by John Yount
“Why did you say the dead person was a soldier, James?” Mrs. Arents asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “That was stupid. Maybe it was because of France, or the snow? I don’t know why I said it.”
“Oh but it wasn’t stupid,” Mrs. Arents said. “Wilfred Owen is very famous for his poems about soldiers and the horrors of the battlefield.”
“I didn’t know,” James said. “It was just a stupid guess.”
“Go on to the second stanza, if you please, James.”
He did not please. It made his stomach hurt. “Well,” he said, holding his head miserably between his hands, “the poet says the sun can wake the seeds and once gave life to, you know, the cold earth, so he wants to know why, when there’s already a person there who is still warm, why it wouldn’t be a lot easier to make him alive again. I mean, if the sun started with nothing but clay and made it finally into something as tall and complicated as a man, the poet wants to know why it would bother, if the man was only going to die; I mean, the poet doesn’t understand why the sunbeams went to all the trouble in the first place.” His head between his hands, as though between the jaws of a vice, James waited for her to go on to someone else, waited for the bell to ring, or something, anything, to come along and release him.
“Would you tell the class what ‘fatuous’ means, please?” she asked.
“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t know what it means. I just left it out when I read that line.”
“And ‘futility’?”
“I think it means hopeless,” he said.
“That’s very close. It really means useless, and ‘fatuous’ means unconscious or silly. But you did beautifully with the poem, kind sir, and I’m sure we’re all impressed and grateful.”
“I sure-the-fuck-am,” Earl said under his breath just as the bell began ringing as long and loud as a fire alarm.
While the class shuffled noisily into the hall, James sat at his desk with his head down, and when at last he took a deep breath and looked up, the room was empty except for Mrs. Arents, who in her shaky, ineffectual way was trying to tidy her desk; and Lester, who was waiting patiently by the door. James gathered his books. She told them to be sure and have a lovely weekend. And he and Lester left by the rear of the building, since both of them knew without having to discuss it, that Earl and the twins rode the first bus and would be waiting out front.
Without speaking, they crossed the ballfield and the trestle over the creek, following an abandoned, narrow-gauge railroad track toward Lester’s house. After a quarter of a mile they left the faded cinders and rotten ties to go cross-country, Lester spreading the strands of a barbed-wire fence for James to climb through and James returning the courtesy.
Lester was worn down by his own brand of misery, and James knew it. In the eighth grade or no, Lester could scarcely read or write, and he would accept no help from James. He meant only to endure this last year until he was sixteen and could quit school forever, just as he had endured every year since he’d given up jumping out of windows. He’d simply made up his mind, long ago, that school and books were not for him, that he could not and would not learn those things that were taught in a classroom, and neither James nor anyone else could convince him otherwise. He was determined to wait it out like some exquisite torture.
Sometimes James nearly envied him, if only because he’d taught himself to be almost invisible. Anyway his classmates didn’t seem to see him. He never spoke to them, or acknowledged them, or asked anything from them; and somehow, over the years, he’d taught them to look beyond him or around him just as they might have looked past a fence post or a tree. Never mind that she’d called on him that day, even Mrs. Arents wasn’t immune to his magic. Already she seldom asked him a question, and when she did forget and call his name, something peculiar seemed to happen to her, as though she realized she’d called on an empty seat, and she never pressed it. The trick was all the more remarkable because Lester looked even sillier than Virginia and Clara had claimed. On his own ground or out fishing or doing chores, he looked okay, but at school his clothes were suddenly so ill-fitting and ragged, he resembled a clown. Roy had made the whole thing worse by buying a huge pair of reddish-yellow, high-top work shoes for Lester to grow into that seemed almost to glow and emitted an outrageous odor of leather James could smell all the way across the classroom. But Effie’s haircut was the cruelest joke of all. Lester had been woolly-headed all summer, and James hadn’t been prepared to find him looking like a bottle brush, cropped on top and shaved from the tops of his ears down, straight around his head. It took talent, mystifying talent, James thought, to be inconspicuous, almost invisible, when you looked like Lester.
When they came to the fence around Roy’s land, James spread the strands of barbed wire first so Lester could slip through. On the other side they climbed up on a granite outcropping and sat down as they had done every day that week, looking silently out across the valley, each of them locked in his own particular brand of trouble. They would part here, Lester going off to the right athwart the grade of the mountain and James going straight up the valley toward his grandmother’s table and the trailer. Still, they sat together for a long time, not saying anything but merely thinking and smelling the sweet scent of ragweed and ripening apples and all that went into the faint but real perfume of the approaching fall.
It had been unseasonably and steadily cool, and on the mountaintops there was already a little color, which would spread and get richer and deeper until, by the first week of October, it would have come creeping down into the valleys. Almost every night had been in the thirties, and on the second of September there had been enough frost to singe the leaves of his grandfather’s squash, even if it had left almost everything else in the garden untouched. When he had time to notice this sweet, sad change of season, it was almost enough to break James’s heart, although he couldn’t have said why.
“Want to do something tomorrow?” he asked at last and without looking at Lester.
