Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  He said, "Oh. Mr. Neumiller. I wasn't sure you'd got in. Hi. I'm sorry about your dad."

  "What are you doing?"

  "Pa told me to come and get this.”

  "Is it yours?"

  "No."

  "Then, why?"

  "Pa said your pa owes us for seed oats from five years back that Clarence got, or something. Pa figured they was worth about this much, er—" Sy raised and lowered the pole of the rake as though measuring its weight in money.

  "Take it back where you got it," Charles said.

  "But Pa said I was to come home with it."

  "Tell your father he can make claims on the estate, if he has any, through the lawyer in town when the estate's being settled. There'll be no more of this. Now, take it back."

  Charles released his grip on the wheel and Sy rolled the rake backward, close to the tool shed, let its pole drop, and went up the lane toward the road, glancing around at Charles as though his back got more vulnerable with each step. The mist lay in coiling banks that came to his elbows, and for long stretches his legs couldn't be seen; he'd walk a ways and then appear to glide to the next break in the mist, then walk on ground again. On the highway he moved above a gray-blue sea. Charles went out to Sand Grass Creek, where weeds were silvered with dew and dripping, and began digging again.

  He finished the grave at nine o'clock. The mist was gone. He brought ropes and the coffin lid from the barn, laid the lid over feed sacks on top of the mound of dirt, concealed the ropes under it, and then got the coffin (the smell of tar was hardly noticeable in it) and carried it to the front porch. He went to the river beside the oak, pulled off his shirt and washed himself, and then removed his shoes and let his feet soak in the cold water as he took out; a sack of tobacco and a package of papers, and had a cigarette for the first time in two days. He went to the house and washed again at the kitchen sink, a more thorough washing with soap, and then shaved, told Augustina he wouldn't have breakfast, and went upstairs and changed into the black suit. He knelt at the bed and prayed for the peace and repose of his father's soul, and asked forgiveness for himself if he'd done anything amiss.

  *

  Clarence arrived from town at ten-thirty, wearing a jacket and bow tie with his worn trousers, and he and Charles carried the coffin into the parlor and placed it on the table. Charles went into his father's room and folded back the sheet and saw that both of his father's eyes were open and bulging in their sockets. Clarence came into the room and stared down at the body, wide-eyed, shaking his head as though about to turn and leave, and then he sighed and his smaller eye wobbled with emotion. He looked at Charles, glanced over his shoulder to the parlor, where Augustina was waiting, and eased the door shut with his hip. "Charles," he said, and pulled a pint of unopened whiskey from his pocket. "Do you mind?" He gestured toward the body with his chin. "You know, if I sort of give him this?"

  "No."

  Clarence slipped the bottle into a pocket of the sewn-together suit coat, folded the flap closed, and patted the pocket. "Who knows, Charles?" he said. "Who really knows? The Indians used to do it."

  "It might have pleased him."

  Clarence opened the door, Charles rolled the sheet into a tight roll on one side of his father, Clarence rolled it into a tight roll on the other, and then they lifted. "He's so light!" Clarence whispered. And Charles was astonished to see that his father's limbs were now as limp and slack as if he were sleeping. They carried the body to the parlor and lowered it into the coffin, and Charles unrolled the sheet, drawing it into gathers, and arranged the gathers along the base of the coffin and around his father's sides and head. He'd built the coffin. small, only two feet wide by five feet eight inches long, and still his father looked dwarfed by it, so diminished and childlike that Charles had the feeling he was retreating from the three of them in front of their eyes.

  Charles went into the bedroom, took the missal from the bureau, and gave it to Augustina. Her face was ashen, with blotches of red, and she'd removed her thick glasses to dry her eyes, or to keep from seeing too clearly this representation, this husk of their father.

  "Clarence," Charles said, and went to the head of the coffin, facing down its length, and nodded for Clarence to go to the foot.

  "Didn't you tell me it was to be at noon?"

  "We're ready. I'd rather it was done.” They were both whispering.

  "Whatever you say.”

