Ordinary Love and Good Will (15 page)

“This Tuesday? I thought that wasn’t till after Labor Day this year.”

“Monday is Labor Day. It’s been September for four days now.”

“Tina was supposed to come on the fifteenth of August.”

“Well, she was two weeks late and we didn’t even notice. She ought to put that in her book.”

“You went to church last Sunday. Didn’t you realize what day it was?”

“It didn’t come up. It’s not like when you’re a Catholic and you’re always counting backwards or forwards to some major holiday.”

“Well, I guess that shows that the prophet is a man of his time. He figures everybody knows what day it is.”

“If you really want to know, what he figures is that every day might as well be the last.”

We haven’t talked about specifics of dogma very much,
but I let it drop. Anyway, Tommy comes out of the barn, where he has been haying and watering the ponies for the night, and greets his mother as if she has been gone since Christmas. She swings him up into her arms, and continues walking, his arms around her neck and his legs around her waist. The voice of my father tells me that he is too old for this, but my own voice disagrees, says that boys are isolated too soon, that as long as he seeks our bodies he should find them. And there is also this reassuring shiver of jealousy, a light touch raising the hairs on the nape of my neck, that reminds me how the pleasure of marriage and the pleasure of fatherhood take their piquancy from watching, left out, as they nuzzle and giggle and tease. He never tries to impress her; she never tries to mollify him. We haven’t used birth control since our marriage and she only got pregnant once. Most of the time I forget that it could happen again. Secretly, I have only ever managed to imagine one boy child. Maybe imagination is the key there, too. “Lovely sunset,” says Liz, and Tommy says, “We fried green tomatoes with basil for dinner.”

“Mmm,” says his mommy. “I just love that.”

We stroll up the road toward the house, toward the dinner laid on the table, and this is what we expect: to eat and be satisfied, to find comfort in each other’s company, to relinquish the day and receive the night, to make an orderly retreat from each boundary that contains us—the valley, the house yard, the house, the room, the covers, wakefulness—in perfect serenity. Well, of course I am thankful, and of course a prayer lifts off me, but there is nothing human about it, no generalizations, nor even words, only the rightness of every thing that is present expressing itself through my appreciation.

2
.
October

I admit I like to be prepared for things. A life without money is predicated on anticipation (although, maybe, it is shaped by the unexpected). More that is unexpected happens when you are married, more still when you have a child. Mostly these unexpected things leave me confused and slow, which is what happens when the day rolls around for slaughtering the summer’s lambs. I feel less than no compunction about slaughtering the lambs, because in fact they are no longer cunning little lambs, they are now stupid, homely sheep. A sheepskin, a leg of mutton, these are things of beauty to me. A flock of sheep trampling each other in a panic is not. They often panic. They often trample. My ram and my six ewes, which I got from a number of different sources, are unrelated to one another and produce healthy, mixed-breed lambs. Inbred animals are subject to parasites, disease, and immune system problems that I might not be able to control with garlic wormers, nutritious feed, and sanitary pasturing practices, so my lambs have no future in my flock.

I get up feeling good on the day I am to slaughter the sheep. Liz is perky, too, because there will be a lot of work to do. We throw some logs into the range, savor the morning chill. I am standing on a chair, rummaging through upper cupboards for my .45, a World War II service revolver
I found at an auction, and for the box of shells I bought last fall, when Tommy comes weeping into the kitchen.

Tommy is nearly eight; he has been present for eight sheep massacres, and cognizant for at least four, so it takes a while for me to understand that it is the death of the lambs that has upset him. When I do understand, I admit, I slam my fist down on the table, angered rather than gladdened that he has grown up enough in the past year to imagine the sheep’s point of view. He sniffles over his breakfast. I shout, “Well, you are going to help! That’s the lesson here. If you eat something, you have to help produce it. Do you want to be a vegetarian?”

He shakes his head. “Do you like lamb stew? Or trout? Or sausage?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Well?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Want to what?”

“Watch you kill them.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Mr. John Doe, a guy who buys a steak at a grocery store. Don’t know where it came from, don’t know what it means to eat it. You want to be like that?”

“No, Daddy.”

“We took good care of those lambs. They ate good grass and had plenty of fresh water, and now they won’t know what hit them. This is a good life for a lamb, Tommy, all the way to the end and past it.”

“I don’t want to.”

I stand up from the table. “Come on outside.”

We shear the lambs first, getting a few pounds of lovely soft wool, and then I shoot them in the head and cut their throats to drain out the blood. We do a good job—quick, competent, without arousing much fear in the lambs. I even
take each one around the corner of the barn, out of sight of the others, to do the deed. By mid-afternoon eight lambskins are pegged to the back of the barn, and the cuts of meat are ready for my friend, Martin Summerbee, who picks it up, wraps it, and freezes it over the winter for me in exchange for half of it. Tommy has been so obedient—holding the lambs during the shearing, helping me hoist them by the feet and catch the blood after they are slaughtered—that I have forgotten, or dismissed, the morning’s disagreement. That is a Saturday. On Wednesday he arrives home from school with a note from Miss Bussman, the second grade teacher. It reads,

Liz, reading over my shoulder, is the first to finish. She makes a little sound, between a cry and a groan, very soft, as she reads, but says nothing afterward, only turns back to the sink, where we have been washing clothes. Tom sits at the table, absolutely still, not even kicking his leg or
tapping his finger. I read the letter again, and say, “Were you that upset over the lambs, son?”

