Before entering his bedroom, I went down the hallway to the bathroom. I leaned over the sink and stared into the mirror. In the artificial light, my eyes were the flat black of an ancient flint arrowhead, the same color as Jimmy’s eyes in the Polaroid picture he had sent home the month before he died.
“Soldier eyes,” Bill had said with all his TV wisdom, fingering the photo. “Like in the movies, Mom.”
My face. Wrinkles wound like ivy around my eyes. Those pink curlers that held my hair like mousetraps.
I was sick of those curlers.
“For chrissakes,” my husband had sneered a few days before, “don’t you ever take those things out?”
Yes, I thought. I’ll take them out.
I reached into the medicine chest for a pair of barber’s scissors. After grabbing one curler and pulling it up, I cut it free from my head. One by one, curlers of my hair fell into the wastebasket until I was left with a jagged crop of hair barely an inch long and a scalp that finally breathed.
I slipped into Bill’s room and stood over his small body. It amazed me that he could sleep in pajamas and with all those blankets when it was so hot, that he could still sleep so deeply after the loss of his brother whereas my insomnia had returned. I wouldn’t realize until years later that it didn’t matter where he slept or how many blankets he had wrapped around him or whether it was hot or cold. His was a dreamless sleep, the deepest sleep of all. But as I looked down at him, he appeared as though he had had a bellyful of my milk and was gone from the world until the next feeding.
I lifted and carried him as if he were a toddler again, on one hip with an arm wrapped underneath his rump, his feet touching the middle of my calves. I scooped up the cotton blanket at the foot of his bed with my other hand.
My arms were stiff with pain by the time we reached the doe’s bed in the field. I dropped the blanket and spread it flat with my foot before easing Bill onto the ground. Then I lay down next to him. Bill had not stirred or made a sound in our journey from the house to the field. I put one hand up near his mouth and felt the warm air from his nose. I studied the way his breathing caused a small tremor in his chest every time he inhaled and exhaled. I lifted his hands and looked at each of his fingers and at the dirt underneath his nails. His palms were as calloused as his feet from climbing trees. I could tell from his long legs that he would be taller than his brother. His toes flexed and curled in his sleep.
I was brushing the hair away from Bill’s forehead when I heard a car pull into the driveway and park. I crouched over Bill and lifted my head just enough so that I could see through the grass without being seen. My husband had come home.
He staggered into the house. I prayed that he was drunk enough to fall into bed and go to sleep. But every light went on, and ten minutes later John came out of the house. He shuffled until he stood underneath the yard lamp. I could tell by the way his shoulders were hunched forward that he was squinting his eyes as though trying to see in what little natural light was left.
“Ca-laire! Bill! Where the hell are you!”
I listened to his repeated call for us. The words were slurred, but with each effort his voice rose to the boiling point I knew so well. The doe had bedded down just close enough to have full view of the comings and goings from the house and barn while staying in the dark, beyond the rim of the barn and yard lights. I could see my husband, but he could not see me.
Only last week he had shoved me against the refrigerator, his hands around my neck, choking me. “Why did you do that? I told you that would make me mad!”
Why did I do what? What had made him mad? I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. And really I had done nothing wrong. He had just come home in a bad mood, ready to burn the house down if that was what it took to make him feel better.
Bill had run outside and gathered rocks from the driveway. As if to break up a dogfight from a safe distance, Bill pelted his father with rocks, striking him in the head twice so that he would release his hold on my neck. My son’s aim was perfect. I didn’t get hit once by one of those rocks. I instinctively reached up to my neck at the memory of it. The bruises were yellowing now.
I stared at my husband. He weaved and reached out to grab the lamppost to steady himself. I opened my eyes and tried to make them as big and as dark as the doe’s, tunneling my rage and hatred through the dark and into the light. And into him.
Then something warm covered my back and traveled down my arms to my hands. There was a voice again, not from my head but from behind my left ear.
