Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "What kind of a guy wrote that story is what I'd like to know! Houff! Peeeow! It was about this man that stabbed his sister, tied her in chains, and as if that wasn't enough, stuffed her into this moldy tomb in the basement. And then this friend of his comes to visit the guy, and the sister revives or rises from the dead, or wasn't stabbed right to begin with—Christ, who knows!—and she decides to get even, so, sure enough, while they're upstairs talking, up she gets out of the coffin, blood all over her and everything, up the stairs she comes, and walks into the room where they are. Well, just as I got to that part, there was this big boom on the front porch. I was afraid to breathe. Much as I wanted to close that damn book, I couldn't. There was all kinds of scratching and pattering out there, too— chains, chains, is what I thought, but it was probably just a chicken—and I swear I even heard the front door open and close. But we sat stockstill—we couldn't move—and I thought. Any second now, we're going to have a corpse coming in that door."

  "We sat that way for an hour!" she said. "We were in the same spot when the folks got back! They figured we must have done something awful, we were so quiet, but we never told them, did we? I think we were too ashamed to admit how scared we'd been."

  "Ashamed?” Elling said. "My Christ, I was in my teens!"

  "I was eight, then,” Conrad said. "I remember well."

  "There was an old man who lived across the road from us at that farm," she said. "In the little shack beside the granaries. Do you remember him? He had a long white mustache and used to pour his coffee out in a saucer to cool it. What was his real name? Who was he? We called him 'Uncle,' but I know he wasn't our uncle. Was he really related?"

  "I think it was Mama's uncle," Elling said. "He spoke some foreign tongue. Finnish, I think. I don't know what happened to him or why we never heard about it. One day he was just gone. Wasn't somebody else living there with him?"

  "Some woman," she said. "But I can't remember her name. I don't think they were married, either."

  "That doesn't sound like Ma's uncle to me," Elling said. "And it's probably the reason he had to move, too."

  "Do you remember when Daddy got into a barroom brawl?"

  "Which time?"

  "Oh, the worst, I guess."

  "Somebody hit him over the head with a bottle of gin. A full one. You could smell him a mile off."

  "Do you remember the sheep dog, the collie who ate cigarette butts?”

  "Duke," Conrad said.

  "Do you remember—"

  "Whoa!" Elling said, and held up his hand. "Right here's where we stop. I've got a speech I've been wanting to make for years, and now, by jing, I'm going to make it. This reliving the past happens all the time, even when I'm away from you two—especially when I'm alone— and it's not a mentally healthy way to be. Every time it happens, it's like I'm stepping out of what I don't want to be into who I really am. And that's bad. It’s not who I am, actually. I'm me. That person's gone. I have to stop myself and say, 'No, no, no, that’s all over! Here's where you are now. You have a wife and kids. You have an important job to do.' That's what I say and sometimes it helps, but it doesn't change things much. Old man McGough still means more to me than any millionaire client, and I could damn near tell you how many times the team of bays broke wind on a given workaday: 'A fartin' horse never tires, a fartin' man's the man to hire.' Dad's line. The smallest detail from then is clearer in my mind than what I did last year, or yesterday, or the day before that, and the older I grow and the farther I get from those days, the clearer and more important the details seem. Will the present ever be like that? I don't know. I hate to think that the best times have to be dead and gone before you can appreciate them, and that's why I don't like to remember the past or even talk about it much.

  "You mustn't misunderstand me, though. I don't believe in going backwards. A person's got to do what he's got to do and he's got to grow up! But it does seem a shame that the— By God, it is a shame, a crying shame, and a crime, and it's not right! That's the way I feel about it, and that's the way everybody else does, too!" He listened for a moment to their silence, and then said, "Isn't it?"

  "Well, if—" she began.

