Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "You know me now, dammit to hell!"

  "Well, yes, of course, but I always assumed that you'd be the first to learn about anything like—"

  "Oh, shut up," she said, and started crying again. They went in to a baseball game, as they'd planned, but she refused to leave the car for fear somebody she knew would see her face. The pitcher was mediocre and Wimbledon lost, five to two, which made Martin whistle off-key with well-being as he drove back, and then Alpha asked him to stop the noise of the car so they could talk. He pulled off the side of the road, into some weeds, and killed the engine. "Yes?" he said.

  She leaned her head on his chest and didn't say a word. "I want you to know that what you've told me doesn't bother me one bit," he said. "What about your parents?" "Ach."

  "Your mother, then?"

  "Oh, well. She has enough of her own to worry about." She kissed him through his shirt. He slid down in the seat and put his arm around her above her waist. It was starting to get dark and a dove was mourning in the distance with a sound as circular and pure as the beginning of time's first dot appearing out of infinity. There was a ghost of a full moon in the sky and the three notes of the dove's song, the first two proclaiming the two of them together and alone. You and You, and the last long Oooo as stretched out and desolate as the plain. Heart, heart, does it have to end here? Holy Mary, Sanctuary of— He put his fingertips to her chin and lifted her face, pupils large and dark, and kissed her on the mouth and let his hand fall, not purposefully, but as it would, to her lap, and felt the springy and textured bulge of pubic hair beneath her skirt.

  Something struck the windscreen and they jumped. Fifty feet away, above them on the railway embankment, was old Ed Jones, who flung aside some pebbles in a silent spray. His eyes were on Alpha and his jaw was moving in a below-the-breath monologue that seemed tinged with the obscene. Then he turned to Martin, jerked his thumb over his shoulder, and yelled, "Get that girl of mine home this instant, boy, before I take you and your car apart!" And then continued down the tracks toward town.

  Alpha held to Martin's arm all the way to her place and made him promise to stop over the next day.

  "Has he ever beaten you?"

  "Yes."

  He knew it! He pulled into their yard in the morning, pale and afraid, and realized immediately, from the look on Alpha's face, that her father hadn't said a word to her mother yet. Martin went inside. Jones was in a rocker, looking haggard and hung-over, reading with a dark scowl, through wire-rimmed bifocals, a worn and dog-eared copy of Shakespeare's sonnets. He glanced up at Martin and seemed to look over his head, and then winked, and whispered, "You sure made tracks last night, boy." And turned back to his sonnets with hardly a pause.

  The rest of the summer he was busy in the barn whenever Martin showed up.

  He and Alpha went back to Valley City in the fall, and the separation from their families and their nearness to one another at school, where they were partaking of learning, an experience that none of their parents had had, must have made their relationship appear, to their parents, natural and perhaps preordained. His mother had Alpha over for dinner when they were home; Mrs. Jones said more than hello to him. Ed Jones became friendlier than he'd ever been, more vocal and revelatory, and often broke into moments of what might be termed paternal advice: "Never lamp a dog, boy. Never look one straight in the eye. It shortens his life and scares the hell out of him. He thinks you've come down to his level, and what he needs is a master, a real seeing or overseeing eye. A dog needs one. And never ever stare at a person when he's asleep. It'll mix up his thoughts." And Jones and Martin were able to talk baseball again. "Has-beens is what we are, both of us," Jones said, and laughed at him.

  It was the most rewarding year of school for Alpha and Martin; they were together as often as they wanted, and were more involved in the theater, the forensic society, the debate team, and their separate church groups, and their grades were better for a change. Elaine and Vince were on the campus, too, and the four of them got together once or twice a week, and had such lighthearted, memorable times that Alpha said she was beginning to feel what it was like to be one of the family without the worries that go with it. And then the Juneberry trees pronounced the end of the term, and Alpha received her Standard Certificate, which qualified her to teach in the lower grades, and said she was going to get a job right away; she wanted to help out at home and also put aside enough money to send Jerome through school.

