Henry filled a second plate and lit into it like he’d always heard wondrous tales about food but this was the first he’d had. Mrs. Bentley served up some of everything on a plate she set in front of Paul. Then she fluttered around filling coffee cups.
I leaned over a little and told him, “Biscuits and gravy at twelve o’clock, sausage at six,” and started in on my own.
Henry gulped a wad of bread and said, “What do you do when nobody else is around?”
Paul never hesitated eating.
“Hey! Paul!”
Paul looked up. “Yes?”
“How do you get by when nobody’s around?”
“Oh.” Paul tapped at his mouth with a napkin and took a sip of coffee. “Well, Henry, have you ever heard that if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound?”
“I guess so . . .”
It was clear he hadn’t.
“Well, if there’s no one around to see me, I don’t exist.”
“You don’t . . . Huh?”
Paul said, “Yesterday, you implied you live by the old adage ‘Seeing is believing.’ Isn’t that what you were saying?”
“Well, you were talkin’ about the fair like—”
“And you know I can’t see myself. So I guess if nobody else is around, I’m not there, am I?” He started eating again.
We all sat and stared at him. I knew he was having fun at Henry’s expense, but his face held no clue that he was anything other than serious. And it’s hard to laugh at a fellow’s joke when you’re not sure what it is. The room was completely still other than Paul’s fork traveling from plate to mouth.
Then Mrs. Bentley appeared with a milk pitcher, and regular conversation took up again. Sugar was passed, and the weather was reported upon and predicted. Henry wolfed a third plateful of food and headed upstairs.
Seconds later, Paul asked, “Has anyone here read the morning newspaper?”
There were grunts that sounded like no from around the table.
The man opposite Paul said, “Why?”
“Keeping up with news on the Johnson-Jeffries fight—that’s all.”
The same man grunted. “Jeffries and Johnson, you meant to say, din’t ya?”
“Not gonna happen,” said the man to his right.
This time the grunts sounded like yes.
The man continued, “John L. Sullivan hisself said it was prob’ly a frame-up, and the governor of California said the same. It’s just a setup to cheat people out of money.”
I had barely a clue what they were talking about.
Paul said, “Yes, I’ve heard that.”
Mrs. Bentley reappeared and started clearing the table, and we all pushed back our chairs and went upstairs to our rooms.
The room we’d slept in looked like a tornado had hit it, and I had to stop myself from asking Henry if he was raised in a barn. Instead, I said, “Okay, then. Let’s figure out what we’re gonna do.”
“Whaddaya mean?” Henry grunted. “What’s to figger?”
I scuffed my toe in the flowers on the rug. “Oh, it’s just that last night when you were downstairs and we were up here, Paul was sayin’—”
“Last night I was saying we should shoot you and put you out of your misery. It’s true. But now I think we should keep you alive and torture you as long as we can.” Paul put on a cheerful smile.
“What the—?”
I grinned at the woolen roses at my feet. “Let’s go. Load up the car and get outta here.”
Mrs. Bentley was waiting by the front door when we banged our way down the cherrywood staircase with our bags. “Seems to me you could of shaved,” she told no one in particular.
Paul was still jolly. “We would have, ma’am, but Henry wants to get on the road so he can be a comfort to his father soon as possible.”
“Well.” Her dark little bird eyes darted over our clothes as if she just now noticed we weren’t dressed like businessmen.
Paul said, “But could you tell us the nearest place to buy a newspaper, please?”
Henry snorted.
Paul ignored him. “Ma’am?”
“Well—” She was blinking telegraph code, trying to sort us out. “Just go on up to the square, and you’ll see Stanford’s. You can get one there.”
“Thank you, ma’am. For everything.” I pushed Henry out the door with the bags I carried.
I drove as we headed out.
Paul leaned over the backrest. “Don’t forget to stop at Stanford’s.”
Henry twisted around. “You meant that? I figured you was jes’ pullin’ that ol’ woman’s leg.”
No answer.
“What are you gonna do with a newspaper?” Henry said.
“I get one every day.”
“But what do you do with it?”
“Have somebody read it to me.”
“Oh.” Henry faced forward two whole seconds. “Who?”
“You or John . . . it doesn’t matter.”
“Naw, I mean every day, like you said. Yer ma or yer pa take all that time out of their day?”
“No. Sam reads to me.”
“Oh.”
I was concentrating on pulling up to the rail in front of Stanford’s, and I jumped when Henry yelled.
“There wasn’t no colored schools around when Sam was comin’ up! You think I’m stupid?”
I didn’t hear Paul’s answer before I walked into the store.
Henry was guffawing when I came back out. I maneuvered into reverse and told Paul while I was turned around facing him, “We oughta buy gasoline before we leave town.”
Henry leaned over and slapped my thigh hard. “You missed a good’n.”
I gritted my teeth against the sting.
“Ol’ Paulie here’s been tellin’ me he learned their boy Sam how to read!”
“Well, then, I’m sure he did.” I could feel the outline of Henry’s hand burning my leg.
“Aw, phffft! Now how would he? Jes’ tell me that.”
