Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  It was his high-school graduation suit. His father had taken him on the train to Fargo to buy it, had made an occasion of the day, had embarrassed Charles by telling the clerks and old man Frantz that his son was a high-school graduate, and had picked out the suit himself. It was black, of a heavy hopsack weave, and its cut, Charles had thought then, was old-mannish and European, and he'd hated it. Had he worn it a dozen times? A half dozen, maybe. How decent disrespect seemed to him then.

  He removed the jacket from the hanger and tried it on. It fit so perfectly it could have been tailored for him. He took it off, hung it over the chair back, took off his overalls, and pulled on the pants. They fit nearly as well, but were big at the waist. The suit he'd brought, his only suit, was tan-colored and baggy on him, and he decided to wear this for the burial. He lifted the upper mattress, held it aloft with his head, smoothed the trousers over the bottom mattress, and lowered the upper mattress down on them. He went across the room in his undershorts and closed the closet door.

  He pulled open the top drawer of the dresser. Inside were mismatched stockings heavily darned, a bronze bust of the Virgin, a white statuette of an elephant that tasted, he knew, like alum; arrowheads, a sachet, a slide rule, a screwdriver, and a clump of tangled rosaries. He took out a wallet-sized notebook with a cover of stiff brown paperboard and thumbed through it. Poems, mostly of the self-improvement sort, were copied in the book in Augustina's correct and girlish hand—"The Psalm of Life," "Aim High," "Daughter, Don't Let Mother Do It!"—along with inspirational quotes from Abraham Lincoln.

  Following the quotes and poems were several pages, which must have been dictated, entitled "Edicot."

  Stopping to look in shop windows is against the rule of

  street edicot.

  To eat anything on the street is a sign of bad breeding.

  A lady must recognize a gentleman by bowing before

  he can acknowledge any acquaintance with her.

  And farther on:

  In entering a carriage be careful that your back is toward

  the seat you are to occupy.

  If there be a step for entering the carriage land on it

  with your left foot, or there are two steps put right

  foot on the first and left foot on the next in order that

  you may enter the carriage with right foot.

  Sink easily into the seat and if you are to sit on the

  other side reverse the action.

  The seat facing the horses is the seat of honor and

  should be given to the eldest lady.

  What was this from?

  Charles flipped the pages backward and saw, on the inside of the front cover, Augustina's signature, and after it an address in Chicago. Their father sent her to an academy and finishing school when she was sixteen, but Charles couldn't remember, now, a time when Augustina was away from the farm. He did remember stories about her and her difficulties in the city; how she was terrified of the crowds, the forward men, the trolley cars and the noise, and especially the lake—the big lake she couldn't see the other side of. She kept to her room, and took sick often, and didn't finish out the year.

  He dropped the notebook into the drawer and closed it. What was he doing while Augustina was away? If she was sixteen, he would be what? Eleven? Twelve? All he could really remember from most of his boyhood was working here in the fields, and the changes of season—as though his past were composed of only four memories: the work in the spring, the work in the summer, the work in the fall, and in the winter little work, except tending to the stock and digging out after blizzards. Details were heaped within the walls of those divisions, and he'd never bothered to look back on the details again.

  He realized he couldn't remember when Augustina was away because he was also away then. His father had sent him to a Benedictine abbey west of Bismarck for the seventh and eighth grades; he wanted him to have a better education than the country school could provide before he entered high school—for he was determined that Charles finish high school—and also hoped that the life of the abbey would appeal to Charles enough to interest him in the priesthood. Was his father hurt that he'd asked to leave the abbey after his second year? Of course. The mind could see better backward than what was at hand.

  He'd learned his Latin fairly well. All of the teachers were Benedictine priests and his Latin teacher, the only teacher he liked or really remembered, a flashy Irishman who knew seven languages, referred to him as Der Alte, because he was so formal and solemn-faced even then. It wasn't that he disliked the abbey; he simply knew from the beginning that he'd never become a priest.

