Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "The rest of them smelled death and ran for the barn, and I sat in the pasture beside her and started bawling and couldn't stop; this beautiful creature that held our hopes now gone because of me, her sides big with calf. It got darker and darker and then I saw your grandpa coming toward me over the fields—" "I bet he spanked you."

  "Wait, now. I want you to hear what kind of person he is. I saw him coming and wanted to run and hide, but knew I couldn't hide forever, so I sat there like the stone I sat beside. 'Even if she's dead, it can't be that important,' he said. 'Yes, it could be,' I said to him, and told him what I'd done. 'You should never lose your temper,' he said. 'I've told you that, I've warned you about it, and now you see what you reap.'

  "You're right. I expected a licking to last me the rest of my life, but instead Dad lifted me to my feet and said, 'Come home and eat now. You've suffered enough. "

  He removes his glasses and lays them in his lap, where reflections on them geometrically shine.

  "Oh, there are so many good stories. At the time they seemed terribly sad, or troubling, or made me wonder about the justice on this earth, and there were a few I didn't think I'd live through, such as the Guernsey, but I did, and now when I look back on them it seems that they happened in a way that was almost ordained. No matter how many times I think them over, or try to write them down, they always have a quality about them that language won't quite explain for me. When I write the book of my life, when I get around to it, that's the way I'm going to make them.

  "Goodness!" he exclaims, and presses his fingers on his thighs and throws his head against the chair back, then grabs his glasses by an earpiece as they slip down a trouser leg away from him. "I'm beginning to sound just about as bad as Iver Seim!"

  11

  PENNIES

  Jerome opens out the bottom doors of the linen closet in their bedroom, steps up on a bottom shelf, opens the top doors with a swaying-out boost and lift from Charles, and hands down from a high shelf the quart jar and one-pound coffee tins that contain their collection of pennies. He and Charles bear the jars and cans to their double bed, while Tim, small for his age, sits in silence on his cot at the side of the room, his eyes hanging on tendrils, and watches them empty the containers until the bedspread is covered with coppery sunshine. Jerome and Charles look at the dates on the coins. They examine Abraham Lincoln. They look for dimes tossed in mistakenly by their father. They look for quarters and nickels and half dollars, too. Their hands begin to smell metallic and bright green. Tim groans from his cot. Where's he been?

  Jerome and Charles start dividing the pennies by hundreds into two equal shares, and grow tired of it; there are too many to do. They pour the pennies from jars to cans to hear the coppery-brown roar of them. They dump them out on the bedspread and he down and make swimming motions with their arms over the layers there. They try to dive beneath them and hurt their foreheads. They decide to count them and arrive at three thousand, licking saliva from their lips as though there's a run on it in this exchange, and then Jerome tosses a handful heavenward and it spatters down on the layers of pennies spread out on the bed around them.

  "There are just too many!"

  He starts shoveling pennies with both hands and covers Charles's stomach the way the people at the seashore do in their father's large green cartoon book. A big fat man here in the middle.

  "They're really heavy, Jay!"

  Medallions and sunlit triplicates of coins float and hover and rock on the ceiling above them. The air in the room is brown-golden, and these children, for the first and only time in their lives, are as rich as princes or kings, or Father Schimmelpfennig, who buys a new Chevrolet every fall, and sometimes sells their father his old one; it's O.K. by their father, and not that expensive, either, he's told them.

  "Then why not just buy a new one?" Jerome asks now.

  "I have no idea," Tim says.

  They all laugh at the imitation of their father. Jerome and Charles throw coins at Tim for speaking so boldly, and then quickly retrieve them.

  "Get out of here," Jerome says to Tim, who's examining a silvery-gray circular piece, all dull and tarnished, which is, believe it or not, a real penny.

  "Go wipe yourself," Charles says. He does a raspberry and lets pennies clatter from the hand pinching his nose into a can.

