by Jeffrey Lent
He went back to the house one midnight. The sheep farmer Flood’s boy was paid to daily water and feed the driving horses. Still he went first to the barn to see them and stood there in the summer dark talking to his horses, old everyday words issuing forth as undirected encompassing love, a croon of self without content and fraught with meaning. And heard himself, heard his father, his sister Prudence also, and stopped. His father would talk to horses as if they were the god who happened to live next door, easy terms and reverential at once. And his sister talked to all creatures as if they might die without the sound of her voice and she there just to reassure. He stood in the dark barn. The horses restless now with his uneasy presence. He stroked them, not speaking.
The house was rank with absence. He sat in the pale filtered starlit yard and smoked and drank a small glass of whiskey. Then went through the dark house to the bedroom and lighted a lamp. The closet doors stood open as she had left them. He stood before them and gathered together an armful of her hanging dresses and thrust his face into them. Laundry soap. The closet smell of mouse scat, pale ancient cedar, a floral thread that might have been from her or might have been only the clothing itself. He blew out the lamp and undressed in the dark and got into the bed. The sheets musty, smelling old.
He woke during the night or half woke in another state altogether. He rolled off the bed onto his knees and crabbed across the floor and found her torn-off clothes from that last afternoon and he took them up wadded against him and lowered himself onto the mattress and humped against the balled clothing and then rolled over onto his back and with his left hand held the mess of clothes against his face, pressed to his nose and mouth as if he meant suffocation and with his other hand masturbated with a furious tight clench. Then slept again.
His first three years of school he frequently arrived home bruised, bleeding from his lips or nose, his eyes swollen. His knuckles broken and raw. It came in spates, days in a row or weekly and then weeks with nothing at all and then it would begin again. He would not speak of it, would stand silent, helpless tears on his face as one or both sisters ministered him. It was Abigail took the buggy to visit the teacher at Riford School but came back with nothing, her face a sneer of undirected anger. Nothing happened on school grounds. The Clifford boy cousins denied all knowledge, their eyes running over Jamie as if memorizing him. Aunt Connie squatted and took him by the elbows and naming them one by one asked if her boys tormented him and he denied it. After this Prudence laid claim to the job of driving him to school and picking him up afternoons but he would slip out of the house while she was in the barn harnessing a horse and go fast across the meadow into the woods and down to where he could come out and cross the road to the school. Afternoons if she was sitting waiting for him he’d bolt past the back of the gig and leap the ditch on the far side of the road and be off into the alders and popples in the springy damp ground there. And yet there in the woods they found him also and once found he would not run but turned to face them, one or five, and stand shaking before their taunt—of himself, of his father, of his dead mother, of his sisters: of them all. Not as simple as his skin or that of his mother or how she died but all of it mixed together in the animal cruelty of boys, the real with the imagined or conjured, the words’ meanings not even understood by them or him but the cut and thrust of them clear enough, the indecent giddy pleasure of making pain. Until he would charge them, silent, clench-fisted. The boys: not just his cousins Clifford but the Polk brothers, Jimmy Potwin, Dennis Dowd, Bill Bartlett, Duffy Smith, the Morgan brothers. Sometimes others. He would always fight them. He knew if he quit they would also and knowing this made him all the more ferocious, wild and ineffectual as they bloodied him and he would not quit. His father knew this, both these things, and he would sit nights wreathed in pipe smoke explaining aloud what the boy already knew. His father gentle, puzzled, remote and tender, his wearied recognition not aid but a balm as if together the two of them understood the pointlessness of the anger of the two women—that it was not the blood or fists or even the words but some other thing altogether that could not be stopped, checked or changed.
When the boy began his fourth year of school not only bloodied but with a dislocated shoulder that the doctor clenched and brought back to place with the first yelp of pain from the boy any of them had ever heard, it was then his sisters determined to take him from the school and so also from the town and their neighbors and educate him at home. Once seized upon the sisters held to this with the righteous fervor not of the convert but of the veteran. As if they might save the boy this way. And what that boy knew but could not ask was to save him for what? To raise up and so walk alongside them a monk to their nunhoods of carving the earth and cutting wood and the pervasive husbandry of livestock that was all they allotted themselves? They had found him as their project, their wellspring of devotion. And it was not even love but thrall that kept the ten-year-old from explaining what could not be explained to his sisters. He was sure they knew. And so he learned that ignorance is not always stark deficit but can be so clearly and simply a denying of what is known. So they removed him from the battle. And so he never once won, never once caused harm or true fear in his opponents. And in this way those tormenting defeated him through the agency of the women who loved him more than any others ever would or could. And those women did educate him but they did not make him. He was already made.
