That was how Patric Heran saw Heaven: a place where the workers were finally able to reap the benefits of their labor, as he imagined his great-grandfather, the family’s last truly great laborer before himself, being waited on, foot and hand, by the politicians who had made his life hell to begin with. Chris Eaton’s idea of Heaven, on the other hand, was a sort of nothingness, without weight or mass or appearance or idiocy. And her father, Robert Eaton, who worked for Stoic Heran for nigh on thirty-five years, giving most of his life and his right index finger to an industry too abstract to even know why, well, his idea of Heaven was a cabin in the wilderness, with wood on the stove and an outhouse in the back, on a pond or a lake, or maybe just a mountain stream, but definitely with water, a lot like Thoreau’s but without his mother stopping by to cut his hair or bring the occasional pie, with enough distance between him and the nearest neighbor that he could crush his legs beneath a fallen tree and never be heard screaming for help. He would also have preferred not to be dead before he reached it, but by the time Chris Eaton’s father got the idea for this perfect retirement in his head (perhaps coinciding with the third anniversary of his wife’s death and perhaps not), he had already spent more than half his life making machines for Heran, machines that made machines that, in his case, went on to make automobiles, blenders, computers, children’s toys, seltzer bottles, Frisbees, an entire assortment of doodads, gizmos, farkles, widgets, thingamabobs, thingamajiggers, and even a third generation of machines that were supposed to manufacture more efficient home HVAC systems that would have saved their owners (plus the government, taxpayers, you name it) close to thirty-six percent off the day’s energy costs. Unfortunately for Heran, not to mention the Earth,
the new temperature-regulating systems got caught up in a lot of red tape, with union worries that the new systems might also last longer and thereby reduce the need for future units, and rather than cannibalize their own jobs, the systems ended up rusting at the back of one of the waterfront warehouses in Brooklyn that most locals assumed were actually just fronts for strategic defense missile silos, until several blocks of them were destroyed in a raging fire that sent plumes of acrid bromium biocide smoke into Manhattan.