by Andre Dubus
Contrition
AFTER SCHOOL Paul and Eddie walked fast; it was a cold January day, the sky had been growing darker all afternoon, and they could feel rain coming on the wind. They crossed themselves as they passed the Cathedral; then they were walking by the Bishop’s huge house, with its iron fence; on his lawn pines and live oaks thrashed in the wind.
‘I’m going to learn an instrument,’ Eddie said.
Paul looked up at him, and then at the cars driving with their lights on. The whole town seemed to be hurrying home before the winter rain. He thought of Eddie going to a woman’s house and taking piano lessons and at the end of the year playing in a recital, taking his turn among girls in velveteen dresses with barrettes in their hair.
‘I talked to Brother Eugene yesterday.’
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘I thought about it during vacation, and I talked to my folks about it.’
‘You’d take lessons at school? And be in the band?’
‘I couldn’t be in the band for a while. It’s mostly just high school boys. But maybe by the eighth grade.’
Eddie was walking faster, looking up at the sky and the trees blowing above the rooftops. In the third grade, when they had both entered Cathedral, Paul had chosen Eddie as his friend. Paul was short and thin and often pressed a handkerchief to his sniffling hayfevered nose. Eddie was taller, but like Paul he moved with caution among the other boys, his voice seemed bent on silencing itself, and his gestures were close to his body as though apologizing for the space he occupied. At recess he and Eddie drank Cokes together, and on the athletic field they watched each other’s failures. Paul believed they could endure grammar school together and by the time they reached high school they would change or the world would change. He did not know precisely how. At Cathedral the boys started in the third grade and went through the twelfth and sometimes when he thought of that he saw himself and Eddie unchanged and outcast until finally they crossed the stage wearing caps and gowns. But most of the time he believed when they reached high school the days would no longer cost so much of fear and patience and hope.
‘We better hurry,’ Eddie said, and started to run. They were a block from his house when the rain fell hard and cold, and their faces dripped and they shivered as they stomped into the kitchen where Mrs. Kirkpatrick was moving toward the door, wearing an overcoat and scarf.
‘I was just going to get you,’ she said, and kissed Eddie. Susan was sitting at the table, and she was smoking. ‘Paul, you’d better call your mother and tell her I’ll take you home. We’ll have hot chocolate.’ She hugged Eddie. Paul hung his jacket on a hook by the door and, rubbing his hair with his handkerchief, he secretly watched Susan who was sixteen and pretty, with hair that was light brown, almost blonde, the color of Eddie’s, and bright red lips and fingernails. He watched her inhaling, and he tingled with guilt and delightful fascination for the secret and forbidden. One Saturday afternoon as Paul and Eddie were walking home after a Red Ryder movie Eddie said he had gone upstairs yesterday and found Susan and his mother smoking in Susan’s room and they had told him not to tell his father because he would be hurt. Eddie told this with the worried, conspiratorial tone of someone confiding a sin. Now here was Susan, and he looked at her brown Philip Morris pack on the table and the cigarette in her hands, then he moved through the kitchen, into the hall, toward the phone.
In the Kirkpatrick house there seemed to be only the one secret, and it was kept from Eddie’s father in a lovingly collusive way, like a gift. Eddie had said he told his father about everything that bothered him: how unhappy he was at school when they had to play football and then basketball and then softball. In Paul’s house everyone was a secret. One Saturday evening last summer his parents had gone out; it was twilight when they left and Paul was in the back yard; he was lying under the fig tree, pretending he was the last Marine alive on Wake Island, when he heard the car doors slam and the engine start. He crawled out from under the tree and ran around to the front yard, to the driveway, but they were gone, they were at the end of the block, and he watched the tail lights as his father braked and then drove on. His sisters were inside the house but he did not go in. He went back to the fig tree and lay under it, in the darkness and sadness under the wide leaves. Always before his parents went out they kissed him and his sisters. Now he lay unkissed, and thinking of the back of the car as it drove away he began to cry. In the sweet luxury of tears he pressed his face into the grass until he heard the back door close. He lay quietly. In the pale dying light Barbara came across the lawn; she approached him and walked past the tree and stood with her back to him. She was looking up at the sky. Then he saw that she was crying. At first she cried quietly, but then she began to moan and sob. Finally she wiped her face with her hands and went sniffing past him and into the house. He waited a while then left his tree, his tears, his foxhole; from the top of the tree a mockingbird screamed at him.