  "Go crawl in Marie's crib and diddle around with yourself, like last month," Jerome says,, and lays a compact and eruptive childlike fart in a jar, and then sticks the mouth of it toward Charles as they lie back on the layers of their pennies laughing. It's real money I and grinds and pulses under their backs like the music of planets circumscribing arcs around musical spheres. Now stars are on the ceiling and the air bright-blue and tingling; its extraterrestrial! Jerome finds a dime. Well, at this moment, take it from me, these children are richer than anybody anywhere in the world will ever possibly be, except for Tim, of course, who's turned to lie face down on his cot and is probably weeping—poor Tim, who isn't bossy or aggressive and wants only to please, and doesn't have a penny among him.

  12

  TIM'S DAY

  Tim hears a loud cry of Deem! Deem! He lowers his eyes and stirs his cereal with his spoon. His mother has bathed Marie and put her in her crib for her nap and now she's in the pantry across the room from him, finishing up the breakfast dishes. All but his. She lets him sleep late and eat late, as he overheard her telling his father, because the day is so long for him. His father leaves for work before he's awake, and his brothers are both in school. He isn't old enough to go yet. He's only four. His birthday is May eighth.

  Deem! The cry is louder and sounds closer, too, as if it originates inside the wall behind and travels over his shoulder in purple shafts. Is that possible, probably or not? He looks up and finds her studying eyes set on him in a frown.

  "Are you done with your breakfast already?"

  “Yes."

  "Do you want to go out today?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "Let's get you dressed, then, and out, before he decides you're not going to show."

  He walks to the wall behind the stove, where outdoor clothes are hung on hooks, and stands as though for inspection, while she opens the door, and says, "Just a minute, Donny. He'll be right out." There's a cry of recognition and other noises she closes the door on, and then slips Tim's wool-tweed topcoat, once Jerome's, up Tim's arms, turns him to face her, and starts buttoning it up. She's worried about him. Almost everybody in town calls him "the principal's son," and his brothers "the Neumiller boys." How sad for him without his knowing it, or does he? He hasn't made any friends as Jerome and Charles did at his age—they collected them—and doesn't seem inclined to. The only child he really likes is Susie, the Eichelburger girl across the hedge and alleyway and white barn, who's high-strung and secretive, and every bit as friendless as he is. They drive shingles into the ground to make pens for Susie's dolls, or count out bottle caps her father has brought back from the tavern uptown, and bury them in treasure boxes, as they call them, small tins from the ash piles up and down the alley, and are so feverish and hushed in all they do that— Well, about a week ago the two were caught in the Eichelburgers' barn with all their clothes off. So Tim certainly is precocious, I'd say. And Susie must be lonelier than even her mother has imagined.

  "Should we give them both a whipping?" Mary Eichelburger, who'd caught them, asked.

  "No, I don't think so," I said.

  "Thanks. Neither do I. I'm afraid Susie would just get to enjoying the goddamnable abuse of it."

  "Goodness, you sound mad—or angry at me."

  "Well, how would you feel if a holy terror of a two-bit Catholic town like this had screwed up one of your kids?"

  She flipped away her cigarette and strode up the back steps and into her house, a heronlike waddle to her high waist, and then the door swung to with a bang, while I thought, so there's one who feels even more outcast than I. She's handsome, exotic, and time-attuned, and hates working for her husband at the tavern
when he takes his half days off—beauty putting up with smart remarks—and there must be an even more fertile secret curl inside that "abuse of it," huh?

  Tim watched every second and aspect of it when I was breast-feeding Marie, and would say sometimes, "Mom, do all girl babies have eyes that big?" Oh, the innocence and the duplicity in it! He'll come up when I'm busy with housework, his eyes enlarged and dark as far as I can see into them, and say, "Remember the day you brought Marie home here from the hospital and laid her down on her back right on the kitchen table?" And even though that's what I did, he was only two and a half at the time and it's inconceivable to me, even though I'm his mother, that he could remember the moment so well. When I asked him about it he said, "Oh, maybe Charluss" —his name for Charles—"told me that. I don't know."

  "Mom, when will Marie walk?" he'd ask, and then when she began to walk, "When will she talk to me?" And lately he's been wondering if brothers and sisters could become close enough to be friends. He never speaks directly to Marie, yet never treats her like an infant or a child, or, thank the Lord, a plaything, but more like an adult he's waiting for to wake from sleep. He seems so mature in ways of intuition usually considered a part of the feminine mind.

