by Scott Walker
“Yep. Down in Huntington, working for the city,” Sam said proudly.
“Well, that’s great, Sammy.” Elsie tapped a Pall Mall from her pack on the table. “I was starting to think you’d make a career of gambling.”
Sam laughed heartily. “No, that’s just for fun. If I’m going to get married and have kids, I need a steady job.”
“Get married and have kids?” Elsie asked, astounded again. “I didn’t even know you had a girl.”
“Ginny’s my girl,” Sam declared. “Ain’t you, Ginny?”
Virginia dropped her fork, and it clattered to the floor. For a few seconds, Virginia was unable to form any kind of response. “Oh, Sammy, you’re so full of shit,” she finally said.
“You’re not the first person to say that,” Sam said, chuckling.
“Amen!” Elsie said.
“But I’m serious,” Sam said to both of them. “I ain’t married. Ginny ain’t married. And now you’ve got that little baby with no home. What do you say, Ginny? Let’s you and me get married and take that baby to Huntington.”
“You’re crazy, Sammy,” Virginia scoffed. But she did not say no.
“What’re you going to do?” Sam asked. “Hang around here at my sister’s house, taking care of her kids and these cast-offs all your life?”
One other factor spurred Sam’s enthusiasm for the idea. He was sterile. Only he and an army doctor knew it. From the time he was old enough to throw a punch, Sam had been an enthusiastic brawler, especially after he got some booze in him. He was a private in the army during the war, serving in the Canal Zone in Panama. The dearth of combat provided many opportunities to swill beer, throw dice and fight. His constant boasting did little to endear Sam to his fellow soldiers.
One night as he was sleeping in the barracks, a group of other privates bound him in a blanket and proceeded to beat him relentlessly. One took particular pleasure in pummeling Sam’s scrotum with the belt from his uniform. The soldier made sure to land as many blows as possible with the heavy brass buckle.
For a month, Sam recovered in the post hospital. His testicles had swollen to the size of navel oranges. “There is no way to be certain at the moment,” the army doctor told him, “but my guess is that the damage has been too extensive. It is highly unlikely you ever will father children.”
“So, what do you say, Ginny?” Sam prodded. “Will you marry me?” He removed the garish gold and diamond-fleck ring from his pinky finger. It also came from a poker pot. Sam pushed his chair back from the table, got up and walked over to where Virginia was sitting. He took her chafed hand and slipped the ring onto her finger. “What do you say?”
Virginia looked at the ring, at Sam, at Elsie, and back to the ring. “You’re crazy, Sammy,” she said again. She looked at him, and then Elsie again. During his visits over the past months, she had suspected he fancied her, though she could not imagine why. No man ever had taken an interest in her, and the way he talked about the big times he had in one city or another, she presumed he had a string of women.
However, Sam had surmised correctly. Elsie always was kind and fair to her, but Virginia wanted a life of her own. She never dwelt on it, because she had no other prospects. Until that moment. She looked once more at the ring and then at Sam’s eager face. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, Sammy. Let’s get married.”
Three days later, a Justice of the Peace administered the minimal vows and signed the paperwork. Elsie and her husband served as the witnesses. Sam, Virginia and Brenda—“We’re naming her ourselves,” Sam had announced to his wife and sister, and then told them the name he had chosen—loaded up in the big Buick an hour after the marriage ceremony and drove the four hours south to Huntington.
Chapter 21
Steubenville, Ohio
February 1947
“You tell them that we don’t want to, but we’re bringing her back to them,” Sam said loudly to Elsie. She was on the telephone with Pilar.
When Mercedes, Pilar and Jim brought Brenda to Elsie, they completed no adoption paperwork. Elsie was waiting for final word from the couple in California. They had no birth certificate because Brenda was born at home, and Julia had not bothered to file for one later.
Sam and Virginia took the girl without a thought about any of that, and now the murky legal situation had become problematic. The city would not include her on Sam’s health insurance without proof she was legally his daughter, and they had learned that they could not register her for school when the time came.
