The Boys of My Youth

by Jo Ann Beard

  One time when Linda was three she shoved a tiny toy train up her nose to see how far it would go. It went quite a ways and she had to have it removed at the hospital. My mother has never gotten over this, and in our house, Life Savers and dry cleaning bags are treated like loaded handguns. So when Brad makes a choking noise out in the kitchen all hell breaks loose here in the dining room. My mother leaps up, throwing the shirt one way and the fringe the other, Linda drops her pencil, Yimmer barks.

  Brad appears in the doorway, enormous-eyed. He points back to the kitchen with his spoon and then pushes past my mother into the living room where he turns and points again, then buries his shocked face in a sofa pillow. There’s something in the kitchen! The rest of us crowd through the doorway to see.

  Nothing.

  My mother screams. I look around wildly and then I see it. Through the glass of the back door, framed by my grandmother’s lace curtains, a face wearing a creature-feature mask. Black hair, forehead, two stunned eyes, and then the rest is blood. It looks like my dad. He fumbles for the doorknob but can’t see through the mask, his hand slips and he cries out, something slides from his mouth and lands on his shirtfront; a wad of blood. My mother springs forward, opens the door, and we get the full picture. His clothes are frozen to his body and over it all, shirt, sport coat, trousers, is dark blood, coming from his mouth. Some of it is frozen and some of it is fresh. He can’t move at all and when Linda and my mother try to pull him inside he groans and resists.

  We get him up over the threshold, my mother on one side, Linda and me on the other, and then try to sit him in a chair in the middle of the kitchen. His legs won’t bend. He groans again and then, with a noise like cracking ice, sits. My mother opens the oven door and turns it up to five hundred. She wants to look inside his mouth but he won’t let her, so she gets a clean dish towel, wets it under the faucet, and starts wiping the blood from his face while Linda and I try to remove his shoes. The laces are stiff but the shoes come off okay. When we peel the socks away, his feet look like long yellow boats. My mother gasps when she sees them, then hands each of us a towel and tells us to rub. When we do, he makes the groaning noise again so we stop. She resituates him so he’s closer to the oven, and then fills a dishpan with tepid water. When she sets his feet in it he makes a moaning sound.

  Still working on his face, she tells me to go to the phone. I do. She tells me the number to dial and what to say. My aunt answers.

  “It’s Jo,” I say.

  “Well, hi Jo,” she answers cheerfully.

  “My mom needs you right now,” I recite.

  There is no pause. She’s on her way. Twenty minutes.

  The oven is blasting heat out into the kitchen. As my father thaws, the story comes out. It’s hard to understand what he’s saying, his words are slurred and when he talks blood dribbles out, over his chin and onto his soaked shirt. He wrecked the car.

  Oh! my mother cries. The beautiful new Impala! Gold with gold interior!

  He was drinking with Charlie at Silver’s.

  Silver’s! Down in the west end? Silver’s!

  Left and started driving back, was coming around the viaduct, something happened.

  The viaduct! At the slough? Clear down there? Oh my God!

  She’s walking in circles, frantic, stopping to clear the blood from his mouth. The slough! Linda is gone, somehow, it’s only me in here with them.

  Lost control and the car went down over the embankment into the water.

  Into the water? Oh my dear goddamned God!

  When he opened his eyes he was underwater and the window wouldn’t roll down.

  My mother is moaning and twisting the bloody dish towel.

  He got it down finally and swam to shore, started walking, and came home.

  You walked? From the viaduct? Five miles?

  The kitchen is baking hot, but it’s November outside. When I traipsed the four blocks to school this morning I had on my winter coat, a scarf, a hat, and mittens. And I was still cold. Suddenly my mother stops.

  “Where’s Charlie?” she asks him. Charlie is his drinking buddy.

  He doesn’t know.

  Where is Charlie? Was he in the car?

  He can’t remember. My mother’s face is stark white. Linda appears in the doorway. With her eyes on my father, she reaches out for me and we hold onto each other while my mother fumbles the phone book out of the drawer and begins clawing through it. She finds the number and dials. Someone answers.

  “You S.O.B.,” she says into the receiver and hangs up.

