The Brothers K (102 page)

The next time it started she was sound asleep, and shrieked when he first touched her. So the following time what woke her was a pencil. Just the point of it, touching her eardrum. “Be still,” he told her. “You’re upsetting your mother.”

Sooner or later, Mama said to us, we were going to ask ourselves, as she had, how it could have happened more than once. She was afraid to kill herself—that was one reason, she said. Children love their parents. That was another. And she went to the police the second time, and told them what had happened. But they called up Beryl, who just came down to the station and told the cops that her daughter was a liar. Then they went back home, and the old man beat Beryl up, threw Mama in her room, and raped her again. (“Hurt me” is the way Mama always put it.)

She ran away after that, and the parish priest she ran to said he’d help her. He then loaded her in his car, drove her straight back to her father and mother, had a chat with them, shook both their hands, and left. And soon as he was gone the old man told Mama that if she told anyone else, or tried to run away again, he’d kill her brothers.

Mama begged her mother to take them away after that, but Beryl was ill by then. When the old man came home that night, she just told him, in a weird little singsong voice, all about Mama’s wish. He turned to Mama then, said, “I warned you,” went to the boys’ room, picked Truman up, carried him back out, and threw him into a wall. Mama screamed. Beryl just sat in a chair and watched. And seeing this—seeing her mother just sit there—Mama suddenly felt that her only duty was to survive. If she didn’t survive, no one would save her brothers. If she didn’t survive they couldn’t run away, grow up together, come back some day, and kill her father. He began to hit her hard, over and over. But Mama said that “everything went quiet.” It was as if she’d entered a silent room inside herself, and shut her body out. And there in the quiet, she could see exactly what she had to do to survive. Before he hit her again, she pulled up her skirt, and looked at him. Knowing what would happen. And sure enough, he stopped beating her and carried her back into her room. It was at this time, she said, that the dreams started. A recurring nightmare, especially, of sleepwalking, then waking to find herself in the act of killing both her parents with the halves of a broken pair of scissors. The dreams made
sleep impossible. Which made school impossible. (Think, Everett. She was a
fifth
grader while all this was going on!)

She started taking her brothers to different churches around the city after that, looking—very cautiously now—for someone who might be willing to help them. But at home she stayed alive, and kept him from hurting her mother and brothers, by doing what he wanted. And five months went by this way. She said this to us twice, Everett. “
Five months
.”

She finally found the help they needed—and it was Adventists who gave it. We know that part of the story: we often made fun of it in our teens. They moved to Walla Walla within days, in secret of course. And for weeks Beryl had to be guarded round the clock to keep her from writing or phoning the old man and telling him where they’d gone. Remember the way Marvin talked about this when we were kids? Outsmarting the Old Drunk and Crazy Mom? It sounded like some wonderful adventure! I envied him when he’d talk about it! And it occurs to me now that for Marvin it
was
just an adventure, and that this innocence of his is just one of the gifts that Mama ransomed with her five months.

The old man was killed the following winter in a head-on car wreck. Driving drunk, of course—they’ve told us that part of the legend, too. What Mama didn’t tell, until two nights ago, was how long and hard she prayed for it. Her father’s death, she said, is one of the pillars of her faith in prayer.

That’s pretty much it, Everett. Except to say how right Papa was. Huge, incomprehensible things have been happening nonstop inside all of us these past two days. What Freddy calls “the eureka feelings” just keep coming. Our entire relationship with Mama is being unmade. I don’t know how it will be for you, but my old desire to “improve” her just embarrasses me: I look at her now and see the very mother I’ve always longed for. All the old battles with her keep replaying themselves, and at the climax of each, just as the pain is being inflicted, I see the true source of the hurt, and am suddenly on Mama’s side instead of my own! I love her so much, and feel so protective and proud, that even her theology makes sense to me now. Where was her love for the God of mercy and forgiveness, I always used to wonder. But now I think of that glowering, overpowering, judgmental Old Testament God of hers and cry “More Power to You!”—because
He’s
the One who’s gonna make Mama’s old man pay!