  Should I encourage him to befriend Jimmy Ianaccona, the neighbor boy across the front, who appears outside his house in short pants and mittens, or in mother-made cowboy suits (and once in a skirt of hers), looking lost and dazed inside the outdoor world shining down on him, who cries if he gets dirt on his clothes, or gets too cold, or wet, or hot, or bored, or stultified, and if he should wander a ways from the house—God forfend and protect us in life!—she'll come onto the porch, a brown shawl about her narrow self, and scream, "Jiimmy! Jiiiimmy!" in such a desperate voice it stiffens your neck cords no matter how many times you've heard it, or how many walls it's come through. Her Jiiiimmy has been more than once the swimming bees of serenity's death.

  When Jerome and Charles let Tim in on their rough-housing and games, he becomes so rowdy they can't contain him. Once they tied up his hands and feet with a jump rope and locked him inside the room with that old Victrola they keep insisting is theirs. I heard him calling out and kicking on the floor and asked Jerome what was up, before I went and saw, and he said, "Oh, nothing really. Tim just doesn't belong to us."

  "You be good to Donny," I say to him.

  "Yes, I will."

  "You're his protector."

  "I guess so."

  Donny Ennis, the youngest of seven boys and a girl, is six feet tall, with a pair of matched shoulders from my personal heaven of men, hands larger than Martin's, and thighs and calves that pop his pants; he holds his hands, limp, in front of his waist or chest as he walks, half flexed and tentative, as if to search out feeling in the air to guide him, and jerks his feet with high steps out of tangles nobody can see. He's thirteen and can't speak, but can understand well enough what you're up to, if spoken to as even pets and plants are spoken to, but he, being neither so tame nor unanimal, seldom is.

  Mrs. Ennis ushers him out of the house in the morning, or perhaps of his own volition he goes, and he wanders the streets, usually pulling an empty wagon behind him, until time for recess at the parochial school, and then stands across from the playground, in our yard, watching at a distance and working his jaws; he knows the nuns don't want him near; his fly is left undone and he'll pull it out wherever the need overtakes him, and, oh, is it huge; little girls shouldn't have to endure that, not yet, and on that the nuns and I are in accord, but I've seen the barnyard habits of a lot of men, and of the animals in the barnyard, too, and know it's natural for him to follow his instincts, but there was still the size of it, and the idea that the girls might get, terrifying or later candid, ah, that men were all that big. It came splattering out of it and foamed with rising steam, moonlight and ice and a pale leg seen.

  He cheers the children if there's a game, and, when they go inside, crosses the street and tries to imitate their play; he can't make the swings work, is afraid of the ladder of the slide, and bangs the teeter-totters so hard, wooden whonks, that the janitor or the principal, Sister Celestina, has to tell him to stop. School-boys sneak behind and slap his back and make him swing around, and then another slaps him from a different direction, until he's spinning so fast he falls. They switch him with sticks and he can't move quite quick enough to catch one. His gums show when he laughs, so he tries not to laugh hard, but likes to, and is patsy for the simplest and most harebrained jokes of theirs, because they know if they can get him to show his gums they've got him going non-stop, a captive laugher.

  The Ianaccona kid found a car-flattened snake and wouldn't touch it, or course, but carried it around on the end of a stick for a day, and when Donny saw what it was, he went stumbling backward and hit a tree and stood there, fixed, his face a craven, unvoiced cry, as though the snake were a representation of an evil bred into all of us

  that still resided inside in some way, while Ianaccona brought the thing closer to his eyes, and then I stepped out the door and yelled, 'Jimmy I Your mother wants you home!"

