Scowler

by Daniel Kraus

  After the first night of this new abuse, his mother was never the same. Ry heard her make a call to Mrs. Horvath, saying she was so sorry but didn’t have time to fix up that blouse after all, could she suggest the stitchery in Bloughton? Soon he began to notice shiners expanding from her elbows and anklebones. Her body would seize up in the midst of odd movements—lifting a jug of milk from the fridge or turning the faucet to the left. She still smiled at her son in a way that insisted it was nothing, only now her own eyes didn’t believe it.

  It was a surprise when he found her sitting on her bed one day working the handle of the bat with a square of sandpaper. He asked her why. He didn’t know any better. When she looked up her eyes were pouched in soft purple tissue, and she winced while making the smallest of turns in his direction, as if there were things inside her that had been hurt. She smiled and told him she wanted the bat to stay pretty—or maybe handsome was a better word for a baseball bat; pretty was a girl’s word. He stood there in the doorway as she kept on about how it had been Ry’s bat first, and that it was still his bat secretly, and that one day he would get it back, just wait and see—but shhh, wait quietly. Ry didn’t know what to say. She kept talking and sanding and crying.

  The end came on a January weekend. They were inside, the entire family, because it was a night cruel with snow and armed with wind like slapping hands. Things were nevertheless going well: Calves bedraggled by some mysterious ailment were making a spirited recovery. Marvin leaned back in the living room rocking chair and hummed his satisfaction: Hmmmm hm hm hmmmm. Mom prepared food in the kitchen, Ry and Sarah played on the living room floor, and there was peace on Earth, at least until the humming stopped.

  Ry glanced over from where he sat scrunched on an ottoman, pretending the floor around him was a river of lava. Marvin’s rocking chair lurched, empty. He was up and moving. The blue TV glow slid off his shaved skull as he swept into the dining room. Ry leaned over the lava to watch. His father reached beneath a correspondence desk and removed a small, folded pile of fabric that Ry had never seen before. Because of the dimness and distance Ry couldn’t be sure, but he thought Marvin put the material to his face and inhaled deeply before adjusting his glasses and thumbing through his mustache bristles. Ry leaned farther and his knees sunk into molten rock. Marvin carefully folded the fabric—it was pink, Ry could see that much—before stuffing it into his pants pocket. Not a word was said. Minutes later, the family sat down to dinner.

  Ry slept well that night. He would never forgive himself for that.

  Eight hours later he got dressed and went outside while shaking off bad dreams about the new kinds of noises coming from the bedroom above. January, after all, was a month that always made the house squeal and moan. He went through the motions of early-morning chores trying to move as little as possible. His knees, brutalized by glaciated dirt, slowed his trip back to the house, or at least, he told himself it was his knees. He dallied for so long that eventually Marvin emerged from the house and passed him on the way to the garage, face obscured inside a white hood of exhalation, his gloved fingers pawing through a key ring.

  “Your mom’s sick.” It was a grunt from behind a coat collar. “Don’t pester her.”

  Ry turned on his heel. “I heard her—” he began, but Marvin was already stamping the snow from his boots at the garage entryway, then slamming the door behind him. Ry paused to hear the truck engine shudder off its armor of frost before lowering his face against the cold and heading indoors.

  It wasn’t until he was shivering in the kitchen that he came up against the reality of no breakfast. Marvin was gone; his mother was sick. He heard movement above but knew by its aimlessness that it was Sarah. He shucked his coat and boots and went upstairs. Sarah had only recently been given her own bed, and already this morning she had abandoned it. She sat near the window groping at toys. Watching her fumble with brightly colored plastic always rankled him. He had his own toys, army figures and superheroes and race cars, but Marvin had made it clear that such trinkets were not for the heirs to mighty farms.

