Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "Reality" of course, is man's most powerful illusion;

  but while he attends to this world, it must outbalance

  the total enigma of being in it at all,

  ERIK H. ERIKSON

  Prelude

  Sept. 6, 1800. Near where we are camped [on the west bank of the Red River of the North, near the confluence of the Red and Park rivers] has been a great game crossing for many years. The ground on both sides is beaten as hard as a pavement and the numerous roads leading to the river, a foot deep, are surprising, and when I consider the hard sod through which these tracks are beaten, I am entirely at a loss and bewildered in attempting to form any idea of the numerous herds of buffalo which must have passed here.

  *

  Sept. 11. I climbed up a tall oak, which I had trimmed for that purpose, . . . from the top of which I had an extensive view of the country . ..

  The weather being perfectly serene, I could distinguish the Hair Hills on the W., though they were scarcely perceptible — nothing more than a blue stripe, running N. and S. The interval is a level meadow, with nothing to attract the eye.

  Jan. 14, 1801. At daybreak I was awakened by the bellowing of buffaloes . . . The plains were black, and appeared as if in motion, S. to N. . . .

  I had seen almost incredible numbers of buffalo in the fall, but nothing in comparison to what I now beheld. The ground was covered at every point of the compass, as far as the eye could reach, and every animal was in motion.

  *

  April 1, Wednesday. The river clear of ice, hut the drowned buffalo continue to drift down by herds . . . It really is astonishing what vast quantities must have perished, as they formed one continual line in the middle of the river for two days and two nights.

  *

  From the manuscript journals of Alexander Henry, one of the first English-speaking explorers to enter North Dakota.

  THE STREET

  Every night when I’m not able to sleep, when scrolls of words and formulas unfurl in my mind and faces of those I love, both living and dead, rise from the dark, accusing me of apathy, ambition, self-indulgence, neglect—all of their accusations just—and there's no hope of rest, I try again to retrace the street. It's an unpaved street and it's the color of my hand. It's made up mostly of the clayey gumbo from the flat and tilting farmland all around this village so small it can be seen through from all sides, and its ungraded surface is generally overrun with ruts that are slippery and water-filled in spring, ironlike in summer, furred in fall with frost as phosphorescent as mountainy ridges on the moon's crust, and in winter buried beyond all thought except for any thought that clay or gravel or the booted feet of people crossing ice-covered snow above might have. It's the main street of Hyatt, North Dakota, and it's one block long. I lived in Hyatt from the time I was born until I was six and returned only once, at the age of eight, wearing a plaid jacket exactly like my brother's, too light for the weather, and ran up and down this street with changed friends, playing hide-and-seek between buildings that stand deserted, now that time has had its diminishing effects.

  Every night I approach the street in the same way, from the east, along a long building that shields it from me until the last moment of unbelievability is banished by its being there. The building was once the machine shed of a John Deere implement dealer, so my father's told me, and is now the Town Hall and high-school gymnasium; this side is surfaced with sheets of tin die-pressed to simulate brick, and the shining gray sheets slant up and down, their seams mismatched, shifting in angle or height or declination with every other step I take, and then I reach out, as I always do, and run my fingertips along the tin. Some nights I feel the entire building will collapse and be revealed as cardboard, and on other nights it's as firm to my touch as my wife's arm at this hour.

  The Town Hall is the heart of Hyatt—the sports arena, the theater, the polling place, the movie house, the dance hall, and the band building, the social retreat, the inoculation center, the courthouse, the village palace with its changing set of kings, and every Thursday evening during the winter, when a man from Fessenden wheels a wooden crate mounted on skate rollers into the building and seats himself on a stool like the stools used by shoe salesmen, and straps on skates, the Town Hall is a noisy roller rink.

  I come to the corner of the building and turn south on Main Street. At its far end I can see the raised roadbed and shining rails of the Soo Line, and, beyond the rails, flanking and towering high above the Western store fronts of the street, four grain elevators, one a faded barn-red with a green roof, and the other three, built together in a cluster, silver-gray. A quarter way down one of them, in black letters ten feet tall, I read N. J. LUDVIG & CO., and when the period after CO starts falling with sidewise swipes toward the ground, I know it's only a pigeon diving after spilled grain, a luncheon along individual lines, a new day for him, a new hour, a new time.

