Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  *

  The doctor drew away from the crib and straightened, and Charles's reflection slipped off the round mirror strapped to his forehead.

  "His fever's broken," the doctor said. "He's going to be all right."

  15

  THE BLACK FOREST

  When I completed my second year of parochial school, I was eligible, as Jerome had often told me, to become a member of the club that met in secret in the Black Forest, or so the members called it, a name picked up from some adult conversation most likely, most likely by Douglas Kuntz; it was a quarter block of swampy lowland that had been left to itself over the years and now held the heaviest concentration of shade trees and brush to be found in any place in Hyatt. One of the playing fields of the parochial school, with a stone wall a foot high around it, bordered so close on the Black Forest that lilacs dropped their blossoms onto the end of the wall my classmates and I passed every day. We never entered the Forest, though; it was forbidden by the Sisters, and once when I was caught there by one, merely to have a look and not testing my limits, I received a whipping with a switch torn from a tree ("Don't ever let me know what's happened to you at school, expecting sympathy," my father often told us, "because from my experience you probably deserved what you got, and then some, and just might get more from me"). The Sisters knew what could happen behind bushes, of course, but claimed the Black Forest was off-limits because it belonged to Orville Sanderson, a bachelor who drank too much, had a foul tongue, and hated children—perhaps from all those years of hearing recess—Catholic ones especially (although he himself was a Catholic), and had been known to chase them for blocks if he found them on his property.

  I followed Jerome out our drive, across the street, and down the alley, carrying an "offering" for each of the club officers, as I'd been told to. We passed the end of Wheaton's garden, where seed packages were tacked to laths and straight rows of green were lining up above the loam behind the laths and paths crossed, passed the goal line of the parochial school's football-softball field, and entered the Black Forest. I could see to my left, through breaks in its leafage, the rotten posts and sagging squares of the wire fence that restrained its advance on the alley; the brick back of the school, the back of the church, the back of the rectory; and to my right, the boulders of the low wall. A membranous network of leaf shadow slid over Jerome's hair and down his back as he knocked aside the filaments that spiders strung up tirelessly across the trail every day, in spite of our efforts to dissuade them, and then the shadow stilled in place. We were at a clearing's edge, a small dirt-packed one, and on the other side, the trunk of a dead tree, barkless, its surface smooth as skin and silvery-gray, glowed in the shadowy foliage.

  "Chockowah," my brother said.

  A password? Beyond the dead tree was a long lattice-work trellis, eight feet tall, overgrown with morning-glories, grapevines, ivy, and rambling rose, and I knew from my foray into the Forest that a catwalk was attached to the other side of the trellis and ran from the alley to Orville Sanderson's back door.

  "Chockakeewah," a voice off to the left said. "Enter brave scribe and guest you've got."

  We stepped into the clearing and people began to appear from beneath the catwalk and out of the brush around us —Buddy Schonbeck, Douglas Kuntz, and the Rimsky brothers, Leo and Brian—and in the silence I felt I was being appraised, and wondered. What's Brian doing here? He was my age and was so mistreated by his older brother, Leo, he'd become the object of everybody's abuse. He was small for his age, but had a head bigger than most adults', and shaped like a light bulb, with a petite pointed chin and the wizened thin-lipped smile of an old woman's mouth, and seemed angry most of the time, sullen and righteously pugnacious, and was always being sent to the library, a narrow room with roll-down maps and statues of saints everywhere, in punishment for his sins of misconduct, disobedience, and disrespect. He had a sack in his hands now and looked as apprehensive as I felt.

  Douglas Kuntz came over and stared me down. Then he said, "Where's your offering, k-new one?"

  I took the cigars I'd found in my father's desk from under my shirt front, three of them, and handed them to Kuntz, who was, as my brother told me, The Ruler. Leo Rimsky was Ruler Number Two and Jerome was the secretary. Kuntz examined the crackling cigars, and then at last gave one to Leo and one to my brother with a solemnity unusual for him; he was usually laughing, showing horsy yellow teeth, at a practical joke he'd devised, or a name he'd made up, such as the one for his sister's cat, a dog-sized beast with dugs .that all but rubbed the ground: Tittyole-buzzard.

