The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  She said, “No, Daddy. Pick him up, then.”

  Ian’s grandfather picked Stuart up, and Stuart tried to rub the coal into his grandfather’s smooth face. But he stopped when his grandfather snarled and shook him in his arms. The grandfather said, “I’ve been thinking about you and your family, Anna. I’ve decided what I think is best. God knows you haven’t been asking but I want to tell you something. I’ve wanted to give you some sort of advice for weeks. Before your Harry came to retrieve you.”

  The mother said, “It sounds like I’m a stick. Or a dead duck.”

  His grandfather said, “And he’s a game dog? Ah. No. No. But for some time. Thinking about this.” He put Stuart down, and Stuart rubbed his coal into his grandfather’s green twill pants. The grandfather slowly kicked at him as he spoke. “I didn’t know you smoked anymore, Anna.”

  Ian’s mother said, “We’re all taking it up these days.”

  His grandfather said, “Ah. There we’re in tune. What we say now rhymes, in a manner of speaking. I mean to say that while I’d prefer not to say it, because I hate to sound as much of a fool as I often am, I nevertheless know what you mean. Which is why I’ve been thinking so much about—it.”

  Ian’s mother patted the end of her cigarette into a small brass ashtray on the sofa. She said, “You’re a sexy old pig, aren’t you?”

  The grandfather nodded. He rubbed his nose. He said, “It’s best for all of us in the family that your family be whole. And home. In the States. Don’t you agree?”

  Ian’s mother said, “I’ve thought that. Couldn’t you tell, really? No, you couldn’t tell. You were busy counting your hormones. Old pig. But I’ve thought about it. It’s impossible to tell someone. Like this. In a situation like this. To have the courage or blandness to say: Let’s take this awkward and embarrassing and slightly hopeless situation and—whatever you do say.” His mother shook her head.

  The grandfather put his hands in his sportcoat pockets, then took his right hand out to rub the tip of his nose back and forth. He slowly pushed the toe of his pebbly bright brown shoe into Stuart’s stomach as Stuart rubbed a piece of coal along his trouser bottoms. He said, “Right. I suppose it’s time to lay claim. Try to.” He pushed the back of his hand into his nose, and Ian’s mother stood up and leaned her fingers on the front of his dark brown shirt. The grandfather said, “Do I represent the family honor handsomely?” Ian’s mother nodded. Her mouth was down and tight, as if she held a cigarette between her lips. Ian’s grandfather asked, “Do you think the family is in senile decay?” He rubbed his nose. Then he went to the door and outside.

  THE DAY’S RAIN had made the stables cold, and Brenda had left the lights off while she and Ian’s father did the mucking out. Ian’s mother said, “Why don’t you wait in the house, love?” But Ian backed against a stall post and stood there, watching his father hold a cigarette in his mouth. Brenda lighted her own and threw the wooden match onto the cobbled floor. The grandfather moved to step on it, and Ian’s mother moved back and so did Brenda. Ian’s father stepped around toward him, stopped on the other side of the stall, and then they all waited.

  The grandfather said, “Put out that silly cigarette.”

  Ian’s father and Brenda said, “Me?”

  Ian’s mother laughed. Stuart moved against her and she shifted him to her other side. She said, “Brenda, I’m going to write to you. All right?”

  Brenda, in the corner where the tools stood, stared at Ian’s mother, then said, “Don’t expect me to write back. I can hardly spell me name. And I can’t testify that you’ll have the address right by then.”

  The grandfather crossed his arms on his chest, shivered, ducked his head down, closed his eyes, and belched the sneezes out. Ian saw his mother close her eyes and shake her head. Then the grandfather sneezed onto his arm and pressed his arm against his nose. The gelding backed out, then moved again toward the front of his stall. Ian’s grandfather sneezed again, and the gelding came out fast, a hoof stabbing, then banging onto the cobblestones, stabbing back. Ian stayed where he was, leaning against the post. Brenda said, “Get out,” very softly as she walked so smoothly she seemed to be skating on ice instead of lifting floppy boots. She said, “Everybody move slowly. Get out.”

