Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  Where was that Ennis taking him now? What did they do on these tours? She couldn't follow the two, and the women in town thought of her as so devoted to her devotions to the Blessed Virgin, she couldn't ask. She'd have to get Tim and his brothers over to her house somehow (date bread? hearts?—potato pancakes, like Mrs. Click?) and see that they had their catechism down pat. Just being around a non-Catholic like her could absorb it right out of their heads.

  Why didn't any children ever visit her in her house?

  Watching from the rectory across the street, the housekeeper and cook for Father Schimmelpfening, Wilhomena Noedler, sighs and makes the sign of the cross, and whispers, in German, Bless them both, poor Donny, poor Tim; Tim who came to the rectory last spring and knocked on the door so politely she didn't hear at first, and when she did, and opened it, expecting a note from his mother, as was often the case, he marched up into the porch next to her, and cried, "My birthday's May eighth! My birthday's May eighth!" And then went over to Mrs. Liffert's, on to the Pete Schommers', and on and on to every house on this side of town until his mother caught up with him and dragged him home by the collar of his coat.

  When Father heard about it, he gave her a silver dollar to send to Tim on his day; and during her vacation, and on visits to other rectories, she told the story every chance she had, she found it so amusing. She didn't get to gossip or talk much here in Hyatt, because everybody was convinced she repeated everything to Father, who compared it to what he'd heard in the confessional and seen in the collection box. She told the story so many times it became a recital, and then she thought of Tim walking from house to house, where some of the people were strangers to him, or people he'd seen only in church or on the street, and announcing his birthday as though it were important to them as it was to him, and never told the story again.

  Bless them both. They are strangers to us, the two of them, Tim as much as Donny, though both are familiar to us, and the worst of it is that Donny, for as long as he's lived as one, doesn't know that he is, and that Tim, at his age, already does, and is living as one. I bow my head. Teach me poverty of spirit and let me learn to love those of yours not so obviously blessed as Father. Help me to accept my life as a nun in everyday clothes.

  There's a flash of another building front, an outhouse, the sprouting shimmer of lilacs along Mrs. Click's light side of the street, the water tower, weeds crushing under Donny's shoes, and Tim's eyes keep step with each step Donny takes, until Tim believes that he's Donny and making Donny walk and the wagon move the way they do, while Donny imagines Tim's sweet and soapy skin and sees all the fresh-washed clothes Tim wears, as though Tim had the entire bundle trunk of them on his back at one time, a fat bug with shining wrappings around him, a lightning bug in his hand. Deem. The wagon moves and the two strangers travel over sunlight on the storehouse of the earth that cushions theirs and everybody else's cloud-capped, many-lamented fears and furtive, futile fantasies of being alive at times in the spiraled intertwinings of time and place, in this all-alive time of life we live inside, today, today chimes, like a hand-wrought old mantelshelf clock: ching.