  I start down the street, on a high-curbed sidewalk fractured and crumbling from severe freezes, and pass the front doors of the Town Hall, which are open, folded back in rectangles of knotty pine against the white siding, and hooked in place. There's a patriotic ceremony going on inside. My father is ready to give the reading he's been rehearsing at home for a week, and I sit in the audience, beside my mother, filled with a fathomless fear for her and my father. I wait until his voice makes its last swirl of lariatlike cadenzas in the air, and concludes with a whisper, and hear a spatter of applause, and am content, and then a rising wash of response like the sea. I walk on.

  Next, a vacant lot overgrown with weeds, with a gray path winding through it to the end of memory, a lot that's flooded in the winter for skating and hockey, and then Friedrich's Meat Market, where stout H. P. Friedrich, wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and a white towel around his waist, mixes up in washtubs with his bare hands an incomparable brand of farm-style sausage, the spiciest the Northern palate can handle and still be pleased. And after Friedrich's comes—

  I can't remember. I can't remember the building, the business carried on in it, or who it should be in its doorway, and this adds to my sleeplessness, is an ominous sign, so I turn in bed and try to work around to it along a less obvious line of tangentiality. Mr. Friedrich has powerful arms. He works with his sleeves rolled up, and the cords in his arms whiten and muscles bulge beneath his shirt. His face and cheeks are round and flushed and his steel-rimmed spectacles are often fogged. Tucked once along the trim of my father's roll-top desk was a photograph of Mr. Friedrich on the high-school steps, with 1913 on the lintel above him, wearing a cap with the ear-flaps folded down and a lined denim jacket buttoned tight at his throat; fuzzy gloves on his hands, the gold-colored ones that were worn then, by the looks of them; his even teeth bared in the smile of somebody unaccustomed to a camera. His first name is Herman. "I wonder if Herman will have the school warm this morning," I hear my father say, and see Mr. Friedrich in the boiler room in the basement of the school, a bulky silhouette against the glow of the open furnace he's stoking with coal. Besides being the butcher, he's the custodian and repairman at the public school, and on the mornings when the bell in the big and lofty, barnlike church a block away rings especially loud, summoning to weekday Mass the parochial-school children (a requirement), and nearly all the rest of the village, which is ninety-percent Catholic, I know that the usual bell ringer, Lowell Russell, a sickly man but the progenitor of twelve children, is ill in bed again, and the rope is being pulled by the powerful arms of Mr. Friedrich. His meat market is tan and its trim is chocolate brown, and next to—

  I see a fluted lintel painted beige, a pair of plate-glass windows, but the rest is a blank, there's blankness behind the plate glass, and no matter how much I coax and prod, nothing further will appear,
the place only turns more vaporous in resistance to me, so I move on to the Red Owl, which, for all the importance it has, might well be forgotten, since our family never shopped here, but nobody can control all the leaps and demands of his own memory.

  Next is the alley, two-thirds of the way down the block instead of at its center, and then a vacant store, lime-colored, which was a barbershop at one time, and later a feed store smelling of flour; and then Eichelburger's Tavern, sheathed with white siding, stretches the rest of the way to the cross street of the block. Eichelburger's is so long there must be a dance hall inside, but it's impossible to know for sure, other than by entering—which I've never done, of course (never old enough)—because there are no doors along this side, and its front entrance and front windows, which look onto the tracks of the Soo Line, are covered with white curtains. The long, blank wall of the building is like the aura around the Eichelburgers themselves, who live just across the hedge from us and are accessible to me, but avoided by most everybody else in the village; they aren't Catholic, Mrs. Eichelburger smokes cigarettes, and their daughter, Susie, at the age of five, has begun to exhibit herself to boys. I was one of the first to see.

