Beaming Sonny Home

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Thank you, Jesus,” said Rita. Mattie was having a hard time telling reporters from the well-wishers who had been mobbing the trailer park, folks cheering Sonny onward. They seemed now to be one and the same. No one was asking important questions. Mattie longed for that tight-faced—what Sonny called tight-assed—woman who had kept things on a serious keel. But she was nowhere to be seen. And then a new actor materialized, a debut moment as the dog, Humphrey, made his appearance on the end of a leash held by a policeman. Mattie could feel the crowd’s delirium all the way from Bangor, could see them rising to the occasion. Humphrey is here. Humphrey is here.

  “There’s the dog!” shouted Marlene.

  “A German shepherd,” said Steven. Mattie nodded. Sonny had always loved German shepherds, had owned three or four of them in his lifetime. The German shepherd seemed caught up in the ruckus. He pulled back on his leash, straining to run, but the policeman held him as best he could, calming him down with a friendly pat.

  What happened next seemed to Mattie to occur in slow motion, as if maybe the television had delayed the action so that no one would miss anything, no viewer out in Washington State, where Sonny’s cousin William lived, or down in deserty New Mexico, where his aunt Frieda, Lester’s sister, had hidden for most of her life after marrying that air force man and abandoning Mattagash, or down in Connecticut, where Theresa Something-Polish was still carrying her torch for Sonny. It only took a few seconds, but time kindly slowed itself down so that Mattie and others could watch it all unfold. Seconds.

  “I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the Bangor Police Department for their patience,” Sonny announced.

  “Who does he think this is?” Rita asked. “A politician?” But before Sonny could say anything else, before he could dole out more of what the papers called his “soft voice and folksy mannerisms,” his dog suddenly heard his master’s voice for the first time in days. At least that’s what it looked like, for Humphrey went crazy, jumping into the air, twisting his body, fighting to get free of the leash.

  “He thinks they’re hurting Sonny!” Mattie cried out. Sonny’s other dogs were the same way. He used to show their devotion off to his friends. “Just pretend you’re hitting me,” Sonny would urge Donnie Henderson. And the dogs would bare their teeth at the sight of Donnie’s raised hand, would go crazy to protect their beloved owner. “He thinks them hostages are hurting Sonny!” Mattie cried again. And then Humphrey pulled away from the policeman who was trying frantically to hold him, pulled away and bounded toward Sonny and the two women. The crowd broke into screams. A loud eruption of chaos. Frenzy on the loose. Mattie realized that Sonny must have seen the dog coming, for he pushed his hostages aside so that Humphrey would see he was unharmed. But it was too much action for too few seconds. Too many pictures for brains under stress to process. As Sonny flung the women away so that he could grab Humphrey up into his arms, one of the policemen panicked. Mattie didn’t see which one, for there was too much commotion. She didn’t even hear the gun firing, for the crowd was thunderous.

  Instead, she stood paralyzed before the television’s face, stood peering at the ruination of her son. The bullet hole between his eyes looked like the mark of Cain, except that Sonny wouldn’t hurt nobody, much less kill his brother. He didn’t even have a brother. He just had those awful sisters. Mattie watched as the two women hostages knelt beside Sonny’s body. They reminded her of women she’d seen before, women in the lumber camps who’d lost a husband beneath a fallen pine. Women she’d seen on TV during the Vietnam War, who wept over the mangled bodies of their children. Women who’d lost their brothers, sons, even themselves somewhere on the bumpy road through life. The two women wailed. Mattie saw them throw their throats back, like coyotes. They wailed for her lost son, her dead boy. In other days, other times, they’d have been allowed to dress the dead body, carry it home, mourn for it in private, the way everybody in Mattagash used to do before they built that funeral home in St. Leonard. But not these women. People who knew them, anxious relatives and friends, rushed in and pulled them both away.