Elsie put her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. “Stop yelling at me, Sammy. That’s not helping anything.” She returned to the conversation with Pilar. “I understand that your sister is being difficult and your mother is worried about signing any document she can’t read, but you have to do this. They can’t even take her to the doctor, because she’s not legally theirs.”
Elsie paused, listening to Pilar on the other end of the line. Sam paced back and forth in the living room. “Sit down, Sammy. You’re driving me crazy,” Elsie said. Then to Pilar, she added: “As you probably heard, my brother is saying he’ll drive over there and leave her with you, today, if you can’t get one of them to agree to sign some papers. And it’s not just talk, I assure you … Okay … Okay. I’ll wait for your call.”
“Well, what are they doing?” Sam asked, still on his feet.
“She’s going to try again to talk some sense into her sister and mother and call me back.”
“This is ridiculous,” Sam said. “I don’t know how you deal with these people all the time.”
“It’s just a hard situation, Sammy,” Elsie said. She was tired of his carping and condescension. “The mother—”
“Don’t call her that,” Sam snapped. “Ginny’s her mother.”
“The woman who had her,” Elsie began again, “is a bit unbalanced, and her mother is a Spanish widow who doesn’t speak any English.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about their problems,” Sam barked.
“Just calm down, Sammy,” Elsie said wearily. “They’ll sign the papers. Pilar heard you ranting. They won’t want you to bring her back.”
Thirty minutes later, Elsie’s telephone rang. “Yes, I have the papers here,” she said. “It’s just one document for a witness to her birth to sign and another saying you agree to Sam and Virginia adopting her. I know a notary who’ll stamp them for us later. All you need to do is have one of them sign the papers … Okay … Very good. They’ll be there in a couple hours … Yes, I have the address. Thank you, Pilar.” As she returned the phone receiver to its cradle, Elsie said to Sam: “I told you there was nothing to worry about.”
“There’s always something to worry about, especially with those people,” he grumbled.
Elsie ignored his comment. “Here are the papers, and here’s the address.” Sam and Virginia had already signed the documents. “It would be best if the mo … if the woman who had her signs them, but her mother will do.”
Sam, Virginia and Brenda drove the winding, narrow roads through the bleak winter landscape to Anmoore. Virginia and Brenda waited in the car. Sam walked up to the house and knocked on the door. Pilar answered.
“I’m Sam Blevins, and somebody needs to sign these papers,” he said brusquely. The soldiers in Panama had not beaten the anger out of him, nor had marriage and fatherhood reduced his volatility. He was like an old box of dynamite. Not much jostling was required for him to explode.
“Hello, Mr. Blevins. I’m Pilar, Julia’s sister.” Sam merely glared at her. “Julia. Mary’s mother.”
“Her name is Brenda, and my wife is her mother,” Sam said.
Pilar nodded. “Julia and my mother will sign the papers. Please come inside.”
“I’d rather wait out here,” Sam said.
“As you wish, Mr. Blevins.” Pilar took the documents and disappeared into the house. When she returned, Mercedes came out with her. She extended her hand to Sam, and he shook it. He could not be angry with this w
oman whose weariness was so palpable that it made him tired to look at her. She spoke something to him in Spanish.
“My mother asks how Mary… uh … Brenda is,” Pilar said.
“Tell her she’s happy and healthy,” Sam said. “We’ve given her a good home.”
Pilar translated his reply. Mercedes’ lips remained clenched, but she nodded her head in grateful acknowledgment.
“Would your mom like to see her?” Sam asked. “She’s out there in the car.” He motioned toward the big Buick with his thumb.
Mercedes understood the question and shook her head no.
“Muchas gracias, señor,” she said to Sam, grasping his hand again. Mercedes looked over his shoulder toward the car parked at the curb. Then she turned and went back inside the house.
Pilar handed the signed documents to Sam. “I hope this takes care of it, Mr. Blevins. I’m sorry if we caused you any trouble. My sister can be difficult sometimes.”
“I understand that,” Sam said. “Mine can be, too.”
“Elsie?” Pilar asked. “I can’t believe that. She always was very sweet with us.”