  Ian’s mother said, “Ian.”

  His father came across the circle with his arm out.

  The grandfather sneezed into both of his hands.

  Ian stood against the post.

  Brenda said, “Get out now. Everybody get out.”

  WHAT YOU MIGHT AS WELL CALL LOVE

  JUST LIKE A CURSE, rain fell for two weeks, hissing on shingles and in nearly naked trees, and the river, dammed by brush and rotted elms, began to rise. Sun sometimes shone, and sometimes the rain held off an hour, but the ground was always spongy, and mud was on everything. The river wound around the hamlet, in some places close to backyards, in others separated from yards by hillocks and cabbage fields. It was a dark autumn, and always cold; the cabbage stank in the early mornings and late at night. And the water table rose in response to the rain and pushed through deep foundation stones and up through cracked cement cellar floors, pooled around furnaces and freezers and water heaters, triggered sump pumps which gargled out the water which ran back into the ground and reappeared inside, rising slowly, in the darkness of the cellars looking black.

  On the second day of flooding, Ethan came home from school with the mimeo’d message about the outbreak of head lice in the elementary grades. Marge had come up from sweeping pooled water in the cellar and her black boots glistened as she read the notice and cross-examined Ethan about school, while, forcing his head down, she raked through the fine brown hair, seeking nits.

  “What’s a nit?” Ethan said.

  “You’re clean,” she said. “A nit is the egg of a louse.”

  “Louse?”

  “A louse is one lice. Lice are a lot of louses.”

  “What’s a person who’s a louse, then?”

  “A nitwit. Please go up and change your clothes.”

  “Can I look at the flood?”

  “There isn’t any flood. There’s water in the cellar and go upstairs and change your clothes. Please. Everything’s fine.”

  “How come you were down there, then, Mom?”

  “I was sweeping water into the sump. It collects some places, and doesn’t go into the sump. If that happens, it doesn’t get pumped out. See? Please go up?”

  “But doesn’t it come back in?”

  Marge sat on the floor and took one boot off. “That is not a nine-year-old question,” she said. “Up.”

  Ethan said, “It’s a nitwit question.” He gave her his grown-up smile, irony and all, ruffled her thick light hair, and went up. Marge took off her other boot and leaned against the wall, stretching out her legs, to wait for Ben to come home.

  HE CAME IN A red-and-black woolen shirt that was darkening with rainwater, and wire-rimmed glasses that were sheeted over, and thirty feet of black plastic pipe taped in a big crooked circle. As Marge held the door, Ben backed and sidled and swore—“Sell. We sell, and we move someplace where we can live on top of a hill and nothing runs in”—and then he was inside their small kitchen, talking in a low rant and forcing the pipe around the table to the cellar door.

  Marge said, “You got it.”

  “The pipe? You noticed, huh?”

  “According to Ethan, who is correct, the water is welling up.”

  “What?”

  “That water’s coming up from the ground.”

  “You noticed that too, huh?” Ben was down on the cellar steps now, pulling the pipe after him and grunting.

  In a far, partly lighted corner, water ran in black smears down the wall stones and onto the cement floor. In the center of the floor, a hole three feet deep, about eighteen inches in diameter, received the runoff from the walls and floor. Tied to various beam jacks and ancient wooden posts, some with bark still on them, held in a web of white sash cord, was the s
ump pump with its copper float; when water in the sump reached a certain level, the float came up and the pump started. Water ran from it through black plastic pipe such as Ben wrestled with, and up through a broken storm window above their heads, and out onto the ground beside the house. The motor went on and off twice as they watched, and Ben cleared his throat and sniffed as if the need for pumping, the sound of the little motor, the invasion of water, were making his sinuses pour.

  He lugged the pipe around the furnace to the other side of the cellar. There water pooled deeper than anywhere else, in a declivity that didn’t permit it to run to the sump. They looked at it, and as Ben began to swear Marge went upstairs and put her boots on.

