by Scott Walker
Julia jumped forward in her chair. “Pruntytown?” she shouted. “You’re not sending my kid to that prison!”
“Miss Ribas, please,” the principal said in as soothing a voice as he could muster. “The West Virginia Reform School is not a prison. It is a place where troubled boys like Richard can receive the special attention they need to alter their behavior and grow into productive members of society.”
“What a load of shit,” Julia said. She stood and leaned over the principal’s desk, poking her finger at him. “You’re out of your mind if you think I’m agreeing to send him there.”
The principal leaned back in his chair. His tone sharpened. “Miss Ribas, I invited you here in hopes that we could do this in the least disruptive way for Richard, not to debate whether we will take this action. I will not allow him to remain at this school any longer. He will be transferred to Pruntytown. It is up to you: the road can be rough, or the road can be smooth.”
Julia sat back down and rested her wrists on the edge of the desk. “Please,” she said quietly. “It’s not his fault. I’ve … I haven’t always paid as much attention to him as I should. I know that. Please don’t punish him for my failures.”
They sat, staring at each other. The sounds of children on the playground drifted up through the open office window. After a long silence, the principal said: “You put me in a very difficult position, Miss Ribas. I understand the particular troubles you face, with Richard’s father absent.” He looked down and glanced over the order transferring Julia’s son to the reform school. He had already endorsed it. The document required only her signature. He drew in a deep breath and sighed. “Okay, Miss Ribas. This contravenes all my experience and good judgment.” He looked up at the ceiling then back to Julia. “Richard can have one more chance.”
Julia leapt from her chair, ran around the desk and gave the rigid, seated principal an awkward hug. “Thank you. Thank you. I promise, he’ll behave. I promise.”
Gently pushing her away, the principal replied: “I hope so, Miss Ribas. I earnestly hope you and Richard will use this reprieve wisely. I cannot tolerate even one more of these incidents from him in the future. Not one more. He must exhibit model behavior from this day.”
“He will. He will. I promise you.” Julia shook his hand in both of hers and swiftly crossed to the office door. “He’ll be an angel,” she added, pausing in the doorway.
Closing the ledger and putting the transfer order into his desk— he had little doubt he would need it again soon—the principal said: “Let’s just aim for not a devil.”
When Julia returned to the house, seven-year-old Richard was in the backyard, catching the butterflies that fluttered around the blossoms on the plants in Mercedes’ garden. Julia stomped into the yard, grabbed him by the ear, and dragged him toward the house. “Come in here, you little shit,” she hissed.
Richard howled as she twisted his ear, and he stumbled along beside her.
“Oh, stop it,” Julia said. “You deserve a beating. Be glad I’m not giving you that.”
She hauled him into the bedroom and slammed the door. “You know where I’ve just been?”
Looking intently at the seam between two of the floorboards, Richard answered a barely audible: “At the school.”
“Yes, at the school. And look at me when I’m talking to you.” She grabbed his chin and jerked his head up. “You know what that principal wants to do? He wants to send you to Pruntytown. Pruntytown!”
“What’s Pruntytown?” Richard asked sheepishly.
“It’s a prison school for boys like you,” she said. “You want to go to prison?”
“No!” he said loudly without hesitation. He had heard his grandfather talking once about a man he knew who was sent to prison, and it sounded like the most frightening thing he could imagine.
“Then you’d better knock this shit off!” Julia shouted. “Do you hear me?”
He nodded his head quickly.
“I’m not kidding, Richard,” she said. “They’re giving you one more chance. Just one. I don’t care what the boys say to you.”
Richard started to cry.
“I don’t care what they say to you or do to you,” Julia said, ignoring his tears. “One more fight, one more, and they’re sending you to fucking prison.”
“I don’t want to go to prison,” he wailed. The tears streamed down his cheeks. “Please don’t send me away. I want to stay here with grandma and grandpa.”
