Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  “What do you mean? What kinds of things? Like biting people’s ears off?”

  “Yes. Like that.”

  “Or worse?”

  Grandpa shuddered. He had the faraway look in his eyes again, and I could tell he was remembering something he didn’t want to remember. “Just remember what I’m telling you. And don’t ever get started on this stuff,” he said, pointing to his glass. “Pure poison. It’ll kill ya. You ever been drunk?”

  “Don’t change the subject!”

  “I’m changing the subject because I’m an adult and I want to change the damn subject, Okay? Answer the question.”

  “No. I have never been drunk.”

  “Good.”

  “I’d like to try it once, though.”

  “What? Drinking?”

  “Just getting drunk.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Seems like the kind of thing everyone oughta do once.”

  “It’s ruined me, that’s for sure.”

  I said nothing. I didn’t think he was ruined. I thought he was disappointed. No farm left, all the money gone, and not an ostrich to show for it. And me the only living descendant of the once-great Mann clan—besides him, that is.

  “Did you talk with Doctor Connor much when he was here?” I asked this to change the subject of my own thoughts.

  “A little,” he said.

  “Are you guys gonna be friends again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How come you guys fought that one time?”

  “How often do you see that Simpson girl?” This was to tell me it was none of my business. I took his cue this time and we changed tack in unison.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. How often do you see her?”

  “Every day, I guess.”

  “You ever kiss her?”

  I blushed. “Shut up,” I said.

  “Did you or didn’t you?”

  “No! Okay? No!”

  “All right,” said Grandpa. He appeared relieved. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind why. You’d just be better off not getting mixed up with those Simpsons.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Annie,” I said.

  “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with her. I’m just saying it would be better if you didn’t get involved with her.”

  “She’s not like the rest of them.”

  “No, you’re right. She’s beautiful. Smart, too. Nobody would ever know she’s even halfway related to that fat bastard up the hill. Oops. Forget I said that.”

  “Why?”

  “Oughtn’t to speak ill of folks,” he said, reciting for the thousandth time some trite piece of country wisdom he’d learned in his childhood.

  “Everyone speaks ill of everyone, seems like.”

  “Not everyone. White trash. White trash sit around saying things about people. Quality folks don’t do that. Gentlemen. Ladies. Decent folk. Simpsons do.”

  “Annie’s a Simpson.”

  “No she isn’t,” said Grandpa. “Being a Simpson is a state of mind.”

  “Something has to happen to him.”

  “I know it.”

  “I’ve seen bruises all over her.”

  Grandpa raised an eyebrow, not joking. “All over?”

  I blushed again. “I mean on her arms and stuff.”

  “Does he just hit her?”

  “What do you mean? Of course he hits her.”

  “But I mean is that all he does?”

  “I…I don’t know for sure.”

  “She doesn’t say?”

  I shook my head.

  “But you think he does more than that?”

  I nodded.

  “You should tell someone.”

  “She told me not to.”

  “Now why did she say that?”

  “She said in a few years she’ll be old enough to move out. Then she won’t ever see him again. She’s saving money and she’s teaching herself how to speak French. She wants to move to Montreal.”

  “Huh,” said Grandpa thoughtfully.

  “She already knows a bunch of it.” I was, I realized, proud of her.

  “My mother wanted me to learn to speak French,” said Grandpa. His head was suddenly forty-two years in the past again. “She wanted me to go to Europe instead of the Pacific. So I could get some culture.”

  “I know. You told me.”

  He shook himself slightly, as though he had been immersed in a shocking but somehow pleasant liquid. “Sure I did. I tell you everything.”

  “Not everything, actually.”

  “What now?”

  “How is it you never told me how Willie Mann found the money?”

  Grandpa turned pale. “What?”

  I was suddenly not so sure of myself. But I pressed on.

  “You remember when you broke your hip?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I went to stay with that German family?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I was already having the nightmares?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Shumacher took me to an old lady who told me what they were about.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of lady?”

  “A witch.”

  “A what?”

  “Some kind of fortune-teller. A real old lady. A Mennonite.”

  “Well, for Chrissakes,” said Grandpa. “I guess I do remember you saying something about that, now that you mention it.”

  “He says everyone except me knows the story of Willie.”

  “Probably so,” said Grandpa.

  “So how come you never told me about it?”

  “I was waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “For you to get older.”

  “Well, I’m older now.”

  “It’s a bloody story.”

  “I’ve seen blood before,” I said.

  “I’m not sure I remember all of it. Most of it’s written down in the diary. I’m afraid I’d get it wrong.”

  He was stalling, I knew, but I let him. “What if he doesn’t bring the diary back from Japan? That fighter pilot?”

  “Fujimora?” Grandpa took a deep breath. “Then there will be a lot of stories that you’ll never hear.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “I’m sorry. You’ll know everything you really need by the time I go. Don’t worry, kid. One of the reasons I was so glad you came along was so I would have someone to tell my stories to.”

  I was looking out the kitchen window as we spoke. As I watched, something appeared around the bend that caused me to forget the conversation we were having. My jaw went slack with astonishment.

