"I'm not bashful," he says, and feels a baby again, and hopes he can sustain this state of suspension for days with her.
"You're not? You're not, ha?" She puts her damp fingertips to his chin and tilts up his face, which he still holds immobile in mourning. "Then why are you blushing, ha?"
He pulls away, turning to put the forks in the chimney cupboard and her Ha?, which she repeats and relishes repeating, rises into high laughter she doesn't seem to be able to control, and so settles into with more relish. She's trapped him within the net of a general female truth.
"Grandpa doesn't talk either," he says. "He just grunts."
His grandfather is the painful area and Charles knows it. He's close to eighty and affects dress pants and pinstriped shirts with sleeves that blossom foppishly above bright arm garters, whether he's in the living room listening to baseball on the radio, or in the barnyard with his favorite team. Colonel and Queenie, feeding them cookies. If Charles were his grandfather, he wouldn't feed sweets to the horses, he'd shoot them; last winter, when his grandfather was gathering hay with the team, they bolted, and he was pitched backward off the hayrack and broke his spine.
The accident has diminished him. He was always small but the top of his head doesn't reach his wife's shoulder now. She keeps the cookies in the same place on purpose, so he knows where they are and can get at them easily, but he believes he steals them without her knowledge, and laughs under his breath so much at his foxiness, he seems diminished in other, worse, ways. All that remains of his former passion is the temper that once compelled him to kick a milch cow so hard its rear legs collapsed and it sat down in its stanchion—that temper—and she scolds him for it with a temper of her own that's just as bad. She talks down to him more than to Charles, and begins arguments that lead to him cursing her to her face and her in tears. She claims he isn't more grateful for the times she's nursed him because he's self-centered, thankless, and as hard as nails. She says, "Maybe your grandpa doesn't talk much now, but there was never a smidgen of bashfulness in that man in his life. He's a miserable, miserable, spiteful old crow!"
These last words were so harsh Charles has looked up. Beneath her cheekbones, color appears and spreads in a rose wash down her jaw. If he hadn't seen her rock his grandfather in her arms, singing, "So, so; so, saso; so so . . ." on the nights when he wakes from his often-repeated dream of being locked up forever in a hospital, he'd think she hates him.
She empties the dishwater into the sink and from the sink it runs splashing into the bucket of slops that sits beneath, and then she takes a dipper of hot water from the reservoir at the side of the stove, swirls it in the pan, and sloshes it over the wooden paddles of a butter chum she's washed. Her anger has evaporated and she's humming in her high and girlish voice a Lutheran hymn, taking different harmony lines as she hums, and her serenity and detachment make him jealous.
He says, "Why don't you have drains, or hot and cold running water, like Grandpa and Grandma Neumiller do?"
"Because we're in the sticks. And plumbing out here comes too high." This is said in the voice she uses in her bedroom, faraway and elegant, as if she's murmuring to herself in an empty palace room. She begins to dry the pieces of crockery and he sees Red Wing Pottery stamped into their bottoms, and feels trapped again.
She says, "When you get to be a big man like your dad, you can build me a nice new house in town somewhere, with plumbing and the other contraptions everybody else seems to have now."
"No, I can't. You'll be dead by then."
"What!"
"You'll be dead by then."
"Charles! What sort of thing is that to say to your grandma?"
She tilts up his face once more. Wherever in him these words have come from, he's now himself again, a responsible nine. In her eyes he sees hurt and stern anger, and then disbelief, and then she laughs and says, "If that doesn't take the cake! So I'll be dead by then, you say. Is that what you really think?"
"I just said that. I don't want you to be."
"Oh, of course not. I know you don't. I know, I know," she says, and takes him in her arms. "So, so, I know you didn't mean it. I know you don't want me to be. I know you didn't want your mother to be, either. Even so, won't you still think of me a lot, the way you do her?"
26
KICKING AROUND
"'Ed!" she calls.
She's hoarse and in a foul mood, her face yellow-tinged with fatigue, and now she slumps on one hip and lays her face along the frame of the Living-room door.
"Ed! Come and eat!"
