Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  Beyond the post office, shadow that changes the day; an overhang supported by four round pillars that extends to the edge of the sidewalk. This is the portico in front of Schommer's Tavern. At the third pillar, a concrete platform projects from the curb out into the street and a tin-covered structure the size of a deep freeze sits on it Near one end is a hand pump converted to power by a yoke and an eccentric, and on the third pillar of the portico, an electrical switch; every family in the village has to visit here at least once a week, even in the blizzards of winter that leave you so numb and astounded they affect only your eyes: Mary Liffert, the widow, arrives with a cylindrical pail equipped with a fitted cover; Dr. Koenig comes slipping down the ice street in a fur cap and fur coat, pulling a red wagon loaded with a five-gallon cream can; the Schonbeck boys, too poor to own a wagon or sled, pair up on a large open bucket, and there are slivers of ice in their drinking water by the time they reach home—the town well, the only place in the village to get potable water. The water tower above the cottonwoods and willows at the end of the block is for fire protection only. My brother once climbed it and peed from its top.

  Between Schommer's and the next cicatrix, Tepke's Hardware, is a narrow alleyway that's excellent to go whooping down before returning home with the water pail, and in it a set of rickety steps leads to the roof of the portico, and from here snowballs can be dropped on people passing by. This leaves you to look out for Leo Rim-sky, who makes up ice balls in winter and hoards them in a freezer in his father's store, and will bean you with a wallop to the back of your head in the middle of August, and those streamers of ice water down your neck then announce the entry of a winter-clinging film you once felt as a world.

  Beyond Tepke's is Rimsky's store, where Leo's father, Leo Sr., a big-headed Russian with a peevish voice that's even more peevish when addressing one of his eleven children, takes the grocery list you've brought from home and checks off each item as he carries it to the counter, while you trail along behind and try to persuade him to give you another slice of halvah from the big brick he keeps cold in his produce case. Rimsky's is the last store on this side of the street. A vacant lot, where a traveling carnival once pitched its tents, stretches from Rimsky's to the end of the block.

  There's a memory of mine, real or imaginary, that goes: walking in sawdust through a tent that smells oily and mildewed, and wishing I'd stayed at home; my mother holding my hand in a manner that makes me feel trapped, too much smoke and noise, and all of the stands and concessions bordered by three-foot canvas curtains I can't see over. Where are my brothers, Charles and Jerome? My mother stops so suddenly I feel a jolt in my arm, and then I look up to where she's looking and see a banner, painted in colors that are cracking away from the cloth, and am sure I haven't read right, but the gaudy drawing above confirms the words:

  25¢ ! ! I SEE THE TWO-HEADED BABY 25¢ ! !

  "What?”

  A smiling man, whom I can see only from the waist up, comes over and puts his hands on the pipe that supports the curtains, and my eyes go into zigzags to take in all of the tattoos needled into his arms. "Just two bits, ma'm," he says.

  "There's no such thing."

  "Sure, ma'm. It's in that box where the curtain is."

  "You're lying. An infant couldn't live in there."

  "Oh, lady, a-heh-heh. It ain't alive."

  "It's not?"

  "Naw. Here. You want to see?"

  I hear curtain rings singing across a rod, and then she grips my hand so tightly I want to cry out, but stop at her changed face.

  "That's diabolical!" she cries.

  "Ah, lady, it's just like your pickles at home."

  “What if a child saw that?"

  "There's many that have, ma'm, and kids, you know, it don't bother one bit. I've let you see now. You want him to?"

  "You should be hanged," my mother says to him, and leads me out of the tent, and I know what it's like not to know when something important is up and exactly what it means to me. Or you. Do you see?

  Across the way is the Town Hall.

  A fluted lintel painted beige, a pair of plate-glass windows— Except for the blank building between the Red Owl and Friedrich's, there, the street is retraced, or at least as completely as it can be for now, and if that building were in place perhaps the right combination would come and cover me white with sleep. The building might have been a shoe-repair shop. I remember standing on that side of the street, watching a man pump a treadle that turned a long axle on which was mounted a series of buffers and grinding wheels—but wasn't there also a creamery there; cream cans moving on metal rollers through a spring-loaded trap door toward a cooling room, a centrifuge spinning two opposed test tubes in a tight circle close to my eyes?