  "Oh, yes," Conrad said. "Those days are best. I keep going over them and over them again and again, over them and over them, just like they were the only part of my life I really lived. And, you know, it doesn't make any difference how many times I go over them. They never grow tiresome and I never run out of things to think about. Oh, I couldn't begin to tell you the half of it, you two. The hay fields, the grain fields, the way the sun was then, the way the people were, how we were different, too. There've been so many times I've—"

  His eyes hazed and he lowered his head. There was a shifting moment between them, and then Elling said, "Why, look! Before we started getting farmed out, if we were ever separated for as much as a day, we started a small rebellion, and, why, now look, now we've been apart for two years, for two whole years, and none of us has even noticed it!"

  "Maybe you didn't," she said. "But I did. I've missed you both. I've missed you and I miss the folks."

  "Oh, sure you have," Elling said, "I know you have. But it's a different kind of missing. We don't throw tantrums like we used to, or drop everything and run off to make sure one or the other is where we think he is, doing what he might be doing. We don't even write. We get by. We get by somehow and, hell, that's the worst part of it, that we get by."

  "Yes," Conrad said, his bass voice blending with the rumbling sound that had begun again. "Yes, and every year it gets worse."

  The bay window had been darkening and now it started to rain. She looked at Jerome with a frown, as if he were responsible, and Conrad and Elling glanced at one another and then turned to him, too. He went to the curtain and looked and listened to the rain falling onto the roof, the sidewalk, the lawn, and the leaves of the lilac trees, and then, without a warning flash of light, the first eruption of thunder came and made the panes of the window vibrate beside his face. He lowered the curtain, went to his windmill, and sat down beside it.

  "He might be afraid of his uncles," Elling said, "but not of the elements. That's good."

  "I was thinking I heard some thunder before," Conrad said. "Well, it's good for the crops."

  "But not the roads," she said. "Can't you stay the night?"

  "Oh, no," Elling said. "Hell, no. Conrad's got to be back for chores. No, just the roads down around Spirit-wood are bad. After that, we'll be fine. Modem blacktop now.”

  "Was there a thunderstorm predicted?" she asked.

  "This isn't a thunderstorm," Elling said. "This is a cloudburst."

  "Maybe," Conrad said. "But it's not going to let up just yet."

  "How do you know?"

  "I can feel it in my bad knee, the one I broke when— well, you know.”

  "I thought that meant trouble."

  "Sometimes it means a good hard rain, or has lately."

  They looked at one another in a nervous way, and then turned to Jerome, and for the first time since they'd been together, a silence, which contained in it only the sound of rain and the sound of water running off the eaves, filled the room and spread through the house. A sleepy voice started saying "Mom, Mom," from behind the door of the bedroom.

  "Tim," she said.

  "Good," Conrad said. "I'll get to see him."

  "Mom?"

  "And now there's Charles. They'll both soon be with us, you can bet on that."

  Jerome was trying to reinsert the trapezoid-shaped violet blade back into the slit at the end of the stick. The piece of thin paperboard had been used a lot and its edges were frayed; he wiggled it at the top of the stick; it wouldn't go in. He examined the end of the stick, and then placed it against an incisor and pushed up on it, gently at first, trying to flare the slit, and the buzzing warmth at the roof of his mouth reminded him of attempting that another time, splitting the stick, and running its pointed end into the roof of his mouth. He rubbed his tongue along the ridged sk
in of his palate, which was itching now, pulled out the stick, and looked at the violet blade. He put it between his lips, compressed them, drew it out, put it there and drew it out again, copying what his mother did with thread before she speared the eye of a needle, and then aligned the dampened edge of the blade with the slit in the stick, stopped, and looked up.

  All three of them were staring at him. They shifted their weight on the couch and looked at him uneasily, as if to say. Go on with it. Please. If you get that together, we’ll be back on the right track. Go ahead.