  Plenty of toys remained, though, and lived in a wilted cardboard box printed with the words “Corn Flakes” and crammed into the space beneath his bed. Sometimes, if he knew Marvin was far out of range, Ry would take out the box and pour the contents onto his bedspread. He would sift through the characters, pair them off for unfought duels, and bask in their million tiny facets. Soon they would seem to be as big and as real as he was. Ry had been jealous of his sister’s happy banging, but that was the wrong approach. Forget chores. Forget meals. Forget his mother. They could bang toys together until the snowy world outside faded to absolute white.

  It was a fantasy interrupted by the blank gaze of his parents’ bedroom door. Ry held his breath, leaned in, and listened. Sarah’s clatter made it hard to hear. He closed his eyes and let his warm ear seal against the cool walnut. There—he heard a tentative bedspring. Somehow relieved, he retreated, picked up Sarah, and carried her downstairs.

  They ate cereal. Ry had to wring the milk out of her shirt. Next, there was a special stool for washing hands and on the sink there was animal-shaped soap. Traumatized by an improper ratio of hot to cold, she barely noticed as he dressed her in coat, hat, snow pants, and boots. She held on to him with a mittened hand and together they took a thousand toddler-sized steps to the dairy barn. When those chores were completed, they cut across the center of the property toward the chicken house, but made a pit stop in the garage to feed Sniggety. The dog, still curious back then, left a wet nose-trail across the girl’s face. This dismayed her and she tried to air her grievance. Ry pretended to listen but was distracted by the space in the garage where the truck used to be. Marvin Burke had mentioned nothing the day before about going into town. For that matter, Jo Beth Burke had shown no signs of illness. Everything felt wrong.

  Soon it was one in the afternoon. Ry felt a flash of annoyance at his mother. Never, not even during the worst bouts of illness, had she failed to fix them food. Her desertion was profane and left him with no choice. Ry’s gut was hot and the stairway banister, when he took it, was cold. Once at the unhelpful bedroom door, though, his indignation dissolved.

  “Mom?” It was too soft. He cleared his throat and raised the volume. “Mom, you okay?”

  He pressed his ear to the wood. Icy air howled through some breach in the defenses. Downstairs, Sarah was yielding to the dull drone of a resolute cry. There was a consistency to these noises that had the texture of sleep; his mother would never know if he snuck in, stole a quick peek. He put his hand to the brass knob and was surprised by his varnish of sweat.

  “Honey.” It was his mother’s voice. He stopped turning the knob and it clattered back to a neutral position. “Honey, is that you?”

  Ry’s heart was pounding. This conversation went right in the face of Marvin’s warning. If they were caught, he knew full well that his mother would get the brunt of the punishment, and that itself was punishing. He spoke quickly. “I wanted to know if you felt better.”

  “No.” The response was instant. “No, dear, leave me alone. Is that Sarah I hear? Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine. I was thinking of making lunch.”

  “That’s a good idea. You do that. Don’t worry about me. You just let me rest and feel better.”

  Ry did not move. She sounded like she was holding her breath.

  “You want me to bring you soup?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Did you feed the chickens? You better do that.”

  “I already did. You need some water?”

  “And what about the cows?”

  “I did them before Dad left.”

  There was a pause.

  “I have water,” she said. “Plenty of water. Now go take care of your sister. You left your comic books in front of the TV. Go read your comic books.”

  The bedsprings creaked. He thought he heard a gasp.

  “You don’t sound sick.” This was bold. He clamped
his teeth.

  “Well, I am.” Her voice carried equal parts disorientation and anger. “I am sick. I am very sick. What else do you want me to say?”

  That he hit you again. That he used the bat. That it’s not a virus that’s keeping you hidden but a bruise or welt or something so bad you won’t let your children see it. Say that, any of it, and the door will open and we can deal with it, you and me; we’ll figure out a way, even if he comes home and finds us—somehow we will deal with it.

  “Now you go look after your sister and let me rest.”

  He was ten years old and always did what he was told.

  It was just this once that he disobeyed.

  He seized the knob and cranked it. It would not open. He wrenched it harder.

  “Ry, no! No, honey! I’m fine! I’m fine!”

