by Alden Nowlan
He supposed he would have to marry. Kings needed sons to continue their dynasties. And Princess Margaret Rose was only a little older than he . . . Then he remembered that Napoleon had divorced Josephine because she could not provide him with an heir. This puzzled him. He asked his mother: “Why couldn’t Josephine have any children, Mummy?”
“Josephine who, sweetikins?”
“You know, Josephine, the one that married Napoleon.”
Laughing, Mary threw her arms around him. She slid her hand inside the back of his shirt and ran her fingers up and down the little bumps in his spine. This was one of her favourite ways of caressing him.
“Oh, Scampi darling, you ask the craziest questions!”
He drew away sulkily. “I don’t see nothin’ crazy about that.”
“No, it isn’t really crazy. Just funny, sort of. But I don’t know, lamb. I really don’t know why Josephine couldn’t have children. I suppose someday you’ll find out all about it. When Mummy’s little sugar baby gets to be a man, he’s going to know all sorts of wonderful things.”
Grandmother O’Brien spoke from her rocker, beneath the clock shelf. “Yer spoilin’ the boy, Mary. Yer spoilin’ the boy with yer foolishness.”
Mary stroked Kevin under the chin and winked at him.
“We’re poor people,” Grandmother O’Brien said. “It ain’t fittin’ fer people like us tuh put on airs.”
Mary winked at Kevin again.
Grandmother O’Brien said this often, to rebuke what she called the false pride of Kevin and his mother. “People like us should be willin’ tuh take what’s handed out tuh us. We’re poor as dirt and allus will be. Puttin’ on high and mighty airs ain’t gonna change things none.”
To ease the perpetual pain in her stomach, Martha O’Brien held a brick, heated on top of the stove and wrapped in an old wool sock, against her waist. She lived on crackers soaked in milk until they’d become an oozing pulp, but her soul was nourished on the flesh offered in sacrifice to the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob.
“The O’Briens has allus been poor, boy. But they allus knew their place. And they was allus willin’ tuh work. The same with my people, the Havelocks; when a man hired a Havelock he knowed he was a-gonna git a day’s work outta him. Yuh never caught a Havelock givin’ hisself no stud-horse airs. They knew what they was and they never pretended tuh be nothin’ else. I don’t like that false pride I see in yuh, boy.”
“Oh, my goodness, Grammie! Scampi just asked a simple little question!” Mary’s voice rose in irritation.
Martha adjusted the pin in her black, bowl-shaped hairdo. “Mark my words, Mary, yer a-spoilin’ that boy. Children should be seen and not heard, I allus say, children should be seen and not heard.” Rocking complacently, she looked at Kevin with undisguised disapproval. “If that was my boy I’d Josephine him! I’d Josephine him out in the garden with a hoe. There’s work tuh be done here. Ain’t no earthly use of Judd workin’ his heart out every night after he comes home from the mill. Put that boy out in the garden. Put him tuh work around the barn. He’s big enough tuh work if he’s ever gonna be!”
“Oh, Grammie, Scampi is only a baby. Things were different when you were young. You don’t realize that, Grammie.”
“I realize a long-legged cockalorum like that one should be doin’ his share of work around the place instead of askin’ questions about women havin’ children.”
Mary drew Kevin’s face against her breast. “When Scampi grows up, he’s going to work with his brain. His hands are going to be soft as a girl’s — like the hands of the men who work in offices and stores in Larchmont. When he’s a man, my baby is going to have nice, soft, pink hands just like he has now. You wait and see.”
“Eh!” This sound, half snort and half grunt, was Martha’s way of dismissing them as hopeless. She rocked vigorously, hugging her brick.
There was nothing that Kevin found more frustrating than his grandmother’s sermons on the certainty of poverty and the duty of humility before one’s betters. He writhed in vexation when she told him, as she often did, that within four years he would be working in the mill. He hated her for the grim satisfaction he detected in her voice. And his hate was made more vicious by the thought that she was probably right in her prediction.
