The Beans of Egypt, Maine

by Carolyn Chute

  “Turn off the light!” Earlene screams.

  “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Earlene!”

  She looks over at the boys, who are looking over at her. Their eyes twinkle.

  She clasps her hands as if in prayer. “Beal! Please!”

  Beal stands and heavily crosses the floor to the light, yanks the chain.

  She adds her clothes to the pallet. The elastic of her underwear snaps, and one of the young boys snickers.

  Somehow, when Beal straddles her, they miss the pallet, and Earlene’s shoulders drive into the floor and the head of a nail. His body weighs, it seems, like a stack of bodies. She rolls her eyes and thinks how Gram used to say, “You know, Earlene, God only gives you one chance. There’s no sneakin’ in the back door!”

  Beal sniffs at her throat, blows into her yellow hair.

  “You can live through it,” Uncle Loren had insisted. “The black bear is only curious. You just gotta remember: Never scream. This one had Chuck Winters grippin’ him in a muck hole up Piscataquis ten, twelve year back . . . pokin’ him, lappin’ him, rubbin’ its head in his shirt . . . sniffin’, snortin’, grippin’. Ol’ Chuck, he just kept what you call a low profile . . . just laid there loose in the muck hole. Well, after about fifteen minutes or so of checkin’ out all the interestin’ parts of ol’ Chuck, the bear plants one powerful final snort in his ear, then ambles off across the fiddleheads.”

  Beal arranges Earlene’s hips with four or five powerful tugs, his vast and hairy front raking back and forth.

  “But then”—Loren had sighed—“they been known to rip you up. They’re a lot like a dog . . . They go for the head . . . but . . . well, now Dick Cross . . . he’s that old Maine guide Bertie used ta chum with . . . he says if you got a beer gut you’re more apt ta live through mutilation . . . but the pain is enough ta make ya lose your mind . . . He said he’d rather be taw-tured with a white-hot iron . . . Yes-suh . . . ol’ Dick knows.”

  “Ohmagawd,” says Earlene softly.

  Beal drags his tongue up her cheek.

  Her arms and legs struggle, but he pushes her harder into the boards, rocks his monstrous weight.

  She screams in his face.

  The rocking of his body suddenly stops. She feels the hot arc of Bean seed. She pictures millions of possible big Bean babies, fox-eyed, yellow-toothed, meat-gobbling Beans.

  “For God sakes, Earlene,” Beal says.

  He flips onto his back and makes a soft groan.

  Earlene wildly jumps to her feet, gasping for breath. She feels her abdomen. It’s intact.

  Beal thrashes the blankets around, buries himself in them, head and all.

  Earlene stands in the dark, pushing her damp hair back, anchoring loose strands behind her ears.

  Beal is silent.

  The young boys turn slowly in their bedding.

  “I suppose that woman will be up here . . . to see what’s the matter,” Earlene says.

  Beal is silent.

  Earlene blinks crazily in the absolute dark.

  Beal is silent.

  “Well,” says Earlene. “Maybe she won’t.”

  Beal is silent, hardly breathing under the blankets.

  Earlene puts her hands on her hips. “I weren’t born yesterday, you know, Mr. Big Man.”

  Beal sighs.

  She tries to make out his form in the dark, but she can’t see anything. “Most the kids in this house’re YOURS. Anybody can tell. ANYBODY! They all look just like you. It’s no secret, you know. Maybe you think so, Mr. Secret Secret Secret. But you are wrong wrong wrong!”

  He slides the covers from his head.

  She says, “Ain’t I right, Beal? Ain’t they yours?”

  He sits up. “You was always a smartass little twerp, Earlene. I’ll give ya five seconds ta lay down and SHUT UP.”

  9

  YES, DADDY IS A GENIUS, Earlene thinks to herself. He can do anything with his hands. She watches through the living room doorway as he hammers and hacks out one inside wall of Gram’s two-hundred-year-old farmhouse. She stands with a cup of almost cold coffee, watching the small self-conscious hands of her father measure and cut, and she says, “Daddy, thank you. It’s what I’ve always wanted.”

  He looks up quick and his pale eyes pass over her. It is spring. She’s pregnant.

  He and she sweep up the floor, a frazzle of plaster and wallpaper. Lee stops sweeping now and then to flutter his fingers through his thinning hair.

