by David Bergen
Back at home he dreamed about severed limbs and fire and the intestines of Jody Booth, a friend who had died beside him in a field outside Danang. He dreamed about pigs being strung from a rope and gutted alive and he dreamed about a young boy who looked up at him as if to ask, “Why?” He woke from these dreams and sat in his room, smoking and staring into the darkness. Sometimes Sara held him and cradled his head and said, “Charlie, what are we gonna do?” but mostly he wanted to be left alone.
Their baby, Ada, was two years old when Sara became pregnant again. Sara worked as a bartender in the evenings and he worked days as a logger, though being in the trees made him panicky, and more than once a co-worker found him huddled and shaking under a jack pine. They were still living in his parents’ basement and Sara said she was tired of the family shit, of not having money, of Charles not getting serious about work and obsessing about the war. “Let it go, Charlie,” she said more than once. “There’s a whole bunch of mouths to feed here.” She was a small woman whom, when he returned from Vietnam, he did not at first recognize. She was holding a baby in one arm, and though she smelled the same when he pushed his nose against her neck, she seemed harder to approach, as if she were afraid of him. For a while after his return she tried to get him to talk, but either he was unwilling or he waved his hand and said, “I don’t know where to begin.”
He loved her being pregnant. He had missed her fullness with the first baby, so now he was always touching her, holding his ear against her belly and then sliding down so that she could clamp his head between her thighs while he whispered secrets to the twins.
While Charles was overseas, Sara had taken on a lover, a bank manager who adored her but who had no interest in ruining his own marriage. The affair continued when Charles returned, and though Sara felt the occasional shiver of guilt, she rationalized that the pleasure of seeing a man who wore a suit and bought her things and told her what beautiful legs and breasts she had made it all right.
Charles knew nothing, until the day the twins turned five and Ada, who was eight, asked him if Robert was coming to the party. That night Sara came home late and found Charles sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by dirty plates and balloons and streamers. He was drinking rye straight out of a bottle and his voice shook when he said her name. She knew that he knew. She said, “Go ahead, hit me.”
“I’m not going to hit you. You know I can’t do that.”
Charles lifted his head and looked at his wife. Her hair was dirty; one side fell over a breast and covered half her face. He stood and went into the bedroom and shut the door. The children, who slept in the same room with them, were laid out like little packages. Charles slid the children up beside each other and lay down on the outside of the bed. He heard Sara in the kitchen, running the water, then she was in the bathroom, taking a bath. He fell asleep and woke briefly as Sara crept into the room for clean underwear and jeans and a shirt. He opened his eyes. She was naked, standing by the dresser. He saw the backs of her arms, and her ass, the full hard shape of her, and the outline between her legs as she bent toward the drawer. She put on panties and turned and slid into her jeans. Top on, no bra. She looked back at the bed, and in the half-light Charles closed his eyes. She called his name quietly, then she said, “Charlie, I’m sorry.” She waited, but he didn’t answer. He opened his eyes again only after she had left and closed the door. He heard her go, the click of the lock, her footsteps, the revving of the car engine, and then the crunch of the gravel as she backed out onto the street.
CHARLES LEFT SARA AND THE CHILDREN AND MONROE AND THE United States. He moved across the border close to Abbotsford, British Columbia. Rented two acres on Sumas Mountain and bought an old caboose that he towed up the winding road. He renovated the caboose and insulated it. Installed a woodstove and built a stack-log shed for his machine shop and raised goats and chickens and milked one cow. In the evenings, he spread his correspondence books over the kitchen table and studied for his accounting exam. He planned to make himself into something other than a man who lived on a mountain and operated a drill press and made machine parts for people much wealthier than he was.
