Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  She began laying more logs on the fire, ignoring his offers to help, and saying, "Shoo! Shoo!" to him in a tone that was almost playful and, for some reason, made him blush. Then she stood with her back to the flames, facing him, and opened her palms at her sides to catch the heat.

  He couldn't see, from the sofa, the expression on her face, and it was impossible to know if she'd heard.

  "I sleep light," she said, and left the room.

  The floorboards above him groaned and creaked and gave out cracking sounds in the cold, and he tried to visualize Alpha above him, and when he did, so vividly, tried not to. He said three Hail Marys. His boyhood prayers, so familiar they no longer seemed constructed of language, went flying through his thoughts with the speed of an express. He discovered that there were five buttons on his shirt and ran his fingers down them, gripping each as he said a Hail Mary, and then ran his fingers up them— a decade of the Rosary—and touched his Adam's apple for an Our Father.

  What did Alpha do, moving around up there for such an eternal length of time, before she even got under the covers? Then there was a sound of springs as she settled into bed and that Was worse. Her legs quicksilvery as moonlight entangled with sheets. He lost track of the times he'd touched his Adam's apple and rolled on his side and said an Act of Contrition so complicated with fleshy imagery it wouldn't have got him beyond the walls. The fire in the potbellied stove was burned down and its bulging sides no longer gave off a glow; the fireplace wasn't intended to heat the house in this sort of weather (indeed, it seemed to be sucking up what warmth there was), and with the sudden absence of human sounds and movements, a deeper chill spread through the house.

  Had Alpha said yes, or was it the wind and the fire? Her hand said yes, her fingertips touching his ring; the angle of her head, bowed so that her dark hair concealed her features, showing only her high brow bronzed by the fire; the fold of her legs below her dress, her bare feet, her tipped shoes lying beside them—all this said Yes, yes, but did she? Alpha and Martin Neumiller. The names sounded indivisible on his tongue, but if she said yes, if they were to be married and not merely speculate in a romantic way about a future married state, as they had, then it would be difficult for them both from now on. Their mothers never spoke and didn't get along, which was a common enough predicament among married couples, perhaps, but in this landlocked state of so few people it was almost unheard of for neighbors not to talk, no matter the quirks of personality or grievances from the past, and their mothers were openly at odds.

  Nearly five years ago, in the spring of '31, after his high-school commencement, his mother went out to get the mail and saw a stranger walking down the tracks at the end of their lane toward town. She came into the house and said, "He was so little, I thought it was a child at first —also because he wasn't wearing a hat, not even a cap, mind you, in this weather. Then I saw that his hair was half gray. It was mussed up like a madman's and flying in the wind. He saw me and stopped, and I shook in my boots. His eyes are as mean as an old billy goat's, and they were looking right through me. He made a sort of bow in my direction and then kept on in a beeline toward town. He walks with a limp."

  And she wondered if he could be a freight bum, or another of those Okies, or somebody she should know about.

  "Oh, that's old Ed Jones," his father said. "He just moved in at the Chet Hollingsworth place. I believe he comes from around Hannaford or Dazey."

  That night the Neumiller household woke to the sound of somebody singing and shouting obscene songs, and looked out to see a dim figure weaving down the tracks in the moonlight: Ed Jones on his way home. His mother felt her children's ears had been scalded, and was convinced that Jones was trying to pervert their innocence. She couldn't bear the least bit of obscenity (the worst words Martin heard his father use were gol-dammit and Scheiss, and those were in the barn) and couldn't tolerate anybody who drank; a drinker was dissolute and bound for hell, and his family, to permit such a condition to exist, had to be as dissolute as the drinker, or at least tending in his direction, to continue to live on with him.

  His mother had very little patience with non-Catholics in the first place, with people who couldn't see, when it was right there in front of them, that the Catholic religion was the one true faith, since it had been founded by St. Peter and went way back to the time of the early Romans. She was an Old World woman, proud of her religion and her family, the Krulls, who came from Berlin and had produced a cardinal and a scholar of ecclesiastical law; proud of the fruitfulness of her womb, of God's beneficence in permitting her to have six sons and two daughters, thus far; proud of the devoutness she'd instilled in her children; proud of her cousin, Selmer Krull, who'd become a priest and headed the parish in Courtenay; of her husband's family, named in state record books as homesteaders, and of the money the Neumillers once had. Her largesse to the world was her children, and her only duty, other than to God, was to them, and now she wanted somebody to do something about this dirty-mouthed Ed Jones.

