He looks at her eyes, which are turned down; at her profile, her face demure and vulnerable-looking now while she eats; at her hands, delicate in spite of the work she does, and flushes with pride and arrogance. She still has her beauty; she's still the same. It would take some doing to win her over again, to make her quail at the tone of his voice, or surrender, and he makes plans on how he'll storm out to the barn, harness up the team, hitch them to the mower, and start to mow the yard while she watches, and then she'll come out to tell him to quit, and he'll rise from the seat, balancing on the axle, and cry, "Get away before you get hurt! Get back in the kitchen where you belong!" And then drive to the hay field on the forty back in the woods and mow all of it, and get drunk on a bottle out in the horse barn and come in late at night, covered with pollen and filth, stinking of horses and booze and armpits, his lights and vitals healthily afire inside him, and crawl into bed like that.
He breaks out with scattering cries of pleasure and delight. Maybe he'll have to try that. Maybe tomorrow. Their eyes meet, hers tentative and questioning, still like a girl's, his shining with slyness, and by Jesus, he decides, he will try it. Soon too. As soon as he can see through the present to the dust that he is and be alive again.
27
AT HEIGHT OF LAND LAKE
WITH FATHER
Charles stepped up from darkness into the frame of the door to the horse barn as a black Chevrolet pulled into the farmyard and stopped near the house, a hundred yards off, and even at that distance he could see that it blazoned a North Dakota license plate, and then the door on the driver's side winged outward and Father Schimmelpfennig rose up from behind it, his balding head bare and glazed by the sun, and turned in a circle as he surveyed the farm. Charles took off on a run, his heart flinging seizures around the column of air in his throat, and then slowed to a walk when Father saw him and waved, but soon his legs betrayed him and he came up to the car as out of breath as if he'd run the mile and a half to the mailbox and back. "Father!" he said. "What are you doing here?"
Father smiled down at him, his gold-capped tooth gleaming in the summer light, and reached out and ruffled his hair. "Well, well, well, and how is my Charles today, ay?"
It was like a return to the comfort of the past to have his name pronounced in Father's accent, like "chalice.”
"Have you been a good boy, Charles?"
Charles flooded with color and looked down; Father had heard in the confessional about his problem with bad actions, as Charles called it, and the problem had become worse.
"Ach! I didn't mean morrrally," Father said, rolling the r with his rich foreignness. "I meant, have you been a good companion to your grandparents?"
"I guess."
"And your Uncle Lionell?" “Yes."
"This is a nice place they have here," Father said, and looked around once more, shorter and older than Charles remembered him, with violet-veined cheeks and deep-set wrinkles at the corners of his eyes; and his stomach, plumper than before, parted his double-breasted jacket with a blacker space, his dainty feet shod in hook-and-eye shoes, like Charles's grandfather's, the high polish on them holding reflections of Charles and the car and—
"Do you always stare down when you meet people you know?" Father asked him. "Aren't you as happy as I on this bright and sunshiny day?"
"Yes," Charles said. He'd spent most of the summer walking from one fence line of the farm to another with his eyes on the ground, wondering if the dead ever really come back to life.
"What's that?" Father asked. He pointed toward some rough-cut lumber, stacked to cure, as children stack match-sticks, into interlocking houselike squares.
"Green fir," Charles said.
"No, no, no. That machine."
Lionell's car was parked between two squares, to protect it from the weather, he said. He'd just finished high school and a current local fad was to have an outlandish car; one of his friends drove an antiquated hearse with kitchen curtains in its windows, and Lionell had told Charles that he and the friend had had girls behind the pulled curtains on the main street of Park Rapids. Lionell had repainted his own car, a '36 Plymouth sedan, with white house paint, and over the white had painted red and blue polka dots the size of dinner plates; had, indeed, used one of his mother's plates as a template.
"That's Lionell's bug," Charles said; and then it occurred to him: "How'd you know where I was?"
"Well, your dad wrote and said you were here over vacation, so I wrote back and said, 'Where is this farm in Minnesota? Are there any good lakes close?' Because even m the Old Country we heard that the fishing in Minnesota was the best. And then I was thinking of my vacation coming up. Priests must take vacations, too, you know!" "But how’d you find it?"
