by T. C. Boyle
The boy was wearing a loose black satin tie and long trailing smock, in imitation of Frank, though it promised to be another hot day. He’d been deep in his work and he gave her a look of utter bewilderment, as if he’d suddenly lost the capacity to speak, snatching a quick glance at his drawing before he flushed and got to his feet. “He was here earlier, with Brodelle, an hour ago maybe—”
“Where is Emil?”
A duck of the head. “He said he was going to go riding before lunch—and work late, of course, to make up for it—”
She waved a hand in dismissal. “If you’d tell Billy to bring the motorcar round—I need to go into the village and I won’t be gone an hour. It’s very urgent.” He was already at the door, a scramble of limbs and the scrape of his shoes, when she called out to him. “I won’t be taking the children.” She hesitated a moment, watching his face—he was still flustered but anxious to please, a good boy, malleable, likable. “Would you look in on them—if it’s not too much trouble?”
The sun was already baking the flagstones of the courtyard as Billy held the door for her and she climbed into the car, everything still and peaceful and not the hint of a breeze. Billy was in his work clothes, as clean and precise and neat as he always was, no matter the job or its demands or how grease-stained and mud-caked his fellow workers might have been. He tipped his hat to her as he slid behind the wheel—“Looks to be another scorcher,” he said and she answered that it certainly did—and that was the last thing she said until he pulled up in front of the Western Union office and she instructed him to wait there for her. She’d wanted to confide in him, but the thought of the scene in the kitchen was too humiliating, too overwhelming, to confide to anyone. She’d had a shock, that was it. And she wasn’t over it yet.
It took her two minutes to compose the telegram—COME AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE STOP SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAS HAPPENED—and then she paid the man, got in the car and had Billy drive her back to Taliesin, trying to stay calm, telling herself that this crisis would pass as they all invariably did and that Frank would be there to support her, as he’d always been and always would be.174
When Billy turned in off the main road, she watched the house emerge from its frame of trees, a house more precious and exquisite than anything in Tuscany or Umbria or anywhere else—the sky above and Frank’s creation below, every detail spun out of his head and for her, for her—and it made her glad and proud too. And it calmed her, just the sight of it, because there was no place she’d rather be. It was home. She was home. And as Billy shifted gears to climb the hill she felt a stab of nostalgia so powerful the tears came to her eyes, but she was quick to dab them with her handkerchief and avert her face so Billy wouldn’t notice. It was nerves, that was all.
She sent Herbert to tell the cook that she and the children would be taking lunch separately out on the screened-in porch and that the workmen would be served in the dining room, and Herbert bobbed back almost immediately to say that the cook was asking how many they’d be. She was seated at her desk, rereading a paragraph she’d already read twelve times over, feigning normalcy—everything was on an even keel, nothing amiss, and she wanted them all to believe that, even Carleton—and she looked up and counted them off on her fingers. “Well, let’s see,” she said, “Brodelle’s here somewhere, isn’t he?”
“He’s back at his desk, yes.”
“All right: Emil and you, and Brunker and Lindblom—that makes four. And Billy makes five.”
“And Billy’s kid.”
“Ernest.” She smiled. “He’s busy learning his father’s trade, is he? I hope he’ll keep up his studies when school starts up again in the fall—there’s no substitute for a good education, wouldn’t you agree?”
He shuffled and stammered a bit, but certainly he agreed—that was the whole point of his being here at Taliesin under the hand of Mr. Wright—and of course, he’d appreciated the gift of The Woman Movement , which he was finding very . . . stimulating.
She thanked him. Told him he was very kind. And thanked him too for acting as go-between for her and the cook—she wasn’t feeling very well and her work had reached a critical stage . . .
He nodded. He was standing at the door, looking only to escape.
“Oh, by the way,” she added, “I think we can expect Mr. Wright back this evening.” She picked up her pen, idly tracing over a notation in the margin of the page. “I just thought you and Emil might want to know.”