  “Amish buggy coming,” I said.

  Grandpa didn’t look.

  “I knew it,” he sighed. “I knew it when I was dipping into my herbs last night.”

  “It’s coming here,” I said, as the buggy wheeled into our driveway.

  “Of course it is,” said Grandpa. “Things are starting all over. They always do.”

  This was exactly the sort of cryptic comment about which I would have loved to press him further, but I was too distracted.

  “There’s an old man with a beard driving it.”

  “Gray?”

  “Sorta.”

  “Short guy?”

  “Why don’t you turn around and look for yourself?”

  “Because I already know who it is,” said Grandpa. “Go out and talk to him. He won’t come in. I have to get some things out of the basement.”

  I went out on the porch. The buggy was a two-seater, pitch black, drawn by a single chestnut mare. The man sat alone on the bench-board in the buggy with a pipe held loosely in one hand. Smoke drifted lazily from the bowl as he puffed on it, creating tiny cumuli around his head.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  The man turned and regarded me curiousl
y. His gaze was frank and appraising, and all the more discomforting because I was still in my pajamas.

  “Hello, English boy,” he said.

  To the Amish, it didn’t matter where your family had originated. If you weren’t Amish, you were English. It was how they thought of everyone else. But I only knew this from Grandpa’s stories; this was the first time I’d ever spoken with an Amishman. A strange feeling wove its way through me, a snake of unreality and disbelief. Perhaps hundreds of buggies had driven up to our door since the house was built, but this was the first one I had witnessed. An odd sense of history was taking over the morning.

  “You can come in if you want,” I said, but he dismissed that with a wave.

  “Where’s your grandfather?”

  “In the basement,” I said. To my surprise, he spoke with an American accent, just like the old Mennonite witch who had told me the source of my nightmares.

  “Did he know I was coming?”

  “Yeah.”

  The Amishman chuckled. “I thought so,” he said. He sat smoking, his hat shading his eyes, his beard falling down his chest in a magnificent wave. He said nothing more. The horse sidled over to the grass that grew next to the driveway and began chomping at it. Unable to think of anything to say, I went back into the house. Grandpa was in the hallway putting on his shoes. There was a black bag next to him much like Doctor Connor’s.

  “He’s smoking,” I said.

  “So?”

  “I thought they weren’t allowed to do stuff like that!”

  “Their rules are complicated. Not all of them are as strict as everybody thinks.”

  I absorbed this. For some reason, the sight of a smoking Amishman struck me as blasphemous. The Amish were a common sight around Mannville. Sometimes they came into town to do some shopping, and I would watch them in Gruber’s to see what they were buying, but to my disappointment I found they bought the same things as everybody else—a pocketknife, a ball of twine, clothespins, overalls. If you got too close to them in the aisle, they either quit talking to each other until you moved away or sidled away from you. But they had never, as far as I knew, bought tobacco.

  “I’m going with him,” Grandpa told me.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To his farm, no doubt.”

  “Why?”

  “His wife is having a baby.”

  “How do you know?”

  Grandpa sighed yet again, but it was a patient sigh. “Because I know. Same as you would know, if you bothered to slow down and pay attention.”

  “Pay attention to what?”

  “To things,” he replied vaguely. “To all the things around you.”

  I wanted to argue with him and tell him that I did already pay attention to everything, but time was suddenly short, and I wanted to go with him.

  “Can I come?”

  “You have a concussion.”

  “Not really. It’s mostly better.”

  Grandpa paused. He knew my concussion couldn’t possibly be better, but the best thing about Grandpa was that he sometimes chose to ignore the obvious in favor of what he would rather believe was true, even when it patently wasn’t. “I would really like you to see this,” he said. “You might never get the chance again in your life.” And I knew I was going.

  “I’ll get dressed,” I said. I had to walk slowly up the stairs, hanging onto the banister, because my head was still spinning. But I felt much better than I had two days earlier. I changed and went back down to the porch. Grandpa was waiting for me in the buggy next to the Amishman. He indicated the back of the buggy, where there was luggage space, or something like it; I couldn’t imagine that the Amish had luggage, or if they did, what they would need it for.

  “Hop on up there,” he said. The Amishman himself said nothing.

  “Eddie’s boy,” said Grandpa.

  The Amishman nodded.

  That was the last word spoken by either of them for an hour. Silence, I have since learned, was a quality once valued among men because it was necessary for survival; and in men older than myself, such as Grandpa, or in men from different worlds, such as the Amishman, I have often witnessed this taciturnity and marveled at it. I’ve never been able to keep my mouth shut for very long. But then I’ve never spent entire days hunting in the forest, as Grandpa had in his youth. Nor have I labored day in and day out at bringing in the hay or sowing corn, as the Amishman did. These are not times for idle chatter. These are times to be quiet, to focus on the job at hand; and I think those two old men were remembering that as they sat side by side, occasionally jostling each other’s shoulders as the buggy swayed with the dips and bumps in the road. There was work ahead. This was no time for talk.

