I gave birth to you out of this body, eleven hours of labor you smart-ass son of a bitch. She laughed like a man sometimes, deep belly laugh no one ever heard the Hearts. Johnny couldn't help but laugh with her. What a joker.
His mom had learned comic turns, droll squinchings of her eyes, a way of wriggling her breasts from the Vegas lounge acts. Her raw-lewd humor she didn't reveal to her Willowsville "business associates." No truth so so crushing you can't turn it into a joke--that's the Vegas philosophy. At the Hilton she'd seen poor Elvis perform in the last year of his life, oncehandsome Elvis bloated as a corpse that'd been floating in water for a week.
Fat face made up pearly-white as a geisha's. She could do an Elvis routine, actually. Love me ten-der, love me tru-e. Even Farley giggled. Yes she took seriously the challenge of being a good mother, a responsible resident of the upper middle class. Intermittently she made an effort to take notice of the younger children. Farley bewildered her, he was so damned smart, but quiet, "still waters run deep," in fact she was proud of Farley's high grades, and one time astounded his teachers by turning up at an open house at his school. Yes, she tried to love her daughter, too. They all tried to love Shirleen.
A sad pudgy not-pretty child. A slow-learning child. A clumsy stumbling yet child. A child who stared at her mother as if watching TV. A flushed with pleasure if her mother noticed her, said a kind word to her. Yet a child stupid enough or reckless enough to have made the error, once, of shrinking from Mommy when in one of her wired moods Mommy swayed in her direction zealous to hug her, and to kiss. The child's beady lashless eyes blinking, narrowed as if she feared being struck.
her own mother. So fearing, in the face of Mommy's proffered love, naturally she was struck. Any one of the Hearts could see that coming. Mommy's hand. The sharp edge of Mommy's twenty-five-carat diamond ring in platinum setting that was in fact a flashy zircon with the diamondlike power of shearing into the child's flesh just the same. Damn you! Nasty little thing!
You do it on purpose to break your mother's heart don't you!
And the time Shirleen fell, or was pushed, from the top of the stairs.
Though Dahlia who'd been at the top of the stairs shaking the child by her shoulders would not be able to comprehend afterward how the happened, how it could possibly have happened, denying responsibility even as she wept for forgiveness. Farley, shaken as Farley rarely was, described to John how their young sister fell fifteen thumping steps without apparent resistance. Her legs and arms limp, head banging against the steps which were carpeted but still ungiving, she fell doggedly, as if out of spite, as Dahlia screamed from above. Her right leg was caught beneath her and cracked in two places and would require a hefty cast for eight months. It was who volunteered to the emergency room physician, stammering with excitement, that she'd been "reading Alice in Wonderland and didn't know I was on the stairs, and the words made me dizzy so I fell." For weeks Dahlia was sober, "stone cold fucking sober" as she described the state.
Shirleen, her leg in a white plaster cast that soon became filthy, was allowed to stay out of school much of that winter.
indulged--pushed in a wheelchair when she should have been walking crutches. Swinging and lurching on crutches when she should have been walking. Her brothers saw with alarm that she sometimes crawled--thumping along on her hands and knees, dragging the clumsy cast. A glum satisfaction in such infant behavior though Shirleen was a solid-bodied girl of ten and in other respects said to be in good health. Though Farley sought out John Reddy one day to tell him he was worried that Shirleen was "mentally ill." John Reddy relayed this information to Dahlia without comment, Dahlia slapped her hands over her ears and began to hum loudly.
Then she burst into tears. "None of us ask to be born, Johnny. It's smart-asses like you who rub it in." Sustained sobriety was exhausting, Dahlia had discovered.
Where others were forgetful when they drank, and perhaps drank to be forgetful, Dahlia was forgetful when she didn't drink.