  A shoe-repair shop? He couldn't have been in town more than six months (I don't remember his name), and I'm sure he occupied the former barbershop-feed-store next to Eichelburger's Tavern. Or was the barbershop actually located in the blank building? There's a barber reflected in a mirror (Henry Mueller?), his scissors snipping around my ears and head, a leg pumping, the axle turning at a higher speed, the centrifuge widening into a toe of my shoe field into the bristles, and then as I turn in sleeplessness, or as my mind turns, the aspect of the street is changed. Cars are parked in the vacant lot next to Rim-sky's store and several are flying miniature American flags from their aerial tips. The portico of the tavern is decorated with hunting, and lights have been strung from poles on its decklike roof, where a band is setting up to play the fox-trots and schottisches that will be danced tonight; every farmer in the area must be in town with his family, because the street is lined with people—a sight I've never seen. In all directions, firecrackers of every size and variety are stuttering and whamming non-stop.

  It's the Fourth of July, 1950. I'm six. I was ill a few winters before with rheumatic fever, and had a relapse this spring; the children my age and ones even younger have grown taller and stronger, while I seem to have shrunk, and they're more graceful and well-coordinated. Since the sickness I haven't been allowed to participate in sports, I'm short-winded and frail, my legs are bony, my ribs protrude, and as if to remind me of my condition, my mother has dressed me in shorts. I've been forbidden to compete in the Fourth of July foot-races.

  I watch Dr. Koenig confer with two other men in the open doors of the Town Hall, where the patriotic ceremony has taken place, and then cup his hands to his mouth and shout out that the first race, for boys between the ages of five and nine, is ready to start. The message travels up and down the crowded sidewalk. Dr. Koenig draws a mark across the street with the heel of his shoe, and my brother's classmates and friends—Douglas Kuntz, the two Rimsky brothers. Buddy Schonbeck, Barry Kolb—begin lining up. I've worked free from my mother at the other end of the street, near Bud McCoy's, and now I pull off my shoes, take off my shirt, and trot out to the center of the line. I step next to Rudy Sill, whose teeth are gray-green nubbins from sweets from the cafe, and turn, hoping I'm somewhat hidden if my parents happen to be near, and see I've taken the wrong slot. My brother Charles is next to me. He's my superior by two and a half years, and he looks me over as a stranger might, and says, "What do you think you're doing?"

  "Running."

  "You better not. You know what—"

  Dr. Koenig, with his characteristic flourishes and attempts at conviviality, is walking up and down the line, saying, "Get in your stances, now, boys—any stance you want. I see some of you have got yourselves holes dug and that's just fine. Hey there, young Rimsky, you want to take off your shoes? Oh, you got on tennis shoes. Well. Well, fine, then. O.K., now. Now all you guys know how I call it—'On your marks, get set, go, and you're off. I'm rootin' for you all, I'm wishing every last one of you could win, but whichever comes in first gets five silver dollars, compliments of the merchants and this professional fellow here, too."

  He walks to the side of the line, and somebody at the far end of the street waves a white handkerchief, then pockets it and with
another man pays out a dazzlingly invisible string. A child is pulled up on the sidewalk.

  My brother, who's down in his crouch, says, "I'd hate to be you when Mom finds out."

  "On your marks!"

  Somebody sets off a string of firecrackers and I'm so nervous I nearly bolt.

  "Get set!"

  Frightened, my fear and adrenaline building, I spring forward at the instant Dr. Koenig shouts "Go!"

  A cheer rises from the crowded sidewalks.

  I hear bare feet pounding on dirt and hard breathing, and see I'm staring at three backs instead of a dozen, and one belongs to Buddy Schonbeck, the tallest boy in the lower grades.

  Past Tepke's.

  Past the town pump, breath coming faster.

  Dr. Koenig's, Sill's Cafe.

  Then I hear my mother scream my name, and begin sprinting like a pursued beast, mad and half blind, imagining her at my back. There's a pain in my heart that blossoms through my chest, crowding the space of my lungs, and then the crown of my head detaches itself and wings upward over the crowd, light as a balloon, leaving the last living part of me, the soles of my feet, traveling over the earth.