  Clarence took the foot of the coffin by the hardwood handles, Charles the head; they lifted; Augustina opened the screen door, and their heavy shoes scraped over the boards of the porch as the weight of the coffin swayed between them. Clarence held the foot higher as Charles came down the steps, and Charles saw a wet line running down his shaved cheek. Clarence took another hold and turned, facing forward, and they went around the house, past the woodshed and the garden, and walked through thick weeds; and the brush and lateral sweep of the weeds across the coffin filled Charles with a sudden hope, the nameless emotion he'd felt on the train, and then he looked down at his father's face.

  They set the coffin beside the open grave. Charles took the missal from Augustina, unable to look at her, and read the last rites at the grave in Latin. He sang "Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine" and Augustina and Clarence gave the responses. He placed the missal beside his father's right hand and saw that his forehead and nose and beard were dusted with pollen. The shadow of Charles's head across his body looked deformed, and he reached up and discovered he was wearing a cap. He removed it and was amazed; had he actually been wearing this striped work cap with his suit? And the shredded strip of handkerchief was still around his thumb.

  He stood, his thigh and chest muscles trembling, and began to sing, from the Benediction after Mass, "Tantum ergo Sacramenturru" His voice found its natural placement and opened in deep tones, his breath appearing in columns of different lengths in front of his lips, and after "Tantum ergo" he started with hardly a pause his favorite song from Benediction, the slower, more sedate, more minor “O salutaris Hostia, Quae coeli pandis ostium.” And he could see the censer at Benediction swinging from its chains, myrrh burning on charcoal, the ciborium beside the tabernacle, beside that the sunburst of the monstrance, which suddenly sent its rays through the walls and ceiling as his voice rose, and then there were arched windows letting in light, then arches of pure light, and he was lifted into the center of his voice, bodiless, and went gliding down the arches and emerged over a field of ripe wheat, limitlessly gold under the sun, and the sun became an entrance his voice passed through.

  "Amen."

  Charles stared at the coffin lid, at the crucifix, the oval with his father's name countersunk into it, at the nails along the lid, each with its black shadow, at the hammer beside the lid, and felt such an uncharacteristic and malevolent bitterness that he had to lock his knees to feel his legs beneath him. He wanted to see lightning across the entire sky, a violent storm, falling snow, or a dove burst from his father's breast and fly off from the coffin—some sign that his father's life and good deeds had not gone unnoticed on earth, not for his father's sake or his own sake, but so his sons and daughters would always feel he believed in a just and reasonable God. He replaced his cap, got the lid and laid it over the coffin, picked the hammer up, and went down on one knee and drove the first nail home with a single blow. Augustina touched his shoulder, and Clarence said, "Wait." Charles looked up, and then to where Clarence and Augustina were looking, and saw, in the direction of the farms to the north and the east, and in a ragged procession along the road from town, dark shapes, mourners in black clothes, grownups and children moving over the plain, coming to pay their last respects to his father.

  2

  NEW YEAR

  He'd dreamed he'd been sleeping in the catacombs, those cold and nitrous tombs he'd heard of only out of history books and from nuns' lips. The shuffling of a pair of slippers traced a tangle of paths and passageways through his sleep, the sound of an object being dropped struck deep into a dream and
turned up as a spatula, and somebody in the kitchen (who?), whispering to Dinah in a banjo tune, mingled with the hiss of a kettle making steam, had washed out a great cave, the echoing hollow where he now lay. There was a cold crown around his ears and forehead and a frosty network stiffening his nostrils, and he felt, at the outline of himself, a heavy and constricting, wrinkled skin. And then he remembered that he hadn't undressed.

  There was a rumble of a cookstove grate as coals were shaken down, and he saw a pattern of cracks, as intricate as in shattered ice, across the leather back of the horsehair sofa, and January 1, 1936, rose above a horizon in his mind. It could mark the beginning of a new life with the new year. Oh, let it, he thought, and was seized by a trembling sigh and half yawn. He covered his head with the quilt. Until Alpha came downstairs, the world wouldn't know he was awake. He'd be a mole if her brother or parents appeared, hibernating under silver webbing in a niche of the cave. He'd be— Last night, here in the Jones house, he'd asked Alpha to be his wife.