He thought about his children a lot. He had asked Sara, just before he left, if the twins, Jon and Del, were his, and she had said, “Of course,” and when he had asked, “How do you know?” she had looked at him and said, “I know.” He wrote to his mother, adding money to the envelope, and he asked her to buy the children birthday gifts. He had plans, he said, to move the children up onto the mountain. The one time he mentioned this to Sara, in a letter sent through his mother, her response was swift and angry. He would never get the children, she wrote. When his mother called him six months later to say that Sara had died, been hit riding a motorcycle close to the bar where she worked, and that the children would be coming to live with him, Charles suffered panic that brought him back to the hills surrounding the harbor of Danang. When the children arrived, ferried up the mountain in his mother’s Ford station wagon, he squatted and held them and said their names softly, “Ada. Jon. Del.” Ada, who was almost nine, looked him in the eye and said, “Sara’s dead.”
That evening he walked them across his land and pointed to the tallest tree and said that a fort could be built up there. His mother called him ridiculous and dangerous. Later, he showed Ada how to split wood and they sat by the fire while the rain fell outside and Charles wondered how he would manage. His mother stayed a week and then returned to Monroe, leaving the cabinets stocked with food, the clothes clean, and with the admonishment to teach his children well. The second morning after his mother left, Ada woke him and said they were hungry. “You have to feed us,” she said. “We like porridge or pancakes. Jon actually likes blueberry pancakes.” She said actually as if it were the most important word in the sentence. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that was too big. Her arms were thin. He had noticed the night before that she chewed on the ends of her hair. She knew more about caring for the twins than he did, and so it happened that she was given that responsibility. On an afternoon when he came in from his workshop and found her reading to them on the couch, he saw the light falling behind Ada’s head and he remembered Sara.
One night Charles sat his children down and told them that their mother was a beautiful woman, there was no one more beautiful, but she had never understood that beauty was like a pail of water. You were given so much at the beginning of your life, and if you wasted it, there was no retrieving what had been spilled. “Your mother spilled her beauty all over the goddamn land, and then she spent the rest of her life scrabbling through the sand and mud, trying to reclaim it. And she couldn’t.” He looked at Ada, and then at Jon, and then Del, and he said, “Don’t let that happen to you, my loves.”
Years later, Ada would remember those words of caution. At the age of seventeen, when Andre Toupin, the neighbor boy, tried to touch her breasts, she told him that he could only look. She stood before him naked from the waist up and watched his face soften and his eyes water, and when he reached out with his left hand she pushed it away and said, “No.” He seemed astounded, as if he had been offered a view into a secret and holy place. He was not smart, but he was the only boy other than Jon who was the girls’ age on the mountain, and so he was allowed visual and verbal access to Ada’s body. He taught her vulgarities in French. He labeled her body parts with their French names and she repeated them after him, pointing and repeating until the pronunciation was exact, though the perfection was lost on Andre. She did not want him wasting her beauty.
Andre’s mother became their father’s lover. She was raising two children alone and she operated a salon out of her kitchen. Her own hair was always clean and coiffed and she was constantly changing its color and shape. The first time she cut Charles’s hair he came home and said, “Claire Toupin smells awfully pretty but she sure has an empty head.”
They were sitting at the table eating soup. Charles spread butter on a slice of bread. His hands were big and square and full
of tiny scars from the machining. He touched his hair. “She wanted to know if I wanted some color. Hah. What, so the goats don’t recognize me? To scare my children?”
The children told him that he might look good with bleached hair. Jon said that colored hair was sexy.
“What do you know about sexy?” Charles asked.
Jon grinned.
“Oh, Jesus.” Charles’s hand reached for more bread. “What’s the boy, Andre, like?”
“Same as Madame Toupin,” Ada said. She knocked her skull with a knuckle.
No one spoke for the longest time. Then their father said, “She wants us to come for Saturday supper.” There was another long pause. Then he said, “Don’t know what we’ll talk about.”