I kept my eyes forward and headed west. “Seems like you’re askin’ the wrong person.” Over my shoulder, I said, “Paul? Gasoline, if I can find a place?”
“Sure, wherever you think.”
Henry buzzed like a mosquito again. “Well, then, you jes’ tell me how the hell you teach somebody else to read when you can’t. That’s what I wanna know.”
“I can read.”
“Not like normal people, you can’t!”
“Oh? And what is normal? If everyone around but you were blind—”
“Don’t start in on that shit again,” Henry hollered. Then to me, “What are you laughin’ at?” His fist came at my shoulder.
I caught it and shoved it back at him. “You. And if you hit me one more time, I’m gonna pull the car over and lay you out. I mean it.” I checked his reaction with a split-second glance. “You hear me?”
“Well, tell me what’s goin’ on!” Henry bleated like a calf.
“Sounds to me like you’re doin’ your best to make Paul mad and he won’t play along.”
“No, I ain’t! I jes’—” He threw up his hands. Like we were the ones being ornery. “I just wanna know how he could learn a man how to read when he can’t even see. That’s all.”
“Oh. Then why didn’t you say so?” Paul asked.
I shot Henry a look that prevented an answer.
“Well, I do know my letters. At school we were taught the shapes with carved wood blocks.”
“But—”
“And I can write. I need paper guides, but I can turn out writing as good as yours, I’d wager. I drew the letters for Sam first and taught him those. Then it was just a matter of teaching him what they sound like and how they fit together. If he got stuck, he’d describe a letter to me or draw it in my hand with his finger and we’d go on from there.”
“Jiminy,” I said. So simple.
But not simple enough for Henry. “But how can you write? How do you know what you�
�ve wrote when you can’t see it?”
“If you wrote something in pitch darkness, it might come out messy, but you’d know what you had written, wouldn’t you?” There was a smile in Paul’s voice.
“Oh.” Henry frowned, then said, “But what about the readin’ part?”
Paul leaned forward. “I read things printed in Braille. It’s a raised-letter code that’s stamped into paper, and you read it by running your fingers over it. It’s named after the man who invented it.”
“A code? You mean it’s like readin’ a whole ’nother language?”
“That’s right,” Paul said. He was resting his head on his arms between us. “Have you heard of Helen Keller?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Well, she can read and write in four or five different languages, and she’s blind and deaf! What do you think of that?”
Henry snorted. “I heard my pa say she weren’t nothin’ but a trained monkey. That’s what I think of that.”
Paul’s words came like bullets. “I once heard your father say that you killed your mother. Do you believe that too?”
Henry made a noise like he’d been kicked.
I braked and turned around to look at Paul—I guess to make sure that comment had really come out of him, the Paul Bricken I knew.
He looked about ready to puke.
We drove until noon and into the town of Levasy without any more said, but Henry cleared his throat a lot. My stomach clenched like a fist and burned like it always does during a brouhaha with my folks.
I had the awful thought that maybe home wasn’t the problem any of us thought it was. Maybe what was wrong hadn’t been left behind at all.
CHAPTER FOUR
“We’re in Levasy,” is how I surfaced from the gloomy silence. “You got enough to buy us gasoline and a meal, Paul, or do we need to rob a chicken house?”
“I can pay.” His voice was flat as train tracks. “Stop somewhere for fuel and ask if there’s someplace to eat that’s not too fancy.”
Now, there was a remark only a blind man would make. The town of Levasy made Wakenda look like Paris, France. The whole town looked like it could do with a bucket of soapy water and a new coat of paint.
But there was a cafe. The town blacksmith carried gasoline for sale, and he pointed us toward Maggie’s after he pocketed Paul’s money. Outside, it looked like the place where we’d stopped to eat in Dover.
And inside, it was about the same, except it had a lunch counter and we were in time for the meat loaf plate special. I would have put us in a line at the counter staring at anything other than each other, but the stools were all taken.
There was one woman running the place, both cook and waitress. Second time over, she brought our plates. “Sure you don’t want separate tables?”
We all frowned at her.
“You ain’t said boo to one another since you come in. I just wondered.”
Even Paul found a spot on the table to study in answer to that.
That afternoon we passed more pastures, more cornfields and farmsteads. I drove and was glad for not talking. My description of the countryside would have sounded like Henry’s. Tree. Rock. Dirt. More dirt. But maybe that was just my mood. If we’d been getting along, I might could have turned out poetry. It’s hard to find the poet inside you when your insides are on fire.
We met one automobile and three teams on the way to Independence. The first horses reared, and we had to stop and help the farmer load barrels back into his wagon. After that, I pulled over and stopped to let the dumb animals pass.
I asked if anybody needed to stop in Independence for anything, and neither one answered, so I drove on through. Once I’d found my way through the maze of streets and we were back out in the open, I pulled the car over and killed the engine.
It took about three minutes before anybody spoke up.
“Where are we?” Paul asked. “Is there another wagon passing?”
I turned sideways in the seat. “Nothin’ passin’ here except the god-awful gas that meat loaf gave me.”
No response from either one. Not even a smile. Hell, everybody likes a fart joke.