  Ben stood above the center of the pool which shimmered, bubbled slightly, in the light of a bulb on the ceiling. In the pool was a silted corroding pipe. He leaned the circle of black plastic pipe against the furnace, squatted in the water, almost sitting in it, and jammed a plastic joint into the pipe in the floor. “It fits!” he called. “I guessed, and I was right, and it fits! I’m telling you, Marge, I’m going to pipe the goddamn water right the hell out of this old well or whatever the hell it is, directly into the faithful sump and its obedient pump, chug chug master, and we are home! There will be no pooling of water in my house without written permission. The furnace will continue to roar, all the necessary machines will function, including us, and the home fires will burn. Marge?”

  She stood a few feet away from him, and when he noticed her he smiled, and then they both were silent as he pushed the elbow joint deeper into the rusted socket. There was the sound of dripping, and of the pump cutting on and off, and then the louder yammer of the water pump forcing water upstairs from their well because the pressure to the faucets was low, and then, at the same time, the whir of the furnace fan. Then the machines completed their cycles and stopped, and there was only the sound of their breathing, of trickles and drips.

  Ben cut the tape from the black plastic pipe and Marge took one end to stretch it away from him. She wove it among lolly columns and beam supports to where it would empty into the sump. “Mere victory,” Ben said. “Nothing great. Maybe a small cathedral’s worth of vision and ability and strength. Thank you.”

  Marge, looking at the open end of the pipe, which still was dry, which carried nothing from the rusted drain into the sump, said, “It does flow up.”

  “Water doesn’t flow up.”

  “It wells up. It seeps. It’s like a spring, Ben, when the water table’s high. It comes up around the pipe you put there. It just comes up.”

  “Jesus, Marge.”

  She walked back to where he stood at the elbow joint and, stooping, pointed. In the silt around the pipe into which he had shoved the white plastic joint, water was bubbling up, stirring mossy brown sediment. The pool of dark water widened. Ben took the big janitor’s broom that leaned against the furnace and he began to sweep, long hard angry strokes, so that the pool ran over the lip of its margins and flowed along the inclines of the cellar, into the sump. He said, breathing hard, “It doesn’t work.”

  “Nice try, though.”

  “I really thought it would work. I thought seventeen dollars’ worth.”

  “It was a good idea,” Marge said.

  “I should have listened.”

  “Ethan figured it out.”

  “Yeah? He’s nine and I’m only thirty-five.”

  “Ben has the advantage of years,” she said.

  He threw the broom into the pool, which was widening again, and said, “I don’t really think it’ll get into the furnace.”

  “No,” she said, “it probably won’t.”

  “We’ll check on it.”

  They were walking up the narrow steps.

  “There’s an epidemic of head lice in school,” Marge said.

  “Ethan’s okay?”

  “So far. But it’s really contagious.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Ben said.

  Marge said, “I’d rather have locusts than lice.”

  “You’re right,” Ben said at the top of the stairs. “There’s a better tone to locusts than lice.”

  “And it seems more suitable to floods, anyway,” Marge said.

  Ethan was waiting in the kitchen. “I thought you said there wasn’t any flood, Mom.”

  She sat on the floor, thin, with long arms, looking like a child as she took her black boots off. She said, “There isn’t.”

  “Didn’t you and Dad just talk about one?”

  “It’s a flood for grown-ups,” Ben said. “It isn’t a flood for kids.”

  “Nitwit,” Ethan said.

  And Ben roared, “What?”

  Marge said, “It’s a joke, Ben. It’s a joke Ethan and I were having. Ethan, why don’t you go upstairs and change your clothes?”

  “I just did. Remember?”

  “Why don’t you go upstairs and read John Sevier, Pioneer Boy?”

  “I finished it last night. Mom, would you and Dad like some privacy? I can go upstairs and work on my carrier.”

  Marge told Ben, “It’s an atomic supercarrier which is capable of holding a hundred and ten assorted fighters and long-range patrol planes, plus surface-to-air missiles. One inch to forty feet. Good-bye, Ethan. I love you.”

