Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  SEPT 21 Payday. With my first check I bought a Shetland pony for Lionell. I haven't been a good sister to him. He's too sensitive to Mama's moods. Martin and I have been having foggy talks about religion. Today, though, for no particular reason, the atmosphere seems settled, and I'm in love as I look into Martin's eyes in the frame on my dresser top. Where has my bonny life gone hiding?

  OCT 8 Last day of a thankless week. Discipline problems. I've never encountered boys so mean. Because they're bigger, they think they can get away with throwing shelled corn, pestering girls, making farting noises when I'm trying to talk — everything! I hate them. I made three of the uglies stay after school to write a 500-word piece on "How To Behave During Class Hours" but cut it short when I saw Martin pull up outside. What's that going to teach them? Lordy, Lord!

  OCT 23 I was waiting for the Courtenay train when Martin surprised me and drove up. We talked non-stop until noon. My throat's still raw. In Wimbledon after supper I got my hair waved and then Martin and I went to the show "Sing, Baby, Sing," the worst sort of trash I've endured for two bits. Later, Martin played Romeo to me and talked about setting a date for the summer and had me on my knees. I hinted at our plans to Mama and she said, "I always thought you wanted to do something decent with your life."

  DEC 31 Daddy must have thought his Xmas meager this year, until his real gift arrived in today's, mail. Mama had ordered him a pocket watch like the one he lost the summer Jerome drowned. It took Mama's egg money for the year and most of my last paycheck. "Send the SOB back!" he said. "I need a corn planter! I need a new drill!" And then he went out to the barn and spent the day there and he's been cranky and confused and afraid to look at us ever since. Why can't some people accept as much as they give?

  1938

  JAN 5 Rushed around getting ready for the rotten job awaiting me in Leal, and then the Model T wouldn't start, so Daddy, Mama, and I started off in the lumber wagon but only got a mile out on the white highway when Carlson came by in his car. Daddy tied the team to a telephone pole and in we went. Back here, warmed by two stoves and my hate for this place, I wrote cards and letters, corrected papers {left from before Xmas) and pasted photographs in the new album Mother gave me. Then I hymned all evening. The only way I can feel alive in the world is by hymning. Brobdingnagian. Huge as all this stretch of sod.

  JAN 6 I’ve dreaded this day, the first of school after vacation, and it was worse than I'd pictured in my dread. The kids, those three boys, mostly, raised so much hell I was ready to hamstring them all, and shook up two until their back teeth clattered and clacked. Went to Sarton after 4 and told him I was going to quit. Today. He said he'd try to change some assignments. I was crying so little-girlishly the front of my dress was wet.

  JAN 10 The 7th grade boys went up the stairs, the 8th grade girls came down to me, and it was like a vision of heaven in Leal Public School. But when night came and I went to my new assignment, coaching girls' basketball {basketball is played with a basketball and baskets), woe unto me! I struggled through but now I'm so fatigued and shaky I'm bumping into my shadow. I planned to spend the evening cutting out poems for my scrapbook but I'm going to fall into bed instead and turn out the light. The one inside me.

  FEB 27 Here in Rogers at the Rynersons', Phil and Lou's. Phil is Martin's old roommate and the principal at Rogers now, and the Rynersons' might become my home away from eyes. Mar came over before anybody was out of bed, and then took me to breakfast at the Belmont Hotel. In the afternoon we listened to our favorite radio programs with Phil and Lou, who like the same, played bridge, and then the Rynersons nicely went to bed at 9:00. Martin was here until three in the morning. Why?

  MAR 1 A day comparable to April 1st. I went around to every room at Sarton's, trying to find somebody to play — cards or sock-and-wrestle — just to play, but no luck. So I went for a walk in the unplowed fields, thinking about Martin and our future freedom, and then back here shoveled snow from under the clothesline. My contribution to real life. Then I washed all the school windows, or at least smeared dirty rainbows around on them, and sat on the steps as the sun set and watched birds scratching at the crumbs and grain they've come to expect me to put out for them. How happy I am.