  “He didn’t have a gun,” Robbie was saying now. “He didn’t have a single thing in his hands.” With the rest of the family staring in shock at the television screen, Mattie moved away from the set. She could stand it no longer. Strangers were there with her child and she was in Mattagash, wringing her hands as though they were mops. She heard Rita sobbing and wondered why. And then Marlene followed suit, Marlene, the middle daughter who seemed to have no identity, who always had to do everything Rita did, even when they were children. Marlene and Rita, shrieking now like hyenas. Willard had dropped his magazine and was standing in front of the set, staring down at the commotion taking place in Bangor. In the breeze coming from Mattie’s little portable fan, which sat on top of the television, Willard’s green hairs were waving like blades of grass, and, crazily, Mattie thought of her cemetery plot in the Catholic graveyard, down by that clutch of pine trees near the old meadow, a slice of land lying next to Lester’s slice. “Looks like you both got a piece of the American pie,” Sonny had said the day he drove Mattie out there so she could plant a red geranium on Lester’s grave. Sonny had been unable to finish reading the words on his father’s tombstone. Beloved Husband, Beloved Father. His earthly toils are over. His heavenly rest begun. Instead, he walked along the meadow’s edge, kicking his boot at invisible rocks, until Mattie finished. “Because I got nothing to say to him,” he told Mattie later, when she asked why. Now, with Sonny himself lying dead in Bangor, Maine, Mattie pushed Robbie’s arms away, for they were encircling her, taking her breath.

  “It’s okay, honey,” Mattie’s voice said, an impersonal voice, a voice like the one on the telephone earlier. You’re his mother, you say? “I just need to be alone for a bit.” She squeezed Robbie’s hand and then let it go. Gracie was now reaching up for Robbie, stretching out her arms. Her ponytail had gone slack.

  “Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord,” Gracie was saying.

  In the kitchen Mattie leaned against the sink and tried to breathe. What should be done now? What steps should be taken? Where was Henry? Henry would know. He couldn’t sell whores in a lumber camp, but he’d know what to do in a mess like this. A knock suddenly rattled the screen on the back door. Mattie tried to gather her thoughts. Was it one of those ghost knocks? A spirit beating on the window to let you know someone has passed over? She’d known about such things since she was a little girl. Hadn’t the wind beat its fists at her own window the night her mother died? Another knock, this one sounding more human than the last. Mattie stood, straightened her hair as best she could, and then felt silly. Fixing her hair, and Sonny just dead! The girls were still all pasted about the television set. There wouldn’t be any more teasers, that was one thing for certain. Her hand shaking, Mattie opened the back door and saw Elmer Fennelson standing there, hat in his hands. Of course, it would be Elmer. Elmer always came to the back door like some railroad bum, some runaway slave. Poor Elmer. Not wishing to make any more racket in the world, any more fuss, than was necessary. Hanging back.

  “Where’ve you been?” Mattie asked. She could feel tears filling her eyes, turning the world all watery. Elmer seemed to be trembling. Had he already heard of Sonny and come to comfort her? No, he couldn’t have. Sonny had just now died. Even if Elmer had jumped into his old pickup, Skunk on his heels, it would’ve taken him more than five minutes to get to Mattie’s house.

  “I been camping out, over on the hardwood ridge behind my house,” Elmer said quietly. “Me and Skunk, we been camping out without telling a soul.” He waited. Mattie held the door ajar with one hand, not knowing what else to do, what to say. She could hear the racket of her daughters and grandchildren behind her.

  “Camping?” Mattie asked vaguely.

  “Camping and doing a parcel of thinking,” Elmer said. He shifted his long, thin frame from one foot to another, twirled his cap. “But I see you got company.
”

  “Thinking?” Mattie asked.

  “Well, what I come to ask you is this,” Elmer said finally. He cleared his throat. Mattie tried to understand what was happening, what her good friend Elmer was working toward, but all she could think of was Sonny. It occurred to her that she might faint, like that day in church when she married Lester Gifford. Elmer had been there to catch her that day, too.

  “I know we’re both older than two old hound dogs,” Elmer said. He looked off toward where Mattie’s garden usually lay. “But I was wondering if you might consider the idea of you and me getting married.” Mattie couldn’t respond. She tried to remember why these kinds of big things in life usually don’t happen at once: a child’s death going hand in hand with a proposal of marriage. That wasn’t the way it was usually done, was it?

  “Married?” Mattie asked.

  “We could live in the house of your choice,” said Elmer, “although I’ve grown real partial to mine.” Mattie stepped out onto the back porch and let the screen door close behind her.

  “Elmer,” she said. “They shot my boy. They just shot Sonny down on television, like he was some kind of outlaw. They just put a bullet into his head. My boy is dead, Elmer.” Then she went back into her house and closed the door.