  THEY WERE SITTING in the kitchen with whiskey and ice, and Ben was telling Marge about an issue of the pharmaceuticals firm’s company magazine he was putting together, for which he was not only editor but photographer and writer. He said, “Substitute teaching may just be the worst work in the world, and I wouldn’t do it. I don’t blame you for hating it. I’m saying, for me, right now, even though I did worse work in New York, this one is an ugly boring stupid horrible job. I mean, I think I’m running out of sick leave from calling in with phony flus every other day.”

  “And you don’t get paid enough,” she said.

  “Nope.”

  “And neither do I, when I do get work.”

  “Nope.”

  “And we’re out seventeen bucks for plastic pipe.”

  “Thank you,” he said, “for recollecting that. For diving deep into your memory to retrieve that data.”

  “Datum.”

  Ben said, “Do I need another drink or do you?”

  “Why don’t we both do that, and skip the fight we don’t even feel like having, and discuss what to have for dinner.”

  “Let’s go out for pizza,” Ben said. “Ethan loves it.”

  “Because it’ll cost more money.”

  “Which we haven’t got.”

  “Almost. We almost haven’t got it, you’re right.”

  Wind threw rainwater, as if it were solid, at the backdoor window, and Ben said, “Fucking rain.”

  Marge stood, poured more whiskey over fresh ice for them, pulled at the hem of her sweater, and remained standing as she said, “I would like us to consider having another child.”

  Ben said nothing, drank a large swallow, stared at her. He offered a smile, the sort you use in case a bearer of bad news might be joking, then he withdrew it. The pump went on and off, then on again, then off. “It always sounds like it’s grinding something,” Ben said.

  Marge said, “I realize this isn’t the best time to broach the subject. But it’s not a complete surprise.”

  “No. I was just hoping I could evade it for a while. Maybe until the rain stops?”

  “Well, the rain keeps making me think about babies. It’s the threat. Do you know what I mean? What if something, I keep thinking, what if something happens.”

  “You mean to Ethan?”

  Marge’s eyes filled and instantly were red at the rims. She nodded.

  “We won’t let anything happen to him,” Ben said, as if he were accused of neglect.

  “We can’t stop the lice,” she said. “We can’t stop the rain.”

  “We’re old, Marge. Aren’t we pretty old to be having kids?”

  “We’re poor, and it’s a nuisance, taking care of a baby again. But a thirty-
five-year-old woman can deliver a child safely, a normal child, without risking her health.”

  “Not without risk.”

  “Without risking that much.”

  “Is that true?”

  She drank some whiskey. She said, “I can find out.”

  IN A KHAKI SLICKER and rubber boots, wearing a tweed hat, Ben walked the river. Behind him, the cabbage field went slightly uphill and then descended to their yard and the backyards of seven other small box-shaped hundred-and-fifty-year-old farmhouses that had rank-smelling cellars and sodden lintels and rotting beams. In the late summer, when the cabbages were young and small, aquamarine, not stinking, thousands of small white cabbage butterflies hovered in the field, invisible until one of them caught the sun and then drew attention to the others, and what had seemed to be hundreds of rows of blue-green vegetables set into rock-studded light brown soil suddenly would seem an ocean of little butterflies that surged around the houses and their small yards. Now the cabbages were bulbous and dark, part of the muddy field that, despite its slope, could not keep the water table from rising through stone toward a furnace’s fuel jet.

  Ben broke through a natural fence of brush, some red poisonous berries still glistening but most fruit gone, and the vegetation a tangle of blackthorn and exploded milkweed and powdering log, pulped fungus. He sank in down to his calves and had to work himself loose. His boots freed with slow-motion sucking sounds, and there was a released smell of gases from the rotted roots and weed. He went downhill the last few yards, a steep muddy incline leading to the river’s edge—higher than it ever had been—where sinuous dying elms stood on both sides of the river, which roared like machines. Debris floated past, chunks of log, plastic milk bottles, a bran-colored kitten, turning. The surface was like a skin, for although it sped, there was an undercurrent, other water, deeper, moving more quickly. The surface was Prussian blue and silver, bright, dangerous-looking, like a reptile’s skin. The water below was muddy and poisoned by cesspools rising with the flood.