“Open it, damn it,” he snapped. I did.
“Hand me the hose.”
I gave him the rubber tube.
“Petroleum jelly.”
There was a large tub of it in the bag. Grandpa slathered it on his hands and began to rub the inside of the woman’s vagina with it. I ventured a look. Her genitals were swollen and bleeding, and a stream of yellow and black liquid oozed slowly from deep inside her onto the sheets. The smell was overpowering. I looked away quickly.
I heard the bottle being uncorked and the glug of liquid being displaced by air.
Grandpa sighed.
“Now we wait a moment,” he said.
Instantly there began a low hum from the women. They were speaking to each other in Low German, and though I knew none of their words, I could tell they did not approve. One of them stepped forward from her position by the wall.
“She has waited too long,” she said to Grandpa, and she stepped immediately back to the wall again, her face red.
“What I gave her will cause contractions,” explained Grandpa.
Nobody said a word in response.
“Otherwise I will have to cut her!”
“Then cut her,” said the man who had brought us. He was standing behind us, leaning against the door. The expression on his face was a turgid mixture of emotions. He was struggling hard to control himself. He clenched his unlit pipe in his teeth.
“All right,” said Grandpa. He looked down at me. “Scalpel,” he said. The urgency had gone out of his voice suddenly, and I knew by that he did not expect things to go well. “It’s the knife thing in there.”
I handed it to him carefully. He swabbed it with alcohol. Then he bent down over the woman’s spread legs so that I couldn’t see what he was doing. I heard the sound of flesh being suddenly rent. One of the younger women against the wall fell without a sound toward the floor. Two others caught her and carried her out.
“It’s coming,” said Grandpa.
“Heilige Gott,” said the Amishman.
The women crowded around the bed. I was surrounded suddenly by a wall of black skirts. I backed out of it against the door and found myself standing next to the Amishman. He reached down and put one hand on my shoulder, squeezing me hard. I put my hand on top of his. He relaxed his grip.
There was a gasp, a spank, and the sudden shriek of a new voice. The baby was born.
Grandpa emerged much later from the knot of women. We hadn’t been in the room an hour, but he looked exhausted. He came slowly to the Amishman. His hands were covered with blood.
“Levi,” he said, “your wife will not live.”
The Amishman took the pipe from his mouth and put it in the pocket of his black jacket. He brought one hand to his brow and held it there, covering his eyes. Grandpa clutched him firmly by both of his shoulders. They stayed like that, poised in an awkward moment of male grief. I watched them and listened to the soft sound made by the women as they wrapped the baby.
“Go outside, Billy,” said Grandpa. He maneuvered Levi away from the door in a weird slow dance, and I opened it and darted out of the room. It closed behind me. I fled through the dining room, ignoring the throbbing in my head. I went out the front door, past the buggy, which still stood waiting in front of the house, and continued across the road and over the adjoining field. I couldn’t be sick and I couldn’t blame anyone, not Grandpa or Levi or the woman, but for the moment all I knew was that I never wanted to see anyone again for the rest of my life. Most of all, if this was what being human meant, I didn’t want any part of it. Nor did I want anyone else to have to go through that either. It was too horrible. Somewhere underneath all of it was the suggestion that life was like this sometimes, but this was not life I had seen. It was death. Its presence was as oppressive as the odor of the Amishwoman’s insides, as stifling as a blanket thrown over my head and held there by massive and inescapable arms.
I kept running across the field. It rose up gently to a small ridge. When I got to the top of it I stopped running and stood still, and I stayed like that until my breathing returned to normal. My head hurt terribly. It was dark, and I was waiting for it to get light again, thinking that perhaps something had shut off my sight inside my head because I had seen what I had seen. But after a time I realized I had my eyes squinted shut. That’s good, I thought. I’ll keep them that way.
I stood there trembling and blind, feeling a gentle breeze move across my face. There was a taste of cold in it. When I smelled it I knew Indian summer was over and fall had arrived in New York.