Martha did not undress at night. She lay fully clothed on her bed, and when the pain became unbearable she came downstairs and heated bricks. Then, in the darkness, with the brick clutched to her belly, she rocked and sang hymns. Often, Kevin awoke and heard her voice rise like the cry of a ghost in the darkness at the other end of the house.
This was the hymn that she most often sang:
There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.
E’er since by faith I saw that stream
Thy flowing did supply,
Redeeming love has been my theme
And shall be till I die.
Four
The mail had brought a letter from a lawyer, demanding a further payment on the house. Kevin and Mary knew that Judd would be angry when he read this letter and so, to postpone the crisis as long as possible, she hid the cellophane-faced, sinister-looking envelope under a stack of mail-order catalogues and love-story magazines on the shelf above the cot. She did not show it to Judd until late Sunday afternoon.
On Sundays, Judd liked to do little odd jobs around the house and outbuildings. He half-soled his work boots, sewed patches on his overalls, which were stiff and black with pitch, plugged holes in pots and glued handles on broken cups. Sometimes, he even repaired a clock. Kevin had seen him devote all of an afternoon to making a clock hand from a bobby pin.
Kevin loved to watch Judd manipulate an awl or a needle. He sat in drowsy entrancement while Judd tapped nails into leather or broke a thread between his teeth. Judd preferred to work seated on the swing in the wagonshed doorway. Here he could enjoy the sun yet avoid being observed by persons who passed on their way to church. In the planting season and again during the harvest, Judd spent his Sundays in the garden, and many times Kevin had seen him leave the field hurriedly and conceal himself behind the woodshed to elude the eyes of passing churchgoers. Judd himself never went to church.
Late in that afternoon, Judd decided to patch one of his gum rubbers. He sat on the swing and removed the punctured boot. Squatting in the couch grass by the weather-beaten wall, Kevin watched him rub the damaged spot briskly with a file. Now the sun was on the other side of the wagonshed and great, triangular shadows crept across the heath toward the smoke stack and the trees. Robins and starlings slowed their movements and quickened the rhythm of their singing, as they always did at dusk. Kevin chewed a blade of grass, letting its juice, which smelled and tasted of fermentation, fill his mouth. Mosquitoes moved in from the swamps and began their dusk song, so ponderous compared to the shrill, stabbing sound they emitted during the day. Insects lit on his bare arms and legs, falling silent as their needles pierced his skin and sucked his blood. He brushed himself continually and scratched at the hard, reddening lumps on his forearms and thighs.
Judd squeezed glue from a tube and lit a match. He made the flame stroke the rubber like a tiny, scarlet brush. Then he adjusted the patch carefully and pressed it down hard with his palm. The job finished, he grunted in satisfaction and laid the boot aside to let the glue harden and set.
Leaning back in the swing, he extracted a yellow-brown quid of chewing tobacco from his pocket, blew away the bits of sawdust that had stuck to it, and tore off a chew with his teeth.
“Soon be dark,” Kevin said.
He had known better than to speak before his father finished his task. The man smiled. Judd laughed rarely, except when he was drunk, and he seldom smiled.
Judd gestured toward the sky.
“Pretty, ain’t it?”
“Yeah,” Kevin agreed.
As always,
their voices, in speaking to one another, were formal, muted with shyness.
“Skeeters botherin’ yuh?”
“A little bit, mebbe.”
“Ever hear the story about the Irishmen and the skeeters?”
“Gee, no.”
Kevin shook himself and changed his position in the grass. The ground beneath his body was turning cool.
“Well, it seems as though there was two Irishmen that hadn’t never seen a skeeter in their life . . . I dunno, but I guess there ain’t no skeeters in Ireland. Mebbe, this is the only country that’s got skeeters. I dunno . . . Anyway, that don’t matter none. The story is, Pat and Mike was campin’ out fer the night — in a tent. And they was bein’ skinned alive by skeeters. Why, they was skeeters big as sparrows! And they stung jist like bumble bees! And after a while, Pat and Mike decided to blow out the lantern so the skeeters couldn’t see them! Well, that was all right for a spell, but then the lightnin’ bugs started comin’ in. And Mike wakes up and sees them lightnin’ bugs and he grabs the quilts off Pat and he says, ‘Wake up, Pat. Bejabers,’ he says, ‘They’re comin’ back with lanterns!’”