The memory of Barbara that summer night was pleasurably mysterious, and often when he thought of her he saw her weeping at the sky. There were other memories he kept in his heart like old photographs. His father rarely talked at home, but when friends came for drinks Paul lay on his bed and listened to the drone of the women at one end of the room and the loud talk of the men at the other and, above it all, his father. He heard his father tell stories about when he was first married and he was a surveyor for the utilities company he still worked for; now he was a district manager. His father had worn a holstered .22 Colt Woodsman and shot cottonmouths in the rice fields. Once one of the crew caught a king snake and carried it in a paper bag until they found a cottonmouth; he threw the king snake on it and the crew watched the fight; listening to his father’s voice through the wall he could see the twining snakes and the cottonmouth’s slow death. A man who owned the land they were surveying told his father to get off and said his company was nothing but a bunch of crooked sons of bitches anyway and his father knocked him down. Once they had to deal with a Negro and when the talking was done the Negro offered his hand and his father took it. In the car one of the crew said: You shook his hand. His father said: And if I hadn’t, then who would have been the gentleman?
His father often said children should be seen and not heard and at times it seemed that Paul’s silence made him invisible too and he could listen like a spy. On an afternoon last summer he sat petting his yellow dog Mike. He sat on the bottom step of the back porch and his father and mother sat on the top step. His father had finished mowing the lawn and Paul smelled his sweat and the beer he was drinking and the smell of clean dog and freshly cut grass; Mike turned on his back and grinned while Paul scratched his belly. Above Paul his parents were murmuring, and with his fingers on Mike’s ribs he concentrated all of himself into one ear, and the muted sound of their voices became words.
‘I’m afraid to,’ his mother said.
‘We can use rubbers.’
‘Don’t talk that way.’
He heard his father’s Zippo, then smelled the smoke. It was all he smelled in the air now. His father and mother sat quietly behind him.
When he returned to the kitchen from calling his mother, Mrs. Kirkpatrick was stirring chocolate on the stove. They were drinking it when the front door opened; Susan put her cigarettes in her purse and Mr. Kirkpatrick came in; he was a slender, gentle man whose posture was slightly stooped. He greeted them all and spoke of the rain and tousled Eddie’s hair, then made himself a drink and joined them at the table.
‘I told Paul I’m going to take an instrument.’
‘What do you think of that, Paul?’
Mine’s better, he thought, looking at Mr. Kirkpatrick’s kind brown eyes with crinkled corners and seeing his father’s ruddy face and blue eyes and thin wavy hair, nearly black now though his mother said when she met him it was blond curls; seeing his father’s broad shoulders and deep hairy chest and hairy arms and hearing the gruff voice; he was shy with all fathers, he went each year in dread to the Ro
tary father and son luncheon where, in turn, he had to stand on a chair and speak his name to the upturned faces; yet he wasn’t shy with Mr. Kirkpatrick, he felt with him now the stirrings of relief, felt drawn to him as though by trust and love, and he wanted to say: Music is for sissies; he wanted to say: Susan smokes; he wanted to say: I could beat up Eddie; and he wanted to show them he could.
‘I guess it’s all right,’ he said.
‘You should do it too,’ Susan said. ‘Y’all could learn together.’
‘Maybe I will,’ he said.