6
My Fourteenth Year; I Become a Man; How Willie Found the Money; the Rory Curse; I Become a Writer
Fall arrived with the death of the Amishwoman and the birth of her baby, and then faded without further event into winter. I thought of Levi Miller’s wife often as the leaves fell and then were followed in their earthward path by snow. I was haunted for months by her tortured face, her lips twisted in pain as she tried to create a new life even as hers was leaving her. I’d seen cows give birth before, and once a horse, and not found it particularly disturbing. But watching Mrs. Miller had disturbed me—not because it was different from horses and cows, but because it was precisely the same. Nature, I discovered, ruled the world under her own terms; and those terms were harsh, bloody, and nonnegotiable.
There were two women in my life, Annie and my mother, and Annie was only my age and my mother was gone altogether. Thus I knew little about females, nothing of motherhood. I was familiar with the mechanics of sex and birthing, but women themselves were to me largely mysterious. Part of it was that I simply wasn’t used to being around women. They seemed strange and fascinating creatures, foreign to my world and slightly unnerving in their ways. Even Annie, who was my best friend and counterpart, was often these days showing signs of inscrutability. She had sudden mood swings, and sometimes wouldn’t speak to me for days, for reasons that were obvious only to her.
But part of it also was because of this strange property women had of being able to produce human beings from somewhere inside their bodies. To me this ability suggested power; but when I saw the poor Amishwoman splayed out on the bed, stripped of her clothes and covered in her own blood, she didn’t look powerful at all. She looked helpless and pathetic. I felt sorry for her, and wondered what it would be like to be a woman, living, as the Amish did, buried under the weight of a hundred years.
Levi Miller’s wife was also the first naked woman I’d ever seen. The sight of her, the whole experience of watching her in labor, seemed to be the catalyst for deep changes in myself. My body began to grow taller and stronger; I grew hair in strange places; my voice changed, became deeper. The whole process seemed oddly familiar; I felt as though I had been reminded of something I’d been forgetting, something I hadn’t known how to remember. It was as if my body had been waiting for some clue to its biological purpose before puberty could begin. By Christmas of that year it was in full swing.
So it was with Annie too. In fact, she’d gotten a head start on me, as girls do. Being with her now was an entirely new experience, electrifying, tantalizing, even physically painful sometimes. To my deep shame, I suffered in her presence from constant erections. They happened not only around Annie, but all females in general, even older married ones, and sometimes even when there wasn’t a female within sight. Anything could inspire an erection. They arose unpredictably and lasted for hours. They were there when I awoke and kept me awake long after I was to have been asleep. I no longer answered questions in class for fear I would be called to the blackboard; the entire world would have seen the madness pulsing in my pants, and the embarrassment would have been unbearable. I took to wearing long shirts and leaving them untucked, or carrying my books in front of my crotch. And I despaired at the arrival of summer. Shorts, in my condition, were dangerously revealing. It was almost safer to stay at home.
My hormones demanded things of me that no sane person would have attempted. They surged in me like a
tidal wave. One Saturday, I’m certain, I broke all previous world records by masturbating six times. I was so sore I could barely walk, but the satiation was temporary; by Monday I was healed and ready to try again. Sometimes desire—for anything, for anyone—would wash over me so strongly I would feel I either had to copulate or die. Yet my shyness and my youth conspired against me. No woman, I knew, would want to have sex with a fourteen-year-old boy, even if he was going on fifteen. And it was definitely a woman I wanted. Not a girl, not someone my age. I wanted a grown, fully developed woman, one who would teach me everything she knew before graduating me into the world. She would train me in the arts of love until I was a skilled master, instead of a masturbator. And I knew I had to find one soon, or I could not be responsible for the consequences.
I remember these times as having a sort of glow about them, although whence that glow emanated I’m now not sure—from youth, I guess, and nothing more. Annie and I danced around each other in that painfully shy adolescent way. I concealed my lust from the world as best as I could. Grandpa drank his way through his days. Time passed in Mannville.