Julia looked him up and down and shook her head. She reached out and gave the boy a stiff hug. More gently than before, she said: “Just control yourself, Richard. No more fighting. None. You understand?”
He sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I understand,” he said. “Please don’t let them send me away.”
Julia searched around the room and found a handkerchief. She wiped his nose and dried his face. “Just do as I told you, and you can stay.”
He took the threat to heart. No matter how much the boys at school taunted him, Richard turned and walked away. Not that he actually developed the ability to process his anger and frustration. He merely packed them down into himself, like stuffing garbage into a sack day after day.
Chapter 18
Anmoore, West Virginia
March 1944
The decades of smelter fumes and tobacco finally caught up with Antonio. The dry cough that began around Thanksgiving would not go away. By mid-January, Mercedes’ entreaties to see the doctor were more aggravating than the cough, and Antonio went for an examination.
The lung cancer was advanced and aggressive, the doctor said. But for another month, Antonio continued to go to his job every day with the state roads department. He told only the foreman about his cancer and arranged to do the lightest work possible. Still, he took frequent breaks to lie down and rest in the back of one of the trucks.
In March, Antonio died in the bed where his five children and two grandchildren were born. His three sons were off in the war. Mercedes, Pilar and Julia were with him at the end, as they had been around the clock for his terrible final two weeks.
“I’m going to Maryland, to work in the shipyard,” Julia announced without fanfare to Mercedes and Pilar at the dinner table three days after Antonio was buried in the Clarksburg cemetery.
Mercedes looked at her, shook her head, and went back to eating her stew. After they returned to Anmoore from the funeral, Mercedes had taken a long walk alone through the woods to the top of Pinnick Kinnick Hill. She stood for nearly an hour looking down at the grungy little town, the air tinted brown with the smoke from the carbon plant.
The valley was about the same size as that at home. If she were standing in San Adriano, at the top of the hill, Mercedes thought to herself, Las Cepas would be down there, a couple hundred yards below to the left, just before the valley floor. Naveces would be straight across on the opposite hillside. And off there to the right, at the valley’s end, would be the sea. Oh, how Mercedes missed the sea. She had not seen it for thirty years, since she arrived at Ellis Island. From Pinnick Kinnick Hill, where the sea should be, was only Clarksburg.
In her mind, Mercedes looked down the hill to Las Cepas. She recalled that first Christmas Eve with Antonio on the steps of the granary. His face illuminated for half a second in the flame burst of the match. She gazed across the valley to Naveces, white-walled and red tile-roofed San Román Church glowing in a late-afternoon sun. She wished she could have buried her husband in the González family tomb in the cemetery behind the rectory.
Mercedes remembered reading the inscription on an adjacent tomb once, when the whole family had made one of their candle-lit All Saints Day vigils in the cemetery: Tu nos dijiste que la muerte no es el final del camino. You told us that death is not the end of the way. “Buen camino, Antonio,” Mercedes whispered.
* * *
“You’re doing what?” Pilar asked after Julia said she was moving away.
“Have you gone deaf, Pilar?” Julia said nast
ily. “I said I’m going to Maryland to work in the shipyard. With so many of the men gone, they’re hiring women to help build the ships.”
“But why?” Pilar asked. “We’ve just buried papa.”
“Exactly. We’ve just buried papa. There’s no good reason for me to stay around here. And, honestly, we need to replace his pay. I’ll make three or four times what I do at the laundry.”
“What about your son?” Mercedes asked. “Or have you not thought of him, as usual?” She was still astounded by her daughter’s utter lack of maternal instinct. A casual observer of Julia’s interaction with her son would have thought Richard was an orphan they took in or a boy from down the street just stopping by the house. When Richard was with Pilar, it appeared that she was his mother, but Julia did not even demonstrate the level of affection one would expect from an aunt.
“Richard’s fine, mother,” Julia said. “He’s stayed out of trouble for a year now. And he only wants to be with you and Pilar all the time anyway.”