  MAR 9 Had my hair newly cut and waved and had to sleep on my nose all night, and then no Martin. Damn! School went okay, when I could be heard between coughing sieges. The flu is raging. I say school went well, but I seem to remember doing a lot of caterwauling. My throat's still sore from it. I finished the embroidery on my "Sunday" (I hate "quotes") towel set tonight, and now I have those, an everyday set, and the tablecloths I've done. There are only a few more pieces to do for the hope chest Dad Neumiller built for me.

  MAR 21 The first day of spring was disappointing — a messy dust storm. No Mail. I must be suffering from spring fever, I'm so worn out and loggy-legged. Or else I'm pregnant.

  MAR 26 No mail again. Are my friends deserting me? Do I have any? Sarton came into my room after school and said I'd been rehired by the school board, then said, "But I'd advise you to look for a different job, such as teaching primary grades." Primary grades. I said, "Goodbye to you. I won't be teaching your scoundrels again!" I'm so livid I can hardly see through it to keep awake. And unsettled! What if I can't find another job? And what if Martin's and my promises about the summer have been vows into the wind again?

  APR 15 Met Mar on train but too bashful to greet him as wanted. Spent whole day dying to get decent mark.

  APR 16 Sick all morning. Mar came to bring me to Fargo in a few minutes. I kept some here. $89. Stayed overnight at N's. Almost asleep when a voice says, "How'd you like to get inside your mother's skin like it was long underwear?"

  APR 17 Ran home from 6:30 till 7:05. Not greeted royally. Walked to church and back again without any help. Let Mrs. N know I've got a church.

  APR 18 They'll have to be up with us with [A wavering line is drawn across the page here.— ed.] an affair he'd give up the river. Almost asleep, a voice again. No words.

  APR 19 Wrote the four preceding entries in my sleep or when I was crazy with no sleep. Besides everything else I said and shouldn't have said and should have done and didn't. In my sleep. I can't eat or talk or make sense of the simplest word. I feel I'm crawling with the Lord.

  APR 21 Another terribly dusty day. The farms are flying over our heads.

  MAY 6 The mystery in the air at the N's has been given a name. Illinois. Mr. N wants to go and look at property there — Mr. N, who's always lived in the state and done so well for himself. Martin said he might drive down too, and since I didn't hear from him or see him tonight, I know he has. I'm bereaved knowing he's so far from me, and with this cold my nose is running off my face.

  MAY 10 Was I surprised when somebody knocked at the door and I found Elaine back from Ill already. She brought a gift from Martin, a blue swan made of real china, and said all of them liked Ill. They might move there soon. Mar came over later, sheepish and indefinite, so I know we won't be married this summer as we planned. I live on air and lies.

  MAY 27 School Year Is Over. A beautiful day for our picnic, and I romped and frolicked in the sun with the children until my arms were burned bright red. Graduation exercises in the eve. I had to sit on the stage, a fogy, and be stared at, and then Martin came afterwards and waited while Betty Sarton bathed my arms in tea and made them mine again. Hands directly from her heart. M helped bring back home my junk and me, and said his Dad is moving the family to Illinois as soon as possible. So there. My cockpit of falling freedom gone.

  MAY 30 I walked to Carlsons' to plan a farewell party for the N's and found out plans were already made and finished. I'm sorely disappointed in them, however; a summer-on-the-farm buffet. I felt I'd dissolve into air all the way to the N's, where Martin dug up irises and tulips from their flower beds, and then planted them around Jerome's grave for me. Martin's father has left for III already, before the closing sale, and Martin said, "He can't stand that everything we own is being sold. He'd wor
ry about the stock if he knew who had it." Then why sell out? Why give monikers to plants and cattle and poultry and machines of work?

  JUNE 2 Walked to the N's for the Hornemaker's party for Elaine and Mrs. N but spent the whole day outside with Martin in that blizzard of silence that comes when one of us is being deceitful. I met Adele, Vince's girl from Ypsilanti, and she has her claws into him like a cat on a rock. Back home, I cleaned out the cellar, took off storm windows, washed crystal and wanted to throw the watch away, though it's the most meaningful gift I've got from Martin, not to mention the cost.