During Christmas break of my fourteenth year I worked for Mr. and Mrs. Gruber, stocking shelves in their store and occasionally delivering groceries, and after vacation was over they invited me to stay on as a regular employee. I showed up after school and worked for about four hours each evening. Mr. Gruber was generous; he insisted I take weekends off, even though I offered to work them. It was almost as if he foresaw certain things that lay in my future. When I told him I wanted to work full time, he said, “You’re going to need your weekends.”
“Why?” I asked. “There’s nothing to do around here.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen,” I said, though of course Mr. Gruber knew very well I wasn’t. I knew he remembered that day in 1970 when Grandpa had come in, flustered and in a hurry after he’d discovered me on the doorstep, and he was not so old that the date had become fogged in his mind. He didn’t mind my being under the legal working age as long as I never reminded him of it. The fact was that he and Emily were too old to deliver groceries anymore, and they knew I was one of the few dependable boys around. I was a Mann, after all, and the Grubers had never lost faith in us, even after the Ostriches.
“Fifteen?” he echoed.
“Yessir.”
“Well now,” he said, “how time does fly.”
“Yuh,” I said, “it sure does.”
“Boy gets around your age, you’d be amazed how many things there are to do all of a sudden,” he said.
“Yessir.”
“Especially on the weekends.”
“Yessir.”
“You better keep your weekends free.”
“All right, then. Weekends free.”
“I know what I’m talkin’ about.”
“Yessir.”
“I once upon a time was young myself, though you wouldn’t know it to look at me now. Which reminds me of a story. There was this one time—”
“Harold, bejesus, shut up, would you,” said Emily, who was Irish by birth, German only by marriage, and had heard her husband’s stories ten thousand times too many.
I began to meet people now. I carried armloads of food to homes all over town, and by the time the old year had rolled over and died and the new one was begun I knew upwards of fifty adults by name. Most of them were elderly and had trouble getting out in the snow, which was deep again that year, but they were all the more interesting to me because they were old, and it was exciting to talk to them. All of them had known my father, and they never failed to comment on how much I looked like him, acted like him, talked like him, and walked like him. Sometimes I got a delivery order for families with small children and busy schedules who couldn’t make it to the store. Of those families, two were single women with children; and of those two women, one was to me the most tantalizing symbol of femininity I’d ever seen.
Her name was Elsie Orfenbacher. Elsie was divorced, or maybe never married in the first place, and had a small boy about three years old; nobody seemed to know who the father was. I wonder now if even Elsie knew. She was notorious for having a steady stream of casual male visitors, occasionally married ones. This practice drew down the wrath of the more virtuous women of Mannville, and so Elsie suffered from a curious sort of social pariah-hood—other women wouldn’t acknowledge her in public, but she was wildly popular with the men.
Elsie was plump, short, energetic, large-breasted, and radiated a kind of sexuality that seemed to affect everyone in one way or another. At least I knew it affected me. After my first delivery to her house I was captivated by her smell. I imagined it was everywhere, hanging over the town like an invisible veil, and all I had to do was crane my neck upward no matter where I was to sense it. She smelled of fresh warm bread and perfume, with a bit of hair spray mixed in. She ordered canned fruit, peanut butter, grape jelly, soap, orange juice, and a package of pork chops, and when I dropped them on her kitchen table she gave me seventy-five cents’ tip and said, point-blank, “Who the hell are you, anyway? I don’t know you from anywhere.”
“Billy Mann, ma’am,” I said, blushing. I was grateful for my long winter coat, which covered the part of my body that was in constant danger of exploding.
“How come I ain’t seen you before?” She cocked her head to one side and winked at me, smiling.
I shrugged. “I dunno.”
“You’re Eddie Mann’s boy.”
“Yuh.”
“I remember Eddie. He was a cute one. So are you, kiddo.”
I grew very hot. Suddenly her little house seemed stifling. Her son was sitting on the floor between us, playing with a red fire truck.
“You knew my dad?”
“Every girl in town knew your dad,” said Elsie, smiling again, and her body seemed to be vibrating with some kind of energy, part sex and part joie de vivre, although at the time it seemed all sex to me. It was too much for me to handle. I began to want to escape. I looked around wildly in terror, my eyes resting for no reason on the sink; it was scrubbed clean, not a fork or a cup in evidence. She was a neat housekeeper.