  Now he is grunting, lifting an enormous glass tank into the hole in the wall. He frames it with strapping. It becomes a wall of glass. Little doors open up in the wall on either side of the glass. Through these, Lee fills the glass tank with warm water.

  “Come on, Earlene. Let’s go get ’em!”

  “Oh, Daddy . . . it’s my legs. They got that ache.”

  “Horseradish!” he cries, and lifts her off her feet.

  “Daddy, you’ll throw your back out again!”

  Gram is in the kitchen in her wheelchair, eating Chips Ahoy! with tea. Lee winks at her as he passes through, Earlene leaning into his shoulder.

  Hours pass.

  They come in carrying big and little brown bags. Gram has wheeled into the living room and is feeling the wall of warm water with her one good hand. She smiles. They show her the little pumps. Lamps. Filters and heaters. Chunks of coral. A miniature sunken ship. Lee rolls up his khaki sleeves and fastens the equipment in the tank. He checks the temperature of the water. Earlene, cross-legged in a straight-back chair, rubs her legs and coos at her father’s ingenuity.

  He stands before them, his hands dripping. He bows, and Earlene applauds and whistles. Gram rings her bell.

  After supper, the water is the right temperature. Here comes the legion of white cartons, like Chinese chow mein to go. Lee untapes the flaps and looks in. “There they are!” he cries out. Jiggles his leg. “Yep! There they are!”

  Earlene giggles.

  Their foreheads come together over the white cartons.

  At last, the wall of water becomes a black sky of cascading stars . . . wee fish . . . all of a kind . . . all of one size, navigating together down, up, across. Their eyes are pinpoints of red like the portholes of hundreds of deep-sea craft, envoys for distinguished missions.

  After the last fish is added in, Lee Pomerleau pulls a straight-back chair between his daughter and mother, all chairs facing the wall of water. Lee turns off all the lights except those that illuminate the fish and the chalky coral landscape. He scurries through the dark hall in his stocking feet and returns with three cups of cocoa.

  The three faces are lighted by the wall of water like faces in a movie house.

  Earlene chirps, “Oh, Daddy! Your hand comin’ down to fix the floor of the ocean was just like the hand of GOD!”

  He sits on the straight-back chair, and she leans into him and kisses his clean-shaven jaw.

  The Grave

  GRAM IS IN her wheelchair with her Bible on her knee, turning the tissuey pages one at a time with her good hand. She watches Bonny Loo climb up on a kitchen chair to tape a paper witch on the window. “Ma says it’s two weeks till Halloween!” Bonny Loo says. She jumps to the floor on both feet and the glasses in the cupboards tinkle.

  Through the kitchen windows, the afternoon dribbles in across Gram’s cheek in a haunting violet.

  Bonny Loo looks at Gram. “Halloween’s the best, ain’t it, Gram? ’Cept for Christmas.” Bonny Loo’s fox-color eyes widen behind her bifocals. “Ain’t it, Gram?”

  The Bible lies open, unwavering, on the butterknife-sharp knee. Gram’s the first dead person Bonny Loo has ever seen, and yet Bonny Loo knows dead when she sees it. No, Gram would not approve of Halloween. And neither would God, they say. Bonny Loo feels these great twin powers slowly sliding out of these rooms, leaving them empty.

  2

  SHE IS BIG, big in the knees, big across the back, and her face is big. Her dark hair stands out from the head to show her almost constant agitati
on, like someone who keeps getting poked with a stick. She tiptoes up the narrow stairs and says, “You ain’t been up here before, have you?”

  He says no.

  Behind her thick glasses her eyes seem to fade in and out like two little TV sets with poor reception. She walks with her hands on her hips. Her hard shoes thunk on the stairs. She grips his wrist. “I’m a scientist, you know. Don’t tell nobody what you see.”

  He hitchhiked here. His nose is red from the cold. He wears a reversible hunting vest turned with the camo’ spots out, a fluorescent hat with the earflaps tied up. He smells of the cold. It’s been a cold spring.

  He is the biggest man Bonny Loo has ever seen. His nose is broad as a teacup . . . like the noses of other Beans. Bonny Loo leads him by the wrist past two closed doors. When she gets to her room, she picks up a flashlight from behind the door. “It’s gotta be dark. Too much light could spoil ’em, you know.” She never calls him Daddy. She calls him Beal Bean.