  He went to the bed and lay on top of the covers, drew the comforter at the footboard up to his chin, willed himself to be awake in one hour, and fell asleep.

  *

  When he woke he rolled in bed and reached for his wife and realized where he was. He took his pocket watch from his overalls on the chair; it was eight o'clock. He dressed and went downstairs, and saw that Augustina had laid out the articles he'd asked for on the oak table.

  After supper he said to her, "You'd best go to your room now."

  She took up a kerosene lamp and went to the foot of the stairs. "I'm going to write Lucy and her husband," she said. "I think they might like living here."

  "I'm sure they would."

  "And it was good of you to think of Clarence, I won't worry about him now. I won't worry about the farm. I feel I've been delivered from worry."

  "I'm glad."

  "God bless you, Charles. I'm so grateful to you, I—" She turned away and went up the stairs. He followed her footsteps after she was out of sight and realized, as she passed his room, that he could hear, from where he stood, the two notes of the windowpane, and wondered if she'd marry Clarence. He turned up the lamp on the table, went into the kitchen to the sink pump, pumped a basinful of water, and brought the basin in to the table. He pushed everything aside and laid down a thickness of sheets, went to his father's room, and put his hand on the knob. He'd never prepared a corpse.

  He opened the door. The room had a warm, rank, sweetish-foul gastric smell, and he waited inside the doorway until he became acclimated to it, then drew the sheet away and was startled to see the silver dollars. As he moved around the bed, the floorboards groaning under him, he pulled the lower sheet from the mattress, folded it over the sheet already covering his father's body, and worked his arms under his father's back and thighs. He lifted and went backward, off-balance, the silver dollars crashing to the floor, and struck the bureau with his rear end and made its legs grate. A silver dollar circling on its rim chattered to a stop. He'd braced himself for a hundred and fifty pounds, his father's weight, but at this moment he couldn't weigh more than eighty. His body was as stony, dehumanized, and rigid as bone. Charles carried him to the table and laid him on the thickness of sheets there.

  He sloshed a bar of soap in the basin of water and washed his father's hair and beard with the sponge. He held a cloth over his index finger, dampened it, and wiped the features of his father's face, where light from the lamp lay yellow-gold and remembered him saying, "I'm not pretty, but it's me, so I guess I've got to like it, and I do." Charles went to the stairs, took the straight razor from the breast pocket of his suit coat, hearing F#, B, F#, B, and placed his foot on the second tread of the stairs and stropped the razor across his overall thigh.

  He rubbed his fingers over the cake of soap and moved them ahead of the razor as he shaved the stubble grown in around his father's beard. Sweat was falling from his face in gray splashes on the sheet, and his intestines trembled and gave out a groan. He was grateful for the notes of the windowpane and concentrated on them until he became abstracted from his work.

  Clarence carrying o'clock twelve.

  He emptied the washbasin in the kitchen and refilled it, then drew the sheet away from his father's chest. He drew the sheet down farther, below his stomach, which was swollen and discolored, and washed it to the line of metallic-gray
pubic hair. The yellow-gold on his father's face trembled and faded, his features went brown, then orange, and then the wick recovered and the lamp burned evenly again over a face no longer a face, but a skin of chrysoprase about a skull. Charles laid a towel across his chest and stomach to absorb the moisture of washing, and removed the sheet completely. It was the first time he'd seen his father's genitals.

  He washed his arms and hands, his legs and feet, then cleaned his nails with a pocketknife. He rubbed rose water over his body, and then folded a clean towel, placed it beside his head, his mind moving F# to B and D, and turned him face down. The backs of his arms and thighs, his shoulders and his buttocks, were flattened and plum-colored, and his rectum was plugged with a cloth. Charles washed his back and rubbed it with rose water and turned him again.