  I guess he was home. The back door opens and my aunt comes in. When she sees my father she starts weeping with her hand over her mouth. Like everyone else, she’s fond of my dad, she just wishes he would behave better. My mother tells her the story in terse words while my father dozes off, his head falling forward on his chest. He jerks awake and groans. Linda takes his feet out of the water and dries them.

  “We love you, Dad,” she whispers. He groans again as she tries to put dry socks on his poor feet. She stops and looks at me.

  “We love you, Dad,” I whisper. I help get the socks on and then we step back and wait until my aunt sends us into the living room. They’re going to take him to the hospital.

  From the sofa, arms around each other, we listen to the sounds from the kitchen, grunts and cries as they get him to his feet. My aunt appears in the doorway with her purse over her arm.

  “Where’s Brad?” she asks us.

  Linda is mute. “Upstairs,” I say.

  “Jody, you go check on him,” she tells me. “And I’ll be back here as soon as we get your dad taken care of.” She disappears again and there’s a series of muffled cries as they ease him through the door and down the back steps. Linda and I each take our arms back and sit quietly, side by side on the sofa. Finally I have to speak.

  “What was in his mouth?” I ask her.

  “Everything but teeth,” she replies.

  His teeth are gone! His beautiful teeth that he smiles with.

  The kitchen has to be cleaned up. There are bloody towels all over the floor and the oven is still blasting out heat. Linda will do that while I go upstairs to find Brad. She stands up wearily and doesn’t move until I give her a push from behind. The steps go on and on forever until I’m finally at the top. The only light on upstairs is in the bathroom. Brad is in there, throwing up. I listen for a moment, until it’s silent, and then push the door open. He’s sitting on the floor next to the toilet, a dripping washcloth in his hand. I take it from him and wring it out. All around the toilet are chewed cornflakes and old Spaghettios.

  “I can’t find Charcoal!” he tells me. “He saw Dad and runned away!” I give the washcloth back and tell him to stay there, I’ll go look for Charcoal.

  I close the door behind me and stand for a moment in the dark upstairs hallway. I can hear Linda in the kitchen, moving things around, running water in the sink. In the morning, down at the slough, we’ll watch them lift our gold Impala, dripping, from the icy water. By then we’ll know that four of his ribs were broken on impact, and my mother will show us the terrible gouges on the steering wheel where his front teeth hit and were driven up into his head, behind his nose, perilously close to his brain. She’ll tell us how the surgeon had to go in with a scalpel and remove them, one by one, while he thrashed, too drunk to be put under. His anesthesiologists were named Jack and Bud, she’ll say grimly, drawing on her cigarette. Jack Daniel’s and Budweiser.

  I wait in the dark hall, counting to twenty, and then to fifty. I push the door open and go back in the bathroom.

  “I found good old Charcoal,” I say.

  Brad looks up at me from his spot on the floor. He’s been rubbing the washcloth across his brow and his hair is standing up in front. He stares at the air next to my shoulder for a moment, searching. Suddenly relief floods across his face.

  “Hi,” he says.

  Waiting

  He places himself in the gentle curve of th
e kidney-shaped desk. It is reddish mahogany, gleaming with Pledge and elbow grease. My sister can’t take her eyes off the desk, because she’s been looking for one like that at yard sales and estate sales and Saturday morning auctions for months. I, on the other hand, am captivated by the little guy sitting at the desk. He’s in a somber profession, a low-voiced talker, a sympathizer, a crooning gentleman, here to make it all less of a hassle. He shuffles papers, twists the top of his thin gold pen and the ballpoint moves gently into place. He looks like he’s been carefully dusted with talc — his head is bald and pink but it is not gleaming or garish in any way. Instead it has a matte surface, and the white hair around the bottom half of his head is straight and coarse. His shirt is white and the tips of the collar are crisp as notebook paper. Beneath his chin and above the snowy embankment of his shirtfront rides a bowtie, black with a pattern of small golden shields. It manages to be both pert and dignified, cheerful if you feel like being cheerful, or old-fashioned and somber if you’re bummed.