He's in a square-backed rocking chair in the corner by his radio, leaning toward the left, his dainty feet dancing a few inches off the floor, his right ear, his good ear, held close to the radio's circular, per orated speaker of brass, through which a baseball game emerges at full volume. He holds a cane in a two-fisted grip, and now its hooked handle turns; somebody's struck out. His face is gray and unshaven, his lips pressed in a white line, and his eyes, hooded by prominent bone that's emerged more over the years, as gleaming and fierce as an eagle's, flash back and forth, tracing a mental record of this baseball game for the sake of future arguments with imaginary friends.
"Ed! Do you hear?"
He doesn't. And it's not so much a question of his hearing, which has failed, as it is him. He doesn't care to hear. He can't bear for her to keep intruding on him and his baseball, as if she's jealous of even that. It's vicarious now, the last of his final pleasures, and elevates him out of the present, where he's become old, nearly eighty, been proclaimed a cripple by the medical profession, and had to hand the reins of this virginal and promising farm, which has the potential to vindicate those decades of grubbing in bad soil, over to his wife and son, goddamnit.
What more does she want? Her wish about the grand-kid, Charles, is fulfilled; the boy's spending his summer here. Everywhere this cane carries him, he sees the kid running all over hell and damnation, chousing the heat-afflicted cattle, kicking at chickens, making this clinker of an old man feel worse. Oh, it isn't the kid's tearing around that really bothers him, though it bothers him enough, being a gimp, but that the boy reminds him so of his dear dead daughter it's enough to make him, the terror of her Me, the noisy drunkard who never once told her he loved her—it's enough to make him cry out at the sky. Hardly more than a girl and already gone from them to the grave gone at the age he was when he met the girl's mother Dear God! Outlived by him, just as he's outlived three of his sons—all in accidents, as though the curse he claimed was on his life, if there was one, had passed through him to them and they'd suffered it in his stead.
What for? All his life he's felt as tangled and stranded within himself as nails m a keg. The only way to freedom was to pull a tangle loose and hammer them into a new day. But he hadn't done that since he was forty. He held back for the kids. They were his hope. They were a way home And now they were gone, all of the boys except Lionell, she was gone, and this husk of a man who was once Ed Jones was paying out endless dues to the demands of the past. He wasn’t even well enough to attend the funeral, or so the doctor and wife told him, to give her a final grace, a father's goodbye, his final word: forgive. When they talked before she left for Illinois, she took his hand in a sudden clasp and covered her eyes as if to say it was the last time there'd be this current of touch between them. And he thought, Well, it's my turn now, I’m a goner soon, and she knows it, and won't say. But it was her time. And he might have realized it if he hadn’t been so afraid for his own skin. Too afraid to enter and help ease the tragedy she ended up living out alone.
Martin, my penance, as you'd call it, and my duty is to help you if I can. Those days when she was a baby wasn’t even walking yet, you missed, boy. We'd sit on the floor and roll empty thread spools back and forth, spools of Ma’s I’d painted every sort of color in a mad and drunken scramble for her Christmas that year, and I could hold up the purple spool and say "Purrr-ple" and make her laugh so hard she turned purple and red. She wasn't a year old
yet and nobody else could make her laugh that way, and it was a word that did it. I miss those days so much my insides are rising out my back teeth, and the chunks of fillings there sing and taste of sin and silver. Oh, the times we had when she was young and I wasn't afraid of her because of the hallucinatory effects of booze. She was so intelligent and changeable she felt alien, a threat to my stiff mind, an angel with the energy of a sun, and it radiated from her eyes if you could look there.
"Ed!"
I felt unworthy of her and poured down even more of the stuff. I had to stay clear of her and her eyes for my sanity's sake. It made her wary and as afraid of everyday life as I was. I'd ask her a question. She'd look at her mother. Then she'd turn back to me. Or does a girl always hesitate that way for her father? Do your daughters do it, boy? I was so old compared to other fathers I must have looked to her a walking ghost. And yet I'm alive and she's not, and I sit here stranded in strife. Oh, sweet Jesus, please forgive me my sins. I'm afraid of burning in hell now. A dirty cringing frigging chicken coward still. Why don't any of the kids send a message about the other side?