  He got the clothes Augustina had laid out and worked the trousers up his father's legs to his waist and then put on his stockings and shoes. His father's arms, bony and blue, were so rigid against his sides Charles knew that, without help, he couldn't put on the shirt and coat. It might be possible to pull them up his arms, but his skin, which was parchmentlike to the touch, slid so easily over his flesh Charles was afraid it would tear. He took a pair of scissors from Augustina's sewing basket and cut off the sleeves of the shirt, cut through the back of the collar and along the side and shoulder seams, and removed the back panel. He tied the tie around his own neck, loosened the knot and removed it, and then laid the shirt front over his father's chest and slipped the tie underneath his head, around his head, and down to his throat, tucked the tie under the shirt collar, and used it to draw the collar tight.

  Then he took the coat and began to rip it up the back, at the center seam, but the sound was so amplified in the silent house he murmured a prayer and used the scissors to cut the seam up to the collar. He stopped there. From the center seam, at shoulder-blade level, he cut across the back of the coat to the right sleeve and down the seam of the sleeve through the cuff; he did the same to the other sleeve and opened the coat out. He slipped the collar under his father's head and buttoned the front of the coat He had to remove, at the side seams, the two panels of the back, which made too much material to work with. He tucked the sleeve edges between his father's arms and sides, tucked the top of the coat under his shoulders, folded the towel beside his head so that a clean side was out, and turned him face down again. He drew the sleeve edges and coat sides through, up to each armpit, laid the panels he'd removed in place, and then took needle and thread and sewed up the coat.

  He turned him once more, unbuttoned the coat, sewed the sides of the shirt to its lining, and buttoned it up again. He put the razor back in his suit, removed a comb from the breast pocket, and combed his father's hair and beard. He took the best sheet Augustina had left out and went into the bedroom and spread it over the bed. He lifted the window shade. The woodshed and the weeds beyond were silver-blue, the weeds swaying with the wind in the moonlight, and from the window he could see, far off to the left, the mound of dirt and the upright bar. He drew the shade. He carried his father into the room, laid him down, and folded the clean sheet over him. He found the silver dollars—one beside a chair leg, one under the bed—and put them in the change purse in the bureau. He crossed himself at the front and closed the door.

  He washed the table, gathered the sheets and towels up, took them into the kitchen and washed them in the sink, and went into a utility porch off the kitchen and hung them on clotheslines, then returned to the parlor, turned the lamp low, and took it with him up the stairs. There was a line of light under Augustina's door, and he remembered that she read at night, sometimes all through the night, until exhaustion overtook her. Inside his own room, something was wrong; the bedcovers had been straightened, and the jacket was missing from the chair. He opened the closet door. Augustina had hung it up. He set the lamp down on the dresser, glanced behind him, and then drew open the dresser drawer and took out Augustina's notebook. What was there about this that unsettled him so?

  Never open your napkin entirely but let it lay on your

  lap partway folded.

  To blow soup to cool it or pouring out tea or coffee

  for same purpose shows ill-breeding and is never

  seen in society.

  Many of the entries were not in Augustina's usual hand, were ragged or wholly illegible, as though she'd been forced to take dictation too fast, or was under mental strain, and he wondered what all she'd gone through during that year. He felt eyes on him from the doorway and turned. Nobody was there. Augustina must have seen him with the notebook and stepped back in the hall, out of sight, to keep from embarrassing him. He dropped the notebook into the drawer, closed it, and cleared his throat. He could feel a presence just outside the door and turned, waiting for Augustina.

  Then the presence moved into the room.

  He stepped back and struck the dresser, and lamplight rocked in wobbling lines over the walls. The atmosphere of the room had changed as suddenly as the weather; it was cooler and less claustrophobic. The presence moved past him to the window; he'd summoned his boyhood self to this room by remembering, earlier, so much of his past here, that was it. The presence was so tangible he could even gauge its height at the window, just above the second mullion, and it wasn't his height as a young man. It was the height of his father. It turned a more powerful side in his direction.

  "Ah!" he cried. He grabbed the lamp and hurried into the hall and saw Augustina in a nightgown, silhouetted in the door to her room, her hair undone and down to her waist.

  "Charles?"

