by Joan Brady
‘Bring yourself up to the present, Sarah.’
‘—I want curtains. I want—’
‘Enough is enough!’
‘I want wallpaper. I want a Christmas cactus in a pot. Remember the Christmas cactus in a pot? Do you? Remember? Even the poorest of the poor have something pretty in the house—’
‘What’s wrong with this house?’ he said, his voice a shade icier but no more than that. ‘I built it with my own hands.’
‘This is your house. It’s not mine. It has nothing to do with me. And it’s ugly, ugly, ugly.’
‘Of course it’s your house. Where else is there for you to live?’
‘My money bought it, but it’s not mine.’
‘It’s the money that preoccupies you, is it?’
‘Show me something pretty,’ Sarah demanded, flailing, determined – absolutely determined – to find some weakness in him, something – almost anything. ‘What’s my money brought for me? Come on, show me something that’s mine. No, there’s nothing. So show me something that’s at least not hideous. I want something to look at. I want a carpet. I want a pelmet. I want – What do I have? What is there for me?’
‘You’re beginning to sound as though you’re just plain against me—’
‘Against you? What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘—no matter what I say or do.’
‘Against. For. With. What does it matter? It’s going to be like this forever. Look at you. You eat away at yourself—’
‘Sarah!’
‘You’re eating yourself alive. I can see it!’
Chekhov – not a man given to overstatement – said that every day he had to make an effort to squeeze the last drops of slavery from his blood. But Chekhov hadn’t been a real slave. My grandfather, who had been, couldn’t measure his slavery in drops; it ran in his veins, as red and rich as the hemoglobin itself. Every day his heart and brain had to fight against the very stuff that fed them. Every night, the illusion-stripped world of the slave ruled him just as it rules Atlas’s patients while they sink into mental and physical incontinence, bladder and bowel on the loose and brain incapable of anything but terror and sleep. What is old age but Jonathan’s nightmare carried to its logical conclusions? What is his nightmare but the ultimate secret, the essence of life itself?
‘Don’t speak to me—’ he said to Sarah. There was a tremor in his voice, and the ice was gone. So it was that she knew something important had happened.
In my mother’s and father’s fights there was always a break-free point like this. My father baited my mother beneath his professorial manner, much as Jonathan – albeit unawares – baited Sarah with his coldness of response, and my mother’s voice climbed, veered off, slid here and there (as Sarah’s voice was sliding), until at last she found the lever that would catch him, pull him into the fray with her, engage him a gear higher, where he could no longer escape the battle that he himself wanted so passionately. The famous raspberry-scented condom she charged him with was one such lever. My sisters and I cowered upstairs, each in her room alone, each at her door listening to the downstairs prelude in rage. I couldn’t hear the words, but when the idiotic object itself appeared on the field, I recognized the moment of crisis as I’d recognized many such moments before. It’s like the break-in-two of a train that Jonathan describes: there’s a change in the sound of the engine’s exhaust. No more. But after that, nothing is the same. It was only by accident that Sarah had stumbled into the land of Jonathan’s nightmare, but Jonathan was atremble with the sudden humiliation of what she’d seen, as though in seeing, she’d made the degradation real. She’d let loose chaos itself around him.
‘And you expect me to help you eat yourself alive!’ Sarah cried.
‘Don’t shout at me,’ he said shakily.
‘You’re the one who’s shouting,’ she shouted, although she knew it wasn’t true. But her newfound power gave her an almost magical insight into the terrors he lived with. ‘Worse than that: you expect me to eat out my own insides for you. And why? Because next year, just maybe, but it’s only a vain hope, hopeless really, not even vain—’
‘Shut up,’ he said, catching at her wrists, holding them tight in his hands.
‘Don’t touch me! Let go of me!’
He tightened his grip.
‘You’re hurting me,’ she screamed.
He didn’t move: he didn’t dare.