"Your dad drew a map and your grandma's friends are friendly to priests. Have you been fishing often yet?”
"Not too."
"I thought when people lived in Minnesota they went every day."
"Lionell's been pretty busy." Lionell had taken over a lot of the work of the farm since Charles's grandfather was injured, but he'd also been hanging out with his high-school friends more, and dating, and said he'd outgrown the sport of catching fish.
"Is he in the fields now?"
"I don't know." When Charles last saw him, he was on his back in the middle of the living-room floor, asleep, in spite of the radio going at full volume; he'd been drunk the night before.
"Well, here's what I was thinking," Father said. "Why don't Charles and Lionell and I go fishing today!"
Charles was off on a run toward the house.
"And maybe your grandma, too! Wilhomena is with me." Wilhomena, dark-haired and plump, with fleshy filled-out features, leaned out of a reflection partly obscuring her and twinkled her fingers at him from behind the windshield.
Charles ran up the steps onto the porch and opened the screen door, then let it close; the house inside was spare and well swept, with all but the kitchen shades drawn against the sun, cool and dark even at midday, parts of it sparkling from the pinholes of light let in by the shades, its air so dense with mourning and unspoken memories you weren't sure whether you were touching somebody's arm or a piece of furniture, and had to stare to make sure. Charles knew that the aspect of him that his grandmother and Lionell liked the least, for differing reasons, was that he was a Catholic, and didn't feel Father would be welcome here; he turned and said, "If they don't want to go, will you still take me?"
"One of the reasons I came so far, Charles, was to see you fish!"
He went through two doors into the kitchen, where his grandmother was at the cookstove, stirring an iron kettle with a wooden spoon stained violet.
"Grandma—"
"I know, I saw," she said, and held up the steaming spoon and touched her tongue to it; she'd met Father once, in January, when he preached the eulogy for Charles's mother, and now as Father stepped into the kitchen Charles felt afraid for him. His grandmother nodded, and said, "Good morning, sir.”
"Good morning, Mrs. Jones, good morning, my dear!”
He took her hand and patted it, and Charles, seeing the impassiveness of his grandmother's face, was aware once again of Father's accent. "Eet's so goot to zsee you agane, ant in yorrr own 'ome dis dtyum. You haf a lufly bplace herrre."
"It does for us."
"Eet's a bparrradice, Meesusz Chones!”
They regarded one another as courtiers must have, with sympathetic separate selves but across a vast and frosty tract of silence where neither had yet trod, each able at any instant to issue a challenge, and then she grasped her apron and looked down. "I've never had the chance, and I've wanted to thank you for the kind words you said about our girl, sir. You buried her as well as we could have asked."
The tremolo in her voice contained a sadness Charles had heard only in song.
"You know, Mrs. Jones, if I could have had my choice, I would have rather it was I who had died."
"That showed in your sermon, sir. I liked it that you said she was
a saint."
"It was no exaggeration!"
"She would have liked that.”
There was an exclamation from the living room and Charles saw his grandfather, in his rocker by the radio, staring in a startled way at Father; he gave his head a hard shake, as if to shake it from dream, grappled with his cane as though it were a weapon he'd use, and then pushed himself up and went stumping past Lionell's out-flung arm into the back bedroom, leaving the radio playing on high to his empty chair that continued to rock.
Father hadn't seen him. He said, "Charles and I have been talking about an outing, a fishing trip, and we decided you'd all like to go. My housekeeper is with me, and you ladies could keep one another company while we men fish."
"Daddy couldn't go," she said with sudden force. "He's too crippled up."
"Then you and Lionell," Father said.
"I just got this batch of blueberries going."
"Will they take long?"
"Two hours." Was this exaggeration?
"That's fine, then! We have to go to town anyway, to get some tings and see about accommodations. We'll want to fish all afternoon, ay, Charles?" He winked. "So we'll need a place for the night. Is there a hotel in Park Rapids?"
"Yes."
"Good! They outshine motels in my business, Mrs. Jones. We'll get ourselves some rooms, then, and come by after lunch to pick you up."
