by Brady Udall
A few months ago she sent me a letter full of details about Lana and Clay’s thirtieth wedding anniversary party. They celebrated it back in Richland, in the old community center packed with neighbors and family and friends and nine different kinds of Jell-O salad. You should have seen it, Sunny wrote. Food and streamers everywhere and my folks dancing out there in the middle of all these old people, my dad swinging his hips and yelling to the music, “That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh…” I could have sworn they were all drunk.
I read that letter out on the porch, bright autumn leaves drifting around my feet, and nearly bawled with joy.
But there has been no greater blessing than Rosa. For thirteen years she and I did one simple thing: we were good to each other. We got each other drinks. We said please and thank you and doesn’t that shirt look nice. We bought cards for each other on Valentine’s Day and found inordinate pleasure in watching reruns of “The Benny Hill Show.” We took turns cleaning the toilet. We talked bad about the neighbors and made fun of the persnickety old widows who liked to stand up front during liturgy and show off their new permanents. We played Scrabble and Yahtzee and let each other get away with murder.
After her first stroke, I was able to care for Rosa almost without help. I have grown into a large man (I have my father’s bull neck and long arms) and it wasn’t difficult at all to carry her up and down the stairs a dozen times a day, to transfer her from couch to wheelchair to bed and back again. The home care nurse came a few times a week to help with her rehabilitation and Mrs. McPherson from down the street would stop by every once in awhile to make dinner or keep Rosa company while I went out with Mitzi on weekends. I drove Rosa to church and to the hospital, I bathed her and helped her in the bathroom until she learned again to do it herself, I fixed meals and positioned her wheelchair at the icon corner so she could say her prayers morning and night, I came to know what she needed before she ever had to ask.
By seven months she had progressed so well that she could make do with a cane and got fed up with me and my solicitous ways. I’d try to help her out of her chair or take her dishes from the table and she’d give me a good swat on the shoulder and say in that funny, childish voice of hers, “Go way! Get out of here!” The doctors had told us that for her there was a high risk of another stroke, but it was something that never crossed my mind until I woke up last Monday morning to a quiet house. Rosa had always gotten up before me without fail, even in those first days home from the hospital when she would sit up in bed and hum to herself or flip through a magazine with her good arm until I decided to climb out of bed so we could start the day.
By the time I stood in her bedroom doorway I already knew. I pulled the covers back and touched her face. I did not have to check her pulse to know she was gone. I had seen it before; I knew what it looked like. I pulled up a chair and sat next to her bed to wait. I didn’t want any overeager paramedics crashing in to try and revive her. For an hour I sat with her and looked at the window where frost grew like the pale imprints of fossilized ferns.
The next night I spent at the church for Rosa’s funeral vigil; she lay in her casket in the flickering candle-glow and Father Grinev led us through the psalms and songs and prayers.
What earthly sweetness remains unmixed with grief?
What glory stands immutable on the earth?
All things are but feeble shadows, all things are
most deluding dreams, yet one moment only,
and death shall supplant them all.
When it was over, when we had all passed by to give our final kiss, Father Grinev, a big, bearded man who makes me think of Attila the Hun, stopped me in the vestibule. He had just spent an entire night leading dire chants of the deepest gravity and gloom and he was smiling. He clapped a thick hand on my back and said, “I hope this doesn’t mean you’re going to stop coming to church!” Then he wrestled me into a bear hug that nearly cracked my spine. A day later, in the middle of a snowstorm, under two barren birch trees, we put Rosa into the ground next to her husband.
For three days I have been knocking around this suddenly too-large house, trying to get everything cleaned and ready before I go. I’m moving in with Mitzi and her two boys, who live in Bloomsburg, a couple of towns over. Our plan is to eventually get married, and it is only hitting me now that I am going to be, by all accounts, a father. A father to two little boys whose typical morning consists of tearing a phone book into confetti and flushing various household items down the toilet until it clogs. Their names are Dale and Ronny, ages three and five. I am not too embarrassed to say I am mortally afraid.
I have swept and mopped and waxed all the floors, covered the furniture, scrubbed the bathroom, emptied and defrosted the refrigerator, turned the mattresses, carefully packed up Rosa’s things for storage, drained the pipes, shut off the power, tossed out garbage bags full of food and medicines and vitamins and old bills and statements and receipts. Mitzi stopped to help a couple of nights after her shift at the county courthouse and Mrs. McPherson has been strong-arming the neighbors and church ladies into bringing casseroles, of which there are seventeen, stacked into mini-pyramids on the kitchen counter.
Now that I have pulled down all the shades and switched off the furnace, the house is dim and cool and quiet as a tomb. Outside it’s a clear day, a bleached winter sun glittering on the hard crust of snow and burning inside each icicle like a flame. I am sitting at my desk in the dark, wondering what to do with all of these pages, bundled and stacked and useless, my zigzag life accumulated on paper. I have considered lugging it all with me wherever I go, every misspelled word and throwaway moment, every detail and passing observation, every line of senseless finger-talk, but it has long since outgrown my steamer trunk and would take a rental truck and a dolly and a couple of strapping men to haul it the twenty miles to Mitzi’s apartment, where there would be no place to put it. I have even entertained dramatic thoughts of dragging it out back and torching it with lighter fluid, making a bonfire that would raise a flood of melted snow, or waiting for a blustery day to release it into the wind, page after page, like a flock of pigeons. But I think I will leave it where it is. For me it will be a comfort to know that it is all here, written down, just in case.