  He couldn't speak.

  "Charles?"

  "Water," he said, and felt as if not he but somebody else, a fugitive inside him with a hand at his throat, had spoken.

  "What is it, Charles? I heard you talking."

  "Need some water."

  "Are you all right?"

  "Yes."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes."

  He started down the stairs, and her door closed. At the foot of the stairs he stopped, realizing how he'd react if any of his children came to him in the night and told him they'd felt something similar; he'd say it was foolishness, their imagination, and tell them to go back to bed. He climbed the stairs, entered his room, and went to the window. The air was as mellow and cleansed as summer air after a rain. It was the alcohol, the sleeplessness, his nerves, and handling his father's body that had affected his mind to such a point. How many times had he traced its shape while he washed and rubbed him with rose water? He hummed the D to harmonize with the pane, nearly noiselessly this time, slipped a suspender off his shoulder, and turned to the chair.

  The presence was now prone on his bed. He went to the bed and held the lamp high. There was no indentation in the covers. He passed his hand over the mattress and felt nothing but bedcovers and mattress, but when he drew back he could sense somebody there. He'd heard that the spirits of certain people, troubled or restless people, sometimes wandered searching until the detail troubling them was taken care of, or their restlessness met with affection and prayer. Was it right to bury his father so far from his mother? Should he wait for a priest?

  He took a rosary from the dresser drawer and went down the stairs to his father's room. He put the lamp on the bureau, closed the door, and went over and opened the window wide. The out-buildings and the weeds beyond were the same shade of blue, but it was colder now, and he could feel dew falling through the night air. He set a chair beside the bed, turned to blow out the lamp, and saw his father's missal on the bureau. He picked it up and a square of paper adhering to its back dropped onto the bureau top. The paper was folded several times and had been handled so much it was oil-saturated and had the feel of old cloth. Charles unfolded it with care, seeing that most of the creases were worn through and parting, and opened it to the dim light. It was dated three years ago and was written in German, in laboriously formed old-fashioned script, and Charles saw that it was from his son.

  Greet
ings, Dearest Grandfather!

  I send you this on the occasion of your seventy-fifth

  birthday to let you know you have my admiration

  and fondest wishes. A seventy-fifth birthday is a great

  event and needs a grand celebration. Please enjoy

  the day! You are many times in my thoughts here

  at the university, where I'm working my hardest to

  get as fine an education as I can, and I hope this

  letter will let you see that I've learned more than

  a little! God bless you, dearest Grandfather, and I

  send you once again my greetings, my love, and

  all my warm thoughts to you.

  Your Grandson, Martin

  Charles slipped the letter into the missal. He felt chastened by Martin, and was ashamed that he himself had never been as open and affectionate to his father. He blew out the lamp. He sat in the chair and pulled it closer to the bed and, when his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, realized he could see, visible through the sheet against the moonlight, the dark shape of his father's body, and thought, Have I displeased you, Dad? Should I have shown more filial love? Am I wrong to bury you here? Would you like a priest and a Requiem? Is there a way you can let me know what you want? Should I pray now or just sit beside you? Do you want me to sit with you here until morning?

  He tried to say the Rosary but couldn't and put it aside. He began his boyhood bedtime prayers, which he hadn't said since he left this house and which once had a soporific effect on him equal to ether, and before he was halfway through them woke to see sunlight shining in the open window.'

  There was a sound of metal wheels spanging over gravel and a horizontal pole passed outside, and then the implement to which the pole was attached, a hayrake, rolled into view. Charles got up and ran out on the porch. Blue-gray mist rose from the weeds and grass like smoke from an extinguished fire, and a man in gray coveralls, Sy Rolfe, a young fellow Martin's age, the son of the neighboring farmer, was pulling the hayrake through the yard by hand. Charles ran out and took hold of a wheel. Sy pulled hard on the pole, swayed it from side to side, jerked it, and then said, "Now what the—" and turned. His eyes were the luminous, unsuspecting blue of youth.