by Pete Dexter
Jaquith stood at the edge after his mule was gone, still holding the oar, staring into the pit.
Daring himself, Spooner thought.
Then he turned and went back to his car and drove off, the rope bouncing along behind. Spooner started back to the opening, which seemed a long ways off. There was an unfamiliar weakness in his legs, and he reached out to touch the wall as he went, holding himself on the straight and narrow until he was safe. He stopped once, afraid he would fall, dizzy with the smell and the heat.
The moon was up when he finally crawled under the fence into his yard. He could see his shadow in the moonlight, and his face felt like frosting on a week-old cake. He circled the house before he went in, and it appeared that every light in the place was on, even the one in the bedroom where he and Margaret slept. Normally, Calmer would check the lights in the house all the time, turning off the ones no one was using. Waste not, want not; saying that out loud.
Spooner came in the back door, noticing the dog wasn’t in his usual spot on the porch. The family was sitting at the kitchen table, eating; it seemed too late for supper. Chicken and dumplings. Nobody’s face appeared to be a familiar color. The door closed behind Spooner and Calmer saw him and was over him a second later but then stopped, as if he’d forgotten what he’d gotten up to do. His mother was red-eyed and had been crying.
His grandmother continued to eat her supper. She did things one at a time, to the exclusion of everything else. On those frequent occasions when everything was going to hell in a handbasket, it seemed to cheer her up to remind them all of her simple rule of day-to-day living: One thing at a time.
Calmer grabbed Spooner by the elbow and lifted him up until Spooner could feel his shoulder pressing into his ear. It was the first time Calmer had ever put his hands on him without kind intentions, and as soon as he’d grabbed him, he seemed to realize what he had done and let go. His expression changed, and he stared down at Spooner, resigned, as if something had been dropped and broken that could not be fixed. They were all looking at him now, even his grandmother.
Then his mother said, “My God, Calmer, his eyebrows.” And they all knew that tone of voice.
Calmer leaned over, staring hard at Spooner’s face, then moved farther up, inspecting his scalp. He got a few inches closer and sniffed at his hair. Margaret’s mouth had hinged open, and there was a piece of dumpling in the gap where she had lost her other front tooth.
“Have you been to the sawmill?” Calmer said, and he sniffed Spooner’s head again. Not angry anymore, just sniffing.
Spooner said, “Jaquith’s mule died and he pushed it into the pit.”
A certain quiet was hanging in the room, even as he spoke. At the far end of the table Spooner’s grandmother continued to eat. One thing at a time.
“I believe we take our fingers out of our mouth when we speak,” she said without looking up from her plate. Spooner realized he was sucking his middle fingers again, something he’d quit about the time he turned into the Fiend of Vincent Heights. And in this moment he felt it all slipping away—the Fiend of Vincent Heights one minute, back to sucking his fingers the next.
Calmer was still puzzling over him, as if trying to see through a foggy window. “Sit down,” he said softly, and Spooner could hear he was sorry for grabbing him by the elbow. He couldn’t say the words themselves, especially not now, but he was sorry. “Eat some supper,” he said, “and we’ll put some butter on the burns later.”
Spooner sat down and Calmer went to the stove and got him a plate of chicken and dumplings. Spooner’s grandmother looked up and watched as Calmer picked out the wings, the part Spooner liked. She didn’t approve of Calmer’s child-rearing and didn’t try to hide it. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “children were on time for supper or they were sent to bed without.”
The steam rose up from the plate and scalded Spooner’s skin like he was back inside the burning shed.
Calmer got him a glass of milk and then returned to his own seat. Presently he said, “Major Shaker was over earlier. Someone threw an egg at his car.”
Calmer had turned slightly away from Spooner’s grandmother, as he often did when she stuck her nose into his business. Spooner nodded, as if the Shaker egging were an interesting development indeed. His fingers were in his mouth again, and he took them out and blew on a dumpling, thinking once it was in his mouth it was bad manners to speak. Not a great day in Spooner’s life for long-range plans.
“He said it was you,” Margaret said.
“The mule exploded,” Spooner said. As if that superseded and explained everything else.
Spooner’s grandmother affected a singsong quality to her voice sometimes, and did so now. She said, “Children who fib go to bed without their supper.”
“I’m not a fibber,” Spooner said.
“Of course you are,” she said, and Calmer looked at her sharply but held what he was thinking to himself.
She caught the look, though. “It’s my house,” she said, “and I’ll say what I want.”
Another sort of look passed over Calmer’s face, and Spooner realized that nobody had told Grandma yet that they were moving. Spooner had only found out himself that week, from Margaret. Calmer was buying Granny Otts’s house next door, and Granny Otts and Marlis were selling their horses and going back to Arkansas, where they came from. Spooner pictured himself riding to school on Gypsy, tying her to the bicycle rack. He thought he might change her name to Brown Fury.