“Tomorrow afternoon, I expect,” Lester said, gazing off in the distance himself, “got to help Poppa grade tobacco in the mornin.”
“Well,” James said after another long pause, “I’d better get going I guess,” and he slid off the face of the outcropping to the ground.
“See you, buddy,” Lester said.
“See you,” James said.
It was just that his summer had been stolen from him, he thought after he’d walked a while. That was why the fall seemed unusually sad. He had borne the unhappiness between his mother and father and therefore merely existed through the summer, and so it had slipped away. It seemed to him he’d spent most of his time sitting up in a huge, grimy catalpa tree on the edge of the trailer park in Knoxville, watching traffic slip under the blue haze of its exhaust, either west into the city or east toward the country. After supper he nearly always climbed into the ancient, half-dead catalpa and stayed until it was time to go in and try not to notice the deadly silence his parents maintained between them like the aftermath of a gunshot. Oh, he’d gotten to go to a movie now and then, and sometimes his troubles seemed kind enough to wait for him outside while he went in where magic could happen, his spirit could still rejoice and even note the earmarks and mannerisms of the hero’s courage, as though for future use. And once his father and his mother and he, all three, spent a grand spectacle of an evening at the Barnum & Bailey Circus. But if there had been more to June, July, and part of August than that, then he couldn’t remember it. Somehow both the beginning and the end of summer had come when he’d gotten to his grandparents’ house, and he’d had only a small taste before his mother was buying him school clothes at Green’s Department Store, he was getting a haircut in the barber shop down the street, and a heartbeat later, he was in Mrs. Arents’s eighth-grade classroom. So. No wonder the cool air and smell of fall saddened him, he thought. No wonder his stomach seemed to hurt.
But as he climbed over a fence and came up out of the dit
ch into the road, some chamber of his heart seemed to insist that the grief was deeper than that, deeper than the loss of summer or even being trapped in eighth grade with the likes of Earl Carpenter and the Lanich twins.
He came in sight of his grandparents’ house just as Virginia and Clara climbed down from the school bus. It was the one he was supposed to ride, since the grammar school and high school were separated only by a small dirt parking lot and used the same buses; but he’d never once ridden it. His cousins didn’t seem to see him. Waving to someone on the bus and looking wonderfully normal and happy, they climbed the flagstone walk and flounced into the house. He wondered if he’d ever know, or could even learn, what they seemed born knowing. Somehow, he doubted it.
When he had let himself into the small, stale trailer and changed out of his school clothes, as his mother insisted he do the moment he got home, he went out to the huge pile of wood by the barn and loaded his arms. It was his great pleasure to carry wood, and he liked even better to split kindling—at least once his grandfather had grown to trust him not to ruin the blades of the double-bitted ax—and he always had to take care not to split too much of it. Beside his grandmother’s cook stove, there was a small box for kindling and a larger one for stove-wood. He filled the large one first, which took him three trips. “Lordy, chile, that’s a gracious plenty,” his grandmother said, which pleased him. Then, since it had grown so cool and his grandfather built a fire in the living room fireplace each evening, he filled the huge wood cradle by the hearth, which took him five trips and got him sweaty. But then it was that time of day he loved best, when the smell of wood seemed strongest, and the shadows had grown long, and the air had grown sharp and crisp. While the sweat at his temples dried, he chose pieces of maple with the straightest grain and split them neatly into kindling, his left hand, which held the wood, daring the right, which held the ax. And his spirits began to lift, as they always did, as though by his labor he could earn a place in his grandparents’ household and be real family and not someone they merely tolerated. Lately he had even begun to enjoy dinnertime. He’d always thought his grandmother was the world’s best cook, but the main thing was that his cousins were back in school and so interested in telling stories about their teachers and friends, they barely noticed him.
Whatever, by the time he’d carried in the last of the kindling and washed up for supper, almost all his sadness had drained away. Still, they had only just pulled up to the table and begun to pass around bowls and platters when the telephone rang two longs and three shorts, which meant it was for them and not one of the other parties on their line; and before Clara could set down a bowl of potatoes, Virginia was up, had snatched the heavy black receiver from its hook and shouted: “Virginia Marshall speaking!” Since the local telephone company was small and poor and used terribly outdated equipment—if you wanted to make a call, you had to crank the old black contraption to get an operator and then yell to be heard—there was no such thing as privacy, and everyone at the table listened openly.
“What?” Virginia shouted into the mouthpiece. “Who?” she yelled. But then her face lost all its anticipation, and she shouted: “I’ll put Grandmother on!” and held the receiver out to Grandmother Marshall. “It’s Uncle Edward,” she said with an embarrassed glance at James.
A current made of equal parts hope and fear ran through his stomach while his grandmother talked, repeating over and over again the bare circumstances of his mother’s employment and the times when she might be found at home. “This Sunday morning would be the best time,” she said. “Yes, this Sunday morning!” she said in a loud but remarkably kind voice. “But James is here!” she shouted. “I say, James is right here!” And suddenly she was holding the receiver out to him and saying, “Come on, son, quickly, it’s your poppa.”