  13

  THE BASEMENT

  It was impossible for them to reconcile their mother's feelings about the attic. She didn't mind the basement one bit. There was no floor in the basement, Mother. It was just bare dirt with planks put down over the dirt to form paths. A single bulb, filmed with coal dust, exuded a light that made the blackness around the planks appear bottomless, and the shadows it cast along the wall concealed, if looked at in the right way, those un-animal-like creatures with outlines of neon that followed us through the nights of all the days of all our childhood dreams; pools of water gleamed from the bulb and white plants grew around them and were reflected on them, and beneath their surface—now and then breaking through a reflection, revealed when the pools dried— were salamanders, newts, and tangled clumps of angleworms. One of the paths of plank led to the furnace and the pile of clinkers in the corner (plus that old coal bucket we lugged paired-up), and another to the potato bin, where my brothers and I were sent twice a week to sort through the smelly potatoes, picking out the best for meals, tossing aside the ones that gave way in our hands and sent smell through our skin to the center of smell, trying to forget about those, and taking pains not to touch the sprouts that grew out of the eyes of some and wove a network of white tubers over the succulent pile. Another led to a set of shelves lined with jars of vegetables, meats, jellies, and fruits; and the dusty jars, with their contents looking out of them (some spoiling, ringing the lids with crystals, or forming snowstorms of mold behind Mason on their insides), reminded Jerome of a Horror Comics story in which a woman chopped up and canned her husband and was finally caught, but just barely, when somebody went into her basement to fix a leak and noticed an eyeball in some fruit. He and Charles and Tim go down twice a week from the afternoon sunlight of the large and airy uptown house, down to these shelves lined with jars by their mother, with their mother, and are administered cod-liver oil in or out or on our honor in our mouth. And when the spoon cut the corners and tasted of August lakes, arched darkness, vaulted space, and foam over the ribs at the back of the throat, and I saw the shining insides of a fish's belly spilling in a flash the way her insides must have spilled on the day I was born or the day that I spied, I ran up the basement stairs, their shoes just behind me, before I was, as I feared that I'd be—blee-blee-blee-blee-!—be devoured: Bea devoured this ole crystal pistol's BBs, beeee bee, wee tea pea, bditt! (pee peculiar, mister?) right down to the root, the root-beer bottle rage of Ginger (grease your palm, sister?), be Bea, be miss priss or do the knees-up spinning twist this minute ("Later"), be my woman, woman ("Uh-oh." "Oh-oh"), Oohooo-wooo, be my bride!

  And this place our mother didn't mind one bit, or so it seems now, or was then, once, or is so forever in our present-day eyes.

  14

  IN A FRAGILE, METALLIC GRIP

  Alpha's spirit was crippled by the injustice of it. Charles had turned six and was dying. After a winter of illnesses, he'd developed double pneumonia, and when he was rushed by car to the McCallister hospital, a doctor told Martin that he had about a fifty-fifty chance of pulling through. His condition had worsened.

  It was nearly impossible to get penicillin, the new antibiotic they were trying on him, in this underpopulated part of this underpopulated state, and if there was another blizzard like the one last week, the shipments wouldn't get through. Already the roads to McCallister were all but impassable—the plowed banks piled higher than a car top most of the way, with only a single lane opened in the worst places—and there was no working airport at McCallister, which was the only town in the three-county area with a hospital. The hospital's oxygen tent, its only one, had to be shared with other patients. Charles had received the last rites of the Church.

  The probability of his death had invaded her, weighted her, moved into the marrow of her bones until she was so heavy with it she hated the details of each day, beginning with the sun; she didn't want to get out of bed, or fix meals, or take care of the other children, and couldn't eat. The sound of Marie cooing or crying, or the sound of the children's voices when the parochial school recessed, infuriated her so much that tears would sting and kindle at her eyes' rim. All she wanted to do was stand at the bay window, as now, and stare out at the snow; it was mounded four feet high in the tangle of lilac stems; the wind had eroded a corrugated bank of it along the foundation; streamers of it were traveling at an angle across the yard, up and down drifts, and filling in a cave Jerome and Tim had dug. She wanted to go there and hide.

  He'd been the easiest to raise, and the most difficult. He seemed hardier and less vulnerable than Tim or Jerome, and there was an incident, two days after his second birthday, that was so typical of him she recorded it in his baby book; Jerome was crying about some internal loss, or something eternally lost to him, when Charles said in his most convincing tone, "Jerome, I got an idee.'" And when Jerome didn't respond t
o this, he came to her and said, "I never cry, do I, Mama?"

  He seldom cried and wasn't prone to tantrums, though if one overtook him it was a day before he recovered. He was fearless and driven to frightening acts; he climbed the water tower when he was five, a hundred feet to its top, and then walked around the catwalk on a dare from below, leaping the open trap door as he did. He preferred to assess a subject on his own, to observe and listen and read rather than bother you with questions. And his face was more mature than other children's, the future person that would emerge already evident around his lips and in his eyes. His eyes. Each day deepening with their own secrets. So bright blue.

  There were times when he seemed to be considering everything and everybody about him while merely going through the motions of play, the quality she watched the closest, and respected the most, and the one she feared the most, too. Was it like her? What was he thinking then? Could he have known this was coming? Impossible. An impossible, horrible thought. Hers.