Then it was lunch. She’d steeled herself—the thought of seeing Carleton, let alone have him there serving at table, made her stomach turn, but she had to appear as if everything was normal. For everyone’s sake. There was no point in upsetting the children—or the workmen either. Or the Carletons, for that matter. She’d had enough upset for one day and she was determined to get through with the meal without exacerbating the situation.
She led John and Martha out onto the porch—“I want to eat with Ernest,” John kept whining. “Why can’t I eat with Ernest?”—seated them at the table and then took her own place. “Not today,” was all she said in response, and she didn’t mean to be curt but she saw no need to involve the children in this—she wanted them with her, she needed them there, and that was enough—and so she turned to Martha and said, “You know, Martha, that truly is a pretty dress. And so lightweight too, perfect for this weather. Aren’t you glad now that we picked it out together?”
And then Carleton was there with his face of iron and his inflexible posture and his gaze on the furniture, the floor, the tray he set down with the faintest mockery of his usual flourish, never daring to lift his eyes to hers or the children’s or to utter one single word. There was soup to start, a vegetable broth into which Gertrude had diced red peppers from the garden, along with paper-thin slices of pork she’d rubbed with sage and then marinated in vinegar and lime oil. It was delicious. But John, always a choosy eater, turned up his nose at it. “Mama,” he said, pinching his voice, “do I have to eat this?”175
Well, corn wasn’t cane and this place was no island you could walk across in a day from shore to shore but a glowering dark limitless prison he wanted no part of, not anymore, and he came up out of that cornfield where he could smell the hot reek of the earth that was nothing but spilled blood and shit and the bone meal of all the men and animals that had ever lived atop it and went into the house and washed his hands and slipped into his white service jacket as if he’d been born to it. Service. He’d show them service. The kind they never expected. Because they didn’t know a thing about him and they didn’t know how he’d squatted over his heels and smelled the raw earth while the cornstalks stabbed all around him like ten thousand spears and he learned and studied and talked to the sky and the voice in his head until he had no choice.
The first thing was the windows to the courtyard where the men would be.
Fifteen minutes to twelve noon and he ghosted round outside, nobody in sight, and nailed those windows to the sills with a fistful of two-penny nails and the mallet end of the hatchet he’d found on a shelf in the automobile stall where the roofers had left it behind for him. He recognized it as something he required as soon as he saw it lying there in a whole farrago of forgotten things, a ball of twine, half a dozen rusted cans full of nails and bolts and woodscrews, a dried-up tin of shoe polish and a jar with the talons of a hawk preserved in it and the whole business sprinkled over with bits of straw and a black rice of rat turds. Or mouse. He’d brushed it off with a flick of his hand and then tried it for balance and it was just right, the closest thing to a tomahawk he could find. Brodelle. He thought of Brodelle with the blade of it cleaving his head just the way the naked Indians would have given it to him when they were in possession of the land and whole boatloads of Brodelles came with their whey-faced women to take it away from them and build their big yellow houses and drive down everything and everybody till there was nothing left but hate and want and sickness. It was his. And he kept it under his pillow. For a time like this.
/> Next was the kitchen and Gertrude with her puffed-up eye and crusted-over lip giving him a wary look and telling him de mistress and her chillun gone take dey refreshment down de screen porch and she already ladling out the soup and the aroma of it rising to his nostrils so that he had to swallow down the saliva, thinking how right they were to separate themselves like that. “Be quick about it, woman,” he said, and then the three white china bowls were balanced on the silver tray and he was elevating the tray on the platform of his spread black fingers, all the while imagining the three white faces—the woman movement herself and her pale little grubs—bent over their good Bajan soup. Slurping. Commenting on the weather. The books they were reading. Dolls and horses and the geese by the lake and the peacocks caught on the eaves like individual bursts of God-given flame. And the boy like a grub. And the girl. And her. Get out! she’d screamed. You get out! I’m giving you your notice.
