Mr. Was Page 7

  I took my baseball bat and went out to the orchard to hit the wormy apples. I liked the sound they made when splattered by a hard-swung aluminum bat.

  In the mornings, Mom would go to her job at the berry farm, and Dad and I would go to work on Boggs’s End. A house that big, there’s always plenty to do. We replaced cracked windows, unstuck stuck doors, scraped and repainted the veranda, fixed the loose banister at the top of the stairs, put new washers in the leaking bathroom faucet. We went to work outside, too, cutting back the young walnut and ash trees that were invading the orchard, and trimming dead wood off the apple trees. Mom wanted us to put up a clothesline so she could dry the laundry outdoors, so we found some rope in one of the sheds and strung it up between two of the apple trees. As he pulled the rope tight, my dad looked critically at the misshapen fruit weighing down the branches.

  “Too late to do anything about them this year, champ. If we haven’t sold the place by spring, we’ll start spraying them. That’s when you have to stop the worms. Next year maybe we can make cider, if we don’t sell this place first.”

  “Does Mom want to sell the house now?” I wasn’t sure which way I wanted him to answer.

  Dad stood with the pruning saw in his hand, staring up into the twisted branches. “I don’t know, Jack. What do you think? It’s going to be a long winter. You want to spend it here?”

  “Mom likes it.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe what she liked was just being away from me while I was drinking. She liked it in Skokie as long as I was on the wagon.”

  These conversations made me uncomfortable.

  “I don’t care,” I said. That usually stopped a conversation dead. It worked like a charm. Dad pressed his lips together and went after another limb with his saw.

  We finished the orchard, then cut back the hydrangeas that were taking over the south side of the house. I hacked at the fibrous stems with hedge clippers and tried not to look too hard at the doorshaped patch of mismatched siding.

  The Invisible Man

  One afternoon I was sitting in the study flipping through some of Skoro’s old copies of National Geographic when I looked out the window and saw my mother in the orchard talking to somebody. But there was no one there. She stood holding her basket of wet laundry, shirts and towels hanging from our improvised clothesline, talking to some invisible person, smiling too hard the way she would when meeting someone new. It gave me a hard-to-describe feeling, something like having your body climbed by a thousand ice-cold centipedes. The one-sided conversation didn’t last long—she slowly rotated her head as if she was watching someone walk away, then let go of the laundry basket with one hand and waved. The basket fell. Wet laundry spilled onto the grass.

  That night at dinner, as she was shaking Parmesan cheese over her spaghetti, my mom mentioned that we’d had a visitor.

  “That older gentleman we saw at the funeral. You remember him, Ron. He had an eye patch?”

  That brought the centipedes back.

  “What did he want?” Dad asked.

  “He was hunting mushrooms. He said his name was Mr. Was.”

  “I don’t like it. He’s got no business coming on our property.”

  “He seemed harmless enough, Ron. I told him he was welcome to hunt mushrooms on our land.”

  Dad frowned and spun a wad of spaghetti onto his fork. “I don’t like it,” he mumbled, his mouth full of noodles. “The guy gives me the creeps.”

  The whole situation was giving me the creeps.

  I rode my bike down the hill to Ole’s one afternoon, just looking for something to do. I figured I’d play some pinball, maybe rent a video. The Gleason twins were sitting on their usual stools, nursing their beers, looking as dumb and old and ugly as ever. They still hadn’t figured out how come I looked so familiar, and I wasn’t about to remind them. Ole slouched behind the counter, a smoldering cigarette between his nicotine-yellowed fingers.

  “Well if it ain’t the master of Boggs’s End,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I said. It didn’t pay to argue with Ole, I’d learned. He was a jerk, and pretty much everybody in town knew it, but since he owned the only retail operation within ten miles, people put up with him.

  “I hear your old man’s doing a lot a work up there.”

  “We’re all working on it.”

  “He stopped by this morning, talking about how your granddaddy let everything go to hell. Sounds like he left you with a real rat hole.”