‘We’re not people anymore,’ she went on, still screaming and as relentless as George had been all those years ago in the Stokes’ sod hut. ‘Let go of me! We’re some kind of perverted sub-human form, some insect with only a mouth, a stomach and an ass-hole. Let go!’ She struggled in his arms. ‘All that waits for us is babies and death. We’re like worms or grubs or slugs, wretched, crawling, dung-covered – Tell me, Johnny, can you sink lower than this? Can anybody? Are you satisfied? Let me loose!’
When the control is let loose, it’s an eerie sensation. There’s a sudden white in the brain and a sudden vacuum in the chest. Jonathan heard the crack his hand made across her face before he was even aware he was going to strike her. He stared at her wildly, then ran out of the room. As he slammed the front door behind him he caught a glimpse of the small figure of Rayner, on his knees beside Sarah, who lay sobbing on the floor. When I was a child myself and Jonathan long dead, long past forgiving or being forgiven, I remember my father saying, ‘The old man hit her. He beat us kids. Nothing special in that, though: most kids got whipped in those days. But he shouldn’t have hit my mother. For that I will never forgive him.’
And yet my father hit my mother once, too – only once, just as Jonathan hit Sarah only once. It happened after the sound of battle had changed in that final, fatal engagement. But this time was different from all other times. I knew it. Usually a wild coupling followed, grunts and whinnies from the marital bed. This time there was silence instead. Then a scream. My sisters and I opened the doors to our rooms and peeped out. My mother was naked – middle-aged flesh curdling on her thighs – barring the way to the bathroom door. As we watched, my father hit her, hard; before our very eyes the weal rose on that pale, sagging flesh. He threw her down, out of his way, crossed the threshold, took the bottle out of the medicine chest and shoveled handfuls of nembutal into his mouth, swallowing as fast as he could. With each handful, pills scattered on the floor. When he’d emptied the bottle, he stood there looking at himself in the mirror. My mother called the police; a squad car arrived, siren screaming. And still my father stood there – my father, Jonathan’s eldest son – he just stood there in his red paisley robe like a cardinal’s and stared into the mirror. So it was that he destroyed his kidneys, raised his blood pressure and caused the stroke that felled him: so it was that he provided me with the wherewithal to keep me in as much comfort as a person in my condition can be kept.
10
Jonathan stayed away for two days, the first day drunk in a ditch, the second fighting a hangover in a boarding house in Seattle. On the third day he returned home, determined to work harder. No matter what, he would force himself to work an hour more every day. He could plant strawberries the following year. There was still hope. Sarah must have a piano. Of course she must. They must have curtains, too, and a carpet and wallpaper – even that damned pelmet. To signal that a new life was beginning, he bought a Christmas cactus in a pot.
But there was nobody in the house when he got back. He ran upstairs, opened the doors, slammed them and ran back down to the silence of the kitchen where plates stood in piles on the shelves next to preserves in rows and knives hanging from hooks. On the kitchen table lay the note in Rayner’s neat, firm hand.
Dear Father:
We are going to visit grandfather in Sweetbrier. Mother says she is going to take tests to become a teacher and maybe we will live there and you can come and see us at grandfather’s house.
Your loving son,
Rayner
Jonathan picked up the cactus and hurled it at the
wall, where its pot shattered and fell to the ground in shards much like the shards he’d found Sarah crouching among, eyes agape with terror, when Rayner was about to be born.
By the time the Youngbloods arrived for Claire’s French dinner party, Atlas was bathed, clean-shirted, ascot-tied; he even smelled of talcum power instead of liquor. I suppose it isn’t surprising that a man who runs an old age ghetto and calls himself Dr Youngblood – I don’t for a moment believe that anybody could have been born with such a name – should turn out to be an ascot-tie kind of man, too, and more than a little oily into the bargain. What is surprising – and irritating – is that I didn’t dislike him. Also, his wife was not near as dopey as Atlas made her out to be. She kept an amused eye on him – on Atlas, that is – as he mixed drinks: short on the whiskey, long on the soda for the guests; in his own glass, whiskey topped up with gin. Claire was safely in the kitchen. The Youngbloods said they didn’t know the Murphys, but when the Murphys arrived Mrs Youngblood said, ‘You know, I think I made a mistake, Dr Murphy. I think I do know you. I recognize the voice.’