  "Are you a Catholic?" he asked me.

  "Yes."

  "Have you made your First Communion yet?”

  "Yes."

  "Are your parents Catholic?"

  "No."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  These questions seemed unnecessary and foolish, since Kuntz had sat in the same schoolroom with me, and I wasn't sure he wasn't having me on.

  "Why aren't they?"

  "Oh, come on, you—"

  "Why?" Kuntz said. He was soberingly serious now. "Just answer the questions I ask."

  "My mother hasn't converted yet."

  "How come?"

  "I don't know."

  "Will she?"

  "Yes, probably."

  "When?"

  "Maybe this summer yet."

  "Good. Do you know any Latin?"

  "Yes."

  "You better say some then."

  "Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, Beatae Marine, sernper Virgini, Beato —"

  "O.K., that's enough."

  Kuntz began to interrogate Brian in the same way, his voice low and nasal and accompanied by a buzzing murmur from the center of his nose, which was so long it gave his small eyes a look of constant cunning. There was a scar across the center of the bridge of it where it had been broken, by Kuntz's father, everybody said; his father was older than our parents, worked for the railroad and was seldom at home, and seemed to have moral reasons for keeping himself so obscure. Kuntz had an older brother in the Navy and a sister in high school—they all lived in a yellow-painted railroad car pulled from a siding out to the far edge of town—and was tough and self-reliant, but not a bully, as he could have been. He listened a lot to the radio and was as in love with the Lone Ranger as a boy his age could be and still be a boy. During the summer when he spent his time outside, or in the fall, practicing football with the rest of us (tackle, without equipment, to toughen us up for the school team), he carried an alarm clock along with him and when it went off, at a few minutes before six, he ran over and held it above his head, the alarm still going, and cried, "Hi-ho, Silver! Away-y-y!" and then took off for home in that lumbering, one-leg-ahead-of-the-other hobble that does as a horse's gallop among children, or did then, slapping his ass with his free hand as if to get it to catch up-with the rest of the galloping parts of him.

  Now when Kuntz instructed Brian to say Latin, Brian said, in his pugnacious way, "Oh, Gobbledegook, you dumb-ass. You know I—"

  Leo slapped the back of Brian's head. "Watch what you call our Ruler, or you won't be in," he said. He spoke through clenched teeth, hardly moving his lips, in the peevish voice of his father, but always with amusement in his eyes, as if mocking his father's manner of speaking, or the idea that he had a voice like his father's, and the amusement shone brightest when he was beating up on or bettering Brian.

  "Oh, come on," Brian said, and turned to him. "You know he's as dumb as—"

  This time the slap came from Kuntz. Kuntz seemed intelligent enough, but the Sisters flunked him in the second grade, twice, and considered him a bad influence and a fool—flicking girls' butts as he did, and referring often to his sister's "buzzooms," which were that big—and when one Sister once asked him what he expected to make of his life with this attitude he always had, Kuntz said, in the deep voice he did so well, "Go into the Black Hills of South Dakota and ride Silver, Sister Mary Michael Theresa, by golly, yessir!"

  "An
d I haven't seen your offering yet," he said to Brian now.

  Brian unrolled his paper sack, took a jar out, and handed it to Kuntz.

  "Hey!" Kuntz said, and his big teeth appeared in the horsy smile. "Hey, look at this." He showed around a jar that looked painted from the inside with white opaque paint. "It's marshmallow cream, you guys. It's one of my favorites."

  "That's what Leo told me," Brian said. He looked close to tears.

  "All right," Kuntz said. "Give them the old initiation treatment! How-wah! A-Huggah! Rhee-hee-hee-him"

  I saw arms grab Brian and then other arms brought me down, and there was the stench of the ground, rank and sewery, leaf mold and decay, bodies covering mine, hands gripping me, and a succession of knuckle rubs ran vibrating over the top of my head until one eye ached and my skull swelled into a lopsided element blooming beyond my hair at some balloonlike areas rubbed thin. I could hear Brian cursing and crying out and then a set of knuckles was gentler on me—my brother? Kuntz?—and I realized that Brian was getting the worst of it; his nickname was Little Fititzer and he was always getting a "fititz," a quick skidding knuckle up the back of his head, his head was such a temptation to scrub on or rub or desecrate, or simply touch, it was so big.