He woke in the morning beside her ruined clothing stiff with semen and crushed where he’d rolled onto it in the night. He felt he’d fouled her someway. He carried the balled mass out to the stone-lined pit where they burned paper trash and poured kerosene over it and set it alight. Back in the house he gathered the rest of her clothes off their hangers and drove to Littleton to a laundry where he left it all to be cleaned and starched and ironed, telling the woman to pack the items for storage. The sun was well up now and he was hungry but wouldn’t stop to eat. At the house he made a fire in the range and filled the copper boiler for wash water and began to clean the house, starting with the dishes clotted together in the sink. He found a rag and wiped down the furniture and then swept and after this found more rags and poured vinegar into a bucket of warm water and washed the windows, inside and out, with the sun hot now on his bare back and his stomach a hard knot consuming itself. Back inside he found a stiff brush and so was on his hands and knees scrubbing the floorboards when a motorcar came down the dirt track and he ignored it for his work and so Scully walked in and found him so, the knees of his trousers sopping from the scrub water, his chest and arms wet from his work, his hair slicked down, and when he raised his head to greet Scully the sweat ran into his eyes.
Scully drew back a chair at the table and seated himself to watch Jamie work. Scully in his rusted black trousers and white shirt and black jacket, his derby hat off his head on the table, one ankle over the other knee, his elbows out from his sides as his hands fiddled together on the tabletop. Bringing to mind a great awkward bird. With his hat off his thin hair invisible across the dome of his head, his skin stretched tight, a color like the crust on butter left too long in the air. From the folds of his coat he drew out a pint bottle without a label, stoppered with a cork and set it on the table. Lighted a cigarette. Drew hard upon it and coughed and drew again. Jamie thought There’s me, thirty—forty years I don’t watch it.
“Once you get it neatened you got yourself a problem. You can either scamper around trying to keep it all just as it was or you can watch it slowly pile up and fall over itself again. Either way, it’s not a pretty thing.”
“It’s summertime,” Jamie said. “A house needs a good cleaning once a year.”
“Spring cleaning is what you’re talking about.”
“I guess the spring got away from me then.” Jamie sat back on his haunches, let go of the brush and leaned against the cupboards. His hands were swollen and sore from the lye soap. “How long’d you know she was leaving?”
Scully shook his head. Uncorked the whiskey but didn�
��t lift it. “She never even said goodbye to me. Other than that, I thought it was only a flirtation. The way she can look at a man and size his bankroll and all the time have him thinking it’s his peter on her mind. You know that about her.”
“I always thought it was shuffle-and-dodge. I never thought she’d run off. It irks me though. You had to have seen what was going on. I thought we were friends, Scully.”
Scully took up the whiskey. “Friends, Jamie? I don’t believe I know what that even means. Seems to me friends are people useful to a body. I’m losing what use I ever had and I know that for a fact. But say I had thought this time was different? And had remarked on it to you. What would you have done? That would have changed her mind?”
“I know it.”
“I told you to marry her.”
Jamie stood then, pushing off the cupboards and feeling his knees crack as he rose. Took up the cigarettes and the matches. “Say I had. Even a year ago, before this Rhode Island sportsman came along. You think that still would’ve stopped her?”
Scully nodded. “She’s a peculiar strong girl.”
“She’s a whore, what she is.”
“No.” Scully didn’t ponder this. “That’s your heartbreak talking. She’s just a girl turned loose in the world with only herself to count on. Trying to figure out each step which is best. That’s what seemed to make you two such a fine pair, maybe, but on the other hand wouldn’t it be natural for her to grasp hard onto someone who knows the way? And that sameness in you both, it could be, she wouldn’t see that as attractive as you do, might be even she could worry over it. This make any sense to you?”
“What do you want, Scully? What’d you come down here for?”
“Why, to check on you. Make sure you were all right.”
“I’m not going to blow my head off, if that’s what you mean. Other than that, I couldn’t tell you how I was.”
“I guess not. But I hadn’t seen you.”
“You expect me to just drop by like old times?”
Scully drank now from the opened whiskey. Offered it over and Jamie shook his head. Scully said, “There’s people want to see you maybe. Out and about.”
“Ones that want it bad enough know where to find me. I don’t need to chase after anything.”
“Maybe it’s just to be sociable.”
“I don’t feel that way right now.”
“Maybe that’s the best time.”
“Could be, maybe not. You got some new girl singing with you yet?”
Scully shook his head. “It’s just me and them other boys. It works I guess but it’s not the same. It’s a sad act right now.”
Jamie took up the bottle and drank a little bit from it. It wasn’t what he wanted—he was ready now for coffee and some food—but had no desire to eat lunch with Scully. He wiped his mouth and said, “I’ve got no interest in being a part of it.”
Scully spread his arms to indicate the empty house, the housecleaning. He said, “Alone this way is sad too.”
Jamie shook his head. “It’s private is what it is. The rest, sad or happy, whatever, is just other people’s ideas.”
Scully stood then and replaced the cork in the bottle and the bottle back in his coat. “Well then.” He looked off at the shining clear glass over the sink, the sunlight prismed there in the small bubbles in the glass. Then back to Jamie. “Don’t be a stranger, boy.”
Jamie nodded, then stepped forward and took the old man’s hand. And said, “All right.”
