The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  I was, to the people of my city, as my city was to the rest of the world—except that, for the most part, my city was oblivious to the rest of the world, not out of ignorance but out of simple disdain. Had the people of St. John’s known how they were regarded by outsiders, they wouldn’t have cared much. But I didn’t have the luxury of disdaining all opinions of me but my own. I was not a city of seventy thousand people, not a community of individuals who could bolster each other’s self-esteem by regarding, or pretending to regard, St. John’s as either the only or the only worthwhile place on earth. Medina had done it, but only by the grace of another’s love for her, the fierce, unqualified, unassailable love of a fellow soul. I wasn’t, yet, loved like that, and I had reason to doubt I ever would be. But what if you are so singular, so alone, as to be your own “audience”? You can’t get more regional than that. Yeats, the Irish poet my mother sometimes declaimed aloud when typing Uncle Paddy’s letters, said that to maintain faith in yourself in the face of corrupt but universal opposition, to believe yourself to be the sole keeper of the truth, was “of all things known … most difficult.” And so it seemed to me.

  THE SLAP HEARD ROUND THE MOUNT

  THIRTEEN. I wondered if the year would be lucky or unlucky for me. My eighth September of school. A boy I’d never seen before but who looked as if he might be one of the Coffin family came out of the gauntlet on the Curve of Bonaventure, left the anonymity of the other students and stood in front of me, blocking my way. He was coming up the hill, but he was taller, so we looked each other in the eye. He wore a maroon Brother Rice blazer. His eyes were as hate filled as if he bore me some lifelong grudge.

  “Your mother is a slut,” he said. “She does it with the Brothers in the Brothers’ Quarters. All she has to do is go across the street to Brother Rice. A hundred Brothers, a hundred bucks. A-Fuck-a-Buck Penelope, that’s what the Brothers call her. She even does it with McHugh.”

  I mashed my still-warm lemon pie into his face, then ran as close to full out as my flipper feet would allow—though, as I discovered near the Block, no one was chasing me. On the hill, the gauntlet had dispersed. I never saw the boy again.

  One day about a week later, just seconds after I left Collins’ store with my mother’s Rothmans in the pockets of my jacket and an ice cream sandwich partially unwrapped in one hand, a man wearing a khaki shirt and black overalls fell into step with me. I looked up at him and smiled back when he smiled. He was young but had a stubble of a beard and black hair that was slicked back from his forehead. A cigarette was tucked between his ear and his head.

  “You’re Percy Joyce,” he said. He was red-faced, as if he was angry or had been drinking. I nodded.

  “I’m Buddy Coffin. Stevie Coffin’s brother. Did you know McHugh gave him fifty straps because of you? Broke two of his fingers. Hit him in the face. He said Stevie hit him first. Stevie came home bleeding all over the place and said he was expelled.”

  “What do you mean, ‘because of me’?” I said.

  Buddy knocked the ice cream sandwich from my hand. “You told on him. You said he called you names and you went bawling to McHugh.”

  “No I didn’t. I don’t even know Stevie Coffin.”

  Suddenly, boys and girls wearing the colours of all the schools on the Mount seemed to appear from out of nowhere, surrounding us, following us, saying nothing. I tried to run, but Buddy grabbed me by the collar of my blazer, turned me around to face him and punched me in the nose. I fell back onto the ground, put my hand to my face. When I took it away, my fingers were smeared with blood. I heard boys shouting his name and mine. Some exhorted him to hit me again, others to leave me alone. A loud cheer went up. I found I was on my feet, holding with both hands to a pack of Rothmans that Buddy was trying to take from me. The package ripped. I had the lower half, shreds of tobacco and broken cigarettes. I was on the ground again, felt a kick in my stomach, I wanted to retch but couldn’t breathe. “Little fucker,” someone said. The boys and girls shouted and screamed. Buddy’s face was very close to mine. “Now you knows what will happen if you tells on anyone again,” he said. Then: “Now go the fuck home. All of ye, go the fuck home.”