  Then the string.

  A ribbon and five silver dollars are pressed into my hand like separate gasps or gaps of air I take to be free.

  My brother and the Rimskys insist I be disqualified; I’m pigeon-toed, and they say that the sight of my churning legs, which are bowed, made them laugh so hard they could hardly run; and I ran cockeyed, they say, like a dog trying to throw his ass out of gear so he didn't crap all over the place as soon as he got going hard. But the race is mine, the ribbon and the prize money are mine, and I'm so lightheaded from the exertion and the triumph that when somebody grabs me by the hips, roughly and without warning, and hefts me high above the crowd, it seems that the street before me is also mine, a deserved possession, that the faces of Charles and Jerome and their friends, the cheers of—

  But by now I'm asleep beside you in bed, and for right now, dear one, loved one, loved ones and friends, that's enough.

  One

  1

  BURIAL

  He was awakened from sleep by his head slamming against glass. The train was going into a shuddering turn and his shoulder was crushed against steel. He pushed himself up in the seat, glimpsing his diminishing reflection in the dim glass, and the act of sitting and the sight of himself, gray and unrelated to who he thought he was, drained away his blood and struck him blind for a breath, and he had a hallucination of milkweed parachutes floating from a broken pod. Alcohol. The pain above his right eye was like a needle imbedded there and pressing upward. What was the form that had been so overarching, so vaulted and protective in his dream, as though he'd been sleeping in a cathedral? He pulled a pocket watch from his overalls; he couldn't have slept more than fifteen minutes. Where was the sun?

  The faded velvet of the seat was impregnated with dust, dry and chalklike to his touch, and then his nostrils widened and his brain was blank numb fragments from the bang of a sneeze. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth and the palm of his hand, trying to hold his head steady against the shock and sway of the car, and then took a telegram from his shirt pocket, ironed it smooth over his thigh, and stared at the yellowish strips of paper pasted askew on the telegraph blank.

  MAHOMET NOR DAK

  957 AM SEPT 24 1935

  CHARLES NEUMILLER

  COURTENAY NOR DAK

  DAD PASSED AWAY THIS AM. NEED YOU FOR BURIAL. GOD SPEED YOU.

  AUGUSTINA

  He pressed his fingers against his eyelids, as though the message and the mounting pain it brought could be buried in that internal blackness, where shining tangles of vision shook and uncurled, and his cupped hand made him conscious of the alcohol on his breath. He'd been drunk three times in his life: in 1913, when his first child, Martin, was born; five years later, when the quartet in which he sang bass received a standing ovation at the state S.P.E.B.S.Q.A. convention (that drunkenness was an accident; it was the first time he'd had sloe gin); and yesterday afternoon, when he received the telegram. Except for the nap just now, he hadn't slept since he'd received it. He looked up, and the mural at the end of the empty car, bison outlined against a background of tan, lifted toward him away from the wall, as if to engage the tangle of vision within him, and he shook his head to clear it, feeling a race of emotion he couldn't name.

  At his feet was a faded carpetbag, made a decade ago by his wife, that contained most of his valuable possessions —his suit, a straight razor of German steel, and his portable carpentry tools. A newly set handsaw, wrapped in newspaper, was tied to the carpetbag with twine. He looked out the sooty window and watched the sun, which was still hidden from him, form a hazy arc of light along the horizon, and then light appeared across the plain as if from the earth, from the plain itself, warming his face, and fall colors became visible everywhere over the flat land.

  Familiar landmarks. In the distance, five elms with a windmill beside them, and, beyond the trees, the silvery gray outbuildings of an abandoned farm with an ocher-painted outhouse slanting among them. He leaned his cheek against the window, feeling the race of it again overtake him—what?—as he followed a green line that wound through the gold stubble and dark-brown squares of summer fallow and then went faint at the horizon. Sand Grass Creek. On the other side of Mahomet, to the east, the creek formed a U around his father's farm. The train started slowing down.