  "Ach, Marie," his father said.

  "Well, if you don't, I will. I'll go out and tell him to use the road like everybody else. I'll give him the what for!"

  She was never equivocal with words and was at least one half of the force of the family to be dealt with, so one day his father walked down the lane to intercept Ed Jones on his way to town, with Martin and his two oldest brothers, Vince and Fred, trailing along behind him, and after introductions and a few pleasantries, their father, who was absent of guile and by no means an artful conversationalist, said, "I wonder why you walk the tracks so much."

  "I don't have a car," Jones said. "And I'll be goddamned if I'll waste the wear and tear on a good team just to go into town and get soused, and that's where I'm bound. These tracks are the straightest shot I know from those two sections of quack grass back there, which some piker pawned off on me as a farm, to the closest gin mill. And after scratching in quack grass for a week straight, I don't mind admitting I like a shot of juice and a few pinches of snoose, or vicey-versa. What do you folks do about quack grass? I've never seen it grow so like unto an ungodly sonofabitch. I cultivate it with the machine, I beat it with a hoe, I keep the wife and daughter and the boy after it, I pull it up by hand—roots, runners, and all—and I even burn the crap. That's right, you laugh, you boys, but I do, by Christ, I burn a hayrack of it a day, and next week it's up as thick as ever, choking my crops."

  It was his tongue and way of talking the boys laughed at, not his problems or him.

  Their father said that the Hollingsworth place was one of the last pieces of land in the area to see the plow; the sod was turned under barely ten years ago, and only a few crops were put in before the Crash.

  "So that's it. It'll take me years, then, or my life, before all that buried stuff comes up where I can give it the ax. Jesus. Well, I'm a hard-working old fart if there ever was one—it's true, you boys—and I'll keep at it till I win. It's partly my fault I got took on the land. I left my old place for this Hollingsworthless brute because of the barn. Have you ever been inside of it? It's a beauty! It's built better than a brick—Well, I've been in a lot of barns in my life and it's the best I've seen, and I've always maintained that if a man can't sleep in his own barn, then it isn't a fit place to keep his livestock. We burden the poor beasts with our work and whims their whole lives, we beat them —I do—we make money on them when the market's right, we don't let them run wild the way they did, so the least we can do in return is say 'No, goddamnit!' when it comes to locking them inside some drafty, stinking, jerry-built shack that's never warm and you can't keep clean, isn't it?"

  Everybody nodded.

  They talked for a long time, or rather Jones talked while the Neumillers, taciturn by nature, listened, blinking, overcome by the outpour and gasconade. At last old Jones said he had to get on with it, said he expected to see them all soon, and then headed down the tracks. They went in for supper and their mother said, "Well?"

  "He seems all right to me,"
their father said. "Let him walk where he wants."

  "What?"

  "Anybody who uses God's name as often as Jones has God's praise in his heart, or at least His fear." To his children he said, "When you hear somebody take God's name in vain, you can change the words, in your own mind, into a silent Ejaculation. Every man worships in his own way, and we're not here to judge one another."

  "But he's an atheist!"

  "Marie."

  "He's a drunkard, that's for sure."

  "He's troubled."

  "Insane would hit it closer. He'll be back again tonight with his insane performance."

  "He needs somebody to talk to. I'll try to make a point of it."

  "Is that right?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "You always say, 'You are judged not by who you are or what you are, but by the company you keep.' "

  "For goodness' sake, Marie, I'm not in at Sheila's drinking with Jones!" Sheila's was a Prohibition haunt. "I'm here with my family."

  "Jones is your neighbor."

  "Marie! Be reasonable."

  This admonition from their father to their mother meant that a topic was closed. And, for the time being, Jones stopped walking the tracks; it was cutting season and he was busy on the weekends, along with everybody else in the area, running his binder. Their mother hardly mentioned him again, but didn't seem appeased about him; and she was also suspicious of Jones's wife, who was so much younger than he was, at least twenty years, that she looked like a niece or a housekeeper instead of a spouse. Was there something that a proper person wouldn't suspect of normal people going on there?