“Maybe that’s because we pay attention to him,” Mercedes said. “You know, children can sense how people feel about them.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, let’s not start this again,” Julia said with a groan.
“And he’s not fine,” Mercedes said. “If you actually spent any time with him, you’d see that. The boy is filled from head to toe with rage. He reminds me of my father, from the little bit I knew him, and my brother José. One day, he’ll explode.”
“Oh, stop being dramatic, mother,” Julia said. “Richard’s just like any other boy his age.”
Although she was always reluctant to challenge her sister about anything, most of all Richard, Pilar said: “I’m not so sure, Julia. It’s not normal the way he keeps to himself all the time.”
“Not you now too,” Julia said. “For Christ’s sake, you’re both as bad as that principal at the school. Richard keeps to himself because those other asshole little boys mistreat him, and he doesn’t want to get into fights and be sent off to Pruntytown.”
“You always have an answer,” Mercedes said.
“Well, at least I’m not sitting around here depressed out of my mind all the time like you,” Julia snapped. She shoved her chair away from the table and slammed her plate into the sink. “I’m going to Maryland. I’ll take the bus on Friday.”
* * *
Mercedes, Pilar and Richard stood on the porch and watched Julia walk off down the street with her leather duffle bag toward the bus stop. She turned and waved before she rounded the corner. Only Pilar waved back.
“Can I go play now?” Richard asked.
“Of course you can,” Mercedes said. “Just make sure you’re home before dark.” He ran down the steps and disappeared around the side of the house.
“Maybe you ought to go to Maryland, too,” Mercedes said to Pilar after a minute.
“What?” Pilar said. “I won’t go off and leave you and Richard, mama.”
“We can manage,” Mercedes said. “You need to get out of this town, Pilar. You’ve never been anywhere or seen anything. And somebody needs to try and keep Julia out of trouble.”
“That’s certainly true, about Julia,” Pilar said, sighing. “But I’m happy being here in Anmoore and at home with you. I’m just a homebody. I always have been.”
Mercedes reached over and squeezed her daughter’s hand. “I know. You’re as gentle and sweet as your Aunt Pilar. I wish you could have known her.”
“I do, too, mama.” When they were young, Mercedes told the children many stories about her life during those thirteen years at Las Cepas with her brother and his family. Pilar’s favourites were the tales about her mother’s visit to Avilés to see the processions of the penitents during the Semana Santa.
“And all of them over there,” Mercedes said. “My brother Antonio and María, and all our family. There are so many of them, and they’re such good people.”
“Like Uncle Ramón,” Pilar said.
“Yes, like your Uncle Ramón, and all his kids. It’s good we at least have him over here, even if he is all the way over in St. Louis. But it’s a shame you don’t know the rest of them. Maybe someday, after this war is over, you can go visit them in Asturias.”
“Oh, mama,” Pilar said, giggling. “I’d love to meet them, you know that. But I can’t go all the way to Spain. I don’t even want to leave Anmoore!”
Mercedes knew that was the truth. If Pilar married the richest man in town and had all the time in the world, she still would never venture so far as Asturias. “Well, as I said, you ought to at least go to Maryland and get yourself a job like Julia, and keep an eye on her.”
“If you think so, then I will,” Pilar said. “But don’t run me off just yet!” She hugged her mother. “You need to eat more, mama. You’re as skinny as a bean pole.”
“I’m fine,” Mercedes said. “Just fine.” She looked up at the sooty, brown sky. “But I’d be better if I could breathe the fresh air blowing in off the Cantabrian Sea, and smell the eucalyptus trees, just one more time.”
Pilar patted her on the back and went inside the house to begin preparing their dinner.
Chapter 19
Baltimore, Maryland
June 1944
Julia was jumping up and down like a little girl as her sister climbed off the bus. “Pilar!” she cried. “I still can’t believe you pried yourself out of that shitty town!”