  This mole is smiling in his burrow with a star-shaped nose of gold, Martin Neumiller his name. He started out yesterday, the sky violet-blue against the white of the plain, the air so still and brilliant that trees and buildings seemed sculptured out of its iciness, and then on his way to Wimbledon to get Alpha a gift, a box of chocolates, snowflakes started drifting out of the violet, and then a wind hit, rocking the car on its springs, and by the time he pulled into their yard, a distance of three and a half miles, the white stuff was up to the axle hubs of the Model A.

  The blizzard swirled away the drifted surface of the countryside and wrapped the house in blackness, while the clock on the piano chimed and showed twelve noon and the windmill in the barnyard spun in the rising wind like a corrective gear. Nobody dared to go out and shut it off. A woman on the other side of Wimbledon, a Mrs. Lundby, left for her barn last year in a similar storm and lost her way and was found twenty paces from her back door, frozen to death. So the windmill clattered and shrieked in the distance, its lifter banging like a mallet on tin, and Ed Jones cursed it, and murmured, "That barnyard will be a skating rink the rest of the winter, folks, you can bet your ass on that."

  The kerosene lamps were lit, split railroad ties brought in from the back porch—along with two lumps of coal, precious coal—the potbellied stove in the front room was fired up, and blankets and rugs were draped over the doors and windows, where the wind hit and billowed them.

  "We're in a tent," Alpha's little brother, Lionell, cried. "We're living in a tent!"

  "Thank your lucky stars we're not," Mrs. Jones said. She opened the door of the potbellied stove and pulled up a rocker and sat staring in at the flames.

  Alpha chorded a slow hymn on the piano and then swiveled around and wrung her fingers. So cold!

  "We've got a few dozen storm windows under a porch somewhere," Ed Jones said. And then he unblocked the fireplace, and in a few minutes a shuddering blaze rose above his hard-bitten profile with its big hooked nose. He sat on a couch in front of the fire with his legs apart, rubbing his hands and saying, "Ah! Ah, God! Ah!" And once when he and Martin were alone in the room, he leaned over and whispered, "Say, boy, doesn't that warm up your balls?"

  He stared at Martin as though he expected a direct reply. His sea-green eyes, sunk in deep sockets, overhung by heavy eyebrows that flared up at the ends, as gleaming and fierce as a bird of prey's, were filled with a fulminating look Martin could never fathom: anger? deviltry? anguish? Jones had a square jaw of the English sort and lips so thin all you noticed of them were the two peaks of red at their center. It was his eyes; they seemed brimming with an incendiary knowledge that had no outlet, and with the same fulminating look in them, he could say, "Martin, God love you, you're One of the finest young fellows hereabouts." Or, about a milch cow that bedeviled his wife when he wasn't in the barn to supervise. "Someday I'm going to take that muley bitch by the tail and pull her tits out her eardrums."

  Now Jones went from the fire to his bedroom and emerged in a suit and tie and highly polished shoes, trailing a smoky and medicinal smell of whiskey, and sat in his chair as if in state. He was five feet six, or less, and Martin, who was studying history in college, couldn't help thinking of him as Napoleonic. His piercing stare and the emanations that came from him and kept Martin silent gave Jones a power over people he seemed afraid of. He kept retreating into the bedroom for surreptitious nips, growing more glassy-eyed, aromatic, and withdrawn, and spent the afternoon telling God, in variations of His name, what He was doing to the livestock and wildlife with His storm. While Martin, a wordless subject in this court, stared at the fireplace, then at the horsehair sofa where Lionell lay with glazed eyes sucking his thumb, and thought, How will I get home? How will I get to church tomorrow? It's a feast day. It's a holy day of obligation dear Lord. '

  After one of Jones's trips to the bedroom, he pulled a silver hip flask out and held it in his lap. "The wife and daughter got me this," he said. "Although neither of them wants me to drink. What do you think of that?" Martin shrugged.