  All she'd been able to do when he was home was feed him orange juice and ice cream and aspirin mashed up in honey, change his bedclothes when they were damp with sweat, give him alcohol rubs, or help with the bedpan. Jerome and Tim were as silent around him as if a stranger had appeared in his bed. What did they sense? She'd been so distant and abrupt with them lately they stayed upstairs, relearning one another's limits and likes, or moved around the house with hesitance, guilty and apologetic, as if they'd done her great harm. She had no words to comfort them. All her energies were centered on Charles, and to expend them on anybody else, even Martin, seemed to diminish his strength.

  She was able to visit him only once a day, if that often; the hospital was fifteen miles, she didn't drive still, and there was seldom a sitter available for the three separate sets of visiting hours that divided and measured her day. If the Rynersons were still in town, Lou would come with her children and sit (it seemed everybody available had children), with no fears of them getting what Charles had, but the Rynersons had moved on to a better job near Minot in the fall. Old friends gone, too. Martin made it for all the visiting hours—as principal of the high school, he could come and go as he pleased, especially in this situation—and she resented his freedom and the position that assured him he'd be free. She resented his maleness, his patience, his faith, everything that made him who he was, and could hardly bear to talk to him. Unless they were speaking about Charles— painful, dragged-out phrases that made them both afraid to look at one another—their conversations were fencing and monosyllabic, and never moved out of time.

  "Eggs?"

  "Two."

  Or, "How was your day?"

  "Fine. Yours?"

  "Fine."

  "The kids?"

  "Fine."

  Or, "Good night."

  "Good night."

  He'll take her hand and stare at her in silence, his large eyes widening—with commiseration? helplessness? guilt? what?—until he looks so pitiful that, even though a moment before she felt like unburdening herself to him, she'll have to turn and walk out of the room. I need something physical, she wanted to tell him, not sympathy.

  When she went to the hospital and saw where they'd put Charles, in an oversized metal-slatted crib covered with a plastic tent, he looked so reduced, bluish, and dehumanized through the crinkled and tinted plastic, she had to leave the room until she got control of herself. Did he know that? In a recurring dream she sees him in his own crib, the one he grew out of three years ago, as an infant, and while she stands above and watches, he grows smaller and smaller, and at the final gray line, just before he disappears into death, she feels him return inside her and wakes tense on the bed with the cold dark room around her, afraid that if she moves she'll kill them both.

  One day when he was home he became incoherent, distant and feverish, his eyes brimming over with an inner vision, and began babbling along in a naked way about nuns scrubbing him in a wooden washtub, silver wires above in the air, and stickmen made of colored tubes chasing him with a shadowy ark—while she swabbed at his face with a washcloth, wanting to shake him or slap him until he talked sense, or hold him so tight he couldn't speak, or put on her coat and walk out and never return. Then Martin came from school and she told him the boy was ill beyond her powers to nurse or comfort him, and if this kept up she'd go insane.

  Martin went into the boys' room, sat on the edge of his bed, and took his hand. "Charlie," he said. "It's Dad. Are you awake?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "How do you feel?”

  "Pretty good."

  "Do you want to go to the hospital?"

  "Oh, no. No, I don't need to. I feel better now."

  "You're sure?"

  "Oh, yes."

  But about twelve o'clock that night they heard him calling, "Dad, Dad," and ran to his room.

  "I'm here," Martin said. "What is it?"

  "I think I was wrong."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You better take me to the hospital."

  She went to him and placed her mouth on his forehead to test his temperature and his fever against her lips was like a sun. Martin went out and warmed up the car—he'd have to go alone; she couldn't wake the other children or risk Marie in the car in this cold—and then they wrapped Charles in quilts and rugs, and as she was tucking him into the front seat with the exhaust and cold air fuming around her, she said, "Now, hurry up and get well, so you can come home quick, do you hear?"

  "Am I coming home?" he asked.

  "Of course you are!"