“Oh, no not Elsie,” Sam laughed, lighting a cigarette. “My other sister. That one’s a handful.” Sam looked over the papers with a judicial air, though he could barely read. “This should be fine. Thank you.”
“Take good care of her,” Pilar shouted across the yard as Sam opened the door to get into the car. He smiled and waved. Pilar stood on the porch in the cold wind until the Buick was out of sight.
Chapter 22
Anmoore, West Virginia
April 1947
Pilar’s husband Jim could have taken a job at the Union Carbide plant in Anmoore along with his brothers-in-law. Pilar had pressed him to, so they could live near her mother, but he loathed the idea of being confined in the factory. He gleefully applied for and accepted a job as a truck driver with a new long-haul company in central Ohio when a friend told him about an open position.
Pilar missed her family. Jim was glad to live six hours away from them. He got on well with Pilar’s brothers, but Julia and her son Richard daily tested the limits of his patience and his generally cheerful demeanor.
Advancing to junior high had liberated Richard from the close oversight of the elementary school principal and his threat of banishment to the reform school at Pruntytown. Physically, Richard took after his uncles Luis and Manuel. Over the summer after elementary school and during first months of junior high, he grew a head taller than the other boys. He became more muscular and broad-shouldered with each passing month.
For Richard, his new found freedom and physical domination finally provided an outlet for his years of suppressed anger and frustration. He became one of the worst bullies in the junior high school. He joined the football team and quickly gained a reputation for leaving opponents writhing on the ground in pain. Richard balked fiercely at every remonstration from Julia and Jim, who had unwillingly been drafted into the role of surrogate father.
The atmosphere frequently was tense at the little house in Anmoore after Pilar and Jim moved away. Mercedes, Julia and Richard survived mostly on the charity of Mercedes’ sons. Julia still worked only part-time at the laundry. She spent most evenings at the roadhouse, leaving sixty-two-year-old Mercedes to deal with Richard.
“Beer and a bump, Dave,” Julia said as she climbed onto her usual stool at the end of the bar.
“Hard day?” the bartender asked as he set the frosted mug of beer and the shot of bourbon on the bar. “You look beat.”
“Hard day. Hard week. Hard month. Hard year. Hard life.” Julia threw back the shot and took a long swallow of the beer. “My kid’s driving me nuts.”
“Boys his age can be tough,” Dave said. “Especially without a man around to knock some sense into them every now and then.”
“Tell me about it,” Julia said. “You know he ran off again last week? He was gone for two days, and when I asked him where he’d been, he told me it was none of my goddamned business.”
“He said that?”
“Yep. ‘None of your goddamned business.’”
“My old man would have beat the shit out of me for that,” Dave said. “My old lady, too.”
“Well, he’s too big for me to thump, or I would have, trust me,” Julia said. She took another long swallow of the beer.
From a booth table along the wall across the dimly-lit roadhouse a man said: “Like Dave suggested, you need a man around.”
Julia thought she recognized the voice, but it could not be. She turned on the barstool and looked into the shadow. “Art?” she asked. He slid out of the booth and walked across the room. “That it is. How are you, babe?”
Julia nearly fainted. “Wha … How … Whe … ,” she sputtered.
Art Kelley laughed and slung his arm around her shoulder. It was less lanky than she remembered. “I just got to town this afternoon, and I figured you’d show up here sooner or later.”
Julia looked at him, and then at the bartender. “Dave, you knew he was here?”
“He did,” Art said. “But I swore him to secrecy. I wanted to surprise you myself.”
Julia finished her beer in one more gulp. “Well, you certainly did that. Jesus, Art. What the hell are you doing here. It’s been … it’s been—”
“Five years and four months.”
“A lot of water under the bridge,” Julia said, though suddenly it felt as if he had never left. She was at once comforted and confounded by his reappearance.
“A whole world war,” Art said.
“And a lot of other shit,” Julia added. She thought of Art’s baby, John Goad’s baby, Richard, her father’s death. “It’s been a tough five years.”
Art nodded and ordered a beer for himself and another for her.