“I gotta go,” I said. “Thanks for the tip.”
There came a knock at the backdoor and George Lemmon walked in. George owned an auto shop near the high school. He was about forty and had a large beer belly. Most men in Mannville had one. Looking at him was a powerful argument against drinking beer.
“’Lo, Else,” he said. “Hi, kid. Hi, Billy.” He looked embarrassed.
“Hi, Mr. Lemmon,” I said.
“Workin’ for the Grubers now?”
“Yuh.”
“Good job?”
“Yuh.”
“That’s good.”
“Well, I gotta go,” I said again.
“You come about my car, George?” said Elsie as I left, and her tone was such that I knew she knew George had not come about her car. As I walked past the front of the house I sneaked a peek in the front window. She and George were sitting in the living room, he in a chair, she on the sofa. He had a beer in his hand. I walked faster.
The next day, as Annie and I were walking home after school, I said, “Let’s go on a date.”
She stopped in her tracks. “Beg pardon?” she said.
“A date,” I said. “Not like anything serious. A movie or something.” I was listening to myself in astonishment. Some new part of me was speaking, a Smooth Operator version of my old personality. What had Elsie awakened? I hadn’t encountered this part of myself before. I stepped back and watched to see what it would do.
“You’re a maniac,” she said. She began walking again.
“Just for fun,” I said, or the Smooth Operator said. “What the hell else is there to do around here?”
She smiled, but said nothing.
“Life is short,” the Smooth Operator philosophized grandly. “We might as well make the most of it. Besides, I’ve only been to one movie in my life.” It was true. G
oing to a movie theater was something Grandpa simply never thought of. I had money of my own now, and the Smooth Operator wanted to spend it lavishly. Return of the Jedi was playing at the Bijou. I’d been dying to see it for weeks. “Besides, you’re the only girl in my life. You’re the one for me, baby.” The Smooth Operator was speaking in a fake French accent now, deliberately bad. Annie shrieked with laughter and blushed. “You are the one who makes the sun go up and down. You make the moon go round and round. You make the leaves grow and the white white snow.”
Annie looked at me out of the corners of her eyes. “Are you making that up?” she asked.
“We shall watch Luke Skywalker, the great Jedi warrior, as he conquers the evil forces of the galaxy, and we shall rejoice together in his victory. And we shall eat popcorn.”
“Have we met?” Annie said.
“‘Ow do you do,” I said. “I am Jacques le Snock.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Not crazy. I am French, baby.”
“Oh my God.”
“Come on, Annie,” I said in my normal voice. “It’s no big deal. It’s just a movie. Just come with me.”
She was looking at me now with round eyes, her face betraying some emotion I’d never seen in her before. “You had me with the white white snow,” she said, and I knew by the sound of her voice that something had changed with us, and that I had caused it, and that it was good.
I walked whistling up Mann Road to the farmhouse. I could hear Grandpa murmuring to himself as I came in the kitchen door. He was sitting in the living room with a glass of whiskey. He had gotten his banjo out, but it lay ignored and unplayed on the floor.
Occasionally, when I was younger, Grandpa used to play old folk songs on the banjo for me—“Oh, Susannah,” “Cripple Creek,” “Soldier’s Joy.” We sang the words together while he played and I banged out the rhythm with a pair of spoons. But it had been years since we’d done that together. Lately he’d taken to getting out the banjo and then just sitting and staring at it, as though he’d forgotten what it was for. I wasn’t sure what this meant. Grandpa seemed like an old man to me all the time he was alive, but I know now he wasn’t old at all; it was only the perspective of my youth that made him seem so. Yet his actions, his appearance, his habits were all those of a man much older than himself. Even his hands were growing crabbed and useless, as though he were eighty-nine instead of only sixty. Maybe it was that arthritis made it too difficult for him to play anymore—arthritis can hit you at any age, and in the Mann family it runs pretty strong. But Grandpa never complained about arthritis to me. He just sat and stared at the banjo, occasionally strumming it with one bare toe as it lay in its case.
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