  Then the three of them locked into place, making it seem he was staring at a photograph that had been snapped of them at that moment, and began receding into the depths of his mind, growing smaller and more faint and retreating as though they were spirits he'd taken by surprise (as indeed they were; that same afternoon, brochures and pamphlets for Hart Parr farm machinery were scattered in the wet grass from an unmarked railroad crossing a hundred yards down the tracks to where the train, dragging with it a Pontiac that held the remnants of two dead men, finally came to a stop; and five years later his mother died after having her stillborn child), until the three of them disappeared altogether, and Jerome, encumbered with the full weight of his twenty-seven years, now an interne, finds himself sitting under lamplight in the sleeping room that will be his home for the next year, thinking. Where did all of that laughter out of the past just now come from? and glimpses Tim and Charles revolving at the edges of a whirlpool of water or air as they echo one another's laughter, in the way that his uncles and mother entered the room laughing, and sees that he's staring at a pamphlet in his lap opened to the first page:

  Emergency Room Procedures

  Garfield Park Hospital

  Chicago, Illinois

  43

  THE MANY-COLORED UPRIGHT PIANO

  Here I am at this old upright piano, banging away just like a breeze and thinking sin. Laura. Bring that phrase back around so it's known it was meant to go off-key and begin again. Laura. It's down to a game between her and the two of us still stuck here at home, not counting Ginny, of course, who is hers and will always be hers from this side of the fence; it's not Ginny I hate, I hope, but her, as Marie and I have come to call the "her” who's now family magistrate without our ayes or a feel of the place. She'll come up with a fake-pleasant smile and say, Susan, Susan, I want to talk with you and Marie and Ginny in my office awhile, and the talk among her dress patterns and sewing machine and sawed-off, console piano will be about general neatness around the house, or hosing down the kitchen the second after a snack, or getting clothes and cots right off to a closet so people won't know we're such awful slobs (not her words; she's so sweet), and all this is directed at Ginny, or at times Marie, so you know that she knows that I know it's intended for me. She won't even give me the thinnest glance, the chicken, the wicked pretender, and I've learned that whenever she says "Girls," it's me she means, It’s Me.

  Money, money, money's another theme. I could always go up to Dads and ask for cash and the most I'd have to put up with was a one-sided, my-sided argument about the amount, but once he married her and I went to hit him up for some, he said he didn't have any money to give any more; she was handling that now. He was on an allowance, for God's sake, a kid again! What she's done to the man in him? What's he carrying in his pockets?

  Are they sewn shut? Do you think I’d plead with her for more than a minute about a buck? I feel from her that money's made of shame. And Dads, my long-time god, sits in the big chair with nothing in his pants and no you-know-whats, groveling to please her and leave the rest of us in the dust, and keeps pestering Marie and me to call that floating figment of family fate "Mom" and making the contents of my stomach climb up. I can't even remember calling my own mom "Mom" or whatever I called her while she was here.

  I could swallow most of the crap, I guess, in the general way I usually swallow crap, but the worst of it is that lately she's been whining about wanting to move. Back to Chicago, no less. And drag all of us along, as if Pettibone, where this patched-together and reasonably peaceful house and all of my friends are, isn't good enough for somebody who teaches music, or did for three years in the Windy City, as Dads has to call the place, trying to ease the feeling that those of us trapped and in collusion here have for it, perhaps ("Well, I'd never think of living in the city itself," Laura said once, "In one of the suburbs, of course," while I thought as far as I was concerned, if you're going to live there, then why not in the center of it, huh?); who can teach music, then, and articulate a lot of the feeling she has for it on the keyboard, and can rattle away at typing faster than a bat out of hell, playing another type of tune on those clattery keys, and knows shorthand and can go shopping like an adding machine, and drinks gin in the summer and whiskey the rest of the year —click, click, the ice in the glass, ho hum. There's nothing in the world that bores me more than people who drink, and I've said so two or three times when I was sure she could hear.

  I've mentioned to him how much against the move-to-Chicago project I am, but he doesn't hear, either, or if he does, doesn't care, now that he's become dedicated to pleasing nobody but her. How I hate her! How Marie does, too, at times, although she's too honest to keep it inside her or let it glow too long. She's a cheerleader this year, at last, after practicing those leaps and splits and arm pumps and mind-buckling chants from the day she was four, and has a boyfriend who takes her out parking in his car, and will have to give that up if we go, at the least, and says she won't, but who's to say? In my case, I've felt cooped and dammed up in dear old Pettibone from the day I could see, and expect to go off to the university and break a goal or two, instead of getting married to a farmer the day I graduate, as half of the girls around here seem to. I'm going somewhere even if it's from here to hell and back, by jeez!

