Green, green, august grass aglow and wind-shaken in his hand. He pulled out other vanity drawers and dumped them, one by one, into the same box. And the middle drawer? He took out the crucifix and placed it on the vanity top. And the cards and notes? Yes, that was over; he wanted no reminders of himself, either, as he was then, and emptied it all into the box. Face powder fumed up, coating his nostrils, and he saw Alpha dressed up and ready for an evening out.
In the box still smoky with powder was the Five Year Diary. From her? He lifted it out and wiped it on his shirt. He might have read it a dozen times, but always wanted her to hand it to him on her own, twenty or thirty years from now, so he could relive that part of their lives through her. Now he never would. He riffled through its pages to see her handwriting and see it move, and stopped at the final entry, in 1940, when they were in Spear's house; in a hurried hand, a single sentence: I’m counting the hours till we leave for Dakota.
He closed the diary and put it at the back of the middle drawer, and then sat on the bench of the vanity and covered his face, and when he looked up again, it was dark in the room.
He turned on lights all through the house, and then thought of dinner, but saw her dishes and utensils and couldn't eat. He put on water for coffee and sat at the table where he and Elaine had had an argument last night; she wanted to adopt Susan and Marie and he agreed with some of her points (what would he do when they were teenagers?) and knew she was making the proposal out of concern and responsibility, and was the woman closest to Alpha besides her mother, but said no to her from the start, definitely not, and finally had to strike the table to make his point; then he asked her to leave, because she was so upset he was afraid the children might hear what she was saying, and what would they think?
And then his mother got upset with him and Elaine; this was a house of mourning, she said, please; and wanted to stay the night, in case any of the children woke, but he asked her to leave, too. He'd have to learn to deal with their most precarious feelings from the start, and on his own, if they were to remain together. And yet he didn't know how he'd survive the coming week without somebody to talk to who was close to him and Alpha, yet unattached to their families, somebody who could counsel him and give him advice—any sort, just so there was a course to follow that would free him from making everyday decisions, which were like Badlands landscape flowing backward over him.
There was a corrosive odor of fouled electrical wiring, and he jumped to the stove and found the water boiled away, burned his fingers on the handle of the pot, and then took a towel and carried it to the sink and turned on water. The black handle shattered over the sink. He tried to clean it up but his fingers knocked the pieces around so much they seemed to be in motion. On the wall at eye level was a plaque in the shape of a maple leaf, with a cup shelf on it, that Jerome had built at school and given to her for Christmas, and he remembered her staring at the plaque, and saying, "Jerome's one I'll never worry about."
"What do you mean?"
"In case something should happen to me."
"What a way to talk! Why should it?"
"If it did, I'd never worry about Jerome. Isn't that strange? He's the one I always thought I'd worry about."
He went to the other side of the house and put the box for Rose Marie at the back of the closet there, carried the other box out the back door to the incinerator and dropped it inside. He’d brought out gasoline earlier, and now he soaked the box and clothes with it and then stepped back and threw a match. There was a rush of air and then a concussive thud like a thick rug snapped and blazing flame flinging stuttering tips toward the telephone wire, while the snow around him turned rose and orange and yellow-crimson and the shifting unnamable shades of color of the stars overhead.
He realized he was standing outdoors in his shirtsleeves and snow was melting into his shoes. Lights went on in the Ebbinger place across the alley, and he looked and saw it was ten. He ran across the dimming snow to the back door and stepped inside and stamped his feet, breathing hard, and then hiccups jarred the column of air in his chest, and sent pain through his heart with their powerful unpredictableness.
He sat in his easy chair and stared across the room. He'd buy a television set; that thought-numbing novelty his parents had, he'd get, to bridge the night from one day to the next, and use as a sitter for the children. Where would the girls stay when he was at work and the boys in school? It would be too complicated with Elaine. Rose Marie had three children already and was pregnant again. Mom?
