by John Yount
“That’s horseshit, Madeline, and you know it,” Edward said at last.
“I’ve spoken to a lawyer, and I want you to give me a divorce,” she told him, her voice full of the burrs and awkward notes of weeping.
So sick she thought she might faint, holding the receiver to her ear and her hand over the mouthpiece so he couldn’t hear her crying, she waited. If the floor had opened up beneath her feet and swallowed her, she wouldn’t have been surprised. If her heart had turned literally to ice and ceased to beat, she wouldn’t have been surprised.
“If that’s the goddamned way you want it,” Edward said, and in the next moment the noise of long distance, all the complicated confabulation of it, simply vanished.
JAMES TALLY
When he came home from church, the trailer smelled faintly of Lysol and vomit and was smotheringly hot.
“Momma?” he said when he discovered her in bed with her face turned to the wall.
“Keep away,” she told him in a shaky voice, “I’ve got the flu.”
He was taken aback. All through Sunday school and church he’d tried to imagine what she and his father would be saying to each other. Finally he’d decided that she would be falsely cheerful when he came home. Yes, and then she’d sit him down on the couch and try to convince him that living in Pittsburgh wouldn’t be so bad. But he hadn’t expected this at all. He looked at her pale face and the damp tendrils of hair stuck to her cheek.
“Can I do something?” he asked at last.
She turned to face him then, her eyes huge and dark and full of something he’d seen in them many times before. “Everything’s going to be all right,” she told him in her shaky voice. “I’m just a little sick.”
He knew she had talked to his father. He saw it in her eyes. And he knew that nothing was all right.
“I need to rest now,” she said and turned her face to the wall again.
He went up to the house and told them she was sick, and Lily came down to check on her and came back to say that she had the flu and couldn’t hold anything on her stomach, so they ate Sunday dinner without her. After dinner he went down and changed his clothes as quietly as he could without knowing if she was asleep or awake, and went out to mope around the barn for a little while before he took the new slingshot he’d made from its hiding place and a handful of round, smooth pebbles he’d collected from the creek and walked up the ridge behind the barn. It had grown raw and misty, and it was very quiet, and all at once he began to feel seriously guilty about the slingshot.
It was the best he’d ever owned. The prongs were mountain laurel, hard as iron, and absolutely even; and the rubbers were made of a prewar inner tube that Lester was lucky enough to own, the kind of lively red rubber no one could find anymore. But the pouch had come from the tongue of one of his father’s worn-out work shoes discovered in the closet behind the fishing equipment.
Anyway he had judged the shoes to be worn-out and had not asked his mother if he could cut out one of the tongues for fear she would forbid it. The tongue had made just the soft, strong pouch he’d known it would. He’d also known it was a transgression that might earn him a whipping. But after seeing what was in his mother’s eyes, the matter seemed more serious. The pit of his stomach told him there was bad trouble, and although he wanted to believe he couldn’t possibly have contributed to it—no one except himself even knew about the shoes—sometimes he feared there was an unseen, magical, and totally just plane on which the world truly operated. And on that plane what he had done might not be trivial but grave.
He’d had the vague intention to hunt, to look for a rabbit hiding in the brush, or maybe a squirrel or a dove perched on some branch, and so, give his slingshot its final true test. If he’d gotten game, hungry or not, he’d have dressed it out, built a fire, cooked, and eaten what he’d killed. But he no longer felt like it or wanted to creep around in the cold quiet woods, which had grown gauzy with fog and rain. His mother might need him. Maybe she was even feeling better, and they could listen to radio programs together. Maybe he could tell her what he’d done.