  She clicks on the flashlight, leads him over the tops of Magic Markers, dirty clothes . . . around puzzles and plastic cars . . . parts to the Visible Man and the Visible Woman mixed . . . Her hard shoes crunch over Lincoln Logs, poker chips. He steps over a pink back scratcher shaped like a hand on a long thin arm. He can smell the warm overstuffedness of this busy person’s world, that which is done and that which is left undone. She points with the flashlight to a closet in the far corner. She whispers, “You gotta kneel!”

  He kneels, his monstrous beard almost touching the floor. She stands at his shoulder and her thick body bends, her large hand closes around a glass jar, one of ten or more glass jars on the pun’kin-pine closet floor. There’s nothing else in this closet but these jars.

  She raises the jar just a few inches from his face. “See!” she whispers.

  “What is it?”

  “This one is a coconut donut.”

  “What ha-haaah-aaappened to it?” he asks.

  “It MOLDED!” she chirps. “I’m good with molds.”

  “Ayuh,” he says. “You got a way with ’em.”

  “Tall, ain’t it?” she whispers. “And furry.”

  He smiles. “It’s a beauty.”

  She stoops, puts her mouth to his ear. “I spend time here,” she whispers. “Hours.”

  “What for?” he asks.

  “I watch ’em grow.”

  He picks up another jar. She puts the light on it for him.

  “Raisin bread,” she says.

  “You’re really smaaaa-smart,” he says.

  She smiles. Her large square teeth have spaces. “I can SEE ’em grow, you know. I put this flashlight right on ’em and put my eye right here”—she holds the jar to her glasses—“and when it happens, I SEE it.”

  “Jesus Christ!” he gasps.

  “It’s a miracle,” she whispers.

  She shows him a jar with a lemon-filled donut. “I started this one last night.” She shows him an English muffin, a brownie, a tangerine. “Fruit don’t grow,” she says grumpily. “Donuts and sandwiches are best.”

  “Where’s your muh-uh-uther?” he asks.

  She frowns. Sets down her jars. “Prack-tickly DEAD.”

  “What do you mean?” He stands up.

  “I don’t know. She’s just come ta bones lately.” Bonny Loo shrugs.

  “Where is she?” he asks.

  “Restin’,” she says. She cuts off the flashlight. “Do you think I’m goin’ ta be a scientist?”

  “Shit, yes!” He looks around the room.

  She looks at his black nails. “Do you fix cars?” she asks.

  “Sometimes,” he says. “But I ain’t got very good tools.”

  “Oh . . . well . . . what do you do? . . . you know . . . for a job?” She narrows her eyes.

  “Nuthin’. I’m outta work,” he says.

  “My gramp’s a carpenter,” she says.

  “I know it,” he says. He moves into the hall.

  “Gramp says if he ever finds out who my father is, he’ll KILL.”

  Beal puts his hand on a closed door. “She in here?”

  “No . . . that one,” she says, pointing to the opposite door. “You don’t wanna go in there. It stinks.” She wrinkles her nose. “Gramp NEVER goes in there. I’m the one that’s gotta go in with stuff.”

  His face whitens. He puts his ear to the door. “I haven’t seen her in a long time. She doesn’t like me,” he says.

  Bonny Loo squints. “QUEER, ain’t she?”

  He taps on the door. No answer.

  Bonny Loo’s eyes widen. “Scary, ain’t it? Sometimes I figure she’s dead by now. I think we should call a doctor. Gramp don’t like doctors.”

  He turns the knob. Bonny Loo steps back, flattens her shoulders to the opposite wall.

  “Earlene?” he whispers. A smell of darkness and stale food and of skin that sleeps and sleeps, never washes . . . and the haze of hundreds of cigarettes . . . leaps at the opening door. “Gawd!” he says, pausing in the doorway.

  “I TOLD ya,” says Bonny Loo.

  The room is only big enough to hold a single bed, a sewing-machine table, and a couple of cereal bowls with crescents of bad milk, a saucer with uneaten toast, a water glass, a heaped ashtray. Bonny Loo says heartily, “Look what I brought, Ma! The secret man . . . HIM!”

  On an uncovered pillow is the face, onion-colored, skulllike, two great hunkering green eyes not quite open, glazed as in death. But the eyes see him. The lips part. “Get outta here before my father calls the deputy,” a craggy, old-womanish voice says.