  Not once in his life had he found a door in the house locked. The old house had keyholes everywhere, but Ry had never suspected the existence of actual keys. He stood and kicked at the door, at the knob, the jamb, the hinges. He slammed his palms against the wood. Nothing gave way.

  “Stop! Ry, please! Just stop!”

  But he was already running, downstairs in moments, through the house in seconds, her protests fading. He hopped into his boots but did not lace them; he hurled on his coat but did not zip it. As he threw open the back door he heard the softening of his sister’s cries as she grew sleepy. With any luck she would doze through the whole thing.

  His parents’ bedroom window was above the back porch. Ry tried to think of it, with its siding and sills and rain gutters, as just another tree to be climbed. Once he found himself standing upon the roof’s sparkling shingles, he took a quick inventory of the nests of snow, the runners of ice. He moved swiftly, stretching his torso over the edge of the roof, reaching out for the storm window that was now at shoulder level, and putting his hands to the pane. It was unexpectedly hot. He dug his nails under the sash and lifted. It opened cleanly for the very last time.

  Ry pushed himself up and over the windowsill. This angle of approach did not allow him to prepare for the various waiting impediments: the rapier of a radio antenna; the rocking chair and its long teeth; and the red bat, which clattered to the floor and sketched a territorial arc. Ry shook off the traps like Sniggety emerging from a rain-beaded crop and rolled away, gaining balance against the dresser.

  She was too ashamed to look at him—that was his first thought. She lay on her left side facing the far wall, a thin sheet draped over her body. His second thought was that it was too cold for such a measly covering; he couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t burrowed beneath a few blankets. He began compassing the foot of the bed.

  Wadded near the headboard was the pink fabric, the one his father had stolen from the dining room the night before. Another step closer brought a new detail into focus: It was bloody. Not soaked, just spotted, as if it had been used to stem the welling of minor nicks. Ry realized that the fabric was another sewing commission. How could she have been so stupid? He did not feel the rest of the steps it took to bring him to the far side of the bed. The sheet, when he lifted it from his mother’s torso, had no texture or weight—it was as if he were shooing away smoke. His mother’s naked body was a surprise, though not fundamentally disturbing; she was, after all, in the privacy of her own bed. Nothing appeared to be wrong, and Ry leaned over to whisper apologies.

  Her ear was sewn to the bed. It was an amateur job, though Ry could imagine Marvin insisting, as he laced the brown thread in and out of the cartilage, that that was the whole point—it didn’t take a genius to sew. Jo Beth made an attempt to look at her son, but even the slightest move tautened the ear. One of the four loops of thread had already snapped; the others proved that Marvin Burke at least knew his knots. Ry lifted an arm to offer some kind of assistance and his mother winced. He winced back. With fingers as clumsy as his, she was sure to emerge from the ordeal slotted. Frustration splintered into impatience. She was the one with dexterous fingers. Use your hands, he thought. Can’t you just use your hands?

  She could not; he felt bad for even thinking it. More brown thread snaked through the webbing between the thumb and index finger of each of her hands, drawing them tight to the mattress. Ry took a step back and was mesmerized by the brown shimmers of thread he suddenly saw in dozens of bodily locations. Marvin had lashed his wife into a posture so natural that, had it not been for the discarded pink cloth, Ry might have taken it for sleep and tiptoed out without thinking twice.

  More than pain, it was numbness that Ry sensed from his mother. Sensation had left his body, too. He didn’t feel the bolt shift when he unlocked the bedroom door from the inside. When he withdrew the twelve-inch sewing shears from the bureau inside the walk-in closet, the metal was without temperature. Before returning to his mother’s side he lowered the window to stem the icy breeze, and it jammed a half inch from closing. He put all of his weight on it but no farther would it budge; nine years later, only nailing it shut would finish the grudge. Blood worked its way back into Ry’s fingers, though, and that was important considering what he had to do next.