"Well, I—"
Father's forefinger came up. "Ah-ah, Mrs. Jones, you can't say no to me. I’m a priest!"
She gave a girlish cry and then bit her lip and looked away.
Lionell came in from the living room, barefoot, the crown of his flattop smashed, his eyes swollen and mean-looking from sleep, and scowled and clenched his fists; he was short-tempered and combative and returned sometimes from his nights out with a black eye or a cut on his face. "What's this?" he asked.
"Lionell," Father said, and took one of his big fists in both hands and gave it a shake. "We're going fishing!"
Lionell glanced at his mother as if for a sign of the attitude he should adopt.
"We're all waiting for you to tell us the best place," Father said.
"Oh?" Lionell said. "Well, I wonder who's going to cultivate my corn when all this is coming off."
"Ouf!" she cried. "You never work anyway, you fool!"
Her handling of Lionell made Charles uneasy, and she'd been angry at her youngest son over the summer in a way that made their relationship worse; he slept late, came home with liquor on his breath, and a week ago, doing the wash, she came across a prophylactic in a pocket of his pants and ran upstairs, where he lay asleep, naked under the sheets, and started slapping him with a flyswatter and crying shame until her voice gave out.
"Well," Lionell said, and shook his head once, like his father. "You better talk to Ma. She's the boss around here."
"Oh, you oaf, you," she cried. "Shut your mouth before I hit you over the head with this spoon!"
"Eek!" Lionell said. "With a priest here. Ma? What manners have we not?" He laughed in a high hee hee hee he'd picked up from a friend, and then winked at Father to indicate this was a joke between them.
Father winked back.
"Which is the lake, Lionell?"
"They're all pretty good around here, Reverend."
"But which is the best?"
"I've been hearing some pretty wild tales about Height of Land lately, but that's thirty miles off."
"Thirty miles is nothing!" Father said. "It's Height of Land for us!" Out of his sleeve he popped a wristwatch up. "At one-thirty, then, we'll come for you. That will give you time for your blueberries, Mrs. Jones, and for Wilhomena to pack some tings for a picnic for us."
"I have some cold chicken I can bring," she said.
Lionell gave her a dry and crusty look and she turned from him to the window. "It'd be nice to get out in the open and away from this stove."
"Good!" Father said, and was out of the kitchen with Lionell and Charles behind, to his car, where he introduced Lionell, through the rolled-down window—Father had whirled his finger at her—to Wilhomena; she was effusive about the scenery, the woods and fields and cattle they'd seen, and her blissful innocence, as enveloping as her perfume, made Charles wish he could protect her; she spoke in an accent exactly like Father's and her fluty adenoidal voice, with its liquid whine of monotone, always reminded Charles of a back-timber mosquito droning close to his ear. Lionell, he was sure, perceived it and her plump translucence in more picturesque terms.
"I believe we'll take this," Father said, and laid his hand on the hood of his car. "Charles has introduced me to yours, Lionell."
"What did you think when you first saw it? Tell me the truth now."
"I thought it was absolutely exquisite for you. But if I were to ride in it, Lionell, well—" He held his hand horizontal, fingers outspread, and teeter-tottered it back and forth. "People might wonder if the Second Coming wasn't on them."
"Yeah, well, I've been having trouble getting it started lately, anyway," Lionel! said. "I think the gas pump's shot."
Father got in the car and put on a black homburg and the bluish window lowered past his face as Wilhomena's went up. "Is there anything in town I can pick up, Lionell? Tackle? Groceries? Night crawlers?"
"Angleworms?" Lionell said.
"Aren't they good on trout?”
"Yeah, well, you won't find many trout around here. We'll be going after line-busting muskies and pike, with maybe a walleye or two thrown in. Only Indians use angleworms."
Charles was surprised at Lionell's tone; his girlfriend for a year was an Indian from the settlement over near Nevis, and during his and Charles's former fishing days, he'd put a fish head in each hill of sweet corn, as the Indians did, and say, "That way the corn can see where it's growing." There was the ratchety sound of a Chevrolet starting motor, and then Father held up a hand and nodded and smiled, the gold in his mouth giving off a flash, and guided the black car around the turnabout and out the drive. Lionell and Charles went back to the house, where Lionell high-stepped past his mother with sneaking strides, and in the center of the room gave off an air-tearing whistle and jumped up and slapped the ceiling with both hands. "Whooopee!" he cried. "A hotel in Park Rapids I Do you think they'll get separate rooms, Ma?"
