Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  He sat up on the sofa. He'd held his hands, crossed at the wrists, so tight over his chest they were asleep. He rubbed the inside of his wrists with his thumbs, then took out his pocket watch; he'd slept less than an hour. There was a smell of coffee, real or imaginary, in the room.

  He went into the kitchen and Augustina, who was at the stove with her back to him, swung around and put a hand to her throat. "Oh," she said. "I didn't know you were up."

  She'd set a place for him at the table, a china plate with the silver next to it resting on a white napkin, and he sat with his back to the window, as he'd sat in this kitchen for most of his life. Augustina had put out on the table sliced roast beef, a plate of homemade bread, a dish of honey, hard-boiled eggs, corn relish, cottage cheese, sour cream, and sliced turnips; there was a butter dish with a butter knife beside it. She took a long-handled spoon and fished an eggshell out of the coffeepot, and poured Charles a cup, then herself, and sat down across from him.

  He took a swallow of coffee, lukewarm, as he liked it, and said, "I think you should ask Lucy and her husband to come live with you,"

  "Oh?"

  "He's been laid off by the railroad, and they're having trouble keeping up their rent. They don't have children and they'd be good company."

  "Oh." Augustina looked reflective and less anxious. Charles knew that children made her nervous. "But I thought Marie might like help with the kids."

  "It would be nice. But unless things change for the better, we'll be moving on from here soon."

  "Where to?"

  "Illinois."

  "To Chicago?"

  "Further south."

  "If you need money, Charles, sell the place here. It's actually yours, I've always thought of it so; Dad gave it to you."

  "No, the place is free and clear, and it's best now to keep whatever you have."

  "Why Illinois?"

  "J. D. Prell is there. He used to be with the Hankinson Bank, and I brought him out once to try and talk sense to Dad about that co-op. Now Prell is working for a land bank around Havana, Illinois, that's buying up farm properties."

  "And you'd do that?"

  "It wouldn't be to my taste. A lot of the farms are bought by paying off a mortgage or back taxes. Prell says that the barns and outbuildings on most of the places have been let go and the land bank, or Prell's development company, or whatever, wants them repaired before they sell. He's asked me to come down and start a carpentry crew. I'd work for him but more or less be my own boss to hire and fire and fix things up as I saw fit."

  "It seems a good opportunity."

  "It does."

  "Could the boys work with you?"

  "The oldest ones, I suppose, if they want."

  The fall sunlight coming through the window lay in a broad band across his back and around his sides, embracing him with its warmth. He thought of his sons and of how unreservedly he loved them, and realized he no longer had a father. He lifted up a spoon of honey and tipped it and let the honey spill in a thick strand into the dish. "Do we still have bees?" he asked.

  "One hive. Dad kept them up until spring, and then Clarence took over."

  "How is the garden?"

  "In good shape."

  "Are the strawberry plants covered with straw?"

  "Clarence did that."

  "Clarence will be out tomorrow to help me out."

  "Poor man, I don't know what he'll do without Dad."

  "Yes, they were very close. Clarence doesn't have any real friends."

  "That, too, but Dad's kept Clarence in money for the last couple of years, you know."

  "I should have," Charles said. "Well, you could take Clarence on as a tenant farmer. He certainly knows the land, and then you'd have a little income."

  "Oh!" she said, and looked down.

  Charles sighed. "I won't move from where I am unless I have to. I love this country, and a farm is the only place to raise kids."

  He felt sententious and as though he'd spoken more in the past five minutes than in any previous year of his life. "I have to be busy," he said.

  "But you haven't eaten."

  "I'm not hungry."