  During the summer that followed, the summer of '35, Martin and his father were employed by the county to work on a road gang, and tallied up twelve- or fourteen-hour days (not for the extra pay or overtime, neither of which they got, but so their jobs weren't given to other men who might work more), and one afternoon were a mile and a half from the home place, scything weeds along the right of way, and piling up the rocks they dulled their scythes on, when there was an explosion that reverberated in the air so much they seemed to hear it several times. They looked at one another, attentive as animals, and his father said, "It's probably Carlson." The neighboring farmer had been using dynamite to blast out a hole for a pond he intended to stock with carp. Martin and his father kept at their work, and about twenty minutes later Vince came galloping down the road on the riding horse. His face was blackened and most of his hair burned away.

  "Terrible accident at home," he said. "Emil— We were —" He slid off the horse and handed the reins to his father. "Dad, you better go."

  Their father leaped on the horse, wheeled her, and set her in a hard run toward home, and Vince and Martin took off over the fields. Martin didn't learn any details until later in the day.

  Vince and Fred and two of the younger boys. Jay and Emil, were weeding a seven-acre potato patch and picking potato bugs from the plants. They filled a gallon can with the bugs and then poured fuel oil over them and dropped a match in; the oil wouldn't bum well, and eventually appeared to go out, so Vince and Fred went over to a fifty-gallon drum to add gasoline to the mixture, and when Vince pressed on the spout of the drum, unaware that it was empty and filled with fumes and that the oil was still burning, the drum exploded. Its circular end blew loose as if an opener had been applied, and went off in a tumbling flight. Vince and Fred and Jay, who were standing beside it, were mostly scared and shaken—they said they hardly heard it going, and then were picking themselves up off the ground—but Emil, the youngest, who was on his way to the house, turned at the noise and the drum's sailing end hit him below the knees. Both bones in his right leg were shattered, a length of tibia torn away, and the leg was held together by shredded tendons, blue muscle, and skin.

  He was put in traction with the hope that, as the tibia knit, it would bridge the gap of missing bone, and was in traction for six months. He was ten. Mrs. Carlson had been a registered nurse before she married, and she walked over to the house every day to dress the wound. The long period in traction had been a success, it seemed. Emil was now hopping around on crutches with his leg in a cast, but hadn't yet put any weight on it, and Vince, who felt responsible, had become more moody and unpredictable than ever.

  And then it was . . .

  Jerome was precocious, an avid reader and a recluse who went for long walks over the plain, sometimes as far as Verendrye Creek, where he'd sit for hours and— Who knows why he went there and sat? He didn't like to fish. He didn't believe in blood sports of any kind. He didn't like violence. He was the only one who could calm Ed Jones when he was drunken, or unhinged, or "out on a wren's perch with a wild hair up my ass," as Jones put it to drinking friends. Jerome knew the native plants and wildlife and was always the first in the area to find the season's first wildflower. He showed it to Alpha and then gave it to his mother. He was four years younger than Alpha and with Mrs. Jones ill so often Alpha had partly raised him, and was maternal toward him, but also spoke to him and of him in a straight-forward and womanly, wifelike way. He wasn't physically attractive. He had big lips and his father's nose, and was skinny—stringy-thin, like Mrs.
Jones—and the back of his head bulged out in such a big way you could see what was meant by the word "occiput." He had an unnerving habit of staring off in the distance while he wound and unwound his hair around a finger. "What's beyond those mountains?" his mother would ask.

  He tried to get the town of Courtenay to start an Audubon Club, a Wildlife Club, an Izaak Walton League, or even something local, but there was no interest. He was often talking, in the phrase of the time, of "conservation of the land," and when his family had any sort of fruit, which was hard to get this far north, even in the summer, he gathered up the seeds and planted them in different types of soil in different locations. Would they grow here, he wanted to know. Had it ever been tried in North Dakota? He broke into an abandoned farmhouse because he'd heard there was money in its basement, and confessed to the act the day after, before the break-in was discovered; and when his mother, hysterical at the lawlessness of it, asked him why he'd do anything so irresponsible and foolish, he said, "I wanted Dad to be rich."