The worst of it is I want a drink this minute.
I was afraid all along about the way she'd go, and knew how she would, and should have been a man and told you, Martin; all her married life, and even before she married you, I kept saying to her over and over, "Alpha, don't have too many kids. Please. Don't ever have too many kids. You'll hurt yourself." I knew it from the time she was four and lived with it since in this silence. She was too delicate, too pliable, too possessed and clinging to her mother then, and her palms were such damp and blue-veined wells. And I knew it was a hard and dangerous world out here. Oh, what energy was expended on that energetic child! Either she was the real reason for reality, or else there's no proof. I'd give half my years if she could have another year on earth and knew over that year she was dying, for her and her kids' sakes. Now there's that creaking and rush in my ears that must be the sound of the end. Oh, ho, ho, Lord, these old bones will shed themselves and soon be pools for bugs to drink at. Give Martin and his kids a long life. Forgive, Alpha, for—
"What's the matter?" his wife asks. "Are they losing again?"
His blurred fingers, swollen broadly at each knuckler remind him of the youngster who caught for the best pitchers around, when there was one major league and pay vas unpredictable, equipment poorly made, and the fast ball the most frequent pitch. There's an unexpected :rack of a bat and the fingers flex with pain. "Ed?"
She walks up and jerks a week-old copy of The Fargo Forum from between his back and the back of the chair, where he's draped it to absorb his sweat. He doesn't respond. She shakes him by the shoulder and says, "Ed, for God's sake, come and eat!"
He turns his fulminating face full on her. She's become his barber and guardian, his nurse and hired man. Whatever she says he can't do, he can't now. Her Christliness has him in chains. She does the chores he can only in his mind, which is the way he occupies himself when he isn't busy with baseball. If she loved him, she wouldn't tackle all the tasks he cares about—the shame of it!—and is too crippled up to do now; she'd let Lionell handle them. If she loved him, she'd leave him to his baseball and himself. She'd let him die.
"Do I have to lift you out of that chair?" “You do—" The tobacco in his mouth, which he's forgotten about and now tastes, has drawn up so much saliva there's no room for his tongue to move. He swallows it down, and says, "You do, and I'll crack you with this goddamn cane.”
She seems less frightened than disenchanted, and her interested eyes retreat from his. "You're a mean old fool," she says. "And you get meaner every day."
"And it'll get worse before it gets better, you can bet your ass on that, milady.”
"Stop!"
"When you stop your yipping."
"As soon as you come and eat.”
"After this inning."
"This inning nothing! After this inning it'll be the next liming, and after that the next game, and then it'll be night. Lord, you infuriate me! Right now! The food's getting cold."
"Pee on the food."
"Ed!" The tremolo in her voice climbs close to tears.
"I'll turn it up so I can listen in there."
"Up? Up? It's been going full blast all day! I have a headache from it! Damn!"
"You're not going on low yourself."
She reaches over and revolves the knob three times (his illuminated master-scene dimming as she does this) until there's a click that recedes into a ticklish spot in his brain. She touches his shoulder. "Please. Chuckie's at the table, waiting."
Chuckie, my best horse's ass, he wants to say, and does get out "horse's" as he pulls himself to his feet with the aid of the cane; he gets his balance and goes toward the kitchen, limping hard on his left leg, his free elbow swinging backward with that uneven stride. His suit pants are belted at the bottom of his chest, a yellow-and-black package protrudes from his hip pocket, and with each belabored step toward his place at the head of the table, a concession to his former authority here, the package rises higher until F. F. Adams & Co. and then Peerless can be read. The package doesn't fall.
"Ed," she says. "Wash your hands first."
"What's that?"
"Wash your hands first."
"What for?"
"You're going to eat."
"So? I washed them this morning. A man can't get dirty sitting on his ass all day."
"It's my food you're eating and you'll wash before you do."
"Bull—"
"Watch that tongue! There's a child here!"
"Child, hell. He's got a hammer on him just like me, hasn't he?"
"Wash!"