“Laugh,” it whispered. I felt a warm breath on my neck.
I hesitated. I wasn’t sure of what I heard. Then it came out of the dark again.
Laugh.
So I did. I laughed. It came out of my mouth in a way that my crying never did. It pierced the darkness naturally, hauntingly high like the scream of a bobcat in heat. Suddenly everything seemed funny: my husband, our marriage, life in Olina, and the craziness of my drifting days. I laughed harder, my voice dropping in pitch so that it squalled.
My husband stumbled backward from the post. “Jesus!”
I laughed again. But this time like the raven. With a deep pitch and rattle in my throat. It worked. My husband ran, tripped, fell down, and stumbled back up in his desperation to reach the car. The rumble and then roar of the engine. The tires spitting rocks.
I waited until it was quiet. Stroked Bill’s face and smiled at the fact that he had slept through it. That I had protected him and he didn’t know it. Smiled for myself. I was not crazy There was a voice out there somewhere in the field. I listened, hoping to hear him again, and turned around to see if I could glimpse him. The sun had gone down, and it was completely dark. All I heard was the rustling of grass, but I wasn’t afraid. After fifteen minutes of hearing nothing, I decided to take the first step. I sat up and held out my hand, hoping to feel that warm breath again. Then I called out, “Sweetheart. Mamma’s here.”
1976
HE HAD TAKEN THE STEERING wheel off of the green Oliver tractor but for no other reason than to do it and to give the impression that he was working even if he had been making the same tinkering noise for twenty years. The tractor had started once during their first year on the farm, and John had driven it for a mere ten feet before the engine killed and stayed dead.
“Cracked manifold” was the diagnosis from the local snuff-chewing farm mechanic, and then he named his price for fixing it. Of course John would not pay it then just as he would not pay for it now. His older son had put it in plainer terms not long before he left for Vietnam.
“The engine’s fucked!” his son had called out from a window in the upper level of the barn. “And has been for twenty years! Besides,” his son sneered, his cigarette ash drifting to the grass below, “you wouldn’t know how to drive it anyway. Who do you think you’re foolin’?”
John Lucas stared up with hatred at his son but made no move to go after him. Nothing John did made the kid obey him, and when Jimmy got older, it became dangerous even to try. But as a young boy Jimmy was immune to his father’s punishment. It didn’t matter how many times he told the boy he was stupid or hit him with a belt, the kid just laughed. If Jimmy hadn’t been conceived so early in their marriage, John Lucas would not have considered Jimmy his because there was nothing of the Lucases in his looks except his height. He was dark like his French-Irish mother. Jimmy had her black hair and deep brown eyes, and he could tan up in the summer as brown as an Indian. John grimaced, thinking of their neighbor Ernie Morriseau.
He could hear his wife singing as she hung clothes on the line. He threw the wrench against the wheel and then settled himself down next to the hub to rest. Earlier that day he had purchased a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon. A treat, he told himself, for working so hard at the mill lately. He drank straight from the bottle. Claire’s voice drifted over the top of the barn, and he shifted uncomfortably against the wheel. He had awakened that morning in a strange mood, an almost oily feeling that made his
limbs feel disconnected. He slithered out of bed, and he noticed that his brain felt the same way. It slid inside his skull like kneaded but well-greased bread dough. His head grew heavier as the day went on, as though his brain were expanding. Things he had not remembered for years bubbled up, warm and yeasty. Until his wife began singing something familiar that punctured the bubbles.
“Are you sure she’s not somethin’ else,” his father had whispered, pulling John aside at his wedding reception, “besides being a mick and a frog? And,” his father added, puffing on his cigar, “a little princess?”
John was in love then, proud of his lovely and well-educated wife.
“Shut up, Pa.”
Basil Lucas blinked several times in astonishment, his broad fatback face turning red as though slapped into a hot frying pan.