  I don't compare Laura to my mother and find her lacking in every respect to this glorious woman who once walked the globe, as the boys portray Alpha N. I can't remember her, not a hair of her, though I wouldn't admit it to anybody in the family, in or out of it, and I've heard enough about her to see her however I please, and not always in a saintly light. An aunt or else a woman friend of hers once told me she died while she was in the middle of toilet training me (now, who has a memory like that?), and I do recall a lot of noise from some woman or other over what looked at the time like peanut butter in a cup.

  What I mostly remember from then is Grandma and Grandpa N and the slam! slam! of the loom as Grandma banged away at making a rug, and the balls of material made by cutting up worn-out clothes and sewing the strips together—huge balls I got to roll over the loom-room floor —and Grandpa N so stem and solemn, locking me in the closet one day because of a dirty word, and me feeling around in the dark through all of those clothes and shoes and coming across— My scream must have been telling, because there was light in an instant and old Gramps was at the door saying, "What is it in there?" in a shaky way, while I checked it out and saw it was a pink piggy bank the size of a baby pig, was what it was in there, and I wanted to say, I'll never forget or forgive you for this, you old fart, you.

  The reason I've been hating her so much is her gall in bringing up this move, knowing that Dad's so entangled in her he'll commit any sort of crime against us to please her, and because just yesterday she said, as if it were settled, "Well, that old piano will have to stay here, of course." This piano I'm playing now! This lovely old upright that's been in the house since I can remember, and came all the way from Hyatt, this piano that Marie and I learned to play on—and I worked at it, too; there were days when I sat on this bench so much I could taste it—that Tim would sometimes play when he was home from Wisconsin, and make it appear it was the source of all the mystery in him, or that music was, as he squeezed out with equal ease Chopin and "Dizzy Fingers" and phrases as green and thundery-reeling as the hills around Sue and Einard's place; pastures appeared from the heart of it (was it improvised?), while blue strings wound like a river through them, water
he'd walked beside, and I could smell the attacks of his fingers, and perfume, and then he'd stump over the keys with his elbows and clown.

  And Jerome and Charles played duets on this when they were in the second grade, or younger yet, and now sometimes as a joke would sit together on the bench, big butts bumping, and play in a toe-stubbing tempo tunes such as "Swinging Along," and it was one of the few times you could see in their faces that they'd been kids once and grown up together, since both of them, here in the present, were so da-dum solemn. Surely it was a tie for them to a life that was past, and their music stirred up currents from then whether you liked it or not. And when the guys from North Dakota, the boys from the basketball team, were living in the house here, they'd gather at this old upright over the weekends, and one would chord away while another played the comet, the third the drums, rumpa tat turn, and their music, though not the best I've heard, always made me sigh for an element that must have been carried through them from Hyatt to here and was missing in old Pettibone. Being in Pettibone is a bore, true, Laura, to me, too, I admit it, but who are you to say this piano is or isn't going, or is staying here, while your little pipsqueak of a machine will damn well follow us wherever we move? Or where you choose for us to?

  When there's so much of our past in this piece I'm pounding on or off on, huh? It's a bit out of tune and not in such beeooooteefull shape now, as Dads would say, and I've heard from him why it is that it happens to look the way it does; when I was a baby, or not even born yet, he got a can of stripper and stripped its dark-cherry color away, and then tried to stain it blond. But the stripper didn't work well, or else the blond wasn't dark enough, and the half-peeled finish kept peeking through in spots; then he ran out of stain and used two different colors on one of the ends, trying to match up with the original blond, but neither color did. Those two colors are with us yet. The cover for the keys and some of the underparts, like those columns on either side, were never stripped or stained at all, so the original finish is also here to see.