  A detached eighty of Neumiller's land lay across the road from the Jones farm, which sat bare and unprotected on the plain, without even a windbreak of poplars around it; Hollingsworth had no practical head, as everybody knew. Martin and his father were cutting barley on the eighty one day in the late summer of cloudless infinite blue. They'd had a series of breakdowns due to the rough going and glacial rock, plus third-hand equipment to begin with, and quit early in the day, before the first sign of darkening, and drove over to the Joneses' in the car and asked if they could leave their tractor in the Joneses' farmyard instead of the field; there'd been trouble lately with migrants stealing parts and gasoline.

  "Sure, sure," Jones said. "What the hell, you should've just driven it right on over. Jesus, what are neighbors for?" He threw open the door of a tilting machine shed. "Park her right in here. It's empty anyway. Come and have a drink first. Today's been a bitch."

  Jones, who was walking with a cane he carried when he was on his property, and was sauntering and gesturing with the jerky torso movements of a short man, led them down to a circular water tank made of cedar staves and worked the handle of a shrieking pump until water spouted out. There was a tin can to drink from. Jones was talking about horses, and the contrast between horsepower and mechanized farming—"all those machines are going to gas up the land, whereas horse apples are good for it"—but Martin hardly heard; his mind closed like a door on the mouth of this man, and he let his father bear the brunt and burden of listening to him.

  The day was dead calm, the temperature in the nineties, and Martin was shrouded in an apathy as heavy as the blue-dazed vault of heat-thick air around him. All those breakdowns and this place. The house was gray and unpainted and so weathered the grain in the wood siding shone out in relief; chickens were scratching at the last patches of green in the yard, a starved-looking dog was snapping at a swarm of gnats, and some old molting Muscovy ducks, whose heads were entirely red wattles, came scuffling around the water tank and started poking their bills into his cuffs to get at some grain in them.

  Why even speculate about farming, he wondered as he emptied the cuffs out, when it was so clear that farming was no way to get ahead, or even make a living. He scooped water from the tank, where feelers of spongy moss grew from the staves, and rubbed it over his face and the back of his neck, and then patted water on the insides of his wrists. He felt eyes on him and took a quick look toward the house. A face disappeared from a window.

  "How many kids, altogether, did you say you have?" Jones asked. "Or did you? I've seen quite a number at your place."

  "Eight," Martin's father said.

  Jones whistled. "Say, you folks aren't Catholic, are you?"

  "Yes."

  "I should have realized. You don't seem like a fool, like me. I've got seven." Jones sat on the edge of the tank. "How do you do it?"

  "What?" Martin's father asked.

  "Keep them all in food and clothes?"

  "I do repair work and carpentry in town. I might take a job as the janitor of the grade school this fall."

  "Yes, I don't think anybody can make it strictly on the land any more, not in this territory. We haven't got a goddamn nothin'. We're so hard up I had to farm out my oldest boys, Conrad and Elling, and then I've got two little girls, Bernice and Kristine, who've lived with a pair of maiden aunts for so long I hardly consider them mine any more. No, nobody has to worry about keeping up with these Joneses. Elling, who's my oldest, is with the wife's sister and husband in Wisconsin, on a dairy farm outside the Twin Cities. The couple hasn't ever had any kids, not by choice, I don't think, but biology, so I imagine Elling gets his share of attention. He's a hard worker and pretty bright, too, but I must say—and I say this without compunction—I don't miss his tongue; he's a smartass like me. You can't tell him a thing and he's at the worst age now, eighteen."

  Martin glanced at Jones, but this didn't seem a reference to him; and how would Jones know his age? Jones's attention centered on one subject, Ed Jones & Co., and Martin felt a twinge of distaste for this tiny man always puffing away to keep himself inflated and get you interested in his everyday affairs in a womanish, preening way, when, my goodness, if you thought about it, he was old enough to be Martin's grandfather.

