by Jeffrey Lent
Three days later he was dying. He sweated the sheets through and after she stripped them and turned new linens out under him he would lie clenched with cold, his body racking and his teeth in a hard staccato ratchet. His lungs seemed to droop and grow small in his chest, as if they no longer could pull air in. Sputum always at the back of his throat, the taste in his mouth of putridity, of decay. As if he were rotting. The bedroom was kept dark and she piled blankets on him regardless if he was sweating or chilled. She would not listen to him. Later what he would remember most clearly was her seated on the side of the bed holding two fingers of one hand against his lips and telling him to hush, to hush. He would wonder what he’d tried those times to tell her that she would not hear. She’d draped a silk shawl over the bedside lamp and with the windows covered day and night all was dim, a blush of light. Time went away. Most often it seemed she was pulling him upright and forcing broth in spoonfuls into his mouth. More than once using the thumb and forefinger of her free hand to force apart his jaws. As his father or sister would do with a horse unwilling to take the bit. Other times the walls, the room itself, grew fluid and fell away before the fever. Not dreams. Visitations. His father. His sisters. His mother. A girl whose name he could never remember screaming silent at him, blood running from her nose and eyes, her hair matted with mud. Or dried blood or shit. His father kneeling, weeping, bent in prayer. As he’d never seen him. He thought. His mother laughing, dissolving, back again, turning her back to him as she opened her dress, telling him she would show him something. Racing ponies. Horses on a dirt track. The colors brilliant beyond life. His little girl, Claire, her voice high and plaintive but with some excitement at the thought also, outside his door, asking if Poppy was going to die. He could not hear the answer.
Then three weeks where he was not dying but wished he might. The fevers now just a chill and ache in his bones without the diversion of nightmare frescoes. Time returned. Lengthened and stretched; days of bedsores and racking coughs, nights of the same cough and spitting wrenches of sleep. Now also he was able to fear for his wife, children. He’d read the accounts out of the Boston papers of the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands dying. Most in days it seemed, if you could believe what you read. He lay recovering in the downstairs bedroom listening to the children playing games upstairs as December shut down around them, lay with the windows no longer shrouded so some days it was bright and others dull. Lay those dull days thinking he could not only see but hear the snow falling outside. He’d not been sick like this before. Some afternoons he would rise and wrapped in a robe go to the kitchen and sit by the stove while the children whirled hectic indoor games about him. Joey tending him with hot tea. Fresh bread. Trying to hush the children. He’d flap his hand at her to let them be. He wanted to hear them.
Then, finally, out again. Christmas Eve day all bundled into the car for the trip through falling snow, fine blowing flakes dancing as if each pellet were unsprung upon its own single course of air. To Littleton where Joey shopped with the children and Jamie wrapped in a greatcoat and muffler, still coughing, his legs still spindly—a strawman— went to the Thayer Hotel and spoke with the desk clerk and made half a dozen calls from the public telephone and then down the street to the barbershop for a haircut and to collect some money held there for him, making arrangements as best he could. A month out of it and his trade was falling off by half. He made promises he wasn’t sure he could keep but had no choice but to make. Then small shopping of his own: matching mother-and-daughter lockets on fine gold chains and a twin-bladed pocketknife for the boy. Back to the car where he ran the engine for heat and sat sipping from the leather-covered flask out of the glove box. Watching the figures moving up and down the street in the dim gray of falling snow. Waiting for those three. Smoked a cigarette and killed his coughing with a taste from the flask. Saw them then, Joey carrying Claire against the piling snow, packages in her other arm. Foster beside his mother, both arms around wrapped boxes. The red paper and green ribbons framing the boy’s cold-red face. Then all of them in the car, Joey’s breath warm against him as she leaned to touch her cold lips to his face.
So they had Christmas. Snow kept falling. Late in the day he forced his way out to the barn. The horse stalls empty the three years he’d owned the Packard. He sat in the cold on an upturned crate and smoked, not even bothering to gaze at the moldering pile of old hay, not needing to envision the eight crates of bottled whiskey buried there. A fraction of what he needed. Which meant the long drive out to Binter’s farm and then to the rented basement in Bethlehem where he would bottle the whiskey. Then the deliveries—at night now, with the wartime prohibition still in effect until demobilization and the Anti-Saloon Leaguers boiling over the country like a hot tar. Volstead was inevitable. All which meant hustle. Hustle and duck and dodge. What had been more sport than effort now held a weight and he was tired when he could not be, weak where he could not afford weakness.
Two nights later Claire crying woke them. The two small bedrooms under the eaves were unheated save for what came up from below but she was hot to the touch, sweating and twisted in her bedclothes. By dawn she was very still, lying as if sleeping, her breathing a wet suck, the small cup of her lips smeared. Joey sat on the bedside, dipping cloths into a basin of hot water and pressing them onto the girl’s forehead. Jamie going up and down the stairs with fresh water to replace that which cooled almost as fast as he brought it. Downstairs keeping the stoves at full force, moving the pot of broth from the hot side to the cool side and back again to keep it warm. Barking once at Foster who sat silent at the kitchen table, commanding him to watch the soup, the firebox, the supply of water in the boiler. To carry in more wood from the shed. The boy rose silent and frightened; for a brief moment Jamie saw him trying to move five directions at once. His eyes keen with some anger across his father.