Possibly, with the world so diminished, as if glimpsed through a soiled scrim, there were fewer things worth remembering. Fucking hard some mornings to muster up the energy, she said, to breathe. Yet you have to slap on makeup, eyeliner.
came Shirleen, the afflicted daughter, crawling in the corridor like a sixmonth infant, banging her cast against the floor.
explained that her Ieg, when she stood, "scared her" because she could see it. When crawled, she couldn't see it. She crawled with surprising up the stairs and would have crawled down the stairs like a slithering snake if she'd been capable. Evidently she wasn't capable. (No one had seen her practice. ) There was Shirleen noisily sucking at her fingers. There was Shirleen refusing to speak. Shirleen refusing to sit and eat with her family.
Though she ate ravenously at other times, alone in the kitchen through the sometimes at night. ) When at last the soiled cast was removed from her leg of course she limped. The doctor recommended physical therapy but Shirleen refused. She preferred to limp. You could see the satisfaction in her eyes, quivering in her mouth. With stubborn pride she would limp life bearing the irrevocable sign of her mother's excessive love.
Sister Mary Agatha of St.. Anne's Sisters of Charity whose pronounced limp from a "mysterious childhood injury" was unfailingly noted. Sister Mary migraine headaches, shortness of brcath, occasional tachycardia, indigestion, she spoke frankly, even cheerfully, of her "congenital dyslexia", the world would be amazed when it was revealed that this woman fasted virtually every day of her life, subsisting on a few grains of brown rice, minuscule quantities of raisins, solitary lettuce leaves, unleavened bread, watery skim milk and vitamin supplements. (Her superiors in the Order of St.. Anne insisted upon the vitamin supplements. ) In truth, Sister Mary Agatha subsisted on prayer and work in equal proportions, from three a. m. to eight a. m. , work from eight a. m. to six p. m. , prayer from six p. m. to midnight, with approximately four hours eked out in interstices of this schedule for sleep and other unavoidable physiological functions. "The way of the penitent," Sister Mary Agatha described herself, "--but the penitent who puts her shoulder to the wheel." But it that the white-clad, wimpled, bespectacled nun with the windburnt girlish face spoke of herself, or spoke at all. She'd known to lead interviewers through her workday at the Kansas City school without a single word, so fierce was she in her concentration on her students.
days before the death of Melvin Riggs, Jr. , which would shatter the Heart family forever, Shirleen, eleven years old at the time, sought out her older Johnny to ask anxiously, "Do you remember your dreams when you up?
Do you still hear the voices? I do! I'm afraid of them. My don't stop when I open my eyes, they keep on and on. They have so much power.
sift through me like I'm nothing--a strainer. It's like in school when the teacher talks through your thoughts, you don't have the power to not-hear. I know, though--I can't make things happen so I need to make myself the way things happen. Is it like that with you, too? Do you it's God talking to us? But we don't understand? I was so happy--in a night a voice said, I am God. You are my daughter. I love you. Rock of Ages, cleft for me.
Let me hide myself in the , Let the water and the blood, From thy riven side which flowed, Be of sin the double cure, Cleanse me from its guilt and power!
They were singing the old hymn military-style. Not begging but commanding. Sometimes John Heart didn't join in, sometimes he did.
Singing was one of those things he'd never learned to do with much or even comprehension, why it meant so much to so many people, to listen but to sing. It's like your soul catches flame, someone him. In another lifetime, Dahlia Heart had hoped to sing. Her breathy-sexy Eartha Kitt impersonation. But singing, true singing, true music, required just talent with which you might be born but training, discipline, doggedness.
At the Apostles of Jesus Christ Risen, John Heart told the minister he embarrassed to sing, he hadn't any voice. Reverend Andy Shaffer snappily, "Eh what? I hear your voice, son. What's that if it ai
n't your voice?" A few Sundays of the year, depending on his mood and the weather, Heart rode his motorcycle twenty-five miles to Watertown, to the church whose minister, Reverend Andy as he was calied, had hired MR. FIXIT a few years ago to repair rotted shingles and drainpipes. A few Sundays of the year, John Heart rode his motorcycle thirty-two miles to Port Calumet to the Unity Love of God, another small church he'd discovered job. There was a Free Methodist church in Pulaski, and there was church with a predominately Portuguese congregation in Shawmouth.