He felt pressure against him, as if in an accelerating car, and found himself at the table in Hyatt with the family around him, reading the letter from his father, and tilting it from side to side because of the sunlight, and then Alpha, in maternity clothes, bowing her head as if ashamed. What? And then he heard the moving trucks pull into the drive, and ran out and said, "You might as well turn around and head back! We've decided not to move!" Then went inside and found the kitchen bare, the family gone, the furniture cleared away, the house empty except for a Fargo Forum on the living-room floor, and heard the rackety sound of the moving trucks starting up and pulling off, and wanted to run after them, but was on the spread-out newspaper, or on a cutout of the state, and if he stepped off it, would step off the edge into Alpha's world.
Or was he there? Where was this? His hands moved, his arms moved, his wristwatch ticked and showed 3 a.m., and there was a steady knocking at the door. He ignored it; for days he'd heard Susan crying when she was asleep, Alpha calling him from other rooms, and underneath all this, as though a record were playing inside his ear, a children's choir singing, "At the cross her station keeping, stood the mournful mother weeping. .. .”
A white face was staring in at him from the frosted front window. The face was familiar, out of dreams or the distant past, and he thought, with an eroding sense of ease at his center, that he'd lost his mind, at last, and couldn't be held responsible for himself from now on.
Then a gloved hand rose beside the face and rapped on the pane.
He went over and opened the door and saw Father Schimmelpfennig's black homburg and the shoulders of his black overcoat whitened with snow. "Martin, are you all right?" he said. "I saw you sitting so—"
"Father. It is you!"
"I brought some tings for the kids, but it's so late now."
Martin stepped into the falling snow and embraced him.
"We've been having one of the worst blizzards of the year up north, otherwise I wouldn't be alone, Martin. The Koenigs and the Pflagers and the Savitskys and Wilhomena and Mrs. Jake Ennis—well, three other cars altogether—started out with me, but the weather got so bad they had to turn back."
"How long have you been on the road?"
"Twenty-two hours."
"Have you slept?"
"No."
"The funeral's this morning, Father."
"I know, Martin. I've come to give her eulogy."
24
PHOTOS OF TIM AND CHARLES
That spring there was one of the worst floods that could be remembered by anybody in Pettibone. The Neumillers were affected by it. Their house sat in one of the lowest areas of town, and in the triangular park across the street was the central reservoir of Pettibone's antiquated municipal drainage system—bare pipe guardrails (good for swinging from your knees from in better weather) around a concrete-capped, grate-covered drain; it plugged with leaves with the first of the spring rains, and the rains lasted for seventeen days.
A concrete viaduct three feet high and a foot and a half wide ran underneath the edges of the front yard, the quickly mowed wedge, and one day Tim and Charles, against the warnings of their father, went floating through this viaduct over and over with the force of the rising water pushing them outward toward the open ditch the viaduct flared into; they'd start by lying in the water in the ditch in shirt and blue jeans, supported on their hands, the chill of twilight above them, getting well aimed, and then push with a submerging splash into the viaduct, whos
e cement walls, pitch-dark and echoey, hardly wider than their shoulders, slid gleaming along the sides of their eyes as they floated, touching the sand-muddied bottom with a hand now and then to keep their balance, their legs spread to catch as much of the current as they could but not so they scraped the sides of the viaduct and slowed themselves, about six or eight inches of air space to breathe in, although there were higher rushes, their hair scraping the cobwebby slab above, and then at the juncture of the busy intersection the viaduct elled off to the left at an angle of ninety degrees, and every time they made the contortions necessary to accomplish this turn, and shoved off in that direction, moving faster toward the colors of the brightening ditch, the rectangle of light ahead sent them gasping for the world that spun out away far beyond Pettibone.
The next day the viaduct filled to the top. The ditches beyond were small streams circumscribing the block. They went swimming in them in undershorts, with long-sleeved shirts above to fend off the cold.