By afternoon Joey was abed also. For the rest of that afternoon and through that night Jamie did not know if it was worse now than it had been for him because there were two of them or because the influenza had sharpened someway or just that he was on the other side now. He wanted to believe the last. He carried Claire down the narrow stairs and put her in bed with her mother. He could not feed them. They were hot, insensible, beyond him. He could do nothing for them because they could not answer what they needed. He switched the forehead cloths from hot to cool. He leaned over them, one or the other as the afternoon fell short to listen to them breathe, to seek breath. Down close, the gurgle of their lungs. Claire now mostly still, gone very white. Joey at times in throes, her face blotched as with a passion, her tongue out running round her lips.
At three in the morning he ran up the stairs and roused Foster from the bed where the boy was not sleeping and sent him out with a lantern to dig a path for the car to the road. The snow was stopped now and the winter starlit night was low and Jamie set the boy to the job although he knew that the road was as filled as the driveway track. He wanted evidence of some effort. For whom he could not say. With the boy out of the house he cradled the swathed girl and strode back and forth with her in the kitchen. As if waiting for something to arrive. Hours later when a pale purple predawn slid over the snow under the tamaracks he at last set the girl down in the bed with her mother and went out to find the boy. Foster a hundred and fifty feet up the driveway with a shoveled path ten feet wide, the lantern guttered out, the banks of snow reaching either side far over his head. Crying as he shoveled. His nose and mouth chapped with frozen snot. Not stopping when his father took his shoulder. The clips of snow feathering up off the blade. The boy’s body shaking when his father took the shovel away from him and drew him tight against him, the boy’s face turned away as if looking back at the job not yet done.
The Christmas lockets hung around the necks of the dead. In the few minutes he had alone with the two of them he used his pocketknife to saw a snip of hair from a hank jerked out tight from his head, then divided the hair and placed half in each locket. Would have c
ut into his own chest for pieces of his heart if he could have done so. And bent and kissed the cool gold. It was the only thing he could think of. Would not kiss the cold faces. This, days later.
Joey had said of Foster, “Must’ve come from your side. LeBarons were all stout-built close-to-the-ground people. Mama’s side too.” Jamie said nothing but it was true, the boy was longlegged and longarmed with a high spread ribcage and shoulders like river rocks. With a stiff hard brush of hair, the shoeshine black of Joey’s but without her softening curls. Or Jamie’s. Eyes the remote blackness of a night creature. For all his length he was not awkward but a child who moved with deliberation, as if each motion however small had been meticulously considered and arranged before execution. What little he had owned of a child’s exuberance died with his mother and sister. After this, the enthusiasms he would display appeared slight, almost superficial, as if he did not care one way or the other. In fact, Jamie was sure these few things deeply mattered, mattered so intently the boy was ready to deny them rather than admit their importance. He was quiet.
That winter had groaned on, storm following storm. The snow did not shrink but settle. A thaw in March and then winter again right on into the first week of May. So much snow the trains stopped running through the Notch for a time. That in February. Foster out to school when he could, Jamie running whiskey when he could. As much as he could he did during the daylight. The boy would not be alone in the house. Those few nights they rode together, the dark packed snow of the roads in the lights, the rising banks of snow either side and the black night lost above. The snowbanks higher than the headlamps’ reach. During that time, Jamie did not like having Foster with him, felt the boy had no place within those things even if all the boy did was ride or wait in the car. And that first winter, that non-spring, what Jamie liked least and would not allow himself to examine too closely was the idea that his boy was protecting him. That Foster was more guide than passenger. That in some way the presence of the boy was a talisman, a ward against chance or misstep.
Summer came without benefit of spring. And Foster’s hand was burned and Jamie sent the Flood girl packing, watched her go down the track between the trees with the sunlight sifting light over her slow even pace. Jamie paid her, his voice thick as he thanked her and told her she’d be wanted no more. There was nothing else to say.
Summer. Sunlight so etched, winter could never have been; even night itself seemed remote, a vagary of the mind. Foster’s fingers stained purple from black raspberries. The two of them at the riverbend, on the shelf of boulderback. Jamie in black swimming trunks, the boy naked as a trout. Brown as syrup. Jewelweed hanging over the bank.
“Poppy?”
“What’s that?”
“What do you think about heaven?”
“Well. It’s a nice idea. I guess I wasn’t ever sure what to think about it.”
The boy nodded. Was quiet a moment. Then, “Me neither.”
Jamie sat with his knees up watching him. Foster looking off somewhere—the trees across the rivermeadow, the high summer clouds. Into the jewelweed. Then looked at his father. “At least there’s both of them. They’ve got each other there.”