Judd chuckled and repeated the words: “Bejabers, Pat! They’re comin’ back with lanterns!”
Kevin doubled over with laughter. He always responded almost hysterically to his father’s rare jokes, not as much because they were funny as because he was overjoyed to find his father in a mood for such stories. Now he laughed until tears streamed down his cheeks and he gasped for breath, and Judd, chuckling complacently and chewing his tobacco, repeated the line again and again.
“Bejabers, Pat, they’re comin’ back with lanterns!”
*
When they went into the house, Mary, observing Judd’s apparent good humour, gave him the letter.
“I don’t know what made me forget this,” she said. “It came in the mail yesterday, but I forgot to tell you . . .”
Judd crushed the envelope in his fist. He went to the cot and sat down with his head in his hands. After a long moment he said, “The damn’ lawyers will hound a man tuh death. They’ll badger a man right intuh his grave.”
Mary and Kevin sat in silent watchfulness, afraid of what might come next.
“I never should of bought this damn shack,” Judd growled. “I shoulda knowed better than to of bought it.”
“Maybe Hod Rankine will lend us the money,” Mary said.
Hod Rankine was the owner of the saw mill.
“Yuh think I’d ask that bastard fer anythin’? He wouldn’t give a man the parin’s off his toenails!”
Kevin choked back a giggle. Judd glared at him hatefully. “What’s so damn funny?” he roared.
“Nothin’,” Kevin gulped. “Nothin’.”
“Eh! Yuh won’t think bills is so damn funny when yuh start payin’ them yourself. I wasn’t much oldern you when my old man put me out tuh dig fer my livin’.”
“Judd, he didn’t do anything,” Mary interjected.
“It’s little enough that he does, that’s for certain,” Judd snapped.
He rose, went to the stove, and threw the wadded, unopened envelope into the fire. Blue-tinted flame shot up as he slammed down the lid. He kicked the stove viciously and reached for a stick of wood.
“Kevin!”
Kevin sat up straight, tingling with fear.
“Why the hell didn’t yuh fill this woodbox?”
“He forgot, Judd.”
“I didn’t ask you. I asked him. Let him speak for himself.”
“I forgot, Daddy,” Kevin quavered.
“Eh! Yuh forgot! I forgot, Daddy.” He mimicked Kevin’s shrill piping. “I forgot, Daddy! That’s all I ever heard outta you! It’s about time I gave yuh somethin’ tuh make yuh remember! It’s about time yuh get another dose of strap oil, Mister Forgetter.”
“Judd!”
“Don’t yuh ‘Judd’ me! I got a good mind to take him out right now and blister his arse for him! Lazy little bastard!”
Kevin mustered his courage. “You’re jist mad because you got that old bill! That’s what’s the matter.”
“Talk back tuh me, will yuh!” Judd roared. “Talk back tuh me!”
“He wasn’t saucing you, Judd.”
“I’ll decide for myself whether he’s sassin’ me or not! Come on, Mister Big Breeches.”
Kevin looked at his mother. She turned away.
“Come on!” Judd bellowed.
Kevin rose from his chair and followed him through the door.
The strap was a strip of peeling orange leather, fourteen inches long and three inches wide. It hung from a peg in the section of the barn in which Judd stored hen food and the blocks of pressed straw which, when broken open, made bedding for the cows. If Kevin’s relationship with his mother reached its apotheosis when she bathed him and readied him for bed, his relationship with his father attained its epitome through the strap.
Judd took the strap from its peg and sat on a block of straw. Kevin’s stomach felt as though it had turned to rock. His mouth was clogged with invisible dust, the moisture of his tongue and throat transferred to his clammy palms.
“All right, Mister Big Breeches, take down yer pants.”
Judd tested the strap on his own palm and grunted. Trembling from head to toe, Kevin unbuttoned his short pants and let them slide from his numbed fingers and down his quivering legs. No act in life filled him with greater shame than this. This was the ultimate violation, the final degradation. He hated his father and himself; all of his will was channelled into the wish that they both of them would die.