  I didn’t like that, him calling our place a rat hole, but I knew he was just trying to get under my skin, so I walked over to the video rack and tried to find a movie I hadn’t already seen twice. It was hard to concentrate, though, because something else was bothering me worse than Ole’s insults. Dad had left that morning to go into Rochester to rent some scaffolding so we could start painting up under the eaves.

  Why had he driven down the hill to Ole’s?

  I didn’t have to wonder long.

  Ole said, “You tell your daddy, next time you see him, you tell him I’ll be stocking his brand from here on out. Okay?”

  “What brand is that?”

  “That fancy lemon vodka he likes, son. Appears my house brand ain’t good enough for you city folk.”

  I got on my bike and started pedaling. I’d just got up to speed when suddenly I ran into something and went flying through the air and landed flat on my back. For what seemed like a long time I lay staring up at the cloudless blue, feeling the road pressing up against my body, trying to get some air into my flattened lungs. When I was finally able to sit up, I looked to see what I’d hit. There was only my bicycle, handlebars twisted to one side, chain broken.

  But I knew I’d run into something. Or somebody. Somebody invisible.

  I walked my broken bike all the way up the bluff to Boggs’s End, arriving long after the sun had set. Dad’s car was still gone. Mom sat alone at the kitchen table, three places set, all the food still in its serving dishes. She hadn’t touched a thing.

  I wasn’t hungry, but I sat down and helped myself to cold mashed potatoes, cold pork chops, warm milk. Once I started eating, Mom took one of the pork chops, cut off a small piece, chewed it slowly. She was staring at Dad’s empty plate.

  I can’t explain to you how she knew. There was a time when she might have thought he’d had a flat tire, or that he’d gotten lost, or broken down, or killed in an accident. Not anymore. I didn’t even have to tell her about what Ole had said. She knew.

  All of a sudden Mom picked up Dad’s plate and sailed it through the kitchen door like a Frisbee, all the way into the living room where it hit the chandelier with the sound of a thousand breaking glasses. The plate and a good part of the chandelier crashed to the floor. Glass shards were everywhere.

  I said, “Mom?”

  “No more,” she said, her face white and hard. “I’m not going through it again.” She got up and put the chain on the front door, then did the same to the back.

  “Maybe he’ll just go back to Skokie,” I said.

  She shook her head. “He’ll be back. But he won’t get in.”

  The Car in the Foyer

  She was half right.

  I lay awake in bed that night until well past midnight, waiting. Sometime around two I fell asleep. At about four o’clock in the morning I woke up to the sound of the door banging against its chain, hard and repeatedly.

  I could hear his hoarse shouts, then my mother’s footsteps. I tugged on a pair of jeans, shoved my feet into my Nikes, opened my bedroom door. Mom stood halfway down the stairs, looking at the front door.

  “Don’t talk to him, Mom,” I said. “Let him yell.” She didn’t answer, just stood there holding her bathrobe closed with one hand, gripping the banister with the other, staring down the staircase.

  I knew if she listened to him too long she wouldn’t be able to resist. She would go down and yell back at him through the crack in the door. That was part of the problem. She couldn’t help but listen to
him, to his foul accusations and crude insults. When he called her names she couldn’t just walk away, couldn’t leave it alone, even when it meant she would get hurt. He knew how to punch her buttons, and she responded like a trained animal.

  She started down the stairs. I ran after her and grabbed her arm.

  “Get off me!” she snapped, as if I was my father, then shook me off with a violent shudder. I watched her descend the stairs, feeling helpless and angry at both of them.

  The hell with them, I thought. Let them fight. They could kill each other, for all I cared. I went back to my room, sat on my bed, and waited for the explosion.

  I didn’t have to wait long.

  First, there was the predictable exchange of hoarse profanities. Most of it was coming from my father, but Mom was getting in her licks, too. Having a chained door between them seemed to inspire her. Then there was a minute or so when I heard only my mother’s voice, then about thirty seconds of silence. Then the roar of an engine, screeching tires, and a tremendous crash—the sound of splintering wood and breaking glass.

