Heading Out to Wonderful

by Robert Goolrick

  He made it clear to her one night, quite casually, who she was and who she belonged to and what she was supposed to do and say in her situation. He made it so clear that she wasn’t able to leave the house for a week, except to sneak off to that colored woman’s house and sob over her piece of pie, or whatever those women shared when they spent their afternoons together.

  He’d never hit a woman before. Never had one to hit, and he took a liking to it right away, wondered why it had taken him so long. If you want to produce an effect in this world, make an impact, it’s a pretty easy way to do it, and it didn’t take much skill.

  After all, what was she going to do about it? Leave him? If she left him, she also left her own family homeless. The contract said so. And then where would she go? If she told Claudie, who was Claudie Wiley going to tell? That idiot daughter?

  No. Like a good farmer checks his fences in the spring before letting the cattle and the calves out to pasture, Boaty made sure his property was securely kept in, kept at hand.

  He knew instinctively not to hit her in the face. That first week she spent at home, swollen and blotched, made him realize that, if people knew he was beating her, they’d never look at him in the way he wanted them to. While a lot of men around here hit their wives, those men were not Boaty Glass and those wives were not Sylvan. So his punishments of her became more secret and more humiliating. Her legs. Her back, her breasts.

  He even drove her out there one day, all the way to Arnold’s Valley, to the home place. Her family looked at her like she’d come from Mars, and they only stayed long enough to make it clear to Sylvan, as though it wasn’t clear already, that her family didn’t want her and she didn’t want them.

  Charlie saw the bruises, the welts. Charlie knew everything. He wanted to kill Boaty, told Sylvan he’d do it, but she talked him out of it over and over. He made love to her, wounded, careful not to hurt her any more than she had been already, not to cause her the slightest discomfort. He felt that she was a damaged child in his arms. He touched her bruises with his lips, as though that would heal them, make her skin pure again. He wept as he came inside her, cried for her pain and her sorrow and her humiliation. He understood nothing of what kept her from leaving her husband.

  She understood less. “Leave him,” said Claudie. “You’ve got a good man, a holy man, a man who loves you and will take care of you. Why bother with that old fool?”

  “Can’t” was all the girl would say. “Wouldn’t never do that. There’s reasons.”

  “Tell me. Tell me the truth.”

  “If I ever leave Boaty, he gets the old home place back and throws my family out. They have nowhere to go. It would kill them.”

  “They could come live with you and Charlie. He’d provide.”

  “He couldn’t. You don’t understand. My mama has never been anywhere in this world, never set foot outside that valley. My father hardly, either. That place, that valley—you’re born there and you die there. You leave it, for them, and life is over. Like a fish out of the bowl. They couldn’t breathe the air. Their feet couldn’t find purchase.”

  “You left.”

  “I left a long time before I left. I left when I started listening to the radio at five years old. I never really lived there after that. Just pretended to.”

  “You’re still walking around. You don’t owe them anything. They’re grown. You got to think about you. And the only thing you need is him. Let Glass have whatever he wants.”

  “I don’t need anything,” said Sylvan. “I don’t even need Charlie Beale. I have . . .” but she couldn’t say what she had, because she wasn’t quite sure what it was. Some papers in an envelope underneath a floorboard in the attic of Boaty Glass’s house? What was that? What did they mean, really?

  They meant she owned things, Charlie had told her. The papers under the attic floorboard meant she was free. But she obviously wasn’t. She’d never owned anything. The land she grew up on, the land her father worked every day, she did, too—did they even own it? She never knew. And even if those papers did mean she owned the land, what was she supposed to do with it? Become a farmer?

  She didn’t trust anybody, except Claudie. When she was with Charlie, she understood that she meant the world to him, the whole world, in that hour, during that sunset. But after? There was a life he lived, separate from hers. What did he do when he wasn’t with her? Did she even cross his mind?