  I feel a pressure behind and turn and there are the cottonwoods and willows at the far end of the street, along the edge of the lake, flying the maidenhair faces of their leaves into the wind, and beyond their crowns of trembling insubstantiality, across the lake dotted with cotton-wood pollen, the blue and azure plain abuts against the horizon at infinity.

  I turn to you in bed. You lie beside me, resting in an arcade of your dream, your closed eyes in motion behind your lids, your hair disarrayed over your arm on the pillow, your forehead marblelike and shining with sleep. At this hour, I feel alien to you, a creature you've never seen but call Tim, or Tinvalin, or my husband, or Dear, or more intimate names, none of which are me; nor am I Mr. or Professor or Sir, as my students call me, nor lector at the church, the principal's son, the plumber's son, Deem, or, as our children say, Dad. I'm so much the person I was in the past, I wonder how I can be given the number of names I have with so much conviction. My existence is a narrow line I tread between the person I'm expected to be and the person who hides behind his real self to keep the innermost antiquity of me intact. Will you wake if—I run my hand over your hair and you don’t even stir. Housework and the children consume your energy and hours, and I know from my work at school how you must feel; the more commonplace the questions, the more bothersome the details of papers and giving out grades, the more my imagination is stunned. I look forward to sleep as an excursion from life, and fall into it like a stone. And then there are the nights, such as tonight, when I defy the principle and float. Cold hard bed.

  Beneath your eyelids you follow the movement of the dream. Who peoples it? Can I enter it as a shade of color, a character, a melody, a landscape, and become a part of you? I feel my thoughts reach you when you sleep. Why else do you stir when one frightens me? You stir now. Tonight I went out on the steps, under a hooked moon holding part of a pale globe above it, and thought I saw a tent, or sleeping bags, or bodies under blankets at the front of the lawn. Who'd be sleeping out on our lawn in this suburban neighborhood, I thought almost aloud. I tiptoed over and realized that the way the light was falling must have formed a mirage. In the dimness I saw, instead, the tricycles of our oldest son and daughter, and the youngest one's baby stroller, parked all the way at the end of the drive, the edge of the lawn again, where I've told them never to leave them, as though all three lived out there in their reality. I left everything standing as it was, a stranger to their needs.

  A girl in my biology class had brought some goldfish from the cattle tank on her farm, afraid they couldn't withstand the Wisconsin winter, and I'd brought them home in a jar; they were swimming in their substantial air above the countertop. You were at the table, leafing through the catalogue for an aquarium for the children, and I sat beside you and gave you feathery kisses over the dark brown covering your forearm. Did they make any connection between what happened before and the closeness of the moment then? Do you feel them now?

  Three children within thirty-five months. Out of fear or possessiveness, or the beast in me, or what? My fear of death? Do I fear death? Do I fear it more than life? Should a scientist bring his science home? The oldest isn't five, so there's a continual battle for affection, or one brewing, and I feel streamers and beams running from them back to my brothers and sisters and me. The five of us were close in age. We were competitive and not always good company. We didn't have both our parents. We didn't live in a house like this, low and ranchlike and sprawled out on its lot, so brand-new and newlywedlike, underfurnished, that when Dad walked through it to see if there were any repairs to be made, I noticed his eyes un-limber and darken with pride, and then strain to the corners to add to the barrenness pieces burnished by the affection of years—real time to me. One dresser in one room A chair and a bed in another. We're a wee bit poor about the eighteenth of every month. Tim'rous, wee, sleekit me.

  Let's change lives. I'll be a fishing guide or an investment broker or a salesman or a poet, and you'll be a lover I met last night, exactly as you are, but I won't be blind to the qualities that made me marry you, and the others I've inhabited since, and won't handle you in any of my habitual manhandling ways; you'll be the same toward me, and we won't have any children. No, we will, but they'll be gone for a month. No, a weekend. I don't know. I envy your sleep and the dream you lie within. Do I move along its boundaries, as we moved down the Trimbelle creek that spring, when its banks on both sides were white with blossoming plum, and a hawk landed in the bare branches of a fire-scorched elm above and screamed down at us? When you wake in the morning to one of the children's crying, drugged with heaviness and not yourself for an hour, will it be from my influence on you? If this adjuration does indeed enter you or your dream, and if I tell you what I can't when you're awake, all through this darkness half the world shares, will you accept your morning disorientation, will you understand and forgive me, and will you listen again another night, or just remain here with me this morning?