  "O.K.," Kuntz said. "That's enough. Let 'em up now."

  "Damn you I" It was Brian. He was on his feet and swinging at Leo with whirlwind fists. Leo grabbed his arms at the wrists, tripped him so he hit hard on his butt, and sat across his stomach where his shirt was pulled up. "Get off!" Brian cried. "Let me up!"

  "Stop punching first."

  "I'm not, now!"

  "Your hands are trying to. Little Fititzer, I can feel."

  Brian stopped arching his back and a tear streaked from one eye into an ear. "I bet none of the rest of you guys got this crap!" he cried.

  "I bet we did," Leo said to him.

  "Oh, yeah? Well, who gave it to Kuntz?"

  Leo, still astride him, turned to everybody with his amused look, and them smiled with clenched teeth. "We all gave it to him," he said, and nodded at Kuntz. "Not?"

  "Right," Kuntz said. "That's right. O.K., let him up, Pajinsky Bear." Kuntz began to pace like a teacher who's just about ready to have something to say. Pajinsky Bear was his name for Leo, derived from Leo's smile, which reminded us of Theodore Roosevelt, a hero whose boyhood we had to study, even in lower grades, since he was the only President of the United States who ever lived or had a home in North Dakota, or cared to come close, it seemed. Kuntz also named Jerome "Paws" and me "Lids" and Buddy Schonbeck he merely called Buddy, which is what Buddy's parents called him, and had named him, in fact. He was skinny and thick-lipped, with a gangling elusive-ness that marked him as a halfback or end for the high-school six-man football team, and wasn't friendly to anybody, much less a buddy to them; he spoke only to be contentious, even with the Sisters and Father Schimmelpfennig ("Yeah, well, that's not the way my dad said it went"—about the Crucifixion), about any topic, to the point of absurdity, and he'd even switch sides to keep the argument going. He insisted the Sisters wore rubber bags under their skirts, because nobody had ever seen them go pee, etc. I could understand Jerome's nickname—he held his fingers apart and his hands somewhat away from his sides when he walked, a little like a gunslinger stalking a street—but I was bothered by my own, and once when I asked Kuntz what he meant by naming me that. Lids, he said, "Because you're thin as a pencil lead." Lid, Kuntz?

  Now Kuntz went to the dead tree, rolled out a sawed-off section of log from it, and sat down. "All right, you and you"—to me and Brian—"sit here on the ground in front of me. Suey!"

  We sat down.

  "Cross your legs."

  We crossed our legs.

  "O.K., now here's the deal. This is your initiation time, you see. It lasts for a week. You get the head treatment every day and—"

  "Oh, come on," Brian said.

  "You get the head treatment every day." Kuntz held up a hand to stop Leo from whapping Brian. "And besides that, you've got to learn our ceremonies—or else you're out. You have to learn them exactly, too, like that lousy Minuet we did last winter, puck, puck, pa-cock!"

  Everybody snorted, chuckled, or guffawed.

  "And besides that, you each have a duty you have to do. Everybody's got to have a duty to do. We'll decide on yours a while later, here. Now, after a week we take a vote on both of youse, and if more than two are against you, you're out."

  "Yeah," Leo said, and his laughter shadowed the leaf-shaded clearing with the dark intent of the intonations in it.

  "Should we show them our hiding place, Number Two and scribe?" Kuntz asked.

  "Sure," Leo said. "Then if we don't let them join in, or just one does, and somebody breaks into it, we'll know who it is and go get him so he'll never forget, Pajunkety Camelhump, old Toaderspies!"

  The nose, the nose, I thought, and could feel Leo's smile behind me.

  Kuntz took us behind the dead tree, where there was a round depression into which his log, or stool, or throne, or whatever, must sit, and brushed away some leaves and dirt at the bottom of the depression, revealing a board recessed into the ground. He lifted this up, took a wooden box out from beneath it, and opened the box on votive candles, clean white handkerchiefs, a glass jar filled with farmer's matches, silver needles, and an oval tin of Cavaliers.