But when he got back to the trailer, Aunt Lily was in the bedroom, and the partition was mostly closed, so he turned the radio on just loud enough to cover their conversation. It was a tense and familiar role, and he’d played it often while his mother and father held their fierce, hushed arguments and fights. He knew exactly what was expected of him. He was supposed to disappear if he could, and if not, he was supposed to distract himself and pretend what was going on was none of his business and didn’t affect him. Never mind that it did. Never mind that it was sometimes even about him. He tried to listen to the radio but couldn’t quite do it. He tried not to listen to his mother and her sister, but he couldn’t quite shut them out either. Twice he was sure he’d heard his mother weeping and his aunt trying to calm and comfort her. But after a while he wasn’t listening to the radio or them; he was occupying a tense and haunted middle ground in which mutilating his father’s shoe, not standing up to Earl Carpenter, picking away at his father’s canvas musette bag of fishing equipment until it was all but empty, and other crimes and misdemeanors accused and convicted him, so that whatever trouble was coming to him and his mother was just. He had earned it.
After a while his aunt Lily came out of his mother’s bedroom, smiling at him with great generosity. He thought her eyes, magnified behind her glasses, were the kindest he’d ever seen, and something about them seemed even younger than Clara’s or Virginia’s eyes. He wondered if that was because she had never been married, but that made no sense. Neither had Clara or Virginia.
“You come on up to the house with me,” she told him. “I want to give you a chamber pot to bring back to your momma.” When they got outside, she put her arm about his shoulders and hugged him. “Don’t worry,” she said, “just let her get some rest and some sleep.”
His mother didn’t go to work either Monday or Tuesday, although she was up and dressed when he came home Tuesday, and from the way she looked at him, he knew it was coming. The time for saying things to each other that were beside the point was over, and it was coming.
They sat together on the couch. She took both his hands in both of hers—hers were icy cold—and she looked into his eyes for a long time, and then she told him she was asking his father for a divorce. Curiously it seemed to be information he already had and simply hadn’t acknowledged. It was as though he’d been expecting something worse, although he couldn’t imagine what that might be. She looked in his eyes and squeezed his hands and told him he probably didn’t understand, but he understood well enough; it was just that his mind had seemed to go blank somehow, so that, for some strange reason, he saw a field with stubble sticking up through a thin covering of snow. She kept talking, but he wasn’t listening. He was occupied with the field of snow, which smelled like dust, like iron.
Afterward they sat on the couch, and she looked at him, finally hugging him longer than he wanted to be hugged, until, at last, he told her that he needed to change his clothes and do his chores. Out at the barn, he carried in wood and split kindling; and somehow the slingshot, the hooks and sinkers, and even Earl Carpenter seemed meaningless considerations.
EDWARD TALLY
Monday, after work, they sat over their drinks at D’Fonzio’s bar, looking straight ahead. It was as though, when Madeline had asked him for a divorce, she had put all comfortable understandings and arrangements, all contracts, treaties, and cease-fires between men and women in question and at risk. He wished he hadn’t even mentioned it to them since he had no intention of being an object of their, by God, pity. It was only that he’d just gotten things sorted out in his own mind, and he’d been shocked to discover she hadn’t come to a similar conclusion. He couldn’t believe that she’d gone the other way, that she wanted a divorce. Not that she hadn’t showed him many times before that he knew no more about her than a billy goat. So he oughtn’t to have been surprised. But he was. He was still shocked although some
anger had begun to creep in and some hurt. And how was it that neither Stella Cox nor Lois Hamby had asked the assholes on either side of him for divorces? Was that fair? Did that make any sense whatever? Not a goddamned bit, he assured himself.
Just then, out of nowhere, as if he’d read Edward’s mind, Ironfield Cox turned his whiskey-cooked eyes on him and said, “You’re better off.”
Edward nodded his head for almost a full minute as though he were palsied. “Probably,” he said.
“Ahhh she don’t mean it,” Womb Broom said. “They don’t never actually mean it.” He took a drink of his beer and blotted his mustache with the back of the hand that held the mug. He spilled only a little. “Anyhow a man needs a wife and family to sort of hold him down. Where the hell would I be if it wasn’t for Lois?”
“Right about where you are,” Ironfield said, staring straight in front of himself.
“What do you mean by that, you stiff-assed bastard?” Womb Broom said.