The summer rolled on, July into August. He retrieved Joey’s clothing from the laundry, the dresses and capes and winter coats packed in long thin cardboard boxes with tops that opened like wings, held together with a pair of hard paper buttons bound one to the other by string. Loaded in the back of the Ford he could not help feeling they were a sort of coffin. Of love or trust or both. He brought them home and stacked them in the unused spare bedroom. Shut that door soft but with a strong pull to hear the latch click to.
As August advanced the nights held a foretaste of winter and he began to leave the house afternoons with a fire laid in the range and a lined overcoat folded on the backseat of the motorcar. He bought hay from the sheep farmer Flood and ordered oats and stacked the sacks in the granary of tight-joined oaken planks. Nights, fires were lit in the public rooms of the Sinclair, one in the bar as well, and the vacationers would cluster in their summer clothes and Jamie raised his bartenders’ pay by a dime an hour simply because they had to make the same remarks about the weather over and over. The guests were all on summer holiday but the season had turned and the hotel workers felt it and it laid an edge to them. Jamie sat in his office or sometimes perched on a stool at the bar sipping ginger ale and for the first time could see how this worked—the quickening of tempers and emotions, the sudden quittings, the ends of love affairs or the beginnings of new and unlikely ones, the workers slightly slower in response to the guests, the afterhours parties more tainted with futility and so bearing harder upon the partygoers so more waiters and laundresses and liverymen and kitchen scrubs and bellboys showed up later in the mornings or if on time more hungover or both. For him, all it did was make him sad.
He brought girls home with him. In between times, it didn’t seem very often but when one was there with him there would always come a time, usually before he roused to drive her back to where she needed to be but a couple of times when he woke in the morning and found her there beside him, he felt like it was just one after the other with a different suit of clothes to take off and high or low breasts and waists wide or slender and different teeth and cries coming out of them or not. And with each he was tender and murderous, wanting while he lay with them nothing but their pleasure and caring nothing for his own but once both were done, once both had taken it as far as it might go he wanted them only gone. He would rise up at four in the morning—when all he wanted was sleep—and make coffee and carry it in to the bed and nurse her from sleep and approve of her sitting up and sipping at the coffee, her face puffed and tender, the sheets and blankets pooled in her lap as she sat, his mind already out the door cranking the Ford.
He woke from dreams of Joey leaving him where he would sob and beg, clinging to her, debasing himself. Would come awake in breathless agony—the look, touch, feel and sound of her fading away. Some days a dream-image would return brilliantly later in the day and he would stop what he was doing to bend double as from a cramp in the middle of him.
And then it was September and the families were gone and it was older couples and maiden aunts and bevies of old women and groups of men; hiking or outing clubs come to the mountains. Some young women traveling in pairs. The occasional solitaire, a man or woman of middle years wrapped in a sheath of loneliness hardened like a cerecloth about them, features set in an ever-distant glare. “Oh, Miss Blake!” one of the older ladies would call from a group at the card tables as the woman hurried down the corridor, away, away. He had not seen Miss Blake’s face; she could be his age or twenty years older, plain or pretty, severe or timid, poised to flight. But he felt he knew something of her, nothing like whatever the women at the card table were discussing. And the Miss Blakes in their rooms gazing out a window endlessly creating and recreating what might have been.
He anticipated the winter with the mute dread of a falling dream.
His managing nightshift bartender Stanley Weeks was overeager for the end of October. One night counting receipts with Jamie he spilled over. “That Florida’s the ticket come winter, I tell you what. Clearwater’s a sweet town. Winter there’s like this place turned inside out. You ought to shed this north country. Why you’d walk in there and own the town. And that Mexican Gulf, you’ve not seen nothing until you set your ass down on that white sand and watch the sun set over that blue water. Swim all the winter through. Custom’s good too, some of the same Yorkers that summer here, plus you got the leftover rich Southerners. Some sweet gals there I tell you. I mean it J, you say the word to Oliphant and he’d write you
a letter would have you sitting pretty anyplace in Clearwater. The rest of the state for that matter.”
Jamie lifted one by one the rubber-banded stacks of banknotes and slid them into a yellow envelope and bent back the metal clasp. Dipped his pen and wrote the amount and date on the outside of the envelope and flourished his initials beneath. Then said, “I believe I’ll sit tight, Stanley. I’ve obligations.”
“You could farm it out. You should do it, at least one winter, just to see. It’s a different place. It ain’t just the weather, it’s the attitude. It’s all easy. Now, there’s the Jews; you got to put up with them. They take to Florida like it’s the promised land. But on the up side there’s the coloreds what do all the grunt work. I’m serious J, a good man’s golden there. Write your own ticket.”
And Jamie wrote the date again and the amount once more also in the narrow columns of the ledger book in his small tight hand and closed the book and slid it into place and stood and crossed the room to place the manila envelope in the open floor safe and spun the dial and heard the tumblers click softly. He sat a pause with his hands on his knees and then pushed himself upright and went back to the desk and stood behind Stanley and reached one hand to hold the bartender’s shoulder and for just a moment let his fingers slip deep to a grip past touch but nearer caress than pain. He said, “Help yourself to a bottle of something, Stanley. Just make note of it.”