He steeled himself because he had to be hard and this was the hardest part of it, going in there on that screened porch and facing her after what she’d said to him, what she’d done, interfering, meddling, thrusting in her cheap whorish opinions when they weren’t wanted or needed or called for in any way save the devil’s way, but he balanced the tray on one hand all down the corridor and out across the paving stones and pulled open the door with the other and set down the white ceramic bowls without drawing a spare breath and then he went back to the kitchen and balanced six more bowls on the tray and went into the close little twelve-foot-square dining room with its big wooden table and lobster-trap chairs and that was hard too. Because Brodelle was there. Brodelle, who’d called him a black nigger son of a bitch to his face and who was ready to laugh at him, who was laughing at him even as he set down the bowls and never looked a one of them in the eye and backed out the door to go see to the mistress for the last and final time.
He wouldn’t be needing the serving tray, not this time, and he let it fall to the flagstones of the loggia with a clapclatter of silver metal and took up the only tool he’d ever need again. Were his thoughts racing? Yes, sure they were, but not in the way of a thinker or mathematician or an architect in the helter-skelter of conception or even a rabbit with the fox at its throat, but in the detached way of a soldier under fire. He saw every detail as if it had been segregated just for him. He saw the cracks between the stones and the weeds struggling there, saw the yellow stucco like the stippled skin of the beast that was the house, saw the screened porch at the end of the passage and the three figures held in abeyance there behind the dark grid of the screen even as a hand rose like a dream hand or a head bobbed on the verge of invisibility. He heard their voices, her voice: “There,” she was saying, “that wasn’t so awful, was it?” And his: “Was so.” And her: “You liked it, John. Admit it—”
And then he came through the door, moving so swiftly he surprised himself, and she looked up this time, this time she saw him, this time her eyes locked on his at the very moment the hatchet came in one savage furious stroke that went in at the hairline and let loose all the red grease of her brains, gray grease and pink grease, and it was on his bleached white jacket like a kind of devil’s rain. The boy was next. Before he could react, before the knowledge of what was happening there in front of him could settle into his eyes, the hatchet came down again, twice, and he was dead and twitching even as the girl jumped up and ran till he hit her just behind the right ear, one time, two, three, until she was down on the stone crawling like a grub and her face turned to him now, grub-pale, with her eyes open so that he had to hit there again with the flat of it to crush the cheekbone and shut them for good.
The gasoline. He had the big canister of it right there, ready to hand—“Mr. Weston,” he’d said to the dishwater man not thirty minutes ago, “may I have some of that automobile fuel to work the spots out of the rug in the living room, that one with all the swirls and patterns on it?” and the dishwater man had said yes, go ahead, he didn’t care—and he sloshed that gasoline over the two of them at the table and the one that had made it out the door and was still alive and working, her legs against the stone floor, and dropped a lit match on it and heard the sudden harsh sucking sound it made.
Quick now, quick—make a job of it. He ran as fast as his lungs and legs would take him to where the men were boasting and laughing and sucking the soup his wife had cooked between their teeth and he bolted into the kitchen through the courtyard door and jammed a wedge of wood under it so no man, even Achilles himself, could have pushed it open. Gertrude might have called out his name, but he gave her one look—one look and two words through his clenched teeth: “Save yourself”—and then he let the gasoline flow out under the door, the whole canister of it and the rugs in the hall already soaked through with it and here was the match, cousin to the last one, and he dashing out his door to the courtyard and the single exit he’d already shut and barred against any man or boy with his clothes aflame and trying to escape. Quick. Quick. The second canister propped there beside the door and gone up in an instant. He could hear them inside, cursing, screaming, shouting like the damned in their hellfire, hear them pounding at the immovable door—shrieks, raw shrieks as alive as the skin that was blistering off their flaming white faces—and then there was the sharp celebratory explosion of the glass of the window and the first of them to come hurtling through it to meet the hatchet, which rose high and higher and fell on them each in turn with all the force of his killing arm and the gravity behind it and it was no more troublesome than splitting shingles.