At first he couldn’t seem to hear anything but a great hum and crackle, but finally, submerged under that, he recognized snatches of his father’s voice, deep and nasal and touched with the constant humor and sadness that always seemed to color it. Although the noise of long distance kept him from understanding most of what his father said and sometimes broke off pieces of words he did understand, he knew his father was telling him about streetcars and parks and telling him that something else wasn’t so bad either. He had hoped his father was going to say he was coming home, but he knew from the familiar tone of salesmanship that his father was up to another matter entirely, which both thrilled him and frightened him completely. He heard his father say quite clearly that he missed them, and then the noise on the line closed in again like a fire popping and crackling. For a while he couldn’t make out anything, and then he realized he was being asked a question.
“What?” he shouted, but he couldn’t hear. “What?” he shouted again, and this time he heard two words: “… doin, son?”
“I’m doing fine,” he yelled.
Of the next question the only word he heard for sure was “school.”
“School’s good!” he shouted.
Into a roar of static his father managed to slip four words: “… Sunday … tell … love her.”
“I will,” James shouted. “I will!”
He understood nothing of what his father said after that, except that it sounded final. “Good-bye,” he shouted, and as though beneath the sound of heavy rain, he heard the reply.
MADELINE TALLY
“It’s just, you know, the continuity you miss. Is that the right word?” Madeline said.
Holding his hands together as though in prayer, Leslie touched his lips with his fingertips and gave her the slightest nod, his eyes looking straight into hers in a way that made her uncomfortable or at least unsure of herself.
“As though continuity were the whole purpose of it all, no matter what the marriage is like,” she said and took her eyes away from his—which were just a little too intense and intimate to suit her—and tried to glance casually around the restaurant as though the matter under discussion weren’t really so important, as though it were actually quite trivial. She laughed briefly. “I’m sure my parents would agree that continuity is the whole point. And I feel like I’m committing a mortal sin. It scares me, as though I’m harming everyone’s future in a way that can’t be mended—mine, James’s, my parents, yours.…” She looked at him again and found that his eyes were just the way she had left them.
“Are you sure you don’t dread talking to him in the morning because you still love him?” he asked and gave her an indulgent smile across the dome of his fingertips.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “What reason has he ever given me to love him?”
“That wasn’t my question,” he said. “What reason did he give you to marry him? You did marry him after all.”
“Well,” she said and laughed miserably, “that was probably because he was just about the only young man my poppa didn’t scare away.”
Leslie looked up at the ceiling. “Jesus, but you confirm a man’s worst nightmares sometimes, do you know that?”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You’ll have to explain.”
“I don’t think I care to,” Leslie said. “I’d rather order dessert. The pecan pie here is very good.”
“I don’t know why I married him. Maybe because I was a young girl and didn’t know anything. Maybe I was crazy. I don’t know.”
“I just hope you don’t look back on what’s happening now and say the same thing,” Leslie said.
The thought had never occurred to her, at least not exactly in those terms. She felt what she felt. Sorrow. Resentment. Betrayal. Although she wasn’t sure whether Edward Tally had betrayed her or she had betrayed herself, she knew her marriage had been one long series of unhappy situations. And of course she felt a great sadness, not only for all the years lost, but because she was going to have to look like a bad and selfish person, an evil woman, just for trying to put her life in order, just for trying to find a little bit of the happiness everyone else seemed to take for granted. But
she wasn’t likely to look back and think she’d been crazy. If anything she would look back and recognize the painful days when she’d first been able to see things with some clarity.
“I know exactly what he’s going to do,” she said. “Tomorrow when he calls he’s going to pretend that we’ve both been acting foolish, but he’ll really mean I have. Oh, he’ll admit he hasn’t been treating me the way he should have, and he’ll promise to do better. But he won’t really change. He’ll act just the way he’s always acted because he doesn’t see anything wrong with it. He’ll expect me to come to Pittsburgh where nothing is familiar and I don’t know a soul, and he’ll stick me somewhere to cook and clean and make things nice for him, and pretty soon, maybe he’ll come home and maybe he won’t. No. I don’t love him, and I want a divorce.
“Do you know what’s funny?” she asked and tried to laugh, although her eyes welled up. “I don’t think I ever did love him, but I wanted him to love me. If I could have made him do that, I might have been able to love him back.” She knew her face was doing something between laughing and crying and probably looked peculiar. “But he couldn’t even see me. Does that make any sense?” she asked him. “Why are you looking at me like that? I want a divorce, that’s all.”
Leslie held his hands up, palms toward her, as though she were pointing a gun at him. “I can’t tell you if it makes sense, but I can tell you that you don’t have any grounds for divorce.”
“How can you say that?” she asked him. “It isn’t any good, and I’m miserably unhappy.”
“Darling,” he said, leaning across the table toward her and speaking in the sort of voice that let her know she was being too loud and probably had been being too loud for a long time, “the law does not recognize unhappiness as grounds for divorce.”