  But the way he asked the question would be imprinted on her mind forever in a roseate glow; straightforward, without fear or self-pity, as if he simply wanted to know the truth. And what could she say to him but "Of course, of course, of course"—it was all she could say.

  His condition got so critical the doctor called Father Schimmelpfennig, the only person in town besides Dr. Koenig with a phone, and he picked up Martin at school and then came to the house in his black car and drove them on in to McCallister. Charles's skin was bluish-ivory and he was passing in and out of consciousness as they watched. They tried to talk to him, and then Father sighed, removed his black overcoat, took out a purple stole, kissed the gold cross embroidered at its center, put it on, and stood over the crib.

  "Charles? Charles?" he kept repeating in his heavy German accent, which made it sound nearly like "chalice." "Charles?"

  "Yes." Finally. A dry whisper like the rustle of weeds.

  "Have you been a good boy, Charles?"

  "What?"

  "Have you been a good boy? Have you done any bad tings, committed any bad sins?"

  There was an unintelligible reply.

  "Do you have anything you'd like to tell me, confess? Like in the confessional?"

  "Hnn?"

  "Do you have anything you'd like to tell me?"

  "Uh-huh."

  He put his ear close to Charles. "You can say it. Nobody will hear you."

  "I'm never happy anymore."

  Father paled, glanced at them to see if they'd heard, and then took out a prayer book and a leather kit with a pyx in it, and bent over Charles and began murmuring in Latin and applying the oil of extreme unction, and she walked out to the hall, half blinded by a chrism of tears, blundered into a rest room, the wrong one, and vomited up her stomach into a urinal where hair and paper matches lay curled.

  If she could believe in the Catholic Church, which defined the character of God and gave Him substance, perhaps she could, like Martin believe in God Himself and be united with him in a further way, and bear all this with more equanimity and self-control. He carried his rosary everywhere, even to school in his suit pocket, and there were nights when she'd seen him take it to bed. The Neumillers, for such a large family, were closely attuned to one another's needs and had grown up to feel protected, not only because of. their size, or the protective mantle of Martin's father, but because of the religion they shared and could talk openly about.

  When she w
as younger and went to church, it was sometimes alone, or else with the neighbors; her mother hardly ever attended a service, and the only time her father referred to a deity of any sort was during a natural disaster, a personal setback, or m a moment of terrible anger or pain, when he cursed God as though He were a hired man, a dimwitted, hairy, incompetent one, sitting m the same room with him. Which was as reasonable a tack to take as any, by God. God. Ha! You clumsy, ignorant, unfair sonofabitch!

  There.

  Her tears opened paths and open beams to the grief in her.

  When she was a child, she used to sit m the door of the haymow and watch as it began to get dark, while below her, in the barn she could hear the calves baaing almost like sheep, cows lowing to them, the clash of a bucket, footsteps, and the muffled voice of her father as he did the chores. The chicken coop was below her, across the lane from the barn and suddenly, at a certain stage of darkness, chickens, white blurs, would appear from the brush from the wheat field, from the pasture on the other side of the road, and begin moving toward the coop as though drawn to a magnet, some of them running, catching up to others and frightening them into a run, some moving slower through the darkness, alone. Watching them, listening to her father murmuring to the animals below, she was filled with peace and, for some reason, a sadness that displaced the peace. Then the windows of the house lit her mother stepped out and called, "Alpha! Slipper! Ed! Elling! Conrad! Come and eat now!" There was such calm and simplicity in it, yet such an urgency, too, and she ran toward the house as though pursued. Then the yellowish light from the kerosene lamps, a light with the added dimension of smell, the serenity of her mother as she moved about the room, testing the food on the cookstove, setting plates and silverware at their places at the table, and dipping and bending and stepping back as though in relation to them all and this moment, which would come soon, in Hannaford or Dazey or Cooperstown or Wallum or Casselton, or even in that shaky little place of theirs outside Courtenay, and the fitting together of the sterilized pieces of the separator, so it would be ready when Daddy and Elling came with the milk. The steaminess of the cookstove at that hour.