‘But not the man, eh?’ Dr Murphy said. Almost all the men Atlas entertained to dinner were doctors. Dr Murphy had a shuffly walk and an unexpectedly sweet smile. ‘Can’t say as I blame you,’ he went on. ‘Just the other day I was out at the mall, and I saw this poor old duffer coming towards me – he was talking to himself, can you imagine, in a shopping mall? – and I said to myself, “Look at that fumbling old fool. He ought to be dead.” And you know what? It was me: in one of those reflecting windows.’ Claire came in from the kitchen, and he made a little bow in her direction. ‘So this is to be the famous French dinner, is it? I’m not much on foreign foods, my dear. I hope I won’t disappoint you.’
‘The point’, said Claire a little stiffly, ‘is educational.’
‘For education, a man must be educable,’ Dr Murphy said. ‘I will try, Claire, but I promise nothing.’
Sarah my grandmother was not so sophisticated: for her, mortification was guaranteed. How could a functional illiterate possibly imagine herself as a teacher? In those days, anyway? Dr Murphy probably was educable, though perhaps less so than his disarming speech implied. Sarah wasn’t. She just plain wasn’t. She might have had a better chance today, somebody just might recognize what was doubtless dyslexia and be of some help to her. We’re all a little dyslexic, we third-generation Carricks, children of her children.
Over the months that followed Jonathan pared his food to the minimum and used no heat. He worked eighteen hours a day. By Christmas he’d managed to sell his crop at a good price, plant two hundred apple trees, and the first two acres of strawberries – that most precious of crops, the crop on which he pinned the future – and there was profit to spare. He made a down-payment on a piano. Every week he wrote to Rayner and every week received a letter in return. He learned that Sarah was studying hard, then that she had had a baby girl called Ruth, then that the teaching examination was very soon. He heard nothing for many weeks after that.
At last came the letter Jonathan had known would come. He wrote immediately, enclosing money he’d put by for his family’s journey back home.
11
The Jonathan who met Sarah when she returned was not the Jonathan she’d left. Sarah – this woman who could not read even as Wify Stoke could not read, this woman who had breached his defenses – Sarah, his Sarah, had deserted him, taken his children from him. She had defied him. She had betrayed him. So the man who met her was not the man whose mysterious fears and angers had moved her so deeply; he was instead the figure who terrified me as a child even though he was long dead by that time: a distant, implacable judge who demanded superhuman effort and total obedience, and who exacted maximum punishment when these demands weren’t met. Which is to say that this was when Atlas’s man of fire became the man of ice who terrified my father, too, even when my father was a middle-aged professor of economics.
Sarah’s betrayal was not the whole of it, either. During the time she was away, the Methodist minister of Hannaville died. Jonathan wrote an impassioned appeal to the District Synod; and the District Synod, lacking any other suitable candidate, made him the dead man’s successor. Jonathan did this for the small pickings of money it would bring in; he did it for the piano and the pelmet; he did it for Sarah because he loved her and wanted to please her despite her betrayal: which is to say, he followed her betrayal of him by betraying himself.
Every day his thundery expression became more thundery and his temperament more mercurial. The atheist preacher who lives in the town that pays his bills must make his children a party to his deception. No child can be relied on to pretend, so my grandfather made the pretending real. They said grace at meals, which they had done only erratically before, whenever Sarah thought to insist. Each child learned a verse of the Bible every day, went into papa’s study and said the verse – and got a whipping if the verse was not correct. Sundays were miserable: church, Sunday school, no play, only chores and God, and whoever dared otherwise got a whipping.
Atlas assumed his father’s faith was completely genuine. My father never doubted it, either; it never crossed his mind that the religion-bound household of his childhood was an exercise in playacting. He never even knew his father’s diaries existed. When he was fourteen he went out behind the barn to defy God and his old man, all in one stroke, and to pay for it with his life if that’s what it came to. He said, ‘God, I defy you,’ and waited for the thunderbolt. When none came, he figured God hadn’t heard and so defied Him again. Thereafter he, too, was an atheist. This rebellion pleased him immensely; it was a source of strength to him throughout his life. Yet the pity of it is that his watershed didn’t amount to rebellion at all; in the end, all he was doing was joining forces with his father in the very way that would have pleased his father most.