  Jones laughed. "Lately, I've been getting letters from Elling, long detailed sons-a-bitches telling me how to start a proper dairy setup here. Ha! As if this was Wisconsin, or I could afford another cow, much less the equipment, although I've certainly got the barn for it. I need every spare acre I've got for grain, I say, where I can work it in among my test plots of quack! Quack-quack!" He poked at the Muscovys with his cane. "Ah, but there's good in the boy's heart, too, God bless him. If he makes any money, any hard cash, he sends it home to Ma. He's out running and hustling one month and the next won't do horse piss for nothin'. Pardon that tongue. I imagine you folks are religious, so I’ll try to watch it around you."

  Jones changed the angle of his polished shoes on the ground, as though positioning them for a portrait photographer, and leaned on his cane. "When Conrad writes home, which is seldom, it's like getting a letter from a nine-year-old. Conrad's seventeen. He's with my bachelor brother in Crosby, Minnesota. Hit a wasp across the border and you've got the place. Do you know it?"

  "No, I've never been out of this state in my life," Martin's father said, and there was such pride in his voice that Martin bristled with filial sympathy.

  "Two of one is eight to another," Jones said. "There's fair-to-middling land around Crosby, and if this place doesn't work out we'll probably move there or closer that way. Not too close to my brother, Cal, though. He's a preacher and has a finger in his Bible most of the time. He also raises Aberdeen Angus breeding stock, and is he a sanctimonious soul, when you figure he preaches one day of the week and sets his bulls to it the other six. He once called me 'sinner-man.' Oh, Lord Christ, Cal! Sinner-man" Jones wiped a long sudden tear from his big hooked nose. "Well, Conrad seems not to rub him wrong, being the quiet type. Conrad's a tall fellow, taller than you, Martin. What are you? Six one?"

  "Six foot exactly."

  "You look taller than you are. He's six two. I can't understand where he gets his height, unless it's from the wife. He's slow-moving and a bit slow-witted, too, but not dumb. No, I've got no illusions about either of the boys, but I miss them. Also, on the practical side, I could use their
help. Jerome's the finest sort; obedient, bright— wheels within wheels always whirling and seesawing in his head—but he's only ten and doesn't like farming. It appears he'll grow up to be the artist type."

  The door at the back of the house opened and a girl came down the porch steps, and for Martin the air around her seemed to lighten with each stride, as though she were walking from a more rarefied season into theirs. Jones was still speaking of Jerome in adulatory tones and didn't notice her. She stared at him as if to draw his attention with her stare, her eyes the poetical blue of deep affliction, and then seemed impatient, or embarrassed that he was still talking, and turned and went up the stairs and inside again. Jones said that it was time to examine the barn, which he knew they'd find extraordinary, while Martin's father wondered if perhaps they shouldn't get the tractor first, and Martin, who had some of his mother's fastidiousness about language and the way it was used, said that he'd go get it. He walked over to the eighty in the heat, trying to preserve the image of the girl as he'd seen her, and take on as his own whatever it was that gave such depth to her eyes.

  He parked the tractor in the shed among torn harnesses, scrap iron, and a forge and anvil, and came out and closed the door, looking for his father and old Jones, and saw the girl beside the Model A. Her hands were clasped and her head bowed. "Mama's not feeling well and needs something from town and your dad said it would be all right if you drove me in to get it. My name is Alpha." She said this as if she'd rehearsed it, in a low voice, her head still bowed, and then raised her eyes to his and turned milk-colored under her tan, and then flushed and looked furious. All the way in to town she sat on the edge of the seat, bolt upright, gazing through the windscreen with such fixity it seemed she was guiding the car.

  "Haven't you ridden in an automobile much?" he asked.

  "Of course. We used to have two. You drive with half your mind."

  "Oh."

  She held her left hand in a fist in her lap, her fingers whitening, and now and then gave it a nervous glance, and then returned her eyes to the road. He felt a tendency to swerve when she glanced down, for his attention, as she'd sensed, wasn't really on his driving. She was short and dark like her father, but her face was oval and finely boned, her eyes spaced far apart and frail-lidded, her upper lip curved like a crossbow, the lower so full and suggestive it looked engorged with blood. She must have been working in the heat before she was asked to run this errand; she wasn't wearing a brassiere.