Mr. Pflager speaks to me as if I'm an equal and not a little fellow who'll come up with a laughable statement if a grownup makes enough faces or acts as grownups never do, but Penny is my favorite; she used to be a registered nurse and when I was ill with rheumatic fever came to our house every day, at twelve noon, and took my temperature and blood pressure, and did, as my mother said, all that it was possible to do. I love the touch of her padded hand across my forehead as much as my mother's, her smile that puts cushioned dimples in her cheeks, which are always flushed, and makes creases at the tail ends of her eyebrows. Her eyes are violet-blue and study you from behind glasses with round gold rims.
"You're worse, you know," she'd say when I was worse, but this doesn't hide her kindness, which comes from her, like most of the feeling around the Pflagers, with a warmth that's golden in hue and curve. I've heard my mother say she often wished Penny didn't have to work —Penny handles the dry-goods section of the store, Mr. Pflager the building and hardware supplies—because she feels she and Penny could become close friends; and I've also heard her say, "Penny's one of the few people in this town I can talk religion with."
My father and I go into Pflager's. The wood floor is worn and warped and oil-darkened; the air smells of linoleum and denim jackets and new boards.
"Martin!" Mr. Pflager cries. "How you be?"
"Fine," my father says.
I've never known my father to say anything but "fine" when he's asked how he is, and I guess he always is fine; he hasn't been ill in his Life, as far as I know, except for strep throat, and that was only once, and he didn't stay home from school for more than a day or two.
"What today?" Mr. Pflager asks.
"Your company, first, Eldon," my father says, and leans his elbows on the countertop, as Mr. Pflager leans across from him, and they begin to talk. My father loves to talk and I've often felt his real profession is making friends, and that's why he sells insurance now. I haven't moved since we came in the door. I never do. Just inside, at this end of the counter, is a square display case, with glass sides, that swivels on a pedestal of wood. Inside the case, on velvet-covered shelves, are wristwatches, pocket watches, clocks, and jackknives. I turn the case until my watch comes around. It lies on a middle shelf and I have to look up to it. It's a wristwatch with a black band that I've wanted since I could see in the case. Mickey Mouse stands in the center of it in red shorts, with one gold-gloved hand, its forefinger extended, pointing to the minutes, the other the hours. I've never wanted anything so much in my life. If there weren't a padlock on the case, I'd have stolen it by now, though I've never stolen before, not even cantaloupes or gooseberries or pear tomatoes from a neighbor's garden, as most of the kids do.
I know it's a sin to want an object so much, even if I don't steal it, and I know this though I've never taken catechism or been instructed by the Sisters. I feel it's a sin. The Sisters will have me in first grade soon enough (although I'll have to admit that since my father quit teaching, I can't help feeling I'll never have to go to school; and as it turns out, they won't have me). I used to be afraid of them and ran whenever they came outside; those white faces looking out from all that black, and gliding toward you as though there were nothing below the black but old curled birds' claws, rumors of heaven, beads that clashed, and beaks of crows. I dream of faces without arms or legs or anything beneath except black holes and big beads that pop and propel them, and I'd probably still be afraid but once I was letting Donny Ennis chase me around the playground, and checking over my shoulder to see how far behind he was, when I crashed into the skirts of one of them, and she said, "Oh, little boy, you've hurt my knee!"
My mother has become a Catholic. After living in this town for ten years without being one, she's become a Catholic, and I'm the cause. There's a story I've heard my father tell his best friends in hushed tones from the time I was three, that goes, "When Tim was born and Alpha came home from the hospital, one of the first things she did was call me in to her bed and say, 'Martin, I've decided. I want to take instructions in the faith. I want to become a Catholic' And I was stunned. Because here after all these years—how many now?— without me saying a word, here it came out of the blue. 'Alpha,' I said. ‘Are you sure? Are you sure this is what you want?' 'Yes,' she said. 'I'd like to start seeing Father Schimmelpfennig right away.' So she's been seeing Father ever since, although few people but Wilhomena know about it: for three years" —this has grown to four years, and then five years —"she's been seeing him! And she absolutely will not convert until she's resolved every doubt about the faith in her mind. Father says she's practically a saint. I've had no hand in any of this, by the way."