  She thought of him all the time, but it was his body she thought of, his physical self, the way he held her and moved above and inside her. She didn’t think about him. She didn’t really know who he was or what he might do to her if she were his.

  Because if Boaty, who had for her a complete lack of feeling, other than his sense of ownership, his right to walk and live on the property he had bought, if he could do this to her, what might a man in love do?

  Charlie was a saint, people said. He brought that boy back to life. People said he was blessed. Even Claudie said it. She’d had made a drawing of the moment the boy had risen from the dead, and it hung on the wall of the room where she sewed Sylvan’s dresses and put balm on her bruises, and Sylvan looked at it and thought, Who is that man? What is he to me?

  He was the man who said, “I’m so sorry, baby,” through his tears, the man who fell to his knees at the sight of a welt across her flesh. He was the only one in the world who had ever said her name as though it meant something, something that was larger than her body, finer than her clothes, something that had meaning and place in the world. SYLVAN. He carved her name in a tree, next to his, and carved a heart around it, and so, when she thought about it, she knew that’s where her heart was.

  He wanted to marry her. He asked her again and again. She was rich, he said. She could be free. They could be together. But every time she was about to say yes, she saw her mother’s face, her father’s face, homeless, displaced, dying on some alien porch somewhere, away from the farm where their mothers and fathers were buried, and she couldn’t do it.

  In the third week of September, on a night so warm that Charlie Beale had left his bed and driven out to the river, where he threw himself on the ground and slept without quilt or cover next to his dog, Sylvan Glass was driven to Sheriff Ricky Straub’s house by her husband, where she woke him up in the middle of the night and spoke to Straub and said that she was Mrs. Harrison Glass—a name he didn’t even recognize at first, as sleepy as he was, he hadn’t heard it in so long—and that she had been raped by Charlie Beale.

  You may wonder why, and I’m telling you that I don’t know.

  Nobody knows what she told Boaty or when she told it, and nobody knows what things a husband like him in that situation might do or say to a wife like Sylvan, a woman who had pieces of paper that showed she was the richest woman in the county, papers that she didn’t understand except insofar as they were a secret, never to be shared, and that, instead of being a ticket to freedom, they had become another lock around her spirit, put there by another man. A better man than her husband, absolutely, but nevertheless a man whose ownership of her consisted of giving her power over everything he had in this world, so that he had nothing, nothing at all except her, and was there to be caught and captured and done to as she wished, at whatever command or whim, it didn’t matter.

  Let’s say that Sylvan told Boaty what she told him not because she volunteered the information, but because he demanded to be told the thing he already knew. Let’s say that he said he’d kill Charlie Beale, the one everybody adored, that he’d kill her, a woman who had no sense of her self or her worth or her place in the world.

  Certainly he would have sat her down at the kitchen table and shown her for the hundredth time the marriage contract, the one that left her mother and father, her whole family, without any place in the world to go or to be. And that it struck her as odd to see her own name in the legal document that made her his, her name in the same sentence as a sum of money and a tractor. Let’s say that she finally understood the burden of th
at, couldn’t bear the thought of the guilt over the misery, even death, her own potential happiness would cause.

  Let’s say he put bullets in his gun and put that gun in her mouth, his fat, strong hand strangling her throat, but then stopped, realizing that in killing her he would lose his best piece of property, and that, in killing Charlie, he would instead be seen as protecting what he already owned, doing his duty, assuming a kind of manhood that had eluded him. Let’s say he was heading out the door with the gun in his hand when she blurted something out to him that stopped him, and that she then sat beside him in the car while he drove her over to Sherriff Straub’s place.

  A rock and a hard place. We hear people say it. But when the rock was the eviction and slow, dwindling death of her whole family, and the hard place the sudden quick death of her lover, maybe Sylvan had to make a choice, and she made it, and it broke her heart and put out the light in her, but her choice would have done that either way.