  Jones said he had a strong pitching arm for his age and was developing a breaking curve, and planned to try out for the high-school team in the fall. Then there was a steamy scandal at school when Jerome, who was at the head of his eighth-grade class, was discovered in the furnace room with Eunice Winandy, lying on the janitor's cot. Martin's father was the janitor; he slept on the cot during the worst of the winter nights in order to keep the furnace stoked with lignite. Jerome was allowed, after a suspension and deliberation among the teachers and school board and community leaders, to graduate as valedictorian. Martin's father might have had a hand in the decision; the superintendent kept coming to him and he kept assuring the superintendent that, yes, Jerome's knickers were buttoned when he walked in on them.

  Jerome's commencement address also caused a stir. He didn't keep to his written text, as he'd been instructed to, and in his extempore speech insinuated that the community was hypocritical; the natural beauty left in the area, the real plains grassland, he said, would soon be lost, along with people's false pride in it, if all that governed their lives was progress, plowing up more land, and money. Alpha stood and applauded when he was finished; she'd bought him a copy of Theodore Roosevelt's essays as a graduation gift. "Dammit, girl," Ed Jones whispered, and jerked on her skirt. "Sit! They think we're crazy the way it is, the bastards."

  Jerome said he wasn't going to the class picnic. He felt he'd changed. He wanted to stay home and help his father; there was fieldwork to be done, cattle to fix, the sheep were lambing, and he knew he'd neglected his duties on the farm up until now. But Mrs. Jones told him there would only be one such picnic as this, and one afternoon out of this new life wasn't too much to ask, and besides, what would people say if the valedictorian wasn't there? She gave him a two-quart jar of pickles to take.

  "He wasn't content to just carry the jar under his arm," she said. "No, he braided twine around the neck, made all sorts of loops and knots, and braided a handle that would have looked proud on a picnic basket. 'I bet this would hold fifty pounds,' he said to me. He went off down the road and when I looked out the window, when he probably figured he was out of sight, I saw him swinging that jar of pickles around his head in big circles, and I thought, 'Sure as the Lord lives, he'll break that before he gets it there.' "

  It arrived intact. It rode between Jerome and Eunice Winandy on the drive to Spiritwood Lake. A close watch was kept on the two the entire day; the superintendent wasn't about to trust a pair who'd demonstrated how brazenly they'd comport themselves if given a chance. After the picnic, Jerome and Eunice, and two of Jerome's friends and their girls, got into a boat and poled a ways out from shore. Jerome stripped down while people from the shore looked on aghast, and then they saw that he was wearing bathing trunks. "I bet I can make it to the diving float," he said to his friends, and leaped overboard and went under as though weighted. His friends and the observers on shore thought he was playing a trick when he didn't at first appear, and then they knew it was serious. A lifeguard was on duty, but it wasn’t until twenty minutes later that Jerome was pulled into a boat, releasing streams of water into the lake. The lifeguard labored over him for a half hour, saying, "Jerome, Jerome," as though Jerome were his brother, and then in a desperate voice. Jerome lay at last on his back on the ground, still and water-blanched and composed, his open eyes staring out beyond the faces of his classmates as at the dim-visioned dreams along a creekbank now dead within him.

  The superintendent and the lifeguard brought his body back in the superintendent's car, but stopped first at the Neumillers and got Martin to help them face the Joneses with this. Mrs. Jones got into the car and uncovered his body and held him and talked to him as if he were alive and listening to her, while he lay in her arms with his head thrown back, his blue mouth open to her kisses, a milky substance forming over his eyes, and no one, not even Alpha, dared to part her from him.

  Martin and the lifeguard walked out to where Jones was cultivating com with the horses. Jones pulled up the reins, threw them loose over the cultivator seat, and came trotting up to them.

  "What is it?" he asked. His face was drawn back against its bones and he was breathless from the run.

  "Mr. Jones," the lifeguard said. "I'm terribly sorry. Well, er—"

  "What is it?"

  "It's Jerome."

  "He's drowned," Jones said.