  Two girls, one on each side, held me up, helped me walk down Bonaventure. I tried to say “thanks” but my mouth was so full of blood and so sore I couldn’t make a sound. They sat me on the Block and ran away. My mother and Pops came out. The next thing I knew, I was in a chair in the front room, my head tipped back, my mother holding over my nose a towel filled with ice cubes. My head stopped buzzing. I was still holding the half pack of Rothmans, the shredded cigarettes. I patted my jacket pockets. They were empty. My St. Bon’s crest hung by a few threads from the pocket of my blazer. My slacks were torn at the knees and smeared with mud.

  “If he doesn’t say something soon, he’s going to the hospital,” my mother said.

  “No,” I protested. “I don’t want to go to hospital.” I put my hand on my stomach where Buddy had kicked me and felt a bruise that had swollen to the size of an apple. I wasn’t sure what else he’d done. It felt as if it was mainly my stomach and my nose. And my left upper arm, though I had no idea why it hurt so much.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  “His nose is not broken,” I heard Pops say. “I’ve seen plenty of broken noses, Paynelope.”

  “Shut up,” she said, and took the towel of ice away and put her arms around my neck. She began to cry. I breathed out and blood bubbled from my nose.

  I heard voices in the kitchen when I woke up on my bunk. The room was not quite dark. The door was partially open. I raised a hand to my face, which had a soft bandage on it, placed there by the doctor who had come and gone. It didn’t hurt. My stomach didn’t either, but I felt dizzy. Later, I woke again and heard voices in the kitchen. I went down and through the half-open door saw my mother standing over Pops, who was sitting at the kitchen table, somewhere he rarely sat. Medina was watching, leaning back against the sink.

  “So do you know why McHugh beat up the younger Coffin brother?” my mother was demanding.

  “I heard the boy made some filthy remarks about you. Especially filthy ones.”

  “Every boy on Bonaventure makes remarks about me.”

  “Not like these.”

  “Who would have repeated them to you? McHugh?

  “It wasn’t McHugh.”

  “It must have been some grown-up. No student would have—they’d be too embarrassed. And too afraid they’d wind up like Percy. Some grown-up must have told you. Who was it, Pops? Whoever it was probably told McHugh—”

  “It doesn’t matter who it was.”

  “It does to me. If McHugh had never heard about what the boy said, he’d never have strapped him and this would never have happened to Percy. I’ll call around the neighbourhood—”

  “Don’t,” Pops said.

  “Then tell me who told you.”

  “No one told me. I overheard the boy talking to Percy, I’m the one who told McHugh. If you knew what that boy said—”

  “I don’t give a damn about what some boy says about me.” She furiously tapped the side of her head with her forefinger. “You are so stupid, Pops! Stupid.”

  “He’s so banged up you can hardly see his stains.” Medina sounded equally mad. “You should teach Buddy Coffin a lesson, Pops.”

  “In what?” my mother said. “Chemistry?”

  “I really think you should stick up for Percy, Pops,” Medina went on relentlessly. “You owe it to him. You should put the fear of God into Buddy Coffin, and his father too. I can show you where they live.”

  “Revenge is for cowards,” Pops said.

  “Yes,” my mother laughed. “The Coffins would be in big trouble if not for your moral opposition to revenge.”

  “Jim Joyce would have paid the Coffins a visit,” Medina said.

  Pops rose from his chair and, beer bottle in hand, turned to face her. “He might have if he hadn’t run away. But I guess we’ll never know, will
we?”

  “Jim Joyce would have kicked the shit out of you using nothing but a loaf of bread,” Medina said. “If they’d made How Green Was My Valley about Pops, they would have called it How Yellow Was My Belly.”

  “Big Bad Jim,” Pops mimicked her, “driving his big bad bread truck. So brave he ran out on his fiancée while she was pregnant. He never left a mark on anyone but Percy.”

  “One more word, Pops,” my mother fumed, “and you’ll be looking for another place to live.”

  “I’m sorry, Paynelope,” Pops said, “but Big Bad Jim’s sister brings out the worst in me.”

  “Fuck off,” Medina said.