THEY TALKED ABOUT CLAIRE. SHE HAD GROWN UP IN VANCOUVER and left the city with her husband, who wanted to live simply, and then, after three months, he went back and she stayed. And they talked about plumbing, septic field versus tank. And the rabbit they were eating, which Andre had snared and skinned. Claire said she had cooked it in red wine and basil. Lots of basil. There was another neighbor at the dinner, Tomas Manik, who lived further up the mountain by himself in a large house that he had designed and built. It was all concrete and steel, and the rebar stuck out of the walls and the metal conduit for the wiring was the prettiest part in the house, except perhaps for the lampshades, which were inverted chicken brooders. Tomas was an artist and sculptor who sold his work in other countries, particularly his home country of Czechoslovakia, but he lived and worked in Canada, where he was little known as an artist. He was rumored to have family money. Tomas sometimes hired Charles to machine metal for his sculptures, and he’d been in the Boatman kitchen before, drinking coffee and sizing things up. When Tomas looked at Del, he stared at her breasts and her belly and then his eyes went up to her face. Even when he knew that she knew what he was doing, he still kept staring.
At the dinner table, Claire was flirting with both Tomas and Charles, and Andre was eyeing Ada while Jon was counting to one hundred in French with Andre’s little sister. They were at ninety-eight and Jon’s mouth was twisting around the quatre-vingt when Tomas turned to Del and asked, “Do you shoot?”
“Shoot?”
He held up his broad arms and closed one eye. Thick brows, wide jaw. “Bang,” he said.
“Hunt?” she asked. “You mean, Do I hunt?”
“Yes, yes.” He smiled and drank from his glass of wine, and then leaned toward Del and whispered, “I love the equipment of hunting. The dressing up, the rattle of bullets in the vest, the smell of the gun, the cold morning, the giant knife at the hip. A gun is like a hard-on.” He paused and lifted his nose as if sniffing for danger. His jaw was wider than Del had first noticed. His neck was thick. She knew that he liked her. He had pronounced equipment wrong, emphasizing the first syllable, but she did not correct him. His hands were rough and his fingernails dirty; there was a residue under his nails. He smelled clean, however. She did not acknowledge the sexual obscenity.
Del said that her father took them hunting every fall. They hunted bear. They took a truck up into the interior and spent the day, sometimes two, huddling out of sight in trees, and when they had had their fill, they returned home. “So, yes,” she said, “I hunt.”
“You don’t go to school?”
“Not anymore.”
“How do you learn?”
Del rolled her eyes. Tapped her head. “It’s all here,” she said, “I just have to find it.”
He laughed. It was a big laugh and it came from somewhere inside his wide chest, and when he stopped he said, “So, you’re smart.”
Del shrugged. She did think that she was smart, certainly smarter than Andre Toupin, who had spent the last ten years in school and had nothing to show for it, except a couple of metal studs in his nose and ears and a head full of sociological gibberish. This was their father’s opinion and the children agreed. Andre was not even smart enough to understand that his own mother would soon be sleeping with their father. The Boatman children foresaw that immediately; they discussed it, and though they did not think the love would last, they accepted it. Perhaps they hoped that Madame Toupin would make their father happy. He was not particularly happy, and there was always the possibility that a good-hearted woman, even an empty-headed one, could pull him out of his despondency.
CHARLES FELT THAT IT WAS HIS RESPONSIBILITY TO EDUCATE HIS children. “You’re not blank slates that need to be written all over,” he’d say. “Imagine yourselves as big containers full of jumbled up letters and you have to reach in and set those letters right so that they make some sense. That’s all.”
“The world is your school,” he said. “Nothing is banal and nothing is boring.” He grinned. “Except for TV.” And so, en masse, they went out into the world. They scavenged garbage dumps, visited a glass-blowing factory, and collected butterflies. One bleak rainy afternoon in January, on Ada’s birthday, they stopped by a crematorium in Abbotsford where Charles told them that artists throughout the centuries, lacking models, had used cadavers.
Jon didn’t understand the word cadaver.
“A dead body, stupid,” Del said.
They went home that day and Charles killed Rosie, the black and orange pullet, dipped her in boiling water and plucked her, and then he sat the children down at the kitchen table and had them eviscerate and then dissect Rosie.
Del sat quietly.
Ada pulled out three yolks.
“Here,” Charles said, holding out a mug. “We’ll use those for rice pudding.”
He studied Del. Said, “Well, we were going to eat her anyway. She’s just furthering our education.”