  Straub later said in court that, as soon as he had put on his badge and pulled himself together, she stood before him and repeated without hesitation, “I’m Mrs. Harrison Glass and Charlie Beale raped me.” And then she stood her ground and never blinked or blushed or stammered when Straub asked her all the questions he asked her, questions that had never been asked in Brownsburg before. She told him where, and when, and how many times. Sheriff Straub had heard what everybody had heard about Charlie and Sylvan, and he doubted that her account, however well acted, was in any way factual. But he saw that Sylvan Glass was very, very afraid of something. And he also knew that Harrison Glass was Harrison Glass and so therefore her story must be held to be in some way true and he also knew that something then would necessarily have to be done about it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHARLIE’S BROTHER APPEARED out of nowhere. Ned Beale was a twenty-one-year-old carpenter, a gawky, on-his-way-to-handsome kid with a head of stiff blond hair, even though his beard was as soft as the hair on the nape of a woman’s neck. He couldn’t have been less like Charlie in height or weight. He nevertheless had his brother’s steeliness, his workman’s hands, and his tendency, as it turned out, to rush headlong into disaster.

  Charlie sent a telegram at Western Union and that’s how people in those days got to know that other people were in trouble or need, and often they came, and Ned did. From where, exactly, like his brother, nobody really knew.

  It’s a terrible thing to see a man whose heart is broken, whose spirit has been irrevocably shattered. We turn away. We look for a happier face. But not Ned. Ned came to Brownsburg, and settled into the little house that was all Charlie had left, and he cooked the meals he didn’t eat, and he picked up the dirty clothes Charlie couldn’t bring himself to put away.

  Every day, in the butcher shop, Charlie Beale was the same, the same man, kind and helpful and expert with the knife, sending all the women home with what he always told them cheerfully was the best meal they would ever have. But you could see what it cost him, going on when nothing, nothing at all, really mattered any more.

  If your heart is broken and there is no visible wound, no sign of sickness, what else is there to do but go on, act the way you’re supposed to, do what has to be done? No use to say it hurts. Everybody knows that already, everybody can see it, and they know as well that they could never in a million years touch or soothe the place where the hurt begins.

  Ned hardly knew his brother. He was a baby when Charlie left home. But he was the only one who could touch that place in Charlie’s heart that Sylvan Glass had sown with salt. Ned kept Charlie presentable, made him shave his face, change his clothes, eat a bite of supper. They tried once to share the table with the Haisletts, but it was awkward and awful, even the boy was fractious, and they didn’t repeat the experiment, just ate sandwiches alone at the table at night, not speaking. What was there to say, what other topic was there, could there possibly be?, and they didn’t talk about that. Charlie wouldn’t, and the boy knew there was no use in trying.

  Instead of talking, Ned went to the lumberyard, got supplies, and began to fix up Charlie’s house. A warped board on the stairs. A rickety rail on the porch. He moved from room to room, and whatever needed putting right, he did it over. And the work was fine and careful and meant to last for a long time. Nothing has been done to the house since that time, and it’s still sound.

  It was his way of saying to his brother there was a future. Ned had nobody, and he needed Charlie, needed a brother, and so he believed and did what he could to see that things turned out all right. Charlie would come home, and he would come back to a house meant to last a long time.

  People noticed him coming and going, and he did odd jobs for them, too, good work. Solid structure to give safety and comfort. When he wasn’t working, and Charlie was at the butcher shop, he drank whiskey at the kitchen table and shivered with fear.

  When he was at home, Charlie never talked about Sylvan at all. From the day Sheriff Straub appeared and read him the charges, putting him in handcuffs at the ball field where he was coaching boys and girls in the art of baseball, while the twins looked on, then leading him away to spend a night in jail until bail could be set and Will had paid it, he never once mentioned her name.