Margaret was getting her own room in the new house—Calmer was going to build it onto the back porch. She was at the age now when she needed her own room, and they all needed more space with the baby coming. And even though Granny Otts’s house wasn’t any bigger than the one they lived in now, it would seem bigger without Spooner’s grandmother underfoot. How Margaret knew all this, Spooner never asked. She was only a year and a half older but so far ahead of him that she might as well have been a grown-up herself.
“We’ve all told fibs,” Calmer said. And there he was, after everything that Spooner had done, still taking his side.
“Speak for yourself,” his grandmother said.
Spooner’s mother found her voice for the first time since she’d noticed his eyebrows were gone. She said, “Mother, would you please shut up for once?”
His grandmother was not used to being told to shut up. She got up out of her chair without another word, deposited her dishes in the sink, and walked out of the kitchen. Could have balanced a book on her head as she left, which was the way she said she learned to walk in charm school.
Spooner’s mother dropped her face into her hands, and her shoulders shook, and before long she got up too, but went the other way—outside to have a cigarette. The rest of them sat for a while in silence, and finally Calmer got a stick of oleo out of the refrigerator and rubbed it on Spooner’s face, and then patted him on the back of the head and began doing the dishes.
“Life goes on,” he said, and the next morning the puppy was dead.
The puppy had been gone all night, but in all the things happening, the crying and singeing and the visit from Major Shaker, only Calmer had noticed he hadn’t come home. They found him in the ditch at the bottom of the driveway where the wheel of Major Shaker’s car had tossed him. Calmer picked Margaret up and held her while she cried.
“We should have been more careful because he was so little and deaf,” she said.
“I know,” Calmer said. “I shouldn’t have let him out by himself until he was older.”
Spooner said, “Deaf? It was deaf?”
EIGHTEEN
The baby’s name was Darrow, after the lawyer. Calmer could not bring himself to call a child Clarence. From day one, he wanted to be carried upside down and would fuss when he was handled right side up. And would fuss if Calmer went anywhere without him. And so Calmer took him to the bathroom when he shaved, held him when he vacuumed the rug, carried him down to the road when he took out the garbage, and set him upside
down in his lap when they went to the A&P.
For all signs, Darrow was born happy. He had a wide, pumpkin-shaped head that bounced and leaked saliva as he went about the world upside down, taking in the sights, and everything he saw seemed to strike him as humorous. He didn’t cry much, only if he was hungry or hurt—nowhere near as much, for instance, as Lance Shaker.
Or Spooner’s mother. She was crying pretty much every day now. According to Calmer, she was going through a certain sadness that mothers sometimes went through after they had babies. According to Calmer, it would pass, but then he wasn’t the first to underestimate Lily Whitlowe.
Spooner didn’t understand how having Darrow around could make anybody sad, being the baby was so happy himself, not to mention smart. Those two qualities were plain enough from the day they brought him home. It was there in the way he looked things over. He was barely in the house a month when Spooner caught him staring at him over breakfast one morning from his mother’s opened robe—he was nursing and went after those things like the vacuum cleaner, and he had intelligent, clear eyes that got everything the first time around—and the baby not only saw Spooner, he flushed up a certain amount of bluish milk and smiled at him, or tried to, and then went back to nursing. Which to Spooner’s mind was pretty advanced for only five weeks old.
Another five weeks found Spooner hanging his own head upside down off the davenport to see if it made him smarter. He had a certain curiosity about how that might feel, to be intelligent, but didn’t dwell on it when it didn’t come.
They took pictures at Christmas, the baby in Margaret’s lap. The camera was on a tripod, and Calmer set the timer and hurried to the davenport to pose, sitting between Spooner’s mother and Margaret, an arm around each of their shoulders, pulling them in to him until they wrinkled. Spooner was on the far right, sitting straight up. The Christmas tree was to the left, with a silver star Margaret had made at school wired to the top. Grandma was in her house next door, pouting, having said she couldn’t be ready on such short notice to come over and be in the family picture, and wasn’t really part of the family anyway. She was pretty good at this but not remotely in the class of Spooner’s mother.
There was another picture that day, taken with Spooner holding his brother, but his mother was closing her eyes when the flashbulb went off so it wasn’t a picture they saved, even though this was perhaps the only picture ever taken of Spooner holding his brother. He was not ordinarily allowed to pick him up. They told him it was because Darrow might twist out of his arms if Spooner weren’t holding him the way he liked to be held, which, of course, was upside down. This rule was laid down the day Darrow arrived, and another rule—although no one called it a rule, or even mentioned it out loud—was that Spooner was never left alone with his brother, not for a minute. One of them was always there with them, watching and pretending not to watch.
And it might have been because of that, or it might have been something he heard or misunderstood, but whatever the reason, he began worrying that the baby would die. The worry grew in his imagination and lay there for him every night along the familiar circular route his mind took as he waited in the dark for sleep, and within a few weeks Spooner could reliably be found wide awake at two in the morning, imagining his brother strangled, imagining he was somehow the cause.