He'd never stepped into any church in Iroquois Point. He'd never told Leavey of his itinerant churchgoing, she wouldn't have known whether to be mystified or to laugh at him. "You, John? A Christian? Come on! Well, he wasn't sure, either. About the most fundamental principles of his life, the innermost secrets of his heart, he wasn't sure.
All night fighting sleep because his dreams were grating as pebbles. Hurtful to his brain like splinters of glass.
Ice-pellets. He understood that he was John Heart, thirty-eight years old, MR. FIX-IT of Barndollar Road, Point, New York, but at the same time he was a boy, a kid, like an animal. Running, stumbling, spraining an ankle.
Crawling (as his poor sister had crawled) on his hands and knees. He was lost in an ice-field.
He'd wiped the gun clean of all fingerprints save his own. Covered the gun with his fingerprints. He'd tossed the gun over the railing of the little bridge onto the ice. It was not this ice, not the ice of the Glass Mountain, but it was ice, since November, covered with a powdery film of snow. He would be surprised at the ease with which the deception worked. They want to believe it's me, it's me they want to hunt down. And that was true. He was only a kid, sixteen.
But he hadn't been a child in a long time. He knew certain truths only adults knew.
And not all adults know. There are those among us we want to hunt down, and kill if we can. There are others, most others, we would spare, We're good people, we don't want to hunt and kill. Except sometimes. So the-y hunting him on Mount Nazarene. Sighting him through their riflemen's scopes. That was their privilege, he'd given them the privilege.
But he meant to make a run for it, climbing, slipping, sliding. His ankle throbbed with pain. Pain could make you into an animal. They were hunting him like an animal, that was their privilege. The brilliant winter sun him. The steep ice-field. He didn't have his dark glasses, or his gloves.
was in terror of going blind. Beneath the ice-crust was a bluish haze. Grasses like frozen ripples in water. He'd believed they might be human beings like somehow reduced, shrunken. He was losing his ability to hands, arms, feet, legs. His ability to think. He was panting. He began to cough.
Rock of Ages, its crust frozen. Cleft for me but it would not.
me hide myself but it would not.
God shouted at him through a megaphone. Called him by name.
Hunted him down like a wounded animal. Captured him, kicked and billyclubbed and brought him back in shackles. His face bleeding, eye punctured. He would be much-photographed. Much-memorized.
John Reddy Heart we would've died for you.
He heard himself telling Nola Leavey that he was better out of her life.
Her children's lives. She knew this, obviously. There was at the other end of the line. "Nola? I'll come by tonight, pick up whatever things of mine are there. All right?" She'd begun to cry. She managed to say, over a confusion of in the background, "It's not as if I have much choice, John, is it."
When he arrived, later than he'd planned, Linda the freckled high girl was with the children in the kitchen. John didn't want to say good-bye to them, nor did Nola, who was looking shaky, think it was a good at this time. She'd work it out with them somehow. If he could call in a day or two and speak with Ellen first and then Drew... "I want to spare them as much hurt as I can this time. But I don't want to lie to them." She wiped roughly at her eyes. She blew her nose. She laughed. "God, I want to be virtuous!
It's as if I almost died, this past week, my life was spared by miracle, I'm so weak and so absurdly grateful. Though, losing you, I did die, guess. Let's go to the Lakeside and get drunk."
"You can't get drunk if you drive."
"Why am I driving?"
"You drive your car, I'll meet you there." Nola considered this. In the other room, Drew was chattering excitedly.
"That's right. You're right. Separate cars. Of course." At the Lakeside they sat in their usual scarred booth at the rear of the bar, as far from the jukebox as possible. The old inn was a place, distinguished in summer by a lengthy open veranda overlooking the lake and a grayish pebbled beach below. John Heart had come here other women, but not in a long time. Nola ordered a whisky-and-water, rare for her, and began talking rapidly. Now that it had been decided, there was no danger of her asking him another time about the trial. Was he murderer. Had he been "protecting" another person. He wouldn't have to I was acquitted.