If Jonathan my grandfather was a harder man when Sarah returned from Sweetbrier, she had grown softer. There were three more babies in the next five years, all girls; Sarah named the youngest one Hope because by then she knew there was no hope left – not for her anyway. She was too tired to play the piano Jonathan went into debt to buy for her; she was too tired to make a pelmet or curtains for a pelmet to go over. When a twenty-six-acre piece of land abutting the farm came up for sale – this was in 1914, the year World War One broke out in Europe, the onset of a wonderfully profitable few years for American farmers – when this neighboring piece of land came up for sale, it was Sarah who proposed buying it. They mortgaged the land they had to get it.
Then the next year, 1915, came the bull.
Atlas told about it seated at the head of the table at Claire’s French dinner. The French dinner was in full swing, a pretty tense swing, too, with Claire’s own battle-line preparations all too reminiscent of my grandfather’s war on life: three wines and three courses down: the aioli on a platter with raw vegetables around it, the soup, the fish (filets de sole gratinés à la Parisienne): our party of seven (an awkward number) seated around Claire’s plate glass table with the iron filigree base, the Japanese arrangement of chrysanthemums in a wide, cut glass bowl in the center, the confusion of glasses: here we all sat when drunken Atlas (falling into one of those alcohol-induced holes in his head and so forgetting that our interview was suspended for the duration of the festivities) – here we sat when Atlas began the tale of the bull.
‘An ugly brute,’ he said out of the blue, ‘irritable, old – near the end of his career – blind in one eye, but cheap. That’s why dad bought him.’
‘What was this?’ I said. None of us, Claire, Murphys, Youngbloods, not even I had any idea what Atlas was talking about. ‘An animal?’
‘A bull, for Christ’s sake: a bull.’
‘He bought a bull? Your dad?’
‘’Course he did. Farmers shared them out in those days. You only needed one to service the cows – all of them in the neighborhood.’ Mrs Murphy giggled, more because of the bull’s appearance at Claire’s dinner table with i
ts Japanese chrysanthemums, I think, than because of his work with cows. ‘He had a ring through his nose, connected to a twenty-foot chain.’
The bull’s first June was hot. Flies were rampant. Bot flies lay their larvae just under the animal’s skin: Atlas was explaining the details just as Claire brought in the bœuf en croûte. Before he began to carve, wavering to his feet (why ever had Claire arranged to let this drunken oaf carve?), he poked through the pastry – carving knife a scalpel – that covered the roast to demonstrate just where a bot fly might be found; steam gushed out of the roast’s wound. At the other end of the table, an infuriated Claire forgot to pour out the burgundy – which left us with the white wine she’d intended only for the fish. Already the repercussions for tomorrow were terrible.
The boils ooze; they’re very painful. While Jonathan inspected the bull’s back, Rayner stood apart, pitchfork aimed like a bayonet. There were at least a dozen boils. Jonathan touched one with creosote. The bull reared. It’s a magnificent sight – a bull rearing – a ton of anguished beef balanced on its back legs, suspended by a chain through the nose. Then the skin of the nostrils burst open. The ring snapped back against the wall of the barn. The bull tore through an open gate. Jonathan grabbed Rayner’s pitchfork and ran: he cornered the animal at the far end of the field beyond.
Around the dinner table, our silver forks waited tensely in front of our mouths, bœuf en croûte growing cold while Atlas, an old man more frail than he let on and now seriously in his cups, but a wonderful story-teller still and just a little boy all those years ago – too tiny to do anything, too scared to run for help – Atlas stood quiet and watched the bull, and the bull stood quiet, too, there in the field, head toward the unenclosed land beyond, presenting Jonathan with his massive rump: tail switching, ponderous testicles swaying between great thighs, hump of muscle erect above his shoulders.