  But in his dreams she devoured him. Night after night she picked at his flesh like a hawk on a deer dead at the side of the road, picking the bones clean. His diary was scrawled still with her name, Sylvan, Sylvan, again and again, but the pictures were no longer of angels descending, but of a vampire who drew his blood, her lovely mouth fanged, dripping crimson, taking him piece by piece until he was a skeletal remembrance of his own body. Gone were the rose and violet he had used to paint her loveliness, the gentle line and the fine hand. Now the drawings were the color of dried blood.

  “You have to get a lawyer.”

  “I didn’t do anything, Ned.”

  “What’s the truth? What really happened?”

  “What happened is private. And that means that nobody will ever hear it from me. No matter what, I owe her that. But the thing she says I did, I didn’t do, and that’s the only fact anybody needs to know.”

  Charlie had loved her with a violence that had electrified his whole body, and now that love had been flicked off, like a light switch, and he didn’t know what to do with all the love he felt in his heart, and there was nothing to do with the hatred he felt for her. So, he just kept his head down and his mouth shut. He had lost the one true belief he had ever had, that belief that had come to him by the river, so long ago—that the only enduring thing was goodness—and now there was nothing left in him or of him.

  Nobody believed her, of course. Behind their doors, where they talked about little else, they said only that it was the biggest lie they’d ever heard, probably cooked up by Boaty, that she wasn’t a bad girl, how could she be, after she’d risked her life pulling that child from the river? She was just a naïve country girl who’d gone funny in the head, running around with that Claudie, her life turned into some movie only she was watching. Maybe she had been unfaithful, but there was a general sense that, if you were married to Boaty Glass, infidelity wasn’t the worst sin in the world.

  Until the Sunday when both the Baptist and the Methodist preachers spoke from the pulpit, and told them exactly what they were facing. “ ‘He has become a prisoner of sin,’ ” said one, quoting Scripture. “He has defiled us all,” said the other.

  “Let the law do whatever it wants, he will burn in hell,” they said it at almost the same time. “He will burn in hell forever.

  “Any man or woman who keeps company with him will go to hell with him. Do not let him into your houses and put him from your heart and from your mind. No man can defile you unless you are ready to be defiled.

  “And even if you do it in secret, take him into your house or into your heart, if you give aid or comfort in even the smallest way, the rack and the wrath will be yours, and you will live among the filthy and the degraded and the vile for eternity.”

>   The two ministers spoke as though they had met and decided what it was they were going to tell their flocks, and they had, and their flocks believed their ministers, even though it broke their hearts to shut their doors and close their hearts to Charlie Beale. Still, they did just that. These were religious people, and they had not forgotten the duties they owed their faith and their pastors.

  The husbands said that Charlie Beale had done no more than was natural, and hellfire had nothing to do with it. But the wives were adamant. Their hearts, always soft for Charlie, turned hard and bitter, and their fear ungovernable. The superstitions and moral rigor of their mountain grandmothers ran through their veins, and now it beat in their hearts and in their minds every moment of the day.

  Some of the men approached Charlie at the filling station, while he was putting gas in the truck he didn’t have anyplace to drive to any more. “We don’t know how to tell you this,“ one of the men began, taking Charlie’s hand in a handshake that was more good-bye than hello.

  “No need,” said Charlie, “I heard. You know who I am. You know how I feel.”

  And they all shook his hand and then stood for an awkward minute until Charlie’s tank was full, looking anywhere but at him, and then it was over. Charlie screwed the cap back on, got in the cab of his truck, and drove slowly off, raising one open hand out the open window in farewell.

  He left them all alone, then, after that. He didn’t offer to rake their leaves, or help fix their roofs, or wash their cars, or teach their children how to drive or throw a curveball. He loved these people. He didn’t want to embarrass them. He didn’t believe in hell, but he didn’t want them to go there.

  “They sure don’t seem to like you much any more,” said Ned one night, when Charlie was trying to explain it.

  “Not the point. You’re not seeing it. They don’t have to love me back. Sometimes it’s just important to remember that you can feel something for other people, even if they don’t feel anything for you.”