  With her daughters still stunned before the television, jolted by death, dazed and astonished, saying nothing for the first time in years, Mattie pulled a chair away from the kitchen table and sank down into it. Funny, but the pattern on the tablecloth, with the tiny rose flowers and wispy green leaves, seemed large suddenly, important in some way. Everything seemed to be a clue to the hereafter, now that one of her own had gone there, was on his way there, since Mattie had no idea how long it took a soul to depart its earthly woes. She wondered if Sonny would be stopping by Mattagash, Maine, on his way out, maybe to see if Mattie’s teeth were really soaking, pick up his Rico Petrocelli baseball and his Best of Ricky Nelson CD. Now, Mattie remembered, remembered wildly, for it seemed that her mind was reeling with this new information, this new intimacy with death, that Ricky Nelson was also dead. Killed in a plane crash. She hoped that he knew how much Sonny admired him and, maybe, would be there to help her boy in some small way, with any kindness. For Sonny needed kindness, that was all. Kindness and attention, and it seemed to Mattie that folks on the other side would be kind to one another, and especially to a newcomer. She should probably wait in Sonny’s room, she was thinking, since that’s where he kept his CDs, and his cherished baseball and those awful playing cards of naked girls. Mattie hoped, in case Sonny did stop by, that he wouldn’t take the cards with him. Then she remembered that ghosts don’t pack their personal belongings before they go. Ghosts don’t get that kind of head start, the way businessmen and stewardesses and such folks do. Sometimes, Mattie had read, this is what keeps ghosts locked to the earth, that sweet burning need for something they loved and gave up too soon. Considering all that, Mattie decided that maybe Sonny Gifford would still be hovering in Bangor, hoping to get one last look at that Sheila woman he had loved and married and lost, maybe hoping to touch her stringy hair one more time, smell the dried sweat of her skin, hear her breath coming at him while she slept. Sonny would be in Bangor, chasing the woman he loved, no doubt about it.

  “Sonny’s dead,” Mattie said to no one. She thought about the strange twist of fate that had caught her up in its knot, caught up everyone she knew and loved. She had put all kinds of families back together, every day for over forty years, ever since Lester had started his nonstop cheating and her picture puzzle addiction had begun, out of sheer loneliness. She had put castles together. She had built massive bridges spanning huge, dangerous caverns. She had created flocks of birds, herds of wild horses, litters of kittens. She had constructed the leathery face of E.T., that ugly little extraterrestrial, as he stared out of a closet full of stuffed animals. And yet she couldn’t do a single thing to pick up the Humpty-Dumpty pieces of her son’s life and fit them all back together.

  She reached a hand into her apron pocket and touched the eyeball piece, still safely tucked into the fold. It gave her a soft kind of comfort, just knowing that it was there. Maybe that’s how Sonny felt the day he had hidden that brown piece of Judas’s money bag from his sisters. Maybe he just needed to keep it a little while longer before it went off to complete the big picture.

  “You need a nap, Mama,” Gracie said. She came and knelt before Mattie. Marlene appeared next, then Rita. Marlene reached out a hand and moved some of Mattie’s hair away from her face. It was a loving gesture, one that rarely fell between Mattie and her girls. And so, for the first time that she could ever remember, Mattie cried in front of her daughters. Not even Lester’s infidelity had prompted her to do such a thing. Instead, she had wept all her tears over Lester in private, thinking that the children needed a safe haven in which to grow up. It stunned the girls, that’s what the crying did. They moved like quiet statues, whispering. Gracie hugged her first, and then Marlene came to offer a slack hug. Mannequins hugging. But Rita couldn’t bring herself. She patted Mattie’s hand, as though it were an interesting thing to find lying there on the table, next to her mother’s arm. How had they become such stiff creatures, afraid of touching each other, afraid of unlocking the rusty doors to their feelings? How could mothers and daughters grow up and discover one day that they’ve nothing left to say to each other, that it’s all been said before?

  “Come on,” said Gracie, gently pulling Mattie up. Marlene found Mattie’s favorite sweater and flung it about her shoulders. A sweater in the afternoon warmth! They led her down the tiny hallway of Lester’s little blueprint of a house.

  “I’ll bring you some warm milk,” said Gracie. Warm milk in the heat of summer! But Mattie said nothing. Let them nurse her. Maybe it would do them good in some small way.