A doctor in Whitefield called Dodge bought liquor by the case from Jamie for his own use and for those of his patients that were the better for it. He owned an English setter bitch who that spring had whelped a litter of nine puppies and Jamie bought one for Foster, feeling it a transparent and ineffectual thing to do but something tangible, some diversion, companionship at the least. Dodge wanted to make a gift of the puppy but Jamie wouldn’t have it and the older man nodded with gravity and folded the bills into his vest pocket. Inquired then mildly about Jamie himself and without pause or thought Jamie said, “The piss and vinegar’s gone right out of me. I need to be looking sharp and I just don’t care. I can’t shake it, it’ll get me hurt or killed or jailed. And seems like nothing I can do about any of it.” The doctor said nothing to this, studying Jamie. Dodge was not a young man and there was little of kindness about him but Jamie knew he was silent because there was nothing true to be said, no remedy to be offered. Then Dodge reached and touched his sleeve, a quick gesture as if lifting something away and told him for Foster to call if he had any questions about the puppy, and to bring the boy and dog by sometime and let him see them.
For that one moment when Jamie brought out from under his jacket the twelve-week-old squirming puppy an illumination appeared in his boy’s face, a brief slide from shadow as the world made new. By the time Jamie spoke the words “She’s for you,” the boy was already reaching for her with his face once more grave, very serious, as if all the implications were understood and accepted, the responsibility assumed and undertaken. The puppy laved her tongue in hard quick curls over the contours of Foster’s face and briefly his eyes closed with pleasure. Then he got both hands firmly around the puppy and held her down against his chest and looked at his father. “I’ll call her Lovey,” he said, “because I love her.”
The speckled pup and the boy. Out gone and lost in the woods through the long summer afternoons that tipped into evening before both would turn up, a pair of sweetly fragrant hungry tired pleasured small animals. Sleeping one next to the other in his bed upstairs. Jamie would wake before dawn and hear the puppy crying and then moments later the boy coming downstairs to let her out. Evenings sleeping on the floor of the kitchen, in the small parlor, the radio playing, the puppy stretched prone, the boy wrapped up to her, his knees drawn tight against her with his arms loose over her. The two of them wrestling in the hemlock duff afternoons, the boy sitting on his knees as the puppy bolted tight figure-eights around his outstretched arms. For a while every small object in the house torn or shredded or punctured by the fine driven points of her teeth. Jamie would sit a morning with his coffee regarding his shoe left out the night before and admire her work.
And still he could not leave the house alone. Starting the Packard was all that was needed to bring boy and pup out of the woods or house or river or even some hole in the ground for all he knew and the way they looked both piled together into the passenger side of the seat. Streaked and dirty and intent. The pup lying on her back with her four legs spread out between man and boy, her head resting on Foster’s thigh, her eyes locked on Jamie. Foster with a hand on her belly. Never asking where they were going. Not even looking at his father. His eyes already slipped down, half into himself, half waiting for the car to slide into gear, for motion to retake him.
So Jamie became the bootlegger with boy and dog in tow. Most of his clients were people he knew well, men who’d been buying in bulk for years now. Many from the hotels: a desk clerk or bellcaptain or stableman or whoever else it was for the thirsty guest to see. Others: railroad men or lumber bosses or area barbers or druggists. Some called Foster by name and would stop by the side of the car to reach in and fondle the puppy. Others ignored these passengers the same way they ignored any indication of knowing the details of the winter Jamie and Foster had just passed through. Some few, new men who’d tracked Jamie round the slick whispers and had the right name to mention to him, some of these looked strangely upon the boy or Jamie or both and to these men Jamie would always speak up easy—“It’s my boy Foster. Shake hands with the man, Foster”—His eyes on the stranger a slick glint like the side of a new coin as he made the introduction.
During her fevers there was much she said that did not make sense and there were other things that he would not hear at the time and would not remember. After the fevers passed, when she lay very still, her eyes bright, wide, dry, her mouth gaped for air her lungs could not receive; then, when the girl abed beside her was already a corpse although he did not think she knew it, she twice spoke to him. She said, “I’ll never have to”—and then a long pause as she coughed and gagged and sucked and finished—“have to sing that song again.” And later one clear sentence to hang out in the grasped tight air of the room: “Goddamn you I’ll never screw you again.” A lament. It was th
ese twins of weariness and regret that he allowed himself of her. Each a summation he could hold within himself that would unscroll all he knew of her. Each the trail end of a knotted set of interlocking dense-corded nets. The only sure memory of her voice. He could hear her.
Late July of the year Binter arrived one morning in his T-model Ford with the rear-end cut off to make a truck of sorts. Jamie didn’t even know the farmer knew where he lived. But he heard him coming, the engine missing on one cylinder, the backfires popping off as if the truck were engaged in small warfare with itself. Jamie out on the short steps to watch it come down the track from the road. Binter did not step down from his rumbling farting machine but sat behind the wheel until Jamie went over to him. The old man, his hair gray but bleached as if streaked with urine, said, “Chew need to know I’m done. This batch working now, she’s the last. After that, I’m out. Retired.”
Jamie stepped close, leaning down to spread his hands over the doorframe, to bring his head closer to the old man. The sound of the Ford a mortification in the summer afternoon. This close, the smell up out of the car of unwashed man. Grayed woolen underwear a grimed circlet above the open collar of the man’s shirt. The black jacket rusted and wormed with moth holes. “The fuck you telling me?”