"By Christ, I don't know what it is with you! I can't understand it! Why can't you leave a man alone? I haven't got a goddamn nothin' but my balls and you keep kicking them around the kitchen! What is it? Say what you want and I'll crawl up your bung to do it. Stop this picky shit!"
"I said wash!"
He shakes with exasperation, and then executes a turn, gets the tripod of him going noisily to the washstand, and dips his hands into the basin of water she's poured. He hangs his cane over a wrist, picks up a bar of her honey-colored, homemade soap, and it slips in a shot through his fingers. He kicks out and gets it with a toe before it hits the floor. She hurried over and places it in the basin, avoiding his fierce eyes, and blushing to her forehead. To hell with soap for today, then.
He wipes his hands on the roller towel, runs his thumb along his gums to remove the matted tobacco, drops it into the slop bucket, and goes to the table and eases himself into his chair. Charles is across from him with his hands in his lap, staring at the flowers on his plate, and the sight of the boy like this fills him with regret. He'll end up like Lionell.
"Where's Lionell?" he asks. "Out cultivating," Charles murmurs. "Good for him!" He also wants to say, For Christ's sake, Charles, buck up. I'm here to help you out, for God's sake.
He turns and hangs his cane on the chair back, sensing the ball game drawing to its conclusion, and this fills him with unrest and a different sort of sadness. He looks up and discovers her eyes on him, and they stir him with their warmth, their interest in him, and their lack of pity. He picks up his fork, fumbling, and begins to eat..
He remembers when he courted her. He was in his thirties, closer to forty, had just left his first wife, and was working as a swipe and jockey for a stable in Fargo, but with pasturing and paddocks spread out across the state; he'd been to Pennsylvania and Ohio and New York, where he'd picked up a wardrobe of tailor-made clothes, and was looked upon as a dandy, even among the jocks. There was one wizened little juicer with a face that reminded him, now, of Lionell's, who referred to him as "Every woman's dream of having a baby who's also hung." Eduardo Jonas, he sometimes called himself, since he was dark-skinned enough to pass for a Mex and the ladies went for that then. He had a reputation as a ladies' man, which he was, and which he was able to be with extraordinary ease, because he didn't give a
damn about ladies. All he cared about were horses and baseball, and real baseball, professional baseball, hadn't yet made its way
Then he met her, a country girl with gold hair piled high on her head, high breasts and slim hips ("The closer the bone, the sweeter the meat"), skin as cool-looking as ivory and a profile—high brow, straight nose, full parted lips-both sensual and strong. She was seventeen, shy and untouched, and refined in a way that Eastern women were bruited to be but weren't; they were just jaded and cold the ones he'd known, while she was as graceful and spirited as the fine thoroughbreds he worked with. And she was tall, tall and elegant, a head taller than he was.
Immediately, he was ill at ease, which had never happened to him when he was with a woman, no matter who or what the woman was or how she was built. He hated himself for being so short. He hated the fancy clothes that called attention to his size. He hated her for making him feel as he did, and after that first meeting vowed never to see her again. But he came to her house the next night and every night after, and sat in the drawing room, silent and in pain, and watched her fingers travel over her needlework as she told pleasant and intelligent stories about school and the children she taught there. She never talked about herself. After months of this, he finally said in a fury "By Jesus, Electa, you better marry me!” She flushed at the tone of his voice and, with eyes still lowered to her sewing told him that she knew he was unhappy, that she'd loved him since he walked through the door, and wanted to live with him for the rest of her life, however he decided it.
He was terrified she was trying to do him in. He went back East, hoping to rid himself of her and the torment she stirred in him, but couldn't stand being apart from her and not knowing how she'd spent her day, even if it was with those damn kids, and so, with a store of contempt for himself at having run off like a coward, he ran back and married her. He cursed her and browbeat and berated her and brought up all the women he could think of, plus a few he invented, who had the power to make her hurt; he told her she put on airs like an assy-pants, and wouldn’t let her go visiting down the road, go to church, wear flattering clothes, have women friends, and went on drinking bouts that lasted for weeks. Then one morning, waking in the web of her hair, he realized he wasn't caught, wasn't in torment, hadn't broken her spirit, and that he loved her.
Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 33