“But she is Rosie,” Del said.
Charles had to allow that Del had a point. He said that this was the unfortunate consequence of naming animals, especially animals that would eventually provide you with food. “Take Ollie. What are we gonna do when her time comes? Un-name her? Even if you try you can’t forget that the black goat out there with the long teats and the sad eyes is actually Ollie, the same Ollie who likes to eat my oregano plants and tomatoes. Uh-uh. The thing is, even if Ollie didn’t have a name, you’d love her. And then you’d eat her.”
Del announced that she was vegetarian. She’d been thinking about it for a while.
“Nonsense,” Charles said. “You’ll starve.”
“Let her, Dad,” Ada said.
“Of course, of course, she’ll do whatever she wants. Go ahead, try it. And some months from now, when you’re a rack of bones and I’m barbecuing moose and you’re salivating, you’d better have a good speech prepared.” He said that he wanted to celebrate everybody’s birthday on the same day. “Next Friday. I figure we’d invite the Toupins, pull out a keg or two, maybe even get that Communist artist down here. I wonder if he paints cadavers.”
“Dad.” Del was shaking her head. The children were pleased that their father was happy, though from experience they knew it wouldn’t last.
Still, it lasted over the following week and through the party that Charles planned for his children. Ada was eighteen. They would play Alice Cooper. Jon and Del would turn sixteen. Elvis for them.
The day of the party it snowed and by evening there was a slushy soup covering the yard. Charles packed down a rink and gathered old hockey sticks and brooms and by dusk the group was involved in a sloppy game of broomball. Tomas, who had never played before, did more shouting than running. He followed Del and told her that her red cheeks were like two apples. Claire Toupin wore a blue tam and swung her broom dangerously, like a baseball bat. Once, she caught Charles on the hand and then, nurselike, removed his glove and kneaded his knuckles. Charles wondered what she looked like naked.
Later, they sat around the bonfire Charles had built at the edge of the rink. Claire taught them a few French songs that they sang badly. At midnight they went inside and ate chili and cake. When Andre and his sister fell asleep by the stove, Claire said, “I’ll take them home,” and Charles s
aid, in a moment of goodwill, “No, stay for the night. Everybody.” He indicated where people could sleep and searched for extra blankets and pillows. Much later, after sharing a bottle of Johnnie Walker with the other adults, he found himself in his room, holding Claire and thinking that we must be careful what we wish for. During the night he woke, Claire’s head pressed against his chest, and for a moment he was confused and he did not know whose body he was holding. He stifled his panic and smelled Claire’s hair. Recalled how easily he had slid into her. He heard the crack of the wood in the stove and thought, Ada, good girl. Then he slept.
In the main room Ada dozed with her head in Jon’s lap. Later, she got up and covered Andre and his sister with a quilt, and then she sat and listened to the rain fall and watched the fire. She knew that Del was with Tomas, and in the morning, before their father got up, she knocked on the door and called Del’s name until she answered. Ada built a fire and made coffee, and when Del appeared, Ada handed her a cup. They sat by the stove and for a long time they did not speak. Finally, Ada said, “Dad’s with Mrs. Toupin.”
“I figured,” Del said.
“You okay?” Ada asked.
Del looked at her hands and said, “It’s still me, Del Boatman.”
The rain had washed away the rink; the sticks and the brooms lay in the mud and puddles. The fire pit had filled with water; charred remains floated on the surface. When Charles came into the kitchen he went to Ada, who was standing by the sink, looking out over the yard. He hugged her from behind.
“Hey,” Ada said.
CHARLES BOATMAN SOMETIMES TALKED TO HIS CHILDREN ABOUT the war. He told them about the heat and the clicking of a bamboo stand in the wind. He told them that he rarely saw the enemy. Once he told them he ’d killed a man; a man in black on the trail near Marble Mountain, whom he shot in the chest. “It didn’t please me,” he said. “It still doesn’t please me.” Then he became quiet. He said, “Most of the time there was emptiness, a great field of nothing. Nothing but ghosts.”