  He got his carpetbag in the parlor, went outside and got the mailbox, and walked down to the barn. He unlatched the side door, a Dutch door whose halves were hooked together, and propped it open with the mailbox. The barn had stood idle for years and smelled of musty hay and old oats going bad m their bins. His vision hadn't adjusted enough to see them, but he could hear the scrabbling and the thumps of rats as they scrambled for cover, and there was a flapping of wings in the loft overhead as a large bird left by some exit. A tiger-striped cat bolted toward a dark corner where some harness hung. Lumber was stored on brackets suspended from the joists above him. In a closed stall were two wood-burning stoves, two washing machines, a half dozen horse collars and some hames, fence posts, a dynamite crate filled with a tangle of fence staples and nails, and stacks of old catalogues. There was a pair of sawhorses. He pulled them out and sat on one and sketched a coffin, with measurements, on the back of the telegram.

  He stood on the horse and sorted through the lumber and located several long pieces of one-by-eight shiplap and pulled them down. He took out his steel tape and found that they made up enough board feet. In the crowded stall he picked up a scrap of hardwood, sawed two scraps of pine to its length, a foot and a half, and nailed the pieces of pine to the hardwood in a channel shape. He took out his protractor and in the bottom of the channel drew a pair of opposed forty-five-degree angles, and then sawed edgeways through the pine boards to his pencil marks, and had a miter box. He glanced toward the house and the sunlight, so brilliant from the interior of the barn it revived his headache, made the trees and grass of the barnyard look bleached.

  He began to saw the boards for the base of the coffin to length. The sound of the saw—the rarp! tssss, rarp! tssss —echoed m the empty barn in a rhythm as regular as his breath and matched the pattern of sunlight and shadow on the floor, where sawdust was snowing down. The smell of pine pitch cleared his mind of death, and the air of the barn seemed to brighten around him. Drops of sweat started falling from his face onto the boards and were soaked up in a second, the wood was so dry. He slipped his overall suspenders off his shoulders, removed his shirt, hung it on a harness peg, and slipped the suspenders onto his shoulders again. His bare back was sensitive to the building's dimness.

  He cut three cleats to go across the boards of the coffin's base, beveled their edges with a block plane, nailed them in place—moistening the nails with saliva to prevent the dry wood from splitting—and then turned the base over and clinched the nail ends that were pointing through the boards and polished bright. He turned it back again and nailed pieces of one-by-three hardwood over the two end cleats, letting the hardwood project six inches on either side, and had handles for carrying the spacers so the ropes used to lower the coffin could be pulled free. He began to miter one-by-eights for the coffin's sides and ends, and felt eyes on him. He turned.

  "Charles." A figure was silhouetted in the doorway.

  "Clarence?" Charles couldn't make out features, and the voice reverberated beyond recognition in the barn.

  "Yes, Clarence." He shambled up to Charles as though gliding, his face a dim mask. "I noticed the door open and heard the saw. I got to thinking after you left. I thought you might like a hand today, you know, with—" Clarence gestured with his jutting jaw toward the coffin base.

  "It's really a job for just one man. Thank you."

  "Well, then, I thought you might like some of this." Clarence pulled a partly full pint of whiskey from his hip pocket. Charles removed the cap, poured a dash of whiskey in it, and tossed the whiskey down. "Thank you," he said, and handed the bottle back to Clarence.

  "I know you don't drink, Charles, but, goodness, you can sure have more than that and not get stumbly."

  "That's just enough to remind me of yesterday, which was enough for the rest of my life, I believe."

>   "Oh-ho," Clarence said. "Yeah, I thought there was a sort of cloud hanging about you. Well, here's to the good days that are gone."

  Clarence put the bottle to his lips, tipped it, and the whiskey appeared to percolate as his gullet swelled and throbbed several times. He recapped the bottle and became contemplative. "Well, I was also wondering if you didn't want me to get started in at town, at the cemetery, you know, on the grave there. I'm the .one usually does that." The whiskey was working in him; creases appeared in his stubbled cheeks with his smile of pride, and his eyes turned lustrous.

  "I'm going to bury him here," Charles said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm going to bury him on the farm here."

  "Here?"

  "That's what I said."

  "But your mother's buried in the cemetery at church! The gravestone there has your dad's name on it!"

  "I'm aware of that."

  "This isn't consecrated ground!"

  "It was to him."

  "What will the priest say?"

  "I have no idea."

  "Charles!"