“Naw, I was just thinkin’ maybe we should turn around and go home after all.”
That got their attention.
Henry popped a “Whuh—?”
Paul’s nose came up like a bird dog on point.
“Yeah, I’ve had a lot of quiet here to do some thinking, and seems to me it won’t be car trouble or robbers or broken noses that kill this trip. It’s gonna be infighting. What’s the point of driving all the way across the country with people you ain’t speaking to?” By God, I was finally coming up with the right words when I needed them, instead of three days too late.
“He started it.” Paul.
“Like hell.” Henry.
Gott im Himmel, as my grandpa used to say. What were they, three years old?
“You could both do with apologizing,” I told them. I nodded at Henry. “You’re a damn troublemaker.” Then I turned all the way around to talk to Paul. “And that was just about the shittiest thing I’ve ever heard anybody say to another person.” I looked back and forth between them. “You don’t need to be best friends—I don’t even care if you like each other—but if you can’t be decent, I’m turnin’ it around right now.”
They pouted for a minute, and Henry sneered, “Thanks, Grandma.”
“Well, stop actin’ like a baby and I’ll stop treatin’ you like one.”
They both grumbled.
Paul finally said, “That was . . . a stupid thing for me to say. I’m sorry.”
Henry’s bottom lip stuck out so far I wanted to smack it. “I didn’t do nothin’,” he said. “You gotta learn not to be so goddamned thin-skinned, is all.”
I was ready to head for home. “Henry,” I said through my teeth, “you’ve tried to stir things up every time you opened your mouth and you know it. Are you gonna quit it or not?”
“Seems like I can’t walk anywhere without steppin’ in some kinda shit.”
I waited.
He shook his head. “Oh, all right. I’ll try.”
I got out of the car with the crank. “Can you see out of those bloody slits well enough to drive?”
He slid behind the wheel, and we were soon on our way.
Half an hour down the road, we came by a barn that listed so far to one side it looked like the wind from a chicken walking by might take it down. I turned around to tell Paul and found him leaning at a similar angle against Henry’s bedroll, sleeping. I faced forward and settled in for a break.
Which lasted less than a minute.
With no preamble, Henry said, “It ain’t like I never heard it before.”
I had to think for a minute what he meant and then said to myself, Oh, hell. “Well, damn, Henry. Women die birthin’ babies. It’s a natural fact. You can’t hardly blame the babies.”
Henry said, “Especially when they’re four years old.” An undertaker’s laugh.
“I don’t understand.” Oh, Lord, I thought, he didn’t really kill her, did he? It seemed like I’d have grown up knowing that story.
“Mama didn’t die birthin’ me. But Pa said I tore her up so bad comin’ out ass first it ruined her for—well, she just never got over it. He said she started dyin’ the day I was born, and it just took her four years to get done.”
“Good God.” I thought about Catherine for the first time since I’d left home and went back two years to remember her at four—so little, so breakable, seemed like. I couldn’t imagine anybody like that without a mother.
I finally ventured, “Well, he didn’t tell you it was your fault, did he?”
“Not when he was sober.” That same laugh. It sent a chill down my back. “But that started comin’ around less and less often. I barely remember him before he got bad. I don’t really remember her at all.”
I sneaked a look. He was blinking fast.
“Where are we?” Paul was awake, an
d I was glad.
“About ten miles from Kansas City would be my guess,” I said. “Ought to be there in a half an hour.”
“You got a plan?” Henry threw over his shoulder.
“Well, not really,” I answered for Paul. “Just that Paul and I talked last night about picking up some work along the way to pay expenses. We didn’t go into it, though.”
I made note of the fact Henry didn’t crack wise about Paul working. He just frowned. “Well, for you and me, I gotta say the stockyards is gonna be our best bet for work. We wanna look for someplace close around there to stay?”
The stockyards. Of course. Work tailor-made for the two of us. I was surprised Henry had thought of it before I could.
“Well, I was thinking,” Paul said, “I can take the trolley downtown from wherever we are. I’m sure there’s a music store there. So you two may as well take the Ford while we’re here. I mean, we don’t need to stay right next door to the livestock.”
Henry wrestled with this.
I offered, “Paul knows how to tune pianos.”
But Henry was on a different path. “You use the trolley in St. Louis?”
“All the time,” Paul said.
“Huh.”
For the two of them, it was downright civilized.
Once in the city, Henry’s Halloween face scared two people away and convinced us I was the better man for asking directions. We all changed places to put him in the shadows of the backseat. About thirty dead-end streets and wrong turns finally got us to the stockyards, locked up tight for the night. Every one of my nerves was jangled by then from the noise and traffic and more people than I’d ever seen in one place. I wanted nothing more than to pull over and sleep in the car.
Instead, I drove us all around there to get our bearings. Then I drove in a bigger circle each time around, looking for a place to put up. The Ben Bolt Hotel declared a vacancy, and the looks of it promised it couldn’t be too expensive.
Once we got to our room and inspected what little was there, I commented, “It smells like feet.”
“It smells like dirty socks stuffed with onions,” Paul volunteered.
Seeing America Page 7