The day after that the basement started filling up. Their father and Uncle Fred ran out and bought two centrifugal pumps that worked off garden hoses, and came back and stood in the basement with water cascading in lateral sheets from the windows they'd opened around them to run the hoses out, and realized they'd have to pump the yard dry, which would pump dry a whole lot of Pettibone, before they could pump dry the basement. Tim and Charles sat a quarter way up the steps and watched as the two men stood in wet pants on soaking chairs and nailed the windows shut, and then asked one another what they'd do if tlie panes in them started breaking; that night they woke to the sound of a series of miniature waterfalls in their basement.
The level of the water moved up the concrete drive and touched the front step. Would it come inside and run over the floor, Tim wondered, hoping it would, in a way. No matter which direction he and Charles went from the house, they had to walk a block and a half on the raised center of the street, shuffling along in overshoes that wanted to float and more often than not overflowed, or inflowed, along their tops, before they reached dry ground.
The old Opera House on its quarter block of elms, across from the back of their house, was reflected in water around it the shade of gray it was painted, but spikes of grass rose in shattering patches through its placid reflection.
The mud sometimes sucked loose their overshoes, the sound and mechanics of which would have been a joke at any other time, without all this water around, and the outdoors became less pleasant for them than they'd ever thought it could be. They went to bed with bad colds, and were sniffing and hacking up brown-green clots in the toilet bowl. Except for their wades to school, they stayed in the house for two weeks and tried to re-teach one another the knitting their grandmother had taught them while "she" was in the hospital, to no avail, and were so hushed and feverish about it, and so sealed off from the rest of the family, Martin felt at the threshold of death again.
*
There are some photos of Tim and Charles taken a few weeks later, by Jerome, most likely, at the front of the house. In the first, Tim stands at the entry, the white beams flanking it showing at the picture's sides, his truncated feet apparently on the concrete drive below. He wears a cap with GOLD BOND printed across its crown. His face looks puffy and strained and his smile is cleft by a half-moon-shaped shadow cast by his nose. His head is ensconced in the furry collar of their father's sheepskin coat. He holds his right arm up in a wave but his hand can't be seen. The coat's that big. The dark-colored bulk of him covers every crossbar of the screen and his head reaches to the base of the outdoor lights on the beams, the height of their father when he stands here. Tim's grown. The coat is buttoned down its front and has an elbowish bulge at its waistline. Grandpa Jones's goatskin chaps jut below its bottom hem into the picture's white border to
MAR • 51
In the second picture, Tim demonstrates modified duck lips, and has shrunk. His head is below the first mullion of the window in the entry, at the level of the screen-door handle. His arms are at his sides and the ends of the coat sleeves touch the concrete step. The coat overflows into the picture's border, as though Tim's deflating or melting or
MAR • 51
In the third picture, Charles stands in a dark parka with ragged cuffs. His legs are bowed out arch-comic-cowboyically, covered by the goatskin chaps. Beside him a white cat of Susan's with tortoise-shell crests around its eyes, and a tortoise-shell saddle, holds its mouth open in an arrested miaow, its tail blurred and the tip of it arched toward Charles: later, that summer, Susan and Marie put the cat in a traveling makeup case of their mother's— its mirror broken and its blue-silken interior in tatters— so they could pull it around in the wagon without its always leaping out, and then left it all standing in the sun, and as Charles was burying the cat in the back yard by the Incinerator in the makeup case it was found in, to their protests and tears and wondering why, he said, "Well, you see, it just sort of drowned on its own carbon dioxide."
A grimy right hand of Charles's is raised in the picture, in a rancherlike manner, and a pushed-out lower lip glistens above his depressed and wrinkled chin. His eyelids are lowered in an "It's all O.K. now, folks" gesture, and his straight hair touches his eyebrows and the top of his broad nose.