  "I believe a priest can bless the area of a gravesite, if he'd like."

  "But this is against all your beliefs!"

  "If it was, I wouldn't do it."

  "What will people say? You know, your mother buried where she is, in the cemetery there, and then your dad way out here?"

  "People always say what they want, no matter what. I've decided."

  "It's heathen," Clarence said. He uncapped the bottle and sat on a sawhorse. He shook his head, as though to shake free from it a daze of disbelief, and finished the whiskey. "Well, Charles, if that's your decision, then how about me starting the grave out here?"

  "It would make things easier, but I'd best do it myself."

  "You don't have to pay me."

  "I'd rather, because I would. I want you to help tomorrow, though, as I said, and I can pay you four dollars."

  "I don't want money, Charles. You have a wife and kids, you—"

  "I can pay you four dollars."

  "Whatever you say."

  "I want to bury him at noon. I'd like you here an hour earlier."

  "I will. Absolutely."

  "It was thoughtful of you to come out. I think you should stay for lunch"—Charles pulled out his pocket watch—"and I think Augustina would like you to stay, too. We have something to ask of you. And it's lunchtime right now."

  Charles got his shirt from the harness peg, and Clarence brushed off his clothes, lifted his cap and smoothed back his hair, tucked his shirt tighter into his pants, and dropped the whiskey bottle inside one of the wood-burning stoves. When they were both at the open door, Charles turned to him and said, "But after lunch, Clarence, I have to be alone."

  *

  Charles finished the coffin at two o'clock. He sealed the cracks and seams in it with wood putty. He found a binder canvas with most of the slats missing or removed and cut it in lengths to fit the sides and base of the coffin, then painted the interior of the coffin with tar, and pressed the lengths of canvas into place. The lid was identical to the base, but with a flat, one-by-three strip around its edges he hoped would help make it seal, and the cleats on it faced inward. He painted the top of the lid with tar, laid canvas over it, nailed over the canvas another thickness of one-by-eights, rasped their outer edges round, and sanded them smooth.

  He wanted to trim the base of the coffin to match the lid but there was no more one-by-three material. He began ripping a one-by-eight in strips. The rasp and sob of the crosscut saw going with the grain. A sharper smell of pine pitch rising as the saw blade heated, a sensation of rising with it, incorporeal as aroma and omniscient, observing thick, nicotine-stained fingers and calloused hands perform work in a world below, where light and shadow clashed. He cut his thumb and blood soaked into the board in a spreading stain. He raised up and spatters of blood appeared over the board as though springing through its surface from beneath. There was no pain. He pinched the thumb at its base, and then took out his handkerchief, tore a strip from it, wrapped it around his thumb, and pulled the knot tight with his teeth. He finished ripping the board and trimmed the coffin's base.

  He brought the mailbox into the barn and removed it from its pole. He cut into the domed top with a hacksaw, the parted metal shrieking against the metal blade, and sawed off the side of the box that held his father's name. He drew marks radiating from the center of the name, used them as a guide to draw an oval around it, and cut the oval out with tin snips. He placed the oval on a piece of wood beam and, with a nail set as a stylus, hammered into the orange paint of each letter, countersinking permanently into the metal "Otto Neumiller," as his father had printed it. He punched holes through the sides of the oval and nailed it at the head of the coffin lid. Darkness spread over his back, and the barn door slammed.

  He picked up an iron bar leaning against a feedbox and propped open the door with it. He'd brought the crucifix from his father's room out after lunch, and now he fastened it to the center of the coffin lid. He tarred the inner edge of the lid, tarred the top edge of the coffin walls, and then started nails at two-inch intervals along the lid for securing it down. From the stall he took a fence post, nailed the channel-shaped miter box to one end, filled the saw cuts in its pine sides with putty, fitted a block into one end, and then roofed the box with a wider board. He put the post over his shoulder, grabbed the iron bar propping the door, and went out to the road. He set the post in the old mailbox hole and tamped rocks and dirt around it. He stepped back; it was standing true. There, Augustina, he thought. There, Augustina, or whoever else lives here.