  Last winter Donny came pulling a sled down the street and stopped and stared at our pantry window, where I usually am. Tim looked out, too, and then I dressed him up and he went out and sat on the sled, no word spoken anywhere, and Donny pulled him around the streets until he asked to be taken home. Donny came with his sled the next day, and then the next, and then winter passed or capsized into spring, and he began to appear with his wagon. If Tim isn't here when I want him, or if I get anxious about him out of any of my personal fears, I'll call him, not in Mrs. Ianaccona’s pitch, but maybe in one that bothers her, for all I know, and in a few minutes he'll appear, drawn up to the back door by Donny, who'll be grinning like a dog who's just chased and nipped his first deer. And then about a week ago when he came with the wagon, he cried, "Deem! Deem!" So there were possibilities of speech in him.

  "O.K.," I say to Tim.

  He goes out the door and down the steps with me in his wake and when we appear Donny cries aloud and claps his large hands as though we're in a movie he's seeing that captivates. His black hair is a tousled haystack that needs rearranging and some shears, his nose is running in bubbly gluten over his Ups onto his chin, and his green jacket, held at its center with a safety pin, is so small that his big veined wrists spring out of the sleeves of it. Its front is covered with mucus and drool.

  "Come here once," I say, and lift Tim into the wagon, take the handkerchief from my apron and wipe Donny's nose, his upper lip, his big chin. He's beginning to get a beard.

  "Now you take good care of Tim."

  He smiles and shows broken and many-shaped gray-green teeth, which must cause him terrible pain, and cries, "Yeh! Ahyatata, Nin Neunhaour!" Then he turns away and begins to pull, and I think again what a pity it is to put him to such a task, but what is there that he'd like more, or more like to do, in a place and time such as this?

  Tim gripped the wagon and looked from the left to the right as they rolled along. He bent and looked over the side. It was spring and the sun made a squat shadow of the wagon and the two of them. The big snowbanks had sunk beneath the ground and the grass was green in spots, circled by black-brindled crusty ice patches backed by thinning brown snow. Puddles in the road had oily rainbows spiraling over them and he was about to tell Donny to stop, thinking he saw the fat nose of a frog in the center of a rainbow, but it was a rock that stood still, or else a toad. A bird like a duck it landed so fast, a robin, hopped across the Eichelburgers' lawn after it came down past them.

  He liked Donny's smell. It was like his dad's sweat and-pee and old bread all mixed up together. And then Donny made a turn that meant he was taking the long trip around the lake, where blue ice would be floating in big blocks that banged and bobbed. Good. Winter made Tim weary of the indoors, and he liked the nice rattly feel of the wagon under his rump, titabum. They passed the Congregational Church on the corner, with moss growing on its concrete steps. Nobody ever w
ent there. Why didn't they take it down or give it to somebody who could use it for whatever they needed it for? Could you live in a church?

  The next house was Mrs. Liffert's, and it would take Donny fifty-eight steps or so to reach it. If he got home early today, he'd build a fort with his brothers' Lincoln Logs, unless they'd hidden them again, or figure out how their Victrola worked, or learn to shoot marbles by flipping a thumb, thuk, the way they did. Then he could go behind the lilacs, where nobody would see, and practice throwing a ball from the croquet set. He didn't know where they kept their baseballs or softballs, and they said he threw like a girl.

  Mary Liffert, the widow whose three sons have entered the Marines instead of the priesthood, where she'd prayed all three would find their vocation, the gray-haired lady who can be seen each spring spading her garden up in fishing waders, watches from her window as Tim and Donny pass, and makes a sign of the cross. Lord have mercy on that Alpha Neumiller's soul, she thinks. Any mother who'd let her kid out with an animal like that should have her head looked at. And maybe the kid could use it, too. He sure was a strange one, that one, him and his May eighth. And then Jerome and Charles came into her yard when she was away just last spring, while Wilhomena was watching, and slashed down her flowers, every last one, with swords they'd made of wood lath. She could feature Charles doing it, but Jerome was the perfect model of an altar boy, who made you wonder after all if there was such a bugaboo as original sin. Their mother had made them come and apologize, but that didn't make her feel any better about the woman, or bring back her flowers—Father was always so complimentary about her side-altar arrangements —and as they left the yard, she heard Jerome say, "I might, if she bothered Mom again." What? Level her flowers with their laths? What had she done to her in the first place, other than give her the cold eye or shoulder, perhaps, for being such an obvious Lutheran?