Every time my father reaches this point in his story, which is its end, I see my mother with her hands clasped and a halo around her, like a picture on a holy card, rising through the ceiling, through the upstairs and the roof of the house, and disappearing into the sky, and I wonder, How did I manage to cause this? What kind of power do I have? I hardly talk to anybody for fear something worse will happen. And how did this? She made her First Communion when I was on a vacation to my Grandma and Grandpa Jones's farm, but I can tell you what she wore: her navy high-heeled shoes, the blue dress with white polka dots and wide red belt, and a piece of lace over her hair. She wrote to Grandma Jones about it and told what I have and more. "Why do I want to know all this?"
Grandma asked, angry, as she read the letter, and I saw moisture behind her glasses, and then she said, in a changed voice, "Well, I imagine your dad is finally satisfied, ha?"
Penny comes from her part of the store, the dry-goods side, and says, "Oh, Martin, hello! How are you?"
"Fine."
"Where's Tim?"
"Here."
She comes over and stares down and I feel the violet-blue eyes envelop me with a warmth like flame. Then she sees where I've been staring—I've even glanced away from her; I can't keep my eyes off it—and says, "Why don't you have your dad pay you a wage so you can buy yourself that watch?"
Like my father in his story, I am stunned; this has never occurred to me; I had no idea—
"Where are you working today?"
"At Schommer's."
"Inside the tavern?'' Penny is shocked!
"Down the basement."
"Oh."
"Putting in soil pipe for a new drain."
"How long will it take?"
"Just today, probably. We were there last week."
"Well, when you get on a house, on a big job, go on strike for a quarter an hour!"
"Maybe I'll try."
"Try nothing. Do it, you hear!"
My father comes over with a string of five-pound ingots of lead and a roll of oakum. "O.K., helper," he says. "Let's go."
We walk to Schommer's, down the echoing alleyway between Schommer's and the hardware to the back door of the tavern, and go down the steps into darkness. He pulls a chain and the basement appears around us as if called. He kneels at the portable white-gas furnace that holds the ladle for melting lead, and pumps the plunger at its base before he lights it: when we're done, I'll give the screw top of the plunger a twist and let the leftover air escape in a whish; it's dangerous to leave the pressure built up, he's said. He starts the furnace and its high-pitched whine against the stone walls surrounds us. He tears a five-pound ingot from the strip of five and drops it into the ladle now. He lays a long piece of black soil pipe in the trench he's dug, lays a level on it, makes a rumbling sound of approval low in his throat, and I bring over the cold chisels—one straight, one with a crook below the handle—and the ball-peen hammer, and hand them to him.
He tears off a length of oakum and begins tamping it into the joint of the soil pipe, all the way around, and when I hear a solid chink of the chisel, I tear off some more oakum and place it in his hand as he reaches behind to me. He takes his cap off by the bill and wipes the sleeve of his work shirt over his forehead, where beads of sweat are beginning to form, and moves the unlit cigar he's chewing to the
opposite corner of his mouth. He finishes filling and tamping the joint and I bring over the asbestos rope he'll fasten around the fitting to hold the lead in place when he pours it around the pipe.
He sets a Y on the floor, fits a piece of cut pipe into one branch of it, and I hold it in place for him. He unwinds the oakum from the roll and presses it into the fitting, the black flange turned back. I like the oakum's tarry, auburn smell; the salty, steamy smell that rises from him, a metallic smell made more so by the smell of his cigar; the way he sucks in air at the side of his mouth to keep the cigar clenched tight in his teeth; being close to his work shirt; the rainbow-colored whorls forming on the molten lead in the ladle; the way the furnace doesn't send up smoke but makes the dark air above it shimmy; how the bulb above him makes his head and shoulders look haloed and ablaze.