“Don’t think,” he slurred, repeating what he had grown fond of saying to his tall son, “that I can’t reach up and pull you down, big-shot soldier. Height’s nothin.’ ”
“Here,” John said, grabbing a stein from a passing waiter and pushing his corpulent father down into a nearby chair, “drink another beer and sit tight for a while.”
Basil Lucas downed half his stein and stared after his son dancing with his new wife. “Height’s nothin’!” he roared, and they danced farther away from him, ignoring him. “You gotta have muscle too,” Basil muttered to himself.
John couldn’t figure out why his wife seemed so happy today. He took another drink. What the hell did she have to sing about? At least it wasn’t crying, though. He hated it when she cried, and he remembered her blubbering the day they had taken Jimmy to the bus station. She had only made things worse by doing that, and their son was just doing what other people’s sons had done for hundreds of years. Served their country. Hell, John snorted, feeling the bourbon in his nose, he didn’t have a mother to see him off when he enlisted. Had circumstances been different, he might have been killed too.
God, he had a sudden terrible pain in his head. He put his head between his knees to relieve some of the pressure. He sniffed again, and he thought he smelled blood, and then, oh, God, that was another memory he thought he had buried.
The truth was it never left him. The sight and smell of those blood-soaked bed sheets or how the smell of blood mingled with the odor that was always in their Milwaukee neighborhood, living as they did four blocks away from the Schlitz brewery. That dank primeval smell of blood mixed with the odor of fermenting hops and yeast. Because it was too late to transport her to the hospital, the doctor did what he could in their home. But his mother died in childbirth anyway, the baby girl dying with her as well. He and his sister, Edna, sat on the parlor sofa and listened to the frenzied sounds of footsteps and watched as two neighborhood women ran back and forth from the kitchen to his parents’ bedroom. Then it became quiet except for the low, moaning sobs of the women.
His mother’s labor had come on with sudden force while she was preparing breakfast for eight-year-old John and his younger sister. His mother hadn’t been feeling well for the last month of her pregnancy, but nothing prepared him for her collapse next to the stove and the sight of all that pinkish fluid that flushed out from beneath her skirts followed by a river of blood. He ran to their next-door neighbor, the Krugs, and Gertrude Krug called for Dr. Horowitz before running over to the Lucas house. She sent John to the brewery to get his father, but Basil Lucas sent his son home, saying there was nothing to worry about as women had babies all the time and he was needed more at work than he was at home.
His father remained speechless for a few minutes upon his arrival home hours later. John thought it was grief, the way his father bent over and moaned, smacking his hands against his thighs. But then he started shouting.
He had no wife! How the hell was he supposed to work and raise two kids? “What was wrong with her? What was wrong with you? Why the hell didn’t you do something!” he yelled at the doctor. “She didn’t have any trouble before! They slid out like butter!” How the hell could she do this to him?
Dr. Horowitz stared at Basil Lucas. He was wet with sweat, and the front of his shirt was soaked with blood. If he had not been a medical doctor, John knew Basil Lucas would never have let him in their home because he was Jewish.
“You thickheaded ass!” Horowitz shouted back. “She had high blood pressure! She’s always had high blood pressure, and your son and daughter did not slide out like butter! Your wife had a massive stroke! The placenta detached too soon, and the baby died before it could breathe.”
Horowitz wiped his forehead against his shirtsleeve.
“Mr. Lucas! Mrs. Krug says your wife hadn’t been feeling well for a while. It was not your wife’s fault! Why didn’t you bring her in to see me? She never regained consciousness, the poor woman.”
“Damn it all!” John and his sister heard their father say as Gertrude Krug was pushing them out the door toward her own home. “It was that goddamn baby! A girl! What a waste!”