Next day the sun and a cold wind dried the earth and after school Paul and Eddie talked to Brother Eugene. He was tall and kept pushing his glasses up on his nose, and his black robe smelled of chalk dust where he had wiped his hands. They told him they wanted to learn the trumpet but he said they should take the French horn. He took them up the wooden stairs to the second floor and unlocked the bandroom and showed them a French horn. He said if they learned to play it they could easily play the trumpet and cornet as well; but they should learn the French horn because the band had all the trumpet players it needed for years to come but soon there would be a shortage of French horns. If they worked hard they could start playing in the regular band in two years when they were only in the seventh grade; they would wear uniforms and go on band trips to play at football games and they would march in the homecoming parade and Mardi Gras parade and many colleges gave band scholarships. He raised the horn to his lips and blew a series of notes.
When Paul got home he told his mother and sisters. Amy said Maybe he’d be a famous trumpet player like Harry James, Barbara said It might be nice and his mother said It was very exciting but they would have to wait and see what Daddy said. She made cinammon toast and a pot of tea and they all sat at the kitchen table. When his father came home Paul listened through the closed kitchen door to him and Mike. From windows he had watched Mike greeting his father as he emerged from his car, his father’s near-scowling face suddenly laughing as the dog ran to him and leaped up at him, his father crouching and pushing Mike back with gentle slaps, Mike growling and wagging his tail and barking, jumping again and again to his father’s hands and loving voice. Now in the living room they were laughing and growling, and they came into the kitchen, Mike following through the swinging door, and his father’s sweeping glance quizzical in the silence which he then broke with hello, kissed Paul’s mother, poured bourbon and water, and went to the living room to read the evening paper.
Usually at supper his mother and sisters talked about school and the nuns or a dress his mother was making for one of them or about other things that Paul paid no attention to while he ate. But that night they were quiet and he knew they were waiting for him. Mike came to watch them and his father said: ‘Mike, you know better than that. Go back to the living room. Go on.’
Mike went back and lay on the rug, watching them.
‘Paul?’ his mother said. ‘Did anything new happen at school today?’
Paul looked at her urging brown eyes. Then his father said: ‘Why should anything new happen?’
Watching his mother he saw that the question was to her.
‘I don’t know,’ his mother said. ‘It can’t be the same every day.’
Barbara was watching him. He looked at her and said: ‘It’s pretty much the same every day.’
When they finished eating, his father took a piece of ham to the living room and dropped it between Mike’s paws.
That night Paul lay in the dark in his room adjacent to the living room and listened to them through the wall. He knew it was eleven o’clock because his father had finished reading. Every week he read The Saturday Evening Post, Time, Collier’s, The Reader’s Digest, Life, and a mystery or a book by a golf pro. While he read Mike slept beside his chair and now and then his father’s hand lowered, with stroking fingers, to Mike’s head. At eleven o’clock he slept.
‘Paul wants to take the French horn.’
‘Where’s he going to take it? To the picture show?’
‘He’s serious about it.’
‘Who, him? Who talked him into it?’
‘Nobody did. Eddie’s going to start, and they’ve talked it over, but I’m sure Eddie didn’t—’
‘Ah: Eddie. When was all this?’
‘Today.’
‘Today. All of a sudden he’s a musician. Did you ever hear that boy say he wanted to be a musician till now?’
‘Well there has to be a first day for everything.’
‘Why didn’t he tell me himself? Is that what all that monkey business was about at supper?’
‘He was afraid to.’
‘Afraid to? Did he tell you that?’
‘No, he—’
‘Did he ask you to ask me?’
‘No, I just—’
‘Why is my son afraid of me? Can you tell me that? I’ve spanked that boy three times in ten years. What’s he afraid of?’
‘He’s very sensitive.’
‘Sensitive. If he’s so sensitive why doesn’t he know—Never mind: do they have the horns at school?’
‘You have to buy one.’
‘Buy one.’
‘Or maybe rent one.’
‘Or maybe rent one. Goddamn.’
‘It means a lot to him. He’ll be in the high school band. Maybe he can get a college scholarship.’
‘Goddamn,’ his father said.
At breakfast his father was reading the paper. Paul waited. He had finished his oatmeal and milk and toast, the girls had gone to brush their teeth, his mother was putting the dishes in the sink, and finally he rose to leave too when his father lowered the paper and looked at him.