Julia looked him over. Had she not been on her first beer, she would have sworn he was a hallucination. “You still haven’t told me why you’re in Anmoore, Art. I assume you haven’t come for a job at the carbon plant.”
“Christ, no,” Art said chuckling. “Actually, I’ve come for you.”
“You’ve done what?” Julia said. Surely she misheard him.
“I still think about you all the time, Julia,” Art told her in the most sincere and tender tone she ever recalled hearing from him. He put a hand over hers that was resting on the bar. “I’ve regretted more times than I can count how things ended with us.”
Julia did not think about Art all the time, though he did pop into her mind occasionally. It always made her sad. She had loved him, and he was the only man she had known who actually made her feel loved.
“But what do you want, after all these years?” she asked, indignant. “You think you can just waltz in here and back into my life, into my heart, because you want to? You don’t get to do that.”
“I was hoping we could try again,” he said as calmly and sweetly as he could. “You know, if you’re not with somebody else, which you don’t seem to be.”
“Oh, Artie, I don’t know.” Separating from him had been one of the most painful episodes in her life. Julia was not eager to risk that agony again. “How am I supposed to trust you now, after what happened before?”
“I’ll make it right this time, Julia,” he said. “I promise. I was a mechanic in the army, and I have a regular job at a garage in Cleveland. I’ve even rented a little apartment of my own. I’m as domesticated as a Labrador retriever. We’ll get married and do it right.”
Julia was exasperated. “You have no idea how many times I’ve wished for that, dreamed of it, that you would come back and want to marry me. But now, I just don’t know, Art. It’s too much somehow. It doesn’t even seem real that you’re here. Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about you, or about us. I can’t make such a decision on the spur of the moment.”
“I understand,” Art said. “I had this image in my mind of coming in here and sweeping you off your feet—”
“Well, life’s not some fucking movie, Art,” Ju
lia said, interjecting.
“I know, I know,” Art said. “It was naive. How about this? Just come with me now for a bit. We’ll take a drive and talk, or not talk. We’ll get some supper in Clarksburg and see what happens and how we feel.”
Julia considered it for a minute as Art stood in front of her, his eyes pleading. “Alright, Artie,” she finally said. “I have to admit, it’s good to see you. Fucking crazy, but good to see you.”
Though Julia had absolutely ruled it out in her mind as they were leaving the roadhouse, they ended up at Art’s room in the motor lodge outside Clarksburg after dinner. They lay in each other’s arms in the lumpy bed, and she began to cry. “Oh, Art,” she said, “all these men I’ve been with the past five years, I never really wanted them. I just wanted you.”
He lightly stroked her naked back, tracing down her spine and around her shoulder blades with his fingertips. He was unsure how to respond and desperate not to misstep.
“But I still don’t know, Artie,” Julia said. “You have to understand that this, tonight, it doesn’t mean we’re back together. It doesn’t mean I’ll marry you. It doesn’t even mean I want to see you again.” A tornado of competing and conflicting emotions swirled up inside her. “I need time to figure out what I think and feel and want now. Do you understand?”
He did, and he did not. But of one thing Art was certain: pushing too hard would drive Julia away. “I do,” he said. He pulled her body tighter against his own and kissed her on the forehead. “In the morning, I’ll take you home and go back to Cleveland. Then we’ll take it a day at a time.”
“Thank you, Artie.” Julia snuggled her head against his chest and drifted off to sleep.
* * *
Art was persistent. He drove down from Cleveland whenever Julia would agree to meet him. Some days were pleasant and easy: walking on Pinnick Kinnick Hill, going to eat and to a movie, drinking beer at the roadhouse. Some visits were wildly passionate and they spent the entire weekend in his shabby motel room.
Other times, Julia would be hostile from the moment Art arrived or whip from hot to cold without warning. They would be whiling away an afternoon when some seemingly innocuous strain of conversation caused her to erupt, her body rigid as she ranted and the look in her eye distant and detached. “You can’t just step back into my life like this!” she would shout and storm away, leaving him sitting alone in his car. Art would drive back to Cleveland and call her a day or two later, and she would be calm and want to see him again.