  A junk yard flashed past, a patch of sweet com gone to pale stalks, a vacant lot where implements (hayrake, binder, mower with cutter bar lifted) were lined along a snow fence, one home, a grain elevator, and then, close to the tracks, a long wall of echoing stone—the rear of the old slaughterhouse. He put away the telegram and went onto the rocking platform between cars, a treadle above a cataract, and the shattering noise and cold air, coming in such a rush, sent a constriction around his stomach; he gagged up wine-flavored saliva, closed his eyes, gagged again. There was a shrieking of steel on steel, a smell of rusty steam, and then the train nearly came to a stop, and he started down the metal stairs and was thrown off balance as, with a clangor of couplings, it stopped for good.

  He stepped onto a platform of railroad ties, down a distance from a yellow depot, and heard the bell on the engine banging and then a release of steam beside him as the train began to move. A sign hanging from the eave of the depot's porch read "MAHOMET," which was to him, Charles Neumiller, home. Two men were on a bench beside the open door, beneath the porch, and when they saw him they stood; one of them—Charles believed he recognized the son of the most recent manager of the coop elevator; he could hardly concentrate for the noise of the train—turned away and took off on a trot. The other stood as though waiting, and then moved in his direction. It was Clarence Popp, tall and shambling and bent-shouldered, with a flat, mask-like face and a long lantern jaw perpetually covered with copper-colored stubble. Clarence had once worked as a hired man for the Neumillers and was Charles's age but was closer to Charles's father. How did Clarence continue to survive, Charles wondered. He was sacristan and unretired altar boy at the church, but hadn't had regular work for several years and lived by himself at the edge of town in a wrecked caboose he'd patched up and somehow made habitable; yet he always appeared healthy, and always had liquor on hand.

  "Chuck," Clarence said, and took his hand, and Charles realized that Clarence was perhaps the only one in the world who would call him, Charles, such a taciturn, solemn-countenanced, and decorous man, "Chuck" and not consider the irony in it. Clarence frowned. One of his eyes was smaller than the other, and it gave him a curiously discerning but defenseless look, as though an orphan of five were peering out from within him. "Or I guess I should call you Charles now," Clarence said. "I heard about the telegram going out and thought you might be on this train. There's not much a person can say at these times except you have my sympathy. You have. I'm terribly sorry. I thought a lot of your dad."

  "Yes."

&nbs
p; "Was the end difficult, do you know?"

  "I haven't talked to Augustina."

  "I haven't seen Augustina myself in a while."

  "Who brought the telegram in?"

  "I hear she walked in herself. A crime, a real crime, and now her out there all alone, by dammit, the poor woman. I hadn't seen your dad, either, in—I don't know—three weeks at the least, I guess. He was poorly, and Augustina and I had the agreement that when he was poorly I wouldn't come out—you know, the drinking. Your dad, of course, he wouldn't come to town. He hasn't set foot in this place in a year, and I don't blame him. The way he was being talked about, well, it'd burn your ears off."

  "Then I'd rather you let mine be."

  "People talking behind his back, blaming him for things he couldn't have had a hand in, and the worst going on like he was responsible for even the dust storms! Jesus! Pardon," Clarence added, and blushed under his stubble; he knew how Charles was about profanity. Then, in a wondering tone, "Lord, how long has it been since I've seen you. Chuck?”

  Charles shrugged, aware that his hair had grayed in the last year and a half and that his face, as deeply lined as his father's, was hollow-cheeked and colorless from alcohol.

  "I was out to Dad's this summer but didn't see anybody in town."

  "It must be four years."

  "It must."

  "Will Marie or any of the kids be coming in?"

  "No."

  "No? Why not?"

  "Martin, Elaine, and Vince are away at college, and it would be too hard on Marie to bring all the little ones. She might be with child again."

  "Huh. That will make—how many then—eight"

  "Nine."

  "That's quite a family, Charles."

  "It is."

  Clarence raised the brim of his engineer's cap and shifted his heavy shoes. His yellow braces, both of which held N.R.A. buttons, were faded and frayed, and his trousers were split over the thighs, showing skin. "Who'll be saying the funeral Mass, I wonder. We haven't had a priest in town for three years now, you know."