  JUNE 4 I got my hair cut short, just below the ears, and waved it the way I used to, with curlers on the lamp chimney, and went to the Neumillers' sale. Vince and Martin did most of the handling of it. I sat in a car with Adele. She wanted to talk about Vincent when he was young and I wanted the car to drive away with just me inside. I walked home and hardly got here when Vince and Adele came after me but wouldn't say why. At the N's, Martin told me he'd changed his mind. He's not staying. He was leaving for III right then. I helped pack some final pieces in spite of my eyes, and then watched Martin go off, riding on a truckload of furniture with Fred, because the cab of it and the car were full, Davey was suspended in a blanket sling from the ceiling of the Model A. I lay in a grain bin in their barn and wailed until it was dark outside. Then I walked home alone, or I'd be alone for good.

  JUNE 18 Got a card and letter, via air meal, from Martin, but no news. Cleaned house for the seventh time this week to drive away memories thick as my hair, then read the 55 letters I received from Mar from Sept. through May. I can't sleep and haven't taken a leak in two days.

  JULY 28 I'm a harvest hand again, riding binder and shocking grain, and so weak I can hardly walk. There were breakdowns every round and after one Daddy yelled, "You're a piss-poor man on the binder!" I started crying and wanted to confess how unhappy I am. "Quit it," he said. "Don't be so God — sensitive!" A letter from Martin. He says he'd like to go to school in III and maybe even teach there. My face will be white for a week.

  JULY 29 Today we thought we'd finish the barley, but no. I went into Courtenay with Daddy from work, in dirty shirt and bib overalls, and was escorted into the tavern, where he bought me my first drink — a glass of wine. It was terrible, melted tin, but I finished it and had a few more, and us field hands made it home just fine, folks, singing through the night.

  JULY 30 We didn't finish the barley till after 4, as a result of canvas trouble and wine. See above. I went into Wimbledon and found out I'm hired for next year at Uxbridge — lovely Uxbridge school that I looked at all last year during every trip back home from Leal the way a calf looks at an udder. Ooooo!

  AUG 15 A restful day. No fieldwork due to last night's rain. I practiced the piano all afternoon and then went into Wimbledon, hoping to find excitement, but no. Rode home in the big box of Tony Mendelson's truck and was almost blown overboard. Tony said he saw it all and gave a wink. There was a letter from Martin, three pages which hardly said a word I wanted to hear, and then at the end that he was lonely. Lonely! Lord, isn't this body where he belongs?

  AUG 22 After today's letter from Martin, I helped Mama put up the rhubarb, 35 quarts of it, and canned 17 of corn myself, and then chopped up a whole RR tie. And wrung a chicken's neck, gladly, for our meal tonight. Went into the tavern and had another type of drink, rum and Coke, and it wasn't so bad. Rode home on Tony Mendelson's lap and could have had myself. I'm single again.

  SEPT 3 I woke at 5 in the morning to a car horn and knew it was Martin, and it was! My first kiss from him in three months, and just in my pajamas! Mama was shocked. Martin's definitely at Rogers for the term, at least, he says, and seems much more happy and free with himself away from his mother. Three months evaporated with his lips on mine.

  SEPT 13 School in Uxbridge isn't bad — thirteen kids in the first four grades (isn't that primary, Mr. S?) — except it's difficult to find something for the different classes to do all the time. I have my own room, a big one, in the teacherage run by the janitor and his wife, Dick and Irma Reese. Just Cissel, the principal, and me and two other teachers live here. There's a phone. Martin came and said Vince was in Ypsilanti to see Adele, so we drove down after supper to visit them. They plan to get married in two weeks.

  SEPT 24 Wedding day. I intended to get up at 5 but couldn't. Mar came at 6 and we were witnesses at the marriage, in the front room of Fr Krull's. Vince was gray but looked strong and he laughed once. His laughter comes out of him with as much pleasure as there is in his eyes and always makes me laugh. There was no music, or real ceremony, and what there was was over before it got going. Mrs. Donnegan, Fr's big housekeeper, stood with her stockings around her ankles, shaking with tears. It could have been me marrying Vince, I realized again and again, and Adele isn't a Catholic, either.

  OCT 9 Mama's ill. I went to Mass with Martin and then came home and got the last of the carrots from the garden, and cooked them up with a chicken for stew. Martin took me to Fr Krull's in the afternoon, for a trial in instructions. It wasn't agonizing, as I'd thought, but Martin left Uxbridge right away for Rogers, when I wanted to talk about the lesson, and I'm worried Mama will be worse if she hears where I've been. I looked at the catechism and then lay on the bed, dozing and waking in fits of surprise, and wondered, Has my role as a wife already begun?