  "I think it was an act of trickery on their part. Or else trust. I once had a flask exactly like this, but I gave it away, or loaned it to a friend, or threw it in a hole in the ground—however you care to look at it. Tergiversationatory irrationable man." Jones winked at Martin. "So the two gals got me this." He revolved the flask in his hands, and his hands and reflections of his hands, joined at the fingertips, slid around its silver curves with his face framed between. He tipped the flask toward Martin. "Some virtues of the earth, boy?"

  Martin shook his head.

  "Oh, come on. It'll make you feel smart."

  "I'd rather not."

  "Sprinkle some on your breath. Have a whiff of it."

  Martin managed a smile.

  "Oh, so you're going to try to kiss and woo the daughter again, huh?"

  Martin blushed.

  Jones was usually attentive to Martin's moods, but when there was no letup in the blizzard, it was Mrs. Jones who finally spoke: "It's no use trying to drive in this weather, Martin. The couch will be yours tonight." She was at the cookstove fixing supper and kept her back to him as she said it, and Alpha, who was in the kitchen helping, turned and winked at him.

  Then the evening meal, a traditional Scandinavian holiday feast, with meatballs and boiled potatoes, creamed corn, fruit soup and lefse, and for dessert, fl0te gr0t, sweet cream cooked with a little rice and a little sugar until the cream formed liquid butter on its top; and there were sugar cookies and julekake and rosettes and krumkake and fattigmann, plus a main course of lutefisk, which Martin wouldn't touch; the fish was soaked in lye until it turned translucent and rubbery, and he'd heard that wholesalers in the city stacked slabs of it like kindling outside their shops and then dogs came along and yellowed it. After the dishes were done and Lionell was in bed, the adults sat around the table and talked, and Mrs. Jones permitted herself to play a few hands of euchre and hearts, since it was a holiday and money wasn't involved, and then it was twelve o'clock.

  They shook hands around and wished one another a happy New Year.

  Mr. and Mrs. Jones went off to bed.

  Then the fire. In front of it on the braided rug, their faces fevered with its heat. Popcorn and divinity in bowls between them. Their fingertips touching. The intonations, the animal-like tones, the lamentation of the blizzard outside, as though the plain were mourning until the human race was no more. The two of them, privileged beings, spared and set down on a warmed island below the wide-wasting malignancy of it. Alone. On the oval of the braided rug, the O of love with them in its center.

  Sinking through echoing silence toward the light of the world, and then the question, alive in him for two years, rising of its own accord.

  "If you ever asked," Alpha said, "I knew it would be tonight."

  "How?"

  "I just did."

  "You mean you've—" Martin swallowed and his necktie climbed his swollen gorge.

  Alpha put her fingers t
o his class ring, which she wore, wound with yarn, on her right hand, and turned its insignia straight.

  "I'm really afraid," Martin said.

  "I know. I've been afraid, too."

  "What of?"

  "Me. You. The way everybody's been." Alpha glanced toward her parents' bedroom. "What makes a man afraid?"

  "Everything. What you?"

  "I'm not, really, now that you asked."

  "Then, will—" It was impossible for him to repeat it. The wind rose and the flames swayed toward the left.

  "Yes," she whispered.

  Or did he imagine it? Mrs. Jones walked into the room just then, wearing a nightgown and a robe, and a dark shawl over her shoulders. "Alpha," she whispered. "It's past time you were in bed." And then she held a quilt toward Martin. "Here," she said. "This is yours."

  Alpha's footsteps went retreating up the stairs.

  Mrs. Jones stood at the fireplace, chafing her upper arms and murmuring to the flames, and pulled her shawl closer around her; she was tall and frail and had a yellowish tinge to her skin, and was often ill, or lying down to rest in order to keep from becoming ill, or to recover from a recent illness. Martin wasn't sure of the nature of her complaint, since it was referred to in such vague terms, but assumed it was feminine. Even her voice was weak, high and adenoidal, with a gasping asthmatic whine to it, but she radiated such righteousness and strength of moral character he always forgot her physical frailties and felt she was about to strike him for all the shameful things he'd done.