  "Hey!" Brain cried. "I know where you got those cigarettes! Dad just put a display on them up in our damn store!"

  There was a smacking report close to my ear as Leo, of course, got Brain again. Leo wasn't amused now. "Of course they're from the store, dummkopf! How many places in town do you think have got them in? If Dad sees any missing, I'll know why, you hear, you slimy little puke of a morfadike!"

  Brian bowed his big head. "O.K., Leo," he said.

  "Schonbeck! Paws! You know your duties," Kuntz said. "Get at it!"

  Buddy took some cigarettes out of the tin, broke each in two, three halved, took out matches and placed them beside the cigarette pieces, on top of Kuntz's wooden seat, and then took the tin and the jar of matches behind the tree again, presumably to hide them. Jerome came over to the dead tree. It had been snapped in two by lightning about eleven feet up, and its upper half, still attached by a splintery hinge of graying wood, had fallen close to its trunk, forming an inverted V; shrubbery and vines grew in a profusion inside this natural arch, and Jerome pushed some of these out of his way and then reached deep in them and began pulling out branches of cut lilac and laying them on the ground, and as more and more came out, I could see, resting on a limb level with my eyes, an apple crate or an orange box covered with a green cloth.

  Leo went to Jerome and they each took opposite corners of the cloth, turned toward Kuntz in unison, as if serving at Mass, said Domine, non sum dignus, and drew the veil. The crate was lined with rich, red, velvetlike material, as rich as the best vestments Father wore, and standing inside was a plaster statuette of the Blessed Virgin, in blue and white gowns trimmed with gold, her head bowed, her palms turned out and held below her waist in patient supplication.

  "Is that neat," Brian said, and the two of us moved closer. "Where'd you get it, guys?"

  "You can't call us that yet," Leo said.

  "Father or somebody threw it out," Kuntz told him. "Over there."

  I looked where he was pointing and saw through the leaves to the ash pile behind the Catholic church, like the large blue-gray, glass-glittering one behind Eichelburger's Tavern, which we picked through sometimes to find cigarette butts; drunkards put them out long. Then I noticed that the base the Virgin was standing on—the upper half of a blue hemisphere overlaid with different-sized silver-colored stars—was broken off, and the front part of her feet and the head of the snake she was standing on were gone. On either side of her were vigil glasses, a nubbly yellow one with a chip out of its rim, and one blue. "Where'd you get the vigil glasses?" I asked.

  "Those aren't what you think they are," Kuntz said. "Those are our cruets."

&
nbsp; "No, sir," I said. "Cruets are—" But stopped at the look from Jerome.

  "Pajinsky Bear and I snuck those cruets out of school in our lunch sacks," Kuntz said.

  "Oh." One of the duties of the third grade was to clean out the vigil glasses that had been used for so many offerings they were filling with wicks and unburned wax and those tinnily thin silver plates from the base of each vanished candle; the Sisters brought the glasses over to school from the church and supplied the class with table knives for the task.

  "We never burn candles in our cruets," Kuntz said. "You got that? You never do or else"—he made a motion across his throat as though he had one of the knives now—"grick! They're where we keep our relics. Here."

  He reached and stopped, a startled look in his eyes, and then whirled his forefinger close to one ear in a blur, and everybody separated and stepped noiselessly into neighboring brush, Brian led by Leo, who had a hand over his mouth, and me by Jerome, and then I heard the heavy stride of somebody on the catwalk, Sanderson, and saw the blooms on the trellis tremble like the musculature below my heart. After a while everybody came back into the clearing, and Kuntz said, "Yeah, I should have told you about that." He whirled his forefinger in the same way. "Anybody, even you new guys, can do that if you think you hear him coming or on the prowl. He's a Scheisspot. O.K., the relics."

  He took down the yellow cruet and held it out to Brian and me and I saw miraculous medals, a square scapular of brown feltlike cloth, newly minted pennies, and several small, circular glass reflectors—red, yellow, orange, and blue—that had been pried loose, by the looks of it, from the big-buckled, broad cowboy belt Kuntz had on now. He put back his cruet and took down the blue one, which was filled with shredded and spicy-smelling herbs or weeds or—