‘What’s this your mother tells me about a French horn?’
The blue eyes were gazing into his and he could see in them the silence when he and his father were trapped together in a car, and the relief he felt at all his father’s departures and the fear at his arrivals.
‘I decided not to,’ Paul said. ‘It costs too much.’
‘Wait a minute: that’s not what I asked. Do you want to play the horn?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Son, I can buy a horn; I can borrow for that. Do you or don’t you want to learn to play it.’
‘Yesterday you wanted to,’ his mother said, and he looked at her. She quickly nodded her head, then gestured with it toward his father, then nodded again. In one of his frequent daydreams he was captured by a band of amazons and taken to a tropical island where they lived; they were tall and lovely and they fed him and cared for him and he could not leave. There was some threatening yet attractive mystery about them too, as if they all shared a secret and it had to do with him; perhaps one morning they would tie him to an altar and sacrifice him to the sun; his heart plucked out, his soul would rise above the beautiful women. He wished he were with them now.
‘Yes, I’d like to.’ he said.
‘All right,’ his father said, the paper rising into place again; then from behind it he muttered: ‘Why didn’t you say so.’
Paul stood there until he was sure his father was reading again and was not waiting for an answer.
Twice a week Paul and Eddie arrived at school carrying their cased horns bumping against their legs and in the afternoon, after an hour’s lesson, walked home with them. Paul was a victim of newspaper and magazine cartoons. Why hadn’t he’d thought of the size of the horn? In cartoons only the inept carried large instruments, usually tubas, and their practicing made cats and dogs howl, neighbors shout, close windows, throw old shoes. Now when he walked home carrying the horn, he was no longer anonymous: anyone driving by could see what he was. After supper he went to his room and closed the door and tried to play the notes. The horn was silver with a shiny brass bell and holding it and depressing its valves smelling of oil he wished he could give it the love it deserved. His father had brought it home and opened the case on the dining room table and displayed for Paul and his sisters and mother the horn nestled in red felt. A h
undred dollars, he said; I hope it’s worth it. Oh let’s don’t talk about money, Paul’s mother said; I hate the dirty old stuff. Two days later Eddie’s father bought a used horn, a gold one with two dents on the bell, and Paul felt deceived.
Sitting in his room he looked at the notes on the page; they made no sense to him. He began to hate the notes themselves, the way they sat inscrutable and arrogant on the stern bars which he didn’t understand either. At times he thought he was simply stupid; he would have preferred that to the truth which sometimes surfaced in his mind: that while he and Eddie sat before Brother Eugene tapping the music sheets with his baton, tapping their horns with his baton, sometimes tapping their knuckles and hands with his baton, Paul was not there: he watched himself looking at the notes; he listened to himself trying to blow them; and all the time he was in suspension, waiting. He was waiting for something to happen. One afternoon he would all at once love the horn, he would know and love the notes, and his lips would blow sweet silver. Or one day someone would steal his horn. Or the school would burn to the ground or Brother Eugene would drop dead.
On the first night he practiced at home his father said it sounded like a bullfrog. Paul said it was hard to get the lips right. He played every night for the first two weeks, making sounds that had nothing to do with the notes he glared at on the sheet, wanting to cross them out with a pencil, to gouge them with its point. For the first time in his life he was living a public lie. With his father he had lived a lie for as long as he could remember: he believed his father wanted him to be popular and athletic at school, so Paul never told him about his days. But now the lie had spread: it touched his mother and Amy and Barbara and Brother Eugene and even Eddie. He hated the lie, not for its sin but for its isolation; and every Tuesday and Thursday he carried the horn to school as though it were a dead bird; and in the afternoons he climbed the stairs with Eddie to the band room and to Brother Eugene’s growing impatience; then entering his house he put the horn on the closet floor, wanting to kick it, and at supper he answered questions about his music lessons. After two weeks of practicing at home his father asked him, the gruff voice trying to be gentle and bantering, if he’d practice when he came home from school, not at night. As lovely as the French horn is, his father said, it wasn’t meant to accompany reading.