They were dead as they came through the window and now the flaming rectangle of the door, dead or stunned, the stunned ones rolling on the ground with their clothes aflame, as if that would do them the least lick of good, and he struck them again and again as they rolled and dodged and put up their hands to try to protect themselves where they were most vulnerable. There was a method to this. An order. An efficiency. And he wanted, above all, to be efficient. Three blows for the dishwater man, the hatchet spinning so that it was the flat that brought him down and not the blade, and the boy too, but Brodelle—black nigger son of a bitch—he split him open like a wiener on the grill, the same as Mamah, and the fat man too and he went after the other boy, Fritz, but Fritz was rolling, rolling, and every board and fiber of the house in an uproaring lit-bright pandemonium of flame.
Later, he was sick. Later, it burst out of both ends of him and he knew they’d be coming for him with their dogs and the noose braided for lynching and if he ran out into the fields he’d have no say in the matter because he would just be their bait. How he got down into the cellar beneath the inferno of the house he couldn’t have said. And he couldn’t have said either why he didn’t just stand there and let the burning joists fall to crush him and the flames to devour him, because he was done now, all the rage purged out of him as if it had never been there at all. He gave a thought for Gertrude—they’d make her pay and she didn’t deserve any part in it—but it was a thought that flitted by and vanished in the instant her sorrowful face materialized in his brain. A flame was as light as air, and yet the frame of that architect’s house couldn’t withstand the weight. Brands fell round him. Everything shrieked and groaned, unholy noise, the structure rattling and striking out against the death that had come to embrace it. He opened the door of the furnace that had boiled the water for the dead of the house. It was cool inside. Or cooler, anyway. He got in there with the thick glass bottle he’d saved for last, the caustic to kill him before they did, muriatic acid and the triple X and the skull and crossbones to warn them off. He pulled the steel door closed against the roar and the chaos. It was black, purely black, not the thinnest tracery of light to be seen in any direction. They would never find him here.
CHAPTER 8 : ALL FALL DOWN
Lunch. A sandwich from the restaurant, a moment to relax with the newspaper—umbrage in the Balkans and the guns thundering across the Continent, and what next, the Archduke rising up out of his coffin on angel’s wings?—before he went
back to wrangling with Waller over money and Iannelli over the sprites, because the Italian, understandably but maddeningly, was balking at delivering the rest of the statuary without payment in hand or at least guaranteed. The sandwich was good, first-rate—Volgelsang really knew his business, give him credit there—and the newspaper was sufficiently lurid and bloody for even the most jaded reader, but Frank couldn’t help keeping one eye on John,176 who was at the far end of the room, up on the scaffolding, applying a wet brush to the polychromatic mural behind the bar. A pretty picture that, and John as precise and unerring a worker as his father himself. Details, details. This room, the tavern, was Waller’s number one priority and never mind the glories of opening night with Max Bendix and his hundred-piece orchestra sawing gloriously away and Pavlova pirouetting across the stage and all the rest, he was bleeding money through his pores till the beer started flowing right here, out of these dry and thirsty taps. (“I don’t give a damn about murals or sprites or anything else,” Waller kept telling him. “I just want the place finished and the tables full. Beer. I just want beer.”)
Of course, it was an insult, and he was determined to see the design realized in its every last particular if he was going to draw another breath on this earth, but he could hardly be blamed for the delays at this point. He took another bite of the sandwich. Lifted the glass of ice water to his lips. It was hot. Damnably hot. He thought of Taliesin then, of the lake, and how he’d give anything to throw off his shirt, trousers and shoes and plunge into the cool opaque depths of it and maybe give the fish a run for the money. He was thinking of that, of the fish and how Billy Weston’s son had pulled a catfish as long as his arm out of there just a week ago—an amazing thing, really, with its big yellow mouth gaping wide as if to suck in all the air in the valley and the barbels twitching and the tiny dots of its blue-black eyes that hardly seemed sufficient to take in the incandescent world that had loomed up on it so precipitately—when the stenographer from the main office suddenly burst through the door, looking as if she’d had all the blood drained out of her in a scientific experiment. He was going to comment on that, make a joke of it, a quip about the heat and how it was a leading cause of anemia in women under thirty, but her face warned him off. “Mr. Wright,” she said, out of breath, running sweat, paler than the stack of paper she kept to hand beside her typewriter, “you’re wanted on the telephone. Long distance. From Spring Green.”