  Bonny Loo grumbles, “Gramp’s at work, Ma! It’s only dinnah-time.” Bonny Loo goes to the window, yanks on the shade so that it flutters up. “I’ll keep watch, okay?”

  “Bonny Loo . . . please put the shade back down,” Earlene moans.

  Beal stares at Earlene with his mouth open.

  Her yellow hair is matted, is almost like fingers around her ears, darkened by oils. “My Gawd,” he whispers.

  He has brought the smell of the outdoors into the room. It reaches the bed. Earlene turns her head away.

  Bonny Loo stands on the sewing table to reach the shade. She yanks on it and again the room darkens.

  Beal goes no closer to the bed. But he doesn’t back out, either. He just stands and looks at Earlene, turning his fluorescent hunting hat in his hands.

  Bonny Loo plunges to the floor from the sewing table, landing on all fours, chimpanzee style . . . then pushes past Beal into the hall, muttering, “See, I TOLD you she’s pracktickly rotten!”

  3

  BONNY LOO wears a reindeer sweater her great-aunt Paula made. She stands on the edge of her grass, trimming off a thumbnail with a jackknife. She watches the tall woman next door sowing her garden by hand. The sun is warm and lard-colored through bony trees and on all the rooves in Egypt Village. Bonny Loo waves to the tall woman. The tall woman waves back. The tall woman’s dark eyes swim around Bonny Loo.

  The tall woman’s latest babies wake up from their naps and come to the sill of the front door, yawning. When they see their mother in the garden, they rejoice: “Yay!” They run and dive into the soft dirt with their knees and faces. “Weeeee!” As two babies stand up, another two go down. Bonny Loo takes a few steps into the tall woman’s grass. The tall woman pitches rocks to the edge. The babies retrieve them and throw them back. Then the tall woman trudges from the wee blue house, giving a smooth ride to a shallow box of dinky tomato plants, plants that are yellowed by the darkness inside her house. Each seedling is in a Dixie cup. Behind Roberta Bean, single-file and solemn, march the babies, one Dixie cup to each, one silly, fainting-away plant.

  Bonny Loo tugs at the hem of her reindeer sweater, agitated, kicking stones.

  Roberta pets each seedling after its entry to earth. The babies follow, petting the seedlings.

  When the planting is done, the tall woman and her young ones troop past Bonny Loo . . . and Bonny Loo waves, her fox-color eyes wild and wide . . . The babies and t
he tall woman each give Bonny Loo a little wave . . . Then they go into the tacky blue house and pull the door shut.

  4

  “MAYBE THIS will grow,” Bonny Loo says to herself. She stands on a chair in the kitchen, turning an onion over and over in her hands. She lands on her feet, and the glasses in the cupboard clink. She gets a dirty spoon from the sink and goes out through the porch and around to the back of the house. She plants the onion.

  That night, she gets dressed in the dark and tiptoes down the narrow stairs. She waits till she’s outdoors to click on the flashlight. She shines the flashlight on the disrupted earth. “GROW!” she commands.

  5

  THE STEAMY SUN clamps upon the land for many days. The evening is a dark bitter rose, heavy with odor, dim on Bonny Loo’s walls. She lies on top of her blankets with her clothes on, her flashlight in one hand. She hears her grandfather come up from the bathroom and step lightly to his room. Through the screen she hears a golden robin and a passing car. She waits.

  Then she gets up and goes out. She carries the flashlight in the stretchy waistband of her shorts and walks with swinging arms.

  When she is only four or five paces from her onion plant, she hears low voices in Roberta Bean’s garden. The tall woman is scooching among the squash vines in a light-color dress. The tall woman lifts a roly-poly pumpkin, still attached to the vine, and she coos at it. “This one will be the biggest. It’s for your poor mother, Beal.” She coos some more. “I can put her initials on it so it looks like nature writes. That’s what I done last year, and she made a fuss over it.”

  Beal stands over her, swatting at mosquitoes that attack his face and neck. He wears no hat and his hair is in a dozen cowlicks in silhouette. He pushes his knee into the tall woman’s back. He says, “I wish I haaaa-a-aad a m-mah-million bucks.”

  The tall woman says, “Me, too.”

  Beal says, “Ain’t no way I’m goin’ ta ever have a million dollars.”

  The tall woman says softly, “The meek shall inherit a hole in the earth. That’s what Pip always says.”