  Linda suddenly gets the hiccups and doesn’t try to hide it. Each time she hiccups he touches his ear or clicks his gold pen. His earlobes are amazingly long and thick for such a little old man. Linda hiccups loudly and begins weeping. I give her the usual sympathetic glance and pat her hand, he gently leans forward and indicates with a gesture the box of tissues on the corner of the desk. She takes one and hiccups into her hand, subdued. She is over it already, I can tell. I try to catch her eye to point out the combed tufts emerging from his ears. He smiles a dim and sincere smile, finds the floor with his tiny feet, rises. He comes out from around the kidney-shaped desk and prepares his face for the task at hand. We move in behind him and trail down the carpeted hallway of the mansion, Linda noticing the wainscoting and chandeliers, me watching the back of his neck. He opens the door with a miniature flourish and moves back demurely. We step past him and into the room full of coffins.

  The best ones are wood, rubbed to the sheen of the mahogany desk, lined with soft padding, intricate tucks and pleats and folds. All that effort. Linda runs her hand along the surface of one, pokes the satin pillow delicately with one finger. It has the kind of brass handles you find on an old-fashioned sideboard. “This one looks like a yacht,” she remarks.

  I glance at Mr. Larson but he’s looking studiously at the tips of his shoes, rocking himself gently forward and backward, waiting. Somewhere deep within the house something flushes, long tubes feed fluids into and out of stiffening lumps.

  “I can’t do this,” I tell them. He reaches behind the door for a folding chair and as he pulls it out the seat falls smoothly into place with a satisfying click. I sit down while Mr. Larson pads down the hall to get me a glass of water. He is accommodating and resourceful but clearly unimpressed, like a plumber in the presence of a medium clog. While he’s gone Linda takes my hair in her hands and winds it softly, lets it drop. She points to the hull of a metal-sided casket.

  “I like that one,” she says. She wanders over and peers inside, touches the lid. She turns after a moment. “Can you keep doing this or do you need to leave?”

  I shrug. Better now than later, which could end up being Christmas morning. The casket she’s touching looks like the Titanic, gunmetal gray, waiting to be launched.

  “What a waste, don’t you think? All those gorgeous trees being chopped down just to get planted all over again,” she said. “Here comes your guy.”

  He crouches to hand me the cup of water, hands on knees, wrinkled-up brow. It tastes like water from a bathroom sink.

  “We think we might get her a metal one,” I tell him, rising. “We like the wooden ones but they’re too nice to put in the ground.” I look to Linda and she nods in support.

  “Plus,” she says, “you know.” She thinks for a second while we wait and then it comes back to her. “They go in a vault,” she finishes. “So who cares.” She looks at him probingly. Her eyes have soft blue pouches underneath and she’s getting a dangerous air about her.

  “We have to get going anyway,” I tell him. “We have to get back before she wonders where we are.”

  In her hospital bed, bent like a branch against the pain, she watches the clock, anticipates the arrival of a daughter. Where have you been? Her voice vanished three days ago, leaving eyes and hands for communicating. I’ve been here all alone, no one would stay in the room with me, you’re the only one and you left. This is my shift alone with her. The afternoon pulls itself along.

  On the rolling lunch tray is a plate of Christmas cookies decorated with glaring Santas and crooked reindeer shapes. One kind has maroon jelly poured into a reservoir in the center and I take a small bite. I have a thing about red jelly but creaky old Velma Edwards made it so I’m willing to give it a shot. Ready, aim, it lands with a crumbling thud in the wastebasket. My mother rolls her gray, diminishing eyes and gives an invisible smirk. Linda has eaten almost all the good ones, left the jelly and green sugar for me. Where did you girls go? She has a clear tube poked up her nose nowadays, connected to an oxygen tank like an astronaut prepared to leave the ship. There is absolute silence, the clank and squeak of the hospital giving way for a moment as an angel passes over, wings beating. The instant passes and the hospital resumes itself, a cart bumps, a nurse calls out loudly, rudely, somewhere down the hall. In the room Coke seethes as I pour it into a glass. Where did you girls go? Why did both of you need to go at once, leaving me here by myself? I get a picture of her long ago, shopping, eating lunch in the mezzanine at McCabe’s, picking out school clothes. Tall and thin in a beautiful suit; lemon meringue pie and coffee. The slide changes and the tufted ears of tiny Mr. Larson click into view. Why did both of you have to go at once? I rise to the occasion. Now-now, I point out, it’s awful close to Christmas to be asking those kinds of questions.