  “Stop it,” my mother yelled. “Pops, everyone, and I mean everyone, knew what would happen to Percy if Buddy Coffin thought he’d laid a finger on his little brother. Half the Coffin boys have criminal records. The half that doesn’t isn’t old enough.”

  “Stevie Coffin told Percy you do it with the Brothers. I wasn’t very far away. I guess the students didn’t see me. Percy shoved a lemon pie in the boy’s face. He was going to chase Percy down the hill, but I intervened. And then I went back down to Brother Rice and told Brother McHugh what happened. That Coffin boy said such awful things, Paynelope.”

  “So you turned him in and Percy got blamed for it.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You will get my cigarettes for me from now on, Pops. You will pay for them and you will give Percy a dime a day.”

  “Yes, yes, all right.”

  Pops went out—not to Collins’ store—to buy my mother’s cigarettes. I was curled up on the sofa under a blanket when he came back, his hands shoved in the pockets of his lab coat. He put the Rothmans down beside her typewriter—put them down with an emphatic thump but never said a word. Next he presented my dime to her like a child bringing back the change as directed, except that he put his index finger on it as he pushed it closer to her. He made his way to the fridge for a beer then to the sunroom, where the empty bottles from the night before still stood around his chair. “No one cleans up in this house anymore,” he said.

  “Clean up after yourself,” my mother answered. “If you bring your empties back, you won’t have to pay as much for my cigarettes.”

  I didn’t go back to school for a while. It turned out that I did have a broken nose, which, though it was wrenched back into place by the doctor, blackened both my eyes. I looked like a red-faced, black mask–wearing bandit, the world’s first red raccoon. The doctor wrapped my torso with tight bandages because my ribs were bruised. They hurt when I coughed or laughed, and at night, in bed, they woke me every time I moved. The doctor said my arm was sprained, probably from a half nelson, but I didn’t need a sling. I had assorted other scrapes and bruises, and my entire school uniform—blazer, slacks, shirt and tie—looked, as my mother put it, as if I had been “dragged behind a horse.”

  She badgered Pops into buying me a new uniform from St. Bon’s. One night, as I lay in my bunk, I heard her say, “I bet McHugh knew what Buddy Coffin would do if his little brother was so severely punished. Buddy Coffin was one of McHugh’s students years ago.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if Percy beat up McHugh? But there’s not much of Jim Joyce in him,” I heard Medina tell my mother. “A hundred in everything. Jim Joyce couldn’t count to a hundred. All his grades together didn’t add up to a hundred. He beat up his teacher just to get expelled.”

  I felt wounded when my mother laughed and whispered things I couldn’t hear. I conjured up an image of Jim Joyce by twisting what my mother and Medina had said about him. A boy who wouldn’t let the prospect of an encounter with McHugh stop him from stealing cigarettes from a boy like me. A boy who could beat up McHugh. A boy who wouldn’t let another boy walk past him enjoying some treat he couldn’t afford. I could conceive of no match for the man such a boy had become. Wherever Jim Joyce was, he walked about like me, unscathed, but for different reasons. So what if he had done nothing better than drive a bread truck? He was probably doing something better now. There must have been something for which he was uniquely qualified by his nature to achieve, something he resisted until one day he left my mother as abruptly as he left Brother Rice.

  My mother called the police about the possibility of pressing charges against Buddy Coffin. “The prosecutor said he wouldn’t advise involving a boy like Percy in something as public as court proceedings.”

  “I don’t want to go to court,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” my mother said. “There isn’t a single person who’s willing to say in court that Buddy Coffin laid a finger on you.” She brooded more on my beating than I did.

  Eight days after my encounter with Buddy Coffin, when the bruises around my eyes had faded to the shade of iodine, I went back to school, accompanied, in spite of my protests that I wanted to go alone, by my mother and Medina, one on either side of me, though I refused to hold their hands. Pops volunteered to join us, but my mother said he would only make the trouble he had caused me even worse.