“There’s nothing wrong with our town,” Pilar said. She hugged her sister tightly and then looked her all over, as if she had not seen her for years, rather than four months. “It’s so good to see you, Julia. We’ve missed you something terrible.”
“I’ve missed you too,” Julia said. “But not that shitty town.”
“Oh, Julia, you’ll never change,” Pilar said.
“Not if I can help it!” She took Pilar’s suitcase in one hand and her sister’s hand with the other. “Come on, now. We’ll drop your bag at the apartment—can you believe I have my own apartment! Then I’ll show you Baltimore. And there’s somebody I want you to meet.”
“A man?” Pilar asked warily.
“Of course, a man, silly,” Julia said, laughing. “You’ll like him. He’s a hoot!”
“I’m sure he is,” Pilar said. “They always are.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. It’s good you came here,” Julia said. “You’re turning more into mama every day.”
Julia hauled Pilar off to the apartment and gave her a perfunctory tour of the major Baltimore sights before they met John Goad in a bar at Fells Point on the shore of Baltimore Harbor.
“Well! Julia’s little sister!” John called out loudly as they entered the bar. “She tells tales about your adventures in the West Virginia hills eighteen hours a day!”
“We didn’t have that many adventures,” Pilar said primly. She shared neither her sister’s enjoyment of boisterous men nor her fondness for whiling away the hours in bars, though this one was more pleasant than the few Julia had dragged her to in Anmoore and Clarksburg. With its brick walls, polished wood bar with brass railings, and view out the window of the harbour, it was not a disagreeable place.
“Didn’t I tell you she’s a card!” Julia said. “Hank,” she shouted at the bartender. “Bring a beer and a bump for me, and a Coca-Cola for my little sister.” She turned to Pilar. “I assume you haven’t started drinking since I escaped Anmoore.”
Pilar grinned a bit. “No, that I haven’t.”
“It’s just as well,” Julia said. “Makes you a cheap date!”
Julia told Pilar about the new friends she had made and about the work at the shipyard. “I never imagined life could feel this good,” Julia said. “I have my own place, and I come and go without having to answer to anyone. I feel as free as a bird. And even with what I send back to mama, I make enough money to shop a little and go to the movies with the other girls.”
Pilar had seen Julia in her manic moods before. She worried that this was another of them, destined
to deflate as soon as she struck some impediment. But Julia did seem genuinely happy, and this life was completely different from her existence in Anmoore. Pilar felt guardedly hopeful that Julia had actually reached a place of true satisfaction after so many years on a stony and troubled path.
As the afternoon faded into evening, John told story after story about his adventures on the road and rails, tramping during the Depression. He seemed to have traversed from coast to coast and stopped at every place in between. To her surprise, Pilar even found herself liking Julia’s latest companion. Eventually, Pilar asked John: “So, why aren’t you off in the war with the rest of the men?”
“Four-F, on account of a lung condition from when I was a kid, thank God,” John told her. “Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing but respect for all those boys over there whipping up on the Krauts and Japs. But I never was much of one for fighting. I’m content to be one of the few left behind to tend to the maidens.” He squeezed Julia high on the thigh.
“John Goad!” Julia howled in mock protest. “You’re a devil! Save that for the bedroom. Hank!” Julia shouted to the bartender. “Another round.”
“Not for me, Julia,” Pilar said. “I’m dead on my feet.”
Julia dug a key out of her handbag. “You go on back to the apartment, then. You remember the way don’t you?”
“I do,” Pilar said.
“Good,” Julia said. “Make yourself at home. There should be some food in the refrigerator.”
Pilar hugged Julia goodbye and shook John’s hand. “It was very nice meeting you.”
“I’m glad you’re here, Pilar.” John said with a toothy smile. “We’ll show you some good times in this old town!”
As Pilar started out the door into the cool night, Julia called to her from across the bar: “Don’t wait up! We’ll be late.”
Later that week, Pilar bought stationery and wrote to Mercedes while Julia was at work.