  My mother screamed.

  I heard a car door slam.

  I couldn’t just sit there in my room. I don’t remember grabbing my baseball bat, but I must’ve because when I got downstairs it was in my hands.

  The front end of Dad’s Jeep was in the foyer. The double front doors we had just refinished had been blasted open, one of them torn off its hinges.

  I could hear them in the kitchen, my father’s voice hoarse with rage, my mother saying, “Go away, leave us alone! Go away, leave us alone!”

  I came around the corner.

  She had a knife, holding it in both hands, waving it back and forth.

  My father had a chair in his hands, holding it out like a lion tamer. He jabbed at her with the legs, then swung it hard, knocking the knife away. He dropped the chair and fell on her with his fists, hitting her on the face and shoulders, driving her down onto the floor.

  I let out a yell and charged him with the baseball bat held high, swinging it down as hard as I could. He heard me, twisted his body, dove to the side. The bat caught him on the hip, but he somehow got his hands on it and wrenched it from my grasp. I backed away. My mother was curled up on the floor, her arms locked over her head.

  He limped toward me, his face blotchy red with fury.

  “You little blindsiding coward. You sneaking little bastard. C’mere, you little piece a crap. Let’s see how you like it.”

  I thought I was going to die.

  I backed away from him, out of the kitchen, down the hall. He kept coming, his fingers white on the bat handle. I turned and ran up the stairs. He climbed after me. I figured my only chance would be to head for the third floor, to go back through the short door. I was on my way up when I heard my mother’s voice.

  “You leave him alone!”

  “Shut up and stay out of this!” he shouted in a hoarse voice.

  “I won’t let you hurt him, Ron.”

  “Put that down!”

  Sounds of a scuffle, a grunt, and then a sound I’ll never forget as long as I live, a sound both soft and sharp, like the sound of a dropped melon, followed by the thud of a body hitting the floor, then the metallic clatter of an aluminum baseball bat, then silence.

  I heard only the blood whooshing through the arteries in my head. Slowly, quietly, I descended the stairs and looked out into the hallway.

  She was staring up at me, her head twisted to the side, eyes unblinking, the side of her head—

  The side of her head—

  The side of her head in a pool of growing red, touching the sole of his shoe. The bat on the floor, wet red. My eyes went from her eyes to the blood to the bat to his shoe to his spattered pant leg up his body to his slack-jawed face, drained of all color, eyes protruding.

  He said, “She made me do it.”

  I fell forward onto my knees and threw up. My mother. My bat. I wanted him to pick it up and kill me, too. I didn’t want to live. I pressed my forehead to the wooden floor.

  Kill me, too, I thought.

  I felt him walk away. I heard his feet on the stairs.

  I stayed where I was, my eyes squeezed shut, trying to stop time, to reverse it, to hold back the pain and the horror that threatened to drown me. I felt as if I were hanging over an abyss, as if to relax one single muscle would plunge me into the deep. Thoughts flapped about in the dark inside my head like a colony of frightened bats unable to land.

  Did time pass? It must have, because when I finally uncurled and opened my eyes the window at the end of the hall was yellow-gray with early sunlight. I could hear the birds singing their morning songs . . . and I could hear my father’s voice.

  I stood up without looking at what lay beside me and walked to the window.

  My father stood in the orchard, talking to the invisible man. He pointed at himself, he pointed at the house, his mouth moved. He started to take down the clothesline. I could see his face clearly. I could see the shine of tears beneath his eyes. He looked drawn, as if the crying had drained his body fluids, as if only his dried husk remained.

  I tried to hate him, but I had nothing left inside. There was no anger, no pain, no sensation whatsoever. I didn’t even wonder why he was untying the clothesline.

  All I cared about was what I had to do next.