I know I’ll never ask him for a wage. I don't want one and don't want him to give me one, or our relationship would change, and, anyway, since he's quit teaching, I've been hearing around our house, more and more, the word "afford.” I know he couldn't afford one, and I know, too, how much he loves to work with his hands—to build and farm and garden and plumb—but I wonder what it was that made him quit teaching; he was the principal, the next to the highest, and then just quit. Even my mother can't say. Was I the cause of this, too? Doesn't he think I'd understand if he explained it to me? I hear the sound of the furnace, the chink of the chisel, his sucks of air.
and watch sweat darken his shirt over his chest and run down his face and drop onto the dirt floor in beads as firm and circular as the beads of molten lead that spill from a fitting and roll in slithering colors over the powdery dirt, and I remember my grandmother reading my mother's letter to me, and wonder, Is he satisfied?
18
PHEASANTS
Alpha went to the window in the pantry at the back of the kitchen, lifted the curtain, and looked down over the hedge toward Main Street; there was still no sign of him. The moonlight on the leaves and on the deserted walks wet with rain came with fall coldness through the glass to her face, feverish with anxiety and impatience, and she put her cheek against the pane. Two blocks down, a street lamp went on, lighting the side of the Town Hall, and a prowling cat made a blur as it bolted for cover in brown grass. Late with them again tonight. It was after nine and the children were in bed.
Delbert Faber came from the shack under the high blue-gray water tower, where he'd thrown the switch for the lights, and went along Main Street through the cone of the lamp, trailing illuminated vapors of spent breath, his head bowed, his hands in his pockets, and then did a sudden jogging side step. Drunk again. She'd hear about it from Mrs. Faber at the next card party, and what could she say to her? She couldn't sympathize with women who complained about their husband's drinking; she'd been through the fruitless world of that with her parents and herself. The only way a man stopped drinking was by taking a look outside himself at the world of his family and this real world (his interior, as he knew himself, was a hell), and if his wife was prattling on about his problem, or scolding or annoyed, or even concerned for his sake when he did look out, then she might as well be off in another century, or be another shot.
In the space between pane and sash, on a card there, was a picture of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus—the Infant standing on the Virgin's knee with arms out like a balanced statue's—and on the other side, the side facing out, were instructions for an act of perfect contrition, followed by a list of life-insurance policies and their average yearly rates, and, at the bottom, in the blunt type of a hand stamp:
HOLY FAMILY LIFE INSURANCE
Martin Neumiller, Agent
P.O. Box 3 C
Hyatt, North Dakota
"Honest as my policies"
Surely one of the boys, not Martin, put the card there, she thought, and blushed for him, and then felt exposed to the whole village; when he told her he was going to start selling insurance, she said, "You're the perfect one to be selling it; nobody has a better life."
She let the curtain fall. She'd defend him against anybody who'd be charitable about the job. The home office was so pleased with his sales they'd offered him the area around Fargo-Moorhead, but he turned it down; he wanted his children to grow up in the country, he said, as he had and his father before him, and so on. They sent him on a paid vacation to Custer and the Black Hills with several other agents, but he wouldn't be moved. He didn't have to be selling insurance in the first place. The president of the board came to the house again this fall and tried to persuade him to take back his teaching job, even hinted that he might be in line for promotion to superintendent, but Martin waves away his words. He wouldn't teach again until he'd succeeded or failed at selling insurance, he said, which might take years, and whenever she tried to imagine that future she felt her personality, or inner self, or good sense, or whatever, was loosening at its roots and leaving her and could be swatted like a fly.
Martin was one of the dozen men in the county with a college degree, and he had a gift for inspiring the young; they saw in his eyes that they could mature and still retain the purity of their beliefs; adulthood didn't mean, necessarily, deception and double-standards and world-weariness and guile. There was a dignity to his innocence, and it brought out trust and fearlessness in others, especially the young, who wouldn't stand for cant or sham; but last spring, at the end of the school year, he came to her and said, "I'm never going to make a decent wage teaching school, and you deserve a better life than this. I'm going to find a job that makes real money."