We’ll be years sorting this out. And we’ll have to be careful to keep
our word never to mention it to Mama herself. But I’m nearly leaving out the best part …

When she finished speaking, and saw how she’d devastated us, Mama was apologetic for a moment. Then she began, in the manner of someone telling her kids a soothing bedtime story (which is just what she was doing), to tell us what it was like to lay eyes on Papa for the first time. With all that bitter background in place, she told us how it felt to watch him pitch; then to meet him over Marvin’s beaned brain at the hospital; to smell the stale tobacco on his clothes and hands; to fall head over heels in love anyway. And my God, Everett. Her eyes as she spoke! Her voice! You could feel, with every word, that there is something Papa’s love gave her, something their love healed and saved, that is
still
healed, and still saved. It was right there in the room with us, this love between them. And when we went our ways that night, it stayed with each of us. It’s with you right now, isn’t it? It’s our real inheritance, isn’t it? We’re rich, aren’t we?

It’s Freddy and my turn to see you this month. We can’t wait.

Love,

Pete

O
ne morning in August, that first summer of the woodstoves, the manager of the Fir Haven Apartments stepped into the garage while Irwin, Roy and Peter were all working and handed them a petition—signed by every resident of his building and by most of our Clark Street neighbors—stating that if the construction of stoves continued in our residentially zoned neighborhood, they, the undersigned, would be forced to turn the matter over to the authorities. Roy just acted embarrassed, and Peter smiled at the petition and started to say something. But before he got a word out, Irwin picked up an acetylene tank, let out a roar, and sent it flying through the side window of the garage. The apartment manager ran for his life. Then Irwin sat down on the garage floor, and for the first time in over a year, started to weep.

That very night Peter quit his job at the Crown Z mill, packed camping gear, sleeping bags and his distraught brother into Roy’s borrowed Travellall, and they departed in the wee hours for Livingston, Montana. Five days later they returned home with a matching pair of hangovers, a large collection of trout flies (though neither of them fly-fished), and a
ten-thousand-dollar cashier’s check from Wind River Woodstoves’ second investor—a fast-rising sporting-goods magnate by the name of T Bar Waites. A week or so after their return, Pete, Roy and Irwin made a down payment on a defunct gas station and garage in a commercial part of Camas, then hired Truman and me—offering us a good wage (which Truman refused but I accepted)—to spend a couple of weeks helping them turn the place into a poor man’s woodstove production plant. And no sooner had we set to work than Peter took off again, this time to Seattle, to try to set up some kind of marketing and distribution plan for their stoves.

I
rwin became a stove-making machine. He worked impossibly hard. Eighty-, even ninety-hour weeks. His muscles grew huge again. His arms, hands and chest became covered with small cuts and burn scars. He also remained so emotionally drab, and so absent to his wife and kids, that it frightened me. But to my worries he kept saying, “We can only do what we can do.” And to Linda he kept saying, “This won’t be forever. If you can stand the wait, I don’t think you’ll be sorry.” “I
hate
this!” she told him. “I hate your stoves!” But she waited.

And in the fall of 1972, Wind River Woodstoves started selling. The business made no profit the first year because every penny got channeled right back into equipment. But Irwin and Peter both had salaries now, and the stoves sold with ease.

Another milestone of that winter: after twenty-five years, Roy quit the Crown Z mill and went to work full-time for Wind River. It was a huge decision for him. It meant the loss of a retirement pension, the temporary loss of health insurance and every other benefit, and a sizable cut in pay. His old friends at the mill assured him that he’d lost his mind. His wife and grown kids waffled some, but tended to side with his mill friends. But the Washougal had been Roy’s home river since boyhood, he loved fishing more than anything, and for twenty-five years he’d watched the effluents pour from his place of employment into that river. “I’m getting too old to live like a hypocrite,” he said. “Wind River Woodstoves don’t kill fish.”

O
ur greatest fears, like our greatest hopes, often come to nothing: though Linda’s father was released from the Oregon State Penitentiary in August 1971, none of us ever heard a word of him again.

I
n August 1974, when Irwin, Amy, myself and the recently paroled Everett were unloading a car and U-Haul trailer full of Natasha and Myshkin’s stuff at their new apartment in Seattle, I thought for a moment that we were going to hear the loon laugh again. What happened was that Irwin, on two successive trips to the car, had conked his head hard on the trunk lid, and the second time he’d done it Everett had unthinkingly snapped, “Enter the third dimension, willya!” All Irwin did was straighten up, still rubbing his head, and look from Everett (who didn’t even notice) to Amy, Natasha and me (who were all smiling). He didn’t make a sound, and finally only smiled back. But even Tasha and Amy, who’d never heard him laugh, could tell by the look in his eyes that he’d come close.