What's Jerome thinking at this moment out of this series of
MAR • 51
Charles's eyes are closed in the last picture, I notice again, and then, shuffling back, can't see Tim's eyes for the black shadow cast by the bill of the cloth cap in the second one; and in the first, the same shadow makes Tim's eyes resemble the depthless phosphorescent reflectors they become when headlights shine straight inside to the backs of them (and Charles, of course, is underneath the sheepskin coat in this one)—as though both are attempting to hide from observers the look that should beam out and reveal all that's happened within less than a year of their lives, but the two are children still, by legacy and for good reason, and in their dim faces can be seen the force of the water that rose and overflowed most of Pettibone, now their new home town, with only a father left to cling to for life, at play here restlessly and at rest in a source outside their primitive designs at last, entrapped in time, caught in these few photographs. Click.
25
THE WAY YOU DO HER
She lifts the earthenware cream crock from the dishpan in the sink, shakes shining beads of water down its oatmeal-colored sides, and sets it, upside down, on the drain-board. Her gestures as she lifts and shakes and sets it are both dignified and precise; when she walks, she holds her body erect and along a straight line, as though her soul were liquid and could spill with ease. The boy beside her smiles. Her youth and grace make him forget she's not his mother, who doesn't seem to have died, but his mother's mother, and her gestures firm the air around him in such a familiar way that when he breathes deeply, as he breathes now, he breathes comfort and strength.
He stares at her, a dish towel draped over his open hand like a magician's silk, and feels himself retreat in a waver to the day in Hyatt when he stood in the kitchen under his mother's blue stare and looked down the legs of the chaps to his father's hat fallen on the floor. His grandmother's hair is auburn-blond and plaited into big braids coiled round and round her delicate skull. Her face is angular and colored now by sunlight, coppery-gold in the golden air, and could be a figurehead on a Viking prow, and then the copper breaks into movement, and he's both startled and pleased and shivers cold.
"Quit gaping," she says. "And close your mouth or it'll fill up with flies, sure as I live, ha!"
"It's not open."
"It most certainly is, dear sir."
"You can't tell. You aren't even looking this way.”
"I can tell about you, boy."
She's sensitive to her beauty that's been altered, not by age in any radical way, but by a set of dentures an older male relative persuaded her to be fitted with when she was twenty, and as part of his persuasion promised to pay the bill, and then sent her to a cut-rate dentist; the mol
d of her lips and the area around her mouth have never been the same. She hasn't allowed a photograph to be taken of her since then, her twenties, and when she combs out her hip-length hair at night, or when he combs it out for her, chasing blond and pink highlights down the ripples raised by the braids, she sits on the edge of the bed, facing away from him, away from the mirror, the tentlike shape of her frail head bowed.
She reaches in the dishpan and lifts out a bundle of forks with sunlit beads dripping from their tines, gives them a shake, and holds them out for him to dry, and as he takes them, he touches her skin. It's smoother than the silver and so transparent her lilac veins and amber freckles glow in it. She smiles and he stares down at his bare feet and curled toes on the linoleum; even more than watching her, her touch gives him strength.
"Lordy, Lordy, you're so bashful!" she says, almost sings, in a voice that awes him because it's like a girl's, gravelly yet girlish, younger than his mother's, with a whispery nasalized sound over sibilants, and full of a teasing bravado so thin and pure it seems it could crack, like fine china. "Nobody knows you're bashful but me! They think you're quiet or just plain dumb. Or maybe you're not even bashful, maybe you don't want anybody to know what really goes on inside that head of yours, ha? What would they think if they knew that, ha?"
"They" refers to the Neumillers. She's stolen him from them over Easter vacation and for the summer—as she'll continue to steal him for every vacation she can for the rest of her life—and the idea of stealing him, which she often mentions, makes her proud; when she and he are reunited, as they want to be, she routs out any affection he might have built up for "them" over the months and examines it with cold decisiveness; and then with a scandalous air of indiscretion lets him know that love, which she feels for him (in contrast to the guardianship they take for granted), is more observant and refined. But if she senses she's been unfair, or wronged them, or colored his emotion too much, she changes from criticism to breath-taking asides of over-painted praise: "Your Grandma Neumiller is one of the most unaffected women I know. Your dad's a saint."
Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 32