  I Go Back Again

  I stepped through the metal door into night, starless and black and bitter cold, only the faintest trace of light from town rising over the bluff. A steady wind sucked the heat out of me. I shuffled around the house through a dusting of brittle snow, pulled a board off the window leading into the kitchen, and climbed through. The inside of the house wasn’t any warmer, but at least there was no wind.

  I’d had the sense to throw on my down parka and a stocking cap, but I hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight. I found a box of matches in one of the cupboards. I walked through the empty rooms, lighting one match after another, the flickering flames throwing weird shadows against the peeling wallpaper.

  I spent most of the night in front of the fireplace, burning scraps of paper, curtains, and hunks of an old broken chair, and whatever else I could find. I fell asleep once, but soon awakened with the image of my mother’s battered head floating in front of my eyes. A couple times I almost went back through the door, but the memory of what I’d find there kept me in place.

  It was a long, cold, miserable night. Morning arrived icy and gray. As soon as it was light enough to see, I set off up the road toward Andie’s. It was the only place I knew to go.

  I almost froze to death. Last time I’d been there Scud had been driving. On foot it wasn’t so close. My ears, toes, and fingers had all gone numb by the time I banged on their door.

  Nobody answered. I pushed the door open. Warm, moist air. I shouted, “Anybody home?”

  No answer. I stepped inside, unzipped my parka with clumsy, half-frozen fingers, and let the heat penetrate.

  When Andie’s father got home half an hour later, I was sitting at his kitchen table eating a loaf of his daughter’s home-baked bread.

  He did not seem pleased to see me.

  Old man Murphy turned out to be an okay guy, once he got over the shock of finding me in his kitchen. I had to tell him something, and he wouldn’t have believed the whole truth, so I made up the story as I went along, sprinkling the lies with bits of fact. I told him I’d hitchhiked up from Chicago looking for a job. I told him my mother was dead. Saying it out loud felt like coughing up a softball—my throat clamped down and I started to cry. The old man just sat there looking at me all stony faced, trying to figure out what to do with me.

  I knew he wasn’t going to send me back out in the cold. It would have been like sentencing me to death. After I managed to get hold of myself, he asked me what kind of work I was looking for.

  “Any kind,” I said. “Why?”

  “On account of I could use an extra hand around here.” He held up his right arm and, for the first time
, I noticed his wrist was swollen up to about twice its normal size.

  “Just tell me what to do,” I said.

  What I remember most about those first days on the Murphy farm is the numbness in my brain. My mind had just turned itself off, and I went through the motions without much using the thinking part of my brain. I didn’t want to think, I didn’t want to remember. I wanted to pretend it had all been a dream. Everything. I imagined that my entire body was shot full of Novocain. I wore the numbness like a shield. Nothing could get in, and I would let nothing out.

  Each morning I would wake up to a banging on the cellar door. I would sit up in my cot wrapped in the prickly, ugly green wool army blankets, cold cellar air swirling around me. I would get dressed in the long Johns, flannel shirt, and denim overalls that the old man had given to me. I would report to the kitchen table, where Andie would have laid out a big farm breakfast of pancakes, eggs, sausages, bacon, bread, biscuits, coffee cake, and apple cider. The old man would already have it half eaten. I would sit down and start eating, and I would keep eating until he growled that it was time to get to work.

  I went through the motions, letting the old man order me around, content to be told what to do. He worked me like a slave, always yelling and watching and telling me how everything I did was wrong. Since I was numb anyways, it didn’t much matter to me. I just did what he told me and, after the first week, the old man slacked off and started treating me like I was a human being. But I still had to work my butt off.

  A lot of the work seemed to involve shoveling large quantities of manure. Fifty percent of farming is feeding the animals. The other half is cleaning up after them, shoveling their crap. In fact, that was what the old man had been doing when he’d slipped and fallen and sprained his wrist.

  It was hard work, but right then hard work was what I needed. I wanted to stay busy, to exhaust my body, to get so tired that when I finally fell into my cot at the end of the day I’d be too tired to think, too tired to remember.