Ironfield’s scalded, emotionless eyes considered Womb Broom over his glasses, which had slipped a little toward the tip of his nose. “I mean two stools down from me and one stool down from Ed.” He set his empty shot glass out in front of him where D’Fonzio would see it and do something about it. It never took Ironfield Cox long to train a bartender to understand sign language. When he wanted a refill, he set his empty glass out in front of him just so; when he was through drinking, he turned it upside down.
D’Fonzio filled the glass with rye whiskey, and Ironfield took a careful sip, reducing the contents by no more than a quarter. “I’ve never met the lady more than twice,” he said, “but there’s a kind of woman who will never let anything go, or give a man any peace, and if you’ll pardon me, Madeline strikes me as just that type.”
“A man don’t need peace, goddammit!” Womb Broom said. “Not the way you mean. It ain’t good for him. He’ll only ruin hisself with it. He needs a wife to help him curb his worst nature, and he needs a place to call home.”
Ironfield made no reply. His high, thin head held very straight and the flesh above his shirt collar as red as if he’d recently suffered first-degree burns, he stared straight ahead at nothing. After a while he licked his lips slowly as though to savor the whiskey and took another careful sip.
Edward was so angry his ears were ringing, first with Ironfield’s high-handed assessment of things, and then with Womb Broom’s foolishness. Trouble was, he couldn’t think of a comeback in either case, but he could have sat on a hotplate longer than he could sit on a stool between them, and snatching a careless wad of bills and change out of his pocket, he smacked it down on the bar and got up. “I need some air,” he said.
“Don’t let her get to you, ole son,” Ironfield said, gazing placidly straight before him.
“That’s right,” Womb Broom agreed.
But he had already bucked open the brass bar of D’Fonzio’s door and stepped into the street.
Dirty sky. Chilly. Half the time you couldn’t tell whether it was sunny or cloudy with the steel mills belching all that smoke and soot. Hell, a man could get filthy just standing on a street corner doing nothing. Already it felt and looked like winter, and many of the cars had their lights on, although, if the sky and air hadn’t been so tarnished, there would have been almost another hour of daylight.
A streetcar clanged and ground by with a heavy whirr of steel wheels and glassed-in volume of gold light and preoccupied, anonymous passengers. Above and behind, the trolley gave chase, sparking along its heavy, jointed wire.
Cars of every make and model negotiated the streets. People on the sidewalks. On the other side four teenage boys, loud and cocksure, went around a corner and out of sight, streaming past an old Italian woman in a winter coat and a scarf, who had a long, unsliced loaf of bread sticking half out of her shopping bag. On his side, he passed a soldier in uniform and his girl or his wife, both gazing through the window of a furniture store; a stooped old man in a vested suit, who looked like a pawnbroker, or maybe a tailor, or perhaps someone who repaired watches; a woman in bright slacks with heavy thighs and a broad ass, who looked as if she might be going bowling; and finally two black men lounging at the corner, one in a pearl-gray fedora, the other with his head tied up elaborately with a red bandanna, both talking and nodding, the one with the bandanna appearing to calculate something, drawing invisible figures in the rusty palm of his hand with the tip of his finger, while the man in the fedora nodded and nodded.
Goddamn, but he loved the city. He loved being surrounded by people he didn’t know and would never know. He loved all the energy, hubbub, all the possibilities. He loved the very goddamned tainted air he breathed. Truth be told, he’d take it any time over clean country air. Shit on the country where a single hot summer day could be so dead it would petrify and last forever, and the only thing a man could do was work—that and get to know the few people around better than anyone ought to know anyone. He craved freedom, by God, and change and possibility.
So how come Madeline—who meant to deny him all those things—how come she was able to stab him through the heart? Why wasn’t it a relief, for Christ’s sake? What the hell was wrong with him anyway? Was it pride? Would it have helped if he’d been the one to ask her? But he wouldn’t have. Couldn’t have.