  With exquisite care he removed the sheet from the rest of her body. Though her skin was blue, he felt the heat of her shame. Her body’s meat hung heavy and shone with perspiration. Her thighs were tacky with urine. Ry felt the prim fealty of a nurse as he took up the pink fabric, shook out its crusty folds, and quartered it. Blood had ruined it, though Ry was of the opinion that it was being repurposed for nobler service. He found a clean edge and swept beads of sweat from his mother’s lip and brow. Then he refolded it again and wiped the urine from her thighs and blotted what he could from the mattress. He discarded the fabric in the trash can and took up the shears.

  It was the most intimate thing he had ever shared with anyone. He began with the left ear, raising the pink flesh and extending the point of the shears to make three minute snips. Freed, she immediately wrenched her neck to stretch the cramped muscles. Ry continued his scrutiny; not an inch was left to chance. A single thread made four passes through her left armpit, and the act of pinching that skin away from the bed was not unlike the morning milking. A tidy knot cinched her left nipple to the mattress, and Ry took care to rest the blade against the areola before committing to the cut. The thread passing through the upper curve of her navel had previously broken free but she had no idea; Ry faked a slice with the shears and watched her stomach pound in relief. Most serious were the four trips the thread made through her hip fat. After he freed it, the flesh spasmed as if just that part of her were sobbing. Everything else was easy to liberate: the thread that passed through both folds of her private parts, the loose knots that strung the underside of her knees to the mattress, the eight meticulous circuits Marvin had sewn through the skin between each and every toe. When Ry finally rose with an aching back and shears shining with blood, he knew that he had freed more than skin.

  Jo Beth sat up, grabbed the glass of water that had sat out of reach for who knew how many hours, and chugged it. She shook stubborn drops from the bottom of the glass, took several deep breaths, and then stood. It was the last thing Ry expected. Two dozen threads dangled like extracted veins. She reached to her ear, pinched her fingers, and began to withdraw each string. It was an unchaining: Each wisp swam away on invisible currents, and she grew stronger with every body part that was emancipated. For the first time Ry felt shy. He lowered his eyes, then felt the encircling of two arms and the nestling of breasts. His feet nearly left the ground with the force of her back-and-forth rocking. Behind her, he glimpsed the white mattress and saw the dotted red outline of her perforated body. It was the residue of a person left behind; this new woman holding him was whole.

  “Gather your sister,” she said.

  Difficult to do, with a baseball bat in one hand and shears in the other, but gather her he did as his mother dressed and hurried downstairs. Barest essentials—bottles, medicine, diapers—were stuffed into a bag. Ry’s main job was to carry the weapons, but the b
at was eerily smooth and kept slithering from his grip like an eel. It would require both hands. He slid the shears into his back pocket.

  His mother’s coat was unzipped when she ran outside. Ry heard the sputter of the car engine cranking, heard it die. Bile surged up his esophagus—it wouldn’t start; they would never make it. When he heard it catch he almost sobbed. Jo Beth knew the vehicle’s quirks as well as anyone; in weather like this it needed five minutes minimum to warm up or it would die before making it past the driveway. Ry set Sarah on the floor and began lacing his boots. They were leaving. It was happening. The knot got sloppy and Ry had to start over.

  Jo Beth burst in, grabbed Sarah’s shoes, coat, snow pants, and hat, then dropped them in a pile in front of the two-year-old and went to work. Ry knew from experience that it took several minutes to dress Sarah. That meant there was time to save something that mattered to him alone. He hurried through the dining room and entered his bedroom. Every object cried out for mercy but he felt a masculine disregard for their pleas. Ry took to his knees and reached under the bed.

  But when he picked up the box it wilted, and the “Corn Flakes” stamped on its side accordioned into a nonsense of consonants. Ry dropped it on the bed before the bottom gave way. There was no way this box was going to make it. He felt the snotty choke of a child’s stubborn determination. This was his birthday, Christmas, and the last day of school put together. He would not be denied.

  “Let’s go.” His mother clapped from the kitchen. “Now, Ry.”

  “Wait!” He took the box and dumped the toys onto the quilt. Hypnotized by chrome and rubber and painted faces and sculpted muscle, Ry found choice an impossibility.