He held out for seven more months. Then, in March 1975, while Natasha was cramming for oral exams back in Seattle, Everett and Myshkin drove down to spend a few days checking out both the new Wind River Woodstoves warehouse and the abused and bankrupt Skamania County farm that Irwin and Linda had bought with a bundle of stove proceeds. What happened this time was that Everett volunteered to babysit Hughie, Nash and Myshkin so that Amy and I could take Irwin and Linda—who’d both become chronic workaholics since buying the farm—out for a night on the town. The four of us ended up trying dinner and a movie, and Linda had dutifully mumbled, “This is fun” once or twice. But it wasn’t exactly a smashing evening. Even enjoying oneself takes practice. When we started home, though, and got to speculating about how Uncle Everett was faring with three wild boys, Irwin and Linda began to enjoy themselves very much. So much that when Irwin reached the farm he turned out the headlights, glided down the last hundred yards of driveway, and the four of us crept up to the house and peeked in the window …

We were more than a little surprised to see Everett in an easy chair,
serenely reading a book while Myshkin, Nash, Hughie, and their dog, Hoover, sat round the kitchen table, deeply—and silently—engrossed in some kind of game. When we stepped in the door, though, Everett leapt out of his chair, cried, “Okay, boys! Game’s over!”—and when I first glimpsed, then smelled, the jiggling abomination he was trying to clear from the table, the picture we’d seen through the window began to make more sense.

“All right,” Linda said, trying out her fierce new scowl. “What’s going on?”

“We broke a window with the football,” said Nash.

“And Daddy got a headache,” said Myshkin.

“You’re out of aspirin,” Everett said.

“Hughie spilled my milk,” Nash added.

“Me too!” Hughie shouted.

“Then he let Hoover in,” Nash continued.

“An’ Hoover got manure on the carpet,” Myshkin said.

“I did it!” Hughie roared.

“Uncle Everett cried,” Nash said.

“You’re out of whiskey,” said Everett.

“So we started playin’ Attaboy,” Myshkin continued.

“It was gross,” Nash added.

“It was quiet,” Everett sighed.

“It was FUN!” Hughie shouted.

“We recommend it,” Everett said.

“How do you play?” Irwin asked.

“Sit down,” Everett said. “I’ll show you.”

Irwin, Linda, Amy and I took the four chairs round the kitchen table.

“You need a dinner plate, a tablespoon, a can opener and a twelve-ounce can of wet dog food,” Everett began. “Hoover’s brand was Attaboy, so that’s what we named the game.”

The boys just grinned, and nodded vehement agreement.

“To begin, you set the plate in the center of the table, open both ends of the dog food can, stand the can on the plate, and demand silence. Silence is crucial. Bribe them if you have to. Because next you lift the can away from the food very very slowly—and you want them to hear the sucking sound. And smell the odor. And watch that gooey yellow stuff run off to one side of the plate.”

The boys kept nodding.

“Now it’s time to tell about dog-food factories you have visited. Explain how no part of the dead horse, however old, sick or infected, goes to
waste. Mention particular body parts—such as ground-up horse noses. Mention the rats that sometimes fall in the grinder.”

Still nothing but happy nods from the boys:
Yep! That’s what we did …

“If your brand was well chosen,” Everett continued, “the brown cylinder on the plate should have sagged to one side by now, like the stovepipe hat of the cat in
The Cat in the Hat
. If your lecture was effective, the players should be doing the same. You then take the tablespoon (teaspoons are too small, mixing spoons too overwhelming), scoop a heaping mound of sagging cat hat, set it on the plate, and say to the sagging kids: ‘The next person to make a peep—and I mean any sound at all, even breathing; out any orifice: anuses, navels, ears—is going to eat the contents of this spoon.’ Let ’em think about that a second. Then add: ‘If anyone else makes a peep while the first peeper is eating, he will have to eat
two
spoonfuls. And if that strikes the third person funny, he’ll have to eat
three.’
You then take them into the kitchen and show them the nineteen other Attaboy cans in the cupboard. And the full case in the closet. Tell ’em it’s not that far to the store, either.”