  “Henry wants you to know that he’s looking into the arrangements,” Rita whispered. “He says to tell you not to worry. He’ll see to everything.” Mattie nodded. Dear Henry. A quick flash of relief settled upon her. Henry would handle the funeral. Sonny’s send-off would be in good hands.

  At the door to the bedroom, Mattie turned, looked at the three faces of her children, faces that had already begun to collect their own share of wrinkles, those little nicks of time, those little dents of life. And there was Rita’s hair, turning gray, almost as gray as Mattie’s.

  “How old are you now?” Mattie asked her oldest child. Rita seemed surprised.

  “Me, Mama?” she said. “I’m forty-five.”

  “Forty-five,” said Mattie. She reached up and touched Rita’s hair, put her fingers on the gray.

  “Life ain’t perfect,” Mattie said softly. The girls waited, respectfully. Now Mattie reached out and touched Marlene’s face, touched the little mark beneath her eye where Sonny had hit her with a stick. A scar that needed three stitches. He was seven years old at the time, and it had been an accident. But Marlene never forgave her brother for it, Mattie knew. She had almost protected the scar, kept it as sure proof of how awful Sonny was. They had all collected scars, hadn’t they? She, the girls, Sonny. But still, they had had so many years to heal, so many years. Funny, but Lester Gifford was the only one in the family paid for his scars, with that government check sent monthly to wounded veterans. Lester had been the family businessman, dealing in wounds and injuries. Broken hearts and crippled emotions. My God, but Rita, her firstborn child, was now forty-five years old. What had they done with time? How had they squandered it so?

  “Mama, are you okay?” Gracie asked. She found Mattie’s wrist and checked there for a pulse. This must be something else that they’d taught her in women’s studies, how to find the pulse on a woman who’s just lost a child to death. Well, good for Gracie. Good for whatever she might learn that could help her out in the world.

  “Life’s not perfect,” Mattie said now. “It’s got cracks in it. And some folks, good people like Sonny, they fall in
to them cracks and they never seem to crawl out. And then one day someone comes along and fills up the cracks and them good souls are lost forever. I don’t ask you to love him, but I do ask you to forgive him. For whatever you imagine he’s done.”

  “Try to sleep for a couple hours,” Rita said.

  “We’re taking the phone off the hook,” said Marlene.

  “Do you want some aspirins?” asked Gracie.

  ***

  For the first time since Monday, when Sonny had taken his hostages, Mattie slept well, slept the long afternoon, slept away the time of day that used to bring her the RH factor blues. Her dreams were good dreams, dreams in which immense gardens boasted row after row of superb vegetables, tall towering cornstalks, beds of shiny cucumbers so green as to appear unreal, long yellow beans hanging like the earrings Mattie had seen Robbie wear. And everything Mattie stooped to pull up was a color to behold: red radishes, orange carrots, yellow-white parsnips. A garden of colors. Like Mattie had always imagined the Garden of Eden to be. And then there was Sonny, leaning on a hoe the way Lester had leaned on it, in a lazy way, as if the hoe was not a tool for working, but invented for a good-looking man to just lean on. “Sonny,” Mattie said, and reached out a hand. It would be so good to touch him. It had been six months since she felt his arms around her at the kitchen stove, while she cooked him a boiled New England dinner, his favorite, and made him biscuits. Would any man ever again put his arms around her, now that Sonny was gone? “Sonny?” Mattie tried again, her tongue finally working in her mouth, her eyes straining hard. Sonny leaning on a garden hoe. What next? Now her dream feet were finally working, her dream feet were taking her places. She would get close to Sonny. She would tell him the best news of all. “I’ve got my teeth soaking, son,” that’s what she’d say. But when her dream feet finally took her where she wanted to go, over all those rows of dazzling vegetables, she didn’t like what she found when she got there. It wasn’t Sonny Gifford leaning on a hoe after all. It was his father, Lester, looking every inch like his son. It was Lester Gifford, looking like a million bucks in his fresh army uniform, asking Mattie out for the very first time. “Run!” Mattie told her dream feet. “Tell him no!” she told her dream tongue. But her feet just kept on walking, and out of her mouth came the very first words she had ever said to Lester Gifford. “Ain’t you got nothing better to do than lean on a hoe?” That’s what she had said to him, on an August day in 1944, a year before she would marry him. And she had said those words simply because she didn’t know, at that point in her trusting life, that Lester Gifford really didn’t have anything better to do than lean on a hoe.