Twenty-two years ago. Long past.
"All he basically wanted, he claimed, was to live closer to the children. l mean--to have the children live closer to him. The way it had been before I moved us to Iroquois Point. Before I upset the balance," Nola said.
she used up all her tissues, and what John had in his pockets, which wasn't much, then began to wipe her eyes and nose on cocktail napkins.
"So he's dropped the suit. He's started back at AA in Lockport, he says.
asks me to apologize to you and to thank you for not pressing charges. He swears he didn't want to cause trouble, or grief for any of us--'I'll never hurt you again, Nola, he says. That's right, I told him. You won't. I don't think he knew I'd had an offer from a school in Bolivar, about twenty miles of Lockport, at the time I accepted the position here. It's still available. A former teacher of mine, who'd been a teaching assistant at SUNY-Albany when I was in graduate school there, is principal. called him yesterday.
It's virtually set. I'll be resigning here. So fast! My head is spinning. But, I said, Bolivar BRO KE HEART BLUES is only twenty miles from Lockport where Jordan lives and he could closer if he wants, it's up to him. Now we have no emotional on each other maybe at last we can be, what's the word, amicable.
word for 'indifferent. This will be so much more convenient for Ellen and Drew, of course. It was selfish of me to make them have to ride so far, so long, in Jordan's car--a hundred-and-forty-mile round trip in a single weekend.
poor Jordan--two hundred and eighty miles. I hadn't been thinking I guess. I don't believe it had been out of spite. He'd complained bitterly but I didn't seem to hear him. I mean, the justice of what he said. His voice got in the way. He says he wrote me letters and his mother wrote me a letter but I have only the dimmest memory of this. I must have torn them up without them. John, do you know Bolivar? It's about the size of Iroquois Point. It's inland from the lake about ten miles. Just a small town. The school is approximately the same size as Iroquois Point and I'll be teaching more or less the same subjects, at a slightly higher salary I hope. And this time I'll rent a house before I buy. I won't make the same mistake twice. God, is embarrassing. Like hemorrhaging." Nola meant her runny nose, bloodshot tearbrimming eyes. She laughed. "What a way for you to remember me, John.
What romance. But maybe you won't remember me." The more a woman talked, the quieter and more withdrawn MR. FIX-IT became.
Thinking how like blows of a hammer. One! two! three! Pounding into fresh-sawed wood. Blunt and deft as a master carpenter the woman was, not noticing, or not seeming to notice, the mild dazed look in face.
He'd mumble, "Sure." And, "O. K." And, "Another drink?" She talked. Seated not beside him but across from him, a subtle rearrangement of their usual positions side by side nudging each other's shoulder. It had been John Heart who'd slid into the seat opposite Nola's and he guessed (the Lakeside was local, everyone knew everyone else) this rearrangement had been noted by the waitress, by the bartender and cashier who was the bartender's wife. Noted, decoded. One of unmistakable rearrangements of the expected that
signals profound irrevocable change.
MR. FIX-IT, dextrous with his hands, you might say generous with hands, wasn't very dextrous with words. Not his own, nor others'.
Sometimes, where emotion was involved, and surprises, he had comprehending. His English teacher Miss Bird, that pushy, kindly who'd seemed to like him, as if seeing, in him, a boy other than the others saw, had said with sparkling impatience Oh John Reddy, express yourself!
you feel, what you want to say, just write whatever comes, or could talk to me, tell me, and I'll write it down for you, c'mon don't be just try! But he
couldn't. For sure, he couldn't. He'd let her down, hadn't to know how badly he'd done on his final English exam, the essay question a cobweb maze of X's, for sure he'd disappointed her, he'd disappointed all. For it was one of the mysteries of his life, that, in the Village of where he'd pa, sed among inhabitants like a ghost, they'd seemed him, to see some elusive promise in him--John Reddy Heart And Nola Leavey had, too. Until now. This past week. Then he'd let her down.
Joyce Carol Oates - Broke Heart Blues Page 40