  5

  ABOUT FATHER KRULL

  Alpha's mother, Electa Jones ("No wonder we've got such weird names," Elling once said to Alpha), was vocal and aphoristic about her likes and aversions, a compendium of arcane beliefs and outright prejudices. "Men with dark hair have minds dark as water," she said, and Alpha's father's hair, except for the silver on the sides, was nearly black; Martin's hair was as black as a Sioux's. "Grown men who chew on a chaw of chewing gum deserve no respect; it looks like their mouths haven't grown up yet and makes you wonder if their minds, which are mighty close, have either." And, "If you don't eat in little bites, if you bolt your food or chomp it with your mouth open wide, or slurp soup like that, people will think we feed you from a trough." The use of tobacco, of cigars and cigarettes, especially, was one of the filthiest acts permitted to take place in public, to her mind, and she often said, "People who put their cigarettes out on plates should have to eat their meals out of ashtrays."

  And Alpha'd heard her say that the biggest bane on the entire human race, other than cigarettes and alcohol, was the Roman Catholic Church; that Catholics were just interested in liquor and getting you to go to bed with them, and not much else; that their rule of eating fish on Fridays was just another way of making themselves look like superior folk (she'd heard it was supporting European fisheries), and anybody who heeded such a rule was a sheep who let his life be dictated by the Pope, a man who lived in Italy, in Europe, you see, and wore women's skirts and little beanies!

  "Ma," Ed Jones said, "I wore some pretty funny-looking clothes myself when I did Shakespeare, you know."

  "Sure. To play make-believe roles up on a stage some place.”

  "I made it up to Buffalo!" he cried, and then scowled hard. "Well, what the hell do you think the Pope's doing, for Christ's sake, if not playing a role!"

  "But Catholics all over heed what he says."

  "If they did. Ma, how could they be up to all the things you say they are?"

  Ed Jones went to church for weddings and funerals— "One in the same; I can't keep 'em apart"—and maintained that every religion, "Well, every one of them just makes holes here in your head." When the family was on the farm near Hannaford, he dressed up once in his best black suit for the funeral of a neighbor and friend, but when they got to the church, said, "We'll see you afterward," and went out into the grass-covered cemetery plot that lay to the back and side of the church. It was hot August, the windows were open wide, and the congregation kept craning their heads to get a look at him. He stood under a single elm in the cemetery, a tree that rose like a showering and entangled fountain above the plain, one foot planted on t
he mound of newly dug earth, holding his coat and tie back, his mouth moving as if in argument, as he leaned and addressed the empty grave, and now and then extricated a silver hip flask from his breast pocket and took a long Adam's-apple-pulsing pull on it. He started away and then came back and flipped the flask into the grave, and walked down the gravel road toward home until he was out of sight against the plain.

  *

  Alpha's mother seldom went to church from then on, even after they'd moved from Hannaford to Courtenay, as if she couldn't rid herself of the ignominy of that day. She read the Bible and hummed and sang hymns while she worked, and on Sundays, with Alpha singing alto to her voice and playing along on their old and tinnily untuned upright piano. The concordance to her Bible was a book called The Perfect Woman. Alpha hadn't been to Lutheran catechism or to Bible school (she'd always had to work) and had never really been instructed by her mother in the faith, other than to believe. Martin often made Alpha think of her mother's prejudices; and the circuitous way in which the closed minds of parents come around again left Alpha fighting an affection for the Catholic Church.

  Martin partly helped change her mother's predisposition against Catholics. He was a non-smoker, he and his father were teetotalers to a tee and seemed honest, and had proved honest, so far, and Mr. Neumiller did so well by the family he might be a Serb; Martin gave off an aura as brawny and brainy and wholesome as fresh-baked bread, and her mother remarked to her about him, more than once, "He's one of the most innocent young men I've ever met, dear!" and, well, it was just too much for the two of them, plain rural women, as they thought of themselves, to take down and digest at one time. But then gossip had it that Mrs. Neumiller had let it be known, when she found out that Martin and Alpha were about to be married, that in the first place Alpha would have to convert to the Church.