“Might as well come over and take yer medicine. Ain’t gonna taste no better no matter how long yuh wait.”
His chest heaving with his agonized efforts to breathe, Kevin went to his father. The man seized his shoulders and bent him across his knees.
He felt his father’s body tense as he raised the strap, heard the sharp intake of his breath.
“Yer gonna remember this fer a long time, Mister Big Breeches. This is one thing I can promise yuh, yuh won’t fergit!”
Kevin shut his eyes and clenched his teeth. I won’t cry this time, he vowed fiercely. No matter how hard he beats me, I won’t cry. I won’t cry even if he kills me.
WHACK!
Kevin’s body jerked. He bit his lower lip savagely. Judd’s free hand clamped down on his back like a vise.
WHACK!
“Yer gonna learn not tuh talk back tuh me, Mister Big Breeches!”
WHACK!
To his horror, Kevin felt his eyes fill with tears. No, he thought desperately, I won’t cry. I won’t let him make me cry. I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.
WHACK!
The pain was the striking of a clock. Each stroke fell like a gong, then shivered away into the silence. And before the long, quivering pain had wholly died, the clock struck again.
WHACK!
This time, Kevin cried out. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”
WHACK!
“I hope you fall on the saw! I hope you kill yourself!”
His father increased the force of the strokes. Nothing in the world was real except pain and the rhythm of the strap.
WHACK!
“I hope the saw cuts you in two! That’s what I hope!”
WHACK!
“When I grow up, I’m gonna kill you! You wait and see if I don’t! I’m gonna kill you!”
WHACK!
“I’ll teach you, Mister Big Breeches! I’ll teach you!”
WHACK!
Kevin was weeping now. His vow forgotten, he sobbed, howled, and writhed. The pain was lava in his hips and thighs.
WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!
Judd whipped him slowly and methodically, drawing a deep breath each time he lifted the strap.
WHACK!
“I’ll kill you! I swear to God, I’ll kill you!”
WHACK!
“Shut yer mouth, boy, or yuh won’t be able tuh sit down fer a week.”
WHACK!
/> He was blubbering now, mindless, undone.
WHACK!
“You’re hurtin’ me! Please don’t hurt me!”
“This is supposed tuh hurt. If it didn’t hurt, yuh might git to like it.”
WHACK!
“Please don’t, Daddy! Please don’t spank me so hard!”
WHACK!
“I’ll fill the woodbox, Daddy. I won’t forget again! I’ll never talk back again, Daddy.”
He blatted like a baby.
WHACK!
“I didn’t mean the things I said to you, Daddy. Please, Daddy! I didn’t mean it!”
WHACK!
“I won’t do it again, Daddy! I promise I won’t ever do it again!”
WHACK!
Then, as always, came the defeat, the final surrender.
“I love you, Daddy,” he whimpered, meaning it. “I do love you. Please, Daddy — don’t hurt me. I love you.”
This was defeat. He had been conquered. His soul, finding it impossible to escape the pain, ran back and embraced it. He had been beaten until he was no longer capable of hate, no longer capable of rebellion. It was finished.
His father lifted him to his feet. He stood blubbering, his buttocks burning and pulsating, his pride a handful of chaff.
“Take that strap and hang it back on its peg.”
Kevin obeyed, wiping his eyes with his fingers.
“Put yer pants on and go wash yer face,” his father commanded. “Yer blubberin’ like a girl.” The man’s voice was no longer cruel, contained even a hint of apology and pity. Kevin wished he would beat him again. He was convinced that he deserved to be beaten until he died.
In his room, his mother bathed his yellow and blue welts with witch hazel.
“I hate him, Scampi. I hate him when he does this to you,” she said. He knew that she had been weeping. And suddenly, he hated her for her weakness. He was angry that she had spoken of his father in such a manner. He felt that he had deserved his whipping. It had been a purgative, cleansing him of secret sins. He was a vile, worthless thing and he loved his father for having thrashed him.