I’m supposed to meet Mitzi at Klutsner’s Deli for lunch to celebrate this new stage in our relationship, and I have a little time, so I roll a clean sheet into my typewriter and let my fingers have their way. In awhile, after I have added a few more inconsequential words and pages to this sprawling pile, I will put on my coat, pick up my Hermes Jubilee, lock the doors behind me, and emerge from the shadows of this house into the bright day, blinking and holding my hand to the sky, amazed at the light, like a man raised from the dead.
THE MIRACLE LIFE OF EDGAR MINT
Brady Udall
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1.“If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and faith in God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one way or another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire of a United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation.” How does the novel’s opening paragraph—and, more broadly, its opening chapter—work to draw the reader into the story? How does the immediacy of the first-person narration affect the reader’s involvement with Edgar and his story?
2.Edgar’s mother doesn’t even get up from the kitchen table when he is run over by the mail truck. Why is Edgar so forgiving of her, even though she abandons him and effectively kills herself with alcohol? Does she provoke any sympathy in the reader?
3.Edgar’s father is a young white man from Connecticut who has come west in the hope of becoming a cowboy. Is it surprising that Edgar never meets or even tries to find his real father? Whic
h characters take on parental roles in his life?
4.On arriving at Willie Sherman, Edgar overhears Principal Whipple say, “The last thing I need right now is another goddamn orphan without any paperwork.” In response to hearing the word “orphan,” Edgar thinks, “It comforted me to understand my place in the world, to put a name to it.” Is it useful to see The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint as an example of the classic genre of orphan novels, like Dickens’s Great Expectations? How loosely or tightly structured is The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint? What are the driving forces behind the novel’s plot?
5.What is the effect of the chapter called “Edgar Gets It,” which is both Edgar and the reader’s introduction to life at Willie Sherman? Why are violence and sadism so casual here? What effect does the school have on Edgar’s behavior? What changes does he make in himself in order to survive?
6.Edgar is “obsessed with memory, with facts, with history on the smallest scale.” He makes daily use of the typewriter Art has given him. What does language do for Edgar? Why is it so necessary for him to write down what happens to him?
7.What does Edgar’s friendship with Cecil mean to him? If thinking about and writing to Cecil have become some of Edgar’s few emotional lifelines, what is the significance of the events that occur when he makes his visit to the juvenile detention center?
8.Note that Udall’s use of narrative point of view often switches between first and third person. Why does he choose to do this? Who is telling the story?
9.What does Sterling Yakezevitch represent to Edgar? Why does Edgar say to himself, “I was just like Sterling Yakezevitch. I knew it, but nobody else seemed to”? What is the significance of “the jumping place” for Edgar and for Sterling?
10.Udall does a superb job of incorporating the landscape of the West into the story. What are the scenes in which the landscape plays an important role? How does the landscape affect the moods and meanings of the novel? Is there any significance to the fact that Edgar ends up in Pennsylvania, far from his Apache homeland?
11.How well does Edgar fit into the Madsen family? Does he have a chance for happiness there? Why does he leave, and is he right to do so?
12.Barry Pinkley’s role in the story evolves over the course of Edgar’s life. Edgar says, “Like Dr. Frankenstein who gave the monster life, I think Barry felt a kind of ownership toward me, a responsibility.” Does Barry’s history as a foster child explain his behavior? Edgar also says, “Barry was a mystery to me. . . . I knew that he loved me, in his own way, more than anyone in my life ever had.” Despite Barry’s constant attention and love, why does Edgar reject him as a possible adoptive parent? What compels Edgar to perform his ultimate act of rejection? Is it shocking or unsurprising that he does so?
13.Edgar says, “God was out there. He had touched me and I had felt His presence, which was more than I could say about my own father.” But he also believes that “either God was a crazed lunatic or He was just plain mean.” How important is religion in this novel?
14.Edgar is a child with no home and almost no belongings. What particular objects take on meaning for him? What is the significance of the objects that are given and received in friendship in this story? What is the significance of Edgar’s trunk?
15.How significant for Edgar’s story is the fact that he is half Apache? What does the novel tell us about racial discrimination and its effect on Native Americans? How interested is Udall in bringing the reader’s attention to the problems bequeathed to the Native American population?
16.There is much in The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint that is bleak—suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, physical suffering, emotional deprivation. Which aspects or episodes of the novel are the most difficult for the reader from an emotional perspective? How does Udall manage to keep the mood so light, comical, and life-affirming?
17.Apart from his brilliance as an inventor of character and plot, what aspects of Udall’s writing style are most impressive? Are there particular sentences or paragraphs that are especially moving, effective, or funny?
18.Edgar’s lifelong quest is to relieve the postman of guilt, to bring him the good news of his survival. “I imagined him with his white skin, his orange hair and blue uniform . . . transformed in an instant from a man twisted inside out with guilt and grief to someone struck with the realization that our worst mistakes can be retrieved, that death can be traded in for life, that what has been destroyed can be made whole again.” Why does Udall deny Edgar this wish? Is finding a long-lost mother in Rosa a good enough substitute for his original wish? What are the ironies of the novel’s ending?
Copyright © 2001 by Brady Udall
All rights reserved
First published as a Norton paperback 2012
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Book design by JAM Design
Production manager: Leelo Märjamaa-Reintal
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Udall Brady.
The miracle life of Edgar Mint : a novel / Brady Udall.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-393-02036-6 (hardcover)
1. Apache Indians—Fiction. 2. Arizona—Fiction. 3. Head—Wounds and injuries—Fiction. 4. Orphans—Fiction. 5. Foster home care—Fiction. 6. Boys—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3571.D36 M57 2001
813'.54—dc21
00-067003
ISBN 978-0-393-34164-5 pbk.
eISBN 978-0-393-08122-0 epub
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