Christ he was cold. He should have gone up to his room and grabbed a jacket. Should have taken the car. He felt absolutely baffled. Freedom was only sweet if it didn’t expand into empty infinity. If it didn’t open up like a bottomless void at your feet. If it wasn’t limited, it wasn’t freedom. If you didn’t have to fight to gain a little of it, it wasn’t sweet. Hell, it didn’t even exist unless you knew for certain that you were essentially and finally, not free at all. Oh God, but he wanted Madeline for his wife and James for his son, and the bosom of his family to be there somewhere. He wanted them to look after and take care of. He wanted somewhere to belong and people to love and to love him, even if he wasn’t always with them. Jesus Christ but he missed them horribly.
So why was he on his way to Paris Pergola’s? Since yesterday, never mind the state he was in, tucked in his memory was the knowledge that she was on the day shift beginning today. He jammed his hands in his pockets and pressed his arms against his sides. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have been the least bit chilled. Heat got to him but never the cold, not, at least, unless he was sick, or unless something in his heart had gone awry.
He wanted his wife and his boy, so he was on his way to see Paris. He was a crazy man. A fool. Some brand of asshole he couldn’t begin to name. And how could he feel so misjudged and misunderstood? How could he feel like a basically good and decent man? Maybe, he decided, every asshole in the world felt like a decent man who was misunderstood.
MADELINE TALLY
Looming up suddenly in the middle of Madeline’s sickness, Bertha Marshall said: “That Leslie Johnson fellow’s up to the house and wants to know if he can look in on you.”
“Oh!” Madeline said, struggling to surface from what seemed an endless, painful, but exquisitely private dream. She blinked at her mother standing at the foot of her bed.
In the next moment she realized that her hair was greasy and plastered to her head with fever and that she stank. “No, Momma!” she said. “You can’t let him come down here!” She knew she never wanted him in her shoddy little trailer. Not even if she were perfectly well and utterly clean.
Holding disapproval and forbearance in perfect balance, Bertha Marshall smoothed her hands over her apron, gave her head a single nod, and turned away; but she was gone only a few minutes before she returned with an enormous bouquet of flowers. “He left these,” she said and began to sweep soiled, wadded tissues from the built-in bedside table into her apron pocket, so she could put the flowers down. “I didn’t have nuthin proper that was big enough to hold em.”
Bertha Marshall and Madeline stared at the profusion of roses and cosmos, daisies and dahlias, and other flowers they couldn’t name, all arranged in a n
umber ten juice can with spots of glue still visible down its side where the paper had been removed; and neither of them seemed capable of a single sensible remark.
“Well,” her mother said after a while, “do you need anything, child?”
“No Momma,” Madeline said.
Leslie didn’t return Tuesday, but he called, wanting to know if there was anything he could do. She didn’t talk to him. She didn’t dare. There were things she had to do that had to be done before she lived another day, and certainly before she talked to Leslie.
Telling James she’d asked for a divorce made him turn so pale his lips looked blue. But he didn’t say anything, and he didn’t cry. He just listened and looked at her with his dark eyes, as though he’d known all along and was just waiting to have it spoken. Somehow telling him was like telling her own heart, as though she hadn’t quite known what she was proposing until she heard what she was saying and saw the blood seem to drain out of him, so that his lips and even his fingernails began to look as if they’d been stained with pale blue ink. It was, she felt, the most intimate thing she had ever done and the most horrible. With all her heart she vowed she’d be the best mother she could be in order to make it up to him, even as she knew, absolutely, that she could never make it up. As for him, he looked at her and listened and allowed himself to be held, and then he told her in a small steady voice that he had to change his clothes and do his chores.
When he left the trailer, all that he had not said seemed to grow enormous and very cold and seemed to haunt the caverns of her heart. But she had done it, and in the awful silence that remained, she found she still had some strength. Maybe it was only a thimbleful, and maybe it felt surrounded by shame and fear, but it was there, asking to be spent. She would tell her mother and father, she decided, at once.
If telling James had been as awful and intimate as informing her own heart, telling her mother and father was like notifying God.