  "Yes, he—"

  "I knew it, by Jesus. I knew it, I did." Jones pulled the bandana from around his neck and threw it to the ground. "You sonofabitch!" he cried up. "You dirty double-dealing sonofabitch! I'm never going to be sober again in my life! I'm going to shoot all the livestock! I'm going to throttle' the wife and that frigging prissy-ass daughter of hers! I—! I—!" His knees gave out and he fell on the ground and said in a voice broken by hiccups and a sob, "Wake me when the world gets off, dear Jesus."

  *

  Martin opened his eyes. He uncovered one ear and listened for Alpha's footsteps, but didn't even hear noises from the kitchen now. Had the Joneses gone out to milk? And then he felt he was asleep and still dreaming. A fly, a large fly from the bumbling buzz of it, hovered near the sofa where he lay, moved off and hovered near again, and then went into widening sweeps of flight, weaving all over the blizzard-locked room the aura and essence of summer, laughter on wing.

  He did all he could to comfort Alpha after the drowning; took her for drives nearly every night, consoled her and held her, got her to talk about Jerome as much as she could, and gave him his class ring. And whenever Alpha asked him, he'd drive into town and fetch Jones home from the tavern. The bad bouts of his were even worse now. Alpha was slow to recover and perhaps never would, nor would her parents, both of whom blamed themselves. Later, in the fall, Martin came to take Alpha shopping and drove up to a house that looked deserted; it had been more barren since the drowning, but tonight it seemed the family had packed up and moved off.

  He went to the porch and knocked on the door. When there was no answer, he pulled it open and found Jones on his back in front of him, his graying hair haloed out over the worn floor-boards. He was snoring and held a bottle of gin over his chest like a child a doll. Martin went out to the water tank and sat, staring up at Alpha's window. Was no one else at home? The Muscovys had left leaflike prints in the mud at his feet. The moss in the tank was now in long strings. There was a tapping sound and he saw Alpha at her window, pale and distraught, her face cleaved across its center by a reflection; she gave a sign that she'd soon be down and tried to signal something else, then disappeared from the window.

  The back door opened out. Jones came from behind it with one hand above an eye and the other hanging on to the doorknob for balance. He stood on the top step, sway-mg and keeping his grip on the knob, unbuttoned his fly, and let go a splattering stream, groaning and erupting with gas as he did, and then noticed Martin, Winked as though to blink back into oblivion a bad dream, and once again turned his attention to the matter at hand, playing it around with such fervor
and attentiveness it seemed he was signing his name. He shook himself dry, buttoned up, and turned to Martin, who could understand now why his mother once described Jones's eyes as resembling a billy goat's; they were depthless and blank, jellylike extensions of a mind not entirely human.

  "You screwed her yet?" Jones asked in a slushy voice.

  Martin blushed and stared at his shoes.

  "I say, you screw her yet?" Jones asked even louder.

  Should Martin simply leave?

  "Tan't ya cock? Pardon," Jones said, and spat a tobacco-browned stream to one side. "Cat got your tongue? I hear all you Catholics like to do is dive for the beaver. Whoo- whoooo! Is that right? What I heard, I mean?"

  Martin went to the Model A and got in behind the wheel. Jones stood wavering, as though deliberating something worse, and then shook his head once, in contempt or disbelief, and stepped inside and closed the door. Martin was about to crank up the car and drive off when Alpha came out. She said this drunkenness was driving her insane, and destroying the life of her little brother, Lionell, and all he could do about it was apologize.

  "Did you hear what he said to me?" Martin asked.

  "What?"

  "Oh— It was sort of jumbled up. I could hardly make it out."

  "What was it about?"

  "Nothing, really."

  "Well, he better not bother you," Alpha said. "If he starts that, I'll leave home on the bobtailed drunken old liquor fiend."

  One evening Martin came to take Alpha to a movie (movies were no longer verboten), and heard Jones talking with a neighbor and drinking crony, Len Melstrom, in the front room, so he waited in the kitchen, where Mrs. Jones was at the table leafing through a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. She licked her fingers every time she went to turn a page, and Martin, who had the same habit, wondered why Alpha was always after him about it, then heard, in Melstrom's voice, he was sure, something about "mackerel-snappers." He cleared his throat in a loud and rattling way to let the men know he was in the house.