  Her eyes move past me, over my head, and I feel suddenly the tepid breath of Barnelle. He’s a swashbuckler today, actually wearing one of those head things, like a doctor in the movies. It is a flat metallic disk connected to a band and he lifts it off and shoves it into the pocket of his suitcoat. The hair over the top of his head is a delicate auburn doily. He pats it down, using the palm of his hand, pushing the tattered strands back in place, willing them to stay there. He’s wearing a plastic Santa Claus face on his lapel. He smiles at her, he has always acted as though he loves her and regrets this. He acknowledges me with a tilt of the head, some kind of invisible language that works, lifts her wrist and counts the pulse, corpuscles stepping through from her hand to her arm, one by one, like soldiers heading back to camp. He finishes and says Hello, girls in a sweet, cheerful voice and then pulls the string on his Santa Claus. The nose lights up and beams across the bedcovers. Barnelle is sending us a signal, Santa’s nose twinkling like Mars. It’s four o’clock and I’m ready to do something else for a while. My legs want to walk, my eyes keep finding the window.

  “I saw Barn-door,” Linda announces. She is back, ready for her shift, standing in the doorway with snow melting on her coat collar. “He was climbing into his gold-plated Cadillac, hightailing it home.” Linda hates Barnelle with a rare enthusiasm, able to tick off his crimes on the fingers of both hands. She passes the plate where the rejected Christmas cookies used to be. “God, you’ll eat anything,” she remarks cheerfully. She’s leaving tracks all over the clean floor, in meandering circles. She’s been wrapping Christmas presents for her kids, I know, and her eyes look better. She crinkles them at me sympathetically. “Was Barn-door open?” she asks. This is rhetorical. Over on the bed the gray eyes are closed. Linda wants to know how it’s going, how she’s doing, but the eyes might open again unexpectedly. We tiptoe out.

  “I stopped at home and went through her closet,” Linda tells me. Nowadays she and I speak of the house where we grew up as home, we forget for long hours the places we live now, which have cupboards with our spices and canned peas, dressers with our clothes. When an aunt or our brother relieves us at the hospital we drive over there for some empty time, some quiet
, and sit at her kitchen table with the carvings of childhood forks in its surface, stand drinking coffee right on the worn spot where she stood to stuff chickens, weave the crusts on pies. Home, we say to each other, drawing those dented walls around us like a wool blanket, two little girls in matching nightgowns, pinching and elbowing, acting hateful, getting yelled at. She was browsing, trying to find something to bury her in.

  I stretch and yawn, shake it off, tell her about Barnelle’s Santa.

  “Gawd,” she drawls. “Did he let on when or anything?” She squints when she asks this, afraid to know, afraid not to. Barnelle has predicted two days, which will land us right smack on Christmas. We have told each other ironically, Why not? and marvel at how the universe is dribbling us like a basketball and then shooting us into the air.

  “He couldn’t,” I tell her, “because she was alert. And I couldn’t follow him out because she already got on me about leaving with you this morning. She wanted to know where we went.” We both shiver at that and then in turn begin crying, the ugly kind, where you turn your clenched face to the wall until it passes. A nurse comes forward, silent, and touches our shoulders. This nurse told me yesterday she hadn’t finished her shopping, still had crowds and the hectic traffic at the mall to contend with. Last week, when she could sit upright and talk a little, my mother had given me her wedding ring for Christmas.

  There is slush and cold air all up and down the hall. When I go back in to get my coat her eyes are open, talking even though no one can hear. You girls left me again. Linda is behind me, getting her needlepoint out, untangling skeins of bright yarn. I pull on my gloves slowly, pushing each finger down meticulously, getting my keys ready for the cold, avoiding her eyes. Behind me Linda says, Hey, remembering something. She digs around in her coat pocket.

  “Look, Ma,” she says softly, moving toward the bed. I step backward into the doorway, halfway gone. Linda holds a sprig of plastic mistletoe in the air above my mother’s head. She whispers something I can’t hear and bends down. I’m gone.