  We pulled off Mann Road and swung onto the County Road, heading away from Mannville. I sat with my legs hanging over the end of the buggy. An old Chevy sedan passed us, the teenagers in it staring at me uncertainly. I smiled. One of them waved. Then a familiar pair of legs appeared in the corner of my vision, headed the opposite way. Same old swinging arms, same lovely head held high. It was Annie, on her way to school alone.

  “Hey!” I shouted.

  My grandfather said nothing, but I felt him turn around and stare at me. I had broken the silence. I was instantly ashamed. Annie stopped and turned. When she saw me sitting in the back of the buggy, it was several moments before she could think of anything to say.

  “What are you doing?” I heard faintly, over the clopping of the horse’s hooves. But I could only smile and shrug my shoulders as we slowly drew away from her. We watched each other disappear, and I caught some of her final words, drowned out by distance and the clopping of the horse’s hooves: “…supposed to have a concussion, I thought…”

  We drove on and on. It was late September, the mornings still warm, and over the creaking of the wheels and the ring of the horse’s iron-shod hooves on the dirt and stones I could hear cicadas already chirruping. I lay down in the back of the buggy, my still aching head cushioned on my arms. Through cracks in the floorboards I could see the road passing beneath us, moving at the speed of a lazy earthen river.

  I must have dozed because the next thing I knew, Grandpa was shaking my shoulder. I sat up and looked around me. The buggy had stopped and we had left the present altogether, or what I thought of as the present. This was another present, and now that I was in it I couldn’t imagine a different one. Time travel, I thought, is possible. You just have to hop in an Amish buggy and fall asleep.

  On a distant hilltop I saw a lone farmhouse. Spreading away from it and toward me were fields and pastureland, broken by an occasional line of trees. The road was of dirt, and it wound over the hill back the way we had come, smudged in green and brown and black pastel colors like a chalk drawing. I got out of the buggy. We’d stopped before another house, a two-story home that reminded me of the Shumachers’. There were no telephone poles, no tractors, no cars, no antennas on the houses; the road was unpaved and rutted; across it was a barn, and against the barn leaned one or two farming tools that haven’t been used by most farmers in America for at least a century and possibly more: a scythe, an adze, and a giant two-man hand drill. Scarcely a sound penetrated the morning, except for the whickering of a horse somewhere. There were no airplanes in the sky, not even a far-off jet. The air smelled of manure and grass, and was tinted with the smoke of burning leaves.

  The Amishman was walking into his house. Grandpa followed him, carrying his black bag. I stayed close behind him. As I looked up at the house I saw a curtain swish violently shut. It was in the window of one of the second-floor rooms. There was someone watching us up there, someone curious.

  The house smelled of kerosene and sweat, but clean sweat. The builders of the house hadn’t bothered with an entrance hall. We passed through the front door and were in a large dining room, the floor of which was polished wood, like ours at home. The walls and ceiling were whitewashed and completely unadorned except for a row of hooks. These, Grandpa explained to me
in a whisper, were where they hung the chairs when they needed the space; there were sixteen of them. A long table stretched from one end of the room to the other, and around it were the sixteen chairs. The mother of this family had given birth to fourteen children, and was trying at this moment to deliver the fifteenth.

  “She’s in here,” said the Amishman. He opened a door and disappeared behind it.

  Grandpa turned to me. He had a look of fierce concentration in his eyes.

  “Don’t try and talk to me,” he said. “Don’t interrupt me at all. Don’t talk to anyone. If I tell you to do something, just do it. If you can’t figure out what I mean, do it anyway. This woman is very sick. She’s been in labor for almost two days.”

  “I’m coming in?”

  “Yes, you’re coming in. Remember what I said.”

  Without another word he opened the door to the room, shoved me in ahead of him, and closed the door behind us.

  “My apprentice,” he said to the room in general.

  Introductions in this place hardly seemed necessary, or even appropriate. The air was close and fetid and reeked of woman’s sweat and blood and other things I couldn’t identify except for their distinctly human smell. The walls of the room were lined with standing women, how many I didn’t know, and they were all dressed alike: white bonnets, floor-length black dresses, and white aprons. When I ventured to look up at them I saw they were all looking at the floor, away from me and Grandpa, and yet I knew they were keenly aware of our presence. In the center of the room, on a large, bloodstained bed, was a middle-aged woman, naked, her belly red and grotesquely distended. Her hands were held on either side by a pair of the black-clad women. She breathed in high-pitched wheezes. Suddenly she gave a scream, but it was not a scream like that of any animal or person I’d ever heard, not a scream of pain but from the realm beyond pain. It was low, hoarse, drawn out at the end, without a hint of hope to it. The woman was dying. Even I could see that.

  “Open the bag,” Grandpa said to me.

  He’d set his bag on the floor at the foot of the bed. I knelt. When I opened it I was confronted with a jumble of bottles, tubes, and shining steel instruments. I looked up at him expectantly.

  “Hensbane,” he said.

  I searched through the bottles until I found the right one. I handed it to him.