  As usual, the button just above my mother’s tits, the highest one she ever fastened, looked as though it would pop at any second and her tits would tumble out. Her blouse was tightly tucked inside her skirt, the white cloth pulled flat against her back. Her skirt, navy blue, with small zippers on each side of her waist, made of her bum a perfect peach. She had on the heels she wore while typing and a pair of nylons, down the outer thigh of which ran a thin white seam. On my other side walked Medina, dressed in her lime-green hospital overalls and her flat-soled grey shoes.

  The boys and girls of Bonaventure lined the street, which made me feel like the sole attraction in a miniature parade. There were a few shouted remarks from deep in the pack. “Nice bodyguards, Percy. One nice one, anyway. Nice new face too.” There were wolf whistles and shouts of “Penelope.” I couldn’t help but identify with the boys who merely groaned, as if to themselves, “Jesus, will you look at that piece of ass.”

  Just outside the gates of St. Bon’s, my mother looked around at all the boys and girls until they fell silent. My mother, her fists clenched at her sides, rose slightly on the balls of her feet. “LISTEN TO ME,” she shouted, “every last one of you little snotbags. What Brother McHugh does to you is not Percy’s fault. Percy Joyce is not a tattletale. It wasn’t because of Percy that Brother McHugh beat up Stevie Coffin. Tell your older brothers and sisters, tell your fathers and your mothers. It is not open season on Percy Joyce. Buddy Coffin will get what’s coming to him. The next person who harms a hair on my son’s head will end up with a broken nose.”

  “Who’s going to break my nose? You and her?” one of the older boys from Brother Rice laughed. “Who’s gonna take on Buddy Coffin? You?” He pointed to Medina.

  My mother pointed back at him. “Would you like me to demonstrate? If I have to make an example of someone, it might as well be you.” The boy grinned. My mother walked straight up to him and slapped him in the face so hard he almost fell over backward.

  “Jesus,” one of the boys whispered. “Did you see that?”

  “You can’t just go around hitting people,” one of the older Heart girls declared, but she did not step forward. My mother pointed at the boy she’d struck. “Ask him what I can or cannot do. I live at 44 Bonaventure Avenue. I’m not hiding out like Buddy Coffin.”

  The boy moved off, his hand to his face, into the mass of tunics and blazers that parted for him, no one saying a word.

  “Let’s hope he doesn’t have an older brother with nothing to lose,” Medina said.

  “In you go, Percy, into school,” my mother said as she walked back toward me and Medina, her face as scarlet as if she was the one who had been slapped. “Now!”

  I ran across the field in front of St. Bon’s, unsure if I was being pursued or if any of the Brothers had witnessed what had happened on the street. “Slut,” I heard some girl say. The word was taken up in a half-hearted staccato, ringing out like the word “here” during the taking of attendan
ce in my homeroom. “You’re a slut and Percy’s a bastard,” some boy shouted. I wondered what they meant, really meant, by “slut”—perhaps not, or not just, that she had been knocked up. Perhaps there were rumours spread by some growing minority who suspected the truth, who were able to see the truth, piece it together from what was commonly known and the way my mother and my aunt couldn’t help but look at one another or stand side by side, a little too close, their shoulders sometimes touching, lingering just that tiny bit that didn’t seem quite right. Perhaps they were giving themselves away by furtive eye contact, the briefest exchanges of conspiring smiles. Was anyone on the Mount watching them that closely, as closely as, for other reasons, I did? On the school steps, I looked back. All I could see were students, students who sounded as if they were exhorting two combatants to tear each other limb from limb. But then the first bells rang out more or less at once from all of the Seven Schools, and the boys and girls resolved into streams of like-coloured uniforms and went their separate ways. I couldn’t see my mother or Medina.

  I hurried inside and sat by myself in my homeroom until the other boys poured in, whooping and laughing. “Your mother knocked O’Keefe into last week,” the boy who sat behind me said. “Penny Joyce could take on all the Coffins at once,” another ambiguously said. I stared at my desk, still unable to credit what I had seen my mother do.

  THE TUNNEL AND THE

  SUITE OF GUS McHUGH