  I cross to the other side of the street.

  On this corner is a brown building with its entrance at an angle to the curb. At one time it was the post office, among other enterprises, but the former postmaster, Bud McCoy, tall and thin, with thinning orange hair, is an incorrigible and blasphemous Republican, and when Roosevelt became President the post office moved up the street. Now Bud carries on the businesses that he ran concurrently in the building while it was a post office; he's the village barber (his competitor across the street lasted only a year) and the insurance agent. He and his wife live upstairs and Mrs. McCoy is a beautician, so it's not uncommon for a woman to be receiving a permanent in one barer chair while a man is shaved in the other; nor is it uncommon to smell dinner cooking in the midst of a haircut.

  Next, going up this side of the street, is Ianaccona’s Locker, where, behind a foot-thick door, a miniature of winter, smelling of ozone and stale ice, is preserved year round, and in warmer weather patrons are provided with an overcoat before entering that world, and are also given pair of heavy gloves to keep their hands from adhering to the metal locker drawers. And next, an eyesore, a big storage shed with double rolling doors like barn doors—a weathered, graying, empty, unused building owned by N. J. Ludvig, the richest man in town. Here's where I hid in that day of hide-and-seek.

  The alley again.

  Sill's Cafe, a facade of counterfeit brick (orange shingle material) that's been lounged against so much the bricks are rubbed away in spots to reveal asphalt. Sill's is the only place to come when it's cold; there are marble-topped tables and metal ice-cream chairs, a counter with swivel tools, a row of comfortable booths along one wall, where I once watched Warren Lee Ennis hold lighted matches his mouth, and a glass display case that contains everything from wristwatches to licorice to homemade cupcakes, cap guns, and jawbreakers. You can sit in Sill's all day withou
t being disturbed and never spend a cent. Wooden-bladed fans, suspended from long pipes attached to the ceiling of stamped tin, spin above you all summer and activate streamers of paper intended to frighten away flies.

  Next to Sill's, like a warning that you'll pay for over-indulgence there, is a frame building less than seventeen feet wide which accommodates the chair, the cabinet of tools, a stiff waiting couch, and the drilling apparatus of L. W. Koenig, D.D.S., Iowa State, in a frame.

  Beside his shed, and overshadowing it, the only building long this street that's made of real brick, and the only one that even hints at opulence. Flat stone pillars flank its entrance. Four wide steps of stone lead to a pair of doors so heavy they're hard to push open: beyond them, a heated foyer. Here I had my first glimpse of mortality; I remember a gray sack with "MAIL" on its side, wafers of snow melting on the floor, a crushed hat in a corner, too many men in one space, and somebody whispering to my father, "It was a stroke," a word I associate with luck, and then see, past the pairs of adult legs, a man on the floor with blue lips and a face the shade of newspaper. N. J. Ludvig. But that's all I'm permitted to see; my father hurries me on, and I walk through the foyer alone, empty now. The floor inside, made up of tiny white and green hexagonal tiles composed in a pattern that forms big white hexagons outlined in green, lifts, shiny with wax. There's a wainscoting of green-and-gray marble around the walls. Before the Depression, when the area was more prosperous, this was the Hyatt National Bank. Now it's the post office, and in the spring its plaster-and-marble walls echo with cheeping as baby chickens arrive in cardboard mailing cartons— thousands of them!—for outlying farmers who'll later sell chickens and eggs in town. The din of their peeping never alters the expression of the postmaster and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew De Fay, a prim-lipped, dignified couple in their late sixties who probably eat prunes or use Hadacol. Bud McCoy won't enter the building. His wife or bachelor son picks up the mail.