"Of course!"
"Adjoining ones?"
"Hush, you."
"Because I thought the old boy looked like he could use a little ahem! before da beeg feeshing treep."
"Lionell, stop!”
"Well, she's got mighty big knockers on her for the housekeeper of a priest. Ma, did you catch that? Oh, them ole boobavoobadoobies"—he was fluttering his lips with a finger and making a kazoolike booby-beleaguered blubbering buzz as though it sputtered up and came from the end of his thumb—"a blub blub blub blah-blah-blah, Ma!"
She unslung the dish towel from her shoulder and threw it, a zigzag in the air at him, and he leaped off to one side, catching it where he'd been, and tied it over his head like a babushka, and sang: " 'Vilhomena! Youf gawd aual tda boisss vacky en dah nauggin' "—he crossed his eyes and rapped on his head—"'eeeein Koooopenhaugin!'!"
"Stop it," she said. "You stop that right now!"
But Charles could see creases of inconsistency appear around her mouth, and then she turned to the stove, blushing, and tried to conceal a smile. Lionell kept up the song and broke into a clumsy clog step in his bare feet, which he made seem snowshoe-sized, and she glanced over her shoulder with eyes that flashed surrender and devotion and feelings deeper than maternal love.
Charles went outdoors, past the lilacs, where chickens scratched and sat ruffled and blinking in oval bowls of dust, past the tool shed, weathered gray, and pressed down on the lowest strand of barbed wire and started toward the grayish-green hill of pines that separated the barnyard from the pasture, walking in the winding path the milk cows continually took, cut like a trench into the sod of the cattle lane, and entered the strip of pines, old trees, forty and fifty feet tall,
their striated trunks the girth of his chest, their lower limbs swaying only inches above his head with a sound of expired breath, the earth coppery-orange with enmeshed needles that gave under his feet and glowed with pools and ladderlike rivulets of sun. With a trunk at his back, ass down, legs spread over the cushiony ground, he looked up through the needles above and wondered if anybody had ever really seen a wood tick fall or drop from a branch onto anybody, and when. The blue of the sky rippled above with its summer intensity.
In Hyatt, under the doorbell of Father's house, on a lettered name card fixed beneath glass, following Father's first initials and his name, were D.D. and Ph.D. Charles's father explained what the initials meant and compared them to the B.A. he had, in terms of school attended, plus a thesis and special reading, and said that Father and earned both of the degrees from the University of Heidelberg, where Hamlet went. In Father's basement, in a brick-lined cave with a white-mortared brick arch above covered with fusty and nitrous old cobwebs, were honeycombed racks that held bottles of wine, plus cases of beer with foreign printing on them stacked to the ceiling. Two or three times a year Charles's family went to the rectory for dinner, and there were so many plates and glasses and pieces of silverware, he didn't know where to begin, and could hardly see the food anyway, because only candles were going, tidbits of light; and as if hidden from them by the shadows cast, Charles's father, who never usually drank, drank then, drank wine, and kept up the general spirits with amusing stories from his past. The dishes were vast affairs arranged by contour, or subtlety of color in the special light, and were unlike any Charles had tasted before, and his mother, who was at the least particular, once said that eating at Father's, where the mood of the meal and the people gathered about it were more important than the food, was eating in style, a word that won esteem with her, while her least word to Charles added her dimension to his simplest event, and when she enjoyed herself as she did at Father's, he felt he could step off his chair and float. Straight as a star. After they'd moved to Illinois and she'd died, he was digging through a box that was still unpacked and came across his baby book, and saw, in her hand: "Charles' baptism. Nov. 26. He wore the full-length embroidered gown with the underslip that his dad wore when he was baptized. Wilhomena held him, proxy, because his godparents. Gram and Grandpa N, couldn't be here. Every time Fr touched him, he opened his eyes and smiled."
Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 34