The worry came with a certain physical weight, at least at night, and he would feel it pressing onto his chest as soon as he lay still in bed, a feeling that in one way reminded him of being buried in the sand on the beach in Savannah, where the family had gone once on vacation—Margaret and Calmer had buried him, all but his head and toes, and then taken his picture—but in another way was nothing like that at all. It was always there, for one thing, waiting for him whenever he lay down, or sometimes if he was quiet for too long in a chair. He couldn’t eat more than a few bites of breakfast and had to be shaken awake several times at Peabody Laboratory, asleep on his desk in the bend of his own arm.
His teacher came to the house one afternoon after school to talk over the problem with Calmer. This was Miss Bell, who was also a looker but no Miss Tuttle. Miss Bell was getting married in June and had invited the whole class to her wedding. They sent Spooner outside to play.
Spooner sat on the steps, pulling ticks the size of lima beans out of the Shakers’ coon dog’s ears, waiting for Calmer and Miss Bell to finish talking and tell him what they’d decided to tell him, and it was while he sat on the steps waiting that he began to wonder if something was wrong with him that the rest of them all knew about but hadn’t said, like the puppy being deaf. Maybe they knew about the weight on his chest; maybe they knew that eventually it was going to press all the air out of his body.
The more Spooner thought about that, the more sense it made, and thinking about it had a certain beneficial effect in that he stopped worrying about his brother strangling at night and worried instead about himself. He was still afraid to go to sleep, and occasionally was so afraid at three or four o’clock in the morning that he whiffed the faint odor of Jaquith’s mule splitting open in the burn pit.
A week passed, and then another, and nothing changed or got better, and he could not stop being afraid or thinking of being afraid, which were the same thing, and one day after school, without particularly even realizing what he was doing, Spooner walked out into the treeless empty lot that lay between his grandmother’s house and the woods, carrying the pail and shovel he’d gotten when they’d gone to the beach in Savannah, and dug around in an anthill roughly the size of the back porch, stirring the nest into wildness, and then sat down in the middle of it, his arms around his legs, his chin resting on his knees, like some teenager dreaming of her true love.
The burning started inside his thigh, where he’d felt them crawling a few seconds earlier, tickling him, and then came rolling in like bad weather. The ants crawled into his underpants and up his back, and between his arms and his chest, and Spooner stayed where he was, lost at the center of a wild, live fire, in a place without order, or patterns, and a little later, he threw back his head and yelled.
Calmer had just seated himself in the kitchen to administer a bottle of formula. It was the baby’s face that changed first—some shadow of worry passing over it—and then the sound came to Calmer too, faintly, nothing more really than a stir in the still kitchen air, and he looked again at the child, his beautiful, pale-haired son, and understood somehow something had happened.
He handed Darrow to Spooner’s mother on the way out the door. Darrow loved to eat and fussed some at being taken away from the table empty. Lily and her mother were sitting in the front room, drinking iced tea—they were friendlier now that they weren’t under the same roof—and he heard Lily’s mother issue a particular snort that she often issued as he left the house, then heard her say, “He’ll spoil that child rotten.”
Calmer came down the steps sideways, like a dancer.
Spooner went loose with relief, knowing he was saved, and tried to stand to meet him, but his eyes were swollen nearly shut, and the day went light and dark, and he tipped and fell, landing on his face in the same spot where he had been sitting. His nose hit first and broke like an egg, and he lay stunned while the world passed over him, blistering everything it touched, blood and dirt in his teeth, the ants on his lips, his cheeks, his legs. Inside his ears. He felt them differently now, as something almost liquid, a slow, scalding wash that seemed to raise him up as if he were floating.
And then he was lifted up and was astonished at being airborne, at the feel of cool air moving across his face.
Calmer had him in his arms and against his chest, the way he would carry firewood, and he was running. It was strange to be held like this—it was so long since he had been held—and strange to feel the power loose in Calmer, to think this was what had been inside him all the time. He could feel Calmer’s heart pounding, or perhaps hear it, and his fear, and in the next few moments, pounding for home, he knew Calmer as well as he ever would and was as close
to him as he would ever be.
He tried to open his eyes, wanting to see Calmer’s face, but his vision had been cropped by the swelling down to a narrow line, and someplace outside that line, the whole world was rolling and unattached. He thought of the baby and wondered if this was how Vincent Heights looked upside down. And then Calmer was running up the steps, eleven brick steps, Spooner had counted them a thousand times, and then they were through the door and out of the sun, and the air was cool and familiar.
He heard his mother somewhere in the distance, asking what was wrong, the old edge of tragedy in her voice, and that was familiar too.
Calmer took Spooner straight to the bathroom and holding him in one arm, leaned over to fill the tub. He brushed the ants off Spooner’s arms and legs, roughly, as if he were angry, then pulled off Spooner’s clothes, shirt and shorts and underpants, uncovering what looked like a whole new nest of them when his underpants came off, running around all over his pecker like it was recess. He felt them in his ears again, and his hair.