Gertrude Krug fed John and his sister pork roast with heavy gravy and onions, poured over boiled potatoes. Henry Krug, over his wife’s protest, put two large glasses of lager in front of John and his sister and told them to drink it. His sister refused, hating the taste of beer, but John drank it and was grateful for the numbness it brought him. Henry Krug filled the glass up a second time and a third time until the boy was nearly incoherent. Then they were put to bed, John with the Krug boys and Edna with the Krug girls. He dimly recollected hearing the conversation between Henry and Gertrude Krug float up from the kitchen, as the boys’ bedroom was directly above the kitchen.
“The cheap bastard. He wouldn’t pay for Amelia to go to the doctor.” To which her husband responded, “Enough, Gertie. The man has just lost his wife.”
“Well!” Gertrude Krug cried. “He might not have lost her now, would he, if he’d have dished out some money? You yell about the Jews being cheap? They take better care of their women!”
Rather than mourn his wife, Basil Lucas bore a grudge toward her until he died. It never occurred to John to be angry with his father. In his family’s particular German culture, obedience to a father and a husband was absolute and remained the highest value, above love and respect. His mother had disobeyed her husband by dying. Without his wife, Basil Lucas seemed to forget about things his children needed, such as new socks and decent shoes and boots. He and his sister did without or quietly accepted the clothing neighbors gave them. Their humiliation deepened when their neighbors’ children recognized their own cast-off clothing on the Lucas children and teased them relentlessly. John and his sister stayed miserably silent. His father would not tolerate complaining. In this way he was just like the other working-class German fathers in their neighborhood.
Whenever his father beat him, John cried with anger at his mother. He silently agreed with his father. His mother should have been stronger. His father labored fourteen hours, sometimes eighteen hours a day. The other German women in the neighborhood were as tough as horses, and many of them had more than five children. Why not his mother? It was Basil Lucas’s excuse whenever he thought his children were faltering.
“You’re weak!’ he would yell. “Like your mother! I’m doing this,” he often added, hitting his children with the belt and the belt buckle, “to toughen you up. You won’t make it in this world if you cry all the time!”
In his child’s mind, John concluded that his mother wanted to leave them, and without realizing it, he nursed this thought his entire life. When later asked about his mother, he would feign to have no recollection of her and would simply say she died.
Gertrude Krug and two other neighborhood women took turns cooking the family meals and cleaning the house, having Edna work alongside them so that when his sister turned ten, she became responsible for the housekeeping. Their father continued to work at the Schlitz brewery despite his loud opinions and garrulous nature. Basil Lucas was the physical epitome of the beer-drinking, working-class German man: big-chested, thick-waist
ed, and ham-fisted with graying blond hair and watery blue eyes. Unlike a baker who spends his days so drenched with the smell of sugar and spices and cream fillings that he cannot eat his own creations, Basil Lucas drank his company’s product with pride and as frequently as if it had been water. He puffed on nothing less than Cuban cigars. It was not uncommon for his father to come home from the brewery with a bucket of beer, its sides smeared with butter to keep the foam down. He drank the entire bucket with his heavy meals of pork, sausage, or beef and fried cabbage or potatoes. His skin reflected the basics of his diet, and his red face had the corrugated consistency of a tire tread. He might have retained his pride in being a German had it not been for the backlash and prejudice during the First World War. Basil Lucas bristled anytime his loyalty to America was called into question. He could not have proved his loyalty, as he was just a hair too young to fight in the First World War, but oh, what he would have given to have the chance. He was a fighter. There was no one that could stand up to Basil Lucas’s fist, and he carried out his job as a foreman at the Schlitz brewery just by the threat of that fist.
While Edna maintained their house, John Lucas got a job at the brewery during high school by the force of his father’s will. Basil Lucas did not want anyone to think he favored his own kid, so he worked his son to exhaustion, running errands, filling in for a sick worker in any one of the sections of the brewery. If he made a mistake, his father’s punishment was immediate. Once he hit his son so hard in the head that it nearly shattered his eardrum. John hated working at the brewery. It was the local priest’s intervention that allowed John Lucas to participate in the school sport he loved the most, football. For three nights of the week he trained with his high school football team.
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