“What?” His surprise at this connection is genuine and total. If he doesn’t make it, should I?

“I thought maybe you were still upset about the lambs, and so you thought this would be a good thing to do, to get back at me, or maybe just to express your anger.”

“I don’t care about the lambs. We kill the lambs every year.”

“Then why would you do such a thing to somebody’s toys? I’m surprised at you. It sounds from the note like you planned it for when the others were away.”

“I knew she had those dolls.”

“But why did you do it, Tommy?” Liz speaks softly from the sink. He gives her a long, careful look, then returns to looking at his foot. We wait. The kettle on the woodstove whistles, and Liz snatches it off the heat as if shushing it. We wait until he says, “She’s a nigger.”

Liz has a tone of voice that reminds me that her family once had money, a tone that suggests that it is unbearable to hear some things, and so they have not been heard. She uses it now. She says, “Pardon me?” There is no maternity in it, and it is meant to force the shame of repeating the unspeakable upon the perpetrator.

“She’s a nigger.” This time he speaks casually, and the toe-tapping, wiggling, sniffling, and fidgeting of little boyhood suddenly resume, like music after a long rest. My reach is enormous. My hands seem to myself to arc across the room and grab his shoulders like a bundle of sticks. His head snaps backward as I pull him to me, and then I do something I promised him two years ago that I would never again do, which is to lay him over my knees and whale the tar out of him. The words pop out in time to the blows:
“NEVER. USE. THAT. WORD. IN. FRONT. OF. ME. AGAIN
.” At
the end of one sentence, he slides off my lap, reduced from a little boy to nothing, weeping, clutching his bottom, gasping for air. But that image isn’t as vivid as the other, his nonchalant defiance, and so it is all I can do to prevent myself from kicking him where he sobs under the table. Liz steps over to him in a businesslike fashion, takes his hand, and pulls him up. “Go to your room now,” she says, “and we’ll talk about it later.”

It has been maybe ten minutes since he handed us the note. All the issues—the sheep, the dolls, the racial slur, his careless attitude, my violent reaction—seem to lie on top of one another, each discrete, none resolved, and each leading to the others in a way that prevents resolution, or even discussion. It would be wrong to provide him with an excuse for either the damage he has done or the language he has used, but his transgressions do seem to lie between my insistence that he help with the sheep and this spanking, expressing something about the triumph of my will on both these occasions. I was unprepared. The result is awkward confusion.

Liz says, from the sink, “I hated hearing him say that, but I don’t know if it warranted violence.”

“Maybe he’ll never forget, at any rate.”

“But we don’t even know if he understands why you attacked him. You were so quick!”

“Everything about it was quick. Simultaneously, I was hearing that word, I was seeing the way he sat there, I was hearing him say that word in front of strangers and feeling their disapproval of us and this setup we have, I was imagining that little girl finding her broken dolls, I was imagining her showing them to her parents and what they would think of us, I was remembering being in the army, I was remembering that Faulkner story where they lynch the guy and seeing my own son in those characters.” She smiles and
comes over to me, puts her hand in my hair. This enables me to say, “I blew it, didn’t I?”

“I don’t know, Robert. I don’t know what the right reaction is. Maybe the right reaction is the most natural one.”

“I’m not inclined to think so.”

Liz drops into a chair by the table. The fact is, this has exhausted us, but we still have to finish the washing, string lines over the range and hang the clothes, clean up after the washing, feed and water the animals, milk the goats, make dinner, clean up from dinner, make sure that Tommy does his homework, bring in wood, stoke the fire so it will last until morning, heat water for washing, warm our beds with bricks so that we can stand to get into them, and check the animals one last time for the night. I say, “Let’s phone out for a pizza.”

Liz says, “Let’s phone out for a phone.”

“Let’s phone out for a road they can deliver it on.”

“Let’s phone out for a town with a pizza parlor in it.”

“No,” I say, “I guess I’d really rather have Chinese.” Our laugh supplies just enough energy for us to hoist ourselves out of our chairs and get to work.

Later, when we have sorted through all the apologies and explanations and come to the real question, where did Tommy learn to call Annabel Harris a “nigger,” he says, “That’s what some teachers were calling her. I heard them. Miss Bussman, too.”

“When did you hear it?”

“One day when we had personal reading and I was going to the boys’ room. They were standing in the hall.”

“When was it?”

“Pretty long ago. Some fifth-graders said it, too. They were standing in the boys’ bathroom, and they said, ‘Did you see that nigger girl in the second grade?’ ” He glances at me and licks his lips. “That was the first day of school.”

“Do you remember what the teachers said exactly?”

“They were talking in soft voices.”

There is something like ten dollars around the house, since I just paid my property taxes two weeks ago. Ten dollars may or may not buy replacement dolls. At any rate, there will be a lot of walking—to the school, to a phone so that I can call the Harrises, to some shopping center (the nearest is in State College)—and every trip will reveal to interested parties the defects of our way of life when it comes to coping with the unexpected.

The next day I get to the school just as the bus of home-bound children is pulling away. I haven’t called ahead, and I want to be sure Miss Bussman is there. I find her straightening up the classroom. She is humming, but her manner hardens when she turns and sees me. She says, “Visitors should check in with the office.”

“I’m Bob Miller, Tommy’s father.”