  He went behind the house, past the woodshed and the garden, to the flat where Sand Grass Creek formed a U, and searched around in the weeds until he found a shallow depression, which was nearly square, and had a ridge around it that was formed when the walls of his father's homesteading shack deteriorated and sank back to the ground. One of Charles's memories was of his father pointing out the place and saying, m German, "You see that, Charles. That's where my real home is." And later, when Charles was older, he was walking through it behind his father and his father said, "Dis is where da stove was. Here da table. Food in a wall here. Here we slept." As his father grew older, every time he passed the area he'd say, "There's where I want to be buried, Charles."

  The last time Charles came to see him, his father said from his sickbed, "Where do I want to be buried?"

  "You shouldn't be thinking such things. You're a strong man. You have years ahead of you."

  "Naw, I'm done. I feel done. I'm past the Bible age. I want to be buried." He winked. "Why not? Everybody has to. I'm tired of the days, the days, the days. I want to be happy. I want to die and sleep forever. Now. Where do I—"

  "Dad, this sort of attitude—"

  “Ach! Attitude! Do you hear what I’m saying, boy? Now. Where do I want to be buried?"

  "You used to say where your shack was."

  "Good! You're right! I do. And if you got anything to say about it, Charles, you'll see it's there, ja?"

  "Mother's not buried there."

  "Ah, well, your ma wanted better things, she always did, God bless her. I don't. I want what I want. If there's a heaven, I'll meet her in heaven, and if not—" He threw up his hands. "Our bones ain't going to do anything in the ground together, especially locked up in steel boxes." He winked again.

  Charles was about to say these weren't light matters.

  "Shush!" his father commanded, and lay back and closed his eyes and said in a weak voice, "I've spoke my piece."

  Charles had started out of the room, when his father said, "And I don't want to be buried in no steel box! I want a wood one!"

  From the low ground of the homesteading shack, looking across the creek to the north and the east, the plain stretched off in golds and grays and blues to the line of the horizon; to the west, he could see the buildings of Mahomet and the road to the farm. A prairie willow grew a ways downstream, and stan
ding closer was an oak his father's favorite, and when Charles was young his father used any excuse to come upstairs and talk to him here; and from the day Charles's mother died until just a few months ago, when his father's final illness confined him downstairs, he'd slept here. Charles let the curtain fall.

  He went to the closet, opened the door, and was surrounded by a smell of cedar and camphor balls. Who'd put the camphor in a cedar-lined closet? The smell of it and the needlessness of it here gave him a wash of the nausea he'd felt on the treadle of the train. When he was a child, he used to sit in the closet with the door closed, and pretend he was on needle-blanketed ground with heavy boughs above him, in the green center of a forest, or a forest as he imagined one; he'd never seen a real forest in his life, not to this day. And sitting in the closet, he visualized the walls of his bedroom around him, and around his bedroom the house, and around that the farmyard, the shape of the creek around the fields, the shape of the county around the creek, and around that the rectangle of North Dakota, at the center of North America, and felt enclosed in layers of protection, invulnerable—marginalia of a boyhood now gone from him beyond regret.

  Why was it that he so seldom thought of his past?

  He never thought of it. And why, when he thought of himself in this room as a child or a young man, could he picture himself only from the chest down, as though he'd had no face? Because there was never a mirror in the room? He sometimes fell asleep in the closet and slept through the night, and it was here he'd first committed the boyhood sin he was so ashamed of, God forgive. "Jackup," a classmate in the third or fourth grade had misnamed it, and he'd had an image of the big steel screw jacks under the granary, and then he'd received from the classmate, in the school pony stable, a demonstration.

  Clothes covers made of chintz, like old cloaks, were draped over groups of garments hung from the closet rod. He opened one out. There were dresses inside—his mother's, from the dark colors and cut of them—and behind the dresses he saw the shoulders of a man's coat. He unhooked the hanger, pulled the coat out, and lifted it open by a lapel. There were trousers with it. The label over the breast pocket read "L. J. Frantz, Fargo."