"No, no!" she wanted to cry out, but held herself silent. Fear bums all dreaming. She'd never interfered with his decisions and never would: "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord." That had the rough-tumbling thunder and lightning of Paul in it, and was him, for sure, but wasn't even a remote part of her guiding source from above. Martin felt confined by the school and longed to get into the country and drive for miles over the plain again, meet new people, live outside his wife, be free of the invariable workday; and when she was a girl, when her family was about to leave another farm, she'd heard each time an argument as old as time itself:
"Why do we have to leave?" Her mother. "Because we have to!" Her dad. "Why?"
"Because I'm not getting ahead.”
"Why can't you be satisfied for once with what you have?"
"Because I'm not getting ahead!”
There was no reason that could be used with a man in that condition; it was more a matter of whether you wanted to be married to him or not. And when she decided to marry Martin, she vowed she wouldn't sustain the argument any further, for the sake of her sons, if she had sons. Her mother and father had moved again, with Lionell, across the border into Minnesota, because her father believed the opportunities for him and the family were better there. Daddy, Daddy, she wanted to say to him, Stop. Mama would be satisfied with a sod shack, if you'd slow down enough to take root in the present, where she's waiting, as she always has, for a few minutes each day of the straightforward love you met and courted her with. You take yourself so seriously, Daddy, you're made of air!
She went into the kitchen and held her hand over the oven vent at the back of the stove. Warmth was still rising from it. What was real in real life? She smoothed the tablecloth, which was already smooth, and straightened the silverware beside Martin's plate, and then felt emptied of energy, her current drained down the floor, and sank in a chair and put her face in her hands. She'd gone over and over the reasons she'd converted to the Church. It tied her to a past more ordered than hers. She felt her life lengthen backward, watching rituals she knew had been performed in the same way over the world for hundreds of years happen again; her mind had new strength and new freedom to roam now; old fears were given names, others disappeared, and doubts were discarded to gain a new end. The prayers held her within a written framework with her feet on the ground. The Church's scholarship and its mysteries were beyond the comprehension of any one man and wife, and she fel
t an infinity of thought and brotherhood about her. Also, it was easy to follow rules set up by somebody else. She'd balked at the idea of the infallibility of the Pope, and then Father said, "Think of him as far, far off, which he is, and transparent—a window you can look through and see the saints. Theirs are the lives to emulate, darling."
But none of this was enough to win her over, by and in itself. She'd converted because of the feeling of light, a light she sensed but couldn't quite see. The more she studied the Bible and the catechism, the stronger the light became, until she felt it just above her the way she could feel the sun on her back when she went down into their root cellar on the farm outside Dazey. Since her First Communion, the light had stayed.
But now she was pregnant again.
At this rate she'd catch up with the Russells. She'd become accustomed in their house to luxury of a kind, and when Martin bought the new bedroom set, she started to think how nice it would be to have the clothes she'd never had, a new stove, an electric sewing machine, and of how she never could if they kept having children. She was willing to try birth control, other than by rhythm, at least once, to see how she felt about it, but Martin wouldn't agree. When you were born a Catholic, it was in your bones and blood, while she could believe in a way that Martin wasn't able to; entirely with her mind. Was that pride, plumed pride, again, or a worse sin?
Maybe her thoughts, through her touch, had been communicated to him and transformed in him into this ambition of late. Or maybe her conversion affected him more than he could comprehend; he seemed to need to be near his family much more, and they went to Illinois nearly every summer vacation, those three months, and to her parents only over holidays or for a weekend, usually. Martin sometimes adopted an all-inclusive indignant whine that was his mother all over again. He said he didn't want to hear any more of her ideas about religion; he just wanted to believe. His serpent? And why had she had the thoughts? There was such a rush and array of detail to daily life (to say nothing of the eternity of detail inside your mind), when your life was divided among husband and children and housework and keeping peace and social obligations and relatives and friends and the community, that there seemed no time or room left for the form there was in her mother's day. The particular mind. That she'd once kept a diary now seemed a vain and luxurious excursion into self-idolatry.
Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 26
